# bib

id: thoreau-walden_005_solitude-1854
author: Thoreau
title: 05 Solitude
date: 1854
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 3474
sentence: 132
flesch: 75
cache: cache/thoreau-walden_005_solitude-1854.txt
txt: txt/thoreau-walden_005_solitude-1854.txt
summary:
  Sometimes, when I compare myself with other men, it seems as if I were more favored by the gods than they, beyond any deserts that I am conscious of; as if I had a warrant and surety at their hands which my fellows have not, and were especially guided and guarded. Not to many men surely, the depot, the post-office, the bar-room, the meeting-house, the school-house, the grocery, Beacon Hill, or the Five Points, where men most congregate, but to the perennial source of our life, whence in all our experience we have found that to issue, as the willow stands near the water and sends out its roots in that direction.


id: thoreau-walden_011_higher_laws-1854
author: Thoreau
title: 11 Higher Laws
date: 1854
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 4249
sentence: 190
flesch: 74
cache: cache/thoreau-walden_011_higher_laws-1854.txt
txt: txt/thoreau-walden_011_higher_laws-1854.txt
summary:
  Whatever my own practice may be, I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized. Yet till this is otherwise we are not civilized, and, if gentlemen and ladies, are not true men and women.


id: thoreau-walden_007_beanfield-1854
author: Thoreau
title: 07 Beanfield
date: 1854
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 3940
sentence: 136
flesch: 71
cache: cache/thoreau-walden_007_beanfield-1854.txt
txt: txt/thoreau-walden_007_beanfield-1854.txt
summary:
  There the sun lighted me to hoe beans, pacing slowly backward and forward over that yellow gravelly upland, between the long green rows, fifteen rods, the one end terminating in a shrub oak copse where I could rest in the shade, the other in a blackberry field where the green berries deepened their tints by the time I had made another bout. Removing the weeds, putting fresh soil about the bean stems, and encouraging this weed which I had sown, making the yellow soil express its summer thought in bean leaves and blossoms rather than in wormwood and piper and millet grass, making the earth say beans instead of grass-


id: thoreau-walden_006_visitors-1854
author: Thoreau
title: 06 Visitors
date: 1854
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 4813
sentence: 184
flesch: 73
cache: cache/thoreau-walden_006_visitors-1854.txt
txt: txt/thoreau-walden_006_visitors-1854.txt
summary:
  Men of one idea, like a hen with one chicken, and that a duckling; men of a thousand ideas, and unkempt heads, like those hens which are made to take charge of a hundred chickens, all in pursuit of one bug, a score of them lost in every morning's dew- and become frizzled and mangy in consequence; men of ideas instead of legs, a sort of intellectual centipede that made you crawl all over. Yet I never, by any manoeuvring, could get him to take the spiritual view of things; the highest that he appeared to conceive of was a simple expediency, such as you might expect an animal to appreciate; and this, practically, is true of most men.


id: thoreau-walden_015_winter_animals-1854
author: Thoreau
title: 15 Winter Animals
date: 1854
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 3690
sentence: 105
flesch: 68
cache: cache/thoreau-walden_015_winter_animals-1854.txt
txt: txt/thoreau-walden_015_winter_animals-1854.txt
summary:
  They were so familiar that at length one alighted on an armful of wood which I was carrying in, and pecked at the sticks without fear. There, far from the village street, and except at very long intervals, from the jingle of sleigh-bells, I slid and skated, as in a vast moose-yard well trodden, overhung by oak woods and solemn pines bent down with snow or bristling with icicles.


id: thoreau-walden_012_brute_neighbors-1854
author: Thoreau
title: 12 Brute Neighbors
date: 1854
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 4862
sentence: 196
flesch: 78
cache: cache/thoreau-walden_012_brute_neighbors-1854.txt
txt: txt/thoreau-walden_012_brute_neighbors-1854.txt
summary:
  When compelled to rise they would sometimes circle round and round and over the pond at a considerable height, from which they could easily see to other ponds and the river, like black motes in the sky; and, when I thought they had gone off thither long since, they would settle down by a slanting flight of a quarter of a mile on to a distant part which was left free; but what beside safety they got by sailing in the middle of Walden I do not know, unless they love its water for the same reason that I do. When I called to see her in June, 1842, she was gone a-hunting in the woods, as was her wont (I am not sure whether it was a male or female, and so use the more common pronoun), but her mistress told me that she came into the neighborhood a little more than a year before, in April, and was finally taken into their house; that she was of a dark brownish-gray color, with a white spot on her throat, and white feet, and had a large bushy tail like a fox; that in the winter the fur grew thick and flatted out along her sides, forming stripes ten or twelve inches long by two and a half wide, and under her chin like a muff, the upper side loose, the under matted like felt, and in the spring these appendages dropped off.


