Walden or Life in the Woods ^cnrp 3D. ST̂ orcau. N E I V R I V E R S I D E E D IT IO N . I. A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRI MACK RIVERS. I I . WALDEN ; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. I I I . THE MAINE WOODS. IV. CAPE COD. V. EARLY SPRING IN MASSACHUSETTS. VI. SUMMER. W ith a Map of Concord. V I I . AUTUMN. V I I I . WINTER. IX . EXCURSIONS. X. MISCELLANIES. With a Biographical Sketch by R a li ' h W ald o E me r so n . X I . FAMILIAR LETTERS. Edited, with an Intro duction and No te s , by F ran k R. S a n b or n . II volumes, crown Svn, each, with an index, $1.50 : the set, cloth, in box, half calf, ^30-25 ; half calf, gilt to[), S33- WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. R iverside A Idine E d ition . 2 vols. i6mo, $2.00. THOREAU’S THOUGHTS. Selections from the Wri t ings of Henry D. Thoreau. Edited by H. G. O. Blake. With Bibliography. i6mo, gilt top, St.00. THE SUCCESSION OF FOREST TREES AND Wl LD APPLES. With Biographical Sketch by Emerson. i6mo, paper, 15 cents, 7iet. HOUGHTON, M IFFLIN & CO. B osto n a n d N e w Y o r k . TH E WRITINGS OF HENRY DAVID THOREAU W I T H B IB L IO G R A P H IC A L IN T R O D U C T IO N S A N D F U L L I N D E X E S I N T E N V O L U M E S V O L U M E I I W A LD EN OR, LIFE IN TH E WOODS BY HENRY DAVID THOREAU 1 do not propose to write an ode to ^dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY Uitictsi&E presa, CambtiSac M DCCC xciv Copyright, 1854, By HEKRY D. THOREAU. Copyright, 1882, By MARY A. T. LOWELL a nd REBECCA J. THACHER, H exes of H en ey D . Thoreau . Copyright, 1893, By HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. All rights reserved. The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Ma^s., U. S. A. Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Company. CONTENTS II. III. IV. V. VI. VII. VIII. IX. X. XI. XII. XIII. XV. XVI. XVII. XVIII. AK D -VVHAT I LIV ED I n t k o d u c t o k y N ote I . E con om y . W h e r e I l iv e d , F O B .................................................................................... R e a d in g ............................................................. S o u n d s ...................................................................... S o l i t u d e ............................................................. V i s i t o r s ............................................................ T h e B e a n -F i e l d ........................................ T h e V i l l a g e .................................................. T h e P o n d s ................................................... B a k e r F a r m ................................................... H ig h e r L a v s .................................................. B r u t e X e i g h b o r s ........................................ H o u s e -W a r m i n g ........................................ X IV . F o r m e r I n h a b it a n t s , a n d W i n t e r V is it o r s ....................................................................... W i n t e r A n i m a l s ........................................ T h e P o n d i n W i n t e r . . . . S p r i n g ............................................................. Co n c l u s i o n ............................................................. PAGE vii 7 128 156 174 202 218 241 261 271 314 327 347 369 396 419 436 461 493 INTRODUCTORY NOTE T h o ee a u lived in liis Walden camp but two years, 1845-1847, and, as liis narrative clearly shows, by no means exiled himself from home and companions. Ilis hermitage was within easy walking distance of Con cord ; and, though his seclusion meant pri vacy at times, he was by no means debarred from society. The life in the woods was a characteristic expression of his stout inde- j)endence of conditions, and served his pur pose of living frugally and securing leisure for observation, reading, and writing. But since the act was in a way unique, it trans ferred something of its unique proj>erty to the book which recorded it, and the book is more closely identified with Thoreau’s fame, has done more to give him distinction, than any other of his writings. The book Wnldcn was what William El lery Channing calls “ the log-book of his woodland cruise at Walden.” Thoreau him- VUl I N T l i O D U C T O H Y N O T E self tells ns that the bulk of the book was written in liis hermitage. One bit of verse, “ L iglit-w inged smoke, Ictirian b ird ,” he had printed in The D ia l; but nothing else appears to have been garnered from previous publications, and the book has thus a unity of design which helps to preserve its individual force. Walden was not pub lished, however, until 1854, when it was brought out by Ticknor & Fields. W A L D E K I. ECONOMY. W h en I wrote the following pages, or rather the hulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachu setts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only. I lived there two years and two months. At present I am a sojourner in civilized life again. I should not obtrude my affairs so much on the notice of my readers if veiy par ticular inquiries had not been made by my townsmen concerning my mode of life, which some would call impertinent, though they do not appear to me at all impertinent, but, considering the circumstances, very nat ural and pertinent. Some have asked what I got to ea t; if I did not feel lonesome ; if 8 WALDEN. I was not afraid ; and the like. Others have been curious to learn what portion of my in come I devoted to charitable purposes ; and some, who have large families, how many poor children I maintained. I will there fore ask those of my readers who feel no particular interest in me to pardon me if I undertake to answer some of these questions in this book. In most books, the /, or first person, is omitted; in this it wiU be re tained ; that, in respect to egotism, is the main difference. We commonly do not re member that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking. I should not talk so much about myself if there were any body else whom I knew as well. Unfortu nately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience. Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men’s lives; some such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land ; for if he has lived sinccu’ely, it must have been in a distant land to me. Per haps these pages are more particularly ad dressed to poor students. As for the rest of my readers, they will accept such portions ECONOMY. 9 as apply to them. I trust that none will stretch the seams in putting on the coat, for it may do good service to him whom it fits. I would fain say something, not so much concerning the Chinese and Sandwich Is landers as you who read these pages, who are said to live in New England; some thing about your condition, especially your outward condition or circumstances in this world, in this town, what it is, whether it is necessary that it be as bad as it is, whether it cannot he improved as well as not. I have travelled a good deal in Concord ; and everywhere, in shops, and offices, and fields, the inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways. What I have heard of Bramins sit ting exposed to four fires and looking in the face of the sun; or hanging suspended, with their heads downward, o\'er flames; or look ing at the heavens over their shoulders “ un til it becomes impossible for them to resume their natural position, while from the twist of the neck nothing but liquids can pass into the stomach ; ” or dwelling, chained for life, at the foot of a tree; or measuring with their bodies, like caterpillars, the breadth of vast empires ; or standing on one leg on the tops 10 WALDEN. of pillars, — even these forms of conscious penance are hardly more incredible and as tonishing than the scenes which I daily wit ness. The twelve labors of Hercules were trifling in comparison with those which my neighbors have undertaken; for they were only twelve, and had an end; but I could never see that these men slew or captured any monster or finished any labor. They have no friend Tolas to burn with a hot iron the root of the hydra’s head, but as soon as one head is crushed, two spring up. I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools ; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suclded by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyms what field they were called to labor in. Who made them serfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is con demned to eat only his peek of dirt ? Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born ? They have got to live a man’s life, pushing all these things before them, and get on as well as they can. How many a poor immortal soul have I met ECONOM Y. 11 well nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never (deansed, and one hun dred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and wood-lot! The portionless, who strug gle with no such unneeessai’y inherited en cumbrances, find it labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh. But men labor under a mistake. The bet ter part of the man is soon ploughed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are em ployed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool’s life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before. It is said that Deucalion and Pyrrha created men by throwing stones over their heads behind them : — Inde g’emis durum sumus, experiensque laborum, Et doeumenta damus quii simus origine nati. Or, as Raleigh rhymes it in his sonorous way, — “ From thence our kind hard-hearted is, enduring pain and care, Approving that our bodies of a stony nature are.” 12 WALDEN. So much for a blind obedience to a blunder ing oracle, throwing the stones over their heads behind them, and not seeing where they fell. Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mis take, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and tremble too much for that. Actually, the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day ; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest rela tions to men ; his labor would be depreciated in the market. He has no time to be any thing but a machine. How can he remem ber well his ignorance — which his growth requires — who has so often to use his knowledge ? We should feed and clothe him gratuitously sometimes, and recruit him with our cordials, before we judge of him. The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus ten derly. Some of you, we all know, are poor, find ECONOMY. it liard to live, are sometimes, as it were, gasping for breath. I have no doubt that some of you who read this book are unable to pay for all the dinners which you have actually eaten, or for the coats and shoes which are fast wearing or are already worn out, and have come to this page to spend borrowed or stolen time, robbing your cred itors of an hour. It is very evident what mean and sneaking lives many of you live, for my sight has been whetted by expe rience ; always on tlie limits, trying to get into business and trying to get out of debt, a very ancient slough, called by the Latins (JBS alienum^ another’s brass, for some of their coins were made of brass; still living, and dying, and buried by this other’s brass ; always promising to pay, promising to l^ay, to - morrow, and dying to - day, insolvent; seeking to curry favor, to get custom, by how many modes, only not state-prison of fences ; lying, flattering, voting, (‘ontract- ing yourselves into a nutshell of civility, or dilating into an atmosphere of thin and vaporous generosity, that you may persuade your neighbor to let you make his shoes, or his hat, or his coat, or his carriage, or import his groceries for him ; making your- 14 WALDEN. selves sick, that you may lay up something against a sick day, something to he tucked away in an old chest, or in a stocking be hind the plastering, or, more safely, in the brick hank; no matter where, no matter how much or how little. I sometimes wonder that we can be so frivolous, I may almost say, as to attend to the gross but somewhat foreign form of servitude called Negro Slavery, there are so many keen and subtle masters that en slave both North and South. It is hard to have a Southern overseer ; it is worse to have a Northern one ; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself. Talk of a divinity in man I Look at the teamster on the highway, wending to market by day or night; does any divinity stir within him ? Ills highest duty to fodder and water his horses ! What is his destiny to him com pared with the shipping interests ? Does not he drive for Squire Make-a-stir ? How godlike, how immortal, is he ? See how he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, uot being immortal nor divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a fame won by his own deeds. Pub lic opinion is a weak tyrant compared with ECONOMY. 15 our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which deter mines, or rather indicates, his fate. Self- emancipation even in the West Indian prov inces of the fancy and imagination, — what Wilberforce is there to bring that about ? Think, also, of the ladies of the land weav ing toilet cushions against the last day, not to betray too green an int(;rest in their fates! As if you could kill time without injuring eternity. The mass of men lead lives of quiet des peration. What is called resignation is con firmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no jday in them, for this comes after work. But it is a char acteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things. When we consider what, to use the words of the cateehism, is the chief end of man, and what are the true necessaries and means of life, it appears as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode of living because 16 WALD Eli. they preferred it to any other. Yet they honestly think there is no choice left. But alert and healthy natures remember that the sun rose clear. It is never too late to give up our prejudices. No way of thinking or doing’, however ancient, can he trusted with out proof. What everybody echoes or in silence passes by as true to-day may turn out to be falsehood to-morrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilizing rain on their fields. What old jicople say you cannot do you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new. Old people did not know enough once, perchance, to fetch fresh fuel to keep the fire a-going ; new people put a little dry wood under a pot, and are whirled round the globe with the speed of birds, in a way to kill old people, as the phrase is. Age is no bettor, hardly so well, qualified for an in structor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost. One may almost doubt if the wisest man has learned anything of absolute value by living. Practically, the old have no very important advice to give the young, their own experience has been so partial, and their lives have been such mis- ECONOMY. 17 erablo failures, for private reasons, as they must believe ; and it may be that they have some faith left which belies that experience, and they are only less young than they were. I have lived some thirty years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors. They have told me nothing, and probably cannot tell me anything to the purpose. Here is life, an experiment to a great extent untried by me ; but it does not avail me that they have tried it. If I have any experience which I think valuable, I am sure to reflect that this my Mentors said nothing about. One farmer says to me, “ You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with ; ” and so ho re ligiously devotes a part of his day to supply ing his system with the raw material of bones ; walldng all the while he talks be hind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plough along in spite of every obstacle. Some things are really necessaries of life in some circles, the most helpless and diseased, whicdi in others are luxuries merely, and in others still are entirely unknown. 18 WALDEN. The whole ground of human life seems to some to have been gone over by their pre decessors, both the heights and the valleys, and all things to have been oared for. Ac cording to Evelyn, “ the wise Solomon pre scribed ordinances for the very distances of trees ; and the lioman prsctors have decided liow often yon may go into your neighbor’s land to gather the acorns which fall on it without trespass, and what share belongs to that neighbor.” Hippocrates has even left directions how wo should cut our nails ; that is, even with the ends of the fingers, neither .siiorter nor longer. Undoubtedly the very tedium and ennui which presume to have ex hausted the variety and the joys of life are as old as Adam. But man’s capacities have never been measured ; nor are we to judge of wliat he can do by any precedents, so little has been tried. What(;ver have been thy failures hitherto, “ bo not afflicted, my child, for who shall assign to thee what thou hast left raidone? ” We might try our lives by a thousand simple tests; as, for instance, that the same sun which ripens my beans illumines at once a system of earths like ours. If I had remembered this it would have prevented ECONOMY. 19 some mistakes. This was not the light in wliieh I hot^d them. The stai-s are the apt'xes of what wonderful tiiaiigles ! What distant and diifereiit beings in the various mansions of the universe are contemplating the same one at the same moment I Nature and liiiman life are as various as our several constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another ? Could a greater mir acle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes foi’ an instant? We should live in all the ages of the world in an hour ; ay, in all the worlds of the ages. History, Poetry, Mythology I — I know of no read ing of another’s experience so startling and informing as this would be. The greater jxu't of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon pos sessed mo that I behaved so well? You may say the wisest thing you can, old man, — you who have lived seventy years, not without honor of a kind, — I hear an irre sistible voice Avhich invites me away from all that. One generation abandons the enter prises of another like stranded vessels. I think that we may safely trust a good 20 WALDEN. deal more than we do. We may waive just so much care of ourselves as we honestly be stow elsewhere. Nature is as well adapted to our weakness as to our strength. The in cessant anxiety and strain of some is a well- nigh incurable form of disease. We are made to exaggerate the importance of what work we do ; and yet how much is not done b}̂ us ! or, what if we had been taken sick ? How vigilant we are ! determined not to live by faith if we can avoid i t ; all the day long on the alert, at night we unwillingly say our prayers and commit ourselves to uncertain ties. So thoroughly and sincerely are we compelled to live, reverencing our life, and denying the possibility of change. This is the only way, we say ; but there are as many ways as there can be drawn radii from one centre. All change is a miracle to contem plate ; but it is a miracle which is taking place every instant. Confucius said, “ To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.” When on(' man has re duced a fact of the imagination to be a fact to his understanding, I foresee that all men will at length establish their lives on that basis. ECONOM Y. 21 Let us consider for a moment what most of the trouble and anxiety which I liave re ferred to is about, and how much it is neces sary that we be troubled, or at least careful. It would be some advantage to live a primi tive and frontier life, though in the midst of an outward civilization, if only to learn what are the gross necessaries of life and what methods have been taken to obtain them; or even to look over the old day-books of the merchants, to see what it was that men most commonly bought at the stores, what they stored, that is, what are tlio grossest groceries. For the improvements of ages have had but little influence on the essential laws of man’s existence : as our skeletons, probably, are not to be distinguished from those of our ancestors. By the words, ne.ce&sary o f life, I mean whatever, of all that man obtains by his own exertions, has been from the first, or from long use has become, so important to human life that few, if any, whether from savageness, or poveidy, or ])liilosop>hy, ever attempt to do without it. To many crea tures there is in this sense hut one necessary of life. Food. To the bison of the prairie it is a few inches of palatable grass, with WALD UN. water to drink; unless lie seeks the Shelter ol the forest or the mountain’s shadow. None of the hrute creation requires more than Food and Shelter. The necessaries of life for man in this climate may, accurately enough, he distributed under the several heads of Food, Shelter, Clothing, and Fuel; for not till we liave secured these are we pre pared to entertain the true problems of life with freedom and a prospect of success. Man has invented, not only houses, hut clothes and cooked food ; and possibly from the accidental discovery of the warmth of lire, and the consequent use of it, at first a luxury, arose the present necessity to sit by it. We observe eats and dogs acquiring the same second nature. By proper Shelter and Clothing we legitimately retain our own in ternal heat; but with an excess of these, or of Fuel, that is, with an external heat greater than our own internal, may not cook ery properly be said to begin ? Darwin, the naturalist, says of the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego, that while his own party, who were well clothed and sitting close to a fire, were far from too warm, these naked sav ages, who were farther off, were observed, to his great surprise, “ to be streaming with E CONOMY . 23 ])erspiratioii at undergoing sucli a roasting.” So, we are told, tlie New Hollander goes naked with impunity, while the European shivers in his clothes. Is it impossible to combine the hardiness of these savages with the intellectualness of the civilized man ? According to Liebig, man’s body is a stove, and food the fuel which keeps up the in ternal combustion in the lungs. In cold weather we eat more, in warm less. The animal heat is the result of a slow combus tion, and disease and death take place when this is too rapid ; or for want of fuel, or from some defect in the draught, the fire goes out. Of course the vital heat is not to be confounded with fire; but so much for analogy. I t appears, therefore, from the above list, that the expression, animal life, is nearly synonymous with the expression, animal heat; for while Food may be re garded as the Fuel which keeps up the fire within us, — and Fuel serves only to pre pare that Food or to increase the warmth of our bodies by addition from without, — Shelter and Clothing also serve only to re tain the liexit thus generated and absorbed. The grand necessity, then, for our bodies, is to keep warm, to keep the vital heat in 24 WALDEN. US. What pains we accordingly take, not only with our Food, and Clothing, and Shel ter, but with our beds, which are our night clothes, robbing the nests and breasts of birds to prepare this shelter within a shel ter, as the mole has its bed of grass and leaves at the end of its burrow ! The poor man is wont to complain that this is a cold woild ; and to cold, no less physical than social, we refer directly a great part of our ails. The summer, in some climates, makes possible to man a sort of Elysian life. Fuel, except to cook his Food, is then unneces sary ; the sun is his fire, and many of the fruits are sufficiently cooked by its rays ; while Food generally is more various, and more easily obtained, and Clothing and Shedter are wholly or half unnecessary. At the present day, and in this countiy, as I find by my own experience, a few imple ments, a knife, an axe, a sjjade, a wheelbar row, etc., and for the studious, lamplight, stationery, and access to a few books, rank next to necessaries, and can all be obtained at a. trifling cost. Yet some, not wise, go to the other side of the globe, to barbarous and unhealthy regions, and devote themselves to trade for ten or twenty years, in order that KCONOMY. 25 they may live, — that is, keep comfortahly warm, — and die in New England at last. The luxuriously rich are not simply kept comfortahly warm, but unnaturally ho t; as I implied before, they are cooked, of course a la mode. Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not onty not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind. M îth respect to luxuries and comforts, the wisest have ever lived a more simple and meagre life than the poor. Tlie ancient philosophers, Chinese, Hindoo, Persian, and Greek, were a class than which none lias been poorer in outward riches, none so rich in inward. We know not much about them. It is remark able that we know so much of them as we do. The same is true of the more modern reformers and benefactors of their race. None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what shoidd call voluntary poverty. Of a life of luxury the fruit is luxury, whe ther in agriculture, or commerce, or litera ture, or art. There are nowaday ŝ professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once 26 W ALDEN. admirable to live. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoiights, nor even to found a scdiool, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanindty, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practi cally. The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier - like suc cess, not kingly, not manly. They make shift to live merely by conformity, practi cally as their fathers did, and are in no sense the progenitors of a nobler race of men. But why do men degenerate ever ? AVhat makes families run out ? What is the nature of the luxury which enervates and destroys nations? Are we sure that there is none of it in our own lives ? The philoso pher is in advance of his age even in the outward form of his life. He is not fed, sheltered, clothed, warmed, like his contem poraries. How can a man be a philosopher and not maintain his vital heat by better methods than other men ? When a man is warmed by the several modes which I have described, what does he want next ? Surely not more warmth of the same kind, as more and richer food, larger ECONOMY. 27 and more splendid houses, finer and more abundant (dothing, more numerous incessant and hotter fires, and the like. When he has obtained those things which are necessary to life, there is another alternative than to ob tain the superfluities; and that is, to adven ture on life now, his vacation from humbler toil having commenced. The soil, it ap pears, is suited to the seed, for it has sent its radicle downward, and it may now send its shoot upward also with confidence. Why has man rooted himself thus firmly in the earth, but that ho may rise in the same j)ro- portiou into the heavens above ? — for the nobler plants are valued for the fruit they bear at last in the air and light, far from the ground, and are not treated like the humbler esculents, which, though they may be bien nials, are cultivated only till they have per fected their root, and often cut down at top for this purpose, so that most would not know them in their flowering season. I do not mean to presciibe rules to strong and valiant natures, who Vvdll mind their own affairs whether in lieaven or hell, and per chance build more magnifieently and spend more lavishly than the richest, without ever impoverishing themselves, not knowing how 28 'WALDEN. they live, — if, indeed, there are any sneh, as has been dreamed ; nor to those who find their encouragement and inspiration in pre cisely the present condition of things, and cherish it with the fondness and enthusiasm of lovers, — and, to some extent, I reckon myself in this number; I do not speak to those who are well employed, in whatever cir cumstances, and they know whether they are well employed or n o t; — but maiidy to the mass of men who are discontented, and idly complaining of the hardness of their lot or of the times, when they might improve them. There are some who complain most energeti cally and inconsolably of any, because they are, as they say, doing their duty. I also have in my mind that seemingly wealthy, but most terribly impoverislied class of all, who have accumulated dross, but know not how to use it, or get rid of it, and tlms have forged their own golden or silver fetters. If I should attempt to tell how I have de sired to spend my life in years past, it would probably surprise those of my readers wlio are somewhat acquainted with its actual his tory ; it would certainly astonish those who know nothing about it. I will only hint at ECONOMY. 29 some of the enterprises which I have cher ished. In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too ; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that lino. You will pardon some obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than in most men’s, and yet not voluntarily kept, but inseparable from its very nature. I would gladly toll all that I know about it, and never paint “ No Admittance ” on my gate. I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail. Many are the travellers I have spoken con cerning them, describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves. To anticipate, not the sunrise and the dawn merely, but, if possible, Nature her self I How many mornings, summer and winter, before yet any neighbor was stir- 30 WALDEN. ring about his business, have I been about mine! No doubt, many of my townsmen hav'e met me returning from this enterprise, farmers starting for Boston in the twilight, or woodchoppers going to their work. I t is true, I never assisted the sun materially in his rising, but, doubt not, it was of the last importance only to be present at it. So many autumn, ay, and winter days, spent outside the town, trying to hear what was in the wind, to hear and carry it ex press ! I well-nigh sunk all my capital in it, and lost my own breath into the bargain, running in the face of it. If it had con cerned either of the political parties, de pend upon it, it would have appeared in the Gazette with the earliest intelligence. At other times watching from the observatory of some cliff or tree, to telegraph any new arrival; or waiting at evening on the hill tops for the sky to fall, that I might catch something, though I never caught much, and that, manna-wise, would dissolve again in the sun. For a long time I was reporter to a jour nal, of no very wide circulation, whose edi tor has never yet seen fit to print the bulk of my contributions, and, as is too common ECONOMY. 31 with writers, I got only my labor for my pains. However, in this case my pains were their own reward. For many years I was self-appointed in spector of snow storms and rain storms, and did my duty faithfully; surveyor, if not of highways, then of forest paths and all across- lot routes, keeping them open, and ravines bridged and passable at all seasons, where the public heel had testified to their utility. I have looked after the wild stock of the town, which give a faithful herdsman a good deal of trouble by leaping fences; and I have had an eye to the unfrequented nooks and corners of the farm ; though I did not always know whether Jonas or Solomon worked in a particular field to-day; that was none of my business. I have watered the red huckleberry, the sand cherry and the nettle tree, the red pine and the black ash, the white grape and the yellow violet, which might have withered else in dry seasons. In short, I went on thus for a long time (I may say it without boasting), faithfully minding my business, till it became more and more evident that my townsmen would not after all admit me into the list of town officers, nor make my place a sinecure with 82 WALDEN. a moderate allowance. My accounts, which I can swear to have kept faithfully, I have, indeed, never got audited, stiU less accepted, still less paid and settled. However, I have not set my heart on that. Not long since, a strolling Indian went to sell baskets at the house of a well-known lawyer in my neighborhood. “ Do you wish to buy any baskets ? ” he asked. “ No, we do not want any,” was the reply. “ W hat! ” exclaimed the Indian as he went out the gate, “ do you mean to starve us ? ” Having S(ien his industrious white neighbors so well off, — that the lawyer had only to weave ar guments, and by some magic wealth and standing followed, — he had said to himself : I will go into bxisiness; I will weave bas kets ; it is a thing which I can do. Think ing that when he had made the baskets he would have done his part, and then it woidd be the white man’s to buy them. He had not discovered that it was necessary for him to make it worth the other’s while to buy them, or at least make him think that it was so, or to make something else which it would be worth his while to buy. I too had woven a kind of basket of a delicate texture, but I had not made it worth any one’s while to ECONOM Y. 33 buy them. Yet not the less, in my east;, did I think it worth my while to weave them, and instead of studying how to make it worth men’s while to buy my baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling' them. The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind. Why slionld we exaggerate any one. kind at the expense of the others ? Finding that my fellow-citizens were not likely to offer me any room in the court house, or any curacy or living anywhere else, but I must shift for myself, I turned my face more exclusively than ever to the woods, where I was better known. I deter mined to go into business at once, and not wait to acquire the usual capital, using such slender means as I had already got. My purpose in going to Walden Pond was not to live cheaply nor to live dearly there, but to transact some pi'ivate business with the fewest obstacles ; to be liindered from ac complishing which for want of a little com mon sense, a little enterprise and business talent, appeared not so sad as foolish. I have always endeavored to acquire strict business habits; they are indispensable to every man. If your trade is with the Celes- 84 WALDEN. tial Empire, then some small counting house on the coast, in some Salem harbor, wiU he fixture enough. You wiU export such arti cles as the country affords, purely native products, much ice and pine timber and a little granite, always in native bottoms. These will be good ventures. To oversee all the details yourself in person; to be at once pilot and captain, and owner and un derwriter ; to buy and sell and keep the ac counts ; to read every letter received, and write or read every letter sent; to superin tend the discharge of imports night and day; to be upon many parts of the coast al most at the same time, — often the richest freight will be discharged upon a Jersey shore ; — to be your own telegraph, un- weariedly sweeping the horizon, speaking all passing vessels bound coastwise ; to keep up a steady despatch of commodities, for the supply of such a distant and exorbitant market; to keep yourself informed of the state of the markets, prospects of war and peace everywhere, and anticipate the ten dencies of trade and civilization, — taking advantage of the results of all exploring ex peditions, using new passages and aU im provements in navigation ; — charts to be ECONOM Y. 35 studied, the position of reefs and new lights and buoys to be ascertained, and ever, and ever, the logarithmic tables to be corrected, for by the error of some calculator the ves sel often splits upon a rock that should have reached a friendly i îer, — there is the un told fate of La Perouse ; — universal science to be kept pace with, studying the lives of all great discoverers and navigators, great adventurers and merchants, from Hanno and the Pheenieians down to our day; in fine, account of stock to be taken from time to time, to know how you stand. I t is a labor to task the faculties of a man, — such problems of profit and loss, of interest, of tare and tret, and gauging of all kinds in it, as demand a universal knowledge. I have thought that Walden Pond would be a good place for business, not solely on account of the railroad and the ice trade ; it offers advantages which it may not be good policy to divulge ; it is a good post and a good foundation. No Neva marshes to be filled ; though you must everywhere build on piles of your own driving. It is said that a flood-tide, with a westerly wind, and ice in the Nova, would sweep St. Petersburg from the face of the earth. 36 W A L D E N . As tliis business was to be entered into witliout the usual capital, it may not be easy to conjecture where those means, that will still be indispensable to every such under taking, were to be obtained. As for Cloth ing, to come at once to the ])ractical part of the question, perhaps we are led oftener by the love of novelty and a regard for the opinions of men, in procuring it, than by a true utility. Let him who has woidt to do recollect that the object of clothing is, first, to retain the vital heat, and secondly , in this state of society, to cover nakedness, and he may judge how much of any necessary or important work may be accomplished with out adding to his wardrobe, queens who wear a suit but once made by some tailor or dressmaker to their majesties, cannot know the comfort of wear ing a suit that fits. They are no better than wooden horses to hang the clean clothes on. Every day our garments become more as similated to ourselves, receiving the impress of the wearer’s character, until we hesitate to lay them aside, without such delay and medical appliances and some such solemnity even as our bodies. No man ever stood the lower in my estimation for having a patch Kings and though E C ON O M Y. in Ills clothes ; yet T am sure tliat there is greater anxiety, commonly, to have fashion able, or at least clean and unpatched clothes, than to have a sound conscience. But even if the rent is not mended, perhaps the worst vice betrayed is improvidence. 1 sometimes try my accpiaintanees by such tests as this, — Who (!ould wear a patch, or two extra seams only, over the knee ? Most behave as if they believed that their prospects for life would be ruined if they should do it. It would bo easier for them to hobble to town with a broken leg’ than with a broken panta^ loon. Often if an accident happens to a gentleman’s legs, they can be mended ; but if a similar accident happens to the legs of his pantaloons, there is no help for i t ; for he considers, not what is truly respectable, but what is res23ected. Wo know but few men, a great many coats and breeches. Dress a scarecrow in your last shift, you standing shiftless by, who would not soonest salute the scarecrow ? Passing a cornfield the other day, close by a hat and coat on a stake, I recognized the owner of the farm, lie was only a little more weather-beaten than when I saw him last. I have heard of a dog that barked at every stranger who ap- 38 W ALDEN. proached his master’s premises with clothes on, hut was easily quieted by a naked thief. It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes. Could you, in such a case, tell surely of any company of civilized men which belonged to the most respected class ? When Madam Pfeiffer, in hei‘ adventurous travels round the world, from east to west, had got so near liome as Asiatic Russia, she says that she felt the ne(;essity of wearing other than a travelling dress, when she went to meet the author- iticis, for she “ was now in a civilized coun try, where . . . people are judged of by their clothes.” Even in our democratic New England towns the accidental possession of wealth, and its manifestation in dress and equipage alone, obtain for the possessor al most universal respect. But they who yield sucih respect, numerous as they are, are so far heathen, and need to have a missionary sent to them. Beside, clothes introduced sewing, a kind of work which you may call endless ; a woman’s dress, at least, is never done. A man who has at length found some thing to do wiU not need to get a new suit E C O N O M Y . 39 to do it in ; for liim the old will do, that has lain dusty in the garret for an indeterminate period. Old shoes will ser\ e a hero longer than they have served his valet, — if a hero ever has a valet, — bare feet are older than shoes, and he can make them do. Only they who go to soirees and legislative halls must have new coats, coats to change as often as the man changes in them. But if my jacket and trousers, my hat and shoes, are fit to worship God in, they will do; will they not ? Who ever saw his old clothes, — his old coat, actually worn out, resolved into its primitive elements, so that it was not a deed of charity to bestow it on some poor boy, by him perchance to be bestowed on some poorer still, or shall we say richer, who could do with less ? I say, beware of all en terprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit ? If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes. All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to he. Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted, so enterprised or sailed 40 WALDKN. ill some way, that we feci like new men in the old, and that to retain it would be like keeping new wine in old bottles. Our moLilting season, like that of the fowls, must bo a crisis in our lives. The loon retires to solitary ponds to spend it. Thus also the snake casts its slough, and the cat erpillar its wormy coat, by an internal in- dufitry and expansion ; for clothes are but oui outmost cuticle and mortal coil. Other wise we shall be found sailing under false colors, and be inevitably cashiered at last by our own opinion, as well as that of man kind. We don garment after garment, as if we gre w like exogenous plants by addition with out;. Our outside and often thin and fanci ful clothes are our epidermis, or false skin, which partakes not of our life, and may be strippeel off hero and there without fatal in jury ; our thicker garments, constantly worn, arc: our cellular integument, or cortex ; but oui’ shirts are our liber, or true bark, which cannot be removed without girdling and so destroying the man. I believe that all races at some seasons wear something equivalent to the shirt. I t is desirable that a man be clad so simply that he can lay his hands ECONOM Y. 41 oil liiinself in tlie dark, and that he live in all respects so eoinpaetly and preparedly, that, if an enemy take the town, he can, like the old philosopher, walk out the gate empty- handed without anxiety. While one thick garment is, for most purposes, as good as three thin ones, and cheap clothing can he obtained at prices really to suit customers ; while a thick coat can he bought for five dollars, which will last as many years, thick pantaloons for two dollars, cowhide hoots for a dollar and a half a pair, a siiinnier hat for a quarter of a dollar, and a winter cap for sixty-two and a half cents, or a better be made at home at a nominal cost, where is he so poor that, clad in such a suit, o f his own earning^ there will not be found wise men to do him reverence ? When I ask for a garment of a particular form, my tailoress tolls me gravely, “ They do not make them so now,” not emphasizing the “ They ” at all, as if she quoted an au thority as impersonal as the Fates, and I find it difficult to get made what I want, simply because she cannot believe that I mean what I say, that I am so rash. When I hear this oracular sentence, I am for a moment absorbed in thought, emphasizing 42 WALDEN. to myself each word separately that I may come at the meaning of it, that I may find out by what degree of consanguinity They ar(! related to me, and what authority they mEiy have in an affair which affects me so nearly; and, finally, I am inclined to answer her with equal mystery, and without any more emphasis of the “ they,” — “ I t is true, thtiy did not make them so recently, but they do now.” Of what use this measuring of mei if she does not measnre my character, but only the breadth of my shoulders, as it were a peg to hang the coat on ? We wor- ship not the Graces, nor the Parcse, but Fashion. She spins and weaves and cuts with full authority. The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveller’s cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same. I some times despair of getting anything quite sim ple: and honest tlone in this world by the help of men. They would have to be passed thiough a powerful press first, to squeeze their okl notions out of them, so that they would not soon get upon their legs again; and then there would be some one in the company with a maggot in his head, hatched from an egg deposited there nobody knows when, for not even fire kills these things, EC O N O M Y. 43 and you would have lost your labor. Nev ertheless, we will not forget that some Egyptian wheat was handed down to us by a mummy. On the whole, I think that it cannot be maintained that dressing has in this or any country risen to the dignity of an art. At present men make shift to wear what they can get. Like shipwrecked sailors, they put on what they can find on the beach, and at a little distance, whether of space or time, laugh at each other’s masquerade. Every generation laughs at the old fash ions, but follows religiously the new. We are amused at beholding the costume of Henry VIII., or Queen Elizabeth, as much as if it was that of the King and Queen of the Cannibal Islands. All costume off a man is pitiful or grotesque. I t is only the serious eye peering from and the sincere life passed within it which restrain laughter and consecrate the costume of any people. Let Harlequin be taken with a tit of the colic and his trappings will have to serve that mood too. When the soldier is hit by a cannon ball rags are as becoming as purple. The childish and savage taste of men and women for new patterns keeps how many 41 WALDEN. shaking and squinting through kaleido scopes that they may discovfu’ the particu lar figure which this generation requires to day. The manufacturers have learned that this taste is merely whimsical. Of two pat terns which differ only hy a few threads more or less of a particular color, the one will be sold readily, the other lie on the shelf, though it frequently hap])ens that alter the lapse of a season the latter be comes the most fashionable. Comparatively, tattooing is not the hideous custom which it is called. I t is not barbarous merely be cause the printing is skin-deep and unalter able. I cannot believe that our factory system is the best mode by which men may get clothing. The condition of the operatives is becoming every day more like that of the English; and it cannot be wondered at, since, as far as I have heard or observed, the principal object is, not that mankind may be well and honestly clad, but, unques- ti(mably, that the corporations may be en- riidied. In the long run men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high. KCONOM Y. 45 As for a Shelter, I will not deny that this is now a necessary of life, though there are instances of men having done without it for long periods in colder countries than this. Samuel Laing says that “ the Laplander in his skin dress, and in a skin bag which he j3uts over his liead and slioulders, will sleep night after night on the snow . . . in a degree of cold which would extinguish the life of one exposed to it in any woollen clothing.” He had seen them aslee]) thus. Yet he adds, “ Tliey are not hardier than other people.” But, probably, man did not live lone' on the earth without disooverintr the convenience which there is in a house, the domestic comforts, which phrase may have originally signified the satisfactions of the house more than of the family ; though these must be extremely partied and occa sional in those climates whore the house is associated in our thoughts with winter or the rainy season chiefly, and two thirds of the year, except for a pai'asol, is unnecessary. In our climate, in the summer, it was for merly almost solely a covering at night. In the Indian gazettes a wigwam was the sym bol of a day’s march, and a row of them cut or painted on the bark of a tree signified 46 WALDEN. that so many times they had camped. Man was not made so large limbed and robust bnt that ho must seek to narrow his world, and wall in a space such as fitted him. He was at first bare and out of doors; but though this was pleasant enough in serene and warm weather, by daylight, the rainy season and the winter, to say nothing of the torrid sun, would perhaps have nipped his rsice in the bud if he had not made haste to clothe himself with the shelter of a house. Adam and Eve, according to the fable, wore tlie bower before other clothes. Man wanted a home, a place of warmth, or comfort, first of physical warmth, then the warmth of the affections. We may imagine a time when, in the in fancy of the human race, some enterprising mortal crept into a hollow in a rock for shel ter. Every child begins the world again, to some extent, and loves to stay out doors, even in wet and cold. It plays house, as well as horse, having an instinct for it. Who does lujt remember the interest with which, when y(mng, he looked at shelving roclis, or any ajjproach to a cave? It was the natural y(!arning of that portion of our most primi tive ancestor which still survived in us. E C O N O M Y . 47 From the cave we have advanced to roofs of palm leaves, of bark and houghs, of linen woven and stretched, of grass and straw, of boards and shingles, of stones and tiles. At last, we know not what it is to live in the open air, and our lives are domestic in more senses than we think. From the hearth the field is a great distance. I t would be well, perhaps, if we were to spend more of our days and nights without any obstruction between us and the celestial bodies, if the poet did not speak so much from under a roof, or the saint dwell there so long. Birds do not sing in caves, nor do doves cherish their innocence in dovecots. However, if one designs to construct a dwelling house, it behooves him to exercise a little Yankee shrewdness, lest after all he find himself in a workhouse, a labyrinth without a clue, a museum, an almshouse, a prison, or a sjjlendid mausoleum instead. Consider first how slight a shelter is abso lutely necessary. I have seen Penobscot In dians, in this town, living in tents of thin cotton cloth, while the snow was nearly a foot deep around them, and I thought that they would be glad to have it deeper to keep out the wind. Formerly, when how to get 48 WALDEN. my living honestly, with freedom left for my proper pui'suits, was a question whieli vexed m(! even more than it does now, for unfor tunately I am become somewhat callous, I used to see a large box by the railroad, six fe(d long by three wide, in which the labor ers, locked up their tools at night; and it suggested to me that every man who was hard pushed might get such a one for a dol lar-, and, having bored a few auger holes in it, to admit the air at least, get into it when it rained and at night, and hook down the lid, and so have freedom in his love, and in hii5 soul be free. This did not appear the worst, nor by any means a despicable alter native. You could sit up as late as you pleased, and, whenever you got up, go abroad without any landlord or liouse-loi-d dogging you for rent. Many a man is liar- assed to death to pay the rent of a larger and more luxurious box who would not have frozen to death in such a box as this. I am far from jesting. Economy is a subject which admits of being treated with levity, but it cannot so be disposed of. A comfort able house for a rude and hardy I'ace, that lived mostly out of doors, was once made here almost eutirelv of such materials as ECONOMY. 