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Title: Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience

Author: Henry David Thoreau

Release date: January 1, 1995 [eBook #205]
Most recently updated: February 20, 2026

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WALDEN, AND
ON THE DUTY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE ***

WA L D E N

and
ON THE DUTY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

by Henry David Thoreau

Contents

WALDEN

Economy
Where I Lived, and What I Lived For
Reading
Sounds
Solitude
Visitors
The Bean-Field
The Village
The Ponds
Baker Farm
Higher Laws
Brute Neighbors
House-Warming
Former Inhabitants and Winter Visitors
Winter Animals
The Pond in Winter
Spring
Conclusion

ON THE DUTY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

"I 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."

WALDEN

Economy

When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived
alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built
myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and
earned my living by the labor of my hands only. I lived there two years and
two months. At present I am a sojourner in civilized life again.
I should not obtrude my affairs so much on the notice of my readers if
very particular 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
natural and pertinent. Some have asked what I got to eat; if I did not feel
lonesome; if I was not afraid; and the like. Others have been curious to
learn what portion of my income I devoted to charitable purposes; and
some, who have large families, how many poor children I maintained. I will
therefore ask those of my readers who feel no particular interest in me to
pardon me if I undertake to answer some of these questions in this book. In
most books, the I, or first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained; that,
in respect to egotism, is the main difference. We commonly do not
remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking. I
should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I
knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness
of my experience. Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first or
last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he
has heard of other men’s lives; some such account as he would send to his
kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, it must have been
in a distant land to me. Perhaps these pages are more particularly addressed
to poor students. As for the rest of my readers, they will accept such
portions as apply to them. I trust that none will stretch the seams in putting
on the coat, for it may do good service to him whom it fits.

I would fain say something, not so much concerning the Chinese and
Sandwich Islanders as you who read these pages, who are said to live in
New England; something about your condition, especially your outward
condition or circumstances in this world, in this town, what it is, whether it
is necessary that it be as bad as it is, whether it cannot be improved as well
as not. I have travelled a good deal in 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 Brahmins
sitting exposed to four fires and looking in the face of the sun; or hanging
suspended, with their heads downward, over flames; or looking at the
heavens over their shoulders “until it becomes impossible for them to
resume their natural position, while from the twist of the neck nothing but
liquids can pass into 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 of pillars,—even these
forms of conscious penance are hardly more incredible and astonishing than
the scenes which I daily witness. 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
Iolas to burn with a hot iron the root of the hydra’s head, but as soon as one
head is crushed, two spring up.
I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited
farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily
acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture
and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what
field they were called to labor in. Who made them serfs of the soil? Why
should they eat their sixty acres, when man is condemned to eat only his
peck of dirt? Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they
are born? They have got to live a man’s life, pushing all these things before
them, and get on as well as they can. How many a poor immortal soul have
I met well nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the
road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean
stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing,
pasture, and wood-lot! The portionless, who struggle with no such
unnecessary inherited encumbrances, find it labor enough to subdue and
cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh.

But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon plowed
into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity,
they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which
moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool’s
life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before. It is said
that Deucalion and Pyrrha created men by throwing stones over their heads
behind them:—
Inde genus durum sumus, experiensque laborum,
Et documenta damus quâ 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.”

So much for a blind obedience to a blundering oracle, throwing the stones
over their heads behind them, and not seeing where they fell.
Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere
ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and
superfluously coarse 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 relations to men; his
labor would be depreciated in the market. He has no time to be anything but
a machine. How can he remember well his ignorance—which his growth
requires—who has so often to use his knowledge? We should feed and
clothe him gratuitously sometimes, and recruit him with our cordials, before
we judge of him. The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits,
can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat
ourselves nor one another thus tenderly.
Some of you, we all know, are poor, find it hard to live, are sometimes, as
it were, gasping for breath. I have no doubt that some of you who read this
book are unable to pay for all the dinners which you have actually eaten, or
for the coats and shoes which are fast wearing or are already worn out, and
have come to this page to spend borrowed or stolen time, robbing your
creditors of an hour. It is very evident what mean and sneaking lives many
of you live, for my sight has been whetted by experience; always on the
limits, trying to get into business and trying to get out of debt, a very

ancient slough, called by the Latins æs 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 pay, tomorrow, and
dying today, insolvent; seeking to curry favor, to get custom, by how many
modes, only not state-prison offences; lying, flattering, voting, contracting
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 yourselves sick, that you may lay up something
against a sick day, something to be tucked away in an old chest, or in a
stocking behind the plastering, or, more safely, in the brick bank; no matter
where, no matter how much or how little.
I sometimes wonder that we can be so frivolous, I may almost say, as to
attend to the gross but somewhat foreign form of servitude called Negro
Slavery, there are so many keen and subtle masters that enslave both north
and south. It is hard to have a southern overseer; it is worse to have a
northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself.
Talk of a divinity in man! Look at the teamster on the highway, wending to
market by day or night; does any divinity stir within him? His highest duty
to fodder and water his horses! What is his destiny to him compared with
the shipping interests? Does not he drive for Squire Make-a-stir? How
godlike, how immortal, is he? See how he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely
all the day he fears, not being immortal nor divine, but the slave and
prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a fame won by his own deeds.
Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion.
What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather
indicates, his fate. Self-emancipation even in the West Indian provinces of
the fancy and imagination,—what Wilberforce is there to bring that about?
Think, also, of the ladies of the land weaving toilet cushions against the last
day, not to betray too green an interest in their fates! As if you could kill
time without injuring eternity.
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called
resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into
the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of
minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed
even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is

no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of
wisdom not to do desperate things.
When we consider what, to use the words of the catechism, is the chief
end of man, and what are the true necessaries and means of life, it appears
as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode of living because they
preferred it to any other. Yet they honestly think there is no choice left. But
alert and healthy natures remember that the sun rose clear. It is never too
late to give up our prejudices. No way of thinking or doing, however
ancient, can be trusted without proof. What 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 people say you cannot do you try
and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new. Old
people did not know enough once, perchance, to fetch fresh fuel to keep the
fire a-going; new people put a little dry wood under a pot, and are whirled
round the globe with the speed of birds, in a way to kill old people, as the
phrase is. Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as
youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost. One may almost doubt if
the wisest man has learned any thing of absolute value by living.
Practically, the old have no very important advice to give the young, their
own experience has been so partial, and their lives have been such
miserable failures, for private reasons, as they must believe; and it may be
that they have some faith left which belies that experience, and they are
only less young than they were. I have lived some thirty years on this
planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest
advice from my seniors. They have told me nothing, and probably cannot
tell me any thing to the purpose. Here is life, an experiment to a great extent
untried by me; but it does not avail me that they have tried it. If I have any
experience which I think valuable, I am sure to reflect that this my Mentors
said nothing about.
One farmer says to me, “You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it
furnishes nothing to make bones with;” and so he religiously devotes a part
of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones; walking
all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones,
jerk him and his lumbering plough along in spite of every obstacle. Some
things are really necessaries of life in some circles, the most helpless and

diseased, which in others are luxuries merely, and in others still are entirely
unknown.
The whole ground of human life seems to some to have been gone over
by their predecessors, both the heights and the valleys, and all things to
have been cared for. According to Evelyn, “the wise Solomon prescribed
ordinances for the very distances of trees; and the Roman prætors have
decided how often you may go into your neighbor’s land to gather the
acorns which fall on it without trespass, and what share belongs to that
neighbor.” Hippocrates has even left directions how we should cut our
nails; that is, even with the ends of the fingers, neither shorter nor longer.
Undoubtedly the very tedium and ennui which presume to have exhausted
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 what he can do by any
precedents, so little has been tried. Whatever have been thy failures
hitherto, “be not afflicted, my child, for who shall assign to thee what thou
hast left undone?”
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 some mistakes.
This was not the light in which I hoed them. The stars are the apexes of
what wonderful triangles! What distant and different beings in the various
mansions of the universe are contemplating the same one at the same
moment! Nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions.
Who shall say what prospect life offers to another? Could a greater miracle
take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant? We
should live in all the ages of the world in an hour; ay, in all the worlds of
the ages. History, Poetry, Mythology!—I know of no reading of another’s
experience so startling and informing as this would be.
The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to
be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior.
What demon possessed me 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 irresistible voice which invites me away from
all that. One generation abandons the enterprises of another like stranded
vessels.

I think that we may safely trust a good deal more than we do. We may
waive just so much care of ourselves as we honestly bestow elsewhere.
Nature is as well adapted to our weakness as to our strength. The incessant
anxiety and strain of some is a well nigh incurable form of disease. We are
made to exaggerate the importance of what work we do; and yet how much
is not done by us! or, what if we had been taken sick? How vigilant we are!
determined not to live by faith if we can avoid it; all the day long on the
alert, at night we unwillingly say our prayers and commit ourselves to
uncertainties. 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 contemplate; 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 one man has reduced a fact of the imagination to be a
fact to his understanding, I foresee that all men at length establish their lives
on that basis.

Let us consider for a moment what most of the trouble and anxiety which
I have referred to is about, and how much it is necessary that we be
troubled, or, at least, careful. It would be some advantage to live a primitive
and frontier life, though in the midst of an outward civilization, if only to
learn what are the gross necessaries of life and what methods have been
taken to obtain them; or even to look over the old day-books of the
merchants, to see what it was that men most commonly bought at the stores,
what they stored, that is, what are the grossest groceries. For the
improvements of ages have had but little influence on the essential laws of
man’s existence; as our skeletons, probably, are not to be distinguished from
those of our ancestors.
By the words, necessary of life, I mean whatever, of all that man obtains
by his own exertions, has been from the first, or from long use has become,
so important to human life that few, if any, whether from savageness, or
poverty, or philosophy, ever attempt to do without it. To many creatures
there is in this sense but one necessary of life, Food. To the bison of the
prairie it is a few inches of palatable grass, with water to drink; unless he
seeks the Shelter of the forest or the mountain’s shadow. None of the brute

creation requires more than Food and Shelter. The necessaries of life for
man in this climate may, accurately enough, be distributed under the several
heads of Food, Shelter, Clothing, and Fuel; for not till we have secured
these are we prepared to entertain the true problems of life with freedom
and a prospect of success. Man has invented, not only houses, but clothes
and cooked food; and possibly from the accidental discovery of the warmth
of fire, and the consequent use of it, at first a luxury, arose the present
necessity to sit by it. We observe cats and dogs acquiring the same second
nature. By proper Shelter and Clothing we legitimately retain our own
internal heat; but with an excess of these, or of Fuel, that is, with an
external heat greater than our own internal, may not cookery properly be
said to begin? Darwin, the naturalist, says of the inhabitants of Tierra del
Fuego, that while his own party, who were well clothed and sitting close to
a fire, were far from too warm, these naked savages, who were farther off,
were observed, to his great surprise, “to be streaming with perspiration at
undergoing such a roasting.” So, we are told, the New Hollander goes
naked with impunity, while the European shivers in his clothes. Is it
impossible to combine the hardiness of these savages with the
intellectualness of the civilized man? According to Liebig, man’s body is a
stove, and food the fuel which keeps up the internal combustion in the
lungs. In cold weather we eat more, in warm less. The animal heat is the
result of a slow combustion, and disease and death take place when this is
too rapid; or for want of fuel, or from some defect in the draught, the fire
goes out. Of course the vital heat is not to be confounded with fire; but so
much for analogy. It appears, therefore, from the above list, that the
expression, animal life, is nearly synonymous with the expression, animal
heat; for while Food may be regarded as the Fuel which keeps up the fire
within us,—and Fuel serves only to prepare that Food or to increase the
warmth of our bodies by addition from without,—Shelter and Clothing also
serve only to retain the heat thus generated and absorbed.
The grand necessity, then, for our bodies, is to keep warm, to keep the
vital heat in us. What pains we accordingly take, not only with our Food,
and Clothing, and Shelter, but with our beds, which are our night-clothes,
robbing the nests and breasts of birds to prepare this shelter within a shelter,
as the mole has its bed of grass and leaves at the end of its burrow! The
poor man is wont to complain that this is a cold world; and to cold, no less
physical than social, we refer directly a great part of our ails. The summer,

in some climates, makes possible to man a sort of Elysian life. Fuel, except
to cook his Food, is then unnecessary; the sun is his fire, and many of the
fruits are sufficiently cooked by its rays; while Food generally is more
various, and more easily obtained, and Clothing and Shelter are wholly or
half unnecessary. At the present day, and in this country, as I find by my
own experience, a few implements, a knife, an axe, a spade, a wheelbarrow,
&c., and for the studious, lamplight, stationery, and access to a few books,
rank next to necessaries, and can all be obtained at a trifling cost. Yet some,
not wise, go to the other side of the globe, to barbarous and unhealthy
regions, and devote themselves to trade for ten or twenty years, in order that
they may live,—that is, keep comfortably warm,—and die in New England
at last. The luxuriously rich are not simply kept comfortably warm, but
unnaturally hot; as I implied before, they are cooked, of course à la mode.
Most of the luxuries, and many of the so called comforts of life, are not
only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.
With respect to luxuries and comforts, the wisest have ever lived a more
simple and meagre life than the poor. The ancient philosophers, Chinese,
Hindoo, Persian, and Greek, were a class than which none has been poorer
in outward riches, none so rich in inward. We know not much about them. It
is remarkable that we know so much of them as we do. The same is true of
the more modern reformers and benefactors of their race. None can be an
impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of
what we should call voluntary poverty. Of a life of luxury the fruit is luxury,
whether in agriculture, or commerce, or literature, or art. There are
nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable
to profess because it was once admirable to live. To be a philosopher is not
merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love
wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity,
independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems
of life, not only theoretically, but practically. The success of great scholars
and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly.
They make shift to live merely by conformity, practically as their fathers
did, and are in no sense the progenitors of a nobler race of men. But why do
men degenerate ever? What 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 philosopher is in advance of his age even in
the outward form of his life. He is not fed, sheltered, clothed, warmed, like

his contemporaries. How can a man be a philosopher and not maintain his
vital heat by better methods than other men?
When a man is warmed by the several modes which I have described,
what does he want next? Surely not more warmth of the same kind, as more
and richer food, larger and more splendid houses, finer and more abundant
clothing, more numerous incessant and hotter fires, and the like. When he
has obtained those things which are necessary to life, there is another
alternative than to obtain the superfluities; and that is, to adventure on life
now, his vacation from humbler toil having commenced. The soil, it
appears, is suited to the seed, for it has sent its 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 he may rise in the same proportion
into the heavens above?—for the nobler plants are valued for the fruit they
bear at last in the air and light, far from the ground, and are not treated like
the humbler esculents, which, though they may be biennials, are cultivated
only till they have perfected 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 prescribe rules to strong and valiant natures, who will
mind their own affairs whether in heaven or hell, and perchance build more
magnificently and spend more lavishly than the richest, without ever
impoverishing themselves, not knowing how they live,—if, indeed, there
are any such, as has been dreamed; nor to those who find their
encouragement and inspiration in precisely the present condition of things,
and cherish it with the fondness and enthusiasm of lovers,—and, to some
extent, I reckon myself in this number; I do not speak to those who are well
employed, in whatever circumstances, and they know whether they are well
employed or not;—but mainly to the mass of men who are discontented,
and idly complaining of the hardness of their lot or of the times, when they
might improve them. There are some who complain most energetically and
inconsolably of any, because they are, as they say, doing their duty. I also
have in my mind that seemingly wealthy, but most terribly impoverished
class of all, who have accumulated dross, but know not how to use it, or get
rid of it, and thus have forged their own golden or silver fetters.