id: thoreau-walden_018_conclusion-1854
author: Thoreau
title: 18 Conclusion
date: 1854
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 4691
sentence: 227
flesch: 78
cache: cache/thoreau-walden_018_conclusion-1854.txt
txt: txt/thoreau-walden_018_conclusion-1854.txt
summary:
  The learned societies and great men of Assyria- where are they? The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels.


id: thoreau-walden_009_ponds-1854
author: Thoreau
title: 09 Ponds
date: 1854
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 9251
sentence: 296
flesch: 70
cache: cache/thoreau-walden_009_ponds-1854.txt
txt: txt/thoreau-walden_009_ponds-1854.txt
summary:
  Sometimes it would come floating up to the shore; but when you went toward it, it would go back into deep water and disappear. About fifteen years ago you could see the top of a pitch pine, of the kind called yellow pine hereabouts, though it is not a distinct species, projecting above the surface in deep water, many rods from the shore.


id: thoreau-walden_016_pond_in_winter-1854
author: Thoreau
title: 16 Pond in Winter
date: 1854
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 5254
sentence: 160
flesch: 66
cache: cache/thoreau-walden_016_pond_in_winter-1854.txt
txt: txt/thoreau-walden_016_pond_in_winter-1854.txt
summary:
  Of five coves, three, or all which had been sounded, were observed to have a bar quite across their mouths and deeper water within, so that the bay tended to be an expansion of water within the land not only horizontally but vertically, and to form a basin or independent pond, the direction of the two capes showing the course of the bar. Cape becomes bar, and plain shoal, and valley and gorge deep water and channel.


id: thoreau-walden_010_baker_farm-1854
author: Thoreau
title: 10 Baker Farm
date: 1854
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 2592
sentence: 81
flesch: 71
cache: cache/thoreau-walden_010_baker_farm-1854.txt
txt: txt/thoreau-walden_010_baker_farm-1854.txt
summary:
  Instead of calling on some scholar, I paid many a visit to particular trees, of kinds which are rare in this neighborhood, standing far away in the middle of some pasture, or in the depths of a wood or swamp, or on a hilltop; such as the black birch, of which we have some handsome specimens two feet in diameter; its cousin, the yellow birch, with its loose golden vest, perfumed like the first; the beech, which has so neat a hole and beautifully lichen-painted, perfect in all its details, of which, excepting scattered specimens, I know but one small grove of sizable trees left in the township, supposed by some to have been planted by the pigeons that were once baited with beechnuts near by; it is worth the while to see the silver grain sparkle when you split this wood; the bass; the hornbeam; the Celtis occidentalis, or false elm, of which we have but one well-grown; some taller mast of a pine, a shingle tree, or a more perfect hemlock than usual, standing like a pagoda in the midst of the woods; and many others I could mention. With his horizon all his own, yet he a poor man, born to be poor, with his inherited Irish poverty or poor life, his Adam's grandmother and boggy ways, not to rise in this world, he nor his posterity, till their wading webbed bog-trotting feet get talaria to their heels.


id: thoreau-walden_014_former_inhabitants-1854
author: Thoreau
title: 14 Former Inhabitants
date: 1854
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 4778
sentence: 165
flesch: 72
cache: cache/thoreau-walden_014_former_inhabitants-1854.txt
txt: txt/thoreau-walden_014_former_inhabitants-1854.txt
summary:
  Down the road, on the right hand, on Brister's Hill, lived Brister Freeman, a handy Negro, slave of Squire Cummings once-there where grow still the apple trees which Brister planted and tended; large old trees now, but their fruit still wild and ciderish to my taste. His words and attitude always suppose a better state of things than other men are acquainted with, and he will be the last man to be disappointed as the ages revolve.