49 Nature furnished ready to their hands. Gooldn, who was superintendent of the In dians subject to the Massachusetts Colony, writing in 1674, says, “ The best of their houses are covered very neatly, tight and warm, with barks of trees, slipped from their bodies at those seasons when the sap is up, and made into great flakes, with pressure of weighty timber, when they are green. . . . The meaner sort ;ire covered with mats which they make of a kind of bulrush, and are also indifferently tight and warm, but not so good as this former. . . . Some I have seen, sixty or a Inmdred feet long and thirty feet broad. . . . I have often lodged in their wigwams, and found them as warm ks the best English houses.” He adds that they were commonly earpeteel and lined within with well-wrought embroidered mats, and were furnished with various utensils. The Indians had advanced so far as to reg ulate the effect of the wind by a mat sus pended over the hole in the roof and moved by a string. Such a lodge was in the first instance constructed in a day or two at most, and taken down and put up in a few hours ; and every family owned one, or its apart ment in one. 50 WALDEN. In the savage state every family owns a shelter as good as the best, and sufficient for its coarser and simpler wants ; but I think tha.t I speak within bounds when I say that, though the birds of the air have their nests, and the foxes their holes, and the savages their wigwams, in modern civilizeil society not more than one half the families own a shelter. In the large towns and cities, where civilization esj)ecially prevails, the number of those who own a shelter is a very small fraction of the whole. The rest pay an annual tax for this outside garment of all, become indisi)ensablo summer and winter, which would buy a village of Indian wig wams, but now helps to keep them poor as long- as they live. I do not mean to insist here on the disadvantage of hiring compared witli owning, but it is evident that the sav age owns his shelter because it costs so little, while the civilized man hires his commonly because he cannot afford to own i t ; nor can he, in the long run, any better afford to hire:. But, answers one, by merely paying this tax the poor civilized man seemres an abode which is a palace compared with the savage’s. An annual rent of from twenty- five to a hundred dollars (these are the coun- ECONOMY. 61 try i-ates) entitles him to the benefit of tlie impi’ovemeiits of centuries, spacious apart ments, clean ]iaint and paper, Kumford fire place, hack plastering, Venetian blinds, cop per pump, spring lock, a commodious cellar, and many other things. But how ha])pens it that he who is said to enjoy these things is so commonly a jmor civilized man, while the savage, who has them not, is rich as a savage? If it is asserted that civilization is a real advance in the condition of man, — and I think that it is, though only the wise im prove their advantages, — it must be shown that it lias produced better dwellings with out making them moi'e costly ; and tlû cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run. An avei'age house in this neighboihood costs perhaps eight hundi-ed dollars, and to lay up this sum will talu; from ten to fifteen ^nars of the laborer’s life, even if lie is not encumbered with a family, — estimating the pecuniary value of every man’s labor at one dollar a day, for if some I'oceive more, otliers receive less ; — so that he must have sjient more tlian half his life commonly be fore his wigwam will he earned. If we 52 WALDEN. suppose him to pay a rent instead, tliis is l;)ut a doubtful choice of evils. "VV ould the sa't’̂ age have been wise to exchange his wig wam for a palace on these terms ? It may be guessed that I reduce almost the whole advantage of holding this super fluous property as a fund in store against the future, so far as the individual is con cerned, mainly to the defraying of funeral expenses. But perhaps a man is not ro- (piired to bury himself. Nevertheless this 2)oints to an important distinction between the civilized man and the savage ; and, no doubt, they have designs on us foi' our ben efit, in making the life of a civilized pieople an in.'ititution, in which the life of the in- aiinot at once name a dozen in the town who own their farms free and clear. If you would know the histoiy of these homesteads, inquire at the bank wliere they are mort gaged. The man who has actually paid for his farm with labor on it is so rare that 54 WALDEN. every neighbor can point to him. I doubt if there are three such men in Concord. What has been said of the merchants, that a very large inajoiity, even ninety-seven in a hundred, are sure to fail, is equally true of the farmers. With regard to the mer chants, however, one of them says perti nently that a great part of their failures are not genuine pecuniary failures, but merely failures to fulfil their engagements, because it is inconvenient; that is, it is the moral character that breaks down. But this puts ill) infinitely worse face on the matter, and suggests, beside, that probably not even the other three succeed in saving their souls, l)ut are perchance bankrupt in a worse sense than they who fail honestly. Bankru])tcy and repudiation are the spring-boards from which much of our civilization vaults and tui'iis its somersets, but the savage stands on the unelastic jdank of famine. Yet the Middlesex Cattle Show goes off here with eclat annually, as if all the joints of the ag ricultural machine were suent. The farmer is endeavoring to solve the problem of a livelihood by a formula more coTn]ilicated than tlie jiroblem itself. To get lii.s shoestrings he speculates in herds of ECONOM Y. 55 cattle. With consummate skill he has set his trap with a hair springe to catch comfort ami independence, and then, as he turned away, got his own leg into it. Q̂ his is the reason he is poor ; and for a similar reason we are all poor in respect to a thousand sav age comforts, though surrounded by luxu ries. As Chapman sings, — “ The false society of men — — for earthly greatness A ll heavenly comforts rarefies to air.” And when the farmer has got his house, he may not he the richer hut the poorer for it, and it he the house that has got him. As I understand it, that was a valid objection urged hy Monius against the house which Minerva made, that she “ had not made it movable, by which means a bad neighbor hood might be avoided; ” and it may still be urged, for our houses are such unwieldy prop>erty that we are often imprisoned rather than housed in them; and the bad neighbor hood to be avoided is our own scurvy selves. I know one or two families, at least, in this town, who, for nearly a generation, have been wishing to sell their houses in the out skirts and move into the village, but have not been able to accomplish it, and only death will set them free. 56 WAI, DEN. Granted, that the majority are ahle at last eiiher to own or hire the modern house with all. its improvements. While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not ecpiall}" improved the men who are to in- haliit them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kii.igs. And i f the civilized man's pursuits are no worthier than the savage's, i f he is employed the (greater part o f his life in ohtuining gross necessaries and comforts merely, ‘why shoidd he have a better dwell ing than the former ? But how do the poor minority fare ? Per haps it will be found that just in proportion as some liave been placed in outivard eir- cuinstances above tlie savage, others have been degraded below him. The luxury of one class is counterbalanced by the indi- ge:.ice of another. On tlie one side is the palace, on the other are the almshouse and ‘‘ .silent poor.” The myriads who built the pyramids to be the tombs of the Pharaohs were fed on garlic, and it may be 'were not dec'ently buried themselves. Tlie mason who finishes the cornice of the palace re turns at night perchance to a hut not so gO(id a.s a wigwam. It is a mistake to sup- E C O N O M Y. pose that, in a country wiiere the usual evi dences of civilization exist, the condition of a very large body of the inhabitants may not be as degraded as that of savages. I refei- to the degraded poor, not now to the degraded rich. To know this I should not need to look farther than to the shanties which everywhere border our railroads, that last iniproveniont in civilization ; where I see in my daily walks human beings livung in sties, and all winter with an open door, for the sake of light, without any visible, often im aginable, wood pile, and the forms of both old and young are permanently contracted by the long habit of shrinking from cold and misery, and the development of all their limbs and faculties is cheeked. It certainly is fair to look at that class by whose labor the works wliieh disting;uisli this generation are accomplished. Such too, to a greater or less extent, is the condition of tlie (>]> eratives of every denomination in England, which is the grcsat workhouse of the world. Or I could refer you to Ireland, which is marked as one of the white oi' enlightened spots on the map. Contrast the physical condition of the Irish with that of the North American Indian, or the South Sea Islander, 58 WALDEN. or any other savage race before it was de graded by contact with the civilized man. Yt̂ t I have no doubt that that people’s rul ers are as wise as the average of civilized rulers. Their condition only proves what scpaalidness may consist with (dvilization. I hardly need refer now to the laborers in our Southern States who produce the staple ex ports of this country, and are themselves a staple production of tlie South. But to confine myself to those who are said to be in moderate circumstances. Most men appear never to have consid ered what a house is, and are actually though needlessly poor all their lives because they think that they must have such a one as their neighbors have. As if one were to wear any sort of coat which the tailor might cm: out for him, or, gradually leaving off palmleaf hat or cap of woodcbnck skin, com plain of hard times because he could not afford to buy him a crown ! It is possible to invent a house still more convenient and lu>:urious than we have, which yet all would admit that man could not afford to pay for. Shall we always study to obtain more of these things, and not sometimes to be con tent with less ? Shall the respectable citizen ECONOMY. 59 thus gravely teach, by jjrecept and example, the necessity of the young man’s providing a certain number of superfluous glow-shoes, and mnbrollas, and empty guest chambers for empty guests, before he dies ? Why should not our furniture be as simple as the Arab’s or the Indian’s ? When I think of the benefactors of the race, whom we have apotheosized as messengers from heaven, bearers of divine gifts to man, I do not see in my mind any retinue at their heels, any car-load of fashionable furniture. Or what if I were to allow — would it not be a singu lar allowance ? — that our furniture shoxild be more complex than the Arab’s, in pro portion as we are morally and intellectually his supeuiors! At present our houses are cluttered and defiled with it, and a good housewife woidd sweep out the greater part into the dust hole, and not leave her morn ing’s work undone. IMorning work I By the blushes of Aurora and the music of Memnon, what should be man’s morning v'ork in this world ? I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, wlien the furniture of my mind was all un dusted still, and I threw them out the win- 6(1 WALDEN. (low ill disgust. How, then, could I liave a furnished house ? I would rather sit in the o]ien air, for no dust gathers on the grass, unless where man has broken ground. It is the luxurious and dissipated wdio set the fashions which the herd so diligently follow. The traveller who stops at the best houses, so called, soon discovers this, for the ]>iiblicans presume him to be a Sardanapa- liis, and if he resigned himself to their ten ch r mercies he would soon be completely emasculated. I think that in the railroad car we are inclined to spend more on lux- uiy than on safety and convenieiieo, and it threatens without attaining these to become no better than a modern di-awing room, with its. divans, and ottomans, and sunshades, and a hundred other oriental tilings, which we are taking west with us, invented for the ladies of the harem and the effeminate na tives of the Celestial Empire, which Jona than should be ashamed to know the names of. T would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself than be crowded on a velvet cushion. I would rather ride on earth in an ox cart, with a free ci^rculation, than go to heaven in the fancy car of an excursion train and breathe a malaria all th(' way. ECONOM y. 61 Tlie very simplicity and nakedness of man’s life in the primitive ages imply this advantage, at least, that they left him still but a sojourner in nature. When he was refreshed with food and sleep he contem plated his journey again. He dwelt, as it were, in a tent in this world, and was either threading the valleys, or crossing the plains, or climbing the mountain tops. But lo ! men have become the tools of their tools. The man who indejjendently plucked the fruits when he was hungry is become a farmer ; and he who stood under a tree for shelter, a housekeeper. AYe now no longer camp as for a night, but have settled down on earth and forgotten heaven. We have adopted Christianity merely as an improved method of og'n-culture.' AYe have built for this world a family mansion, and for the next a family tomb. The best works of art are the expression of man’s struggle to free himself from this condition, but the effect of our art is merely to make this low state com fortable and that higher state to be forgot ten. There is actually no place in this vil lage for a work of Jine art, if any had come down to us, to stand, for our lives, our houses and streets, furnish no proper pcd- 62 WALDEN. estal for it. There is not a nail to hanal men in N(!W England, in the beginning of the colo- nii3s, commenced their first dwelling houses in this fashion for two reasons : firstly, in order not to waste time in building, and not to want food the next season ; secondly, in order not to discourage poor laboring people wliom they brought over in numbers from Eatherland. In the course of three or four years, when the country became adapted to agriculture, they built themselves handsome houses, spending on them several thousands.” E C O N O M Y . 65 In this course which our ancestors took there was a show of prudence at least, as if their principle were to satisfy the more pressing wants first. But are the more pressing wants satisfied now ? When I think of acquiring for myself one of our luxurious dwellings, I am deterred, for, so to speak, the country is not yet adajjted to human culture, and we are still forced to cut our spiritual bread far thinner than our forefathers did their wheaten. Not that all architectural ornament is to be neglected even in the rudest periods; but let our houses first be lined with beauty, where they come in contact with our lives, like the tenement of the shell-fish, and not overlaid with it. But, alas! I have been inside one or two of them, and know what they are lined with. Though we are not so degenerate but that we might possibly live in a cave or a wig wam or wear skins to-day, it certainly is better to accept the advantages, though so dearly bought, which the invention and in dustry of mankind offer. In such a neigh borhood as this, boards and shingles, lime and bricks, are cheaj3er and more easily ob tained tlian suitable caves, or whole logs, or G6 WALDEN. bark in sufficient quantities, or even well- teinjjered clay or flat stones. I sj^eak im- derstandingly on tliis subject, for I have jtiade myself acquainted with it both theo- i-etically and practically. With a little more wit we might use these materials so as to become richer than the richest now are, and make our civilization a blessing. The civilized man is a more experienced and wiser savage. But to make haste to my own experiment. Near the end of March, 1845, 1 borrowed an axe and went down to the woods by Walden Pond, nearest to where 1 intended to build my house, and began to cut down some tall arrowy white pines, still in their youth, for timber. It is difficult, to begin without borrowing, but perhaps it is the most generous course thus to permit jmur fellow-men to have an interest in your enter prise. The owner of the axe, as I k ; released his hold on it, said that it was tlu; apple of his eye ; but I returned it sharper than I re ceived it. It was a pleasant hillside where I worked, covered with pine woods, thi’ough which I looked out on the pond, and a small open field in the woods wliere ])ines and ECONOM Y. 67 hickories were spi'inghig up. The ice in the pond was not yet dissolved, though there were soine open spaces, and it was all dark colored and saturated with water. There were some sliglit Hurries of snow during the days that I worked there ; but for tlie most pai't when I came out on to the railroad, on !ny way home, its yellow sand heap stretched away gleaming in the hazy atmosphere, and the rails shone in the spring sun, and I heard the lark and ])ewce and other birds already come to commence another year with us. They were pleasant spring days, in which the winter of man’s discontent was thawing as well as the earth, and the life that had lain torpid began to stretch itself. One day, wlien my axe had come off and I had cut a green hickory for a wedgcg driv ing it with a stone, and liad placed the whole to soak in a pond hoL̂ in ord(‘r to swell the wood, I saw a striped snake run into the water, and he laj ̂on tlu: bottom, a])parently without inconvenienecg as long as I stayed there, or more tlian a cpiarter of an hour; perha])s because he had not yet fairly come out of the torpid state. It appeared to me that for a like reason men rcjiiain in their present low and primitiv'e condition ; but if 68 WALDEN. th(;y should feel the influence of the spring of springs arousing them, they would of necessity rise to a higher and moie ethereal life. I had previously seen the snakes in frosty mornings in my path with portions of their bodies stiU numb and inflexible, wait ing for the sun to thaw them. On the 1st of April it rained and melted the ice, and in the early part of the day, which was very foggy, I heard a stray goose gro]>ing about over the pond and cackling as if lost, or like the spirit of the fog. So I went on for some days cutting and hewing timber, and also studs and rafters, all with my narrow axe, not having many communicable or scholar-like thoughts, sing ing to myself, — Men say they know many things; But lo I they have taken wings, — The arts and sciences, And a thousand appliances ; The wind that blows Is all that anybody knows. I hewed the main timbers six inches square, most of the studs on two sides only, and the rafters and floor timbers on one side, leaving the rest of the bark on, so that they were just as straight and much stronger than E CO N O M Y. 69 sawed ones. Each stick was carefully mor tised or tenoned by its stump, for 1 had bor rowed other tools by this time. My days in the woods were not very long ones ; yet I usually carried my dinner of bread and but ter, and read the newspaper in which it was wrapped, at noon, sitting amid the green pine boughs which I had cut off, and to my bread was imparted some of their fragrance, for my hands were covered with a thick coat of pitch. Before I had done I was more the friend than the foe of the pine tree, though I had cut down some of them, having be come better acquainted with it. Sometimes a rambler in the wood was attracted by the sound of my axe, and we chatted pleasantly over the chips which I had made. By the middle of April, for I made no haste in my work, but rather made the most of it, my house was framed and ready for the raising. I had already bought the shanty of Janies Collins, an Irishman who worked on the Fitchburg Railroad, for boards. Janies Collins’ shanty was considered an un commonly line one. When I called to see it he was not at home. I walked about the outside, at first unobserved from within, the window was so deep and high. I t was of 70 WALDEN. small dimensions, with a peaked cottage roof, and not much else to he seen, the dirt being raised five feet all around as if it were a (iompost heap. The roof was the soundest part, though a good deal warped and made brittle by the sun. Door-sill there was none, but a perennial passage for the hens under the door board. Mrs. C. came to the door and asked mii to view it from the inside, T1 le hens were driven in by my approach. I t was dark, and had a dirt floor for the most part, dank, clammy, and aguish, only here a board and there a board which would not bear removal. She lighted a lamp to show me the inside of the roof and the walls, and also that the board floor extended under the bed, warning me not to step into the cellar, a sort of dust hole two feet deep. In her own words, they were “ good boards overhead, good boards all around, and a good window,” — of two whole squires origi nally, only the cat had passed out that way lately. There was a stove, a bed, and a place to sit, an infant in the house where it was born, a silk parasol, gilt-framed looking- glsiss, and a patent new coffee-mill nailed to an oak sapling, all told. The bargain was soon concluded, for James had in the mean E CO NO MY . 71 while returned. I to jjay four dollars and twenty-five cents to-nig'lit, he to vacate at five to-niorrow niorning', selling to nobody else meanwhile; I to take possession at six. I t were ^vell, he said, to be there early, and anticipate certain indistinct but wholly unjust claims on the score of g-round rent and fuel. This he assured me was the only encum brance. At six I passed him and his family on the road. One large bundle held their all, — bed, coffee-mill, looking-glass, hens, — all but the ca t; she took to the woods and became a wild cat, and, as I learned after ward, trod in a trap set for woodchucks, and so became a dead cat at last. I took down this dwelling the same morn ing, drawing the nails, and removed it to the pond side by small cart-loads, spreading the boai'ds on the grass th(‘re to bleach and warp back again in the sun. One early thrush gave me a note or two as I drove along the woodland path. I was informed treacher ously by a young Patrick that nciighbor Seeley, an Irishman, in the intervals of the carting, transferred the still tolerable, straight, and drivable nails, staples, and spikes to his pocket, and then stood when I came back to pass the time of day, and 72 WALDEN. look freshly up, unconcerned, with spring thoughts, at the devastation ; there being a dearth of work, as he said. lie was there to represent spectatordom, and help make this seemingly insignificant event one with the removal of the gods of Troy. I dug my cellar in the side of a hill slop ing to the south, where a woodchuck had formerly dug his burrow, down through sumach and blackberry roots, and the lowest stain of vegetation, six feet squar(? by seven deep, to a fine sand where potatoes would not freeze in any winter. The sides were left shelving, and not stoned; but the sun having never shone on them, the sand still keeps its place. I t was but two hcurs’ work. I took j)articular pleasure in this breaking of ground, for in ahiiost all latitudes men dig into the earth for an equabk: tempera ture. Under the most splendid house in the city is still to be found the cellar where they store their roots as of old, and lo2ig after the superstructure has disappeared posterity re mark its dent in the earth. The house is still but a sort of porch at the entrance of a burrow. At length, in the beginning of May, with the help of some of my acquaintances, rather EC ON OMY . 73 to improve so good an occasion for neighbor liness than from any necessity, I set np the frame of my house. No man was ever more honored in the character of his raisers than I. They are destined, I trust, to assist at the raising of loftier structures one day. I began to occupy my house on the 4th of July, as soon as it was boarded and roofed, for the boards were carefully feather-edged and lapped, so that it was perfectly impiervi- ous to rain, but before boarding I laid the foundation of a chimney at one end, bring ing two cartloads of stones up the hill from the pond in my arms. I built the chimney after iny hoeing in the fall, before a tire be came necessary for warmth, doing my cook ing in the mean while out of doors on the ground, early in the morning ; which mode I still think is in some respects more con venient and agreeable than the usual one. When it stormed before my bread was baked, I fixed a few boards over the fire, and sat under them to watch my loaf, and passed some pleasant hours in that way. In those days, when my hands were much em ployed, I read but little, but the least scraps of paper which lay on the ground, my holder, or tablecloth, afforded me as much entertain- 74 WALDEN. nieiit, in fact answered the same purpose as the Iliad. It would be worth the while to Imild still more deliberately than I did, considering, for instance, what foundation a door, a window, a cellar, a garret, have in the nature of man, and perchance never raising any sux)erstruc- t/nre until we found a better reason for it tlian our temporal necessities even. There is some of the same fitness in a man’s build ing his own house that there is in a bird’s building its own nest. Who knows but if men constructed their dwellings with their own hands, and provided food for themselves and families simply and honestly enough, the poetic faculty would be iiniversally devel oped, as birds universally sing when they are so engaged? But alas ! we do like cow- liirds and cuckoos, which lay their eggs in nests which other birds have built, and cheer no traveller with their chattering and un musical notes. Shall we forever resign the pleasure of construction to the r'lirpenter ? What does architecture amount to in the cx- })erience of the mass of men? I nev̂ er in all my walks came across a man (iugaged in so simple and natural an oecupation as build- E C O N O M r . 75 iiig’ liis house. We belong to the commu nity. It is not the tailor alone who is the ninth part of a man ; it is as much the preacher, and the merchant, and the farmer. Where is this division of labor to end ? and what object does it finally serve ? No doubt another may also think for me ; but it is not therefore desirable that he should do so to the exclusion of my thinking for myself. True, there are architects so called in this country, and I have heard of one at least possessed with the idea of making architec tural ornaments have a core of truth, a ne cessity, and hence a iKsauty, as if it were a revelation to him. All very well perhaps from liis point of view, but only a little better tlian the common dilettantism. A sentimental reformer in arcliitecture, ho be gan at the cornice, not at the foundation. I t was only now to jrat a core of truth within the ornaments, that every sugar plum in fact might have an almond or caraway seed in it, — though I hold that almonds are most wholesome without the sugar, — and not how the inhabitant, the indweller, might build truly within and without, and let the ornaments take care of themselves. What reasonable man ever supposed that orna- 76 WALDEN. ments were something outward and in the skin merely, — that the tortoise got his spotted shell, or the shellfish its mother-o’- pearl tints, by such a contract as the inhab itants of Broadway their Trinity Church? But a man has no more to do with the style of architecture of his house than a tortoise with that of its shell: nor need the soldier be so idle as to try to paint the precise color of his virtue on his standard. The enemy will find it out. He may turn pale when the trial comes. This man seemed to me to lean over the cornice, and timidly whisper his half truth to the rude occupants who really knew it better than he. What of architectural beauty I now see, I know has gradually grown from within outward, out of the necessities and character of the in dweller, who is the only builder, — out of some unconscious truthfulness, and noble ness, without ever a thought for the appear ance ; and whatever additional beauty of this kind is destined to be produced will be preceded by a like unconscious beauty of life. The most interesting dwellings in this (iountry, as the painter knows, are the most unj)retending, humble log huts and cottages of the poor commonl}^; it is the life of the E C O N O M Y. 77 inliabitants whose shells they' are, and not any peculiarity in their surfaces merely, which makes them picturesque ; and equally interesting will be the citizen’s suburban box, when his life shall be as simple and as agreeable to the imagination, and there is as little straining after effect in the style of his dwelling. A great proportion of archi tectural ornaments are literally hollow, and a September gale would strip them off, like borrowed plumes, without injury to the sub- stantials. They can do without architecture who have no olives nor wines in the cellar. What if an equal ado were made about the ornaments of style in literature, and the architects of our bibles spent as much time about their cornices as the architects of our churches do ? So are made the hdles-lettres and the heaux - arts and their professors. Much it concerns a man, forsooth, how a few sticks are slanted over him or under him, and what colors are daubed upon his box. I t would signify somewhat, if, in any ear nest sense, he slanted them and daubed i t ; but the spirit having departed out of the tenant, it is of a piece with constructing his own coffin, — the architecture of the grave, and “ carpenter,” is but another name for 78 WALDEN. “ coffin-maker.” One man says, in his de spair or indifference to life, take up a hand ful of the earth at your feet, and paint your house that color. Is he thinking of his last and narrow house ? Toss up a copj)er for it as well. What an abundance of leisure he must have ! Why do you take up a hand ful of dirt ? Better paint your house your own complexion; let it turn pale or blush for you. An enterprise to im])rovc the style of cottage architecture I W hen you have got my ornaments ready I will wear them. Before winter I built a chimney, and shingled the sides of my house, which were already impervious to rain, with imperfect and sappy shingles made of the first slice of the log, whose edges I was obliged to straighten with a plane. I have thus a tight shingled and plastered house, ten feet wide by fifteen long, and eight-feet posts, with a garret and a closet, a large window on each side, two trap doors, one door at the end, and a Ijrick fireplace opposite. The exact cost of my house, pay ing the usual price for such materials as I used, but not counting the work, all of which was done by myself, was as follows; and I give the details because very few are able to E C O N O M Y . 79 tell exactly what their houses cost, and fewer still, if any, the separate cost of the various materials which compose them : —■ B o a r d s ..........................$8 03|, mostly shanty boards. Refuse shingles for roof and sides . . . . 4 00 Laths .......................... 1 25 T avo second-hand win dows with glass . . 2 43 One thousand old brick 4 00 Two casks of lime . . 2 40 That was high. H a i r ............................... 0 31 More than I needed. Mantle-tree iron . . . 0 15 Nails ...........................3 90 Hinges and screws . . 0 14 Latch ..........................0 10 C h a l k .......................... 0 01 m , ■* f I carried a good partIransportation . . . 1 40 > ̂ f ^ \ on my back. In all . . . . $28 12i These are all the materials excepting the timber, stones, and sand, which I claimed by squatter’s right. I have also a small wood shed adjoining, made chiefly of the stuff which was left after building the house. I intend to build me a house which will surpass any on the main street in Concord in grandeur and luxury, as soon as it pleases me as much and will cost me no more than my present one. 80 WALDEN. I thus found that the student who wishes for a shelter can obtain one for a lifetime at an expense not greater than the rent which he now pays annually. If I seem to boast more than is becoming, my excuse is that I brag for humanity rather than for myself; anel my shortcomings and inconsistencies do not affect the truth of my statement. Not withstanding much cant and hypocrisy, — chaff which I find it difficult to separate from my wheat, but for which I am as sorry as any man, — I will breathe freely and stretch myself in this respect, it is such a relief to both the moral and physical sys tem ; and I am resolved that I will not through humility become the devil’s attor ney. 1 will endeavor to speak a good word for the truth. At Cambridge College the mere rent of a student’s room, which is only a little larger than my own, is thirty dollars each year, though the corporation had the advantage of building thirty-two side by side and under one roof, and the occupant suffers the inconvenience of many and noisy neighbors, and perhaps a residence in the fourth story. I cannot but think that if we had more true wisdom in these respects, not only less education would be needed, be- E C O N O M Y . 81 cause, forsooth, more would already have been acquired, but the pecuniary expense of getting an education would in a great mea sure vanish. Those conveniences which the student requires at Cambridge or elsewliere cost him or somebody else ten times as great a sacrifice of life as they would with proper management on both sides. Those things for which the most money is demanded are never the things which the student most wants. Tuition, for instance, is an impor tant item in the term bill, while for the far more valuable education which he gets by as sociating with the most cultivated of his con temporaries no charge is made. The mode of founding a college is, commonly, to get up a subsorijstion of dollars and cents, and then following blindly the principles of a division of labor to its extreme, a principle which should never be followed but with cir cumspection, — to call in a contractor who makes this a subject of speculation, and he employs Irishmen or other operatives actu- all}' to lay the foundations, while the stu dents that are to be are said to be fitting themselves for i t ; and for these oversights successive generations have to pay. I think that it would be better than this, for the stu- 82 WALDEN. dents, or those who desire to he benefited by it, even to lay the fonndation themselves^ The student who secures his coveted leisure and retirement by systematically shirking any labor necessary to man obtains but an ignoble and unprofitable leisure, defraud ing himself of the experience which alone can make leisure fruitful. “ But,’’ says one, “ you do not mean that the students should go to work with their hands instead of their heads ? ” I do not mean that exactly, but I mean something which he might think a good deal like th a t; I mean that they should not 'play life, or study it merely, while the community supports them at this expensive game, but earnestly live, it from beginning to end. How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the ex periment of living? Methinks this would exercise their minds as much as mathemat ics. If I wished a boy to know something about the arts and sciences, for instance, I would not pursue the common course, which is merely to send him into the neighborhood of some professor, where anything is pro fessed and practised but the art of life; — to survey the world through a telescope or a microscope, and never with his natural ECOMOM Y. 83 eye ; to study cliemistry, and not learn liow his bread is made, or ineehanies, and not learn how it is earned ; to discover new sat ellites to Neptune, and not detect the motes in his eyes, or to what vagabond he is a satellite himself; or to he devoured by the monsters that swarm all around him, while contemplating the monsters in a drop of vinegar. Which would have advanced the most at the end of a month, •— the hoy who had made his own jackknife from the ore which he had dug and smelted, reading as much as would ho necessary for this — or the hoy who had attended the lectures on metallurgy at the Institute in the mean while, and had receivcnl a Rogers’ penknife from his father ? Wliieh would he most likely to cut his fingers ? . . . To my as tonishment I was informed on leaving col lege that I had studied navigation ! — why, if I had taken one turn down the har bor I should have known more about it. Even the poor student studies and is taught only political economy, while that econ omy of living which is synonymous with philosophy is not even sincerely professed in our colleges. The consequence is, that while he is reading Adam Smith, Ricardo, 84 WALDEN. and Say, he runs his father in debt irretriev ably. As with our colleges, so w'ith a hundred “ modern imjJrovements ; ” there is an illu sion about them ; there is not always a posi tive advance. The devil goes on exacting compound interest to the last for his early share and numerous succeeding investments in them. Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive a t ; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a mag netic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. Either is in such a predicament as the man who was earnest to be introduced to a distinguished deaf woman, but when he was presented, and one end of her ear trumpet was put into his hand, had nothing to saj'. As if the main object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly. We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad. EC ON OMY . 85 flap})iiig American ear will be tliat the Prin cess Adelaide lias the whooping cough. After all, the man whose horse trots a mile in a niimite does not carry the most impor tant messages; he is not an evangelist, nor does he come round eating locusts and wild honey. I doubt if Plying Childers ever cai* ried a peek of corn to mill. One says to me, “ I wonder that you do not lay up money ; you love to travel; you might take the cars and go to Fitchburg to-day and see the country.” But I am wiser than that. I have learned that the swiftest traveller is he that goes afoot. I say to my friend. Suppose we try who will get there first. The distance is thirty miles ; the fare ninety cents. That is almost a day’s wages. I remember when wages were sixty cents a day for laborers on this very road. Well, I start now on foot, and get there be- I have travelled at that rate by You will in the mean while have earned your fare, and arrive there some time to-morrow, or possibly this even ing, if you are lucky enough to get a job in season. Instead of going to Fitchburg, you will be working here the greater part of the day. And so, if the railroad reached round fore night the week together. 86 WALDEN. the world, I think that I should keep ahead of you; and as for seeing the country and. getting- experience of that kind, I should have to cut your acquaintance altogether. Such is the universal law, wliidi no man can ever outwit, and with regard to the rail road even we may say it is as broad as it is long. To make a railroad round the world available to all mankind is equivalent to grading the whole surface of the planet. Men have an indistinct notion that if they keep up this activity of joint stocks and spades long enough all will at length ride somewhere, in next to no time, and for noth ing; ; but though a c.rowd rushes to the depot, and the conductor shouts “ All aboard ! ” when the smoke is blown away and the vaj)or condensed, it will be perceived that a few are riding, but the rest are run over, — and it will be called, and will bo, “ A melancholy accident.” No doubt they can ride at last who shall have earned their fare, that is, if they survive so long, but they will ])robably have lost their elasticity and desire to trav-el by that time. This spending of the best })art of one’s life earning nioiuiy in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it, reminds me of the Eng- E C O N O M Y. 87 lishman who went to India to make a for- txxne first, in order that he might return to Eiiglanxl and live the life of a poet. He shoxxld have gone up garret at onoe. “ W hat! ” exclaim a million Irishmen stai’t- ing’ xxp from all the shanties in the land, “ is not this railroad which we have hixilt a good th ing?” Yes, I answer, comparatively good, that is, you might have done worse ; hut I wish, as you are brothers of mine, that you coxild have spent your time better than digging in this dirt. Before I finished my house, wishing to earn ten or twelve dollars by some honest and agreeable method, in order to meet my unxisxxal expenses, I planted about two acres and :i half of light and sandy soil near it chiefly with beans, but also a small paxt with potatoes, corn, peas, and txxx-xxips. The whole lot contiiins eleven acres, mostly grow ing xxp to pines axxd hickories, and was sold the preceding sexxson for eight dolhxrs and eight eeixts an acre. One farmer said tlixxt it w:is ‘‘ good for nothiixg but to raise cheep ing scpxirrels on.” I pxxt ixo manux'e what ever on this land, not beiixg the oxvixer, bxit merely a squatter, and not expectiixg to cul- 88 WALDEN. tivate so much again, and I did not quite hoe it all once. I got out several cords of stumps in ploughing, which supplied me with fuel for a long time, and left small (sireles of virgin mould, easily distinguishable through the summer by the greater luxuri ance of the beans there. The dead and for the most part unmerchantable wood behind my house, and the driftwood from the pond, liave supplied the remainder of my fuel. I was obliged to hire a team and a man for the ploughing, though I held the plough myself. My farm outgoes for the first sea son were, for implements, seed, work, etc., $14 72|. The seed corn was given me. This never costs anything to speak of, un less you plant more than enough. I got twelve bushels of beans, and eighteen bushels of potatoes, beside some peas and sweet corn. The yellow corn and turnips were too late to come to anything. My whole income from the farm was Deducting the outgoes $23 44 14 m Tliere are l e f t ............................ $8 Y14-, beside produce consumed and on hand at the i;nie this estimate was made of the value of E C O N O M Y . 89 $4.50, — the amount on hand much more than balancing a little grass which I did not raise. All things considered, that is, con sidering the importance of a man’s soul and of to-day, notwithstanding the short time oc cupied by my experiment, nay, partly even because of its transient character, I believe that that was doing better than any farmer in Concord did that year-. The next year I did better still, for I spaded up all the land which I required, about a third of an acre, and I learned from the experience of both years, not being in the least awed by many celebrated works on husbandry, Arthur Young among the rest, that if one would live simply and eat only the crop which he raised, and raise no more than he ate, and not extshange it for an in sufficient quantity of more luxurious aird ex pensive things, he would need to cultivate only a few rods of ground, and th&t it would be cheaper to spade up that than to use oxen to plough it, and to select a fresh spot from time to time than to manure the old, and he could do all his necessary farm work as it were with his left hand at odd hours in the summer; and thus he would not be tied to an ox, or horse, or cow, or pig, as at present. 90 WALDEK. I desire to speak impartially on this point, and as one not interested in the success or failure of the j)rosent economical and social arrangements. I was more independent than any farmer in Concord, for I was not anchored to a house or farm, but could fol low the bent of my genius, which is a very crooked one, every moment. Beside being better off than they already, if iny house had been burned or my crops had failed, I should have been nearly as well off as be fore. I am wont to think that men are not so much the keepers of herds as herds are the keepers of men, the former ai'e so much the freer. Men and oxen exchange work; but if we consider necessary work onljr. the oxen will be seen to have greatly the advantage, their farm is so much the larger. Man does some of his part of the exchange work in his six weeks *of haying, and it is no boy’s play. Ccirtainly no nation that lived simply in all I'espects, that is, no nation of pliilosopliets, would commit so sreat a blunder as to use tlie labor of animals. True, there never was and is not likely soon to be a nation of phi losophers, nor am I certain it is desirable that there should be. However, I should E CO NO MY . 91 never have broken a horse or hull and taken him to board for any work he might do for me, for fear I should become a horse-man or a lierds-man merely ; and if society seems to be the gainer by so doing, are we certain that what is one man’s gain is not another’s loss, and that the stable-boy has equal cause with his master to be satisfied ? Granted that some public works would not have been con structed without this aid, and let man share the glory of such with the ox and horse; does it follow that he could not have accom plished works yet more worthy of himself in that case? When men begin to do, not merely unnecessary or artistic, but luxurious and idle work, with their assistance, it is in evitable that a few do all the exchange work with the oxen, or, in other words, become the slaves of the strongest. Man thus not only works for the animal within him, but, for a symbol of this, he works for the animal without him. Though we have many sub stantial houses of brick or stone, the pros perity of the farmer is still measured by the degree to which the barn overshadows the house. This town is said to have the largest houses for oxen, cows, and horses hereabouts, and it is not behindhand in its public build- 92 WALDEN. ings ; but there are very few halls for free worship or free speech in this county. It should not be by their architecture, but why not even by their power of abstract thought, that nations should seek to commemorate themselves ? How much more admirable the Bhagvat-Geeta than all the ruins of the E ast! Towers and temples are the luxury of princes. A simple and independent mind does not toil at the bidding of any prince. Genius is not a retainer to any emperor, nor is its material silver, or gold, or marble, ex cept to a trifling extent. To what end, pray, is so much stone hammered? In Arcadia, when I was there, I did not see any hammer ing stone. Nations are possessed with an insane ambition to perpetuate the memory of themselves by the amount of hammered stone they leave. What if equal pains were taken to smooth and polish their manners ? One piece of good sense would be more memorable than a monument as high as the moon. I love better to see stones in place. The grandeur of Thebes was a vulgar gran deur. More sensible is a rod of stone wall that bounds an honest man’s field than a hundred-gated Thebes that has wandered farther from the true end of life. The reli- EC ON OMY . 93 gion and civilization which are barbaric and heathenish build splendid temples ; but what you mig'ht call Christianity does not. Most of the stone a nation hammers goes toward its tomb only. It buries itself alive. As for the Pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitions booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs. I might possibly invent some excuse for them and him, but I have no time for it. As for the religion and love of art of the builders, it is much the same all the world over, whether the building be an Egyptian temple or the United States Bank. I t costs more than it comes to. The mainspring is vanity, assisted by the love of garlic and bread and butter. Mr. flalcom, a promising young architect, designs it on the back of his Vitruvius, with hard pencil and ruler, and the job is let out to Dobson & Sons, stone cutters. "When the thiify centuries begin to look down on it, mankind begin to look up at it. As for your high towers and monuments, there was a crazy fellow once 94 WALDEN. in this town who undertook to dig through to China, and he got so far that, as he said, he heard the Chinese pots and kettles rattle ; hut I think that I shall not go out of my way to admire the hole which he made. Many are concerned about the monuments of the West and the East, — to know who built them. For my part, I should like to know who in those days did not build them, — who were above such trifling. But to proceed with my statistics. By surveying, carpentry, and day - labor of various other kinds in the village in the mean while, for I have as many trades as Angers, I had earned tfl3.34. The ex pense of food for eight months, namely, from July 4th to March 1st, the time when these estimates were made, though I lived there more than two years, — not counting potatoes, a little green corn, and some peas, which I had raised, nor considering the value of what was on hand at the last date, was Rice . . , Molasses Rye meal . Indian meal Pork . . ,$1 , 1 7:14 73 1 04 | 0 99f 0 22 Cheapest form of the saccharine. Cheaper than rye. E C O N O M Y . 95 ] Costs more than Indian ^ FJour . . . . 0 88 meal, both money J and trouble. Sugar . . . . 0 80 Lard . . , . 0 65 3 Apples . . . . 0 25 3- ^ Dried apple . . 0 22 Sweet potatoes 0 10 O One pumpkin 0 6 One watermelon 0 2 Salt . . . . 0 3 Yes, I did eat $8.74, all ;old ; but I should not thus unblushingly publish my guilt, if I did not know that most of my readers were equally guilty with mys(4f, and that their deeds would look no better in print. The next year I sometimes caught a mess of fish for my dinner, and once 4 went so far as to slaughter a woodchuck which ravaged my bean-field, — effect his ti'ansmigration, as a Tartar would say, — and devour him, partly for experiment’s sake ; but though it afforded mo a momentary enjoyn.ent, notwithstand ing a musky flavor, I saw that the longest use would not make that a good practice, however it might seem to have your wood chucks ready dressed by the village butcher. Clothing and some incidental expenses within the same dates, though little can be inferred from this item, amounted to 96 WALDEN. f8 40 | Oil and some houseliold utensils » . 2 00 So that all the pecuniary outgoes, excepting for washing and mending, which for the most part were done out of the house, and their bills have not yet been received, — and these are all and more than all the ways by which money necessarily goes out in this part of the world, — were House . . .......................................$28 12^ Farm one y e a r ................................... 14 72^ Food eight m o n t h s ........................... 8 74 Clothing, etc., eight months . . 8 40^ Oil, etc., eight months . . . . 2 00 In a l l .......................... . = . $61 99f I address myself now to those of my readers who have a living to get. And to meet this I have for farm produce sold $23 44 Earned by d a y - la b o r .....................13 34 In a U ................................................$36 78, which subtracted from the sum of the out goes leaves a balance of i25.21| on the one side, — this being very nearly the means with which I started, and the measure of ex penses to be incurred, — and on the other, beside the leisure and independence and E C O N O M Y . 97 health thus secured, a comfortable house for me as long as I choose to occupy it. These statistics, however accidental and therefore uninstruetive they may appear, as they have a certain completeness, have a cer tain value also. Nothing was given me of which I have not rendered some account. It appears from the aboi^e estimate, that my food alone cost me in money about twenty- seven cents a week. It was, for nearly two years after this, rye and Intlian meal with out yeast, potatoes, rice, a very little salt pork, molasses, and salt; and my drink, water. It was fit that I should live on rice, maiidy, who loved so well the philosophy of India. To meet the objections of some in veterate cavillers, I may as well state, that if I dined out occasionally, as I always had done, and I trust shall have opportunities to tlo again, it was frequently to the detriment of my domestic arrangements. But the dining out, being, as I have stated, a con stant element, does not in the least affect a comparative statement like this. I learned from my two years’ experience that it would cost incredibly little trouble to obtain one’s necessary food, even in this latitude ; that a man may use as simple a 98 WALDEN. diet as the animals, and yet retain health and strength. I have made a satisfactory dinner, satisfactory on several accounts, simply off a dish of purslane (^Portidaca oleracea) which I gathered in my cornfield, boiled and salted. I give the Latin on ac count of the savoriness of the trivial name. And pray what more can a reasonable man desire, in peaceful times, in ordinaiy noons, than a sufficient number of ears of green sweet-corn boiled, with the addition of salt ? Even the little variety which I used was a yielding to the demands of appetite, and not of health. Yet men have come to such a pass that they frequently starve, not for want of necessaries, but for want of luxuries ; and I know a good woman who thinks that her son lost his life because he took to drink ing water only. The reader will perceive that I am treat ing the subject rather from an economic than a dietetic point of view, and he will not venture to put my abstemiousnt^ss to the test unless he has a well-stocked larder. Bread I at first made of pure Indian meal and salt, genuine hoe-cakes, which I baked before my fire out of doors on a sliingle or the end of a stick of timber sawe.d off in E C O N O M Y . 