If I should attempt to tell how I have desired to spend my life in years
past, it would probably surprise those of my readers who are somewhat

acquainted with its actual history; it would certainly astonish those who
know nothing about it. I will only hint at some of the enterprises which I
have cherished.
In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to
improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the
meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present
moment; to toe that line. You will pardon some obscurities, for there are
more secrets in my trade than in most men’s, and yet not voluntarily kept,
but inseparable from its very nature. I would gladly tell all that I know
about it, and never paint “No Admittance” on my gate.
I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still on
their trail. Many are the travellers I have spoken concerning them,
describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met one or
two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the
dove disappear behind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious to recover them
as if they had lost them themselves.
To anticipate, not the sunrise and the dawn merely, but, if possible,
Nature herself! How many mornings, summer and winter, before yet any
neighbor was stirring about his business, have I been about mine! No doubt,
many of my townsmen have met me returning from this enterprise, farmers
starting for Boston in the twilight, or woodchoppers going to their work. It
is true, I never assisted the sun materially in his rising, but, doubt not, it was
of the last importance only to be present at it.
So many autumn, ay, and winter days, spent outside the town, trying to
hear what was in the wind, to hear and carry it express! I well-nigh sunk all
my capital in it, and lost my own breath into the bargain, running in the face
of it. If it had concerned either of the political parties, depend upon it, it
would have appeared in the Gazette with the earliest intelligence. At other
times watching from the observatory of some cliff or tree, to telegraph any
new arrival; or waiting at evening on the 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 journal, of no very wide circulation,
whose editor has never yet seen fit to print the bulk of my contributions,
and, as is too common with writers, I got only my labor for my pains.
However, in this case my pains were their own reward.

For many years I was self-appointed inspector of 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 a moderate allowance. My accounts, which I
can swear to have kept faithfully, I have, indeed, never got audited, still less
accepted, still less paid and settled. However, I have not set my heart on
that.
Not long since, a strolling Indian went to sell baskets at the house of a
well-known lawyer in my neighborhood. “Do you wish to buy any
baskets?” he asked. “No, we do not want any,” was the reply. “What!”
exclaimed the Indian as he went out the gate, “do you mean to starve us?”
Having seen his industrious white neighbors so well off,—that the lawyer
had only to weave arguments, and by some magic, wealth and standing
followed, he had said to himself; I will go into business; I will weave
baskets; it is a thing which I can do. Thinking that when he had made the
baskets he would have done his part, and then it would be the white man’s
to buy them. He had not discovered that it was necessary for him to make it
worth the 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 buy them. Yet not the less, in my case, did I think
it worth my while to weave them, and instead of studying how to make it
worth men’s while to buy my baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the
necessity of selling them. The life which men praise and regard as

successful is but one kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the
expense of the others?
Finding that my fellow-citizens were not likely to offer me any room in
the court house, or any curacy or living any where else, but I must shift for
myself, I turned my face more exclusively than ever to the woods, where I
was better known. I determined to go into business at once, and not wait to
acquire the usual capital, using such slender means as I had already got. My
purpose in going to Walden Pond was not to live cheaply nor to live dearly
there, but to transact some private business with the fewest obstacles; to be
hindered from accomplishing which for want of a little common sense, a
little enterprise and business talent, appeared not so sad as foolish.
I have always endeavored to acquire strict business habits; they are
indispensable to every man. If your trade is with the Celestial Empire, then
some small counting house on the coast, in some Salem harbor, will be
fixture enough. You will export such articles as the country affords, purely
native products, much ice and pine timber and a little granite, always in
native bottoms. These will be good ventures. To oversee all the details
yourself in person; to be at once pilot and captain, and owner and
underwriter; to buy and sell and keep the accounts; to read every letter
received, and write or read every letter sent; to superintend the discharge of
imports night and day; to be upon many parts of the coast almost at the
same time;—often the richest freight will be discharged upon a Jersey
shore;—to be your own telegraph, unweariedly 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 every where, and anticipate the tendencies of trade and civilization,—
taking advantage of the results of all exploring expeditions, using new
passages and all improvements in navigation;—charts to be studied, the
position of reefs and new lights and buoys to be ascertained, and ever, and
ever, the logarithmic tables to be corrected, for by the error of some
calculator the vessel often splits upon a rock that should have reached a
friendly pier,—there is the untold fate of La 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 Phœnicians down to
our day; in fine, account of stock to be taken from time to time, to know
how you stand. It is a labor to task the faculties of a man,—such problems

of profit and loss, of interest, of 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 port and a good
foundation. No Neva marshes to be filled; though you must every where
build on piles of your own driving. It is said that a flood-tide, with a
westerly wind, and ice in the Neva, would sweep St. Petersburg from the
face of the earth.

As this business was to be entered into without the usual capital, it may
not be easy to conjecture where those means, that will still be indispensable
to every such undertaking, were to be obtained. As for Clothing, to come at
once to the practical part of the question, perhaps we are led oftener by the
love of novelty, and a regard for the opinions of men, in procuring it, than
by a true utility. Let him who has work to do recollect that the object of
clothing is, first, to retain the vital heat, and secondly, in this state of
society, to cover nakedness, and he may judge how much of any necessary
or important work may be accomplished without adding to his wardrobe.
Kings and queens who wear a suit but once, though made by some tailor or
dressmaker to their majesties, cannot know the comfort of wearing a suit
that fits. They are no better than wooden horses to hang the clean clothes
on. Every day our garments become more assimilated to ourselves,
receiving the impress of the wearer’s character, until we hesitate to lay them
aside, without such delay and medical appliances and some such solemnity
even as our bodies. No man ever stood the lower in my estimation for
having a patch in his clothes; yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety,
commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes,
than to have a sound conscience. But even if the rent is not mended,
perhaps the worst vice betrayed is improvidence. I sometimes try my
acquaintances by such tests as this;—who could wear a patch, or two extra
seams only, over the knee? Most behave as if they believed that their
prospects for life would be ruined if they should do it. It would be easier for
them to hobble to town with a broken leg than with a broken pantaloon.
Often if an accident happens to a gentleman’s legs, they can be mended; but
if a similar accident happens to the legs of his pantaloons, there is no help

for it; for he considers, not what is truly respectable, but what is respected.
We know but few men, a great many coats and breeches. 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. He was only a little more
weather-beaten than when I saw him last. I have heard of a dog that barked
at every stranger who approached his master’s premises with clothes on, but
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 her
adventurous travels round the world, from east to west, had got so near
home as Asiatic Russia, she says that she felt the necessity of wearing other
than a travelling dress, when she went to meet the authorities, for she “was
now in a civilized country, 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 almost universal respect. But they yield such
respect, numerous as they are, are so far heathen, and need to have a
missionary sent to them. 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 something to do will not need to get a
new suit to do it in; for him the old will do, that has lain dusty in the garret
for an indeterminate period. Old shoes will serve a hero longer than they
have served his valet,—if a hero ever has a valet,—bare feet are older than
shoes, and he can make them do. Only they who go to soirées 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 enterprises that require new clothes,
and not rather a new wearer of clothes. If there is not a new man, how can
the new clothes be made to fit? If you have any enterprise before you, try it
in your old clothes. All men want, not something to do with, but something
to do, or rather something to be. Perhaps we should never procure a new

suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted, so
enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel like new men in the old, and
that to retain it would be like keeping new wine in old bottles. Our moulting
season, like that of the fowls, must be a crisis in our lives. The loon retires
to solitary ponds to spend it. Thus also the snake casts its slough, and the
caterpillar its wormy coat, by an internal industry and expansion; for
clothes are but our outmost cuticle and mortal coil. Otherwise we shall be
found sailing under false colors, and be inevitably cashiered at last by our
own opinion, as well as that of mankind.
We don garment after garment, as if we grew like exogenous plants by
addition without. Our outside and often thin and fanciful clothes are our
epidermis, or false skin, which partakes not of our life, and may be stripped
off here and there without fatal injury; our thicker garments, constantly
worn, are our cellular integument, or cortex; but our 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. It is desirable that a man be clad so simply that he can lay his
hands on himself in the dark, and that he live in all respects so compactly
and preparedly, that, if an enemy take the town, he can, like the old
philosopher, walk out the gate empty-handed without anxiety. While one
thick garment is, for most purposes, as good as three thin ones, and cheap
clothing can be obtained at prices really to suit customers; while a thick
coat can be bought for five dollars, which will last as many years, thick
pantaloons for two dollars, cowhide boots for a dollar and a half a pair, a
summer hat for a quarter of a dollar, and a winter cap for sixty-two and a
half cents, or a better be made at home at a nominal cost, where is he so
poor that, clad in such a suit, of his own earning, there will not be found
wise men to do him reverence?
When I ask for a garment of a particular form, my tailoress tells me
gravely, “They do not make them so now,” not emphasizing the “They” at
all, as if she quoted an authority as impersonal as the Fates, and I find it
difficult to get 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 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 are related to me, and what authority they
may have in an affair which affects me so nearly; and, finally, I am inclined

to answer her with equal mystery, and without any more emphasis of the
“they,”—“It is true, they did not make them so recently, but they do now.”
Of what use this measuring of me if she does not measure my character, but
only the breadth of my shoulders, as it were a peg to hang the coat on? We
worship not the Graces, nor the Parcæ, but Fashion. She spins and weaves
and cuts with full authority. The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveller’s
cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same. I sometimes despair of
getting anything quite simple and honest done in this world by the help of
men. They would have to be passed through a powerful press first, to
squeeze their old 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, and you would have lost your
labor. Nevertheless, we will not forget that some Egyptian wheat was
handed down to us by a mummy.
On the whole, 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 fashions, but
follows religiously the new. We are amused at beholding the costume of
Henry VIII., or Queen Elizabeth, as much as if it was that of the King and
Queen of the Cannibal Islands. All costume off a man is pitiful or
grotesque. It 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 fit 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 shaking and squinting through kaleidoscopes that they may
discover the particular figure which this generation requires today. The
manufacturers have learned that this taste is merely whimsical. Of two
patterns which differ only by a few threads more or less of a particular
color, the one will be sold readily, the other lie on the shelf, though it
frequently happens that after the lapse of a season the latter becomes the
most fashionable. Comparatively, tattooing is not the hideous custom which

it is called. It is not barbarous merely because the printing is skin-deep and
unalterable.
I cannot believe that our factory system is the best mode by which men
may get clothing. The condition of the operatives is becoming every day
more like that of the English; and it cannot be wondered at, since, as far as I
have heard or observed, the principal object is, not that mankind may be
well and honestly clad, but, unquestionably, that corporations may be
enriched. In the long run men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, though
they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high.

As for a Shelter, I will not deny that this is now a necessary of life,
though there are instances of men having done without it 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 puts over his head and shoulders, will
sleep night after night on the snow—in a degree of cold which would
extinguish the life of one exposed to it in any woollen clothing.” He had
seen them asleep thus. Yet he adds, “They are not hardier than other
people.” But, probably, man did not live long on the earth without
discovering the convenience which there is in a house, the domestic
comforts, which phrase may have originally signified the satisfactions of
the house more than of the family; though these must be extremely partial
and occasional in those climates where the house is associated in our
thoughts with winter or the rainy season chiefly, and two thirds of the year,
except for a parasol, is unnecessary. In our climate, in the summer, it was
formerly almost solely a covering at night. In the Indian gazettes a wigwam
was the symbol of a day’s march, and a row of them cut or painted on the
bark of a tree signified that so many times they had camped. Man was not
made so large limbed and robust but that he must seek to narrow his world,
and wall in a space such as fitted him. He was at first bare and out of doors;
but though this was pleasant enough in serene and warm weather, by
daylight, the rainy season and the winter, to say nothing of the torrid sun,
would perhaps have nipped his race in the bud if he had not made haste to
clothe himself with the shelter of a house. Adam and Eve, according to the
fable, wore the bower before other clothes. Man wanted a home, a place of
warmth, or comfort, first of physical warmth, then the warmth of the
affections.