id: thoreau-walden_002_where_i_lived-1854
author: Thoreau
title: 02 Where I Lived
date: 1854
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 6165
sentence: 223
flesch: 72
cache: cache/thoreau-walden_002_where_i_lived-1854.txt
txt: txt/thoreau-walden_002_where_i_lived-1854.txt
summary:
  Men think that it is essential that the Nation have commerce, and export ice, and talk through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles an hour, without a doubt, whether they do or not; but whether we should live like baboons or like men, is a little uncertain. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to glorify God and enjoy him forever.


id: thoreau-walden_017_spring-1854
author: Thoreau
title: 17 Spring
date: 1854
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 6708
sentence: 238
flesch: 71
cache: cache/thoreau-walden_017_spring-1854.txt
txt: txt/thoreau-walden_017_spring-1854.txt
summary:
  O the evening robin, at the end of a New England summer day! In a pleasant spring morning all men's sins are forgiven.


id: thoreau-walden_013_housewarming-1854
author: Thoreau
title: 13 Housewarming
date: 1854
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 5760
sentence: 177
flesch: 69
cache: cache/thoreau-walden_013_housewarming-1854.txt
txt: txt/thoreau-walden_013_housewarming-1854.txt
summary:
  There are enough fagots and waste wood of all kinds in the forests of most of our towns to support many fires, but which at present warm none, and, some think, hinder the growth of the young wood. One day, however, as I was splitting wood, I thought that I would just look in at the window and see if the house was not on fire; it was the only time I remember to have been particularly anxious on this score; so I looked and saw that a spark had caught my bed, and I went in and extinguished it when it had burned a place as big as my hand.


id: thoreau-walden_001_economy-1854
author: Thoreau
title: 01 Economy
date: 1854
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 25827
sentence: 901
flesch: 70
cache: cache/thoreau-walden_001_economy-1854.txt
txt: txt/thoreau-walden_001_economy-1854.txt
summary:
  How can a man be a philosopher and not maintain his vital heat by better methods than other men? Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted, so enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel like new men in the old, and that to retain it would be like keeping new wine in old bottles.


id: thoreau-walden_003_reading-1854
author: Thoreau
title: 03 Reading
date: 1854
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 3812
sentence: 136
flesch: 66
cache: cache/thoreau-walden_003_reading-1854.txt
txt: txt/thoreau-walden_003_reading-1854.txt
summary:
  The solitary hired man on a farm in the outskirts of Concord, who has had his second birth and peculiar religious experience, and is driven as he believes into the silent gravity and exclusiveness by his faith, may think it is not true; but Zoroaster, thousands of years ago, travelled the same road and had the same experience; but he, being wise, knew it to be universal, and treated his neighbors accordingly, and is even said to have invented and established worship among men. I aspire to be acquainted with wiser men than this our Concord soil has produced, whose names are hardly known here.


id: thoreau-walden_008_village-1854
author: Thoreau
title: 08 Village
date: 1854
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 2046
sentence: 60
flesch: 67
cache: cache/thoreau-walden_008_village-1854.txt
txt: txt/thoreau-walden_008_village-1854.txt
summary:
  In one direction from my house there was a colony of muskrats in the river meadows; under the grove of elms and buttonwoods in the other horizon was a village of busy men, as curious to me as if they had been prairie-dogs, each sitting at the mouth of its burrow, or running over to a neighbor's to gossip. One afternoon, near the end of the first summer, when I went to the village to get a shoe from the cobbler's, I was seized and put into jail, because, as I have elsewhere related, I did not pay a tax to, or recognize the authority of, the State which buys and sells men, women, and children, like cattle, at the door of its senate-house.


id: thoreau-walden_004_sounds-1854
author: Thoreau
title: 04 Sounds
date: 1854
extension: .txt
mime: text/plain
words: 5819
sentence: 201
flesch: 70
cache: cache/thoreau-walden_004_sounds-1854.txt
txt: txt/thoreau-walden_004_sounds-1854.txt
summary:
  The most aldermanic, with his chin upon a heart-leaf, which serves for a napkin to his drooling chaps, under this northern shore quaffs a deep draught of the once scorned water, and passes round the cup with the ejaculation tr-r-r-oonk, tr-r-r--oonk, tr-r-r-oonk! When other birds are still, the screech owls take up the strain, like mourning women their ancient u-lu-lu.