99 building my house ; but it was wont to get smoked and to have a piny flavor. I tried flour also ; but have at last found a mixture of rye and Indian meal most convenient and agreeable. In cold weather it was no little amusement to bake several small loaves of this in succession, tending and turning them as carefully as an Egyptian his hatching eggs. They were a real cereal fruit which I ripened, and they had to my senses a fra grance like that of other noble fruits, which I kept in as long as possible by wrapjjing them in cloths. I made a study of the an cient and indispensable art of bread-making, consulting such authorities as offered, going back to the primitive days and first inven tion of the unleavened kind, when from the wildness of nuts and meats men first reached the mildness and refinement of this diet, and travelling gradually down in my studies through that accidental souring of the dough which, it is supposed, taught the leavening process, and through the various fermenta- tious thereafter, till I came to “ good, sweet, wholesome bread,” the staff of life. Leaven, which some deem the soul of bread, the spir- itini which fills its cellular tissue, which is religiously preserved like the vestal fire, — 100 WALDEN. some jjrecious bottle-full, I suppose, first brought over in the Mayflower, did the busi ness for America, and its influence is still rising, swelling, spreading, in ceiealian bil lows over the land, — this seed 1 regularly and faithfully procured from the village, till at length one morning I forgot the rules, and scalded my yeast; by which accident I dis covered that even this was not indispensa ble, — for my discoveries were not by the synthetic but analytic process, — and I have gladly omitted it since, though most house wives earnestly assured me that safe and wholesome bread without yeast might not be, and elderly people prophesied a speedy decay of the vital forces. Yet I fi]id it not to be an essential ingredient, and after going without it for a year am still in the land of the living; and I am glad to escape the trivialness of carrying a bottle-ihll in my pocket, which would sometimes pop and dis charge its contents to my discomfiture. It is simpler and more respectable to omit it. Man is an animal who more than any other can adapt himself to all climates and cir cumstances. Neither did I put any sal-soda, or other acid or alkali, into my bread. It would seem that I made it ac(3ording to E C O N O M Y . 101 the recipe whi(;h Marcus Porcius Cato gave about two centuries before Christ. “ Pa- nein depsticium sic facito. Manus niortari- umque bene lavato. Farinam in mortarium indito, aqu:e paulatim addito, subig'itoque pulchre. Ubi bene subegeris, defingito, co- quitoque sub testu.” IVbich I take to mean, “ Make kneaded bread thus. Wash your hands and trough well. Put the meal into the trough, add water gradually, and knead it thoroughly. M^hen you have kneaded it well, mould it, and bake it under a cover,” that is, in a baking-kettle. Not a word about leaven. But I did not always use this staff of life. At one time, owing to the emptiness of my purse, I saw none of it for more than a month. Every New Englander might easily raise all his own breadstuffs in this land of rye and Indian corn, and not depend on distant and fluctuating markets for them. Yet so far are we from simplicity and indepen dence that, in Concord, fresh and sweet meal is rarely sold in the shops, and hominy and corn in a still coarser form are hardly used by any. For the most part the farmer gives to his cattle and hogs the grain of his own producing, and buys flour, which is at 102 W A L D E N . least no more wholesome, at a greater cost, at the store. I saw that I could easily raise my bushel or two of rye and Indian corn, for the former will grow on the poorest land, and the latter does not require tlie best, and grind tliem in a hand-mill, and so do with out rice and pork ; and if I must have some concentrated sweet, I found by experiment that I could make a very good molasses either of pumpkins or beets, and I knew that I needed only to set out a few maples to obtain it more easily still, and ^vhile these were growing I could use various substitutes beside those which I have nannsd. “ For,” as the Forefathers sang, — “ we can make liquor to sweeten our lips Of pumpkins and parsnips and walnut-tiee cliips.” Finally, as for salt, that grossest of grocer ies, to obtain this might be a fit occasion for a visit to the seashore, or, if I did without it altogether, I should probably drink the less water. I do not learn that tlie Indians ever troubled themselves to go after it. Thus 1 could avoid all trade and barter, so far as my food was concerned, and hav ing a shelter already, it would only remain to get clothing and fuel. The pantaloons which 1 now wear were woven in a farmer’s E C O N O M Y. 103 family, — thank Heaven there is so much virtue still in man; foi' I think the fall from the farmer to the operative as great and memorable as that from the man to the farmer ; — and in a new country, fuel is an encumbrance. As for a habitat, if I were not permitted still to squat, I might pur chase one acre at the same price for which the land I cultivated was sold — namely, eight dollars and eight cents. But as it was, I considered that I enhanced the value of tlie land by squatting on it. There is a certain class of unbelievers who sometimes ask me such questions as, if I think that I can live on vegetable food alone ; and to strike at the root of the mat ter at once, — for the root is faith, — I am accustomed to answer such, that I can live on board nails. If they cannot understand that, they cannot understand much that I have to say. For my part, I am glad to hear of experiments of this kind being tried; as that a young man tried for a fortnight to live on hard, raw corn on the ear, using his teeth for all mortar. The squirrel tribe tried the same and succeeded. The human race IS interested in these experiments, though a few old women who are incapacitated for 104 WALDEN. them, or who own their thirds in mills, may be alarmed. My furniture, part of which I made my self, and the rest cost me nothing' of which I have not rendered an account, cfnisisted of a bed, a table, a desk, three chairs, a looking- glass three inches in diameter, a pair of tongs and andirons, a kettle, a skillet, and a frying-pan, a dipper, a wash-bowl, two knives and forks, three plates, caie cup, one spoon, a jug for oil, a jug for molasses, and a japanned lamp. None is so poor that he need sit on a pumpkin. That is shiftless- iiess. There is a plenty of such chairs as I like best in the village garrets to he had for taking them away. Furniture ! Thank God, I can sit and I can stand without the aid of a furniture warehouse. ITliat man hut a philosopher would not be ashamed to see his furniture packed in a cart and going- up country exposed to the light of heaven and the eyes of men, a heggarl}- account of empty boxes ? That is Spaulding’s furni ture. I could never tell from inspecting such a load whether it belonged to a so- called rich man or a poor one ; the owner alwaj^s seemed poverty-stricken. Indeed, the E C O N O M Y. 105 more you have of such things the poorer you are. Each load looks as if it oontained the contents of a dozen shanties ; and if one shanty is poor, this is a dozen times as poor. Pray, for what do we move ever hut to got rid of our furniture, our exuvim ; at last to go from this world to another newly fur nished, and leave tlris to he burned ? It is the same as if all these traps were buckled to a man’s belt, and he could not move over the rough country where our lines are east without dragging them, — dragging his trap. lie was a lucky fox that left his tail in the trap. The muskrat will gnaw his third leg off to be free. No wonder man has lost his elastieitjv flow often he is at a dead se t! “ Sir, if I may be so bold, what do you mean by a dead set ? ” If you are a seer, whenever you meet a man you will see all that he owns, ay, and much that he pretends to disown, behind him, even to his kitchen furniture and all the trumj^ery which he saves and will not burn, and he will appear to be harnessed to it and mak ing what headway he can. I think that the man is at a dead set who has got through a knot hole or gateway where his sledge load of furniture cannot follow him. I cannot 106 WALDEN. but feel compassion when I hear some trig, compact - looking man, seemingly free, all girded and ready, speak of his “ furniture,” as whether it is insured or not. “ But what shall I do with my furniture ? ” My gay butterfly is entangled in a spider’s web then. Even those who seem for a long while not to have any, if you inquire more narrowly you will find have some stored in somebody’s barn. I look upon England to-day as an old gentleman who is travelling with a great deal of baggage, trumpery which has accu- imdated from long housekeeping, which he has not the courage to burn ; great trunk, little trunk, bandbox and bundle. Throw away the first three at least. It would sur pass the powers of a well man nowadays to take up his bed and walk, and I sliould cer tainly advi.se a sick one to lay down his bed and run. When I have met an immigrant tottering under a bundle which contained his all —• looking like an enormous wen which had grown out of the nape of his neck — I have pitied him, not because that was his all, but because he had all tAat to carry. If I have got to drag my trap, I will take care that it be a light one and do not nip me in a vital part. But perchance E C O N O M Y . 107 it would be wisest never to put one’s paw into it. I would observe, by the wajy that it costs me nothing for curtains, for I have no gaz ers to shut out but the sun and moon, and I am willing that they should look in. The moon will not sour milk nor taint meat of mine, nor will the sun injure my furniture or fade my carpet; and if he is sometimes too warm a friend, I find it still better economy to retreat beliind some curtain which nature has provided, than to add a single item to the details of housekeeping. A lady once offered me a mat, but as I had no room to spare within the house, nor time to spare within or without to shake it, I de clined it, preferring to wipe my feet on the sod before my door. I t is best to avoid the beginnings of evil. Not long since I was present at the auc tion of a deacon’s effects, for his life had not been ineffectual: — “ The evil that men do lives after them.” As usual, a great proportion was trumpery which had begun to accumulate in his fa ther’s day. Among the rest was a dried tapeworm. And now, after lying half a 108 WALDEN. century in his garret and other dust holes, tliese things were not hurned; instead of a honfire, or purifying destruction of them, there was an auction., or increasing of them. The neighbors eagerly collected to view them, bought them all, and carefully trans ported them to their garrets and dust holes, to lie there till their estates are settled, when they will start again. When a man dies he kicks the dust. The customs of some savage nations might, jierchance, be profitably imitated by us, for they at least go through the sem blance of casting their slough annually ; they have the idea of the thing, whether they have the reality or not. Would it not be well if we were to celebrate such a “ busk,” or “ feast of first fruits,” as Bai’tram de scribes to have been the custom of the Muc- (dasse Indians ? “ When a town celebrates the busk,” says he, “ having previously pro vided themselves with new clothes, new pots, pans, and other household utensils and furniture, they collect all their worn out clothes and other despicable things, sweep and cleanse their houses, squares, and the whole town, of their filth, which with all the and other old provisions E C O N O M Y . 109 they cast together into one common heap, and consume it with fire. After having taken medicine, and fasted for three days, all the fire in the town is extinguished. During this fast they abstain from the grat ification of every appetite and passion what ever. A general amnesty is proclaimed ; all malefactors may return to their town.” “ On the fourth morning, the high priest, by rubbing dry wood together, produces new fire in the public squai'e, from whence every habitation in the town is supplied with the new and pure flame.” They then feast on the new corn and fruits, and dance and sing for three days, “ and the four following days they receive visits and rejoice with their friends from neighboring towns who have in like manner purified and prepared themselves.” The Mexicans also practised a similar purification at the end of every fifty-two years, in the belief that it was time for the world to come to an end. I have scarcely heard of a truer sacra ment, that is, as the dictionary defines it, “ outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace,” than this, and I have no doubt that they were originally inspired 110 WALDEN. directly from Heaven to do thus, though they have no biblical record of the revela tion. For more than five years I maintained myself thus solely by the labor of my hands, and I found, that by working about six weeks in a year, I could meet all the ex penses of living. The whole of my winters, as well as most of my summers, I had free and clear for study. I have thoroughly tried school-keeping, and found that my expenses were in proportion, or rather out of propor tion, to my income, for I was obliged to dress and train, not to say think and believe, ac cordingly, and I lost my time into the bar gain. As I did not teach for the good of my fellow-men, but simply for a livelihood, this was a failure. I have tried trade ; but I found that it would take ten years to get under way in that, and that then I should probably be on my way to the devil. I was actually afraid that I might by that time be doing what is called a good business. When formerly I was looking about to see what I could do for a living, some sad experience in conforming to the wishes of friends be ing fresh in my mind to tax my ingenuity, E C O N O M Y . I l l I thought often and seriously of picking huckleberries; that surely I could do, and its small profits might suffice, — for my greatest skill has been to want but little, — so little capital it recpiired, so little distrac tion from my wonted moods, I foolishly thought. While my acquaintances went un hesitatingly into trade or the professions, I contemplated this occupation as most like theirs ; ranging the hills all summer to pick the berries which came in my way, and thereafter carelessly dispose of them ; so, to keep the flocks of Admetus. I also dreamed that I might gather the wild herbs, or carry evergreens to such villagers as loved to be reminded of the woods, even to the city, by hay-cart loads. But I have since learned that trade curses everything it handles ; and though you trade in messages from heaven, the whole curse of trade attaches to the busi ness. As I preferred some things to others, and especially valued my freedom, as I cordd fare hard and yet succieed well, I did not wish to spend my time in earning rich car pets or other fine furniture, or delicate cook ery, or a house in the Grecian or the Gothic style just yet. If there are any to whom it 112 WALDEN. is no interruption to acquire these things, and who know how to use them when ac quired, I relinquish to them the pursuit. Some are “ industrious,” and appear to love labor for its own sake, or perhaps because it keeps them out of worse mischief ; to such I have at present nothing to say. Those who would not know what to do with more lei sure than they now enjoy, I might advise to work twice as hard as they do, — work till they pay for themselves, and get their free papers. For myself I found that the occu pation of a day-laborer was the most inde pendent of any, especially as it required only thirty or forty days in a year to support one. The laborer’s day ends with the going down of the sun, and he is then free to devote himself to his chosen pursuit, independent of his labor ; but his employer, who speculates from month to month, has no respite from one end of the year to the other. In short, I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one’s self on this earth is not a hardship but a pas time, if we will live simply and wisely; as the pursuits of the simpler nations are still the sports of the more artificial. I t is not necessary that a man should earn his living E C O N O U Y . 113 by the sweat of Ms bi’ow, unless he sweats easier than I do. One young man of my acquaintance, who has inherited some acres, told me that he thought he should live as I did, i f he had the meam. I would not have any one adopt my mode of living on any account; for, be side that before he has fairly learned it I may have found out another for myself, I desire that there may be as many different persons in the world as possible; but I would have each one be very careful to find out and pursue his own way, and not his father’s or his mother’s or his neighbor’s instead. The youth may build or plant or sail, only let him not be hindered from do ing that which he tells me he would like to do. It is by a mathematical point only that we are wise, as the sailor or the fugitive slave keeps the polestar in his eye ; but that is sufficient guidance for all our life. We may not arrive at our port within a calcu lable period, but we would preserve the true course. Undoubtedly, in this ease, what is true for one is truer still for a thousand, as a large house is not proportionally more ex pensive than a small one, since one roof may 114 WALDEN. cover, one cellar underlie, and one wall sep arate several apartments. But for luy part, I preferred the solitary dwelling. More over, it will commonly be cheaper to build the whole yourself than to convince anotlier of the advantage of the common wall; and when you have done this, the common parti tion, to be much cheaper, must he a thin one, and that other may prove a bad neighbor, and also not keep his side in repair. The only cooperation which is cominoidy ]iossihle is exceedingly partial and superficial; and what little true coiiperation there is, is as if it were not, being a harmony inaudible to men. If a man has faith, he will coo|)erate with equal faith everywhere ; if he has not faith, ho will continue to live like the rest of the world, whatever company he is joined to. To cooperate in the highest as well as the lowest sense, means to get our living together. I heard it proposed lately that two young men should travel together over the world, the one without money, earning his means as he went, before the mast and behind the plough, the other carrying a hill of exchange in his pocket. It was easy to see that tliey could not long he companions or coi'qjerate, since one would not operate at all. They E C O N O M Y . 115 would part at the first interesting crisis in their adventures. Above all, as I have im plied, the man who goes alone can start to day ; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is readjr, and it may be a long time before they get off. But all this is very selfish, I have heard some of my townsmen say. I confess that I have hitherto indulged very little in phi lanthropic enterprises. I have made sofne sacrifices to a sense of duty, and among others have sacrificed this pleasure also. There are those who havu; used all their arts to persuade me to undertake the support of some poor family in the town ; and if I had nothing to do — for the devil finds employ ment for the idle — I might try my hand at some such pastime as that. However, when I have thought to indulge myself in this respect, and lay their Heaven under an obli gation by maintaining certain poor persons in all respects as comfortably as I maintain myself, and hav̂ e even ventured so far as to make them the offer, they have one and all unhesitatingly preferred to remain poor. While my townsraoii and women are devoted in so many ways to the good of their fellows, 116 W A L D E N . I trust that one at least may be spared to other and less humane pursuits. You must have a genius for charity as well as for any thing else. As for Doing-good, that is one of the professions which are full. Moreover, I have tried it fairly, and, strange as it may seem, am satisfied that it does not agree with my constitution. Probably I should not consciously and deliberately forsake my par ticular calling to do the good which society demands of me, to save the universe from annihilation; and I believe that a like but infinitely greater steadfastness elsewhere is all that now preserves it. But 1 would not stand between any man and his genius ; and to him who does this work, which I decline, with his whole heart and soul and life, I would say, Persevere, even if the world call it doing evil, as it is most likely they will. I am far from supposing that my case is a peculiar one ; no doubt many of my readers would make a similar defence. At doing something, — I will not engage that my neighbors shall pronounce it good, — I do not hesitate to say that I should be a capital fellow to hire ; but what that is, it is for my employer to find out. What good I do, in the common sense of that word, must be- E C O N O M Y . 117 aside from my main path, and for the most part wholly unintended. Men say, practi cally, Begin where you are and such as you are, without aiming mainly to become of more worth, and with kindness aforethought go about doing good. If I were to preach at all in this strain, I should say rather. Set about being good. As if the sun should stop when he had kindled his fires up to the splendor of a moon or a star of the sixth magnitude, and go about like a liobin Good fellow, peeping in at every cottage window, inspiring lunatics, and tainting meats, and making darkness visible, instead of steadily increasing his genial heat and benefieenoe till he is of such brightness that no mortal can look him in the face, and then, and in the mean while too, going about the world in his own orbit, doing it good, or rather, as a truer philosophy has discovered, the world going about him getting good. When Phae ton, wishing to prove his heavenly birth by his beneficence, had the sun’s chariot but one day, and drove out of the beaten track, he burned several blocks of houses in the lower streets of heaven, and scorched the surface of the earth, and dried u]) every spring, and made the great desei't of Sahara, till at 118 WALDEN. length Jupiter hurled him headlong to the earth with a thunderbolt, and the sun, through grief at his death, did not shine for a year. There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted. It is human, it is divine, carrion. If I knew for a cer tainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life, as from that dry and parching wind of the African deserts called the simoom, which fills the mouth and nose and ears and eyes with dust till you are suffocated, for fear that I should get some of his good done to me, — some of its virus mingled with my blood. No, — in this case I would rather suffer evil the natural way. A man is not a good man to me be cause he will feed me if I should be starving, or warm me if I should be freezing, or pull me out of a ditch if I should ever fall into one. I can find yon a Newfoundland dog that will do as much. Philanthropy is not love for one’s fellow-man in the broaeaks to the mob before him, to those who can hem him; but^the writer, whose more equable life is his occasion, and who would be distracted by the event and the crowd which inspire the orator, speaks to the intellect and heart of mankind, to all in any age who can understand him. No wonder that Alexander carried the Iliad with him on his expeditions in a pre cious casket. A written word is the choicest of relies. It is sornetliing at once more in timate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips ; — not be represented on canvas or in mar ble only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself. The symbol of an ancient 162 WALDEN. man’s thought becomes a modern man’s speech. Two thousand summers have im parted to the monuments of Grecian litera ture, as to her marbles, only a inaturer golden and autumnal tint, for they have carried their own serene and celestial atmosphere into all lands to protect them against the corrosion of time. Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations. Books, the oldest and the best, stancj naturally and rightfully on the shelves of eve-"y cottage. They have no cause of their own to plead, but while they enlighten and sustain the reader his common sense will not refuse them. Their authors are a natural and irresistible aristoc racy in every society, and, more than kings or emperors, exert an influence on mankind. When the illiterate and perhajrs scornful trader has earned by enterprise and industry his coveted leisure and independence, and is admitted to the circles of wealth and fashion, he turns inevitably at last to those stiU higher but yet Inaccessible circles of intellect and genius, and is sensible only of the im perfection of his culture and the vanity and insufficiency of all his riches, and further proves his good sense by the pains which he READING. 163 takes to secure for his children that inteUec- tiial culture whoso want he so keenly feels; and tims it is that he becomes the founder of a family. Those who have not learned to read the ancient classics in the language in which they were written must have a very imper fect knowledge of the history of the human race ; for it is remarkable that no transcript of them has ever been made into any mod ern tongue, unless our civilization itself may be regarded as such a transcript. Homer has never yet been printed in English, nor HCschylus, nor Virgil even, — works as re fined, as solidly done, and as beautiful al most as the morning itself; for later writers, say what we will of their genius, have rarely, if ever, equalled the elaborate beauty and finish and the lifelong and heroic literary labors of the ancients. They only talk of forgetting them who never knew them. It will be soon enough to forget them when we have the learning and the genius which will enable ns to attend to and appreciate them. That age will be rich indeed when those rel ics which we c;all Classics, and the still older and more than classic but even less known Scriptures of the nations, shall have stiU 164 WALDEN. further accumulated, when the Vaticans shall be filled with Vedas and Zendavestas and Bibles, with Homers and Dantes and Shakespeares, and all the centuries to come shall have successively deposited their tro phies in the forum of the world. By such a pile we may hope to scale heaven at last. The works of the great poets liave never yet been read by mankind, for only great poets can read them. They have only been read as the multitude read the stars, at most astrologically, not astronomically. Most men have learned to read to serve a paltry convenience, as they have learned to cipher in order to keep accounts and not be cheated in trade ; but of reading as a noble intellec tual exercise they know little or nothing ; yet this only is reading, in a high sense, not that which luUs us as a luxury and suffers the nobler faculties to sleep the while, but what we have to stand on tip-toe to read and de vote our most alert and wakeful hours to. I think that having learned our letters we should read the best that is in literature, and not be forever repeating our a b abs, and words of one syllable, in the fourth or fifth classes, sitting on the lowest and fore most form all our lives. Most men are sat- READING. 165 isfied if they read or hear read, and per chance have been convicted by the wisdom of one good book, the Bible, and for the rest of their lives vegetate and dissipate their faculties in what is called easy reading. There is a work in several volumes in our Circulating Library entitled Little Beading, which I thought referred to a town of that name which I had not been to. There are those who, like cormorants and ostriches, can digest all sorts of this, even after the fullest dinner of meats and vegetables, for they suffer nothing to be wasted. If others are the machines to provide this provender, they are the machines to read it. They read the nine thousandth tale about Zebulon and Sephronia, and how they loved as none had ever loved before, and neither did the course of their true love run smooth, — at any rate, how it did run and stumble, and get up again and go on! how some poor unfortu nate got up on to a steeple, who had better never have gone up as far as the belfry; and then, having needlessly got him up there, the happy novelist rings the bell for all the world to come together and hear, O dear! how he did get down again ! For my part, I think that they had better metamorphose 166 W ALDEN. all such aspiring heroes of universal novel- clom into man weather-cocks, as they used to put heroes among the constellations, and let them swing round there till they are rusty, and not come down at all to bother honest men with their pranks. The next time the novelist rings the bell I will not stir though the meeting-house burn down. “ The Skip of the Tip-Toe-Hop, a Romance of the Mid dle Ages, by the celebrated author of ‘ Tit- tlo-Tol-Tan,’ to appear in monthly parts; a great rush; don’t all come together.” AU this they read with saucer eyes, and erect and primitive curiosity, and with unwearied gizzard, whose corrugations even yet need no sharpening, just as some little four-year- old bencher his two-cent gilt-covered edition of Cinderella, — without any improvement, that I can see, in the pronunciation, or accent, or emphasis, or any more slcill in ex tracting or inserting the moral. The result is dulness of sight, a stagnation of the vital circulations, and a general deliquium and sloughing off of all the intellectual faculties. This sort of gingerbread is baked daily and more sedulously than pure wheat or rye-and- Indian in almost every oven, and finds a surer market. READING. 167 The best books are not read even by those who are called good readers. What does onr Concord culture amount to ? There is in this town, with a very few exceptions, no taste for the best or for very good books even in English literature, whose words all can read and spell. Even the college-bred and so - called liberally educated men here and elsewhere have really little or no ac quaintance with the English classics; and as for the recorded wisdom of mankind, the ancient classics and Bibles, Avhich are acces sible to all who will know of them, there are the feeblest efforts anywhere made to be come acquainted with them. I know a woodehopper, of middle age, who takes a French j^aper, not for news as he says, for he is above that, but to “ keep himself in prac- titie,” ho being a Canadian by birth ; and when I ask him what he considers the best thing he can do in this world, he says, beside this, to keep up and add to his English. This is about as much as the college-bred generally do or aspire to do, and they take an English paper for the purpose. One who has just come from reading perhaps one of the best English books will find how many with whom he can converse about it ? 168 W A LD E N . Or snj^pose he comes from reading a Greek or Latin classic in the original, whose praises are familiar even to the so - called illiterate ; he will find nobody at all to speak to, but must keep silence about it. Indeed, there is hardly the professor in our colleges, who, if he has mastered the difficulties of the lan guage, has proportionally mastered the dif ficulties of the wit and poetry of a Greek poet, and has any sjanpathy to impart to the alert and heroic reader; and as for the sacred Scriptures, or Bibles of mankind, who in this town can tell me even their titles ? Most men do not know that any nation but the Hebrews have had a scripture. A man, any man, will go considerably out of his way to pick up a silver dollar; but here are golden words, which the wisest men of antiq uity have uttered, and whose worth the wise of every succeeding age have assured us of ; — and yet we learn to read only as far as Easy Reading, the primers and class-books, and when we leave school, the “ Little Read ing,” and story books, which are for boys and beginners ; and our reading, our conver sation and thinking, are all on a very low level, worthy only of pygmies and manikins. I aspire to be acquainted with wiser men READING. Iti9 than this our Concord soil has produced, whose names are hardly known here. Or shall I hear the name of Plato and never read his hook ? As if Plato were my towns man and I never saw him, — my next neigh bor and I never heard him speak or attended to the wisdom of his words. But how ac tually is it? His Dialogues, which contain what was immortal in him, lie on the next shelf, and yet 1 never read them. We are under-bred and low-lived and illiterate ; and in this respect I confess I do not make any very broad distinction between the illiterate ness of my townsman who cannot read at all and the illiterateness of him who has learned to read only what is for children and feeble intellects. We should be as good as the worthies of antiquity, but partly by first knowing how good they were. We are a race of tit-men, and soar but little higher in our intellectual flights than the columns of the daily paper. I t is not all books that are as dull as their readers. There are probably words ad dressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning or the spring to our lives, and possibly put a new 170 WALDEN. asj)ect on the face of things for us. How many a man has dated a new era in liis life from the reading of a hook. The hook exists for us pcirchanee which will explain our miraides and reveal new ones. The at present unutterahle things we may find somewhere uttered. These same questions that disturb and p>uzzle and confound us have in their turn occurred to all the wise men ; not one has heen omitted ; and each has answered them, according to liis ability, by his words and his life. Moreover, with wisdom we shall learn liberality. The soli tary 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 silent gravity and exclu siveness 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 ac cordingly, and is even said to hâ "e invented and established worship among men. Let him humbly commune with Zoroaster then, and through the liberalizing influence of all the worthies, with Jesus Christ himself, and let “ our church ” go by the board. HEADING. 171 We boast that we belong to the nineteenth centm-y and are making the most rapid strides of any nation, lint consider how lit tle this village does for its own culture. I do not wish to flatter my townsmen, nor to be flattered by them, for that will not advance either of ns. We need to be provoked, —- goaded like oxen, as we are, into a trot. We have a comparatively decent system of com mon schools, stdiools for infants only ; but excepting the half-starved Lyceum in the winter, and latterly the imny beginning of a library snggested by the state, no school for ourselves. We spend more on almost any article of bodily aliment or ailmcmt than on our mental aliment. It is time that we had uncommon schools, that we did not leave off our education when we begin to be men and women. It is time that villages were uni versities, and their elder inhabitants the fel lows of universities, with leisure — if they are indeed so well off — to pursue liberal studies the rest of their lives. Shall the world bo confined to one Paris or one Ox ford forever ? Cannot students be boarded here and get a liberal education under the skies of Concord ? Can we not hire some Abelard to lecture to us ? Alas! what with 172 WALDEN. foddering tlie cattle and tending the store, we are kept from sehool too long, and our education is sadly neglected. In iliis coun try, the village should in some respects take the place of the nohleman of Eiirope. It should he the patron of the fine arts. It is rich enough. I t wants only the magna nimity and refinement. It can spend money enough on such things as farmers and traders value, hut it is thought Utopian to propose spending money for things which more in telligent men know to be of far more worth. This town has spent seventeen thousand dol lars on a town-house, thank fortune or poli tics, hut probably it will not spend so much on living wit, the true meat to put into that shell, in a hundred years. The one hundred and twenty-five dollars annually subscribed for a Lyceum in the winter is better spent than any other equal sum raised in the town. If wo live in the nineteenth century, why should we not enjoy the advantagcis which the nineteenth century offers ? Why should our life be in any respect provincial ? If w(> will read newspapers, why not skip the gossip of Boston and take the best newspaper in the world at once? — not he sucking the pap of “ neutral family ” papers, or browsing READING. 173 “ Olive-Branches ” here in New England. Let the reports of all the learned societies come to us, and wc will see if they know any thing. Why should we leave it to Harper & Brothers and Bedding & Co. to select our reading ? As the nobleman of cultivated taste surrounds himself with whatever con duces to his culture, — genius — learning — wit — books — paintings — statuary — music — philosophical instruments, and the like ; so let the village do, — not stop short at a pedagogue, a parson, a sexton, a parish library, and three selectmen, because our pilgrim forefathers got through a cold winter once on a bleak rock with these. To act collectively is according to the spirit of our institutions ; and I am confident that, as our circumstances are more flourishing, our means are greater than the nobleman’s. New England can hire all the wise men in the world to come and teach her, and board them round the while, and not be provincial at all. That is the uncommon school we want. Instead of noblemen, let us have noble villages of men. If it is necessary, omit one bridge over the river, go round a little there, and throw one arch at least over the darker gulf of ignorance which sur rounds us. IV. SOUNDS. B ut while we are confined to books, though the most select and classic, and read only partioidar written languages, which are themselves but dialects and provincial, we are in danger of forgetting the language which all things and events spe:;k without metaphor, which alone is copious and stand ard. Much is published, but little printed. The rays which stream through the shutter will be no longer remembered when the shutter is wholly I'emoved. No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of be ing forever on the alert. What is a course of history or philosophy, or poetry, no mat ter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, com pared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen? Will you bo a reader, a student merely, or a seer ? Read your fate, see what is before you, and walk on into futurity. S OU N DS . 175 I did not read books the first summer ; I hoed beans. Nay, I often did better than this. There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hands. I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sang around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveller’s wagon on the dis tant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been. They were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allow ance. I realized what the Orientals mean by contemplation and the forsaking of works. For the most part, I minded not how the hours went. The day advanced as if to light some work of mine; it was morn ing, and lo, now it is evening, and noth ing memorable is accomplished. Instead of 176 WALDEN. singing like the birds, I silently smiled at my incessant good fortune. As the sparrow had its trill, sitting on the hickory befoi'e my door, so had I my chuckle or su]i- pressed warhle which he might hear out of my nest. My days were not days of the week, bearing the stamp of any heathen deity, nor were they minced into hours and fretted by the ticking of a clock ; for I lived like the Puri Indians, of whom it is said that “ for yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow they have only one word, and they express the variety of meaning by pointing back ward for yesterday, forward for to-morrow, and overhead for the passing day.” This was sheer idleness to my fellow-townsmen, no doubt; but if the birds and bowers had tried me by their standard, I should not have been found wanting. A man must find his occasions in himself, it is true. The natural day is very calm, and will hardly reprove his indolence. I had this advantage, at least, in my mode of life, over those who were obliged to look abroad for amusement, to society and the theatre, that my life itself was become mĵ amusement and never ceased to be novel. I t was a drama of many scenes and without SOUNDS. 177 an end. If we were always indeed getting our living, and regulating our lives ac cording to the last and best mode wo had learned, we should neviu’ he troubled with cimui. Follow your genius closely enough, and it will not fail to show you a fresh pros pect every hour. Housework was a pleas ant pastime. When my floor was dirty, I rose early, and, setting all my furniture out of doors on the grass, bed and bedstead making hut one budget, dashed water on the floor, and sprinkled white sand from the pond on it, and then with a broom scrubbed it clean and white ; and by the time the vil lagers had broken their fast the morning sun had dried my house sufficiently to allow me to move in again, and my meditations were almost uninterrupted. It was pleasant to see my whole household effects out on the grass, making a little pile like a gypsy’s pack, and my three-legged table, from which I did not remove the books and pen and ink, standing amid the pines and hickories. They seemed glad to get out themselves, and as if unwilling to be brought in. I was sometimes tempted to stretch an awning ovei‘ them and take my seat there. I t was worth the while to see the sun shine on these 178 WALDEN. things, and hear the free wind blow on them ; so much more interesting most famil iar objects look out of doors than in the house. A bird sits on the next bough, life everlasting grows under the talde, and black berry vines run round its legs; pine cones, chestnut burs, and strawberry leaves are strewn about. I t looked as if tins was the way these forms came to be transferred to our furniture, to tables, chairs, and bed steads, — because they once stood in their midst. My house was on the side of a hill, im- m'ediately on the edge of the larger wood, in the midst of a young forest of pitch pines and hickories, and half a dozen rods from the pond, to which a narrow footpath led down the hill. In my front yard grew the strawberry, blackberry, and life - everlast ing, johnswort and golden-rod, slirub-oaks and sand-cherry, blueberry and ground-nut. Near the end of May, the sand-cherry (ce- rasus 'pumiln?) adorned the sides of the path with its delicate flowers arranged in undjels cylindrically about its short stems, which last, in the fall, weighed down with good sized and handsome cherries, fell over in wreaths like rays on every side. I tasted S OUN DS . 179 them ovit of compliment to Nature, though they were scarcely palatable. The sumach (j’lius gluhra) grew luxuriantly about the house, pushing up through the embankment which I had made, and growing five or six feet the first season. Its broad pinnate tropical leaf was pleasant though strange to look on. The large buds, suddenly pushing out late in the spring from dry sticks which had seemed to be dead, developed them selves as by magic into graceful green and tender boughs, an inch in diameter; and sometimes, as I sat at jny window, so heed lessly did they grow and tax their weak joints, I heard a fresh and tender bough suddenly fall like a fan to the ground, when there was not a breath of air stirring, broken off by its oun weight. In August, the large masses of berries, which, when in flower, had attracted many wild bees, gradually assumed their bright velvety crimson hue. and by their weight again bent down broke the tender limbs. and As I sit at my window this summer after noon, hawks are circling about my clearing; the tantivy of wild pigeons, flying by twos and threes athwart my view, or perching 180 WALDEN. restless on the white-pine houghs behind house, gives a voice to the a ir; a fishhawk dimples the glassy surface of the pond and brings up a fish; a mink steals out of the marsh before my door and seizes a frog by the shore ; the sedge is bending under the weight of the reed-birds flitting hither and thither; and for the last half hour I have heard the rattle of railroad cars, now dying away and then reviving like the beat of a partridge, conveying travellers from Boston to the country. For I did not live so out of the world as that boy, who, as I hear, was put out to a farmer in the east part of the town, but ere long ran away and came home again, quite down at the heel and homesick. He had never seen such a dull and out-of- the-way place ; the folks were all gone off; why, you could n’t even hear the whistle ! I doubt if there is such a place in Massachu setts now; — “ In truth, our village has become a butt For one of those fleet railroad shafts, and o’er Our peaceful plain its soothing sound is — Concord.” The Fitchburg Railroad touches the pond about a hundred rods south of where I dwell. I usually go to the village along its causeway, and am, as it were, related to so- S O U N D S. 181 ciety by this link. The men on the freight trains, who go over the whole length of the road, bow to me as to an old acquaintanee, they pass me so often, and apparently they take me for an employee; and so I am. I too would fain be a track-repairer somewhere in the orbit of the earth. The whistle of the locomotive penetrates my woods summer and winter, sounding like the scream of a hawk sailing over some farmer’s yard, informing me that many rest less city merchants are arriving within the circle of the town, or adventurous country traders from the other side. As they come under one horizon, they shout their warning to get off the track to the other, heard some times through the circles of two towns. Here come your groceries, country; your rations, countrymen ! Nor is there any man so independent on his farm that he can say them nay. And here’s your pay for them! screams the countryman’s whistle; timber like long battering rams going twenty miles an hour against the city’s walls, and chairs enough to seat all the weary and heavy laden that dwell within them. With such huge and lumbering civility the country hands a chair to the 182 WALDEN. city. All the Indian hnekleberry hills are stripped, all the cranberry meadows are raked into the city. Up comes the cotton, down goes the woven cloth ; up conies the silk, down goes the woollen ; up come the hooks, hut down goes the wit that writes them. When I meet the engine with its train of cars moving off with planetary motion, — or, rather, like a comet, for the beholder knows not if with that velocity and with that direc tion it will ever revisit this system, since its orbit does not look like a returning curve, — with its steam cloud like a banner streaming behind in golden and silver wreaths, like many a downy cloud which I have seen, high in the heavens, unfolding its masses to the light, — as if this travelling demigod, this cloud-compeller, would ere long take the sunset sky for the livery of his train ; when I hear the iron horse make the iiills echo with his snort like thunder, shaking the earth with his feet, and breathing fire and smoke from his nostrils, (what kind of winged horse or fiery dragon thej" will put into the new Mythology I don’t know,) it seems as if the eartli had got a race now worthy to inhabit it. If all were as it seems, S O U N D S . 183 and men made tlie elements tlieir servants for noble ends I If tlie eloud tliat liany a cer tain gurgling melodiousness, — I find myself beginning with the letters gl when I try to imitate it, — expressive of a mind which has reached the gelatinous mildewy stage in the mortification of all healthy and courageous thought. It reminded me of ghouls and idiots and insane bowlings. But now one answers from far woods in a strain made really melodious by distance, — IJoo hoo Jioo, hoorer Jioo; and indeed for the most part it suggested only pleasing associations, whether heard by day or night, summer oi‘ winter. I rejoice that there are owls. Let them do the idiotic and maniacal hooting for men. It is a sound admirably suited to swamps and S O U N DS . 197 twilight woods which no day illustrates, sug gesting a vast and undeveloped nature which men have not recognized. They represent the stark twilight and unsatisfied thoughts which all have. All day the sun has shone on the surface of some savage swamp, where the single spruce stands hung with usnea lichens, and small hawks circulate above, and the chicadee lisps amid the evergreens, and the partridge and rabbit skulk be neath ; but now a more dismal and fitting day dawns, and a dillerent race of creatures awakes to express the meaning of Nature there. Late in the evening I heard the distant rumbling of wagons over bridges, — a sound heard farther than almost any other at night, — the baying of dogs, and sometimes again the lowing of some disconsolate cow in a dis tant barn-yard. In the mean while all the shore rang with the trump of bullfrogs, the sturdy spirits of ancient wine-bibbers and wassailers, still unrejientant, trying to sing a catch in their Stygian lake, — if the Wal den njunjdis will pardon the comparison, for though there are almost no weeds, there are frogs there, — who Avould fain keep up the hilarious rules of their old festal tables, 198 WALDEN. though their voices have waxed hoarse and solemnly grave, mocking at mirth, and the wine has lost its flavor, and become only liquor to distend their paunches, and sweet intoxication never comes to drown the mem ory of the past, hut mere saturation and waterloggedness and distention. The most aldermanic, with his chin upon a heartdeaf, 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 ejacula tion tr-r-r-oonk, tr-r-r-oonk., tr-r-r-oonk ! and straightway comes over the water from some distant cove the same password repeated, where the next in seniority and girth has gulped down to his m ark; and when this observance has made the circuit of the shores, then ejaculates the master of cere monies, with satisfaction, tr-r-r-oonk! and each in his turn repeats the same down to the least distended, leakiest, and flabbiest paunched, tliat there he no mistake; and then the howl goes round again and again, until the sun disperses the moriiing mist, and only the patriarch is not under the pond, but vainly bellowing troonk from time to time, and pausing for a reply. SOUNDii . 199 I am not sure that I ever heard the sound of cock - crowing' from my clearing, and I thought that it rniglit be worth tlic while to keep a cockerel for his music merely, as a sino’ina' bird. The note of this once wild Indian pheasant is certainly the most re markable of any bird’s, and if they could be naturalized without being domesticated, it would soon become the most famous sound in our woods, surpassing the clangor of the goose and the hooting of the owl; and then imagine the cackling of the hens to fill the pauses when their lords’ clarions rested! No wonder that man added tliis bird to his tame stock, — to say nothing of the eggs and drumsticks. To walk in a winter morn ing in a wood where these birds abounded, their native woods, and hear the wild cock erels crow on the trees, clear and shrill for miles over the resounding earth, di'owning the feebler notes of other birds, — think of i t ! It would put nations on the alert. Who would not be early to rise, and rise earlier and earlier every successive day of his life, till he became unspeakably healthy, wealthy, and wise ? This foreign bird’s note is cele brated by the poets of all countries along with the notes of their native songsters. 200 WALDEN. All climates agree with brave Chanticleer. He is more iiitligenous even than the na tives. llis health is ever good, his lungs arc sound, his spirits never flag. Even tlie sailor on the Atlantic and Pacific is awak ened by his voice ; but its shrill sound never roused me from my slumbers. 