We may imagine a time when, in the infancy of the human race, some
enterprising mortal crept into a hollow in a rock for shelter. Every child
begins the world again, to some extent, and loves to stay out doors, even in
wet and cold. It plays house, as well as horse, having an instinct for it. Who
does not remember the interest with which when young he looked at
shelving rocks, or any approach to a cave? It was the natural yearning of
that portion of our most primitive ancestor which still survived in us. From
the cave we have advanced to roofs of palm leaves, of bark and boughs, of
linen woven and stretched, of grass and straw, of boards and shingles, of
stones and tiles. At last, we know not what it is to live in the open air, and
our lives are domestic in more senses than we think. From the hearth to the
field is a great distance. It would be well perhaps if we were to spend more
of our days and nights without any obstruction between us and the celestial
bodies, if the poet did not speak so much from under a roof, or the saint
dwell there so long. Birds do not sing in caves, nor do doves cherish their
innocence in 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 splendid mausoleum instead. Consider first how slight a shelter is
absolutely necessary. I have seen Penobscot Indians, in this town, living in
tents of thin cotton cloth, while the snow was nearly a foot deep around
them, and I thought that they would be glad to have it deeper to keep out the
wind. Formerly, when how to get my living honestly, with freedom left for
my proper pursuits, was a question which vexed me even more than it does
now, for unfortunately I am become somewhat callous, I used to see a large
box by the railroad, six feet long by three wide, in which the laborers
locked up their tools at night, and it suggested to me that every man who
was hard pushed might get such a one for a dollar, and, having bored a few
auger holes in it, to admit the air at least, get into it when it rained and at
night, and hook down the lid, and so have freedom in his love, and in his
soul be free. This did not appear the worst, nor by any means a despicable
alternative. You could sit up as late as you pleased, and, whenever you got
up, go abroad without any landlord or house-lord dogging you for rent.
Many a man is harassed to death to pay the rent of a larger and more
luxurious box who would not have frozen to death in such a box as this. I
am far from jesting. Economy is a subject which admits of being treated

with levity, but it cannot so be disposed of. A comfortable house for a rude
and hardy race, that lived mostly out of doors, was once made here almost
entirely of such materials as Nature furnished ready to their hands. Gookin,
who was superintendent of the Indians 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 are covered with
mats which they make of a kind of bulrush, and are also indifferently tight
and warm, but not so good as the former.... Some I have seen, sixty or a
hundred feet long and thirty feet broad.... I have often lodged in their
wigwams, and found them as warm as the best English houses.” He adds,
that they were commonly carpeted and lined within with well-wrought
embroidered mats, and were furnished with various utensils. The Indians
had advanced so far as to regulate the effect of the wind by a mat suspended
over the hole in the roof and moved by a string. Such a lodge was in the
first instance constructed in a day or two at most, and taken down and put
up in a few hours; and every family owned one, or its apartment in one.
In the savage state every family owns a shelter as good as the best, and
sufficient for its coarser and simpler wants; but I think that I speak within
bounds when I say that, though the birds of the air have their nests, and the
foxes their holes, and the savages their wigwams, in modern civilized
society not more than one half the families own a shelter. In the large towns
and cities, where civilization especially prevails, the number of those who
own a shelter is a very small fraction of the whole. The rest pay an annual
tax for this outside garment of all, become indispensable summer and
winter, which would buy a village of Indian wigwams, but now helps to
keep them poor as long as they live. I do not mean to insist here on the
disadvantage of hiring compared with owning, but it is evident that the
savage owns his shelter because it costs so little, while the civilized man
hires his commonly because he cannot afford to own it; nor can he, in the
long run, any better afford to hire. But, answers one, by merely paying this
tax the poor civilized man secures an abode which is a palace compared
with the savage’s. An annual rent of from twenty-five to a hundred dollars,
these are the country rates, entitles him to the benefit of the improvements
of centuries, spacious apartments, clean paint and paper, Rumford fireplace,
back plastering, Venetian blinds, copper pump, spring lock, a commodious

cellar, and many other things. But how happens it that he who is said to
enjoy these things is so commonly a poor 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 improve their advantages,—it must be shown that it has produced
better dwellings without making them more costly; and the cost of a thing is
the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it,
immediately or in the long run. An average house in this neighborhood
costs perhaps eight hundred dollars, and to lay up this sum will take from
ten to fifteen years of the laborer’s life, even if he is not encumbered with a
family;—estimating the pecuniary value of every man’s labor at one dollar
a day, for if some receive more, others receive less;—so that he must have
spent more than half his life commonly before his wigwam will be earned.
If we suppose him to pay a rent instead, this is but a doubtful choice of
evils. Would the savage have been wise to exchange his wigwam for a
palace on these terms?
It may be guessed that I reduce almost the whole advantage of holding
this superfluous property as a fund in store against the future, so far as the
individual is concerned, mainly to the defraying of funeral expenses. But
perhaps a man is not required to bury himself. Nevertheless this points to an
important distinction between the civilized man and the savage; and, no
doubt, they have designs on us for our benefit, in making the life of a
civilized people an institution, in which the life of the individual is to a
great extent absorbed, in order to preserve and perfect that of the race. But I
wish to show at what a sacrifice this advantage is at present obtained, and to
suggest that we may possibly so live as to secure all the advantage without
suffering any of the disadvantage. What mean ye by saying that the poor ye
have always with you, or that the fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the
children’s teeth are set on edge?
“As I live, saith the Lord God, ye shall not have occasion any more to use
this proverb in Israel.”
“Behold all souls are mine; as the soul of the father, so also the soul of
the son is mine: the soul that sinneth, it shall die.”
When I consider my neighbors, the farmers of Concord, who are at least
as well off as the other classes, I find that for the most part they have been
toiling twenty, thirty, or forty years, that they may become the real owners

of their farms, which commonly they have inherited with encumbrances, or
else bought with hired money,—and we may regard one third of that toil as
the cost of their houses,—but commonly they have not paid for them yet. It
is true, the encumbrances sometimes outweigh the value of the farm, so that
the farm itself becomes one great encumbrance, and still a man is found to
inherit it, being well acquainted with it, as he says. On applying to the
assessors, I am surprised to learn that they cannot at once name a dozen in
the town who own their farms free and clear. If you would know the history
of these homesteads, inquire at the bank where they are mortgaged. The
man who has actually paid for his farm with labor on it is so rare that every
neighbor can point to him. I doubt if there are three such men in Concord.
What has been said of the merchants, that a very large majority, even
ninety-seven in a hundred, are sure to fail, is equally true of the farmers.
With regard to the merchants, however, one of them says pertinently that a
great part of their failures are not genuine pecuniary failures, but merely
failures to fulfil their engagements, because it is inconvenient; that is, it is
the moral character that breaks down. But this puts an infinitely worse face
on the matter, and suggests, beside, that probably not even the other three
succeed in saving their souls, but are perchance bankrupt in a worse sense
than they who fail honestly. Bankruptcy and repudiation are the
springboards from which much of our civilization vaults and turns its
somersets, but the savage stands on the unelastic plank of famine. Yet the
Middlesex Cattle Show goes off here with éclat annually, as if all the joints
of the agricultural machine were suent.
The farmer is endeavoring to solve the problem of a livelihood by a
formula more complicated than the problem itself. To get his shoestrings he
speculates in herds of cattle. With consummate skill he has set his trap with
a hair spring to catch comfort and independence, and then, as he turned
away, got his own leg into it. This is the reason he is poor; and for a similar
reason we are all poor in respect to a thousand savage comforts, though
surrounded by luxuries. As Chapman sings,—
“The false society of men—
—for earthly greatness
All heavenly comforts rarefies to air.”

And when the farmer has got his house, he may not be the richer but the
poorer for it, and it be the house that has got him. As I understand it, that

was a valid objection urged by Momus against the house which Minerva
made, that she “had not made it movable, by which means a bad
neighborhood might be avoided;” and it may still be urged, for our houses
are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed
in them; and the bad neighborhood 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 outskirts and move
into the village, but have not been able to accomplish it, and only death will
set them free.
Granted that the majority are able at last either to own or hire the modern
house with all its improvements. While civilization has been improving our
houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them. It has
created palaces, but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings. And if
the civilized man’s pursuits are no worthier than the savage’s, if he is
employed the greater part of his life in obtaining gross necessaries and
comforts merely, why should he have a better dwelling than the former?
But how do the poor minority fare? Perhaps it will be found, that just in
proportion as some have been placed in outward circumstances above the
savage, others have been degraded below him. The luxury of one class is
counterbalanced by the indigence of another. On the one side is the palace,
on the other are the 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 decently buried themselves. The mason who finishes the cornice
of the palace returns at night perchance to a hut not so good as a wigwam. It
is a mistake to suppose that, in a country where the usual evidences of
civilization exist, the condition of a very large body of the inhabitants may
not be as degraded as that of savages. I refer to the degraded poor, not now
to the degraded rich. To know this I should not need to look farther than to
the shanties which every where border our railroads, that last improvement
in civilization; where I see in my daily walks human beings living in sties,
and all winter with an open door, for the sake of light, without any visible,
often imaginable, 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 checked. It
certainly is fair to look at that class by whose labor the works which
distinguish this generation are accomplished. Such too, to a greater or less
extent, is the condition of the operatives of every denomination in England,

which is the great workhouse of the world. Or I could refer you to Ireland,
which is marked as one of the white or enlightened spots on the map.
Contrast the physical condition of the Irish with that of the North American
Indian, or the South Sea Islander, or any other savage race before it was
degraded by contact with the civilized man. Yet I have no doubt that that
people’s rulers are as wise as the average of civilized rulers. Their condition
only proves what squalidness may consist with civilization. I hardly need
refer now to the laborers in our Southern States who produce the staple
exports of this country, and are themselves a staple production of the South.
But to confine myself to those who are said to be in moderate
circumstances.
Most men appear never to have considered what a house is, and are
actually though needlessly poor all their lives because they think that they
must have such a one as their neighbors have. As if one were to wear any
sort of coat which the tailor might cut out for him, or, gradually leaving off
palmleaf hat or cap of woodchuck skin, complain of hard times because he
could not afford to buy him a crown! It is possible to invent a house still
more convenient and luxurious than we have, which yet all would admit
that man could not afford to pay for. Shall we always study to obtain more
of these things, and not sometimes to be content with less? Shall the
respectable citizen thus gravely teach, by precept and example, the
necessity of the young man’s providing a certain number of superfluous
glow-shoes, and umbrellas, and empty guest chambers for empty guests,
before he dies? Why should not our furniture be as simple as the 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 singular allowance?
—that our furniture should be more complex than the Arab’s, in proportion
as we are morally and intellectually his superiors! At present our houses are
cluttered and defiled with it, and a good housewife would sweep out the
greater part into the dust hole, and not leave her morning’s work undone.
Morning work! By the blushes of Aurora and the music of Memnon, what
should be man’s morning work in this world? I had three pieces of
limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to be
dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and I
threw them out the window in disgust. How, then, could I have a furnished

house? I would rather sit in the open air, for no dust gathers on the grass,
unless where man has broken ground.
It is the luxurious and dissipated who set the fashions which the herd so
diligently follow. The traveller who stops at the best houses, so called, soon
discovers this, for the publicans presume him to be a Sardanapalus, and if
he resigned himself to their tender mercies he would soon be completely
emasculated. I think that in the railroad car we are inclined to spend more
on luxury than on safety and convenience, and it threatens without attaining
these to become no better than a modern drawing room, with its divans, and
ottomans, and sun-shades, and a hundred other oriental things, which we
are taking west with us, invented for the ladies of the harem and the
effeminate natives of the Celestial Empire, which Jonathan should be
ashamed to know the names of. I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it
all to myself than be crowded on a velvet cushion. I would rather ride on
earth in an ox cart with a free circulation, than go to heaven in the fancy car
of an excursion train and breathe a malaria all the way.
The very simplicity and nakedness of man’s life in the primitive ages
imply this advantage at least, that they left him still but a sojourner in
nature. When he was refreshed with food and sleep he contemplated his
journey again. He dwelt, as it were, in a tent in this world, and was either
threading the valleys, or crossing the plains, or climbing the mountain tops.
But lo! men have become the tools of their tools. The man who
independently plucked the fruits when he was hungry is become a farmer;
and he who stood under a tree for shelter, a housekeeper. We now no longer
camp as for a night, but have settled down on earth and forgotten heaven.
We have adopted Christianity merely as an improved method of agri-
culture. We 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 comfortable and that higher state to be forgotten. There is
actually no place in this village for a work of fine art, if any had come down
to us, to stand, for our lives, our houses and streets, furnish no proper
pedestal for it. There is not a nail to hang a picture on, nor a shelf to receive
the bust of a hero or a saint. When I consider how our houses are built and
paid for, or not paid for, and their internal economy managed and sustained,
I wonder that the floor does not give way under the visitor while he is
admiring the gewgaws upon the mantel-piece, and let him through into the

cellar, to some solid and honest though earthy foundation. I cannot but
perceive that this so called rich and refined life is a thing jumped at, and I
do not get on in the enjoyment of the fine arts which adorn it, my attention
being wholly occupied with the jump; for I remember that the greatest
genuine leap, due to human muscles alone, on record, is that of certain
wandering Arabs, who are said to have cleared twenty-five feet on level
ground. Without factitious support, man is sure to come to earth again
beyond that distance. The first question which I am tempted to put to the
proprietor of such great impropriety is, Who bolsters you? Are you one of
the ninety-seven who fail, or of the three who succeed? Answer me these
questions, and then perhaps I may look at your bawbles and find them
ornamental. The cart before the horse is neither beautiful nor useful. Before
we can adorn our houses with beautiful objects the walls must be stripped,
and our lives must be stripped, and beautiful housekeeping and beautiful
living be laid for a foundation: now, a taste for the beautiful is most
cultivated out of doors, where there is no house and no housekeeper.
Old Johnson, in his “Wonder-Working Providence,” speaking of the first
settlers of this town, with whom he was contemporary, tells us that “they
burrow themselves in the earth for their first shelter under some hillside,
and, casting the soil aloft upon timber, they make a smoky fire against the
earth, at the highest side.” They did not “provide them houses,” says he,
“till the earth, by the Lord’s blessing, brought forth bread to feed them,”
and the first year’s crop was so light that “they were forced to cut their
bread very thin for a long season.” The secretary of the Province of New
Netherland, writing in Dutch, in 1650, for the information of those who
wished to take up land there, states more particularly that “those in New
Netherland, and especially in New England, who have no means to build
farmhouses at first according to their wishes, dig a square pit in the ground,
cellar fashion, six or seven feet deep, as long and as broad as they think
proper, case the earth inside with wood all round the wall, and line the
wood with the bark of trees or something else to prevent the caving in of the
earth; floor this cellar with plank, and wainscot it overhead for a ceiling,
raise a roof of spars clear up, and cover the spars with bark or green sods,
so that they can live dry and warm in these houses with their entire families
for two, three, and four years, it being understood that partitions are run
through those cellars which are adapted to the size of the family. The
wealthy and principal men in New England, in the beginning of the

colonies, commenced their first dwelling houses in this fashion for two
reasons; firstly, in order not to waste time in building, and not to want food
the next season; secondly, in order not to discourage poor laboring people
whom they brought over in numbers from Fatherland. In the course of three
or four years, when the country became adapted to agriculture, they built
themselves handsome houses, spending on them several thousands.”
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 adapted to human culture, and we are still forced to cut
our spiritual bread far thinner than our forefathers did their wheaten. Not
that all architectural ornament is to be neglected even in the rudest periods;
but let our houses first be lined with beauty, where they come in contact
with our lives, like the tenement of the shellfish, and not overlaid with it.
But, alas! I have been inside one or two of them, and know what they are
lined with.
Though we are not so degenerate but that we might possibly live in a
cave or a wigwam or wear skins today, it certainly is better to accept the
advantages, though so dearly bought, which the invention and industry of
mankind offer. In such a neighborhood as this, boards and shingles, lime
and bricks, are cheaper and more easily obtained than suitable caves, or
whole logs, or bark in sufficient quantities, or even well-tempered clay or
flat stones. I speak understandingly on this subject, for I have made myself
acquainted with it both theoretically and practically. With a little more wit
we might use these materials so as to become richer than the richest now
are, and make our 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, I borrowed an axe and went down to the
woods by Walden Pond, nearest to where I intended to build my house, and
began to cut down some tall, 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 your fellow-men to have an interest in your
enterprise. The owner of the axe, as he released his hold on it, said that it
was the apple of his eye; but I returned it sharper than I received it. It was a

pleasant hillside where I worked, covered with pine woods, through which I
looked out on the pond, and a small open field in the woods where pines
and hickories were springing up. The ice in the pond was not yet dissolved,
though there were some open spaces, and it was all dark colored and
saturated with water. There were some slight flurries of snow during the
days that I worked there; but for the most part when I came out on to the
railroad, on my way home, its yellow sand heap stretched away gleaming in
the hazy atmosphere, and the rails shone in the spring sun, and I heard the
lark and pewee and other birds already come to commence another year
with us. They were pleasant spring days, in which the winter of man’s
discontent was thawing as well as the earth, and the life that had lain torpid
began to stretch itself. One day, when my axe had come off and I had cut a
green hickory for a wedge, driving it with a stone, and had placed the whole
to soak in a pond hole in order to swell the wood, I saw a striped snake run
into the water, and he lay on the bottom, apparently without inconvenience,
as long as I stayed there, or more than a quarter of an hour; perhaps because
he had not yet fairly come out of the torpid state. It appeared to me that for
a like reason men remain in their present low and primitive condition; but if
they should feel the influence of the spring of springs arousing them, they
would of necessity rise to a higher and more ethereal life. I had previously
seen the snakes in frosty mornings in my path with portions of their bodies
still numb and inflexible, waiting for the sun to thaw them. On the 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 groping about over the pond and
cackling as if lost, or like the spirit of the fog.
So I went on for some days cutting and hewing timber, and also studs and
rafters, all with my narrow axe, not having many communicable or scholar-
like thoughts, singing to myself,—
Men say they know many things;
But lo! they have taken wings,—
The arts and sciences,
And a thousand appliances;
The wind that blows
Is all that any body 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 sawed

ones. Each stick was carefully mortised or tenoned by its stump, for I had
borrowed other tools by this time. My days in the woods were not very long
ones; yet I usually carried my dinner of bread and butter, and read the
newspaper in which it was wrapped, at noon, sitting amid the green pine
boughs which I had cut off, and to my bread was imparted some of their
fragrance, for my hands were covered with a thick coat of pitch. Before I
had done I was more the friend than the foe of the pine tree, though I had
cut down some of them, having become better acquainted with it.
Sometimes a rambler in the wood was attracted by the sound of my axe, and
we chatted pleasantly over the chips which I had made.
By the middle of April, for I made no haste in my work, but rather made
the most of it, my house was framed and ready for the raising. I had already
bought the shanty of James Collins, an Irishman who worked on the
Fitchburg Railroad, for boards. James Collins’ shanty was considered an
uncommonly fine one. When I called to see it he was not at home. I walked
about the outside, at first unobserved from within, the window was so deep
and high. It was of small dimensions, with a peaked cottage roof, and not
much else to be seen, the dirt being raised five feet all around as if it were a
compost heap. The roof was the soundest part, though a good deal warped
and made brittle by the sun. Door-sill there was none, but a perennial
passage for the hens under the door board. Mrs. C. came to the door and
asked me to view it from the inside. The hens were driven in by my
approach. It 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 squares originally, only the cat had passed out that
way lately. There was a stove, a bed, and a place to sit, an infant in the
house where it was born, a silk parasol, gilt-framed looking-glass, and a
patent new coffee mill nailed to an oak sapling, all told. The bargain was
soon concluded, for James had in the meanwhile returned. I to pay four
dollars and twenty-five cents to-night, he to vacate at five to-morrow
morning, selling to nobody else meanwhile: I to take possession at six. It
were well, he said, to be there early, and anticipate certain indistinct but
wholly unjust claims on the score of ground rent and fuel. This he assured

me was the only encumbrance. At six I passed him and his family on the
road. One large bundle held their all,—bed, coffee-mill, looking-glass,
hens,—all but the cat, she took to the woods and became a wild cat, and, as
I learned afterward, trod in a trap set for woodchucks, and so became a dead
cat at last.
I took down this dwelling the same morning, drawing the nails, and
removed it to the pond side by small cartloads, spreading the boards on the
grass there to bleach and warp back again in the sun. One early thrush gave
me a note or two as I drove along the woodland path. I was informed
treacherously by a young Patrick that neighbor 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 look freshly up, unconcerned, with spring
thoughts, at the devastation; there being a dearth of work, as he said. He
was there to represent spectatordom, and help make this seemingly
insignificant event one with the removal of the gods of Troy.
I dug my cellar in the side of a hill sloping to the south, where a
woodchuck had formerly dug his burrow, down through sumach and
blackberry roots, and the lowest stain of vegetation, six feet square by seven
deep, to a fine sand where potatoes would not freeze in any winter. The
sides were left shelving, and not stoned; but the sun having never shone on
them, the sand still keeps its place. It was but two hours’ work. I took
particular pleasure in this breaking of ground, for in almost all latitudes men
dig into the earth for an equable temperature. Under the most splendid
house in the city is still to be found the cellar where they store their roots as
of old, and long after the superstructure has disappeared posterity remark its
dent in the earth. The house is still but a sort of porch at the entrance of a
burrow.
At length, in the beginning of May, with the help of some of my
acquaintances, rather to improve so good an occasion for neighborliness
than from any necessity, I set up 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
impervious to rain; but before boarding I laid the foundation of a chimney

at one end, bringing two cartloads of stones up the hill from the pond in my
arms. I built the chimney after my hoeing in the fall, before a fire became
necessary for warmth, doing my cooking in the mean while out of doors on
the ground, early in the morning: which mode I still think is in some
respects more convenient and agreeable than the usual one. When it
stormed before my bread was baked, I 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 employed, I read but little,
but the least scraps of paper which lay on the ground, my holder, or
tablecloth, afforded me as much entertainment, in fact answered the same
purpose as the Iliad.

It would be worth the while to build still more deliberately than I did,
considering, for instance, what foundation a door, a window, a cellar, a
garret, have in the nature of man, and perchance never raising any
superstructure until we found a better reason for it than our temporal
necessities even. There is some of the same fitness in a man’s building his
own house that there is in a bird’s building 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 universally developed, as birds universally sing when they are so
engaged? But alas! we do like cowbirds and cuckoos, which lay their eggs
in nests which other birds have built, and cheer no traveller with their
chattering and unmusical notes. Shall we forever resign the pleasure of
construction to the carpenter? What does architecture amount to in the
experience of the mass of men? I never in all my walks came across a man
engaged in so simple and natural an occupation as building his house. We
belong to the community. It is not the tailor alone who is the ninth part of a
man; it is as much the preacher, and the merchant, and the farmer. Where is
this division of labor to end? and what object does it finally serve? No
doubt another may also think for me; but it is not therefore desirable that he
should do so to the exclusion of my thinking for myself.
True, there are architects so called in this country, and I have heard of
one at least possessed with the idea of making architectural ornaments have
a core of truth, a necessity, and hence a beauty, as if it were a revelation to
him. All very well perhaps from his point of view, but only a little better

than the common dilettantism. A sentimental reformer in architecture, he
began at the cornice, not at the foundation. It was only how to put a core of
truth within the ornaments, that every 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 ornaments 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
inhabitants of Broadway their Trinity Church? But a man has no more to do
with the style of architecture of his house than a tortoise with that of its
shell: nor need the soldier be so idle as to try to paint the precise color of his
virtue on his standard. The enemy will find it out. He may turn pale when
the trial comes. This man seemed to me to lean over the cornice, and
timidly whisper his half truth to the rude occupants who really knew it
better than he. What of architectural beauty I now see, I know has gradually
grown from within outward, out of the necessities and character of the
indweller, who is the only builder,—out of some unconscious truthfulness,
and nobleness, without ever a thought for the appearance and 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
country, as the painter knows, are the most unpretending, humble log huts
and cottages of the poor commonly; it is the life of the inhabitants whose
shells they are, and not any peculiarity in their surfaces merely, which
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 architectural ornaments are literally hollow,
and a September gale would strip them off, like borrowed plumes, without
injury to the substantials. 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 belles-lettres and the beaux-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. It would signify somewhat,
if, in any earnest sense, he slanted them and daubed it; 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
“coffin-maker.” One man says, in his despair or indifference to life, take up
a handful of the earth at your feet, and paint your house that color. Is he
thinking of his last and narrow house? Toss up a copper for it as well. What
an abundance of leisure he must have! Why do you take up a handful of
dirt? Better paint your house your own complexion; let it turn pale or blush
for you. An enterprise to improve the style of cottage architecture! When
you have got my ornaments ready I will wear them.
Before winter I built a chimney, and shingled the sides of my house,
which were already impervious to rain, with imperfect and sappy shingles
made of the first slice of the log, whose edges I was obliged to straighten
with a plane.
I have thus a tight shingled and plastered house, ten feet wide by fifteen
long, 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 brick fireplace
opposite. The exact cost of my house, paying the usual price for such
materials as I used, but not counting the work, all of which was done by
myself, was as follows; and I give the details because very few are able to
tell exactly what their houses cost, and fewer still, if any, the separate cost
of the various materials which compose them:—
Boards.......................... $ 8.03½, mostly shanty
boards.
Refuse shingles for roof sides,.. 4.00
Laths,........................... 1.25
Two second-hand windows
with glass,................... 2.43
One thousand old brick,.......... 4.00
Two casks of lime,............... 2.40 That was high.
Hair,............................ 0.31 More than I
needed.
Mantle-tree iron,................ 0.15
Nails,........................... 3.90
Hinges and screws,............... 0.14
Latch,........................... 0.10
Chalk,........................... 0.01
Transportation,.................. 1.40 I carried a good
part
———— on my back.
In all,..................... $28.12½