1 kept nei ther dog, cat, cow, pig, nor hens, so that you would have said there was a deficiency of domestic sounds ; neither the churn, nor the spinning-wheel, nor even the singing of the kettle, nor the hissing of the urn, nor chil dren crying, to comfort one. An old-fash ioned man would have lost his senses or died of ennui before this. Not even rats in the wall, for they were starved out, or rather were never baited in, — only scpiirrels on the roof and under the floor, a whippoorwill on the ridge-pole, a blue-jay scn^aming be neath the window, a hare or woodchuck under the house, a screech-owl or a cat-owl behind it, a flock of wild geese or a laughing- loon on the pond, and a fox to bark in the night. Not even a lark or an oriole, those mild plantation birds, ever visited my clear ing. No cockerels to crow nor hens to cackle in the yard. No yard ! but unfenced Nature reaching up to your very sills. A S O U N DS . 201 youBg forest growing up under your win dows, and wild sumachs and blackberry vines breaking tlirongli into your cellar; sturdy pitch - pines rubbing and creaking against the shingles for want of room, their roots reaching quite under the house. In stead of a scuttle or a blind blown off in the gale, — a pine tree snapped off or torn up by the roots behind your house for fuel. Instead of no path to the front-yard gate in the Great Snow, — no gate — no front-yard, — and no path to the civilized world. V. SOLITUDE. T h i s is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes delight through every pore. I go and come with a strange liberty in Nature, a part of herself. As I walk along the stony shore of the pond in my shirt sleeves, though it is cool as well as cloudy and windy, and I see nothing special to attract me, all the elements are unusually congenial to me. The bullfrogs trump to usher in the night, and the note of the whippoorwill is borne on the rippling wind from over the water. Sympathy with the fluttering alder and poplar leaves almost takes away my breath ; yet, like the lake, my serenity is rippled but not ruffled. These small waves raised by the evening wind are as remote from storm as the smooth reflect ing surface. Though it is now dark, the wind still blows and roars in the wood, the waves still dash, and some creatures lull the rest with their notes. The repioso is never SOLITUDE. 203 comj)lete. The wildest animals do not re pose, but seek their prey now ; the fox, and skunk, and rabbit, now roam the fields and woods without fear. They are Nature's watchmen, — links which connect the days of animated life. When I return to my house I find that visitors have been there and left their cards, either a bunch of flowers, or a wreath of evergreen, or a name in pencil on a yellow walnut leaf or a chip. They who come rarely to the woods take some little piece of the forest into their hands to play with by the way, which they leave, cither intention ally or accidentally. One has peeled a wil low wand, woven it into a ring, and dropped it on my table. I could always tell if vis itors had called in my absence, either by the bended twigs or grass, or the print of their shoes, and generally of what sex or age or quality they were by some slight trace left, as a flower dropped, or a bunch of grass plucked and thrown away, even as far off as the railroad, half a mile distant, or by the lingering odor of a cigar or pipe. Nay, I was frequently notified of the passage of a traveller along the highway sixty rods off by the scent of his pipe. 204 WALDEN. There is commonly sufficient space about us. Our horizon is never quite at our el bows. The thick wood is not just at our door, nor the pond, but somewhat is always clearing, familiar and worn by us, appropri ated and fenced in some way, and reclaimed from Nature. For what reason have I this vast range and circuit, some square miles of unfrequented forest, for my privacy, aban doned to me by men ? My nearest neigh bor is a mile distant, and no house is visible from any place but the hill-tojis within half a mile of my own. I have my horizon bounded by woods all to myself : a distant view of the railroad where it touches the pond on the one hand, and of the fence which skirts the woodland road on the other. But for the most part it is as solitary where I live as on the prairies. I t is as much Asia or Africa as New England. I have, as it were, my own sun and moon and stars, and a little world all to myself. At night there was never a traveller passed my house, or knocked at my door, more than if I were the first or last man; unless it were in the spring, when at long intervals some came from the village to fish for pouts, — they plainly fished much more in the, Walden SOLITUDE. 205 Pond of their own natures, and baited their hooks with darkness, —but they soon re treated, usually with light baskets, and left “ the world to darkness and to me,” and the black kernel of the night was never pro faned by any human neighborhood. I be lieve that men are generally still a little afraid of the dark, though the witches are all hung, and Christianity and candles have been introduced. Yet I experienced sometimes that the most sweet and tender, the most innocent and encouraging society may be found in any natural object, even for the poor misanthrope and most melancholy man. There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature and has his senses still. There was never yet such a storm but it was ./Eolian music to a healthy and inno cent ear. Nothing can rightly compel a simple and brave man to a vulgar sadness. While I enjoy the friendship of the seasons I trust that nothing can make life a burden to me. The gentle rain which watei's my beans and keeps me in the house to-day is not drear and melancholy, but good for me too. Though it prevents my hoeing them, it is of far more worth than my hoeing. If 206 WALDEN. it should continue so long as to cause the seeds to rot in the ground and destroy the potatoes in the low lands, it would still be good for the grass on the uplands, and, being good for the grass, it would be good for me. Sometimes, when I comj)are myself with other men, it seems as if I were moi'e favored by the gods than they, beyond any deserts that I am conscious of ; as if I had a warrant and surety at their hands which my fellows have not, and were especially guided and guarded. I do not flatter my self, but if it be ]3ossible they flatter me. I have never felt lonesome, or in the least op- })ressed by a sense of solitude, but once, and that was a few weeks after I came to the woods, when, for an hour, I doubted if the near neighborhood of man was not essential to a serene and healthy life. To be alone was somethi:ig unpleasant. But I was at the same time conscious of a slight insanity in my mood, and seemed to foresee my I'e- eovery. In the midst of a gentle rain while these thoughts prevailed, I was suddenly sensible of such sweet and beneficent society in Nature, in the very pattering of the drops, and in every sound and sight around my house, an infinite and unaccountable friend- S O L I T U D E . 207 liness all at once like an atmosphere sustain ing' me, as made the fancied advantages of humiiu neigliborhood insignificant, and I have never thought of them since. Every little pine needle expanded and s'welled 'with sympathy and befriended me. I was so dis tinctly made aware of the presence of some thing kindred to me, even in scenes which we are accustomed to call wild and dreary, and also that the nearest of blood to me and humanest was not a person nor a villager, that 1 thought no place could ever be strange to me again. — “ Mourning- mitimelj’ consumes the sad; Few are their days in the land of the living-, Beautiful daughter of Tosear.” Some of my pleasantest hours were durlng ̂ the long rain storms in the spring or fall, which confined me to the house for the after noon as well as the forenoon, soothed by their ceaseless roar and pelting; when an early twilight ushered in a long evening in which many thoughts had time to take root and unfold themselves. In those driving north - east rains which tried the village houses so, when the maids stood ready with mop and pail in front entries to keep the deluge out, I sat behind my door in my lit- 208 WALDEN. tie hoitse, which was all entry, and thor oughly enjoyed its protection. In one heavy thunder shower the lightning struck a large pitch-pine across the pond, making a very conspicuous and perfectly regular spiral groove from top to bottom, an inch or more deep, and four or five inches wide, as you would groove a walking-stick. I passed it again the other day, and was struck with awe on looking up and beholding that mark, now more distinct than ever, where a terrific and resistless bolt came down out of the harndess sky eight years ago. Men frequently say to me, “ I should think you would feel lonesome down there, and want to be nearer to folks, rainy and snowy days and nights especially.” I am tempted to reply to such, — This whole earth which we inhabit is but a }>oint in space. How far apart, think you, dwell the two most distant inhabitants of yonder star, the breadth of whose disk cannot be ap])re- ciated by our instruments ? H^hy should I feel lonely ? is not our planet in the Milky Way? This which you put seems to me not to be the most important question. What sort of space is that which separates a man from his fellows and makes him soli tary ? I have found that no exertion of the SOLITUDE. 209 legs can bring two minds much nearer to one another. What do we want most to dwell near to? Not to many men surely, the depot, the post-oifice, the bar-room, the meeting house, the school-house, the grocery. Beacon Hill, or the Five Points, where men most con gregate, 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 direc tion. This will vary with different natures, but this is the place where a wise man will dio- his cellar. . . . I one evenins: overtook one of my townsmen, who has accumulated what is called “ a handsome property,” — though I never got a fa ir view of it, — on the Walden road, driving a pair of cattle to market, who inquired of me how I could bring my mind to give up so many of the comforts of life. I answered that I was very sure I liked it passably well; I was not jok ing. And so I went home to my bed, and left him to pick his way tlirough the dark ness and the mud to Brighton, — or Bright- town, — which place he would reach some time in the morning. Any prospect of awakening or coming to life to a dead man makes indifferent all 210 WALDEN. times and places. The place where that may occur is always the same, and indescribahly j)loasaiit to all our senses. For the most part we allow only outlying and transient circumstances to make our occasions. They are, in fact, the cause of our distraction. Nearest to all things is that power which fashions their being. N'ext to us the grand est laws are continually being executed. Hext to us is not the workman whom we have hired, with whom we love so well to talk, hut the workman whose work we are. “ How vast and profound is the influence of the subtile ijowers of Heaven and of Earth ! ” “ We seek to perceive them, and we do not see them ; we seek to hear them, and we do not liear them ; identified with the sub stance of things, they cannot be separated from them.” “ They cause that in all the universe men purify and sanctify their hearts, and clothe themselves in their holiday garments to offer sacrifices and oblations to their ancestors. It is an ocean of subtile intelligences. They are everywhere, above us, on oin- hdt, on our righ t; they environ us on all sides.” We are the subjects of an experiment which is not a little interesting to me. Can S O L I T U D E . 211 we not do without the society of our gossips a little while under these circumstances, — have our own thoughts to cheer us ? Confu cius says truly, “ Virtue does not remain as an ahaudoned orphan; it must of necessity hav̂ e neighbors.” With thinking we may be beside ourselves in a sane sense. By a conscious effort of the mind we can stand aloof from actions and their consecpiences ; and all things, good and bad, go by us like a torrent. We are not wholly involved in Nature. I may be either the drift-wood in the stream, or Indra in the sky looking down on it. I may be affected by a theatrical exhibition; on the other hand, I may not be affected by an act ual event which appears to concern me much more. I only know myself as a human en tity ; the scene, so to speak, of thoughts and affections ; and am sensible of a certain doubleness by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another. However in tense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but spectator, shaiing no experience, but taking note of i t ; and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is 212 WALDEN. over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned. This donh- leness may easily make us poor neighbors and friends sometimes. I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissi pating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most j)art more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will. Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows. The really diligent student in one of the crowded hives of Cam bridge College is as solitary as a dervis in the desert. The farmer can work alone in the field or the woods all day, hoeing or chopping, and not feel lonesome, because he is employed; but when he comes home at night he cannot sit down in a room alone, at the mercy of his thoughts, but must be where he can “ see the folks,” and recreate, and as he thinks remunerate, himself for his day’s solitude ; and hence he wonders how S OLI TUDE. 213 the student can sit alone in the house all night and most of the day without ennui and “ the blues ; ” bu.t he does not realize that the student, though in the house, is still at woi'k in his held, and chopping in his woods, as the farmer in his, and in turn seeks the same recreation and society that the latter does, though it may be a more condensed form of it. Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are. We have had to agrees on a certain set of rules, called etiquette and jjoliteness, to make this frequent meeting tolerable and that we need not come to open war. We meet at the post-office, and at the sociable, and about the fireside every night; we live thick and are in each other’s way, and stumble over one another, and I think that we thus lose some respect for one an other. Certainly less frequency would suf fice for all important and hearty eommuiii- eations. Consider the girls in a factory, — never alone, hardly in their dreams. It would be better if there were hut one in- 214 WALDEl^. habitant to a sqiiare mile, as wliere I live. The value of a man is not in his skin, that we shonhl touch him. I have hoard of a man lost in the woods and dying of famine and exhaustion at the foot of a tree, whose loneliness was relieved by the grotesque visions with which, owing to bodily weakness, his diseased imagination surrounded him, and which he believed to he real. So also, owing to bodily and men tal health and strength, we may be continu ally cheered by a like but more normal and natural society, and come to know that we are never alone. I have a great deal of company in my house ; especially in the morning, when no body calls. Let me suggest a few compari sons, that some one may convey an idea of my situation. I am no more lonely than the loon in the pond that laughs so loud, or than Walden Pond itself. What company has that lonely lake, I pray ? And yet it has not the blue devils, but the blue angels in it, in the azure tint of its waters. The sun is alone, except in thick weather, when there sometimes appear to be two, but one is a mock sun. God is alone, — but the devil, he is far from being alone ; he sees a great S OLI TUDE. 215 deal of company ; lie is legion. I am no more lonely than a single mnllein or dande lion in a pasture, or a hean leaf, or sorrel, or a horse-fly, or a humhlc-hee. I am no more lonely than the Mill Brook, or a weathercock, or the north star, or the south wind, or an April shower, or a January thaw, or the first spider in a new house. I have occasional visits in the long winter evenings, when the snow falls fast and the wind howls in the wood, from an old settler and original proprietor, who is reported to have dug Walden Pond, and stoned it, and fringed it with pine woods ; who tells me stories of old time and of new eternity ; and between us we manage to pass a cheerful evening with social mirth and pleasant views of things, even without apples or eider, — a most wise and humorous friend, whom I love much, who keeps himself more secret than ever did Goffe or Whalley; and though he is thought to be dead, none can show where he is buried. An elderly dame, too, dwells in my neighborhood, invisible to most per sons, in whose odorous herb garden I love to stroll sometimes, gathering simples and listening to her fables ; for she has a genius of unequalled fertility, and her memory runs 216 WALDEN. back farther than mythology, ami she can tell me the original of every fable, and on what fact every one is founded, for the in cidents occurred when she was young. A ruddy and lustj^ old dame, who delights in all weathers and seasons, and is likely to out live all her children yet. The indescribable innocence and benefi cence of Nature, — of sun and wind and rain, of summer and winter, — such health, such cheer, they afford forever! and such sympathy have they ever with our race, that all Nature would be affected, and the sun’s brightness fade, and the winds would sigh humanely, and the clouds rain tears, and the woods shed their leaves and put on mourn ing in midsrnnmcr, if any man should ever for a just cause grieve. Shall I not have intelligence witli the earth ? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself ? What is the pill which will keĉ j) us well, serene, contented ? Not my or thy great grandfather’s. but our great-grandmother Nature’s universal, vegetable, botanic medi cines, by which she has kept herself young always, outlived so many old Parrs in her day, and fed her health with their deca3dng fatness. For my panacea, instead of one of S O L I T U D E . 217 those quack vials of a mixture dipped from Acheron and the Dead Sea, which come out of those long shallow hlack-schooner looking wagons which we sometimes see made to carry bottles, let me have a draught of un diluted morning air. Morning air ! If men will not drink of this at the fountain-head of the day, why, then, we must even bottle up some and sell it in the shops, for the benefit of those who have lost their sub scription ticket to morning time in this world. But remember, it will not keep quite till noonday even in the coolest cel lar, but drive out the stopples long ere that and follow westward the steps of Aurora. I am no worshipper of Hygeia, who was the daughter of that old herb-doctor îBscula- pius, and who is represented on monuments holding a serpent in one hand, and in the other a cup out of which the serpent some times drinks; but rather of Hebe, cup bearer to Jupiter, who was the daughter of Juno and wild lettuce, and who had the power of restoi'ing gods and men to the vigor of youth. She was probably the only thoroughly sound-conditioned, healthy, and robust young lady that ever walked the globe, and wherever she came it was spring. VI. VISITORS. I THINK that I love society as much as most, and am ready enough to fasten m yself like a bloodsucker for the tim e to any full- blooded man that conies in m y way. I am naturally no herm it, but m ight possibly sit out the sturdiest frequenter of the bar-room, if m y business called me thither. 1 had three chairs in my house ; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society. When visitors came in larger and unexpected numbers there was but the third chair for them all, but they generally economized the room by standing up. I t is surprising how many great men and women a small house will contain. I have had twenty-five or thirty souls, with their bodies, at once under my roof, and yet we often jiarted without being aware that we had come very near to one another. Many of our houses, both jiub- lic and private, with their almost innumer able apartments, their huge halls and their VISITORS. 219 cellars for the storage of wines and other munitions of peace, appear to me extrava gantly larg’e for their inhabitants. They ai-e so vast and mag'nificent that the latter seem to he only vermin which infest them. I am surprised when the herald blows his summons before some Tremont or Astor or Middlesex House, to see come creeping out over the piazza for all inhabitants a ridicu lous mouse, which soon again slinks into some hole in the pavement. One inconvenience I sometimes experi enced in so small a house, the difficulty of getting to a sufficient distance from my guest when we began to utter the big thoughts in big words. You want room for your thoughts to get into sailing trim and run a course or two before they make their port. The bullet of your thought must have overcome its lateral and ricochet motion and fallen into its last and steady course before it reaches the ear of the hearer, else it may plough out again through the side of his head. Also, our sentences wanted room to unfold and form their columns in the inter val. Individuals, like nations, must have suitable broad and natural boundaries, even a considerable neutral ground, between them. 220 WALDEN. I have found it a singular luxury to talk across the pond to a companion on the oppo site side. In my house we were so near that we could not begin to hear, — we could not speak low enough to he heard ; as when you throw two stones into calm water so near that they break each other’s undulations. If we are merely loquacious and loud talkers, then we can afford to stand very near to gether, cheek by jowl, and feel each other’s breath; but if we speak reservedly and thoughtfully, we want to be farther apart, that all animal heat and moisture may have a chance to evaporate. If we would enjoy the most intimate society with that in each of us which is without, or above, being spoken to, we must not only be silent, but commonly so far apart bodily that we can not possibly hear each other’s voice in any case. Referred to this standard, speech is for the convenience of those who are hard of hearing; but there are many fine things which we cannot say if we have to shout. As the conversation began to assume a loftier and grander tone, we gradually shoved our chairs farther apart till they touched the wall in opposite corners, and then commonly there was not room enough. VISITORS. 221 My “ best ” room, however, my withdraw ing room, always ready for company, on whose carpet the sun rarely fell, was the pine wood behind my house. Thither in summer days, when distinguished guests came, I took them, and a priceless domestic swept the floor and dusted the furniture and kept the things in order. If one guest came he sometimes partook of my frugal meal, and it was no interrup tion to conversation to be stirring a hasty- pudding, or watching the rising and matur ing of a loaf of bread in the ashes, in the mean while. But if twenty came and sat in my house there was nothing said about dinner, though there might be bread enough for two, more than if eating were a forsaken habit ; but we naturally practised abstinence; and this was never felt to be an offence against hospitality, but the most proper and consid erate course. The waste and decay of phys ical life, which so often needs repair, seemed miraculously retarded in such a case, and the vital vigor stood its ground. I could enter tain thus a thousand as well as twenty; and if any ever went away disappointed or hun gry from my house when they found me at home, they may depend upon it that I sym- 222 WALDEN. pathlzed ■with them at least. So easy is it, though many housekeepers doubt it, to estab lish new and better customs in the place of the old. You need not rest your reputation on the dinners you give. For m}̂ own part, I was never so effectually detci’rcd from fre quenting a man’s house, by any kind of Cerberus whatever, as by the ])arade one made about dining me, which I took to be a very polite and roundabout hint never to trouble him so again. I think I shall never revisit those scenes. I should be proud to have for the motto of my cabin those lines of Spenser which one of my visitors inscribed on a yellow walnut leaf for a card : — “ Arrived there, the little house they fill, Ne looke for entertainment where none was ; Rest is their feast, and all thing's at their w ill; The noblest mind the best eontentmcnt lias.” When Winslow, afterward governor of the Plymouth Colony, went with a compan ion on a visit of ceremony to Massasoit on foot through the woods, and arrived tired and hungry at his lodge, they were well re ceived by the king, but nothing was said about eating that day. When the nlglit ar rived, to quote their own words. — “ lie laid us on the bed with himself and his wife, they VISITORS. 223 at the one end and wo at the other, it being oidy plank, laid a foot from the ground, and a thin mat upon them. Two more of his chief men, for want of room, pressed by and upon ns ; so that we were worse weary of our lodging than of our journey.” At one o’clock the next day Massasoit “ brought two fishes that he had shot,” about thrice as big as a bream ; “ these being boiled, there were at least forty looked for a share in them. The most ate of them. This meal only we had in two nights and a day; and had not one of us bought a partridge, we had taken our journey fasting.” Fearing that they would be light-headed for want of food and also sleep, owing to “ the savages’ barbarous singing, (for they used to sing themselves asleep,) ” and that they might get home while they had strtmgtli to travel, they departed. As for lodging, it is true they were but poorly entertained, though what they found an inconvenience was no doubt intended for an honor; but as far as eating was concerned, I do not see how the Indians could have done better. They had nothing to eat themselves, and they were wiser than to think that apologies could supply the place of food to their guests; so they drew their 224 WALDEN. belts tighter and said nothing about it. An other time when Winslow visited them, it being a season of plenty with them, there was no deficiency in this respect. As for men, they will hardly fail one any where. I had more visitors while I lived in the woods at than any other period of my life; I mean that I had some. I met several there under more favorable circumstances than I could anywhere else. But fewer came to see me on trivial business. In this respect, my company was winnowed by my mere distance from town. I had withdrawn so far within the great ocean of solitude, into which the rivers of society empty, that for the most part, so far as my needs were concerned, only the finest sediment was de posited around me. Beside, there were wafted to me evidences of unexjdored and uncultivated continents on the other side. Who should come to my lodge this morn ing but a true Homeric or Paphlagonlan man, — he had so suitable and poetic a name that I am sorry I cannot print it here, — a Canadian, a wood - chopper and post maker, who can hole fifty posts in a day, who made his last supper on a woodchuck which his dog caught. He, too, has heard VIS I rons. 225 of Homer, and, “ if it were not for books,” wonld “ not know what to do rainy days,” tliougli perhaps he has not read one wholly through for many rainy seasons. Some priest who could pronounce the Greek itself taught him to read his verse in the testament in his native parish far away; and now I must translate to him, while he holds the hook, Achilles’ reproof to Patroclus for his sad countenance. — “ Why are you in tears, Patroclus, like a young girl ? ” — “ Or have you alone heard some news from Phthia ? They say that Meiicetius lives yet, son of Actor, And Peleus lives, son of ^acu5, among the Myrmidons, Either of whom having died, w'e should greatly grieve.” He says, “ That’s good.” Ho has a great bundle of white-oak hark upder his arm for a sick man, gathered this Sunday morning. “ I suppose there’s no harm in going after such a thing to-day,” says he. To him Homer was a areat writer, thono'h what his writino- w’as about he did not know. A more O simple and natural man it would he hard to find. Vice and disease, which cast such a sombre moral hue over the world, seemed to have hardly any existence for him. He was about twenty-eight years old, and had left Canada and his father’s house a dozen 226 WALDEN. years before to work in the States, and earn money to buy a farm with at last, perhaps in his native country. lie was east in the coarsest mould ; a stout but sluggish body, yet gracefully carried, with a thick sun burnt neck, dark bushy hair, and dull sleepy blue eyes, which were occasionally lit up with expression. He wore a flat gray cloth cap, a dingy wool-colored great-coat, and cowhide boots. He was a great consumer of meat, usually carrying his dinner to his work a couple of miles past my house, — for he chopped all summer, — in a tin pail; cold meats, often cold woodchiudrs, and cof fee in a stone bottle which dangled by a string frotn his belt; and sometijues he of fered me a drink. He came along early, crossing my bean-field, though without anx iety or haste to get to his work, siudi as Yan kees exhibit. He was n’t a-going to hurt himself. He did n’t care if he only earned his board. Frequently he would leave his dinner in the bushes, when his dog had caught a woodchuck bĵ the way, and go back a mile and a half to dress it and leave it in the cellar of the house where he boarded, after deliberating first for half an hour whether he could not sink it in the pond VISITORS. 227 safely till nig-htfall, — loving to dwell long- upon tlicse themes. would say, as he went by in the morning, “ How thick the pigeons are! If working every day were not my trade, I could get all the meat I should want by hunting, — pigeons, wood chucks, rabbits, partridges, — by gosh ! I could get all I should want for a week in one day.” He was a skilful chopper, and indulged in some flourishes and ornaments in his art. He cut his trees level and close to the ground, that the sprouts which came up af terward might be more vigorous and a sled might slide over the stumps ; and instead of leaving a whole tree to support his corded wood, he would pare it away to a slender stake or sjdinter which you could break off with your hand at last. He interested me because he was so quiet and solitary and so happy withal; a well of good humor and contentment which over flowed at his eyes. His mirth was without alloy. Sometimes I saw him at his work in the woods, felling trees, and he would greet me with a laugh of inexpressible satisfaction, and a salutation in Canadian French, though he spoke English as well. When I ap- 228 WALDEN. preached him he would suspend his work, and with half-suppressed mirth lie along the trunk of a pine which he had f(‘lled, and, peeling off the inner bark, roll it up into a ball and chew it while he laughed and talked. Such an exuberance of animal spir its had he that he sometimes tumbled down and rolled on the ground with laughter at anything which made him think and tickled him. Looking round upon the trees he would exclaim, — “ By George ! I can enjoy mjrself well enough here chopping ; I want no better sport.” Sometimes, when at leisure, he amused himself all day in the woods with a pocket pistol, firing salutes to himself at resailar intervals as lie walked. In the win-o ter he had a fire by which at noon he warmed his coffee in a kettle ; and as he sat on a log to eat his dinner the chicadees would some times come round and alight on his arm and peck at the potato in his fingers ; and he said that he “ liked to have the little fellers about him.” In him the animal man chiefly was de veloped. In physical endurance and con tentment he was cousin to the pine and the rock. I asked him once if he was not some times tired at night, after working all day ; V I S I T O R S . 229 and ho answered, with a sincere and serious look, “ Gorraj)pit, I never was tired in my life.” But the intellectual and what is called spiritual man in him were slumbei’- ing as in an infant. He had been instructed only in that innocent and ineffectual way in which the Catholic priests teacli the aborig ines, by which the pupil is never educated to the degree of consciousness, but only to the degree of trust and reverence, and a child is not made a man, but kept a child. When Nature made him, she gave him a strong body and contentment for his por tion, and propped him on every side with reverence and reliance, that he might live out his threescore years and ten a child. He was so genuine and unsophisticated that no introduction would serve to introduce him, more than if you introduced a wood chuck to your neighbor. He had got to find him out as you did. He would not play any part. Men paid him wages for work, and so helped to feed and clothe him ; but he never exchanged opinions with them. He was so simply and naturally humble — if he can be called humble who never aspires — that humility was no distinct quality in him, nor could he conceive of it. Wiser men 230 WALDEN. were demigods to him. If you told him that such a one was coming, he did as if he thought that anything so grand would ex pect nothing of himself, hut take all the re sponsibility on itself, and let him be for gotten still. He never heard the sound of praise. He jiartieularly reverenced tlie wi'iter and the j^reacher. Their perform ances were miracles. When I told him that I wrote considerably, he thought for a long time that it was merely the handwriting which I meant, for he could write a remark ably good hand himself. I sometimes found the name of his native parish handsomely written in the snow by the highway, with the proper French accent, and knew that he had passed. I asked him if he ever wished to write his thoughts. He said that he had read and written letters for those who could not, but he never tried to write thoughts, — no, he could not, he could not tell what to put first, it would kill him, and then there was spelling to be attended to at the same time ! I heard that a distinguished wise man and reformer asked him if he did not want tlie world to be changed ; but he answered with a chuckle of surprise in his Canadian ac- VI SI TO RS . 231 (!ent, not knowing tliat tlie question 'had ever been entertained bei'ore, “ JS'o, 1 like it well enongb.” It would Itave suggested many tilings to a pliilosoplier to have dealings with him. To a stranger lie appeared to know nothing of things in general; yet I sometimes saw in him a man whom I had not seen before, and I did not know whether he was as wise as Shalcespeare or as simply ignorant as a child, whether to suspect him of a line poetic consciousness or of stujiidity. A townsman told me that when he met him sauntering through the village in his small close-fitting cap, and whistling to himself, he reminded him of a prince in disguise. His only books were an almanac and an arithmetic, in which last he was consider ably expert. The former was a sort of oy- eloptedia to him, which he supposed to con tain an abstract of human knowledge, as indeed it does to a considerable extent. I loved to sound him on the various reforms of the day, and he never failed to look at them in the most simple and practical light. He had never heard of such things before. Could he do without factories ? I asked. He had worn the home-made Vermont gray, he said, and that was good. Could he dispense 232 WALDEN. with tea’ and coffee ? Did this country af ford any beverage beside water ? He had soaked hendock leaves in water and drank it, and thought that was better than water in Avarm weather. When I asked him if he could do without money, he showed the con venience of money in such a way as to sug gest and coincide with the most f>hilosoph- ical accounts of the origin of this institution, and the very derivation of the woj'd pecunia. If an ox were his property, and he wished to get needles and thread at tlie store, he thought it would be inconvenient and im possible soon to go on mortgaging some portion of the creature each time to that amount. lie covdd defend many institu tions better than any philosopher, because, in describing them as they concfu-ned him, he gave the true reason for their ]wevalenee, and speculation had not suggested to him any other. At another time, hearing Pla to’s dcfinitioii of a man, — a biped with out feathers, — and that one exhibited a cock plucked and called it Plato’s man, he thought it an important difference that the knees bent the wrong way. He would some times exclaim, “ H oav I love to talk ! By George, I could talk all 'day! ” I asked V IS IT ORS . 233 him once, when I had not seen him for many months, if he had got a new idea this sum mer. “ Good Lord,” said he, “ a man that has to work as I do, if he does not forget the ideas he has had, he will do well. May be the man you hoe with is inclined to race ; then, by gorry, your mind must he there; you think of weeds.” He would sometimes ask me first on such occasions, if I had made any improvement. One winter day I asked him if he was always satisfied with himself, wishing to suggest a substitute within him for the priest without, and some higher mo tive for living. “ Satisfied ! ” said he ; “ some men are satisfied with one thing, and some with another. One man, perhaps, if ho has got enough, will be satisfied to sit all dajr with his hack to the fire and his belly to the table, by George ! ” Yet I never, by any manamvring, could get him to take tlie spiritual view of things ; the highest that he appeared to conceive of was a simple ex pediency, such as you might expect an ani mal to appreciate; and this, practically, is true of most men. If I suggested any im provement in his mode of life, he merely an swered, without expressing any regret, that it was too late. Yet he thoroughly believed in honesty and the like virtues. 234 WALDEN. There was a certain positive originalit}% however slight, to ho detoeted in liim, and I occasionally observed that lie was thiiddng for himself and expressing his own opinion, a phenomenon so rare that I wonld any day walk ten miles to observe it, and it amounted to tlie re-origination of many of the institu tions of socdety. Though he hesitated, and perhaps failed to expiress himself distinetly, he always had a piresentable thought behind. Yet his thinking was so primitive and im mersed in his animal life, that, though more promising than a merely learned man’s, it rarely ripened to anything which can be re ported. Ho suggested that then^ might be men of geniirs in the lowest grades of life, however permanently Immble and illiterate, who take their own view always, or do not pretend to see at a l l ; who are as bottondess even as Walden Pond was thought to be, though they may he dark and muddy. Many a traveller came out of his -way to see mo and the inside of my house, and, as an excuse for calling, asked for a glass of water. I told them tliat I dranl? at the pond, and pointed thitlier, offering to lend them a dipper. Far off as I lived, I was V I S I T O R S . 235 not exempted from that annual visitation which occurs, methinks, about the first of A 2)i’il, when everyljody is on tlie move; and I had my share of good liuik, though tliere were some curious specimens among my visitors. Half-witted men from the alms house and elsewln;re came to see me; but I endeavored to make them exercise all the wit they had, and make their confessions to me : in such cases makiiio- wit the theme of ■ o our conversation; and so was compensated. Indeed, I found some of them to be wiser than the so-called ovei'seers of the poor and selectmen of tlie town, and thought it was time that the tables were turned. With re spect to wit, I learned that there was not much difference between the half and the whole. One day, in particular, an inoffen sive, simple - minded pauper, whom with others I had often seen used as fencing stuff, standing or sitting on a bushel in the fields to keep cattle and himself from straying, visited me, and exprc'ssed a wisii to live as I did. He told me, with the utmost simplicity and truth, quite superior, or rather inferior, to anytliing that is called humility, that he was “ deficient in intellect.” These were his words. The Lord had made him so, yet he 236 WALDEiJ. supposed the Lord eared as much for him as for another. “ I have always been so,” said ho, “ from my childhood; I never had much mind ; I was not like other children ; I am weak in the head. I t was the Lord’s will, I suppose.” And there he was to prove the truth of his words. He was a miitaphysical puzzle to me. I have rarely met a feUow- mati on such promising ground, — it was so simple and sincere and so true all that he said. And, true enough, in proportion as he appeared to humble himself was he exalted. I did not know at first but it was the result of a wise policy. It seemed that from such a basis of truth and frankness as the poor weak-headed pauper had laid, our intercourse might go forward to something better than the intercourse of sages. I had some guests from those not reckoned commonly among the town’s poor, but who should be; who are among the world’s poor, at any rate; guests who appeal, not to your hospitality, but to your hofipitulality ; who earnestly wish to be helped, and preface their appeal with the information that they are resolved, for one thing, never to lielp themselves. I require of a visitor that lie be not actually starving, though he may have V I S I TO RS . 237 tlie very best appetite in the world, however he got it. Objects of charity are not guests. Men who did not know when their visit had terminated, though I went about my business again, answering them from greater and greater remoteness. Men of almost eveiy degree of wit called on me in the migrating season. Some who had more wits than they knew what to do with; runaway slaves with plantation manners, who listened from time to time, like the fox in the fable, as if they heard the hounds a-baying on their track, and looked at me beseechingly, as much as to say, — “ 0 Christian, will you send me hack ? ” One real runaway slave, among the rest, whom I helped to forward toward the north- star. Men of one idea, like a hen with one chicken, and that a duckling; men of a thousand ideas, and unkempt heads, like those hens which are made to take charge of a hundred chickens, all in pursuit of one bug, a score of them lost in every morning’s dew, -— and become frizzled and mangy in consequence ; men of ideas instead of logs, a sort of intellectual centipede that made you crawl all over. One man proposed a book 238 WALDEN. in which visitors should write their names, as at the White Mountains ; but, alas ! I have too good a memory to make that neces sary. I could not but notice some of the pecu liarities of my visitors. Girls and boys and young women generally seemed glad to be in the woods. They looked in the pond and at the flowers, and improved their time. Men of business, even farmers, thought only of solitude and employment, and of the great distance at which I dwelt from some thing or other ; and though they said that they loved a ramble in the woods occasion ally, it was obvious that they did not. Restless committed men, whose time was all taken up in getting a living or keeping i t ; ministers who spoke of God as if they en joyed a monopoly of the subject, who could not bear all kinds of opinions ; doctors, law yers, uneasy housekeepers who pried into my cupboard and bed when I was out, — how came M rs.----- to know that my sheets were not as clean as hers ? — young men who had ceased to be young, and had concluded that it was safest to follow the beaten track of the professions, — all these generally said tliat it was not possible to do so much good VISITORS. 239 in my position. A y! there was the rub. The old and infirm and the timid, of what ever age or sex, thought most of sickness, and sudden accident and death ; to them life seemed full of danger,— what danger is there if you don’t think of any? — and they thought that a prudeiit man would carefully select the safest position, where Dr. B. might be on hand at a moment’s warning. To them the village was literally a coin-munity, a league for mutual dehmce, and you would suppose that they would not go a-huekle- berrying without a medicine chest. The amount of it is, if a man is alive, there is always danger that he may die, though the danger must he allowed to he less in propor tion as he is dead-and-alive to begin with. A man sits as many risks as he runs. Finally, there were the self-styled reformers, the great est bores of all, who thought that I was for ever singing, — T his is th e house th at I b u i l t ; T h is is the m an th a t lives in th e house that I b u i l t ; but they did not know that the third line was, — T hese are the fo lk s th at worry the m an T h a t lives in the house th at I built. I did not fear the hen-harriers, for I kept 240 W A L D E N . no chickens; but I feared the men-harriers rather. I had more cheering visitors than the last. Children come a-berrying, railroad men tak ing a Sunday morning walk in (dean shirts, fishermen and hunters, poets and philoso phers ; in short, all honest pilgrims, who came out to the woods for freedom’s sake, and really left the village behind, I was ready to greet with, — “ Welcome, Eng lishmen ! welcome, Englishmen I ” for I had had communication with that race. vn. THE BEAN-FIELD. M e a n w h il e my beans, the length of whose rows, added togethtT, was seven miles already planted, were impatient to be hoed, for the earliest had grown considerably be fore the latest were in the ground; indeed they were not easily to be put off. What was the meaning of this so steady and self- respecting, this small Herculean labor, I knew not. I came to love my rows, my beans, though so many more than I wanted. They attached me to the earth, and so I got strength like Antieus. But why should I raise them ? Only Heaven knows. This was niy curious labor all summer, — to make this portion of the earth’s surface, which had yielded only cinquefoil, black berries, johnswort, and the like, before, sweet wild fruits and pleasant flowers, pro duce instead this pulse. What shall I learn of beans or beans of me ? I cherish them, I hoe them, early and late I have an eye to 242 W A L D E N . them ; and this is my day’s work. It is a fine broad leaf to look on. My auxiliaries are the dews and rains which water this dry soil, and what fertilitv is in the soil itself, which for the most part is lean and effete. My enemies are worms, cool days, and most of all woodchucks. The last have nibbled for me a quarter of an acre (dean. But what right had I to oust johnswort and the rest, and break up their ancient herb gar den ? Soon, however, the remaining beans will be too tough for them, and go forward to meet new foes. 4Vhen I was four years old, as I well re member, I was brought from Boston to this my native town, through these very woods and this field, to the pond. It is one of the oldest scenes stamped on my memory. And now to-night my flute has waked the echoes over that very water. The pines still stand here older than I ; or, if some have fallen, I have cooked my supper with their stumps, and a new growth is rising all around, pre paring another aspect for new infant eyes. Almost the same johnswort springs from the same perennial root in this pasture, and even I have at length helped to clothe that fabulous landscape of my infant dreams, T H E H E A N -FIEL D . 243 and one of the results of my presence and influMiee is seen in these bean leaves, corn blades, and potato vines. I planted about two acires and a half of upland ; and as it was only about fifteen years since the land was cleared, and I my self had got out two or three cords of stumps, I did not give it any manure ; but in the course of the summer it appeared by the arrow-heads w'hich I turned up in hoe ing, that an extinct nation had anciently dwelt here and planted corn and beans ere white men came to clear the land, and so, to some extent, had exhausted the soil for tills very ci'op. Before }'et any woodchuck or squirrel had run across the road, oi- the sun had got above the shrub-oaks, while all the dew was on, though the farmers warned me against it, — I -would advise you to do all your work if possible while the dew is on, — I began to level the ranks of haughty weeds in my bean-field and throw dust upon their heads. Eai'ly in the morning I worked barefooted, dabbling like a plastic artist in the dewy and ciumbling sand, but later in the day the sun blistered my feet. There the sun lighted me to hoe beans, pacing slowly back- 244 W A L D E N . ward 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 blos soms rather than in wormwood and piper and millet grass, making the earth say beans instead of grass, — this was my daily work. As I had little aid from horses or cattle, or hired men or boys, or improved implements of husbandry, I was much slower, and be came much more intimate with my beans than usual. But labor of the hands, even when pursued to the verge of drudgery, is perhaps never the worst form of idleness. I t has a constant and imperishable moral, and to the scholar it yields a classic result. A very agricola lahoi'iosus was I to travel lers bound westward through Lincoln and Wayland to nobody knows whcrti; they sit ting at their ease in gigs, with elbows on knees, and reins loosely hanging in festoons; T H E B E A N - F I E L D . 245 I the home-staying, laborious native of the soil. But soon my homestead was out of It was the onlytheir sight and thought. open and cultivated field for a great dis tance on either side of the road, so they made the most of i t ; and sometimes the man in the field heard more of travellers’ gossip and comment than was meant for his ea r: “ Beans so late ! peas so late ! ” — for I con tinued to plant when others had begun to hoe, — the ministerial husbandman had not suspected it. “ Corn, my boy, for fodder; corn for fodder.” “ Does he live there ? ” asks the black bonnet of the gray coat; and the hard-featured farmer reins up his grate ful dobbin to inquire what you are doing where he sees no manure in the furrow, and recommends a little chip dirt, or any little waste stuff, or it may be ashes or plaster. But here were two acres aud a half of fur rows, and only a hoe for cart and two hands to draw it, — there being an aversion to other carts and hoi-ses, — and chip dirt far away. Fellow-travellers as they rattled by compared it aloud with tlie fields which they had passed, so that I came to know how I stood in the agricultural world. This was one field not in Mr. Coleman’s report. And, 246 W A L D E N . by the way, who estimates the value of the crop which Nature yields in the still wilder fields unimproved by man ? The crop of Engl'uih hay is carefully weighed, the moist ure calculated, the silicates and the potash ; but in all dells and pond holes in the woods and pastures and swamps grows a rich and various crop only unreaped by man. Mine was, as it were, the connecting- link between wild and cultivated fields; as some states are civilized, and others half-civilized, and others savage or barbarous, so my field was, though not in a bad sense, a half-cultivated field. They were beans cheerfully return ing to their wild and primitive state that I cultivated, and my hoe played the Hann des Vachcs for them. Near at hand, upon the topmost spray of a birch, sings the brown-thrasher — or red mavis, as some love to call him — all the morning, glad of your society, that would find out another farmer’s field if yours were not here. While you are planting the seed, ho cries, — “ Drop it, drop it, — cover it up, cover it u]i, — pull it up, pull it up, pull it up.” But this was not corn, and so it was safe from such enemies as he. ^^ou may wonder what his rigmarole, his amateur T H E B E A N - F I E L D . 