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.
I thus found that the student who wishes for a shelter can obtain one for a
lifetime at an expense not greater than the rent which he now pays annually.
If I seem to boast more than is becoming, my excuse is that I brag for
humanity rather than for myself; and my shortcomings and inconsistencies
do not affect the truth of my statement. Notwithstanding much 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
system; and I am resolved that I will not through humility become the
devil’s attorney. I 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, because, forsooth, more would already have been acquired, but the
pecuniary expense of getting an education would in a great measure vanish.
Those conveniences which the student requires at Cambridge or elsewhere
cost him or somebody else 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 important item in the term bill, while for
the far more valuable education which he gets by associating with the most
cultivated of his contemporaries no charge is made. The mode of founding a
college is, commonly, to get up a subscription of dollars and cents, and then
following blindly the principles of a division of labor to its extreme, a
principle which should never be followed but with circumspection,—to call
in a contractor who makes this a subject of speculation, and he employs
Irishmen or other operatives actually to lay the foundations, while the
students that are to be are said to be fitting themselves for it; and for these

oversights successive generations have to pay. I think that it would be better
than this, for the students, or those who desire to be benefited by it, even to
lay the foundation themselves. The student who secures his coveted leisure
and retirement by systematically shirking any labor necessary to man
obtains but an ignoble and unprofitable leisure, defrauding himself of the
experience which alone can make leisure fruitful. “But,” says one, “you do
not mean that the students should go to work with their hands instead of
their heads?” I do not mean that exactly, but I mean something which he
might think a good deal like that; I mean that they should not play life, or
study it merely, while the community supports them at this expensive game,
but earnestly live it from beginning to end. How could youths better learn to
live than by at once trying the experiment of living? Methinks this would
exercise their minds as much as mathematics. If I wished a boy to know
something about the arts and sciences, for instance, I would not pursue the
common course, which is merely to send him into the neighborhood of
some professor, where any thing is professed and practised but the art of
life;—to survey the world through a telescope or a microscope, and never
with his natural eye; to study chemistry, and not learn how his bread is
made, or mechanics, and not learn how it is earned; to discover new
satellites to Neptune, and not detect the motes in his eyes, or to what
vagabond he is a satellite himself; or to be devoured by the monsters that
swarm all around him, while contemplating the monsters in a drop of
vinegar. Which would have advanced the most at the end of a month,—the
boy who had made his own jackknife from the ore which he had dug and
smelted, reading as much as would be necessary for this,—or the boy who
had attended the lectures on metallurgy at the Institute in the mean while,
and had received a Rodgers’ penknife from his father? Which would be
most likely to cut his fingers?... To my astonishment I was informed on
leaving college that I had studied navigation!—why, if I had taken one turn
down the harbor I should have known more about it. Even the poor student
studies and is taught only political economy, while that economy of living
which is synonymous with philosophy is not even sincerely professed in our
colleges. The consequence is, that while he is reading Adam Smith,
Ricardo, and Say, he runs his father in debt irretrievably.
As with our colleges, so with a hundred “modern improvements”; there is
an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance. The devil
goes on exacting compound interest to the last for his early share and

numerous succeeding investments in them. Our inventions are 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 at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great
haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and
Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. Either is in such
a predicament as the man who was earnest to be introduced to a
distinguished deaf woman, but when he was presented, and one end of her
ear trumpet was put into his hand, had nothing to say. As if the 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, flapping
American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.
After all, the man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the
most important messages; he is not an evangelist, nor does he come round
eating locusts and wild honey. I doubt if Flying Childers ever carried a peck
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 before night; I have
travelled at that rate by the week together. You will in the mean while have
earned your fare, and arrive there some time to-morrow, or possibly this
evening, if you are lucky enough to get a job in season. Instead of going to
Fitchburg, you will be working here the greater part of the day. And so, if
the railroad reached round the world, I think that I should keep ahead of
you; and as for seeing the country and getting experience of that kind, I
should have to cut your acquaintance altogether.
Such is the universal law, which no man can ever outwit, and with regard
to the railroad even we may say it is as broad as it is long. To make a
railroad round the world available to all mankind is equivalent to grading
the whole surface of the planet. Men have an indistinct notion that if they
keep up this activity of joint stocks and spades long enough all will at
length ride somewhere, in next to no time, and for nothing; but though a

crowd rushes to the depot, and the conductor shouts “All aboard!” when the
smoke is blown away and the vapor condensed, it will be perceived that a
few are riding, but the rest are run over,—and it will be called, and will be,
“A melancholy accident.” No doubt they can ride at last who shall have
earned their fare, that is, if they survive so long, but they will probably have
lost their elasticity and desire to travel by that time. This spending of the
best part of one’s life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty
during the least valuable part of it, reminds me of the Englishman who went
to India to make a fortune first, in order that he might return to England and
live the life of a poet. He should have gone up garret at once. “What!”
exclaim a million Irishmen starting up from all the shanties in the land, “is
not this railroad which we have built a good thing?” Yes, I answer,
comparatively good, that is, you might have done worse; but I wish, as you
are brothers of mine, that you could have spent your time better than
digging in this dirt.

Before I finished my house, wishing to earn ten or twelve dollars by
some honest and agreeable method, in order to meet my unusual expenses, I
planted about two acres and a half of light and sandy soil near it chiefly
with beans, but also a small part with potatoes, corn, peas, and turnips. The
whole lot contains eleven acres, mostly growing up to pines and hickories,
and was sold the preceding season for eight dollars and eight cents an acre.
One farmer said that it was “good for nothing but to raise cheeping squirrels
on.” I put no manure whatever on this land, not being the owner, but merely
a squatter, and not expecting to cultivate so much again, and I did not quite
hoe it all once. I got out several cords of stumps in ploughing, which
supplied me with fuel for a long time, and left small circles of virgin mould,
easily distinguishable through the summer by the greater luxuriance of the
beans there. The dead and for the most part unmerchantable wood behind
my house, and the driftwood from the pond, have supplied the remainder of
my fuel. I was obliged to hire a team and a man for the ploughing, though I
held the plough myself. My farm outgoes for the first season were, for
implements, seed, work, &c., $14.72½. The seed corn was given me. This
never costs anything to speak of, unless 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 any
thing. My whole income from the farm was
$ 23.44
Deducting the outgoes,........... 14.72½
—————
There are left,................. $ 8.71½,

beside produce consumed and on hand at the time this estimate was made of
the value of $4.50,—the amount on hand much more than balancing a little
grass which I did not raise. All things considered, that is, considering the
importance of a man’s soul and of to-day, notwithstanding the short time
occupied 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 exchange it for
an insufficient quantity of more luxurious and expensive things, he would
need to cultivate only a few rods of ground, and that it would be cheaper to
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. I desire to
speak impartially on this point, and as one not interested in the success or
failure of the present economical and social arrangements. I was more
independent than any farmer in Concord, for I was not anchored to a house
or farm, but could follow the bent of my genius, which is a very crooked
one, every moment. Beside being better off than they already, if my house
had been burned or my crops had failed, I should have been nearly as well
off as before.
I am wont to think that men are not so much the keepers of herds as herds
are the keepers of men, the former are so much the freer. Men and oxen
exchange work; but if we consider necessary work only, 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. Certainly no nation that lived simply in all respects, that
is, no nation of philosophers, would commit so great a blunder as to use the
labor of animals. True, there never was and is not likely soon to be a nation
of philosophers, nor am I certain it is desirable that there should be.
However, I should never have broken a horse or bull and taken him to board
for any work he might do for me, for fear I should become a horse-man or a
herds-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 constructed without this aid, and let man
share the glory of such with the ox and horse; does it follow that he could
not have accomplished works yet more worthy of himself in that case?
When men begin to do, not merely unnecessary or artistic, but luxurious
and idle work, with their assistance, it is inevitable that a few do all the
exchange work with the oxen, or, in other words, become the slaves of the
strongest. Man thus not only works for the animal within him, but, for a
symbol of this, he works for the animal without him. Though we have many
substantial houses of brick or stone, the prosperity of the farmer is still
measured by the degree to which the barn overshadows the house. This
town is said to have the largest houses for oxen, cows, and horses
hereabouts, and it is not behindhand in its public buildings; but there are
very few halls for free worship or free speech in this county. It should not
be by their architecture, but why not even by their power of abstract
thought, that nations should seek to commemorate themselves? How much
more admirable the Bhagvat-Geeta than all the ruins of the East! Towers
and temples are the luxury of princes. A simple and independent mind does
not toil at the bidding of any prince. Genius is not a retainer to any emperor,
nor is its material silver, or gold, or marble, except to a trifling extent. To
what end, pray, is so much stone hammered? In Arcadia, when I was there, I
did not see any hammering stone. Nations are possessed with an insane
ambition to perpetuate the memory of themselves by the amount of
hammered stone they leave. What if equal pains were taken to smooth and
polish their manners? One piece of good sense would be more memorable
than a monument as high as the moon. I love better to see stones in place.
The grandeur of Thebes was a vulgar grandeur. More sensible 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 religion and

civilization which are barbaric and heathenish build splendid temples; but
what you might call Christianity does not. Most of the stone a nation
hammers goes 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 ambitious booby, whom it would have been
wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to
the dogs. I might possibly invent some excuse for them and him, but I have
no time for it. 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. It costs more than it comes to. The mainspring is
vanity, assisted by the love of garlic and bread and butter. Mr. Balcom, a
promising young architect, designs it on the back of his Vitruvius, with hard
pencil and ruler, and the job is let out to Dobson & Sons, stonecutters.
When the thirty centuries begin to look down on it, mankind begin to look
up at it. As for your high towers and monuments, there was a crazy fellow
once in this town who undertook to dig through to China, and he got so far
that, as he said, he heard the Chinese pots and kettles rattle; but 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 fingers, I had earned
$13.34. The expense 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,................... $ 1.73½
Molasses,................ 1.73 Cheapest form of the
saccharine.
Rye meal,................ 1.04¾
Indian meal,............. 0.99¾ Cheaper than rye.
Pork,.................... 0.22

All experiments which failed:

Flour,................... 0.88 Costs more than Indian
meal,
both money and trouble.
Sugar,................... 0.80
Lard,.................... 0.65
Apples,.................. 0.25
Dried apple,............. 0.22
Sweet potatoes,.......... 0.10
One pumpkin,............. 0.06
One watermelon,.......... 0.02
Salt,.................... 0.03

Yes, I did eat $8.74, all told; but I should not thus unblushingly publish
my guilt, if I did not know that most of my readers were equally guilty with
myself, and that their deeds would look no better in print. The next year I
sometimes caught a mess of fish for my dinner, and once I went so far as to
slaughter a woodchuck which ravaged my bean-field,—effect his
transmigration, as a Tartar would say,—and devour him, partly for
experiment’s sake; but though it afforded me a momentary enjoyment,
notwithstanding a musky flavor, I saw that the longest use would not make
that a good practice, however it might seem to have your woodchucks ready
dressed by the village butcher.
Clothing and some incidental expenses within the same dates, though
little can be inferred from this item, amounted to
$8.40¾
Oil and some household 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,................................ $ 28.12½
Farm one year,.......................... 14.72½
Food eight months,...................... 8.74
Clothing, etc., eight months,........... 8.40¾
Oil, &c., eight months,................. 2.00
——————
In all,........................... $ 61.99¾

I address myself now to those of my readers who have a living to get. And
to meet this I have for farm produce sold

$23.44
Earned by day-labor,................... 13.34
——————
In all,............................ $36.78,

which subtracted from the sum of the outgoes leaves a balance of $25.21¾
on the one side,—this being very nearly the means with which I started, and
the measure of expenses to be incurred,—and on the other, beside the
leisure and independence and health thus secured, a comfortable house for
me as long as I choose to occupy it.
These statistics, however accidental and therefore uninstructive they may
appear, as they have a certain completeness, have a certain value also.
Nothing was given me of which I have not rendered some account. It
appears from the above estimate, that my food alone cost me in money
about twenty-seven cents a week. It was, for nearly two years after this, rye
and Indian meal without yeast, potatoes, rice, a very little salt pork,
molasses, and salt, and my drink water. It was fit that I should live on rice,
mainly, who loved so well the philosophy of India. To meet the objections
of some inveterate cavillers, I may as well state, that if I dined out
occasionally, as I always had done, and I trust shall have opportunities to do
again, it was frequently to the detriment of my domestic arrangements. But
the dining out, being, as I have stated, a constant element, does not in the
least affect a comparative statement like this.
I learned from my two years’ experience that it would cost incredibly
little trouble to obtain one’s necessary food, even in this latitude; that a man
may use as simple a diet as the animals, and yet retain health and strength. I
have made a satisfactory dinner, satisfactory on several accounts, simply off
a dish of purslane (Portulaca oleracea) which I gathered in my cornfield,
boiled and salted. I give the Latin on account of the savoriness of the trivial
name. And pray what more can a reasonable man desire, in peaceful times,
in ordinary noons, than a sufficient number of ears of green sweet-corn
boiled, with the addition of salt? Even the little variety which I used was a
yielding to the demands of appetite, and not of health. Yet men have come
to such a 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 drinking water only.
The reader will perceive that I am treating the subject rather from an
economic than a dietetic point of view, and he will not venture to put my

abstemiousness to the test unless he has a well-stocked larder.
Bread I at first made of pure Indian meal and salt, genuine hoe-cakes,
which I baked before my fire out of doors on a shingle or the end of a stick
of timber sawed off in building my house; but it was 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
fragrance like that of other noble fruits, which I kept in as long as possible
by wrapping them in cloths. I made a study of the ancient and indispensable
art of bread-making, consulting such authorities as offered, going back to
the primitive days and first invention of the unleavened kind, when from the
wildness of nuts and meats men first reached the mildness and refinement
of this 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 fermentations thereafter, till I came to
“good, sweet, wholesome bread,” the staff of life. Leaven, which some
deem the soul of bread, the spiritus which fills its cellular tissue, which is
religiously preserved like the vestal fire,—some precious bottle-full, I
suppose, first brought over in the Mayflower, did the business for America,
and its influence is still rising, swelling, spreading, in cerealian billows over
the land,—this seed I regularly and faithfully procured from the village, till
at length one morning I forgot the rules, and scalded my yeast; by which
accident I discovered that even this was not indispensable,—for my
discoveries were not by the synthetic but analytic process,—and I have
gladly omitted it since, though most housewives earnestly assured me that
safe and wholesome bread without yeast might not be, and elderly people
prophesied a speedy decay of the vital forces. Yet I find 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-full
in my pocket, which would sometimes pop and discharge 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
circumstances. Neither did I put any sal soda, or other acid or alkali, into
my bread. It would seem that I made it according to the recipe which
Marcus Porcius Cato gave about two centuries before Christ. “Panem

depsticium sic facito. Manus mortariumque bene lavato. Farinam in
mortarium indito, aquæ paulatim addito, subigitoque pulchre. Ubi bene
subegeris, defingito, coquitoque sub testu.” Which 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. When 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 independence that,
in Concord, fresh and sweet meal is rarely sold in the shops, and hominy
and corn in a still coarser form are hardly used by any. For the most part the
farmer gives to his cattle and hogs the grain of his own producing, and buys
flour, which is at least no more wholesome, at a greater cost, at the store. I
saw that I could easily raise my bushel or two of rye and Indian corn, for
the former will grow on the poorest land, and the latter does not require the
best, and grind them in a hand-mill, and so do without rice and pork; and if
I must have some concentrated 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 while
these were growing I could use various substitutes beside those which I
have named. “For,” as the Forefathers sang,—
“we can make liquor to sweeten our lips
Of pumpkins and parsnips and walnut-tree chips.”