247 Paganini performances on one string' or on twenty, have to do witii your planting, and yet prefer it to leached ashes or plaster. It was a cheap sort of top dressing in which I had entire faith. As I drew a still fresher soil about the rows with my hoe, 1 disturbed the ashes of unchronicled nations who in primeval years lived under these heavens, and their small imjdements of war and hunting were brought to the light of this modern day. They lay mingled with other natural stones, some of which bore the marks of having been burned by Indian fires, and some by the sun, and also bits of pottery and glass brought hither by the recent cultivators of the soil. When my hoe tinkled against the stones, that music echoed to the woods and the sky, and was an accompaniment to my labor which yielded an instant and immeas urable crop. I t was no longer beans that I hoed, nor I that hoed beans ; and I remem bered with as much pity as pride, if I re membered at all, my accpiaintances who had gone to the city to attend the oratorios. The night-hawk circled overhead in the sunny afternoons — for I sometimes made a day of it — like a mote in the eye, or in heaven’s 248 W A L D E N . eye, falling from time to time with a swoop and a sound as if the heavens were rent, torn at last to very rags and tatters, and yet a seamless cope remained; small imps that fill the air and lay their eggs on the ground on hare sand or rocks on the tops of hills, where few have found them ; graceful and slender like ripples caught up from the pond, as leaves are raised by the wind ’ to float in the heavens; such kindredship is in Nature. The hawk is aerial brother of the wave which he sails over and surveys, those his perfect air-inflated wings answering to the elemental unfledged pinions of the sea. Or sometimes I watched a pair of hen-hawks circling high in the sky, alternately soaring and descending, approaching and leaving one another, as if they were the embodiment of my own thoughts. Or I was attracted by the passage of wild pigeons from this wood to that, with a slight quivering win nowing sound and carrier haste ; or from under a rotten stump my hoe turned up a sluggish portentous and outlandish spotted salamander, a trace of Egypt and the Nile, yet our contemporary. When I paused to lean on my hoe, these sounds and sights I heard and saw anywhere in the row, a part T H E B E A N - F I E L D . 249 of the inexhaustible entertainment which the country offers. Oil gala clays the town fires its great guns, which echo like popguns to these woods, and some waifs of martial music occasionally penetrate thus far. To me, away there in my bean-field at the other end of the town, the big guns sounded as if a puff ball had burst; and when there was a military turn out of which I was ignorant, I have some times had a vague sense all the day of some sort of itching and disease in the horizon, as if some eruption would break out there soon, either scarlatina or canker-rash, until at length some more favorable puff of wind, making haste over the fields and up the Wayland road, brought me information of the “ trainers.” I t seemed by the distant hum as if somebody’s bees had swarmed, and that the neighbors, according to Virgil’s advice, by a faint tintinnahidiim upon the most sonorous of their domestic utensils, were endeavoring to call them down into the hive again. And when the sound died quite away, and the hum had ceased, and the most favorable breezes told no tale, I knew that they had got the last drone of them all safely into the Middlesex hive, and that now 250 W A L D E N . their minds were hent on the honey with whieh it was smeared. I felt proud to know that the liberties of Massachusetts and of our fatherland were in such safe keeping; and as I turned to my hoeing again I was filled with an inex pressible confidence, and pursued my labor cheerfully with a calm trust in the future. When there were several bands of musi cians, it sounded as if all the village was a vast bellows, and all the buildings expanded and collapsed alternately with a din. But sometimes it was a really noble and inspir ing strain that reached these woods, and the trumpet that sings of fame, and 1 felt as if I could spit a Mexican with a good relish, — for why should we always stand for trifles ? — and looked round for a woodchuck or a skunk to exercise my chivalry upon. These martial strains seemed as far away as Pales tine, and reminded me of a march of cru saders in the horizon, with a slight tantivy and tremulous motion of the elm-tree tops which overhang the village. This was one of the great days; though the sky had from my clearing only the same everlastingly great look that it wears daily, and I saw no difference in it. T H E B E A N - F I E L D . 251 It was a singular experience that long acquaintance which I cultivated with beans, what with planting , and hoeing, and har vesting, and threshing, and picking over and selling them, — the last was the hardest of all, — I might add eating, for I did taste. I was determined to know beans. When they were growing, I used to hoe from five o’clock in the morning till noon, and com monly spent the rest of the day about other affairs. Consider tin; intimate and curious acquaintance one makes with various kinds of weeds, — it will bear some iteration in the account, for there was no little Iteration in the labor, — disturbing their delicate or ganizations so ruthlessly, and making such invidious distinctions with his hoe, levelling whole ranks of one sjiecies, and sedulously cultivating another. T hat’s Roman worm wood, — tha t’s pigw(?ed, — th a t’s sorrel, — th a t’s piper-grass, — have at him, (drop him up, turn his roots ujjward to the sun, don’t let him have a fibre in the shade, if you do he ’ll turn himself t’other side up and bo as green as a leek in two days. A long war, not with cranes, but with weeds, those Tro jans who had sun and rain and dews on their side. Daily the beans saw me come to their 252 W A L D E N . resciie armed witli a hoe, and thin the ranks of their enemies, filling up the trenches with weedy dead. Many a lusty crest-wav ing Hector, that towered a whole foot above his crowding comrades, fell hefor(! my wea pon and rolled in the dust. Those summer days which some of my contemporaries devoted to the fine arts in Boston or Borne, and others to contemplation in India, and others to trade in London or New York, I thus, with the other farmers of New England, devoted to husbandry. Not that I wanted beans to cat, for I am by nature a Pythagorean, so far as beans are concerned, whether they mean porridge or voting, and exchanged them for I'ice; but, perchance, as some must work in fields if only for the sake of tropes and expression, to serve a parable-maker one day. I t was on the whole a rare amusement, which, con tinued too long, might have become a dissi pation. Though I gave them no manure, and did not hoe them all once, I hoed them unusually well as far as I went, and was paid for it in the end, “ there being in truth,” as Evelyn says, “ no compost or lEetation whatsoever comparable to this continual motion, repastination, and turning of the T ill! B E A N - F I E L D . 253 mould with the spade.’ “ The earth,” he adds elsewhere, “ especially if fresh, has a certain magnetism in it, by which it attracts the salt, powei’, or virtue (call it either) wliich gives it life, and is the logic of all the labor and stir we keep about it, to sustain us ; all dungings and other sordid temper ings being hut the vicars succedaneous to this improvement.” Moreover, this being one of those “ worn-out and exhausted lay fields which enjoy their sabbath,” had per chance, as Sir Kenelrn Digby thinks likely, attracted “ vital spirits ” from the air. I harvested twelve bushels of beans. But to be moi'e particular, for it is com plained that Mr. Coleman has reported chiefly the expensive experiments of gentle men farmers, my outgoes were, — l^or a h o e , .................................... $0 54 Plouglimg-, harrowing, and furrowing, 7 50 Too m uch. B eans for seed, . . . . . . . . 3 1 2 | P otatoes “ ........................................................... 1 33 P eas “ .......................................... 0 40 Turnip s e e d , ..................................................... 0 06 W hite line for crow fence, . . . . 0 02 H orse cultivator and boy three hours, 1 00 H orse and cart to g e t crop, . . . . 0 75 In a il, . . . . . . . . . $14 72^ 254 WALDEN. My income was, (patrem fainilias vendar̂ cem, non emacem esse ojiortet,) from Nine bushels and twelve quarts of beans sold, $10 94 Five “ larg'e potatoes,...................................... 2 50 Nine “ s m a l l , ......................................................2 25 G r a s s , ............................................................................ 1 00 S t a lk s , ........................................................................... 0 75 In a l l , ........................................................... $23 44 Leaving a pecuniary profit, as I have else where said, o f .......................................... $8 7I|. This is the resnlt of my experience in raising beans. Plant the common small white bush bean about the first of June, in rows three feet by eighteen inches apart, being carefnl to select fresh round and un mixed seed. First look out for worms, and supjdy vacancies by planting anew. Then look out for woodchucks, if it is an exposed jdaee, for they will nibble off the earliest tender leaves -almost clean as they go ; and again,'wlien the young tendrils make their appearance, they have notice of it, and will shear them off with both buds and young pods, sitting erect like a squirrel. But above all harvest as early as possible, if you would escape frosts and b-ave a fair and salable crop; you may save much loss by this means. T H E B E A X -FI ELD. 255 This furthei' experience also I gained. I said to myself, I will not plant beans and corn with so much industry another summer, hot such seeds, if the seed is not lost, as sin cerity, truth, simplicity, faith, innocence, and the like, and see if they will not grow in this soil, even with less toil and manurance, and sustain me, for surely it has not been ex hausted for these crops. Alas ! I said this to myself ; but now another summer is gone, and another, and another, and I am obliged to say to you. Reader, that the seeds which I planted, if indeed th(5y were the seeds of those virtues, were wornieaten or had lost their vitality, and so did not come up. Com monly men will only be brave as their fathers were brave, or timid. This generation is very sure to plant corn and beans each new year precisely as the Indians did centuries ago and taught the first settlers to do, as if there were a fate in it. I saw an old man the other day, to my astonishment, making the holes with a hoe for the seventieth time at least, and not foi- himself to lie down in ! But why should not the New Englander try new adventures, and not lay so much stress on his grain, his potato and grass crop, and his orchards, — raise other crops than these ? 256 WALDEN. Why concern ourselves so much about our beans for seed, and not be concerned at all about a new generation of men ? We should really be fed and cheered if wheii we met a man we were sure to see that some of the qualities which I have named, which we all prize more than those other productions, but which are for the most part broadcast and floating in the air, had taken root and grown in him. Here comes such a subtile and in effable quality, for instance, as truth or jus tice, though the slightest amount or new variety of it, along the road. Our ambassa dors should be instructed to send home snch seeds as these, and Congress heljo to dis tribute them over all the land. We should never stand upon ceremony with sincerity. We should never cheat and insult and ban ish one another by our meanness, if there were present the kernel of worth and friend liness. We should not meet thus in haste. Most men I do not meet at all, for they seem not to have time ; they are busy about their beans. We would not deal with a man thus plodding ever, leaning on a hoe or a spade as a staff between his work, not as a mush room, but partially risen out of the earth, something more than erect, like swallows alighted and walking on the gi'ound : — T H E B E A K - F J E L D . 257 “ And as he spake, his wings would now and then Spread, as he meant to hy, then close again, — ” so that we should suspect that we might he conversing with an angel. Bread may not always nourish u s ; but it always does us good, it even takes stiffness out of our joints, and makes us supple and buoyant, when we knew not what ailed us, to recognize any generosity in man or Nature, to share any unmixed and heroic joy. Ancient poetry and mythology suggest, at least, that husbandry was once a sacred a r t ; but it is pursued with irreverent haste and heedlessness by us, our object being to have large farms and large crô JS merely. We have no festival, nor procession, nor cere mony, not excepting our Cattle-shows and so called Thanksgivings, by which the farmer expresses a sense of the sacredness of his calling, or is reminded of its sacred origin. It is the premium and the feast which tempt him. He sacrifices not to Ceres and the Terrestrial Jove, but to the infernal Plutus rather. By avarice and selfishness, and a grovelling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded 258 WALDEN. with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber. Cato says that the profits of agriculture are particularly pious or just, (jnuxhneqiie piiis qucestus,') and according to Yarro the old Romans “ called the same earth Mother and Ceres, and thought that they who cultivated it led a pious and useful life, and that tln̂ y alone were left of the race of King Saturn.” We are wont to forget that the sun looks on our cultivated fields and on the prairies and forests without distinction, ^’hey all re flect and absorb his rays alike, and the for mer make but a small y>art of the glorious picture which ho beholds in his daily courserience, to be lost in the woods anytime. Often in a snowstorm, even by day, one will come out u])on a well- known road and yet lind it impossible to tell which way leads to the village. Though he knows that he has travelled it a thousand times, he cannot recognize a feature in it, but it is as strange to him as if it were a road ill Siberia. By night, of course, the perplexity is infinitely greater. In our most trivial walks, we are constantly^ though un- consciouslyg steering like pilots by certain well-known beacons and headlands, and if we go bey^ond our usual course we still cany in our minds the bearing of some neighboring cape ; and not till we are completely' lost, or 268 W A L D E N . turned round, — for a man needs only to he turned round once with liis eyes shut in this world to be lost, — do we appi < eiate tlu; vastness and strangeness of Nature. Every man has to learn the points of compass again as often as he awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction. Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations. One afternoon, near the end of the first summer, when I went to the village to get a shoe from the cobbler’s, I was seized and put into jail, because, as I have elsewhere re lated, 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. 1 liad gone down to the woods for other purposes. But, wherever a man goes, men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society. It is true, I might have resisted forcibly with more or less effect, might have run “ amok ” against society; but I preferred that society should run “ amok ” against me, it being the desper- THE VILLAGE. 269 ate party. However, I was released tlie next day, obtained my mended shoe, and returned to the woods in season to get my dinner of hnekleherries on Fair Haven Hill. I was never molested by any person but those who represented the state. I had no lock nor bolt but for the desk which held my papers, not even a nail to put over my latch or win dows. I never fastened my door night or day, though I was to be absent several days ; not even when the next fall I spent a fort night in the woods of Maine. And yet my house was more respected than if it had been surrounded by a file of soldiers. The tired rambler could rest and warm himself by my fire, the literary amuse himself with the few books on my table, or the curious, by open ing my closet door, see what was left of my dinner, and what prospect I had of a supper. Yet, though many people of every class came this way to the pond, 1 suffered no serious inconvenience from these sources, and I never missed anything but one small book, a volume of Homer, which perhaps was im properly gilded, and this I trust a soldier of our camp has found by this time. I am convinced, that if all men were to live as simply as I then did, thieving and robbery 270 W A L D E N . Avoiild be unknown. These take place only in communities where some have got more than is sufficient while others have not enough. The Pope’s Homers would soon get properly distributed — “ Nec bella fuerunt, Faginus astabat dmn scyphus ante dapes.” “ Nor wars did men molest, When only beechen bowls were in request.” “ You who govern public affairs, what need have you to employ punishments ? Love virtue, and the people will be virtuous. The virtues of a superior man are like the wind ; the virtues of a common man are like the grass ; the grass, when the wind passes over it, bends.” IX. THE PONDS. S ometimes, having had a surfeit of hu man society and gossip, and worn out all my village friends, I rambled still farther west ward than I habitually dwell, into yet more unfrequented parts of the town, “ to fresh woods and pastures new,” or, while the sun was setting, made my supper of huckleber ries and blueberries on Fair Haven Hill, and laid up a store for several days. The fruits do not yield their true flavor to the purchaser of them, nor to him who raises them for the market. There is but one way to obtain it, yet few take that waj^ If you would know the flavor of huckleberries, ask the cow-boy or the partridge. It is a vidgar error to suppose that you have tasted huckle berries who never plucked them. A huckle berry never reaches Boston ; they have not been known there since they grew on her three hills. The ambrosial and essential part of the fruit is lost with the bloom which 272 W A L D E N . is rubbed off in the mai'ket cart, and they become mere provender. As long as Eter nal Justice reigns, not one innocent liuckle- berry can be transported thither from the country’s hills. Occasionally, after my hoeing was done for the day, I joined some impatient com panion who had been fishing on the pond since morning, as silent and motionless as a duck or a floating leaf, and, after practising various kinds of philosophy, had concluded commonly, by the time I arrived, that he belonged to the ancient sect of Coenobites. There was one older man, an excellent fisher and skilled in all kinds of woodcraft, who was pleased to look upon my house as a building erected for the convenience of fish ermen ; and I was equally pleased when he sat in my doorway to arrange his lines. Once in a while we sat together on the pond, he at one end of the boat, and I at the other ; but not many words passed between us, for he had grown deaf in his later years, but he occasionally hummed a psalm, which har monized well enough witli my philosophy. Our intercourse was tlius altogecher one of unbroken harmony, far more pleasing to I'C- membor than if it had bt;en carried on by THE PONDS. ■2T6 When, as was commonly the case, I had none to coinmiUKi with, I used to raise the echoes by striking \vith a paddle on the side of my boat, filling the suiTouiiding woods with circling and dilating sound, stir ring them up as the kc^eper of a menagerie his wild beasts, until I elicited a growl from every wooded vale and hill-side. In warm evenings 1 frequently sat in the boat playing the flute, and saw the perch, which I seem to have charmed, hovering around me, and the moon travelling over the ribbed bottom, which was strewed with the wrecks of the forest. Formerly I had come to this pond adventurously, from time to time, in dark summer nights, with a com panion, and making a fire close to the wa ter’s edge, which we tliought attracted the fishes, we caught pouts with a bunch of worms strung on a thread, and when we had done, far in the niglit, threw the burning brands high into the, air like skyrockets, which, coming down into the pond, were quenched with a loud hissing, and we were suddenly groping in total darkness. Through this, whistling a tune, we took our way to the haunts of men again. But now 1 had made my home by the shore. 274 WALDEN. Sometimes, after staying in a village j>ar- lor till the family had all retired. I have re turned to the woods, and, partly with a view to the next day’s dinner, spent the hours of midnight fishing from a boat by moonlight, serenaded by owls and foxes, and hearing, from time to time, the creaking note of some unknown bird close at hand. These expe riences were very memorable and valuable to me, — anchored in forty feet of water, and twenty or thirty rods from the shore, sur rounded sometimes by thousands of small perch and shiners, dimpling the surface with their tails in the moonlight, and commu nicating by a long flaxen line with mystei-i- ous nocturnal fishes which had their dwell ing forty feet below, or sometimes dragging sixty feet of lino about the pond as I drifted in the gentle night breeze, now and then feeling a slight vibration along it, indicative of some life prowling about its extremity, of dull uncertain blundering juupose there, and slow to make up its mind. At length you slowly raise, pulling hand ov̂ er hand, some horned j)out squeaking and squirming to the upper air. I t was very queer, espe cially in dark nights, when your thoughts had wandered to vast and cosmogonal themes in THE PONUS. 275 other spheres, to feel this faint jerk, which came to interrupt your dreams and link you to Nature again. It seemed as if I might next cast line upward into the air, as well as downward into this element, which was scarcely more dense, two fishes as it were with one hook. Thus I caught The scenery of Walden is on a humble scale, and, though very beautiful, does not approach to grandeui-, nor can it much con cern one who has not long frequented it or lived by its shore; yet this pond is so re markable for its depth and purity as to merit a particular description. It is a clear and deep green well, half a mile long and a mile and three quarters in circumference, and contains about sixty-one and a half acres ; a perennial spring in the midst of pine and oak woods, without any visible inlet or out let except by the clouds and evaporation. The surrounding hills l ise abruptly from the water to the height of forty to eighty feet, though on the south-east and east they attain to about one hundred and one hundred and fifty feet respectively, within a quarter and a third of a mile. They are exclusively woodland. All our Concord waters have 276 W A L D E N . two colors at least; one when viewed at a distance, and another, more proper, close at hand. The first depends more on the light, and follows the sky. In clear weather, in summer, they appear blue at a little distance, especially if agitated, and at a great distance all appear alike. In stormy weather they are sometimes of a dark slate c(dor. The sea, however, is said to be blue one day and green another without any perceptible change in the atmosphere. I have seen our river, when, the landscape being covered with snow, both water and ice were almost as green as grass. Some consider blue “ to be the color of pure water, whether liquid or solid.” But, looking directly down into our waters from a boat, they are seen to be of very different colors. Walden is blue at one time and green at another, even from the same point of view. Lying between the earth and the heavens, it partakes of the color of both. Viewed from a hill-top it re flects the color of the sky ; but near at hand it is of a yellowish tint next the shore where you can see the sand, then a light green, which gradually deepens to a uniform dark green in the body of the pond. In some lights, viewed even from a hiU-top, it is of a THE PONDS. 277 vivid green next the shoi'e. Some have re ferred this to the reflection of the verdure; hut it is equally green there against the rail road sand-bank, and in the spring, before the leaves are expanded, and it may be siin- pljr the result of the prevailing blue mixed with the yellow of the sand. Such is the color of its iris. Tliis is that 2)ortion, also, where in the s]3ring, the ice being warmed by the heat of the sun reflected from the bottom, and also transmitted through the earth, melts first and forms a narrow canal about the still frozen middle. Like the rest of our waters, when much agitated, in clear weather, so that the surface of the waves may reflect the sky a.t the right angle, or because there is more light mixed with it, it apjjears at a little distance of a darker blue than the sky itself ; and at such a time, be ing on its surface, and looking with divided vision, so as to see the reflection, I have dis cerned a matchless and indescribable light blue, such as watered or changeable silks and sword blades suggest, more cerulean than the sky itself, alternating with the original dark green on the ojjjjosite sides of the waves, which last ajjpeared but muddy in comj)arison. I t is a vitreous greenish blue, 278 W A L D E N . as I remember it, like those patches of the winter sky seen through cloud vistas in the west before sundown. Yet a single glass of its water beld up to the light is as color less as an equal quantity of air. I t is well known that a large plate of glass will have a green tint, owing, as the makers say, to its “ body,” but a small jiiece of the same will be colorless. How large a body of Walden Acatei’ wmdd be required to reflect a green tint I have never proved. The water of our I'iver is black or a very dark brown to one looking directly down on it, and, nice that of most ponds, imparts to the body of one bathing in it a yellowish tinge; but this water is of such crystalline purity that the body of the bather appears of an alabaster whiteness, still more unnat ural, which, as the limbs are magnified and distorted withal, produces a monstrous ef fect, making fit studies for a Michael An gelo. The water is so transparent that the bot tom can easily be discerned at the depth of twenty-five or thirty feet. Paddling over it, you may see many feet beneath the surface the schools of perch and shiners, perhaps only an inch long, yet the former easily dis- THE PONDS. 279 ting'uished by their transverse bars, and you think that they must 1k̂ ascetic fish that find a subsistence tiiere. Onee, in the winter, many years ago, when I had been cutting holes through the ice in order to catch pick erel, as I stepped ashore I tossed my axe back on to the ice, but, as if some evil gen ius had directed it, it slid four or five rods directly into one of the holes, where the water was twenty-five feet deep. Out of curiosity, I lay down on the ice and loolced through the hole, until I saw tlie axe a little on one side, standing on its head, witli its helve erect and gently swa3dng to and fro with tlie pulse of the pond ; and there it might have stood erect and swa^dng till in the course of time the handle rotted off, if I had not disturbed it. Making another hole directly over it with an ice chisel wliich I had, and cutting down the longest birch which I could find in the neighborhood with my knife, I made a slip-noose, which I at-* tached to its end, and, letting it down care fully, passed it over the knob of the handle, and drew it by a line along the birch, and so pulled the axe out again. The shore is composi'd of a belt of smooth rounded white stones like paving-stones, ex- 280 WALDEN. ceptiiig one or two short s:ind beaches, and is so steep that in many places a singio leap will carry you into water over your head ; and were it not for its reinarkable transpar ency, that would be the last to be seen of its bottom till it rose on the opposite side. Scjme think it is bottomless. It is nowhere muddy, and a casual observer would say that there were no weeds at all in i t ; and of noticeable plants, except in the little meadows recently overflowed, which do not properly belong to it, a closer scrutiny does not detect a flag nor a bulrush, nor even a lily, yellow or white, but only a few small heart-leaves and potaniogetons, and perhaps a water-target or two; all which however a bather might not perceive ; and these plants are clean and bright like the element they grow in. The stones extend a rod or two into the water, and then the bottom is pure sand, except in the deepest parts, where 'there is usually a little sediment, probably from the decay of the leaves which have been wafted on to it so many successive falls, and a bright green weed is brought up on anchors even in midwinter. We have one other pond just like this, White Pond, in Nine Acre Corner, about THE rO N D S . 281 two and a half miles westeily; but, though I am ac(|uaiuted with most of the ponds within a dozen miles of this cei’.tre, I do not know a third of this pure and well-like char acter. Successive nations perchance have drank at, admired, and fathomed it, and passed away, and still its water is green and pellucid as ever. Not an intermitting spring ! Perhajis on that spring morning when Adam and Eve were driven out of Eden Walden Pond was already in exist ence, and even then breaking up in a gentle spring rain accompanied with mist and a southerly wind, and covered with myriads of ducks and geese, which had not heard of the fall, when still such 2>ure lakes sufficed them. Even then it had commenced to rise and fall, and had clarified its waters and colored them of the hue they now wear, and obtained a joatent of Heaven to be the only Walden Pond in the world and distiller of celestial dews. Who knows in how many unremembered nations’ literatures this has been the Castalian Fountain ? or what nymidis jiresided over it in the Golden Age ? It is a g'em of the first water which Concord wears in her coronet. Yet perchance the first who came to this 282 W A LD E N . well have left some trace of their footsteps. I have been surprised to detect encircling the pond, even whore a thick wood has just been cut down on the shore, a narrow shelf like path in the steep hill-side, alternately rising and falling-, approaching anti receding from the water’s edge, as old probably as the race of man here, worn by the fe(;t of abo riginal hunters, and still from time to time unwittingly trodden by the present occupants of the land. This is particularly rlistinct to one standing on the middle of tht; pond in winter, just after a light snow has fallen, ap pearing as a clear undulating white line, un obscured by weeds and twigs, and very ob vious a quarter of a mile olf in many places where in summer it is hardly distinguishable close at hand. The snow reprints it, as it were, in clear white type alto-reli(uu). The ornamented grounds of villas whicli will one day be built here may still preserve some trace of this. The pond rises and falls, but whether reg ularly or not, and within what period, no body knows, though, as usual, many pretend to know. It is commonly higher in the win ter and lower in the summer, though not corresponding to the general wet and dry- THE PO N D S. 283 ness. I can remember when it was a foot or two lower, and also when it was at least five feet higher, than wh(>n I lived by it. There is a narrow sand-bar running into it, with v(̂ ry deep water on one side, on which I helped boil a kettle of chowder, some six rods from the main shore, about the year 1824, which it has not been possible to do for twenty - five years; and, on the other hand, my friends used to listen with incre dulity when I told them, that a few years later I was accustomed to fish from a boat in a secluded cov̂ e in tlie woods, fifteen rods from the only shore they knew, which place was long since converted into a meadow. But the pond has ilsen steadily for two years, and now, in the summer of ’52, is just five feet higher than when I lived there, or as high as it was thirty years ago, and flsh- in two, you survey its surface critically, it is literally as smooth as glass, except where the skater in sects, at equal intervals scattered over its THE PONDS. 293 whole extent, by their motions in the sun produce the finest imaginable sparkle on it, or, perchance, a duck plumes itself, or, as I have said, a swallow skims so low as to touch it. It may be that in the distance a fish describes an arc of three or four feet in the air, and there is one bright flash where it emerges, and another where it strikes the water; sometimes the whole silvery arc is revealed; or here and there, perhaps, is a thistle-down floating on its surface, which the fishes dart at and so dimple it again. It is like molten glass cooled but not con gealed, and the few motes in it are pure and beautiful like the imperfections in glass. You may often detect a yet smoother and darker water, separated from the rest as if by an invisible cobweb, boom of the water nymphs, resting on it. From a hill-top you can see a fish leap in almost any p a rt; for not a pickerel or shiner picks an insect from this smooth surface but it manifestly disturbs the equilibrium of the whole lake. It is wonderful with what elaborateness this simple fact is advertised, — this piscine mur der will out, — and from my distant perch I distinguish the circling undulations when they are half a dozen rods in diameter. You 294 WALDEN. can even detect a water-bug (^Gyrinus) ceaselessly j^rogressing over the smooth sur face a quarter of a mile off; for they furrow the water slightly, making a conspicuous ripple bounded by two diverging lines, but the skaters glide over it without rippling it perceptibly. When the surface is consider ably agitated there are no skaters nor water- bugs on it, but apparently, in calm days, they leave their havens and ach'enturously glide forth from the shore by short impulses till they completely cover it. I t is a sooth ing employment, on one of those line days in the fall when all the warmth of the sun is fully appreciated, to sit on a stump on such a height as this, overlooking the pond, and study the dimpling circles which are inces santly inscribed on its otherwise invisible surface amid the reflected skies and trees. Over this great expanse there is no disturb ance but it is thus at once gently smoothed away and assuaged, as, when a vase of water is jarred, the trembling circles seelc the shore and all is smootli again. Not a fish can leap or an insect fall on tlie pond but it is thus rejjortcd in circling dimples, in lines of beauty, as it were the constant welling up of its fountain, the gentle pulsing of its life, THE FONDS. 295 the lieaving of its hreast. The thrills of joy and thrills of pain are undistinguishable. How peaceful the phenomena of the lake ! Again the works of man shine as in the spring. Ay, every leaf and twig and stone and cobweb sparkles now at mid-afternoon as when covered with dew in a spring morn ing. Every motion of an oar or an insect produces a flash of light; and if an oar falls, how sweet the echo ! In such a day, in September or October, Walden is a 2Jerfect foi'est mirror, set round with stones as jjrecious to my eye as if fewer or rarer. Nothing so fair, so 2)iire, and at the same time so large, as a lake, jicrehance, lies on the surface of the earth. Sky water. I t needs no fence. Nations come and go without defiling it. I t is a mirror which no stone can crack, whose rpiicksilver will never wear off, whose gilding Nature continually rejoairs; no storms, no dust, can dim its sur face ever fresh ; — a mirror in which all impurity presented to it sinks, swejrt and dusted by the sun’s hazy brush, — this the light dust-cloth, — which retains no breath that is bi'eathed on it, but sends its own to float as clouds high above its surface, and be reflected in its bosom stiU. 296 WALDEN. A field of water betrays the spirit that is in the air. It is continually recdving new life and motion from above. It is interme diate in its nature between land and sky. On land only the grass and trees wave, but the water itself is rippled by the wind. I see where the breeze dashes across it by the streaks or flakes of light. I t is remarkable that we can look down on its surface. We shall, perhaps, look down thus on the sur face of air at length, and mark where a still subtler spirit sweeps over it. The skaters and water-bugs finally disap pear in the latter part of October, when the severe frosts have come ; and then and in .November, usually, in a calm day, there is absolutely nothing to ripjjle the surface. One Novend)er afternoon, in the calm at the end of a rain storm of several days’ duration, when the sky was still completely overcast and the air was fidl of mist, I observed that the pond was remarkably smooth, so that it was difficult to distinguish its surface; though it no longer' reflected the bright tints of October, but the sorrrbre November colors of the srrrroundirrg hills. Thorrgh I passed over it as gerrtly as possi ble, the slight undulations produced by my THE FONDS. 297 boat extended almost as far as I could see, and gave a ribbed appearance to the reflec tions. But, as I was looking- over the sur face, I saw here and there at a distance a faint glimmer, as if some skater insects which had escaped the fi-osts might be col lected there, or, perchance, the surface, be ing so smooth, betraj^ed where a spring welled up from the bottom. Paddling gently to one of these places, I was sur prised to find myself surrounded by myr iads of small perch, about five inches long, of a rich bi’onze color in the green water, sporting there, and constantly rising to the surface and dimpling it, sometimes leaving- bubbles on it. In sucii transparent and seemingly bottomless water, reflecting the clouds, I seemed to be floating tlirough the air as in a balloon, and their swimming im pressed me as a kind of flight or hovering, as if tliey were a compact flock of birds passing just beneath my level on the right or left, their fins, like sails, set all around them. There were many smdi schools in the pond, apparently improving the short season before winter would draw an icy shutter over their broad skylight, sometimes giving to the surface an appearance as if a slight breeze 298 WALDEN. struck it, or a few rain-drops fell there. When I approached carelessly and alarmed them, they made a sudden plash and rip pling- with their tails, as if one had struck the water with a brushy bough, and in stantly took refuge in the de]iths. At length the wind rose, the mist increased, and the waves began to run, and the perch leaped much higher than before, half out of water, a hundred black points, three inches long, at once above the surface. Even as late as the fifth of December, one year, I saw some dinijdes on the surface, and think ing it was going to rain hard immediately, the air being full of mist, I made haste to take my place at the oars and row home ward ; already the rain seemed rapidly in creasing, thoaigh I felt none on my cheek, and I anticipated a thorough soaking. But sudderdy the dini2)les ceased, for they were produced by the jjerch, which tlui noise of my oars had scared into the dejjths, and I saw their schools dimly disajjjiearing; so I sjjent a dry afternoon after all. An old man who used to frecpient this pond nearly sixty years ago, when it was dark with surrounding forests, tells me that in those days he sometimes saw it all alive THE PONDS. 299 with clucks and other water fowl, and that there were many eagles alcout it. He came here a-fishiiig, and used an old log canoe which he found on the shore. It was made of two white-pine logs dug- out and pinned together, and was cut off square at the ends. I t was very clumsy, hut lasted a great many years before it became water - logged and perhaps sank to the liottom. He did not know whose it was; it belonged to the pond. He used to make a cable for his anchor of strips of hickory bark tied together. An old man, a potter, who lived by the pond before the Kevolution, told liim once that there was an iron chest at the bottom, and that he had seen it. Sometimes it would come floating np to the sliore ; but when you went toward it, it would go back into deep water and disappear. I was pleased to hear of the old log canoe, which took the place of an Indian one of the same material but more graceful construction, which pei'chance had first been a tree on the bank, and then, as it were, fell into the water, to float there for a generation, the most ])roper vessel for the lake. I remember that cvhen I first looked into these depths there were many large trunks to be seen indistinctly lying on 300 WALDEN. the bottom, which had either been blown over formerly, or left on the ice at the last cutting, when wood was cheaper ; but now they have mostly disappeared. When I first paddled a boat on Walden, it was completely surrounded by thick and lofty pine and oak woods, and in some of its coves grape - vines had run over the trees next the water and formed bowers under which a boat could pass. The hills which form its shores are so steep, and the woods on them were then so high, that, as you looked down from the west end, it had the appearance of an amphitheatre for some kind of sylvan spectacle. I have spent many an hour, when I was younger, floating over its surface as the zephyr willed, having paddled my boat to the middle, and lying on my back across the seats, in a summer fore noon, dreaming awake, until I was aroused by the boat touching the sand, and I arose to see what shore my fates had impelled me to ; days when idleness was the most attrac tive and productive industry. Many a fore noon have I stolen away, pr(!ferring to spend thus the most valued part of the day ; for I was rich, if not in money, in sunny hours and summer days, and spent them lav- THIi PONDS. 301 islily; nor tio I regret that I did not waste more of tliein in the woi'ksiiop or the teach er’s desk. But since I left those shores the woodcdioppers have still further laid them waste, and now for man}̂ a year there will he no more rainhling thi'ough the aisles of the wood, with occasional vistas through which you see the water. My Muse may be excused if she is silent henceforth. How can you expect the birds to sing when their groves are cut down? Now the trunks of trees on the bottom, and the old log canoe, and the dark surrounding woods, are gone, and the villagers, who scarcely know where it lies, instead of going to the pond to bathe or drink, are thinking to bring its water, which should be as sacred as the Ganges at least, to the village in a pipe, to wash their dishes with ! — to earn their lYalden by the turning of a cock or drawing of a plug! That devilish Iron Horse, whose ear - rending neigh is heard throughout the town, has muddied the Boil ing Spring with his foot, and he it is that has browsed off all the woods on lYalden shore, that Trojan horse, with a thousand men in his belly, introduced by mercenary Greeks ! IVhere is the country’s champion, 302 WALDEN. the Moore of Moore Hall, to meet Mm at the Deep Cut and thrust an avenging lance between the ribs of the bloated p(’st ? Nevertheless, of all the characters I have known, perhaps M^alden wears best, and best preserves its purity. Many men have been likened to it, but few deserve that honor. Though the woodchoppcrs have laid bare first this shore and then that, and the Irish have built their sties by it, and the railroad has infringed on its border, and the iee-nien have skimmed it once, it is itself unchanged, the same water which my youth ful eyes fell on ; all the change is in me. It has not acquired one permanent wrinkle af ter all its ripples. I t is perennially young, and I may stand and see a swallow dip ap parently to pick an insect from its surface as of yore. It struck me again to-night, as if I had not seen it almost daily for more than twenty years, — Why, here is ITalden, the same woodland lake that I discovered so many years ago; where a forest was cut dowm last winter another is S2Jringing uj) by its shore as lustily as ever; the same thought is welling uj) to its surface that was then ; it is the same liquid joy and hapjiinoss to it self and its Maker, aj% and it may be to me. TBE PONDS. 303 It is the work of a brave man surely, in whom there was no guile ! He rounded this water with his hand, deepened and clarified it in his thought, eUnd in his will bequeathed it to Concord. I see by its face that it is visited by the same reflection ; and I can al most say, Walden, is it you ? It is no dream of mine, To ornament a line ; I cannot come nearer to God and Heaven Than I live to Walden even. I am its stony shoi-e, And the breeze that passes o’e r ; In the hollow of my hand Are its water and its sand, And its dee]3est resort Lies high in my thought. The cars never pause to look at i t ; yet I fancy that the engineers and firemen and brakemen, and those passengers who have a season ticket and see it often, are better men for the sight. The engineer does not forget at night, or his nature does not, that he has beheld this vision of serenity and purity once at least during the day. Though seen but once, it helps to wash out State-street and the engine’s soot. One projooses that it be called “ God’s Dropi.” I have said that Walden has no visible in- 304 WALDEN. let nor outlet, but it is on the on<3 hand dis tantly and indirectly related to Flints’ Pond, which is more elevated, by a chain of small ponds coming from that quarter, and on the other directly and manifestly to Concord River, which is lower, by a similar chain of ponds through which in some otlrer geolog ical period it may have flowed, and by a lit tle digging, which God forbid, it can be made to flow thither again. If by living thus reserved and austere, like a hermit in the woods, so long, it has acquired such won derful purity, who would not regret that the comparatively impure waters of Flints’ Pond should be mingled with it, or itself should ever go to waste its sweetness in the ocean wave ? Flints’, or Sandy Pond, in Lincoln, our greatest lake and inland sea, lies about a mile east of Walden. It is much larger, being said to contain one hundred and nine ty-seven acres, and is more fertile in fish; but it is comparatively shallow, and not re markably pure. A walk through the woods thither was often my recreation. I t was worth the while, if only to feel the wind blow on your cheek freely, and see the waves THE POEDS. 305 run, and remember tlie life of mariners. 1 went a-(diestnutting tliere in the fall, on windy days, when th(i nuts were dropping into the water and were washed to my feet; and one day, as I crept along its sedgy shore, the fresh spray blowing in my face, I came upon the mouldering wTeck of a boat, the sides gone, and hardly more than the impression of its flat Irottom left amid the rushes; yet its model was sharply defined, as if it were a largo decayed pad, with its veins. I t was as impressive a wrecik as one could imagine on the sea-shore, and had as good a moral. It is by this time mere vegetable mould and undistinguishable pond shore, through which rushes and flags have pushed up. I used to admire the ripple marks on the sandy bottom, at the noifh end of this pond, made firm and hard to the feet of the wader bĵ the pressure of the water, and the rushes which grew in Indian file, in waving lines, corresponding to these marks, rank behind rank, as if the weaves had planted them. There also I have found, in considerable quaiititio.s, curious balls, com posed apparently of fine grass or roots, of pipewort perhay)s, from half an inch to four inches in diameter, and perfectly spherical. 306 WALDEN. These wash hack and forth in shallow water on a sandy bottom, and are sometimes cast on the shore. They are either solid grass, or have a little sand in the middle. At first you would say that they were formed by the action of the waves, like a pebble ; yet the smallest are made of equally coarse mate rials, half an inch long, and they are produced only at one season of the year. Moreover, the waves, I suspect, do not so much con struct as wear down a material which has already acquired consistency. They preserve their form when dry for an indefinite period. FllntiC P ond! Such is the poverty of our nomenclature. What right had the un clean and stupid farmer, whoso farm abutted on this sky water, whose shores he has ruth lessly laid bare, to give his name to it ? Some skin-flint, who loved better the reflect ing surface of a dollar, or a bright cent, in which he could see his own br azen face; who regarded even the wild ducks which settled in it as trespassers; his fingers grown into crooked and horny talons from the long habit of grasping harpy-like ; — so it is not named for me. I go not there to see him nor to hear of him ; who never .̂ a-w it, who never bathed in it, who never loved it, who T i l l - : I - 'O N D S . 307 never protected it, who nev̂ er spoke a good word for it, nor tiiaiiked God that he had made it. Ihither leti it be iiaiiied from tlie fishes that swim in it, tlie wild fowl or quad rupeds which .frequent it, the wild flowers which grow by its shores, or some wild nmn or child the thread of whose history is intei'- woven with its own; not from him who could show no title to it but the deed which a like-minded neighbor or legislature gave him, — him who tlionght only of its money value; whose presence perchance cursed all the shore; wdio exhausted the land around it, and would fain have exhausted the waters within i t ; who regri'tted only that it was not English hay or cranberry meadow, — there wms nothing to redeem it, forsooth, in his eyes, — and would have drained and sold it for the mud at its bottom. It did not turn his mill, and it was no privilerje. to him to behold it. I respect not his labors, his farm where everything has its price, who would carry the landscape, who would carry his God, to market, if he could get any thing for him ; who goes t(i market fo r his god as it is : on who^c farm nothing grows free, whoso fields hear no crops, whose mead ows no flowers, whose trees no fruits, but 808 WALDEN. dollars; wlio loves not the beauty of his fruits, whose fruits are not ri])e for him till they are turned to dollars. Give me the poverty that enjoys true wealth. Farmers are respectable and interesting to me in pro portion as they are poor, — poor farmers. A model farm I where the house stands like a fungus in a muck-heap, chambers for men, horses, oxen, and swine, cleansed and un cleansed, all contiguous to one another! Stocked with men I A great grease-spot, redolent of manures and buttermilk ! Under a high state of cultivation, being manured with the hearts and brains of m(!ii! As if you were to raise your potatoes in the chnreh- yard ! Such is a model farm. No, no ; if the fairest features of the land scape are to be named after men, let tliem be the noblest and worthiest men alone. Let our lakes receive as true names at least as the Icarian Sea, where “ still the shore ” a “ brave attempt resounds.” Goose Pond, of small extent, is on my way to Flints’ ; Fair Haven, an expansion of Concord River, said to contain some seventy acres, is a mile south-west; and White Pond, of about forty acres, is a mile and a half be- THE PONDS. 309 yond Fair Haven. This is my lake country. Tiiese, with Concord Eiver, are my water pi-ivileges ; and night and day, year in year out, tliey grind such grist as I carry to them. Since the wood-cutters, and the railroad, and I myself have profaned Walden, per haps the most attractive, if not the most beautiful, of all our lakes, the gem of the woods, is White Pond ; — a poor name from its commonness, whether derived from the remarkable purity of its waters or the color of its sands. In these as in other respects, however, it is a lesser twin of Walden. They are so much alike that you would say they must be connected under ground. It has the same stony shore, and its waters are of the same hue. As at Walden, in sultry dog-day weather, looking down through the woods on some of its bays which are not so deep but that the reflection from the bottom tinges them, its waters are of a misty bluish- green or glaucous color. Many years since I used to go there to collect the sand by cart-loads, to make sand-paper with, and I have continued to visit it ever since. One who frequents it proposes to call it Virid Lake. Perhaps it might be called Yellow- 310 W ALDEN. Pine Lake, from the following circumstance. About fifteen years ago you could see the top of a pitch-pine, of the kind called yel low-pine hereabouts, though it is not a dis tinct species, projecting above the surface in deep water, many rods from the shore. It was even supposed by some that the pond had sunk, and this was one of the primitive forest that formerly stood there. I find that even so long ago as 1792, in a “ Topograph ical Description of the Town of Concord,” by one of its citizens, in the Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, the author, after speaking of AValden and White Ponds, adds: “ In the middle of the latter may be seen, when the water is very low, a tree which appears as if it grew in the place where it now stands, although the roots are fifty feet below the surface of the water; the top of this tree is broken off, and at that place measures fourteen inches in diameter.” In the spring of ’49 I talked with the man who lives nearest the pond in Sudbury, who told me that it was he who got out this tree ten or fifteen years before. As near as he could remember, it stood twelve or fifteen rods from the shore, where the water was thirty or forty feet deep. It was in the win- T H E PONDS. 311 ter, and he had been getting out ice in the forenoon, and had resolved that in the after noon, with the aid of his neighbors, he would take out the old yellow-])ine. He sawed a cliannel in the ice toward the shore, and haided it over and along and out on to the ice -witli oxen ; but, before ho had gone far in his work, he was surprised to find that it was wrong end upward, with the stumps of the branches pointing down, and the small end firmly fastened in the sandy bottom. It was about a foot in diameter at the big end, and he had expected to get a good saw-log, but it was so rotten as to be fit only for fuel, if for that. He had some of it in his shed then. There were marks of an axe and of woodpeckers on the butt. He thought that it might have been a dead tree on the shore, but was finally blown over into the pond, and after the top had become water-logged, while the butt-end was still dry and light, had drifted out and sunk wrong end u]i. His father, eighty years old, could not remember when it was not there. Se^nral jjrctty large logs may still be seen lying on the bottom, where, owing to the undulation of the sur face, they look like huge water snakes in motion. i l2 WALDEN. This pond has rarely been profaned by a boat, for there is little in it to tempt a fish erman. Instead of the white lily, whieh re quires mud, or the common sweet flag, the blue flag (/rhs versicolor) grows thinly in . the pure water, rising from the stony bot tom all around the shore, where it is visited by humming birds in June ; and the color both of its bluish blades and its flowers and especially their reflections, are in singular harmony with the glaucous water. White Pond and Walden are great crys tals on the surface of the earth, Lakes of Light. If they were permanently congealed, and small enough to be clutched, they would, perchance, be carried off by slaves, like pre cious stones, to adorn the heads of emperors ; but being liquid, and ample, and secured to us and our successors forever, we disregard them, and run after the diamond of Kohi- noor. They are too pure to have a market value ; they contain no muck. How much more beautiful than our lives, liow much more transparent than our characters, are they ! We never learned meanness of them. How much fairer than the pool before the farmer’s door, in which his du(iks swim! Hither the clean wild ducks come. Nature THE PONDS. 813 has no human inhabitant who appreciates her. The birds with their plumage and their notes are in harmony with the flowers, hut what youth or maiden conspires with the wild luxuriant beauty of Nature ? She flour ishes most alone, far from the towns where they reside. Talk of heaven! ye disgrace earth. BAKER FARM. S ometimes I rambled to pine groves, standing like temples, or like fleets at sea, full-rigged, with wavy boughs, and rippling with light, so soft and green and shady that the Druids would have forsaken their oaks to worship in them ; or to the cedar wood beyond Flints’ Pond, where the trees, cov ered with hoary blue berries, spiring higher and higher, are fit to stand before Valhalla, and the creeping juniper covers the ground with wreaths full of fruit; or to swamps where the usnea lichen hangs in festoons from the white-spruce trees, and toadstools, round tables of the swamp gods, cover the ground, and more beautiful fungi adorn the stumps, like butterflies or shells, vegetable winkles; where the swamp-pink and dog wood grow, the red alder-berry glows like eyes of imps, the waxwork grooves and crushes the hardest woods in its folds, and the wild-holly berries make the beholder for- B A K E R FARM. 315 get Ills home witli their beauty, and he is dazzletl and tempted by naineless other wild forbidden fruits, too fair for mortal taste. Instead of calling on some scholar, I paid many a visit to particulai' trees, of kinds which are rare in this neighborhood, stand ing far away in the middle of some pasture, or in the depths of a wood or swamp, or on a hill-top; such as the black-birch, of which we have some handsome specimens two feet in diameter; its cousin, the yellow - birch, with its loose golden vest, perfumed like the first; the beech, which has so neat a bole and beautifully lichen-painted, perfect in ail 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 beech nuts near b y ; it is worth the while to see the silver grain sparkle when you split this wood ; the bass ; the hornbeam ; the celtis occidentalism or false elm, of which we have but one well- grown ; some taller mast of a pine, a shingle tree, or a more perfect hemlock than usual, standing like a pagoda in the midst of the woods; and many others I could mention. These were the shrines T visited both sum mer and winter. 316 WALDEN. Onee it chanced tluit I stood in the very abutment of a rainbow’s arch, which iilled the lower stratum of the atmo,s])here, ting ing the grass and leaves around, and daz zling me as if I looked through colored crys tal. It was a lake of rainbow light, in which, for a short while, I lived like a dol phin. If it had lasted longer it might have tinged my employments and life. As I walked on the railroad causeway, I used to wonder at the halo of light around my shadow, and would fain fancy myself one of the elect. One who visited me declared that the shadows of some Irishmen before him had no halo about them, that it was only natives that were so distinguished. Ben venuto Cellini tells us in his memoirs, that, after a certain terrible dream or vision which he had during his eonlinenient in the castle of St. Angelo a resplendent light ap peared over the shadow of his head at morn ing and evening, whether he was in Italy or France, and it was j)articularly conspicuous when the grass was moist with dew. This was probably the same phenomenon to which I have referred, which is especiall}' obs(‘rved in th(! morning, but also at other times, and even by moonlight. Though a constant one, BAKER FARM. 817 it is not commonly noticed, and, in the case of an excitable imagination like Cellini’s, it woidd he basis enough for superstition. Beside, he tells us that he showed it to very few. But are they not indeed distin guished who are conscious that they are re garded at all ? I set out one afternoon to go a-fishing to Fair Haven, through the woods, to eke out my scanty fare of vegetables. My way led through Pleasant Meadow, an adjunct of the Baker Farm, that retreat of which a poet has since sung, beginning, — “ T hy entry is a pleasant field, W hich som e m ossy frail, trees y ie ld P artly to a ruddy brook. By" g lid in g m usquash undertook, A n d mercurial trout, D arting about.” I thought of living there before I went to M^alden. I “ hooked ” the apples, leaped the brook, and scared the musquash and the trout. It was one of those afternoons which seem indefinitely long before one, in which many events may happen, a large portion of our natural life, though it was already half spent when I started. By the way there came 318 WALDEN. up a shower, which compelled me to stand half an hour under a pine, piling boughs over my head, and wearing my handkerchief for a shed; and when at length I had made one cast over the pickerel-weed, standing up to my middle in water, I found myself sud denly in the shadow of a cloud, and the thunder began to rumble with such empha sis that I could do no more than listen to it. The gods must be proud, thought I, with such forked flashes to rout a poor unarmed fisherman. So I made haste foi' shelter to the nearest hut, which stood half a mile from any road, but so much the nearer to the pond, and had long been uninhabited: — “ And here a poet huilded, In the completed years, For behold a trivial cabin That to destruction steers.” So the Muse fables. Hut therein, as I found, dwelt now John Field, an Irishman, and his wife, and several children, from the broad-faced boy who assisted his father at liis work, and now came running by his side from the bog to escape the rain, to the wrin kled, sibyl-like, cone-headed infant that sat upon its father’s knee as in the palaces of nobles, and looked out from its home in the B A K E R F A R M . 319 midst of wet and hunger inquisitively upon the stranger, with the pri'^dlege of infancy, not knowing but it was the last of a noble line, and the hope and cynosure of the world, instead of John Field’s poor starve ling brat. There we sat tog'ether under that part of the roof which leake^d the least, while it showered and thundered without. I had sat there many times of old before the ship was built that floated this famil} ̂ to America. An honest, hard-working, but sliiftless man plainly was John Field; Jind his wife, she too was brave to cook so many successive dinners in the recesses of that lofty stove ; with round greasy face and bare br'east, still thinking to improve her ctindition one day ; with the never absent mop in one hand, and yet no effects of it visible anywliere. The chickens, which had also taken shelter here from the rain, stalked about the room like members of the family, too Immanized me- thought to roast well. Thoj' stood and looked in my eye or pecked at my shoe significantly. Meanwhile my host told me his story, how hal’d he worked ‘‘ bogging ” for a neighbor ing farmer, turning up a meadow with a spade or bog hoe at the rate of ten dollars an acre and the use of the land with manure 820 WALDEN. for one year, and his little broad-faced son worked cheerfully at his father’s side the while, not knowing how poor a bai'gain the latter had made. I tried to lielj) him with my experience, telling him that he was one of my nearest neighbors, and that I too, who came a-fishing here, and looked like a loafer, was getting my living like himself; that I lived in a tight, light, and clean house, which hardly cost more than the annual rent of such a ruin as his commonly amounts to ; and how, if he chose, he might in a month or two build himself a palace of his own ; that I did not use tea, nor coffee, nor butter, nor milk, nor fresh meat, and so did not have to work to get them ; again, as I did not work hard, I did not have to eat hard, and it cost me but a trifle for my food; but as he began with tea, and coffee, and butter, and milk, and beef, he had to woik hard to pay for them, and when he bad worked hard he had to eat hard again to repair the waste of his system, — and so it was as broad as it was long, indeed it was broad(jr than it was long, for he was discontented and wasted his life into the bargain ; and y('t he had rated it as a gain in coming to America, that here you could get tea, and (‘offee, and BAKER FARM. 321 meat every da} ̂ But the only true America is that country whore you are at liberty to pursue such a mode of life as may enable you to do without these, and where the state does not endeavor to compel you to sustain the slavery and war and other superfluous expenses which directly or indirectly result from the use of such things. For I pur posely talked to him as if he were a philoso- jjher, or desired to be one. 1 should be glad if all the meadows on the earth were left in a wild state, if that were the consequence of men’s beginning to redeem themselves. A man will not need to study history to find out what is best for his own culture. But alas! the culture of an Irishman is an en terprise to be undertaken with a sort of moral bog hoe. I told him, that as he worked so hard at bogging, he required thick boots and stout clothing, which yet were soon soiled and worn out, but I wore light shoes and thin clothing, which cost not half so much, though he might think that I was dressed like a gentleman, (which, how ever, was not the case,) and in an hour or two, without labor, but as a recreation, I could, if I wished, catch as many fish as I should want for two days, or earn enough 322 W A L D E N . money to support me a week. If he and his family would live simply, they might all go a-huekleherrying in the summer for their amusement. John heaved a sigh at this, and his wife stared with arms a-kimbo, and both appeared to be wondering if they had capital enough to begin such a course with, or arithmetic enough to carry it through. 11 was sailing by dead reckoning to them, and they saw not clearly how to make their port so; therefore I suppose they still take life bravely, after their fashion, face to face, giving it tooth and nail, not having skill to split its massive columns with any fine en tering wedge, and rout it in detail; — think ing to deal with it roughly, as one should handle a tliistle. But they fight at an over whelming disadvantage, —living, John Field, alas! without arithmetic, and failing so. “ Do you ever fish? ” I asked. “ O yes, I catch a mess now and then when I am lying by ; good perch I catch.” “ W hat’s your bait ? ” “ I catch shiners with fish- worms, and bait the perch with them.” “ You’d better go now, John,” said his wife, with glistening and hopeful face; but John demurred. The shower was now over, and a rainbow BAKER FARM. 323 above the eastern woods promised a fair evening ; so I took my departure. When I had got without I asked for a dish, hoping to get a sight of the well bottom, to complete mjr survey of the premises ; but there, alas ! are shallows and cpileksands, and rope bro ken withal, and bucket irrecoverable. Mean while the right culinary vessel was selected, water was seemingly distilled, and after con sultation and long delay passed out to the thirsty one, — not yet suffered to cool, not yet to settle. Such gruel sustains life here, I thought; so, shutting 1113 ̂ e}̂ es, and exclud ing the motes by a skilful!} ̂ directed under current, I drank to genuine hospitality the heartiest draught I could. 1 am not squeam ish in such cases when manners are con cerned. As I was leaving the Irishman’s roof af ter tlie rain, bending m3' steps again to the pond, my haste to catch pickerel, wading in retired meadows, in sloughs and bog-holes, in forlorn and savage places, appeared for an instant trivial to me who had been sent to school and college ; but as I ran down the hill toward the reddening west, with the rainbow over my shoulder, and some faint tinkling sounds borne to my ear through the 324 W A L D E N . cleansed air, from I know not what quarter, my Good Genius seemed to sa}̂ , — Go fish and hunt far and wide day by day, — farther and wider, — and rest thee by many brooks and hearth-sides without misgiving. Re member thy Creator in the days of thy youth. Rise free from care before the dawn, and seek adventures. Let the noon find thee by other lakes, and the night over take thee everywhere at home. There are no larger fields than these, no worthier games than may here be played. Grow wild according to thy nature, like these sedges and brakes, which will never become English hay. Let the thunder rumble ; what if it threaten ruin to farmers’ crops ? that is not its errand to thee. Take shelter under the cloud, while they flee to carts and sheds. Let not to get a living be thy trade, but thy sport. Enjoy the land, but own it not. Through want of enterprise and faith men are where they are, buying and selling, and spending their lives like serfs. O Baker Farm ! “ Landscape where the richest element Is a little sunshine innocent.” . . . “ No one runs to revel On thy rail-fenced lea.” . . . B A K E R F ARM. 825 “ Debate with no man hast thou, With questions art never perplexed, As tame at the first sig'ht as now, In tliy plain russet g-abardine dressed.” • . . “ Come ye who love, And ye who hate. Children of the Holy Dove, And Guy Faux of the state, And hang conspiracies From the tough rafters of the trees! ” Men come tamely home at night only from the next field or street, where their house hold echoes haunt, and their life pines he- cause it breathes its own breath over again ; their shadows morning and evening reach farther than their daily stejjs. We should come home from far, from adventures, and perils, and discoveries every day, with new experien(!e and character. Before I had reached the pond some fresh impnlse had brought out John Field, with altered mind, letting go “ hogging ” ere this sunset. But he, poor man, disturbed only a couple of fins while I was catching a fair string, and he said it was his luck; hnt when we changed seats in the boat luck changed seats too. Poor John Field! — I trust he does not read this, unless he will improve by it, — thinking to live by some 320 W A L D K N . derivative old country mode in this primitive new country, — to catch perch with shiners. It is good bait sometimes, I allow. With his horizon all his own, yet he a poor man, born to be poor, with his inherited Irish pov erty 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. XI. HIGHER LAWS. As I came home through the woods with my string of fish, trailing my pole, it being now quite dark, I caught a glimpse of a woodchuck stealing across my path, and felt a strange thrill of savage delight, and was strongly tempted to seize and devour him raw ; not tliat I was hungry then, except for that wildness which he represented. Once or twice, however, while I lived at the pond, I found myself ranging the woods, like a half-starved hound, with a strange abandonment, seeking some kind of venison which I might devour, and no morsel could have been too savage for me. The wildest scenes had become unaccountably familiar. I found in myself, and still find, an instinct toward a higher, or, as it is named, spiritual life, as do most men, and another toward a primitive rank and savage one, and I rev erence them both. I love the wild not less than the good. The wildness and adventure 328 WALDEN. that are in fishing still recommended it to me. I like sometimes to take rank hold on life and spend my day more as the animals do. Perhaps I have owed to this eni2Jloy- ment and to hunting, when quite young, my closest acquaintance with Nature. They early introduce us to and detain us in scenery with which otherwise, at that age, we should have little acquaintance. Fishei'inen, hun ters, woodcho2)j)ers, and others, sjjending their lives in the fields and woods, in a j)e- culiar sense a part of Nature themselves, are often in a more favorable mood fo]‘ observing her, in the intervals of their puisuits, than philosojjhers or jjoets even, who apiu’oach her with exj^ectatiou. She is not afraid to exhibit herself to them. The traveller on the jjrairie is naturally a hunter, on the head waters of the Missouri and Columbia a trap per, and at the Falls of St. Mary a fislier- man. lie who is only a traveller learns things at second-hand and by the halves, and is poor authority. We are most interested when seieiico re2)orts what those men already know practically or instinctively, for that alone is a true Jmrnanity, or account of hu man exjoerience. They mistake who assert that the Yankee niGUER LAWS. 329 has few amusements, because he has not so many public holidays, and men and boys do not j)lay so many games as they do in Eng land, for here the more primitive but soli tary amusements of hunting, fishing, and the like have not yet given place to the former. Almost every New England boy among my contemporaries shouldered a fowling piece between the ages of ten and fourteen ; and his hunting and fishing grounds were not limited, like the preserves of an English nobleman, but were more boundless even than those of a savage. No wonder, then, that he did not oftener stay to play on the common. But already a change is taking place, owing, not to an in creased humanity, but to an increased scar city of game, foi‘ jreiiiaps the hunter is the greatest fiiend of the animals hunted, not excepting the Humane Society. Moreover, when at the pond, I wished sometimes to add fish to my fare for vari ety. I have actually fished from the same kind of necessity that the first fishers did. M^hatever humanity I might conjure up against it was all factitious, and concerned my philosoidiy more than my feelings. I speak of fishing only now, for I had long 330 WALDEN. felt dilferently about fowling, and sold my gun before I went to the woods. Not that I am less humane than others, but I did not perceive that my feelings were much af fected. I did not pity the fishes nor the worms. This was habit. As for fowling, during the last years that I carj'ied a gun my excuse was that I was studying orni thology, and sought only new or I’are birds. But I confess that I am now inclined to think that there is a finer way of studying ornithology than this. It requires so much closer attention to the habits of the birds, that, if for that reason only, I have been willing to omit the g'lin. Yet notwithstand ing the objection on the score of hnmanity, I am compelled to doubt if equally valuable sports are ever substituted for these; and when some of my friends have asked me anxiously about their boys, whether they should let them liunt, I have answered, yes, — remembering that it was one of the best parts of my education, — mahe them hunt ers, though sportsmen only at first, if pos sible, mighty hunters at last, so that they shall not find game large enough for them in this or any vegetable wilderness, — hunt ers as well as fishers of men. Thus far I am of the opinion of Chaucer’s nun, who HIGHER LAWS. “ yave not of the text a pulled hen That saith that hunters ben not holv men.” 331 There is a period in the history of the in dividual, as of the race, when the hunters are the “ best men,” as the Algonquins called them. We cannot but pity the boy who has never fired a gun ; he is no more humane, while his education has been sadly neglected. This was my answer with re spect to those youths who were bent on this pursuit, trusting that they would soon outgrow it. No humane being, past the thoughtless age of boyhood, will wantonly murder any creature, which holds its life by the same tenure that he does. The hare in its extremity cries like a child. I warn you, mothers, that ray sympathies do not always make the usual \>\n\.-anthropic distinctions. Such is oftenest the young man’s intro duction to the forest, and the most original part of himself. He goes thither at first as a hunter and fisher, until at last, if he has the seeds of a better life in him, he dis tinguishes his proper objects, as a poet or naturalist it may be, and leaves the gun and fish-pole behind. The mass of men are still and alwaj^s young in this respect. In some countries a hunting parson is no uncommon 332 W A L D E N . sight. Such a one might make a good shep herd’s dog, hut is far from being the Good Shepherd. I have been surprised to con sider that the only obvious employment, ex cept wood-chopping, ice-cutting, or the like business, which ever to my knowledge de tained at Walden Pond for a whole half day any of my fellow-citizens, whether fathers or children of the town, with just one excep tion, was fishing. Commonly they did not think that they were lucky, or well paid for their time, unless they got a long string of fish, though they had the opportunity of see ing the pond all the while. They might go there a thousand times before the sediment of fishing would sink to the bottom and leave their purpose pure ; but no doubt such a clarifying process would be going on all the while. The governor and his council faintly remember the pond, for they went a-fishing there when they' were boys ; but now they are too old and dignified to go a-fishing, and so they know it no more for ever. Yet e’\̂ en they expect to go to heaven at last. If the legislature regards it, it is chiefly to regulate the number of hooks to be used there ; but they know nothing about the hook of hooks with which to angle for B i a n Ell LAWS. 333 the pond itself, impaling the legislature for a bait. Thus, even in civilized communities, the embryo man ])asses through the hunter stage of development. I have found rejieatedly, of late years, that I cannot fish nitliout falling a little in self-respect. I have tried it again and again. I have skill at it, and, like many of my fel lows, a certain instinct for it, which revives from time to time, but always when I have done I feel that it woidd have been better if I had not fished. I think that I do not mistake. It is a faint intimation, yet so are the first streaks of morning. There is unquestionably this instinct in me which belongs to the lower orders of creation; yet with every year I am less a fisherman, though without more humanity or even wis dom ; at present I am no fisherman at all. But I see that if I were to live in a wilder ness I should again be tempted to become a fisher and hunter in earnest. Beside, there is something essentially unclean about this diet and all flesh, and I began to see where housework commences, and whence the en deavor, which costs so much, to wear a tidy and respectable appearance each day, to keep the house sweet and free fi'oni all ill 334 WALDEN. odors and sights. Having been my own butcher and scullion and cook, as well as the gentleman for whom the dishes were served up, I can speak from an unusually complete experience. The practical objection to ani mal food in my case was its uncleanness ; and besides, when I had caught and cleaned and cooked and eaten my fish, they seemed not to have fed me essentially. It was insig nificant and unnecessary, and cost more than it came to. A little bread or a few potatoes would have done as well, with less trouble and filth. Like many of my contemporaries, I had rarely for many years used animal food, or tea, or coffee, etc. ; not so much be cause of any ill effects which I had traced to them, as because they were not agreeable to my imagination. The repugnance to ani mal food is not the effect of experience, but is an instinct. It appeared more beautiful to live low and fare hard in many respects ; and though I never did so, I went far enough to please my imagination. I believe that every man who has ever been earnest to pre serve his higher or poetic faculties in the best condition has been particularly inclined to abstain from animal food, and from much food of any kind. I t is a significant fact, HIGHER LAWS. m stated by entomologists, I find it in Kirby and Spence, that “ some insects in tlieir per- fecit state, thongdi furnished with organs of feeding, make no use of them ; ” and they lay it down as “ a general rule, that almost all insects in this state eat much less than in that of larv£e. The voracious caterpillar when transformed into a butterfly,” . . . “ and the gluttonous maggot when become a fly,” content themselves with a drop or two of honey or some other sweet liquid. The abdomen under the wings of the butterfly still represents the larva. This is the tid bit which tempts his insectivorous fate. The gross feeder is a man in the larva state ; and there are whole nations in that condition, nations without fancy or imagination, whose vast abdomens betray them. It is hard to provide and cook so simple and clean a diet as will not offend the imae wholly expelled; like the worms which, even in life and health, occupy our bodies. Possibly we may with draw from it, but never change its nature. I fear that it may enjoy a certain health of its own ; that we may be weU, yet not pure. The other day I picked up the lower jaw of a hog, with white and sound teeth and tusks, which suggested that there was an animal health and vigor distinct from the spiritual. This creature succeeded by other means than temperance and purity. “ That in which men differ from brute beasts,” says 342 W A L D E N . Mencius, “ is a thing very inconsiderahle; the common herd lose it very soon ; supe rior men preserve it carefully.” M^ho knows what sort of life would result if we had at tained to purity ? If I knew so wise a man as could teach me purity I would go to seek him forthwith. “ A command over our pas sions, and over the external senses of the body, and good acts, are declared by the Ved to he indispensable in the mind’s ap proximation to God.” Yet the spirit can for the time pervade and control every mem ber and function of the body, and transmute what in form is the grossest sensuality into purity and devotion. The generative en ergy, which, when we are loose, dissipates and makes us unclean, when we are conti nent invigorates and inspires us. Chastity is the flowering of man ; and what are called Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like, are but various fruits which succeed it. Man flows at once to God when the channel of purity is open. By turns our purity inspires and our impurity casts us down. He is blessed who is assui'ed that the animal is dying out in him day by day, and the divine being established. Perhaps there is none but has cause for shame on account of the infe- HIGHER LAWS . 343 rior and brutish nature to which he is allied. I fear that we are such gods or deniig'ods oidy as fauns and satyrs, the divine allied to beasts, the (‘reatures of appetite, and that, to some extent, our very life is our disgrace. — “ How happy’s he who hath due place assigned To his beasts and disafforested his mind ! Can use his horse, goat, wolf, and ev'ry beast, And is not ass himself to all the rest! Else man not only is the herd of swine, But h e ’s those devils too which did incline Them to a headlong rage, and made tliem worse.” All sensuality is one, though it takes many forms; all purity is one. I t is the same whether a man eat, or drink, or cohabit, or sleep sensually. They are but one appetite, and we only need to see a person do any one of these things to know how great a sensu alist he is. The impure can neither stand nor sit with purity. When the reptile is at tacked at one mouth of his burrow, he shows himself at another. If you would be chaste, you must be temperate. AVhat is chastity ? How shall a man know if he is chaste ? He shall not know it. We have heard of this virtue, but we know not what it is. We speak conformably to the rumor which we have heard. From exertion come wisdom 844 W A L D E N . and purity ; from sloth ignorance and sen- suality. In the student sensuality is a slug gish habit of mind. An unclean person is universally a slothful one, one who sits by a stove, whom the sun sliines on prostrate, who )'cposes without being fatigued. If you would avoid uneleanness, and all the sins, work earnestly, though it be at cleaning a stable. Nature is hard to be overcome, but she must be overcome. What avails it that you are Christian, if you ai'o not purer than the heathen, if you deny yourself no more, if you are not more religious ? I know of many systems of religion esteemed hea thenish whose precepts fill the reader with shame, and provoke him to new endeavors, though it be to the performance of rites merely. I hesitate to say these things, but it is not because of the subject, — I care not how ob scene my vjorda arc, — but because I cannot speak of them without betraying my im purity. We discourse freely without shame of one form of sensuality, and are silent al)out another. We are so degraded that we cannot speak simply of the nec/cssary func tions of human nature. In earlier ages, in some countries, every function was rever- m a n Eli l a u s . 345 ently spoken of and regulated by law. Noth ing was too trivial for the Hindoo lawgiver, however offensive it may be to modern taste. He teaches how to eat, drink, cohabit, void excrement and urine, and the like, elevating what is mean, and does not falsely excuse himself by calling these things trifles. Every man is the builder of a temple, called his body, to the god ho worships, after a style purely his own, nor can he get off by hammering marble instead. We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones. Any nobleness begins at once to refine a man’s features, any meanness or sensuality to im- brnte them. John Farmer sat at his door one Septem ber evening, after a hard day’s work, his mind still running on his labor more or less. Having bathed he sat down to recreate his intellectual man. It was a rather cool even ing, and some of his neiglibors were appre hending a frost. He liad not attended to the train of his thoughts long when he heard some one playing on a flute, and that sound harmonized with his mood. Still he thought of his work; but tlie burden of Iris thought was, that though tliis kept running in his 346 WALDEN. head, and ho found himself planning and contriving it against his will, yet it concerned him very little. I t was no more than the scurf of his skin, which was constantly shuf fled off. But the notes of the flute came home to his ears out of a different sphere from that he worked in, and suggested work for certain faculties which slumhej'ed in him. They gently did away with the street, and the village, and the state in which he lived. A voice said to him, — Why do you stay here and live this mean moiling life, when a glorious existence is possible for you ? Those same stars twinkle over other tields than these. — But how to come out of this condi tion and actually migrate thither ? All that he could think of was to jJractise some new austerity, to let his mind descend into his body and redeem it, and treat himself with ever increasing respect. XII. BRUTE NEIGHBORS. S ometimes I had a oompanion in my fish ing, who came through the village to my house from the other side of the town, and the catching of the dinner was as much a social exercise as the eating of it. Hermit. I wonder what the world is do ing now. I have not heard so much as a lo cust over the sweet-fern tliese three hours. The pigeons are all asleep upon their roosts, — no flutter from them. ATas that a farm er’s noon horn which sounded from beyond the woods just now ? The liands are coming in to boiled salt beef and cider and Indian bread. Why will men worry themselves so? He that does not eat need not work. I won der how much they have reaped. AAdio would live there where a body can never think for the harking of Bose ? And O, the house keeping ! to keep bright the devil’s door knobs, and scour his tubs this bright day ! Better not keep a house. Say, some hollow 348 W A L D E N . tree ; and then for morning calls and dinner parties ! Only a woodpecker ta])ping. O, they swarm; the smi is too warm there ; they are born too far into life for mii. I have water from the spring, and a loaf of brown bread on the shelf. — H ark! I hear a rust ling of the leaves. Is it some ill-fed village hound yielding to the instinct of the chase ? or the lost pig which is said to be in these woods, whose tracks I saw after the rain ? It comes on apace; my sumachs and sweet- briers tremble. — Eh, Mr. Poet, is it you ? How do you like the world to-day ? Poet. See those clouds ; how they hang! T hat’s the greatest thing I have siien to-day. There’s nothing like it in old paintings, nothing like it in foreign lands, — unless when we were off the coast of Spain. That’s a true Mediterranean sky. I thought, as I have my living to get, and have not eaten to-day, that I might go a-fishing. That's the true industry for poets. I t is the only trade I have learned. Come, le t’s along. Hermit. I cannot resist. My brown bread will soon be gone. I will go with you gladly soon, but I am just concluding a serious meditation. I think that I am near the end of it. Leave me alone, then, for a B R U T E N K n W I W R S . 3!9 while. But that we may not be delayed, you shall be digging the bait meanwhile. Angle-worms are rarely to be met with in these parts, where the soil was never fat tened with manure ; the race is nearly ex tinct. The sport of digging the bait is nearly equal to that of catching the fish, when one’s appetite is not too keen ; and this you may have all to yourself to-day. I would advise you to set in the spade down yonder among the ground-nuts, where you see the johnswort waving. I think that I may warrant you one worm to every three sods you turn up, if you look well in among the roots of the grass, as if you were weed ing. Or, if you choose to go farther, it will not be unwise, for I have found the increase of fair bait to be very nearly as the squares of the distances. Hermit alone. Let me see ; where was I ? Methinks I was nearly in this frame of mind; the world lay about at this angle. Shall I go to heaven or a-fishing ? If I should soon bring this meditation to an end, would another so sweet occasion be likely to offer ? I was as near being resolved into the essence of things as ever I was in my life, I fear my thoughts will not come back 350 WALDEN. to me. If it would do any good, I would whistle for them. When tluiy make us an offer, is it wise to say, We will think of it ? My thoughts have left no track, and I can not find the path again. What was it that I was thinking- of ? I t was a very hazy day. I will just try these three sentences of Con- fut-see ; they may fetch that state about again. I know not whether it was the dumps or a budding ecstasy. Mem. There never is hut one opportunity of a kind. Poet. How now. Hermit, is it too soon ? I have got just thirteen whole ones, beside several which are imperfect or undersized; hut they will do for the smaller f iy ; they do not cover up the hook so much. Those vil lage worms are quite too large ; a shiner may make a meal off one witliout finding the skewer. Hermit. ITell, then, le t’s be off. Shall we to the Concord ? There’s good sport there if the water be not too high. IThy do precisely these objects which we behold make a world ? lYlij" has man jiist these species of animals for his neighbors ; as if nothing but a mouse could have filled this creviiie? I sus])ect that Pilpay & Co. BR U T E K KIG11B 0 A\S. 351 liave put aiiiiiuils to their best use, for they are all beasts of burden, in a sense, made to carry some portion of our thoug'hts. The mice which haunted my house were not the eomnion ones, which are said to have been introduced into the country, but a wild native kind not found in the village. I sent one to a distinguished naturalist, and it in terested him much. When 1 was building, one of these had its nest underneath the house, and before I had laid the second floor, and swept out the shavings, would come out regularly at lunch time and pick up the crumbs at my feet. It probably had never seen a man before ; and it soon became C|uite familiar, and would run over my shoes and up my clothes. It (iould readily ascend the sides of the room by short impulses, like a squirrel, which it resembled in its motions. At length, as I leaned with my elbow on the bench one day, it ran up ray clothes, and along my sleeve, and round and round the paper which held my dinner, while I kept the latter close, and dodged and played at bo- peep with i t ; and when at last I held still a piece of cheese between my thumb and fin ger, it came and nibbled it, sitting in my hand, and afterward cleaned its face and ])aws, like a fly, and wallced away. 352 W A LD E N. A plioebe soon built in my sbed, and a robin for protection in a pine wbicb grew against tbe bouse. In June tbe partridge, (^Tetrao umhellus,') wbicb is so sby a bird, led ber brood past my windows, from tbe woods in tbe rear to tbe front of my bouse, clucking and calling to tbem like a ben, and in all ber bebavior proving berself tbe ben of tbe woods. Tbe young suddenly disperse on your approach, at a signal from tbe mother, as if a whirlwind had swept them away, and they so exactly resemble the dried leaves and twigs that many a traveller has placed his foot in the midst of a brood, and heard the whir of the old bird as she flew off, and her anxious calls and mewing, or seen her trail her wings to attract his atten tion, without suspecting their neighborhood. The parent will sometimes roll and spin round before you in such a dishabille, that you cannot, for a few moments, detect what kind of creature it is. The young squat still and flat, often running their heads under a leaf, and mind only their mother’s directions given from a distance, nor will yoin- approach make them run again and betray themselves. You may even tread on them, or have youi' eyes on them for a minute, without discovei-- B R U T E NEIGHBORS. 3^3 ing them. 1 have held them in my open hand at snch a time, and still their only care, obedient to their mother and their instinct, was to sqixat there without feai‘ or trembling. So perfect is this instinct, that once, when I had laid them on the leaves again, and one accidentally fell on its side, it was found with the rest in exactly the same position ton minutes afterward. They are not callow like the young of most birds, but more per fectly developed and precocious even than chickens. The remarkably adult yet inno cent expression of their open and serene eyes is very memorable. All intelligence seems reflected in them. They suggest not merely the purity of infancy, but a wisdom clarified by experience. Such an eye was not born when the bird was, but is coeval with the sky it reflects. The woods do not yield another such a gem. The traveller does not often look into such a limpid well. The ignorant or reckless sportsman often shoots the parent at such a time, and leaves tlnjse innocents to fall a prey to some prowling beast or bird, or gradually mingle with the decaying leaves which they so much reseml)le. It is said tliat when hatched by a hen tliey will directly disperse on some alarm, and so are lost, for m WA LDE N. they never hear the mother’s call which gathers them again. These wer(i my hens and chickens. It is remarkable how many creatures live wild and free though secret in the woods, and still sustain themselves in the neighbor hood of towns, suspected by hunters only. How retired the otter manages to live here! lie grows to be four feet long, as big as a small boy, perhaps without any human being getting a glimpse of him. I formerly saw the raccoon in the woods behind where my house is built, and probably still heard their whinnering at night. Commonly I rested an hour or two in the shade at noon, after plant ing, and ate my lunch, and read a little by a spring which was the source of a swamp and of a brook, oozing from und(;r Blister’s Hill, half a mile from my field. The ap proach to this was through a succession of descending grassy hollows, full of young pitch-pines, into a larger wood about the swamp. There, in a very secluded and shaded spot, under a spreading white - pine, there was yet a clean firm sward to sit on. I had dug out the spring and made a well of clear gray water, where 1 could di]) up a pailful without roiling it, and thither I went BK U TK N K I o n B ORS. 555 for this purpose almost ev̂ eiy day in inld- suimner, wlian the pond was warmest. Thither too tiie wood-cock led her brood, to probe the mud for worms, flying but a foot above them down the bank, while they ran in a troop beneath; but at last, sp}dng me, she would leave her young and circle round and round me, nearer and lusarer till within four or five feet, pretending broken wings and legs, to attract my attention, and get off her young, who would alrc^ady have taken up their march, with faint wiry peep, single file through the swamp, as she directed. Or I heard the peep of the young when I could not see the parent bird. There too the tur tle-doves sat over the spring, or fluttered from bough to bough of the soft white-pines over my head; or the red squirrel, coursing down the nearest bough, was particularly familiar and inquisitive. You only need sit still long enough in some attractive spot in the woods that all its inhabitants may ex hibit themselves to you by turns. I was witness to events of a less peaceful character. One day when I went out to my wood-pile, or rather my pile of stumps, I observed two large ants, the one red, the other much larger, nearly half an inch long, WALDEN. and black, fiercely contending with one am other. Having once got hold tliey never let go, but struggled and wrestled and rolled on the chips incessantly. Looking farthei', I was surprised to find that the chips were covered with such combatants, that it was not a duellum, but a bellum, a war between two races of ants, the red always pitted against the black, and frequently two red ones to one black. The legions of these Myrmidons covered all the hills and vales in my wood-yard, and the ground was already strewn with the dead and dying, both red and black. It was the only battle which I have ever witnessed, the only battle-field I ever trod while the battle was raging ; inter necine war ; the red republicans on the one hand, and the black imperialists on the other. On every side they were engaged in deadly combat, yet without any noise that I could hear, and human soldiers never fought so resolutely. I watched a couple that were fast locked in each other’s em braces, in a little sunny valley amid the chips, now at noon-day prepared to fight till the sun went down, or life went out. The smal ler red champion had fastened himself like a vice to his adversary’s front, and through B R U T I! NEIGHBORS. 357 all the tumblings on that held never for an instant ceased to gnaw at one of his feel ers near the root, having already caused the other to go by the board ; while the stronger black one dashed him from side to side, and, as I saw on looking nearer, had already di vested him of several of his members. They fought with more pertinacity than bull-dogs. Neither manifested the least disposition to retreat. It was evident that their battle- cry was Conquer or die. In the mean while there came along a single red ant on the hill side of this valley, evidently full of excite ment, who either had despatched his foe, or had not yet taken part in the battle ; prob ably the latter, for he had lost none of his limbs ; whose mother had charged him to return with his shield or upon it. Or per chance he was some Achilles, who had nour ished his wrath apart, and had now come to avenge or rescue his Patroclus. He saw this unequal combat from afar, — for the blacks were nearly twice the size of the red, —he drew near with rapid pace till he stood on his guard within half an inch of the com batants ; then, watching his opportunity, he sprang upon the black warrior, and com menced his operations near the root of his ]58 WALDEN. right fore-leg, leaving the foe to select among his own ineinhers ; and so there were three united for life, as if a new kind of attrac tion had been invented which put all other locks and cements to shame. I should not have wondered by this time to find that they had their respective musical bands stationed on some eminent chip, and playing their na tional airs the while, to excite the slow and cheer the dying combatants. I was myself excited somewhat even as if they had been men. The more you think of it, the less the difference. And certainly there is not the fight recorded in Concord history, at least, if in the history of America, that will bear a moment’s comparison with this, whether for the numbers engaged in it, or for the patriotism and heroism displayed. For numbers and for carnage it was an Aus- terlitz or Dresden. Concord F ight! Two killed on the patriots’ side, and Luther Blanchard wounded! Why here every ant was a Buttrick, — “ Fire I for (jod’s sake fire ! ” — and thousands shared the fate of Davis and Hosmer. There was not one hireling there. I have no doubt that it was a principle they fought for, as much as our ancestors, and not to avoid a three-penny tax B R U T E NKIGIIBURS. 359 on tlieir tea ; and. the results of this battle will he as important and memorable to those whom it concerns as those of the battle of Bunker Hill, at least. I took up the chip on which the three I have particularly described were struggling, carried it into my house, and placed it under a tumbler on my window-sill, in order to see the issue. Holding a microscope to the first- mentioned red ant, I saw tliat, though he was assiduously gnawing at the near fore leg of his enemy, having severed his remain ing feeler, his own breast was all torn away, exposing what vitals he had there to the jaws of the black warrior, whose breast plate was apparently too thick for him to pierce ; and the dark caibuncles of the suf ferer’s eyes shone with ferocity such as war only could excite. They struggled half an hour longer under the tumbler, and when 1 looked again the black soldier had severed the heads of his foes from their bodies, and the still living heads were hanging on either side of him like ghastly trophies at his sad dle-bow, still apparently as firmly fastened as ever, and he was endeavoi'ing with feeble struggles, being without feeders and with only the remnant of a leg, and I know not 360 WALDEN. how many other wounds, to divest liimself of them ; which at length, after half an hour more, he accomplished. I raised the glass, and he went off over the window-sill in that crippled state. Whether he finally survived that combat, and spent the remainder of his days in some Hotel des Invalides, I do not know; but I thought that his industry would not he worth much thereafter. I never learned which party was victorious, nor the cause of the war ; but I felt for the rest of that day as if I had had my feel ings excited and harrowed by witnessing the struggle, the ferocity and carnage, of a hu man battle before my door. Kirby and Spence tell us that the battles of ants have long been celebrated and the date of them recorded, though they say that Huber is the only modern author who ap pears to have witnessed them. “Hlneas Syl vius,” say they, “ after giving a very circum stantial account of one contested with great obstinacy by a great and small species on the trunk of a j)ear tree,” adds that “ ‘ This action was fought in the pontificate of Eu- genius the Fourth, in the presence of Nich olas Pistoriensis, an eminent lawyer, who related the whole history of the battle with B R U T E NEIGHBORS. 301 the greatest fidelity.’ A siiiiilar engagement between great and small ants is recorded by Olaus Magnus, in which the small ones, being victorions, are said to have buried the bodies of their own soldiers, but left those of their giant enemies a prey to the birds. This event happened previous to the expul sion of the tyrant Christiern the Second from Sweden.” The battle which I wit nessed took place in the Presidency of Polk, five years before the passage of Webster’s Fugitive-Slave Bill. Many a village Bose, fit only to course a mud-turtle in a victualling cellar, sported his heavy quarters in the woods, without the knowledge of his master, and ineffectually smelled at old fox burrows and woodchucks’ holes; led perchance by some slight cur which nimbly threaded the wood, and might still inspire a natural terror in its denizens; — now far behind his guide, barking like a canine bull toward some small squirrel which had treed itself for scrutiny, then, cantering off, bending the bushes with his weight, imagining that he is on the track of some stray member of the jerbilla family. Once I was surprised to see a cat walking along the stony shore of the pond, for they 362 W A L D E N . rarely wander so far from home. The sur prise was mutual. Nevertheless the most domestic cat, which has lain on a rug all her days, appears quite at home in tlie woods, and, hy her sly and stealthy behavior, proves herself more native there than the regular inliahitants. Once, when berrying, I met with a oat with young kittens in the woods, quite wild, and they all, like theii- mother, had their hacks up and were fiercely spitting at me. A few years before I lived in the woods there was what was called a “ winged cat ” in one of the farm-houses in Lincoln nearest the pond, Mr. Gilian Baker’s. When I called to see her in June, 1842, she was gone a-hunting in the woods, as was her wont, (I am not sure whether it was a male or female, and so use the more common pro noun,) 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 l)rownish-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 strips ten or twelve inches long by two and a half wide, and under her Bli V TK NF.I Gini OKS. o63 (‘liiu like a muff, the iip])er side loose, the uiidev matted like felt, and in the spring these appendages dropped off. They gave mo a pair of her wings,’’ whieh I keep still. Thei'C i.s no ap2 )earance of a membrane about them. Some thought it was jjart flying- squirrel or some other wild animal, which is not impiossible, for, according to naturalists, 2)roliflo hybrids have been produced by the union of the marten and dome.stic cat. This would have been the right kind of cat for me to keej), if I had kept any ; for why should not a j)oet’s cat be winged as well as his horse ? Iji the fall the loon ( Cohjmhus glacialis) came, as usual, to moult and bathe in the 25011(1, making the woods ring with his wild laughter before I had risen. At rumor of his arrival all the Mill-dam S25ortsmen are on the alert, in gigs and on foot, two by two and three by three, with 25atent rifles and conical balls and S2>y - glasses. They come rustling through tlie woods like au tumn leaves, at least ten men to one loon. Some station themselves on this side of the 25ond, some on that, for the poor bird cannot be omni23resent; if he div(>, here he must come U2) there. But now the kind October 364 W A U ) E N . wind rises, rustling the leaves and rippling the surface of the water, so that no loon can be heard or seen, though his foes sweep the pond with spy-glasses, and make the woods resound with their discharges. The waves generously rise and dash angrily, taking sides with all waterfowl, and our sportsmen must heat a retreat to town and shop and unfinished jobs. But they were too often successful. When I went to get a pail of water early in the morning I frequently saw this stately bird sailing out of ray cove within a few rods. If I endeavored to over take him in a boat, in order to see how he would mancEuvre, he would dive and be com pletely lost, so that I did not discover him again, sometimes, till the latter part of the day. But I was more than a match for him on the surface. He commonly went off in a rain. As I was paddling along the north shore one very calm October afternoon, for such days especially they settle on to the lakes, like the milkweed down, having looked in vain over the pond for a loon, suddenly one, sailing out from the shore towaid the mid dle a few rods in front of me, set up his wild laugh and betrayed himself. I pursued with B R U T E NEIGHBORS. 