Finally, as for salt, that grossest of groceries, to obtain this might be a fit
occasion for a visit to the seashore, or, if I did without it altogether, I should
probably drink the less water. I do not learn that the Indians ever troubled
themselves to go after it.
Thus I could avoid all trade and barter, so far as my food was concerned,
and having a shelter already, it would only remain to get clothing and fuel.
The pantaloons which I now wear were woven in a farmer’s family,—thank
Heaven there is so much virtue still in man; for I think the fall from the
farmer to the operative as great and memorable as that from the man to the
farmer;—and in a new country, fuel is an encumbrance. As for a habitat, if I

were not permitted still to squat, I might purchase one acre at the same price
for which the land I cultivated was sold—namely, eight dollars and eight
cents. But as it was, I considered that I enhanced the value of the land by
squatting on it.
There is a certain class of unbelievers who sometimes ask me such
questions as, if I think that I can live on vegetable food alone; and to strike
at the root of the matter at once,—for the root is faith,—I am accustomed to
answer such, that I can live on board nails. If they cannot understand that,
they cannot understand much that I have to say. 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 them, or who own their thirds in mills, may be alarmed.

My furniture, part of which I made myself, and the rest cost me nothing
of which I have not rendered an account, consisted of a bed, a table, a desk,
three chairs, a looking-glass three inches in diameter, a pair of tongs and
andirons, a kettle, a skillet, and a frying-pan, a dipper, a wash-bowl, two
knives and forks, three plates, one 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 shiftlessness. There is a plenty of such chairs as I like best
in the village garrets to be had for taking them away. Furniture! Thank God,
I can sit and I can stand without the aid of a furniture warehouse. What man
but a philosopher would not be ashamed to see his furniture packed in a cart
and going up country exposed to the light of heaven and the eyes of men, a
beggarly account of empty boxes? That is Spaulding’s furniture. I could
never tell from inspecting such a load whether it belonged to a so called
rich man or a poor one; the owner always seemed poverty-stricken. Indeed,
the more you have of such things the poorer you are. Each load looks as if it
contained the contents of a dozen shanties; and if one shanty is poor, this is
a dozen times as poor. Pray, for what do we move ever but to get rid of our
furniture, our exuviæ; at last to go from this world to another newly
furnished, and leave this to be burned? It is the same as if all these traps
were buckled to a man’s belt, and he could not move over the rough country
where our lines are cast without dragging them,—dragging his trap. He was

a lucky fox that left his tail in the trap. The muskrat will gnaw his third leg
off to be free. No wonder man has lost his elasticity. How often he is at a
dead set! “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 trumpery which he saves and will not burn, and he will appear to
be harnessed to it and making what headway he can. I think that the man is
at a dead set who has got through a knot hole or gateway where his sledge
load of furniture cannot follow him. I cannot but feel compassion when I
hear some 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 accumulated 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 surpass the powers of a well
man nowadays to take up his bed and walk, and I should certainly advise a
sick one to lay down his bed and run. When I have met an immigrant
tottering under a bundle which contained his all—looking like an enormous
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 that to carry. If I have got to
drag my trap, I will take care that it be a light one and do not nip me in a
vital part. But perchance it would be wisest never to put one’s paw into it.
I would observe, by the way, that it costs me nothing for curtains, for I
have no gazers to shut out but the sun and moon, and I am willing that they
should look in. The moon will not sour milk nor taint meat of mine, nor will
the sun injure my furniture or fade my carpet, and if he is sometimes too
warm a friend, I find it still better economy to retreat behind some curtain
which nature has provided, than to add a single item to the details of
housekeeping. A lady once offered me a mat, but as I had no room to spare
within the house, nor time to spare within or without to shake it, I declined
it, preferring to wipe my feet on the sod before my door. It is best to avoid
the beginnings of evil.
Not long since I was present at the auction of a 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 father’s day. Among the rest was a dried tapeworm. And now, after
lying half a century in his garret and other dust holes, these things were not
burned; instead of a bonfire, or purifying destruction of them, there was an
auction, or increasing of them. The neighbors eagerly collected to view
them, bought them all, and carefully transported them to their garrets and
dust holes, to lie there till their estates are settled, when they will start
again. When a man dies he kicks the dust.
The customs of some savage nations might, perchance, be profitably
imitated by us, for they at least go through the semblance of casting their
slough annually; they have the idea of the thing, whether they have the
reality or not. Would it not be well if we were to celebrate such a “busk,” or
“feast of first fruits,” as Bartram describes to have been the custom of the
Mucclasse Indians? “When a town celebrates the busk,” says he, “having
previously provided 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 remaining grain and other old
provisions they cast together into one common heap, and consume it with
fire. After having taken medicine, and fasted for three days, all the fire in
the town is extinguished. During this fast they abstain from the gratification
of every appetite and passion whatever. A general amnesty is proclaimed;
all malefactors may return to their town.—”
“On the fourth morning, the high priest, by rubbing dry wood together,
produces new fire in the public square, from whence every habitation in the
town is supplied with the new and pure flame.”
They then feast on the new corn and fruits, and dance and sing for three
days, “and the four following days they receive visits and rejoice with their
friends from neighboring towns 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 sacrament, 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 directly from
Heaven to do thus, though they have no biblical record of the revelation.

For more than five years I maintained myself thus solely by the labor of
my hands, and I found, that by working about six weeks in a year, I could
meet all the expenses of living. The whole of my winters, as well as most of
my summers, I had free and clear for study. I have thoroughly tried school-
keeping, and found that my expenses were in proportion, or rather out of
proportion, to my income, for I was obliged to dress and train, not to say
think and believe, accordingly, and I lost my time into the bargain. As I did
not teach for the good of my fellow-men, but simply for a livelihood, this
was a failure. I have tried trade; but I found that it would take ten years to
get 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
being fresh in my mind to tax my ingenuity, I thought often and seriously of
picking huckleberries; that surely I could do, and its small profits might
suffice,—for my greatest skill has been to want but little,—so little capital it
required, so little distraction from my wonted moods, I foolishly thought.
While my acquaintances went unhesitatingly into trade or the professions, I
contemplated this occupation as most like theirs; ranging the hills all
summer to pick the berries which came in my way, and thereafter carelessly
dispose of them; so, to keep the flocks of Admetus. I also dreamed that I
might gather the wild herbs, or carry evergreens to such villagers as 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 business.
As I preferred some things to others, and especially valued my freedom,
as I could fare hard and yet succeed well, I did not wish to spend my time in
earning rich carpets or other fine furniture, or delicate cookery, or a house
in the Grecian or the Gothic style just yet. If there are any to whom it is no
interruption to acquire these things, and who know how to use them when
acquired, I relinquish to them the pursuit. Some are “industrious,” and
appear to love 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 leisure 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 occupation of a day-
laborer was the most independent 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 pastime, if we will live simply
and wisely; as the pursuits of the simpler nations are still the sports of the
more artificial. It is not necessary that a man should earn his living by the
sweat of his brow, unless he sweats easier than I do.
One young man of my acquaintance, who has inherited some acres, told
me that he thought he should live as I did, if he had the means. I would not
have any one adopt my mode of living on any account; for, beside 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 doing
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 calculable period, but we would preserve the true course.
Undoubtedly, in this case, what is true for one is truer still for a thousand,
as a large house is not proportionally more expensive than a small one,
since one roof may cover, one cellar underlie, and one wall separate several
apartments. But for my part, I preferred the solitary dwelling. Moreover, it
will commonly be cheaper to build the whole yourself than to convince
another of the advantage of the common wall; and when you have done
this, the common partition, to be much cheaper, must be a thin one, and that
other may prove a bad neighbor, and also not keep his side in repair. The
only coöperation which is commonly possible is exceedingly partial and
superficial; and what little true coöperation there is, is as if it were not,
being a harmony inaudible to men. If a man has faith, he will coöperate

with equal faith everywhere; if he has not faith, he will continue to live like
the rest of the world, whatever company he is joined to. To coöperate, in the
highest as well as the lowest sense, means to get our living together. I heard
it proposed lately that two young men should travel together over the world,
the one without money, earning his means as he went, before the mast and
behind the plow, the other carrying a bill of exchange in his pocket. It was
easy to see that they could not long be companions or coöperate, since one
would not operate at all. They would part at the first interesting crisis in
their adventures. Above all, as I have implied, the man who goes alone can
start to-day; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is
ready, and it may be a long time before they get off.

But all this is very selfish, I have heard some of my townsmen say. I
confess that I have hitherto indulged very little in philanthropic enterprises.
I have made some sacrifices to a sense of duty, and among others have
sacrificed this pleasure also. There are those who have used all their arts to
persuade me to undertake the support of some poor family in the town; and
if I had nothing to do,—for the devil finds employment for the 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
obligation by maintaining certain poor persons in all respects as
comfortably as I maintain myself, and have even ventured so far as to make
them the offer, they have one and all unhesitatingly preferred to remain
poor. While my townsmen and women are devoted in so many ways to the
good of their fellows, I trust that one at least may be spared to other and less
humane pursuits. You must have a genius for charity as well as for 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 particular calling to do the good
which society demands of me, to save the universe from annihilation; and I
believe that a like but infinitely greater steadfastness elsewhere is all that
now preserves it. But I would not stand between any man and his genius;
and to him who does this work, which I decline, with his whole heart and
soul and life, I would say, Persevere, even if the world call it doing evil, as
it is most likely they will.

I am far from supposing that my case is a peculiar one; no doubt many of
my readers would make a similar 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 aside from my main path, and for the most part wholly unintended.
Men say, practically, Begin where you are and such as you are, without
aiming mainly to become of more worth, and with kindness 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 Robin Goodfellow, peeping in at every cottage window,
inspiring lunatics, and tainting meats, and making darkness visible, instead
of steadily increasing his genial heat and beneficence till he is of such
brightness that no mortal can look him in the face, and then, and in the
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 Phaeton, 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 up every spring, and made the
great desert of Sahara, till at length Jupiter hurled him headlong to the earth
with a thunderbolt, and the sun, through grief at his death, did not shine for
a year.
There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted. It is
human, it is divine, carrion. If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming
to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for
my life, as from that dry and parching wind of the African deserts called the
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 because he will
feed me if I should be starving, or warm me if I should be freezing, or pull
me out of a ditch if I should ever fall into one. I can find you a
Newfoundland dog that will do as much. Philanthropy is not love for one’s
fellow-man in the broadest sense. Howard was no doubt an exceedingly
kind and worthy man in his way, and has his reward; but, comparatively

speaking, what are a hundred Howards to us, if their philanthropy do not
help us in our best estate, when we are most worthy to be helped? I never
heard of a philanthropic meeting in which it was sincerely proposed to do
any good to me, or the like of me.
The Jesuits were quite balked by those Indians who, being burned at the
stake, suggested new modes of torture to their tormentors. Being superior to
physical suffering, it sometimes chanced that they were superior to any
consolation which the missionaries could offer; and the law to do as you
would be done by fell with less persuasiveness on the ears of those who, for
their part, did not care how they were done by, who loved their enemies
after a new fashion, and came very near freely forgiving them all they did.
Be sure that you give the poor the aid they most need, though it be your
example which leaves them far behind. If you give money, spend yourself
with it, and do not merely abandon it to them. We make curious mistakes
sometimes. Often the poor man is not so cold and hungry as he is dirty and
ragged and gross. It is partly his taste, and not merely his misfortune. If you
give him money, he will perhaps buy more rags with it. I was wont to pity
the clumsy Irish laborers who cut ice on the pond, in such mean and ragged
clothes, while I shivered in my more tidy and somewhat more fashionable
garments, till, one bitter cold day, one who had slipped into the water came
to my house to warm him, and I saw him strip off three pairs of pants and
two pairs of stockings ere he got down to the skin, though they were dirty
and ragged enough, it is true, and that he could afford to refuse the extra
garments which I offered him, he had so many intra ones. This ducking was
the very thing he needed. Then I began to pity myself, and I saw that it
would be a greater charity to bestow on me a flannel shirt than a whole
slop-shop on him. There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to
one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the
largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his
mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve. It is
the pious slave-breeder devoting the proceeds of every tenth slave to buy a
Sunday’s liberty for the rest. Some show their kindness to the poor by
employing them in their kitchens. Would they not be kinder if they
employed themselves there? You boast of spending a tenth part of your
income in charity; maybe you should spend the nine tenths so, and done
with it. Society recovers only a tenth part of the property then. Is this owing