365 a paddle and lie dived, but when he came up I was nearer than before. He dived again, but I iniscale.ulated the diiiiction he would take, and we were fifty rods apart when he came to the surface this time, for I had helped to widen the interval ; and again he laughed long and loud, and with more rea son than before. He manceuvred so cun ningly that I could not get within half a dozen rods of him. Each time, when he came to the surface, turning his head this way and that, he coolly surveyed the water and the land, and apparently chose his course so that he might come up where there was the widest expanse of water and at the great est distance from the boat. It was surpris ing how quickly he made up his mind and put his resolve into execution. He led me at once to the widest part of the pond, and could not be driven from it. While he was thinking one thing in his brain, I was endeav oring to divine his thought in mine. It was a pretty game, played on the smooth surface of the pond, a man against a loon. Sud denly your adversary’s checiker disappears beneath the board, and the problem is to place yours nearest to where his will appear again. Sometimes he would come up unex- 366 W A L D E N . pectedly on the opposite side of me, having apparently passed directly under the boat. So long-winded was he and so unweariahle, that when he had swum farthest he would immediately j:)lunge again, nevertheless ; and then no wit could divine where in the deep pond, beneath the smooth surface, he might be speeding his way like a fish, for he had time and ability to visit the bottom of the pond in its deepest part. It is said that loons have been caught in the New York lakes eighty feet beneath the surface, with hooks set for trout, — though Walden is deeper than that. How surprised must the fishes be to see this ungainly visitor from another sphere speeding his way amid their schools 1 Yet he appeared to know his course as surely under water as on the sur face, and swam much faster there. Once or twice I saw a ripple where he approached the surface, just put his head out to recon noitre, and instantly dived again. I found that it was as well for me to rest on my oars and wait his reappearing as to endeavor to cahmlate where he would rise ; for again and .again, when I was straining my eyes over the surface one way, I would suddenly be star tled by his unearthly laugh behind me. But B R U T E N E I G HB OR S . 867 wliy, after displaying so imndi cunning, did he invariably betray himself the moment ho came np by that lond laugh ? Did not his white breast enongh btfray him ? He was indeed a silly loon, I thong'ht. I could com monly hear the plash of the water when he came up, and so also detected him. But after an hour he seemed as fresh as ever, dived as willingly, and swam yet farther than at first. It was surprising to see how serenely he sailed off with unruffled breast when he came to the surface, doing all the work with his webbed feet beneath. His usual note was this demoniac laughter, yet somewhat like that of a water-fowd; but oc casionally, when he had balked me most successfully and come up a long waxy off, he uttered a long-drawn unearthly howl, prob ably more like that of a wolf than any bird ; as wdien a beast puts his muzzle to the ground and deliberately howls. This was his looning, — perhaps the wildest sound that is ever heard here, making the woods ring far and wide. I concluded that he laughed in derision of my efforts, confident of his own resources. Though the sky wais by this time overcast, the pond was so smooth that I could see wliere he broke the surface when I did not hear him. His B68 W A L D E N . white breast, the stillness of the air, and the smoothness of the water were all against him. At length, having come up fifty rods off, he uttered one of those prolonged howls, as if calling on the god of loons to aid him, and immediately there came a wind from the east and rippled the surface, and filled the whole air with misty rain, and I was im pressed as if it were the prayer of the loon answered, and his god was angry with me ; and so I left him disappearing far away on the tumultuous surface. For hours, in fall days, I watched the ducks cunningly tack and veer and hold the middle of the pond, far from the sports man ; tricks which thej ̂will have less need to practise in Louisiana bayous. When compelled to rise they would sometimes cir cle round and round and over the [)ond at a considerable height, from which they could easily see to other ponds and tlie river, like black motes in the sky; and, when 1 thouglit 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; hut what beside safety they got by sailing in the middle of Walden I do not know, unless they love its watei’ for the saiiK' rt'ason that 1 do. XIII. HOUSE-WARMING. I n October I went a-graping to the river meadows, and loaded myself with clusters more precious for their l)eauty and fragrance than for food. There too I admired, though I did not gather, the cranberries, small waxen gems, pendants of the meadow grass, pearly and red, which the farmer plucks with an ugly rake, lead ing the smooth mea dow in a snarl, hecidlessly measuring them by the bushel and the dollar only, and sells the spoils of the meads to Boston and Xew York; destined to jammed, to satisfy the tastes of lovers of Nature there. So butch ers rake the tongues of bison out of the prairie grass, regardless of the torn and drooping plant. The barberry’s brilliant fruit was likewise food for my eyes merely; but I collected a small store of wild applies for coddling, which the proprietor and trav ellers had overlooked. When chestnuts were ripe I laid up half a bushel for winter. I t 370 WALDEN. was very exciting- at tliat season to roam the tlien boundless chestnut woods of Lincoln, — they now sleep their long sleep under the railroad, — with a bag on my shoulder, and a stick to open burrs with in my hand, for I did not always wait for the frost, amid the rustling of leaves and the loud reproofs of the red-squirrels and the jays, whose half- consumed nuts I sometimes stole, for the burrs which they had selected were sure to contain sound ones. Occasionally I climbed and shook the trees. They grew also be hind my house, and one large tree, which al most overshadowed it, was, when in flower, a bouquet whicli scented the whole neighbor hood, but the squirrels and the jays got most of its fru it; the last coming in flocsks early in the morning and picking the nuts out of the burrs before they fell. I relinquished these trees to them and visited the more distant woods composed wholly of chestnut. These nuts, as far as they went, were a good substitute for bread. Many other substi tutes might, perhaps, be found. Digging one day for fish-worms I discovered the ground-nut (A/hos tuherosa) on its string, the potato of the aborigines, a sort of fabu lous fruit, which I had begun to doubt if 1 B O U S E - W A R MI N G . ;]71 had ever dug and eaten in childhood, as I had told, and had not dreamed it. I had often since seen its (uimpled red velvety blossom supported by tlie stems of other plants without knowing it to be the same. Cultivation has well - nigh exterminated it. I t has a sweetish taste, much like that of a frost-bitten potato, and I found it better boiled than roasted. This tuber seemed like a faint promise of Nature to rear her own children and feed them simply here at some future period. In these days of fatted cat tle and waving grain-fields this humble root, which was once the totem of an Indian tribe, is quite forgotten, or known only by its flowering vine ; but let wild Nature reign here once more, and th(3 tender and luxu rious English grains will probably disappear before a mju-iad of foes, and without the care of man the crow may carry back even the last seed of corn to the great corn-field of the Indian’s God in the south-west, whence he is said to have brought i t ; but the now almost exterminated ground-nut will perhaps revive and flourish in spite of frosts and wildness, prove itself indigenous, and resume its ancient importance and dignity as the diet of the hunter tribe. Some In- 372 W A L D E N . dian Ceres or Minerva must have been tlie inventor and hestower of i t ; and when the reign of poetry commences here, its leaves and string of nuts may be represented on our works of art. Already, by the first of September, I had seen two or three small ma2:)les turned scar let across the pond, beneath where the white stems of three aspens diverged, at the point of a promontory, next the water. Ah, many a tale their color told! And gradually from week to week the character of each tree came out, and it admired itself reflected in the smooth mirror of the lake. Each morn ing the manager of this gallery substituted some new jiicture, distinguished by more brilliant or harmonious coloring, for the old u2 >on the walls. The wasps came by thousands to my lodge in October, as to winter quarters, and set tled on my windows within and on the walls overhead, sometimes deterring visitors from entering. Each morning, when they were numbed with cold, I swejjt some of them out, but I did not trouble mj'self much to get rid of them ; I even felt conqdimented by their regarding my house as a desirable shelter. They never molested me seriously. H O U S E - W A R M I N G . 173 though they heckled with me; and they gradually disappeared, into wliat erevices I do not know, avoiding winter and unspeak able cold. Like the wasps, before I finally went into winter quarters in November, I used to re sort to the north-east side of Walden, which the sun, reflected from the pitch-pine woods and the stony shore, made the fireside of the pond; it is so much pleasanter and wholesomer to be warmed bĵ the sun while you can be, than by an artificial fire. I thus warmed myself by the still glowing embers which the summer, like a departed hunter, had left. When I came to build my chimney I stud ied masonry. My bricks being second-hand ones recpiired to be cleaned with a trowel, so that I learned more than usual of the qual ities of bricks and trowels. The mortar on them was fifty years old, and was said to be' still growing harder ; but this is one of those sayings which men love to repeat whether they are true or not. Such sayings them selves grow harder and adhere more firndy with age, and it would take many blows with a trowel to clean an old wiseacre of them. 374 W A L D E N . Many of the villages of Mesopotamia are built of seconcl-hantl brioks of a very good quality, obtained from the ruins of Baby lon, and the cement on them is older and probably harder still. However that may be, I was struck by the peculiar toughness of the steel which bore so many violent blows without being worn out. As my brioks had been in a chimney before, though I did not read the name of Nebuchadnezzar on them, I picked out as many firejrlace bricks as I could find, to save work and waste, and I filled the spaces between the bricks about the fireplace with stones from the pond shore, and also made my mortar with the white sand from the same place. I lingered most about tli6 fire]dace, as the most vital part of the house. Indeed, I worked so de liberately, that though I commenced at the ground in the morning, a course of bricks raised a few inches above the floor served for my pillow at night; yet I did not get a stiff neck for it that I remember ; my stiff neck is of older date. I took a poet to board for a fortnight about those times, which caused me to be put to it for room. H(! brought his own knife, though I had two, and we used to scour them by thrusting them into H O U S E - W A R M I N G . 375 tlie earth. He shared with me the labors of cooking. I was pleased to see my work ris- ijig so squai'e and solid by degrees, and re flected, that, if it proceeded slowly, it was eahmlated to endure a long time. The chim ney is to some extent an independent struc ture, standing on the ground, and rising through the house to the heavens ; even af ter the house is burned it still stands some times, and its importance and independence are apparent. This was toward the end of summer. It was now Kovember. The north wind had already begun to cool the pond, though it took many weeks of steady blowing to at'comidish it, it is so deep. When I began to have a fire at even ing, before I plastered my house, the chim ney carried smoko particularly well, because of the numerous chinks between the boards. Yet I y>assed some cheerful evenings in that cool and airy apartment, surrounded by the rough brown boards full of knots, and raf ters with the bark on high overhead. My house never j)leased my ey<; so much after it was plastered, though I was obliged to con fess that it was more comfortable. Should not every apartment in which man dwells be 376 W A I . D E N . lofty enough to create some obscurity over head, where flickering shadows may play at evening about the rafters ? These forms are more agreeable to the fancy and imagina tion than fresco paintings or other the most expensive furniture. I now first began to inhabit my house, I may say, when I began to use it for warmth as well as shelter. I had got a couple of old fire-dogs to keep the wood from the hearth, and it did me good to see the soot form on the back of the chim ney which I had built, and I poked the fire with more right and more satisfaction than usual. My dwelling was small, and I could hardly entertain an echo in i t ; but it seemed larger for being a single apartment and re mote from neighbors. All the attractions of a house were concentrated in one room; it was kitchen, chamber, pai-lor, and keeping- room ; and whatever satisfaction jJarent or child, master or servant, derive from living in a house, I enjoyed it all. Cato says, the master of a family (^jKitrernfird. Melting’ tliy pinions in iliy upward flig’ht, Lark without song', and nies.songer of dawn, Circling above the hamlets as thy nest; Or else, departing dream, and shadowy form Of midnight vision, gathering up thy skirts; 892 WALDEN. By niglit star-veiling, and by day Darkening the light and blotting out the sun; Go thou my incense upward from this hearth, And ask the gods to pardon this clear flame. Hard green wood just cut, tliougli I used but little of that, answered my pui'pose bet ter than any other. I sometimes left a good fire when I went to take a walk in a winter afternoon; and when I returned, three or four hours afterward, it woidd be still alive and glowing. My house was not empty though I was gone. I t was as if I had left a cheerful housekeeper behind. I t was I and Fire that lived there; and commonly my housekeejier proved trustworthy. One day, however, as I was splitting wood, I thought that I would just look in at the window and see if the house was not on fire ; it was the only time I remember to have been ])artieularly anxious on this score ; so I loolted and saw that a spark had caught my bed, and I went In and extinguished it when it had burned a place as big as my hand. But my house occupied so sunny and sheltered a position, and its roof was so low, that I could afford to let the fii'e go out in the middle of almost any winter day. The moles nested in my cellar, nibbling II0 USE- WARMING. 393 every third potato, and making’ a snug bed even there of some hair left after plastering and of brown 2>aper ; for even the wildest animals love comfort and warmth as well as man, and they survive the winter only be cause tliey are so careful to secure them. Some of my friends sj^oke as if I was com ing to the woods on jJurjiose to freeze my self. The animal merely makes a bed, which he warms with his body, in a sheltered place ; but man, having discovered fire, boxes u|3 some air in a salacious ajiartment, and warms that, instead of robbing himself, makes that his bed, in which he can mov̂ e iibout divested of more cumbrous clothing, maintain a kind of summer in the midst of winter, anil by means of windows even admit the light, and with a lam̂ T lengthen out the day. Thus he goes a step or two bi;yond instinct, and saves a little time for the fine arts. Though, when I had been exjmsed to the rudest blasts a long time, my whole body began to grow tor})id, when I reached the genial atmos phere of my house I soon recovered my faculties and ^orolonged my life. But the most luxuriously housed has little to boast of in this I'esjject, nor jieed we trouble our selves to sj)eculate how the human race may 894 WALDEN. be at last destroyed. It would be easy to cut their threads any time with a little sharper blast from the north. go on dating from Cold Fridays and Great Snows ; but a little colder Friday, or greater snow would put a period to man’s existence on the globe. The next winter I used a small cooking- stove for economy, since I did not own the forest; but it did not keep fire so well as the ojDcn fireplace. Cooking was then, for the most part, no longer a poetic, but merely a chemic process. It will soon be forgotten, in these days of stoves, that we used to roast potatoes in the ashes, after the Indian fashion. The stove not only took up room and scented the house, but it concealed the fire, and I felt as if I had lost a companion. You can always see a face in the fii'e. The laborer, looking into it at evening, purifies his thoughts of the dross and earthiness which they have accumnlated during the day. But I could no longer sit and look into the fire, and the pertinent words of a poet recurred to me with new force. — “ Never, brig’lit flame, may be denied to me Thy dear, life imag’iiig', close sympathy. What but my hopes shot upward e’er so brig;bt ? What but my fortunes sunk so low in iiig-ht ? HOUSE- WARMING. 395 Why art thou banished from our hearth and hall, dlioii -who art welcomed and beloved by all ? Was thy existence then too fanciful For our life’s common light, who are so dull ? Did thy bright gleam mysterious converse hold With our congenial souls i* secrets too bold ? Well, we are safe and strong', for now we sit Beside a hearth where no dim shadows flit. Where nothing cheers nor saddens, but a fire Warms feet and hands — nor does to more aspire ; By Avhoso compact utilitarian heap The present may sit down and go to sleep, Xor fear the ghosts who from the dim past walked, And with us by the unequal light of the old wood fire talked.” XIV. FORMER INHABITANTS ; AND WINTER VIS ITORS. I WEATHERED Some merry snow storms, and spent some cheerful winter evenings by my fireside, while the snow whirled wildly without, and oven the hooting of the owl was hushed. For many weeks I met no one in my walks but those who came occasionally to cut wood and sled it to the vilLage. The elements, however, abetted me in making’ a path through the deepest snow in the woods, for when I had once gone through the wind blew the oak leaves into my tracks, where they lodged, and by absorbing the rays of the sun melted the snow, and so not only made a dry bed for my feet, but in the night their dark line was my guide. For human society I was obliged to conjure nj) the for mer occupants of these woods. Within the memory of many of my townsmen the road near which my house stands resounded with the laugh and gossip of inhabitants, and the F O R M E R I N U A B I T A N T S . 397 woods which border it were notched and dotted here and there with their little gar dens and dwelling's, though it was then much more sliut in by the forest than now. In some places, within my own remembrance, the pines would scrape both sides of a chaise at once, and women and children who were compelled to go this way to Lincoln alone and on foot did it with fear, and often ran a good part of the distance. Though mainly but a humble route to neighboring villages, or for the woodman’s team, it once amused the traveller more than now by its varietjy and lingered longer in his memory. Where now firm open fields stretch from the village to the woods, it then ran through a maple swamp on a foundation of logs, the remnants of which, doubtless, still underlie the present dusty highway, from the Stratten, now the Alms House, Farm, to Brister’s Hill. East of my bean - field, across the road, lived Cato Ingraham, slave of Duncan In graham, Esquire, gentleman, of Concord vil lage, who built liis slave a liouse, and gave him permission to live in Walden Woods ; — Cato, not Uticensis, but Concordiensis. Some say that he was a Guinea Negro. There are a few who remember his little J98 WALDEN. jjatch among the walnuts, which he let grow up till he should be old and need them ; but a younger and whiter speculator got them at last. lie too, however, occupies an cq\nvlly narrow house at present. Cato’s half - ob literated cellar bole still remains, though known to few, being com;ealed from the trav'cller by a fringe of pines. I t is now filled with the smooth sumach, (lihiis gla- 1)7X1,') and one of the earliest species of gol- denrod QSoIidago st/'ictu) grows there lux uriantly. Here, by the very corner of my field, still nearer to town, Zilpha, a colored woman, had her little house, where she spun linen for the townsfolk, making the Walden Woods ring with her shrill singing, for she had a loud and notable voice. At length, in the wai- of 1812, her dwelling was set on fire by English soldiers, prisoners on parole, when she was away, and her cat and dog and hens were all burned up together. She led a hard life, and somewhat inhumane. One old frecpienter of these woods remembers, that as he passed her house om; noon he heard her muttering to herself over her gur gling pot, — “ Ye are all bones, bones ! ” I have seen bricks amid the oak copse there. FO HMFIC IN n A BI TAN TB. 399 Uowii the road, on the right hand, on Blaster’s Hill, lived Blister Breeinan, “ a hainly Negi’o,” slave of Squire Cummings Onee, — there where grow still the apple- trees whieh Blister planted and tended; large old trees now, hut their fruit still wild and oiderish to iny taste. Not long since I read his epitaph in the old Lincoln hur- ying-ground, a little on one side, near the unmarked graves of some British grenadiers who fell in the retreat from Concord, — where he is styled “ Sippio Blister,” — Sci- pio Afilcanus he had some title to be called, — “ a man of color,” as if he were discol ored. I t also told me, with staring empha sis, when he died ; whieh was hut an indirect way of informing me that he ever lived. With him dwelt Fenda, his hospitable wife, who told fortunes, yet pleasantly, — large, round, and black, blacker than any of the children of night, such a dusky orb as never rose on Concord before or since. Farther dowui the hill, on the left, on the old road in the woods, are marks of some homestead of the Stratteu family; wliose orchard once covered all the slope of Blis ter’s Hill, but was long since killed out by pitch-pines, excf'pting a few stumps, whose 400 WALUEN. old roots furnish still the wild stocks of many a thrifty village tree. Nearer yet to town, you come to Breed’s location, on the other side of the way, just on the edge of the wood ; ground famous for the pranks of a demon not distinctly named in old mythology, who has acted a prominent and astounding part in our New England life, and deserves, as much as any mytho logical character, to have his biography writ ten one day; who first comes in the guise of a friend or hired man, and then robs and murders the whole family, — New-England Rum. But history must not yet tell the tragedies enacted here ; let time intervene in some measure to assuage and lend an azure tint to them. Here the most indistinct and dubious tradition says that once a tavein stood; the well the same, which tempered the traveller’s beverage and refreshed his steed. Here then men saluted one another, and heard and told the news, and went their ways again. Breed’s hut was standing only a dozen years ago, though it had long been unoccu pied. I t was about the size of mine. I t was set on fire by mischievous boys, one Election night, if I do not mistake. I lived on the FOR MER I Ni l A BITANTS. 401 edge of tlio village then, and liad just lost mv'self over Davenant's (londibert, that win ter that 1 labored with a lethargy, —- which, by the way, I never knew whether to re gard as a family complaint, having an uncle who goes to sleep shaving himself, and is obliged to sprout potatoes in a cellar Sun days, in order to keep awake and keep the Sabbath, or as the consec|uence of my at tempt to read Chalmers’ collection of Eng lish poetry without ski])])ing. It fairly over came my Nervii. I had just sunk my head on this when the bells rung fire, and in hot haste the engines rolled that way, led by a straggling troop of men and boys, and I among the foremost, for I had leaped the brook. We thought it was far south over the woods, — we who had run to fires be fore, — barn, shop, or dwelling-house, or all together. “ I t ’s Baker’s barn,” cried one. “ It is the Codman Place,” affirmed another. And then fresh sparks went up above the wood, as if the roof fell in, and we all shouted “ Concord to the rescue ! ” Wagons shot past with furious sp(;ed and crusliing loads, bearing, perchance, among the rest, the agent of tlie Insui'ance Comjmny, who was bound to go however far ; and ever and 402 WALDEN. anon the engine bell tinkled behind, more slow and sure; and rearmost of all, as it was afterward whispered, came they who set the fire and gave the alarm. Thus we key>t on like true idealists, rejecting the evidence of our senses, until at a turn in the road we heard the crackling and actually felt the heat of the fire from over the wall, and real ized, alas! that we were there. The very nearness of the fire but cooled our ardor. At first we thought to throw a frog-jjond on to i t ; but concluded to let it burn, it was so far gone and so worthless. So we stood round our engine, jostled one another, ex pressed our sentiments through speaking- trumpets, or in lower tone referred to the great conflagrations which the world has witnessed, including Bascom’s shop, and, be tween ourselves, we thought that, were we there in season with our “ tub,” and a full frog-pond by, we could turn that threatened last and universal one into another flood. We finally retreated without doing any mis chief,— returned to sleep and Gondibert. But as for Gondibert, I would except that passage in the preface about wit being the soul’s pow'der, — “ but most of mankind are strangers to wit, as Indians are to powder.” FORMER INHABITANTS. 403 It chanced that I walked that way across the fields the following night, about the same hour, and hearing a low moaning at tliis spot, I drew near in the dark, and dis covered the onljr survivor of the family that I know, the heir of both its virtues and its vices, who alone was interested in this burn- ing, lying on his stomach and looking over the cellar wall at the still smouldering cin ders beneath, muttering to himself, as is his wont. He had been working far off in the river meadows all day, and had improved the first moments that he could call his own to visit the home of his fathers and his youth. He gazed into the cellar from all sides and points of view by turns, always lying down to it, as if there was some treas ure, which he remembered, concealed be tween the stones, where there was absolutely nothing but a heap of bricks and ashes. The house being gone, he looked at what there was left. He was soothed by the sym pathy which my mere presence implied, and showed me, as well as the darkness permit ted, where the well was covered u p ; which, thank Heaven, could never be burned ; and he groped long about the wall to find the well-sweep which his father had cut and 404 WAI . DKN. mounted, feeling for the iron hook or staple hy which a burden had been fastened to the heavy end, — all that he could now cling to, — to convince me that it was no common “ rider.” I felt it, and still remark it al most daily in my walks, for hy it hangs the history of a family. Once more, on the left, where are seen the well and lilac bushes by the wall, in the now open field, lived Nutting and Le Grosse. But to return toward Lincoln. Farther in the woods than any of these, where the road approaches nearest to the pond, Wyman the potter squatted, and fur nished his townsmen with earthen ware, and left descendants to succeed him. Neither were they rich in worldly goods, holding the land by sufferance while they lived ; and there often the sheriff came in vain to collect the taxes, and “ attached a chip,” for form’s sake, as I have read in his accounts, there being nothing else that he could lay his hands on. One day in midsummer, when I was hoeing, a man who was carrying a load of pottery to market stopped his horse against my field and inquired concerning Wyman the younger. He had long ago bought a potter’s wheel of him, and v.lshed F O R M E R I N H A B / T A N T S . 405 to know what had become of ]iim. I had read of the potter’s clay and wheel in Scrip ture, but it had never occurred to me that the pots we use were not such as had come down unbroken from those days, or grown on trees like gourds somewhere, and I was pleased to hear that so fictile an art was ever practised in my neighborhood. The last inhabitant of these woods before me was an Irishman, Hugh Quoil, (if I have spelt his name with coil enough,) who occupied Wyman’s tenement, — Col. Quoil, he was called. Rumor said that he had been a soldier at Waterloo. If he had lived I should have made him fight his battles over again. His trade here was that of a ditcher. Napoleon went to St. Helena ; Quoil came to Walden Woods. All I know of him is tragic. He was a man of manners, like one who had seen the workl, and was capable of more civil speech than you could well attend to. lie wore a great coat in midsummer, be ing affected with the trembling delirium, and his face was the color of carmine. He died in the road at the foot of Blister’s Hill shortly after I came to the woods, so that I have not remembered him as a neighbor. Before his house was pulled down, when his com- 406 W A L D E N . rades avoided it as “ an unlucky castle,” I visited it. There lay his old clothes curled up by use, as if they were himself, uj)on his raised plaidc bed. His pipe lay broken on the hearth, instead of a bowl broken at the fountain. The last could never have been the symbol of his death, for he confessed to me that, though he had heard of Brister’s Spring, he had never seen i t ; and soiled cards, kings of diamonds spades and hearts, were scattered over the floor. One black chicken which the administrator could not catch, black as night and as silent, not even croaking, awaiting Reynard, still went to roost in the next apartment. In the rear there was the dim outline of a garden, which had been jjlanted but had never received its first hoeing, owing to those terrible shaking fits, though it was now harvest time. It was overrun with Roman wormwood and beggar- ticks, which last stuck to my clothes for all fruit. The skin of a woodchuck was freshly stretched upon the back of the house, a tro phy of his last Waterloo ; but no warm cap or mittens would he want more. Now only a dent in the earth marks the site of these dwellings, with buried cellar stones, and strawberries, raspberries, thim- F O R ME R IN HA B I T A NT S . 407 ble-berries, liazel-buslies, and sumaelis grow ing in the suimy sward there; some pitch- pine or gnarled oak occupies what was the chimney nook, and a sweet-scented black- birch, perhaps, waves where the door-stone was. Souietiines the well dent is visible, where once a spring oozed ; now dry and tear less grass; or it was covered deep, — not to be discovered till some late day, — with a flat stone under the sod, when the last of the race departed. What a sorrowful act must that be, — the covering up of wells ! coinci dent with the opening of wells of tears. These cellar dents, like deserted fox burrows, old holes, are all that is left where once were the stir and bustle of human life, and “ fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute,” in some form and dialect or other were by turns discussed. But all I can learn of their conclusions amounts to just this, that “ Cato and Brister pulled wool; ” which is about as edifying as the history of more famous schools of philosophy. Still grows the vivacious lilac a genera tion after the door and lintel and the sill are gone, unfolding its sweet-scented flowers each spring, to be plucked by the musing traveller; planted and tended once by chil- 408 W A L D E N . (Iren’s hands, in front-yard plots, — now standing by wall-sides in retired pastures, and giving place to new-rising forests ; — the last of that stirp, sole survivor of that family. Little did the dusky children think that the puny slip with its two eyes only, which they stuck in the ground in the shadow of the house and daily watered, woidd root itself so, and outlive them, and house itself in the rear that shaded it, and grown man’s garden and orchard, and tell their story faintly to the lone wanderer a half century after they had grown up and died, — blos soming as fair, and smelling as sweet, as in that first spring. I mark its still tender, civil, cheerful, lilac colors. But this small village, germ of something more, why did it fail wliile Concord keeps its ground ? Wei'c there no natural advan tages, — no water privileges, forsooth ? Ay, the deep Walden Pond and cool Blaster’s Spring, — privilege to drink long and healthy draughts at these, all unimproved by these men but to dilute their glass. They were universally a thirsty race. Might not the basket, stable - broom, mat-making, corn- parching, linen-spinning, and poti;ery busi ness have thrived here, making tire wilder- W I N T E R VISITORS. 409 ness to blossom like the rose, and a numerous j)osterity have inherited the land of their fathers ? The sterile soil would at least have been proof against a low-land degen eracy. Alas! how little does the memory of these human inhabitants enhance the beauty of the landscape ! Again, perhaps. Nature will try, with me for a first settler, and my house raised last spring to be the oldest in the hamlet. I am not aware that any man has ever built on the spot which I occupy. Deliver me from a city built on the site of a more ancient city, whose materials are ruins, whose gartlens cemeteries. The soil is blanched and accursed there, and before that becomes necessary the earth itself wiU be destroyed. With such reminiscences I repeopled the woods and lulled myself asleep. At this season I seldom had a visitor. When the snow lay deepest no wanderer ventured near my house for a week or fort night at a time, but there I lived as snug as a meadow mouse, or as cattle and poultry v̂dlich are said to have survived for a long time buried in drifts, even without food ; or like that early settler’s family in the town of 410 W A L D E N . Sutton, in this state, whose cottage was eoni- pletely covered by the great snow of 1717 when he was absent, and an Indian found it only by the hole which the chimney’s breath made in the drift, and so relieved the family. But no friendly Indian concerned himself about me ; nor needed he, for the master of the house was at home. The Great Snow ! How cheerful it is to hear o f! When the farmers could not get to the woods and swamps with their teams, and were obliged to cut down the shade trees bedore their houses, and when the crust was harder cut off the trees in the swamps ten feet from the ground, as it appeared the next spring. In the deepest snows, the path which I used from the highway to my house, about half a mile long, might have been repre sented by a meandering dotted line, with wide intervals between the dots. For a week of even weather I took exaetty the same number of steps, and of the same length, coming and going, stepping deliberately and with the precision of a pair of dividers in my own deep tracks, — to such routine the win ter reduces us, — yet often they were filled with heaven’s own blue. But no weather interfered fatally with my walks, or rather W I N T E R VISITORS. 411 my going abroad, for I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an ajjpointnient with a beech-tree, or a yellow-birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines; when the ice an«l snow causing their limbs to droop, and so sharpening their tops, had changed the qiines into fir-trees; wading to the tops of the highest hills when the snow was nearly two feet deep on a level, and shaking down another snow-storm on my head at every step; or sometimes creeping and floundering thither on my hands and knees, when the hunters had gone into winter quartoi's. One afternoon I amused myself by watching a barred owl (^Strix nehidosu') sitting on one of the lower dead limbs of a white-pine, close to the trunk, in broad daylight, I standing within a rod of him. He could hear me when I moved and cronched the snow with my feet, but could not plainly see me. When I made most noise he would stretch out his neck, and erect his neck feathers, and ojren his eyes wide; but their lids soon fell again, and he began to nod. I too fidt a slum berous Influence after watching him half an hour, as he sat thus with his eyes half open, like a cat, winged brother of the cat. There 412 W A L D E N . ■was only a narrow slit left between tlieir lids, by which he preserved a peninsular relation to me ; thus, with half-shut eyes, looking out from the land of dreams, and endeavoring to realize me, vague object or mote that interrupted his visions. At length, on some louder noise or my nearer approach, he would grow uneasy and sluggishly turn about on his perch, as if impatient at hav ing his dreams disturbed; and when he launched himself off and flapped through the pines, spreading his wings to unexpected breadth, I could not hear the slightest sound from them. Thus, guided amid the jhne boughs rather by a delicate sense of their neighborhood than by sight, feeling his twi light way as it were with his sensitive pin ions, he found a new jierch, where he might in j^eace await the dawning of his day. As I walked over the long causeway made for the railroad through the meadow.s, I en countered many a blustering and nipping wind, for nowhere has it freer play; and when the frost had smitten me on one cheek, heathen as I was, I turned to it the other also. Nor was it much better by the car riage I'oad from Brister’s Hill. For I came to town still, like a friendly Indian, when W I N T E R VISITORS. 413 the contents of the broad open fields were all piled up between the walls of the Walden road, and half an hour sufficed to obliterate the tracks of the last traveller. And when I returned new drifts would have forinetl, through which I floundered, wliere the busy north-west wind had been depositing the powdery snow round a sharp angle in the road, and not a rabbit’s track, nor even the fine print, the small type, of a meadow mouse was to be seen. Yet I rarely failed to find, even in midwinter, some warm and springy swamp whore tlie grass and the skunk-cabbage still put forth with perennial verdure, and some hardier bird occasionally awaited the return of spring. Sometimes, notwithstanding the snow, when I returned from my walk at evening I crossed the deep tracks of a wood-chopper leading from my door, and found his pile of whittlings on the hearth, and my house filled with the odor of his pipe. Or on a Sunday afternoon, if I chanced to be at home, I heard the cronching of the snow made by the step of a long-headed farmer, who from far through the woods sought my house, to have a social “ crack; ” one of the few of his vocation who are “ men on 414 W A L D E N . their farms; ” who donned a frock instead of a professor’s gown, and is as ready to ex tract the moral out of church or state as to haul a load of manure from his harn-yard. We talked of rude and simple times, when men sat about large fires in cold bracing weather, with clear heads ; and when other dessert failed, we tried onr teeth on many a nut which wise squirrels have long since abandoned, for those which have the thick est shells are commonly empty. The one who came from farthest to my lodge, through deepest snows and most dis mal tempests, was a poet. A farmer, a hun ter, a soldier, a reporter, even a philosopher, may be daunted ; but nothing can deter a poet, for he is actuated by pure love. Who can predict his comings and goings ? His business calls him out at all hours, even when doctors sleep. We made that small house ring with boisterous mirth and resound with the murmur of much sober talk, mak ing amends then to Walden vale for the long silences. Broadway was still and de serted in comparison. At suitable intervals there were regular salutes of laughter, which might have been referred indifferently to the last uttered or the forth-coming jest. W I N T E R V IS IT ORS . 415 We made many a “ bran new ” theory of life over a thin dish of gruel, which com bined the advantag’es of conviviality with the clear-headedness which philosophy re quires. I should not forget that during my last winter at the pond there was another wel come visitor, who at one time came through the village, through snow and rain and dark ness, till he saw my lamp through the trees, and shared with me some long winter even ings. One of the last of the philosophers, ■— Connecticut gave him to tlie world, — he peddled first her wares, afterwards, as he declares, his brains. These he peddles still, prompting God and disgracing man, bearing for fruit his brain only, like tlie nut its ker nel. I think that he must be the man of the most faith of any alive. Ills 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 disap pointed as the ages revolve. He has no venture in the present. But though com paratively disregarded now, w'hen his day comes, laws unsuspected by most will take effect, and masters of families and rulers will come to him for advice. — 416 W AI.D EN . How blind that cannot see serenitj^! ” A true friend of man ; almost tlie only friend of human progress. An Old Mortal ity, say rather an Immortality, with iimvea- ried patience and faith making plain tlie image engraven in men’s bodies, the God of whom they are but defaced and leaning monuments. With his hospitable intellect he embraces children, beggars, insane, and scholars, and entertains the thought of all, adding to it commonly some breadth and elegance. I think that he should keep a car avansary on the world’s highway, where phil osophers of all nations miglit put uĵ , and on his sign should be printed, “ Entertain ment for man, but not for his beast. Enter ye that have leisure and a quiet mind, who earnestly seek the right road.” lie is perliaps the sanest man and has the fewest crotchets of any I chance to know ; the same yester day and to-morrow. Of yore we had saun tered and talked, and effectually put the world behind u s ; for he was pledged to no institution in it, freeborn, ingenvus. Whichever way we turned, it seemed that the heavens and the earth had met together, since he enhanced the beauty of the land scape. A blue - robed man, whose fittest WINTER VISITORS. 417 roof is the overarching sky which reflects his serenity. I do not see how he can ever die; Nature cannot spare him. Having each some shingles of thought well dried, we sat and whittled them, trying onr knives, and admiring the clear yellowish grain of tlie pumpkin pine. We waded so gently and reverently, or we pulled together so smoothly, that the fishes of thought were not scared from the stream, nor feared any angler on the hank, hut came and went grandly, like the clouds which float through the western sky, and the mother-o’-pearl flocks which sometimes form and dissolve there. There we worked, revising mythol ogy, rounding a fahle here and there, and building castles in the air for which earth offered no worthy foundation. Great Look er ! Great Expecter ! to converse with whom was a New England Night’s Enter tainment. Ah ! such discourse we had, her mit and philosopher, and the old settler I have spoken of, — we three, — it expanded and racked my little house ; I should not dare to say how many pounds’ weight there was above the atmospheric pressure on every circular inch; it opened its seams so that they had to be calked with much dulness 418 W A L D E N . thereafter to stop the consequent leak; — but I had enough of that kind of oakum al ready picked. There was one other with whom I had “ solid seasons,” long to be remembered, at his house in the village, and who looked in upon me from time to time; but I had no more for society there. There too, as everywhere, I sometimes ex pected the Visitor who never comes. The Vishnu Purana says, “ The house-holder is to remain at eventide in his court-yard as long as it takes to milk a cow, or longer if he jjleases, to await the arrival of a guest.” I often performed this duty of hospitality, waited long enough to milk a whole herd of cows, but did not see the man approaching from the town. XV. WINTER ANIMALS. W hen the ponds were firmly frozen, they afforded not only new and shorter routes to many points, hut new views from their sur faces of the familiar landscape around them. When I crossed Flints’ Pond, after it was covered with snow, though I had often pad- died about and skated over it, it was so un expectedly wide and so strange that I could think of nothing but Baffin’s Bay. The Lincoln hills rose up around me at the ex tremity of a snowy plain, in which I did not remember to have stood before ; and the fishermen, at an indeterminable distance over the ice, moving slowly about with their wolfish dogs, passed for sealers or Esqui maux, or in misty weather loomed like fabu lous creatures, and I did not know whether they were giants or pygmies. I took this course wlien I went to lecture in Lincoln in the evening, travelling in no road and pass ing no house between my own hut and the 420 WALDEX. lecture room. In Goose Pond, which lay in my way, a colony of muskrats dwelt, and raised their cabins high above the ice, tliough none could be seen abroad when I crossed it. Walden, being hke the rest usually bare of snow, or with only shallow and in terrupted drifts on it, was my yard where I could walk freely when the snow was nearly two feet deep on a level elsewhei’e and the villagers were confined to their streets. There, far from the village street, and ex cept 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. For sounds in winter nights, and often in winter days, I heard the forlorn but melo dious note of a hooting owl indefinitely fa r ; such a sound as the frozen earth would yield if struck with a suitable plectrum, the very lingua vernacida of Walden Wood, and quite familiar to me at last, though I never saw the bird while it was making it. I sel dom opened my door in a winter evening without hearing i t ; Hoo hoo hoo, koorer hoo, sounded sonorously, and the first three syl lables accented somewhat like how der do ; WINTER ANIMALS. 421 or sometimes hoo Jioo only. One night in the beginning of winter, before the pond froze over, about nine o’clock, I was startled by the loud honking of a goose, and, step ping to the door, heard the sound of tlieir wings like a tempest in the woods as they flew low over my house. They passed over the pond toward Fair Haven, seemingly de terred from settling by my light, their com modore honking all the while with a regular beat. Suddenly an unmistakable cat-owl from very near me, with tire most harsh and tremendous voice I ever heard from any in habitant of the woods, responded at regular intervals to the goose, as if determined to expose and disgrace this intruder from Hud son’s Bay by exhibiting a greater compass and volume of voice in a native, and hoo-Jioo him out of Concord horizon. What do you mean by alarming the citadel at this time of night consecrated to me ? Do you think I am ever caught napping at such an hour, and that I have not got lungs and a larynx as well as yourself ? Boo-hoo, hoo-hoo, hoo- Tioo ! I t was one of the most thrilling dis cords I ever heard. And yet, if you had a discriminating ear, there were in it the elements of a concord such as these plains never saw nor heard. 422 WAI . DEN. 1 also heard the whooping of the ice in the pond, niy great hed-fellow in that part of Concord, as if it were restless in its bed and would fain turn over, were troubled with flatulency and bad dreams ; or I was waked by the cracking of the ground by the frost, as if some one had driven a team against my door, and in the morning would find a crack in the earth a quarter of a mile long and a third of an inch wide. Sometimes I heard the foxes as they ranged over the snow crust, in moonlight nights, in search of a partridge or other game, harking raggedly and demoniacally like for est dogs, as if laboring with some anxiety, or seeking expression, struggling for liglit and to be dogs outright and run freely in the streets ; for if we take the ages into our account, majr there not be a civilization go ing on among brutes as well as men ? They seemed to me to be rudimental, burrowing men, still standing on their defence, await ing their transformation. Sometimes one came near to my window, attracted by mĵ light, barked a vulpine curse at me, and then retreated. Usually tiie red squirrel (^Sciurus liud- soniud) waked me in the dawn, coursing WINTER ANIMALS. 423 over the roof and up and down the sides of the house, as if sent out of the woods for this purpose. In tlie course of the winter I threw out half a bushel of ears of sweet- corn, which had not got ripe, on to the snow crust by my door, and was amused by watch- ino- the motions of the various animals whichO were baited bĵ it. In the twilight and the night the rabbits came regularly and made a hearty meal. All day long the red squir rels came and went, and afforded me much entertainment by their manoeuvres. One would approach at first w'arily through the shrub-oaks, running over the snow crust by fits and starts like a loaf blown by the wind, now a few paces this waijy with w'onderful speed and Weaste of energy, making incon ceivable haste with his “ trotters,” as if it were for a wager, and now as many paces that w'ay, but never getting on more than half a rod at a time ; and then suddenly pausing with a ludicrous expression and a gratuitous somerset, as if all the eyes in the universe were fixed on him, — for all the motions of a squirrel, even in the most soli tary recesses of the forest, imply spectators as much as those of a dancing girl, — wast ing more time in delay and circumspection 424 WALDEN. than would have sufficed to walk the whole distance, — I never saw one walk, — and then suddenly, before you could say Jack Robinson, he would be in the top of a young- pitch-pine, winding up his clock and chid ing all imaginary spectators, soliloquizing and talking to all the universe at the same time, — for no reason that I could ever de tect, or he himself was aware of, I suspect. At length he would reach the corn, and se lecting a suitable ear, frisk about in the same uncertain trigonometrical way to the top-most stick of my wood-pile, liefore my window, where he looked me in the face, and there sit for hours, supplying himself with a new ear from time to time, nibbling at first voraciously and throwing the half - naked cobs about; till at length he g;rew more dainty still and played with his food, tast ing only the inside of the kernel, and the ear, which was held balanced over the stick by one paw, slipped from his careless grasp and fell to the ground, when he would look over at it with a ludicrous expression of un certainty, as if suspecting that it had life, witli a mind not made up whether to get it again, or a new one, or be off ; now thinking of corn, then listening to hear w-hat was in W I NT ER A N I . ',IA L S . 