to the generosity of him in whose possession it is found, or to the
remissness of the officers of justice?
Philanthropy is almost the only virtue which is sufficiently appreciated
by mankind. Nay, it is greatly overrated; and it is our selfishness which
overrates it. A robust poor man, one sunny day here in Concord, praised a
fellow-townsman to me, because, as he said, he was kind to the poor;
meaning himself. The kind uncles and aunts of the race are more esteemed
than its true spiritual fathers and mothers. I once heard a reverend lecturer
on England, a man of learning and intelligence, after enumerating her
scientific, literary, and political worthies, Shakespeare, Bacon, Cromwell,
Milton, Newton, and others, speak next of her Christian heroes, whom, as if
his profession required it of him, he elevated to a place far above all the
rest, as the greatest of the great. They were Penn, Howard, and Mrs. Fry.
Every one must feel the falsehood and cant of this. The last were not
England’s best men and women; only, perhaps, her best philanthropists.
I would not subtract any thing from the praise that is due to philanthropy,
but merely demand justice for all who by their lives and works are a
blessing to mankind. I do not value chiefly a man’s uprightness and
benevolence, which are, as it were, his stem and leaves. Those plants of
whose greenness withered we make herb tea for the sick, serve but a
humble use, and are most employed by quacks. I want the flower and fruit
of a man; that some fragrance be wafted over from him to me, and some
ripeness flavor our intercourse. His goodness must not be a partial and
transitory act, but a constant superfluity, which costs him nothing and of
which he is unconscious. This is a charity that hides a multitude of sins. The
philanthropist too often surrounds mankind with the remembrance of his
own cast-off griefs as an atmosphere, and calls it sympathy. We should
impart our courage, and not our despair, our health and ease, and not our
disease, and take care that this does not spread by contagion. From what
southern plains comes up the voice of wailing? Under what latitudes reside
the heathen to whom we would send light? Who is that intemperate and
brutal man whom we would redeem? If any thing ail a man, so that he does
not perform his functions, if he have a pain in his bowels even,—for that is
the seat of sympathy,—he forthwith sets about reforming—the world. Being
a microcosm himself, he discovers, and it is a true discovery, and he is the
man to make it,—that the world has been eating green apples; to his eyes, in
fact, the globe itself is a great green apple, which there is danger awful to

think of that the children of men will nibble before it is ripe; and
straightway his drastic philanthropy seeks out the Esquimaux and the
Patagonian, and embraces the populous Indian and Chinese villages; and
thus, by a few years of philanthropic activity, the powers in the mean while
using him for their own ends, no doubt, he cures himself of his dyspepsia,
the globe acquires a faint blush on one or both of its cheeks, as if it were
beginning to be ripe, and life loses its crudity and is once more sweet and
wholesome to live. I never dreamed of any enormity greater than I have
committed. I never knew, and never shall know, a worse man than myself.
I believe that what so saddens the reformer is not his sympathy with his
fellows in distress, but, though he be the holiest son of God, is his private
ail. Let this be righted, let the spring come to him, the morning rise over his
couch, and he will forsake his generous companions without apology. My
excuse for not lecturing against the use of tobacco is, that I never chewed it;
that is a penalty which reformed tobacco-chewers have to pay; though there
are things enough I have chewed, which I could lecture against. If you
should ever be betrayed into any of these philanthropies, do not let your left
hand know what your right hand does, for it is not worth knowing. Rescue
the drowning and tie your shoe-strings. Take your time, and set about some
free labor.
Our manners have been corrupted by communication with the saints. Our
hymn-books resound with a melodious cursing of God and enduring him
forever. One would say that even the prophets and redeemers had rather
consoled the fears than confirmed the hopes of man. There is nowhere
recorded a simple and irrepressible satisfaction with the gift of life, any
memorable praise of God. All health and success does me good, however
far off and withdrawn it may appear; all disease and failure helps to make
me sad and does me evil, however much sympathy it may have with me or I
with it. If, then, we would indeed restore mankind by truly Indian, botanic,
magnetic, or natural means, let us first be as simple and well as Nature
ourselves, dispel the clouds which hang over our own brows, and take up a
little life into our pores. Do not stay to be an overseer of the poor, but
endeavor to become one of the worthies of the world.
I read in the Gulistan, or Flower Garden, of Sheik Sadi of Shiraz, that
“They asked a wise man, saying; Of the many celebrated trees which the
Most High God has created lofty and umbrageous, they call none azad, or

free, excepting the cypress, which bears no fruit; what mystery is there in
this? He replied; Each has its appropriate produce, and appointed season,
during the continuance of which it is fresh and blooming, and during their
absence dry and withered; to neither of which states is the cypress exposed,
being always flourishing; and of this nature are the azads, or religious
independents.—Fix not thy heart on that which is transitory; for the Dijlah,
or Tigris, will continue to flow through Bagdad after the race of caliphs is
extinct: if thy hand has plenty, be liberal as the date tree; but if it affords
nothing to give away, be an azad, or free man, like the cypress.”
COMPLEMENTAL VERSES

The Pretensions of Poverty

“Thou dost presume too much, poor needy wretch,
To claim a station in the firmament
Because thy humble cottage, or thy tub,
Nurses some lazy or pedantic virtue
In the cheap sunshine or by shady springs,
With roots and pot-herbs; where thy right hand,
Tearing those humane passions from the mind,
Upon whose stocks fair blooming virtues flourish,
Degradeth nature, and benumbeth sense,
And, Gorgon-like, turns active men to stone.
We not require the dull society
Of your necessitated temperance,
Or that unnatural stupidity
That knows nor joy nor sorrow; nor your forc’d
Falsely exalted passive fortitude
Above the active. This low abject brood,
That fix their seats in mediocrity,
Become your servile minds; but we advance
Such virtues only as admit excess,
Brave, bounteous acts, regal magnificence,
All-seeing prudence, magnanimity
That knows no bound, and that heroic virtue
For which antiquity hath left no name,
But patterns only, such as Hercules,
Achilles, Theseus. Back to thy loath’d cell;
And when thou seest the new enlightened sphere,
Study to know but what those worthies were.”
T. CAREW

Where I Lived, and What I Lived For

At a certain season of our life we are accustomed to consider every spot
as the possible site of a house. I have thus surveyed the country on every
side within a dozen miles of where I live. In imagination I have bought all
the farms in succession, for all were to be bought, and I knew their price. I
walked over each farmer’s premises, tasted his wild apples, discoursed on
husbandry with him, took his farm at his price, at any price, mortgaging it
to him in my mind; even put a higher price on it,—took everything but a
deed of it,—took his word for his deed, for I dearly love to talk,—cultivated
it, and him too to some extent, I trust, and withdrew when I had enjoyed it
long enough, leaving him to carry it on. This experience entitled me to be
regarded as a sort of real-estate broker by my friends. Wherever I sat, there
I might live, and the landscape radiated from me accordingly. What is a
house but a sedes, a seat?—better if a country seat. I discovered many a site
for a house not likely to be soon improved, which some might have thought
too far from the village, but to my eyes the village was too far from it. Well,
there I might live, I said; and there I did live, for an hour, a summer and a
winter life; saw how I could let the years run off, buffet the winter through,
and see the spring come in. The future inhabitants of this region, wherever
they may place their houses, may be sure that they have been anticipated.
An afternoon sufficed to lay out the land into orchard, woodlot, and pasture,
and to decide what fine oaks or pines should be left to stand before the door,
and whence each blasted tree could be seen to the best advantage; and then
I let it lie, fallow perchance, for a man is rich in proportion to the number of
things which he can afford to let alone.
My imagination carried me so far that I even had the refusal of several
farms,—the refusal was all I wanted,—but I never got my fingers burned by
actual possession. The nearest that I came to actual possession was when I
bought the Hollowell place, and had begun to sort my seeds, and collected
materials with which to make a wheelbarrow to carry it on or off with; but

before the owner gave me a deed of it, his wife—every man has such a wife
—changed her mind and wished to keep it, and he offered me ten dollars to
release him. Now, to speak the truth, I had but ten cents in the world, and it
surpassed my arithmetic to tell, if I was that man who had ten cents, or who
had a farm, or ten dollars, or all together. However, I let him keep the ten
dollars and the farm too, for I had carried it far enough; or rather, to be
generous, I sold him the farm for just what I gave for it, and, as he was not a
rich man, made him a present of ten dollars, and still had my ten cents, and
seeds, and materials for a wheelbarrow left. I found thus that I had been a
rich man without any damage to my poverty. But I retained the landscape,
and I have since annually carried off what it yielded without a wheelbarrow.
With respect to landscapes,—
“I am monarch of all I survey,
My right there is none to dispute.”

I have frequently seen a poet withdraw, having enjoyed the most valuable
part of a farm, while the crusty farmer supposed that he had got a few wild
apples only. Why, the owner does not know it for many years when a poet
has put his farm in rhyme, the most admirable kind of invisible fence, has
fairly impounded it, milked it, skimmed it, and got all the cream, and left
the farmer only the skimmed milk.
The real attractions of the Hollowell farm, to me, were; its complete
retirement, being, about two miles from the village, half a mile from the
nearest neighbor, and separated from the highway by a broad field; its
bounding on the river, which the owner said protected it by its fogs from
frosts in the spring, though that was nothing to me; the gray color and
ruinous state of the house and barn, and the dilapidated fences, which put
such an interval between me and the last occupant; the hollow and lichen-
covered apple trees, gnawed by rabbits, showing what kind of neighbors I
should have; but above all, the recollection I had of it from my earliest
voyages up the river, when the house was concealed behind a dense grove
of red maples, through which I heard the house-dog bark. I was in haste to
buy it, before the proprietor finished getting out some rocks, cutting down
the hollow apple trees, and grubbing up some young birches which had
sprung up in the pasture, or, in short, had made any more of his
improvements. To enjoy these advantages I was ready to carry it on; like
Atlas, to take the world on my shoulders,—I never heard what

compensation he received for that,—and do all those things which had no
other motive or excuse but that I might pay for it and be unmolested in my
possession of it; for I knew all the while that it would yield the most
abundant crop of the kind I wanted if I could only afford to let it alone. But
it turned out as I have said.
All that I could say, then, with respect to farming on a large scale, (I have
always cultivated a garden,) was, that I had had my seeds ready. Many think
that seeds improve with age. I have no doubt that time discriminates
between the good and the bad; and when at last I shall plant, I shall be less
likely to be disappointed. But I would say to my fellows, once for all, As
long as possible live free and uncommitted. It makes but little difference
whether you are committed to a farm or the county jail.
Old Cato, whose “De Re Rusticâ” is my “Cultivator,” says, and the only
translation I have seen makes sheer nonsense of the passage, “When you
think of getting a farm, turn it thus in your mind, not to buy greedily; nor
spare your pains to look at it, and do not think it enough to go round it once.
The oftener you go there the more it will please you, if it is good.” I think I
shall not buy greedily, but go round and round it as long as I live, and be
buried in it first, that it may please me the more at last.

The present was my next experiment of this kind, which I purpose to
describe more at length; for convenience, putting the experience of two
years into one. As I have said, I do not propose to write an ode to dejection,
but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if
only to wake my neighbors up.
When first I took up my abode in the woods, that is, began to spend my
nights as well as days there, which, by accident, was on Independence Day,
or the Fourth of July, 1845, my house was not finished for winter, but was
merely a defence against the rain, without plastering or chimney, the walls
being of rough, weather-stained boards, with wide chinks, which made it
cool at night. The upright white hewn studs and freshly planed door and
window casings gave it a clean and airy look, especially in the morning,
when its timbers were saturated with dew, so that I fancied that by noon
some sweet gum would exude from them. To my imagination it retained
throughout the day more or less of this auroral character, reminding me of a
certain house on a mountain which I had visited the year before. This was

an airy and unplastered cabin, fit to entertain a travelling god, and where a
goddess might trail her garments. The winds which passed over my
dwelling were such as sweep over the ridges of mountains, bearing the
broken strains, or celestial parts only, of terrestrial music. The morning
wind forever blows, the poem of creation is uninterrupted; but few are the
ears that hear it. Olympus is but the outside of the earth every where.
The only house I had been the owner of before, if I except a boat, was a
tent, which I used occasionally when making excursions in the summer, and
this is still rolled up in my garret; but the boat, after passing from hand to
hand, has gone down the stream of time. With this more substantial shelter
about me, I had made some progress toward settling in the world. This
frame, so slightly clad, was a sort of crystallization around me, and reacted
on the builder. It was suggestive somewhat as a picture in outlines. I did not
need to go outdoors to take the air, for the atmosphere within had lost none
of its freshness. It was not so much within doors as behind a door where I
sat, even in the rainiest weather. The Harivansa says, “An abode without
birds is like a meat without seasoning.” Such was not my abode, for I found
myself suddenly neighbor to the birds; not by having imprisoned one, but
having caged myself near them. I was not only nearer to some of those
which commonly frequent the garden and the orchard, but to those wilder
and more thrilling songsters of the forest which never, or rarely, serenade a
villager,—the wood-thrush, the veery, the scarlet tanager, the field-sparrow,
the whippoorwill, and many others.
I was seated by the shore of a small pond, about a mile and a half south
of the village of Concord and somewhat higher than it, in the midst of an
extensive wood between that town and Lincoln, and about two miles south
of that our only field known to fame, Concord Battle Ground; but I was so
low in the woods that the opposite shore, half a mile off, like the rest,
covered with wood, was my most distant horizon. For the first week,
whenever I looked out on the pond it impressed me like a tarn high up on
the side of a mountain, its bottom far above the surface of other lakes, and,
as the sun arose, I saw it throwing off its nightly clothing of mist, and here
and there, by degrees, its soft ripples or its smooth reflecting surface was
revealed, while the mists, like ghosts, were stealthily withdrawing in every
direction into the woods, as at the breaking up of some nocturnal
conventicle. The very dew seemed to hang upon the trees later into the day
than usual, as on the sides of mountains.