425 the wind. So the little impudent fellow would waste many an ear in a foroioou; till at last, seizing some longer and plumper one, considerably bigger than himself, and skilfully balancing it, he woidd set out with it to the woods, like a tiger with a buffalo, by the same zigzag course and frequent pauses, scratching along with it as if it were too heavy for him and falling all the while, making its fall a diagonal between a perpen dicular and horizontal, being determined to put it through at any rate; — a singularly frivolous and whimsical fellow;— and so he would get off with it to where he lived, per haps carry it to the top of a pine-tree fort} ̂ or fifty rods distant, and I would afterwards find the cobs strewn about the woods in va rious directions. At length the jays arrive, whose discord ant screams were heard long before, as they were warily making their approach an eighth of a mile off, and in a stealthy and sneaking manner they flit from t’-'ee to tree, nearer and nearer, and pick up the kernels which the squirrels have dropped. Then, sitting on a pitch-pine bough, they attempt to swal low in their haste a kernel which is too big for their throats and chokes them; and after 426 W A L D E N . great labor they disgorge it, and s]iend an hour in the endeavor to eraek it by repeated blows with their bills. Tliey were mani festly thieves, and I had not mnt^h respect for them ; but the squirrels, though at first shy, went to work as if they were taking what was their own. Meanwliile also came the chicadees in flocks, which, picking up the crumbs the squirrels had dropped, flew to the nearest twig, and, placing them under their claws, hammered away at them with their little bills, as if it were an insect in the bark, till they were sufficiently reduced for their slen der throats. A little flock of these tit-mice came daily to piedi a dinner out of my wood- pile, or the crumbs at my door, with faint flitting lisping notes, like the tinkling of ici cles in the grass, or else with sprightly day day day, or more rarely, in spring-like days, a wiry summery phe-oe from the wood-side. They were so familiar that at length one alighted on an armful of wood which I was carrying in, and pecked at the sticks with out fear. I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment wdiile I was hoe ing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance W I N T E R A N I M A L S . 427 tlian I sliould have been by any epaulet I could have worn. The squirrels also grew at last to be quite familiar, and occasionally stepped upon my shoe, when that was the nearest way. When the ground was not yet quite cov ered, and again near the end of winter, when the snow was melted on my south hill-side and about my wood-pile, the partridges came out of the woods morning and evening to feed there. Wliichever side you walk in the woods the partridge bursts away on whirring wings, jarring the snow from the dry leaves and twigs on high, which comes sifting down in the sunbeams like golden dust, for this brave bird is not to be scared by winter. It is frequently covered up by drifts, and, it is said, “ sometimes plunges from on wing into the soft snow, where it remains concealed for a day or two.” I used to start them in the open land also, where they had come out of the woods at sunset to “ bud ” tlie wild apple-trees. They will come regularly every evening to particular trees, where the cun ning sportsman lies in wait for them, and the distant orchards next the woods suffer thus not a little. I am glad that the par tridge gets fed, at any rate. It is Nature’s 428 W A L D E N . own bird winch lives on buds and diet- drink. In dark winter mornings, or in short win ter afternoons, I sometimes heard a pack of hounds threading- all the woods with hound ing cry and yelp, unable to resist the instinct of the chase, and the note of the hunting horn at intervals, proving that man was in the rear. The woods ring again, and yet no fox bursts forth on to the open level of the pond, nor following pack pursuing their Ac tion. And perhaps at evening I see the hunters returning with a single brush trail ing from their sleigh for a trophjg seeking their inn. They tell me that if the fox would remain in the bosom of the frozen earth he would be safe, or if he would run in a straight line away no fox-hound could overtake him ; but, having left his pursuers far behind, he stops to rest and listen till they come up, and when he runs he circles round to his old haunts, where the hunters await him. Sometimes, however, he will run upon a wall many rods, and then leaji off far to one side, and he appears to know that water will not retain his scent. A hunter told me that he once saw a fox ])ursued by hounds burst out on to Walden when the WINTF.R ANIMALS. 429 ice was covered with sliallow puddles, run part way across, and then return to the same shore. Ere long the hounds arrived, but here they lost the scent. Sometimes a pack hunting by themselves would pass my door, and circle round my house, and yelp and hound without regarding me, as if afflicted by a species of madness, so that nothing could divert them from the pursuit. Thus they circle until they fall upon the recent trail of a fox, for a wise hound will forsake everything else for this. One day a man came to my hut from Lexington to inquire after his hound that made a large track, and had been hunting for a week by himself. But I fear that he was not the wiser for all I told him, for every time I attempted to answer his que.stions he interrupted me by asking, “ What do you do here ? ” He had lost a dog, but found a man. One old hunter who has a dry tongue, who used to come to bathe in Walden once every year when the water was warmest, and at such times looked in upon me, told me that many years ago he took his gun one after noon and went out for a cruise in Walden Wood; and as he walked the Wayland road he heard the cry of lioxinds approaching, 430 W A L D E N . and ere long a fox leaped the wall into the road, and as quick as thought leaped the other wall out of the road, and his swift bullet had not touched him. Some way be hind came an old hound and her three pups in full pursuit, hunting on their own ac count, and disappeared again in the woods. Late in the afternoon, as he was resting in the thick woods south of Walden, he heard the voice of the hounds far over toward Fair Haven still pursuing the fox; and on they came, their hounding cry which made all the woods ring sounding nearer and nearer, now from Well-Meadow, now from the Baker Farm. For a long time he stoorl still and listened to their music, so sweet to a hunter’s ear, when suddenly the fox appeared, thread ing the solemn aisles with an easy coursing pace, whose sound was concealed by a sym pathetic rustle of the leaves, swift and still, keeping the ground, leaving his pursuers far behind; and, leaping upon a rock amid the woods, he sat erect and listening, with his back to the hunter. For a moment compas sion restrained the latter’s arm ; but that was a short-lived mood, and as quick as thought can follow thought his piece was levelled, and whang ! — the fox rolling over W I N T E R . A N I M A L S . 431 tlic rock lay dead on the ground. The hun ter still kept his jdace and listened to the hounds. Still on they came, and now the near woods resounded through all their aisles with their demoniac cry. At length the old hound burst into view with muzzle to the ground, and snapping the air as if possessed, and ran directly to the rock; but spying the dead fox she suddenly ceased her hounding, as if struck dumb with amazement, and walked roirnd and round him in silence; and one by one her pups arrived, and, like their mother, were sobered into silence by the mystery. Then the hunter came for ward and stood in their midst, and the mys tery was solved. They waited in silence while he skinned the fox, then followed the brush a while, and at length turned off into the woods again. That evening a Weston Squire came to the Concord hunter’s cottage to inquire for his hounds, and told how for a week they had been hunting on their own account from Weston woods. The Concord hunter told him what he knew and offered him the skin ; but the other declined it and departed. lie did not find his hounds that night, but the next day learned that they had crossed the river and put up at a farm- 482 W A L D E N . hovise for the night, whence, having been well foci, they took their dejDarturo early in the morning. The hunter who told me this could remem ber one Sam Nutting, who used to hunt bears on Tair Haven Ledges, and exchange their skins for rum in Concord village ; who told him, even, that he had seen a moose there. Nutting had a famous fox-hound named Burgoyne, —he pronounced it Engine, — which my informant used to borrow. In the “ Wast Book ” of an old trader of this town, who was also a captain, town-clerk, and representative, I find the following en try. Jan. 18th, 1742-3, “ John Melven Cr. by 1 Grey Fox 0 — 2 — 3 ; ” they are not now found here; and in his ledger, Feb. 7th, 1743, Hezekiah Stratton has credit “ by a Catt skin 0 — 1 — 4|-; ” of course, a wild cat, for Stratton was a sergeant in the old French war, and woidd not have got credit for hunting less noble game. Credit is given for deer skins also, and they were daily sold. One man still preserves the horns of the last deer that was killed in this vicinity, and another has told me the particulars of the hunt in which his uncle was engaged. The hunters were formerly a numerous and WINTER ANIMALS. 433 inony crow here. I remember well one gaunt Nimrod who would catch up a leaf by the road-side and play a strain on it wilder and more melodious, if niy memory serves me, than any hunting horn. At midnight, when there was a moon, I sometimes met with hounds in my path prowling about the woods, which would skulk out of my way, as if afraid, and stand silent amid the bushes till I had passed. Squirrels and wild mice disputed for my store of nuts. There were scores of pitch- pines around my house, from one to four inches in diameter, which had been gnawed by mice the previous winter, — a Norwegian winter for them, for the snow lay long and deep, and they were obliged to mix a large proportion of pine bark with their other diet. These trees were alive and apparently flourishing at midsummer, and many of them had grown a foot, though completely girdled ; but after another winter such were without exception dead. It is remarkable that a single mouse should thus be allowed a whole pine - tree for its dinner, gnawing round instead of up and down i t ; but per haps it is necessary in order to thin these trees, which are wont to grow up densely. 434 w a l i ) j:n . The hares (^Lejms Amencanux') were very familiar. One had her form under my house all winter, separated from me only hy the flooring, and she startled me each morn ing hy her hasty departure when I began to stir, — thump, thump, thump, striking her head against the floor timbers in her hurry. They used to come round my door at dusk to nibble the potato parings which I had thrown out, and were so nearly the color of the ground that they could hardty be distinguished when still. Sometimes in the twilight I alternately lost and recovered sight of one sitting motionless under mĵ window. When I opened my door in the evening, off they would go with a squeak and a bounce. Near at hand they only ex cited my pity. One evening one sat by my door two paces from me, at first trembling with fear, yet unwilling to move; a poor wee thing, lean and bony, with ragged ears and sharp nose, scant tail and slender paws. I t looked as if Nature no longer contained the breed of nobler bloods, but stood on her last toes. Its large eyes appeared young and unhealthy, almost dropsical. I took a step, and lo, away it scud with an elastic spring over the snow crust, straightening its WINTER ANIMALS. boily :iiul its limbs into graceful length, and soon put the forest between me and itself, —■ the wild free venison, asserting its vigor and the dignity of Nature. Not without reason was, its slenderness. Such then was its na ture. (^Le/pus, levipes, light-foot some think.) What is a country without rabbits and partridges ? They are among the most sim ple and indigenous animal products; an cient and venerable families known to antiq uity as to modern times; of the very hue and substance of Nature, nearest allied to leaves and to the ground, — and to one an other ; it is either winged or it is legged. I t is hardly as if you had seen a wild crea ture when a rabbit or a partridge bursts away, only a natural one, as much to be expected as rustling leaves. The partridge and the rabbit are still sure to thrive, like true natives of the soil, whatever revolutions occur. If the forest is cut off, the sprouts and bushes which spring up afford them concealment, and they become more numer ous than ever. That must be a poor coun try indeed that does not support a hare. Our woods teem with them both, and around every swamp may be seen the partridge or rabbit walk, beset with twiggy fences and horse-hair snares, which some cow-boy tends. XVI. THE POND IN WINTER. A f t e r a still winter night I awoke with the impression that some question had been put to me, which I had been endeavoring in vain to answer in my sleep, as what — how — when — where ? But there was dawning Nature, in whom all creatures live, looking in at my broad windows with serene and sat isfied face, and no question on her lips. I awoke to an answered question, to Nature and daylight. The snow lying deep on the earth dotted with young pines, and the very slope of the hill on which my house is placed, seemed to say. Forward! Nature puts no question and answers none which we mortals ask. She has long ago taken her resolution. “ O Prince, our eyes contem plate with admiration and transmit to the soul the wonderful and varied spectacle of this universe. The night veils without doubt a part of this glorious creation; but day comes to reveal to us this great work, which T H E P O N D I N W I N T E R . 437 extends from eai'th even into the plains of the ether.” Then to iny morning work. Fir.st I take an axe and pail and go in search of water, if that he not a dream. After a cold and snowy night it needed a divining rod to find it. Every winter the licpiid and trembling surface of the pond, which was so sensitive to every breath, and reflected every light and shadow, becomes solid to the depth of a foot or a foot and a half, so that it will sup port the heaviest teams, and perchance the snow covers it to an equal depth, and it is not to be distinguished from any level field. Like the marmots in the surrounding hiUs, it closes its ej^elids and becomes dormant for three months or more. Standing on the snow-covered plain, as if in a pasture amid the hills, I cut my way first through a foot of snow, and then a foot of ice, and open a window under my feet, where, kneeling to drink, I look down into the quiet parlor of the fishes, pervaded by a softened light as through a window of ground glass, with its bright sanded floor the same as in summer ; there a perennial waveless serenity reigns as in the amber twilight sky, corresjDonding to the cool and even temperament of the in- 438 W A L D E N . habitants. Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads. Early in the morning, while all things are crisp with frost, men come with fishing reels and slender lunch, and let down their fine lines through the snowy field to take pickerel and perch; wild men, who instinctively fol low other fashions and trust other authorities than their townsmen, and by their goings and comings stitch towns together in parts where else they would he ripped. They sit and eat their luncheon in stout fear-naughts on the dry oak leaves on the shore, as wise in natural lore as the citizen is in artificial. They never consulted with hooks, and know and can tell much less than they have done. The things which they practise are said not yet to be known. Here is one fishing for pickerel with grown perch for bait. You look into his pail with wonder as into a sum mer pond, as if he kept summer locked up at home, or knew where she had retreated. How, pray, did he get these in midwinter ? O, he got worms out of rotten logs since the ground froze, and so he caught them. His life itself passes deeper in Nature than the studies of the naturalist penetrate; himself a subject for the naturalist. The latter THE POND IN WINTER. 439 raises the moss and hark gently with his knife in search of insects ; the former lays open logs to their core with his axe, and moss and hark fly far and wide. He gets his living hy harking trees. Such a man has some right to fish, and I love to see Na ture carried out in him. The perch swal lows the grub-worm, the pickerel swallows the perch, and the fisherman swallows the pickerel; and so all the chinks in the scale of being are filled. When I strolled around the pond in misty weather I was sometimes amused hy the primitive mode which some ruder fisherman had adopted. He would perhaps have placed alder branches over the narrow holes in the ice, which were four or five rods apart and an equal distance from the shore, and hav ing fastened the end of the line to a stick to prevent its being pulled through, have passed the slack line over a twig of the alder, a foot or more above the ice, and tied a dry oak leaf to it, which, being pulled down, would show when he had a bite. These al ders loomed through the mist at regular in tervals as you walked half way round the pond. Ah, the pickerel of Walden! when I see 440 WALDEN. them lying on the ice, oi' in the well which the fisherman cuts in the ice, making a little hole to admit the water, I am always sur prised by their rare beauty, as if they were fabulous fishes, they are so foreign to the streets, even to the woods, foreign as Arabia to our Concord life. They possess a quite dazzling and transcendent beauty which sepa rates them by a wide interval from the cadav erous cod and haddock whose fame is trum peted in our streets. They are not green like the pines, nor gray like the stones, nor blue like the sky; hut they have, to my eyes, if possible, yet rarer colors, like flowers and precious stones, as if they were the pearls, the animalized nuclei or crystals of the W al- den water. They, of course, are Walden all over and all through; are themselves small Waldens in the animal kingdom, Waldenses. It is surprising that they are caught here, — that in this deep and capacious spring, far beneath the rattling teams and chaises and tinkling sleighs that travel the Walden road, this great gold and emerald fish swims. I never chanced to see its kind in any market; it would be the cynosure of all eyes there. Easily, with a few convulsive quirks, they give up their watery ghosts, like a mortal THE P O N D IN W INTER. 441 translated before his time to the thin air of heaven. As I was desirous to recover the long lost bottom of Walden Pond, I surveyed it care fully, before the ice broke up, early in ’46, with compass and chain and sounding line. There have been many stories told about the bottom, or rather no bottom, of this pond, which certainly had no foundation for them selves. I t is remarkable how long men will believe in the bottomlessness of a pond with out takings the trouble to sound it. I have visited two such Bottomless Ponds in one walk in this neighborhood. Many have be lieved that Walden reached quite through to the other side of the globe. Some who liave lain flat on the ice for a long time, looking down through the illusive medium, perchance with watery eyes into the bargain, and driven to hasty conclusions by the fear of catching cold in their breasts, have seen vast holes “ into which a load of hay might be driven." if there were anybody to drive it, the un doubted source of the Styx and entrance to the Infernal Eegions from these parts. Oth ers have gone down from the village with a “ fifty-six ” and a wagon load of inch rope, 442 W A L D E N . but yet have failed to find any bottom ; for while the “ fifty-six” was resting by the way, they were paying out the rope in tlie vain attemjit to fathom their tridy immeas urable capacity for marvellousness. But I can assure my readers that Walden has a reasonably tight bottom at a not unreason able, though at an unusual, depth. I fath omed it easily with a cod-line and a stone weighing about a pound and a half, and could teU accurately when the stone left the bottom, by having to pull so much harder before the water got underneath to help me. The greatest depth was exactly one hundred and two feet; to which may be added the five feet which it has risen since, making one hundred and seven. This is a remark able depth for so small an area ; yet not an inch of it can be spared by the imagination. What if all ponds were shallow ? Would it not react on the minds of men ? I am thankfnl that this pond was made deep and pure for a symbol. While men believe in the infinite some ponds will be thought to be bottomless. A factory owner, hearing what depth I had found, thought that it could not be true, for, judging from his acquaintance with dams, T H E P O N D I N W I N T E R . 443 sand would not lie at so steep an angle. But the deepest ponds are not so deep in propor tion to their area as most suppose, and, if drained, would not leave very remarkahle valleys. They are not like cups between the hills; for this one, which is so unusually deep for its area, appears in a vertical sec tion through its centre not deeper than a shallow plate. Most ponds, emptied, would leave a meadow no more hollow than we fre quently see. William Gilpin, who is so ad mirable in all that relates to landscapes, and usually so correct, standing at the head of Loch Lyne, in Scotland, which he describes as “ a bay of salt water, sixty or seventy fathoms deep, four miles in breadth,” and about fifty miles long, surrounded by moun tains, observes, “ If we conld have seen it im mediately after the diluvian crash, or what ever convulsion of Nature occasioned it, before the waters gushed in, what a horrid chasm it must have appeared! “ So h igh as heaved th e tum id h ills, so low D ow n sunk a hollow bottom , broad, and deep, Capacious bed o f w a te r s -------. ’ ’ But if, using the shortest diameter of Loch Fjme, we apply these proportions to M âl- den, which, as we have seen, appears already 444 WALDEN. in a vertical section only like a shallow plate, it will appear four times as shallow. So much for the increased horrors of the chasm of Loch Fyne when emptied. No doubt many a smiling valley with its stretching cornfields occupies exactly such a “ horrid chasm,” from which the waters have receded, though it requires the insight and the far sight of the geologist to convince the unsus pecting inhabitants of this fact. Often an inquisitive eye may detect the shores of a primitive lake in the low horizon hills, and no subsequent elevation of the plain have been necessary to conceal their history. But it is easiest, as they who work on the high ways know, to find the hollows by the pud dles after a shower. The amount of it is, the imagination, give it the least license, dives deeper and soars higher than Nature goes. So, probably, the depth of the ocean will be found to be very inconsiderable com pared with its breadth. As I sounded through the ice I could de termine the shape of the bottom with greater accuracy than is possible in surveying har bors which do not freeze over, and I was surprised at its general regularity. In the deepest part there are several acres more THE PO.VD /N WINTER. 445 level than almost any field which is ex posed to the sun, wind, and plough. In one instance, on a line arhitrarily chosen, the depth did not vary more than one foot in thirty rods; and generally, near the middle, I could calculate the variation for each one hundred feet in any direction beforehand within three or four inches. Some are ac customed to speak of deep and dangerous holes even in quiet sandy ponds like this, but the effect of water under these circum stances is to level all inequalities. The reg ularity of the bottom and its conformity to the shores and the range of the neighboring hills were so perfect that a distant promon tory betrayed itself in the soundings quite across the pond, and its direction could be determined by observing the opposite shore. Cape becomes bar, and plain shoal, and val ley and gorge deep water and channel. When I had mapped the pond by the scale of ten rods to an inch, and put down the soundings, more than a hundred in all, I observed this remarkable coincidence. Hav ing noticed that the number indicating the greatest depth was apparently in the centre of the map, I laid a rule on the map length wise, and then breadthwise, and found, to 446 WALDEN. my surprise, that the line of greatest length intersected the line of greatest breadth e,r- actly at the point of greatest depth, notwith standing that the middle is so nearly level, the ontline of the pond far from regular, and the extreme length and breadth were got by measuring into the coves ; and I said to my self, Who knows but this hint would con duct to the deepest part of the oc(?an as well as of a pond or puddle ? Is not this the rule also for the height of mountains, re garded as the opposite of valleys ? We know that a hill is not highest at its narrowest part. Of five coves, three, or all which had been sounded, were observed to have a bar quite across their mouths and deeper water within, so that the bay tended to be an expansion of water within the land not only horizontally but vertically, and to form a basin or inde pendent pond, the direction of the two capes showing the course of the bar. Every har bor on the sea-coast, also, has its bar at its entrance. In proportion as the mouth of the cove was wider compared with its length, the water over the bar was deeper comj)ared with that in the basin. Given, then, the length and breadth of the cove, and the T H E F O N D I N W I N T E R . 447 cliaraeter of the surrounding sliore, and you have almost elements enough to make out a formula for all eases. In order to see how nearly I could guess, with this experience, at the deepest point in a pond, by observing the outlines of its sur face and the character of its shores alone, I made a plan of White Pond, which contains about forty-one acres, and, like this, has no island in it, nor any visible inlet or outlet; and as the line of greatest breadth fell very near the line of least breadtli, where two op posite capes approaclied each other and two opposite bays receded, I ventured to mark a point a short distance from the latter line, but still on the line of greatest length, as the deepest. The deepest part was found to be within one hundred feet of this, still farther in the direction to which I had inclined, and was only one foot deeper, namely, sixty feet. Of course, a stream running through, or an island in the pond, would make the problem much more complicated. If we knew all the laws of Nature, we should need only one fact, or the description of one actual phenomenon, to infer all the particular results at that point. Now we know only a few laws, and our result is viti- 448 W A L D E N . ateu- rity, as if it were muddy, and preferred the 502 W A L D E N . Cambridge ice, which is white, but tastes of weeds. The purity meu love is like the mists which envelop the earth, and not like the azure ether beyond. Some are dinning in our ears that we Americans, and moderns generally, are in tellectual dwarfs compared with the an cients, or even the Elizabethan men. But what is that to the purj)ose ? A living dog is better than a dead lion. Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmy that he can ? Let every one mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made. Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his com panions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. I t is not important that he should mature as soon as an apple-tree or an oak. Shall he turn his spring into summer ? If the condition of things which we were made for is not yet, what were any reality which we can substitute ? We will not be slii])- wrecked on a vain reality. Shall we with CON CL USION. 503 pains erect a lieaveu of blue glass over our selves, though when it is done we shall he sure to gaze still at the true ethereal heaven far above, as if the former were not ? There was an artist in the city of Koiiroo who was disposed to strive after perfection. One day it came into his mind to make a staff. Having considered that in an imper fect work time is an ingredient, hut into a perfeet work time does not enter, he said to himself. I t shall he perfect in all respects, though I should do nothing else in my life. He proceeded instantly to the forest for wood, being resolved that it should not be made of unsuitable material; and as he searched for and rejected stick after stick, his friends gradually deserted him, for they grew old in their works and died, but he grew not older by a moment. His singleness of purpose and resolution, and his elevated piety, en dowed him, without his knowledge, with perennial youth. As he made no compro mise with Time, Time kept out of his way, and only sighed at a distance because he could not overcome him. Before he had found a stock in all respects suitable the city of Kouroo was a hoary ruin, and he sat on one of its mounds to peel the stick. Be- 504 W A L D E N . fore lie had given it the proper shape the dynasty of the Candahars was at an end, and with the point of the stick he wrote the name of the last of that race in the sand, and then resumed his work. By the time he had smoothed and polished the staff Kalpa was no longer the pole-star ; and ere he had put on the ferule and the head adorned with pre cious stones, Brahma had awoke and shun- hered many times. But why do I stay to mention these things ? When the finishing stroke was put to his work, it suddenly ex panded before the eyes of the astonished ar tist into tlie fairest of all the creations of Brahma, lie had made a new system in making a staff, a world with full and fair proportions; in which, though tlio old cities and dynasties had passed away, fairer and more glorious ones had taken their plaices. And now he saw hy the heap of shavings still fresh at his feet, that, for him and his work, the former lapse of time had been an illusion, and that no more time had elapsed than is required for a single scintillation from the brain of Brahma to fall on and in flame the tinder of a mortal brain. Tlie ma terial was pure, and his art was ]iure ; how could the result be other than wonderful ? C O N C L U S I O N . 505 No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well at last as the truth. This alone wears well. For the most part, we are not where we are, but in a false posi tion. Through an infirmity of our natures, we suppose a case, and put ourselves into it, and hence are in two cases at the same time, and it is doubly difficult to get out. In saiie moments we regard only the facts, the case that is. Say what you have to say, not what you ought. Any truth is better than make- believe. Tom Hyde, the tinker, standing on the gallows, was asked if he had anything to say. “ Tell the tailors,” said he, “ to re member to make a knot in their thread be fore they take the first stitch.” His com panion’s prayer is forgotten. However mean your life is, meet it and live i t ; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glo rious hours, even in a poor-house. The set ting sun is reflected from the windows of the alms-house as brightly as from the risdi man’s abode ; the snow melts before its 506 W A L D E N . door as early in the spring. I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace. The town’s poor seem to me of ten to live the most independent lives of any. May be they are simply great enough to receive without misgiving. Most think that they are above being supported by the town; but it oftener happens that they are not above supporting themselves by dishon est means, which should be more disreputa ble. Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn the old; return to them. Things do not change; we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will see that you do not want society. If 1 were confined to a corner of a garret all my days, like a spider, the world would be just as large to me while I had my thoughts about me. The philosopher said : “ From an army of three divisions one can take away its gen eral, and put it in disorder; from the man the most abject and vulgar one cannot take away his thought.” Do not seek so anxiously to be developed, to subject yourself to manj ̂ influences to be played on ; it is all dissipa- C O N C L U S I O N . 507 tion. Humility like darkness reveals the heavenly lights. The shadows of poverty and meanness gather around us, “ and lo ! creation widens to our view.” AVe are of ten reminded that if there were bestowed on us the wealth of Croesus, our aims must still he the same, and our means essentially the same. Moreover, if you are restricted in your range by poverty, if you cannot buy books and newspapers, for instance, you are but confined to the most significant and vital experiences; you are compelled to deal with the material whicli yields the most sugar and the most starch. It is life near the bone where it is sweetest. You are defended from being a trifler. No man loses ever on a lower level by magnanimity on a higher. Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only. Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul. I live in the angle of a leaden wall, into whose composition was jjoured a little alloy of bell metal. Often, in the repose of my mid-day, there reaches my ears a confused tintimiahiihirn from without. It is the noise of my contemporaries. My neighbors tell me of their adventures with famous gentle men and ladies, what notabilities they met 608 W A L D E N . at the dinner-table ; but I am no more inter ested in such things than in the contents of the Daily Times. The interest and the con versation are about costume and manners chiefly ; but a goose is a goose still, dress it as you will. They tell me of California and Texas, of England and the Indies, of the lion. M r.------of Georgia or of Massachu setts, all transient and fleeting phenomena, till I am ready to leap from their court-yard like the Mameluke hey. I delight to come to my hearings, — not walk in procession with j)omp and parade, in a conspicuous place, but to walk even with the Builder of the universe, if I may, — not to live in this restless, nervous, hustling, trivial Nineteenth Century, but stand or sit thoughtfully while it goes by. What are men celebrating? They are all on a committee of arrange ments, and hourly expect a speech from somebody. God is only the president of the day, and Webster is his orator. I love to weigh, to settle, to gravitate toward that which most strongly and rightfully attracts m e; — not hang by the beam of the scale and try to weigh less, — not suppose a case, hut take the case that is ; to travel the only path I can, and that on which no power can C O N C L U S I O N . 509 resist me. It affords me no satisfatdion to commence to spring an arcli before I have got a solid foundation. Let us not play at kittlybenders. There is a solid bottom everywhere. We read that the traveller asked the boy if the swamp before him had a hard bottom. The boy replied that it had. But presently the traveller’s horse sank in up to the girths, and he observed to the boy, “ I thought you said that this bog had a hard bottom.” “ So it has,” answered the latter, “ but you have not got half way to it yet.” So it is with the bogs and quicksands of so ciety ; but he is an old boy that knows it. Only what is thought, said, or done at a cer tain rare coincidence is good. I would not be one of those who will foolishly drive a nail into mere lath and plastering; such a deed would keep me awake nights. Give me a hammer, and let me feel for the furrowing. Do not depend on the putty. Drive a nail home and clinch it so faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction, — a work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke the Muse. So will help you God, and so only. Every nail driven should be as another rivet in the machine of the universe, yon carrying on the work. 510 WALDEN. Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. I sat at a table where wore rich food and wine in abundance, and obse quious attendance, but sincerity and truth were not; and I went away hungry from the inhospitable board. The hospitality was as cold as the ices. 1 thought that there was no need of ice to freeze them. They talked to me of the age of the wine and the fame of the vintage ; but I thought of an older, a newer, and purer wine, of a more glorious vintage, which they had not got, and could not luiy. The style, the house and grounds and “ en tertainment ” pass for nothing with me. I called on the king, but he made me wait in his hall, and conducted like a man incapaci tated for hospitality. There was a man in my neighborhood who lived in a hollow tre(\ His manners were truly reffal. I .sliould have done better had I called on him. How long shall we .sit in our norticoes practising idle and musty virtues, which any work would make impertinent ? As if one were to begin the day with long-suffering, and hire a man to hoe his potatoes , and in the afternoon go forth to practise Chris tian meekness and charity with goodness aforethought ! Consider the China pride C O N C L U S I O N . 511 and stagnant self-complacency of mankind. This generation inclines a little to congratu late itself on being the last of an illustrious line; and in Boston and London and Paris and Borne, thinking of its long descent, it speaks of its progress in art and science and literature with satisfaction. There are the Eecords of the Philosophical Societies, and the public Eulogies of Great Men ! I t is the good Adam contemplating his own vir tue. “ Yes, we have done great deeds, and sung divine songs, which shall never die,” — that is, as long as lee can remember them. The learned societies and great men of As syria, — where are they ? What youthful philosophers and experimentalists we are ! There is not one of my readers who has yet lived a whole human life. Those may be but the spring months in the life of the race. If we have had the seven-years’ itch, we have not seen the seventeen-year locust yet in Concord. We are acquainted with a mere pellicle of the globe on which we live. Most have not delved six feet beneath the surface, nor leaped as many above it. We know not where we are. Beside, we are sound asleep nearly half our time. Yet we esteem our selves wise, and have an established order on 512 WALDEN. the surface. Truly, we are deep thinkers, we are ambitious spirits! As I stand over the insect crawling amid the pine needles on the forest floor, and endeavoring to conceal itself from my sight, and ask myself why it will cherish those humble thoughts, and hide its head from me who might, perhaps, be its benefactor, and impart to its race some cheering information, I am reminded of the greater Benefactor and Intelligence that stands over me the human insect. There is an incessant influx of novelty into the world, and yet we tolerate incredible dulness. I need only suggest what kind of sermons are still listened to in the most en lightened countries. There are such words as joy and sorrow, but they are only the bur den of a psalm, sung with a nasal twang, while we believe in the ordinary and mean. We think that we can change our clothes only. I t is said that the British Empire is very large and respectable, and that the United States are a first-rate power. We do not believe that a tide rises and falls be hind every man which can float the British Empire like a chip, if he should ever harbor it in his mind. Who knows what sort of seventeen-year locust will next come out of C O N C L U S I O N . 513 the ground ? The government of the world I live in was not framed, like that of Brit ain, in after-dinner conversations over the wine. The life in us is like the water in the river. I t may rise this year higher than man has ever known it, and flood the parched up lands ; even this may he the eventful year, which will drown out all our muskrats. It was not always dry land where we dwell. I see far inland the hanks which the stream anciently washed, before science began to record its freshets. Every one has heard the story which has gone the rounds of New England, of a strong and beautiful bug which came out of the dry leaf of an old table of apple-tree wood, which had stood in a farmer’s kitchen for sixty years, first in Connecticut, and afterward in Massachu setts, — from an egg deposited in the living tree many years earlier still, as appeared by counting the annual layers beyond i t ; which was heard gnawing out for several weeks, hatched perchance by the heat of an urn. Who does not feel his faith in a resurrection and immortality strengthened by hearing of this ? Who knows what beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for 514 WALDEN. ages under many concentric layers of wood enness in the dead dry life of society, de posited at first in the alhurnmn of the green and living tree, which has been gradually converted into the semblance of its well-sea soned tomb, — heard perchance gnawing out now for years by the astonished family of man, as they sat round the festive board, — may unexpectedly come forth from amidst society’s most trivial and handselled furni ture, to enjoy its perfect summer life at last! I do not say that John or Jonathan will realize all this ; but such is the character of that morrow which mere lapse of time can never make to dawn. The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning-star. INDEX. A cton (Mass.), 192. a l ie n n m ^ another’s brass, a very ancient slough, 13. .^sculapius, that old herb-doc tor, 217. Age and youtli, 16. Alms House Farm, 397. America, the only true, 321. “ Amok ” against T., society run ning, 268. Amusements, games and, despair concealed under, 15. Animal food, objections to, 334. Animal labor, man better without the help of, 91. Ani)iial life and heat nearly syn onymous, 23. Ant.s, battle of the, 355-361, Apples, the world eating green, 123. Architecture, need of relation be tween ma)i, truth, and, 75, 76. Asiatic Russia, Mine. Pfeiffer in, 38. Atlas, 132. Atro))os, as name for engine, 185. Auction of a deacon’s effects, 107 ; or increasing, 108. Average, the law of, in nature and ethics, 448- B aker F arm , 314-326. Baker’s, barn, 401 ; Farm, 430. B inds of music in distance, 250. Bartram, "William, quoted, 108. Baskets, strolling Ijidiau selling, B ean -F ie l d , T h e , 241-259. Bcilford (Mass.), 192. Beiiavior, repentance for good, 19. Bells of Lincoln, Acton, Bedford, Concord, the, 192. “ Best ” room, the pine wood be hind house, 221. Bibles of mankind, 167, 168. Birds, living with the, 135. Body a temple, man’s, 345. Bogs with hard bottom, 509. Books, how to read, 159; the in heritance of nations, 162. Box, living in a, 48. Brahmins, tlieir forms of con scious penance, 9; Walden ice makes T. one with the, 459. Bread without yeast, 98-101. Breed’s Imt, 400. Bricks, mortar growing harder on, 373. Brighton — or Brighttown, 209. Brister’s Hill, 354; 397 ; 399; 405; 412. Brister’s Spring, 406, 408. B r u te N eighbors, 347-368. Bug from an egg in table of apple wood, the, 513. Building one's own house, sig nificance of, 74. Busine.ss habits indispensable, strict, .33. Busk, Indian feast of first fruits, 108. Calida.s’, Sacontala quoted, 491. Cambridge, college room rent comparcid witii T.’s, 80 ; crowd ed liives of, 212. Canadian wood - chopper, 224- 234. Cauoc, water-logged in Walden Pond, 299. Cards left by visitors, 203. Carew, Thomas, quoted, 127. Caryatides, gossips leaning against barn like, 263. Cat, the Collins’s, 71; in the 516 I N D E X . woods, domestic and “ winged,” 3Gl-;i63. Cato Major, quoted, 101; 132, 133; 258; 370. Caves, birds do not sing in, 47. Celebrating, men, a committee of arrangements, always, 508. Celestial Empire, conditions of successful trade with, 33. Cellar, a burrow to which house is but a porch, 72. Cellini, Benvenuto, quoted, 316. Chairs for society, three, 218. Change of air, 403. Channing, W. E., quoted, 317. Chapman, George, quoted, 55. Chastity, the flowering of man, 342. Chaucer, Geoffrey, quoted, 331. Chickadees, coming of the, 426. Chief end of man, 15. Christianity, adopted as an im proved method of «crn-culture, 61. Circulating library, 105. Civilization not all a success, 51. Classics, a study of the, 158-160; must be read in t h e original, 163. Clothing, a necessary of life, 22; not always procured for true aitility, 36 ; new and old, 39. Cook-(‘rowing, the charms of, 100- 201. Codman place, the, 401. Cold Friday, dating from, 304. Collins, James, Irishman whose shanty T. bought, 00. ComiiLerce, in praise of, lSG-102. Cominonsense, the sense of men asleep, 501. Compost, better part of man soon ploughed into soil for, 11. CoKCLUsioN, 403-514. Concord (Mass.), Walden Pond in, 7 ; traveled a good deal in, 0 ; Che farmers of, 53; house surpassing the luxury of, 79 ; little fresh meal and corn sold in, 101 ; Battle-Ground, 136 ; effect of a fire bell on people living near, 147 ; culture, 167 ; wiser men than produced by soil of, 169 ; hired man of, 170 ; liberal education in, 171; “ its soothing sound i s -----180 ; sign of a trader in, 189 ; bells of, 192 ; two-colored waters of, 275; Walden bequeathed to, 303 ; ffglit of ants, 358 ; I). In graham, Esq., of, 307 ; “'to the rescue,” 401; 408 ; 431. Concord River, 304; 308, 309. Confucius, quoted, 20; 211. Cooperation, difficulties of, 114. Cost, the amount of life ex changed for a thing, 5; of house, items of, 70 ; of food for eight months, 94 ; total, of liv ing, 96; bean-field, 253. 'Cowper, William, quoted, 130. Cummings, slave of Squire, 399. Damodara, quoted, 138. Darwin, Charles R , quoted, 22. Davenant, Sir Wm., G o jid ib e r t quoted, 402. Day, deliberately, like nature, spending one, 153. Debt, getting in and out of, 13. Desperation, mass of men lead lives of quiet, 15. Dialogue between Hermit and Poet, 347-350. D ig b y , SirKenelm, quoted, 253. Discontented, speaking mainly to the, 28. Divinity in man! Look at the teamster, 14. Dog in the woods, a village Bose, 361. Doing-good, a crowded profes sion, 116. Drummond of Hawthornden, William, quoted, 308. Ducks on Walden Pond, 368. Dug-out houses of American col onists, 63, 64. Dwelling-house, what not to make it, 47. E conomy, 7-127. Education, tuition bills pay for the least valuable part of, 81. Egotism in wu-iters, 8. Eloquence a transient thing, 160. Elysian life, summer makes pos sible, 24. England, last news from, 149. Epidermis, our outside clothec, 40. Epitome of the year, the day, 4G4. Etesian winds, news simmers through men like, 262. I N DE X . 517 Evelyn, John, quoted, 18; 252. Expenses, see Cost; farm, 88; outj ô and income, bean-field, 2.33, 254. Ex|)loration of one’s self, 494- 497. E x t r a V a g a n c e ! depends on how you are yarded, 500. Face, imaginary formation by thawing of the, 474- Factory system, not best mode of supplying clothing, 43. Fair Haven, huckleberries on hill, 209, 271 ; 290 ; 308 ; 317 ; 385; 421; 430; Ledges, 432; 401; late ice on pond, 408. Farm, the Hollowell, 131; a model, 308. Farmer, John, reflections of, 345. Fariner, visits from a long-head ed, 413. _ Farmers, interesting in propor tion as they are poor, 308. Fashion, worship of, 42. Fate, what a man thinks of him self, his, 15. Father tongue, written language our, 159. Fenda, wife of “ Sippio Brister,” 399. Field, John, an Irishman, story of, 318. Fine art, no place for a work of, 01, G2. Fire, purification by, 108; “ my housekeeper,” 392; man and, 393; an alarm of, 401. Fishes, schools of, in Walden Pond, 297 ; of thought, 417. Fishing, witli silent man, 272; at night, 274 ; alone detains citi zens at Walden Pond, 332 ; im possible to T. without loss of self-respect, 333; in winter, 438. Fitchburg (Mass.), going to, 85 ; Railroad, 180. Flint’s Pond, 284; or Sandy, in Lincoln, 304-308 ; 314 ; covered with snow, like Baffin’s Bay, 418; 401. Food, a necessary of life, 21 ; the fuel of man’s body, 23 ; general consideration of, 87-104; objec tions to animal, 334; desirabil ity of simple, 335-340. F ormer I n habitants and W in ter V isito r s , 39(>-4l8. Fox, shooting a, 430. Foxes uLitsi in habit house in (;old weather, 37G; finishes house with {>1 is- tering, 380; surveys Walden Pond. 441; h“ives WaMeu, Sept.'O, 1847, 402. Thoughts, sell your clothes and keep yoiu‘, 50G. Thseng-tse«., quoted, 339. Tierra del Fuego, inhabitants un able to stand artificial heat, 20. Time, but a stream to fish in, 155. Tintimiabulum from without, the noise of contetnporaries, 507. Tools, men the tools of their, ('•!. Trees, visits to particular, 315. Truth, to be preferred to all things, 510. Turtle-dove, long ago lost hound, bay horse, and, 29. Varro, Marcus Terentius, (luoted, 258. Vedas, the, quoted, 141; and Zendavestas, 1G4 ; quoted, 339. Vegetable-made bones, oxen with, 17. V il l a g e , T h e , 261-270. Village, should play part of a nobleman as patron of art, 171-173; a great news-room, 2G2 ; running the gauntlet in the, 2G3. Vislmn Parana, the, quoted, 418. V isito r s , 218-240. Vivid Lake as a name for White Pond, 300. Wacliito River, 148. Walden, road, townsman on, 2 0 9 ; vale, giving notice, by smoke, to inhabitants of, 391 ; snow in roads of, 413; vale, making amends for silence, to, 414. Walden Pond, house on the shore of, 7 ; purpose in living by. to transact private business, 33; advantages of, as a place of business, 35; March, 1845, went to woods by, GG ; of their own natures, fisliing in the, 204; no more lonely tlian, 214: old settler who dug. 215; bottom less as, 235 ; scenery of, 275- 304; origin of paving of, 285; temperature of water in, 287 ; animals in, 288-290 ; purity of, 302; fishing alone detains citi- zeuis at, 332; ducks on, 3G8; first ice on, 382: dates of first freezing over, 380 ; 408 ; bare of snow, 420; fox on tliin ice of, 428 ; 429; pickerel of, 439; surveying and sounding, 441- 452; cutting ice on, 452-4G0; breaking up of ice in, 4G0-4G7 ; dates of complete opening, 4G7. Walden Woods, geese alighting in, 385 ; Cato Ingraham living I N D E X . in, 398; Zilpha living in, 398; Hugh Quoil living in, 405 ; owls hooting the l in g u a v e r n a c u la of, 420; 429. Waldenses, pickerel, 440. Wasps, visits from, 372. Water, colors of, 270-278 ; trans parency of, 278-281. Wayland (Mass.), 244. Weeds, destruction of various, 251. “ Welcome, Englishmen ! ” 240. Well-Meadow, 430. West Indian provinces of the fancy and imagination, 15. Weston (Mass.), 431. “ W hat’s the railroad to me ? ” verse, 192. W h er e I L iv e d , and W h a t I L iv e d F or , 1 2 ^1 5 5 . Whippoorwills, singing of, 194. White Pond, 280 ; 284 ; 308-313; plan of, 447. Wigwam, in Indian gazettes, symbol of a day’s march, 45. Winslow, Edward, quoted, 222. W in t e r A nim als, 419-435. W in t er V isito rs, F ormer I n h ab itan ts , AND, 390-4,18. Wood, gathering, 38G; relative value, in different places, of, 389. Woodchuck, eating a, 95. Wood-pile, the, 390. Woods, turning face to the, 33. Work, exaggerated importance of our, 20. Wyman, the potter, 404. Yellow-Pine Lake, why suggested as a name for White Pond, 309. Young, Arthur, 89. Youth and age, IG. Zendavestas, Vedas and, 164. Zilpha, a colored woman, 398. Zoroaster, let the hired man commune with, 170.

Walden, or Life in the Woods

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