This small lake was of most value as a neighbor in the intervals of a
gentle rain storm in August, when, both air and water being perfectly still,
but the sky overcast, mid-afternoon had all the serenity of evening, and the
wood-thrush sang around, and was heard from shore to shore. A lake like
this is never smoother than at such a time; and the clear portion of the air
above it being shallow and darkened by clouds, the water, full of light and
reflections, becomes a lower heaven itself so much the more important.
From a hill top near by, where the wood had been recently cut off, there was
a pleasing vista southward across the pond, through a wide indentation in
the hills which form the shore there, where their opposite sides sloping
toward each other suggested a stream flowing out in that direction through a
wooded valley, but stream there was none. That way I looked between and
over the near green hills to some distant and higher ones in the horizon,
tinged with blue. Indeed, by standing on tiptoe I could catch a glimpse of
some of the peaks of the still bluer and more distant mountain ranges in the
north-west, those true-blue coins from heaven’s own mint, and also of some
portion of the village. But in other directions, even from this point, I could
not see over or beyond the woods which surrounded me. It is well to have
some water in your neighborhood, to give buoyancy to and float the earth.
One value even of the smallest well is, that when you look into it you see
that earth is not continent but insular. This is as important as that it keeps
butter cool. When I looked across the pond from this peak toward the
Sudbury meadows, which in time of flood I distinguished elevated perhaps
by a mirage in their seething valley, like a coin in a basin, all the earth
beyond the pond appeared like a thin crust insulated and floated even by
this small sheet of interverting water, and I was reminded that this on which
I dwelt was but dry land.
Though the view from my door was still more contracted, I did not feel
crowded or confined in the least. There was pasture enough for my
imagination. The low shrub-oak plateau to which the opposite shore arose,
stretched away toward the prairies of the West and the steppes of Tartary,
affording ample room for all the roving families of men. “There are none
happy in the world but beings who enjoy freely a vast horizon,”—said
Damodara, when his herds required new and larger pastures.
Both place and time were changed, and I dwelt nearer to those parts of
the universe and to those eras in history which had most attracted me.
Where I lived was as far off as many a region viewed nightly by

astronomers. We are wont to imagine rare and delectable places in some
remote and more celestial corner of the system, behind the constellation of
Cassiopeia’s Chair, far from noise and disturbance. I discovered that my
house actually had its site in such a withdrawn, but forever new and
unprofaned, part of the universe. If it were worth the while to settle in those
parts near to the Pleiades or the Hyades, to Aldebaran or Altair, then I was
really there, or at an equal remoteness from the life which I had left behind,
dwindled and twinkling with as fine a ray to my nearest neighbor, and to be
seen only in moonless nights by him. Such was that part of creation where I
had squatted;—
“There was a shepherd that did live,
And held his thoughts as high
As were the mounts whereon his flocks
Did hourly feed him by.”

What should we think of the shepherd’s life if his flocks always
wandered to higher pastures than his thoughts?
Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal
simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself. I have been as
sincere a worshipper of Aurora as the Greeks. I got up early and bathed in
the pond; that was a religious exercise, and one of the best things which I
did. They say that characters were engraven on the bathing tub of king
Tching-thang to this effect: “Renew thyself completely each day; do it
again, and again, and forever again.” I can understand that. Morning brings
back the heroic ages. I was as much affected by the faint hum of a mosquito
making its invisible and unimaginable tour through my apartment at earliest
dawn, when I was sitting with door and windows open, as I could be by any
trumpet that ever sang of fame. It was Homer’s requiem; itself an Iliad and
Odyssey in the air, singing its own wrath and wanderings. There was
something cosmical about it; a standing advertisement, till forbidden, of the
everlasting vigor and fertility of the world. The morning, which is the most
memorable season of the day, is the awakening hour. Then there is least
somnolence in us; and for an hour, at least, some part of us awakes which
slumbers all the rest of the day and night. Little is to be expected of that
day, if it can be called a day, to which we are not awakened by our Genius,
but by the mechanical nudgings of some servitor, are not awakened by our
own newly-acquired force and aspirations from within, accompanied by the
undulations of celestial music, instead of factory bells, and a fragrance

filling the air—to a higher life than we fell asleep from; and thus the
darkness bear its fruit, and prove itself to be good, no less than the light.
That man who does not believe that each day contains an earlier, more
sacred, and auroral hour than he has yet profaned, has despaired of life, and
is pursuing a descending and darkening way. After a partial cessation of his
sensuous life, the soul of man, or its organs rather, are reinvigorated each
day, and his Genius tries again what noble life it can make. All memorable
events, I should say, transpire in morning time and in a morning
atmosphere. The Vedas say, “All intelligences awake with the morning.”
Poetry and art, and the fairest and most memorable of the actions of men,
date from such an hour. All poets and heroes, like Memnon, are the children
of Aurora, and emit their music at sunrise. To him whose elastic and
vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning. It
matters not what the clocks say or the attitudes and labors of men. Morning
is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me. Moral reform is the effort to
throw off sleep. Why is it that men give so poor an account of their day if
they have not been slumbering? They are not such poor calculators. If they
had not been overcome with drowsiness, they would have performed
something. The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one
in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in
a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I
have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked
him in the face?
We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical
aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us
in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the
unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. It
is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and
so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and
paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which
morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of
arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the
contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour. If we refused, or rather
used up, such paltry information as we get, the oracles would distinctly
inform us how this might be done.
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only
the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach,

and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to
live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise
resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck
out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to
rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life
into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean,
why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its
meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and
be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it
appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil
or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of
man here to “glorify God and enjoy him forever.”
Still we live meanly, like ants; though the fable tells us that we were long
ago changed into men; like pygmies we fight with cranes; it is error upon
error, and clout upon clout, and our best virtue has for its occasion a
superfluous and evitable wretchedness. Our life is frittered away by detail.
An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in
extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity,
simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a
hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep
your accounts on your thumb nail. In the midst of this chopping sea of
civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-
and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not
founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead
reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds.
Simplify, simplify. Instead of three meals a day, if it be necessary eat but
one; instead of a hundred dishes, five; and reduce other things in
proportion. Our life is like a German Confederacy, made up of petty states,
with its boundary forever fluctuating, so that even a German cannot tell you
how it is bounded at any moment. The nation itself, with all its so called
internal improvements, which, by the way, are all external and superficial,
is just such an unwieldy and overgrown establishment, cluttered with
furniture and tripped up by its own traps, ruined by luxury and heedless
expense, by want of calculation and a worthy aim, as the million
households in the land; and the only cure for it as for them is in a rigid
economy, a stern and more than Spartan simplicity of life and elevation of
purpose. It lives too fast. Men think that it is essential that the Nation have

commerce, and export ice, and talk through a telegraph, and ride thirty
miles an hour, without a doubt, whether they do or not; but whether we
should live like baboons or like men, is a little uncertain. If we do not get
out sleepers, and forge rails, and devote days and nights to the work, but go
to tinkering upon our lives to improve them, who will build railroads? And
if railroads are not built, how shall we get to heaven in season? But if we
stay at home and mind our business, who will want railroads? We do not
ride on the railroad; it rides upon us. Did you ever think what those sleepers
are that underlie the railroad? Each one is a man, an Irish-man, or a Yankee
man. The rails are laid on them, and they are covered with sand, and the
cars run smoothly over them. They are sound sleepers, I assure you. And
every few years a new lot is laid down and run over; so that, if some have
the pleasure of riding on a rail, others have the misfortune to be ridden
upon. And when they run over a man that is walking in his sleep, a
supernumerary sleeper in the wrong position, and wake him up, they
suddenly stop the cars, and make a hue and cry about it, as if this were an
exception. I am glad to know that it takes a gang of men for every five
miles to keep the sleepers down and level in their beds as it is, for this is a
sign that they may sometime get up again.
Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are
determined to be starved before we are hungry. Men say that a stitch in time
saves nine, and so they take a thousand stitches to-day to save nine to-
morrow. As for work, we haven’t any of any consequence. We have the
Saint Vitus’ dance, and cannot possibly keep our heads still. If I should only
give a few pulls at the parish bell-rope, as for a fire, that is, without setting
the bell, there is hardly a man on his farm in the outskirts of Concord,
notwithstanding that press of engagements which was his excuse so many
times this morning, nor a boy, nor a woman, I might almost say, but would
forsake all and follow that sound, not mainly to save property from the
flames, but, if we will confess the truth, much more to see it burn, since
burn it must, and we, be it known, did not set it on fire,—or to see it put out,
and have a hand in it, if that is done as handsomely; yes, even if it were the
parish church itself. Hardly a man takes a half hour’s nap after dinner, but
when he wakes he holds up his head and asks, “What’s the news?” as if the
rest of mankind had stood his sentinels. Some give directions to be waked
every half hour, doubtless for no other purpose; and then, to pay for it, they
tell what they have dreamed. After a night’s sleep the news is as

indispensable as the breakfast. “Pray tell me any thing new that has
happened to a man any where on this globe,”—and he reads it over his
coffee and rolls, that a man has had his eyes gouged out this morning on the
Wachito River; never dreaming the while that he lives in the dark
unfathomed mammoth cave of this world, and has but the rudiment of an
eye himself.
For my part, I could easily do without the post-office. I think that there
are very few important communications made through it. To speak
critically, I never received more than one or two letters in my life—I wrote
this some years ago—that were worth the postage. The penny-post is,
commonly, an institution through which you seriously offer a man that
penny for his thoughts which is so often safely offered in jest. And I am
sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of
one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or
one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the
Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the
winter,—we never need read of another. One is enough. If you are
acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and
applications? To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they
who edit and read it are old women over their tea. Yet not a few are greedy
after this gossip. There was such a rush, as I hear, the other day at one of the
offices to learn the foreign news by the last arrival, that several large
squares of plate glass belonging to the establishment were broken by the
pressure,—news which I seriously think a ready wit might write a twelve-
month, or twelve years, beforehand with sufficient accuracy. As for Spain,
for instance, if you know how to throw in Don Carlos and the Infanta, and
Don Pedro and Seville and Granada, from time to time in the right
proportions,—they may have changed the names a little since I saw the
papers,—and serve up a bull-fight when other entertainments fail, it will be
true to the letter, and give us as good an idea of the exact state or ruin of
things in Spain as the most succinct and lucid reports under this head in the
newspapers: and as for England, almost the last significant scrap of news
from that quarter was the revolution of 1649; and if you have learned the
history of her crops for an average year, you never need attend to that thing
again, unless your speculations are of a merely pecuniary character. If one
may judge who rarely looks into the newspapers, nothing new does ever
happen in foreign parts, a French revolution not excepted.

What news! how much more important to know what that is which was
never old! “Kieou-he-yu (great dignitary of the state of Wei) sent a man to
Khoung-tseu to know his news. Khoung-tseu caused the messenger to be
seated near him, and questioned him in these terms: What is your master
doing? The messenger answered with respect: My master desires to
diminish the number of his faults, but he cannot come to the end of them.
The messenger being gone, the philosopher remarked: What a worthy
messenger! What a worthy messenger!” The preacher, instead of vexing the
ears of drowsy farmers on their day of rest at the end of the week,—for
Sunday is the fit conclusion of an ill-spent week, and not the fresh and
brave beginning of a new one,—with this one other draggle-tail of a
sermon, should shout with thundering voice, “Pause! Avast! Why so
seeming fast, but deadly slow?”
Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is
fabulous. If men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow
themselves to be deluded, life, to compare it with such things as we know,
would be like a fairy tale and the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments. If we
respected only what is inevitable and has a right to be, music and poetry
would resound along the streets. When we are unhurried and wise, we
perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute
existence,—that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the
reality. This is always exhilarating and sublime. By closing the eyes and
slumbering, and consenting to be deceived by shows, men establish and
confirm their daily life of routine and habit everywhere, which still is built
on purely illusory foundations. Children, who play life, discern its true law
and relations more clearly than men, who fail to live it worthily, but who
think that they are wiser by experience, that is, by failure. I have read in a
Hindoo book, that “there was a king’s son, who, being expelled in infancy
from his native city, was brought up by a forester, and, growing up to
maturity in that state, imagined himself to belong to the barbarous race with
which he lived. One of his father’s ministers having discovered him,
revealed to him what he was, and the misconception of his character was
removed, and he knew himself to be a prince. So soul,” continues the
Hindoo philosopher, “from the circumstances in which it is placed, mistakes
its own character, until the truth is revealed to it by some holy teacher, and
then it knows itself to be Brahme.” I perceive that we inhabitants of New
England live this mean life that we do because our vision does not penetrate

the surface of things. We think that that is which appears to be. If a man
should walk through this town and see only the reality, where, think you,
would the “Mill-dam” go to? If he should give us an account of the realities
he beheld there, we should not recognize the place in his description. Look
at a meeting-house, or a court-house, or a jail, or a shop, or a dwelling-
house, and say what that thing really is before a true gaze, and they would
all go to pieces in your account of them. Men esteem truth remote, in the
outskirts of the system, behind the farthest star, before Adam and after the
last man. In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. But all
these times and places and occasions are now and here. God himself
culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the
lapse of all the ages. And we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime
and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that
surrounds us. The universe constantly and obediently answers to our
conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us. Let us
spend our lives in conceiving then. The poet or the artist never yet had so
fair and noble a design but some of his posterity at least could accomplish
it.
Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off the
track by every nutshell and mosquito’s wing that falls on the rails. Let us
rise early and fast, or break fast, gently and without perturbation; let
company come and let company go, let the bells ring and the children cry,
—determined to make a day of it. Why should we knock under and go with
the stream? Let us not be upset and overwhelmed in that terrible rapid and
whirlpool called a dinner, situated in the meridian shallows. Weather this
danger and you are safe, for the rest of the way is down hill. With unrelaxed
nerves, with morning vigor, sail by it, looking another way, tied to the mast
like Ulysses. If the engine whistles, let it whistle till it is hoarse for its
pains. If the bell rings, why should we run? We will consider what kind of
music they are like. Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet
downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and
tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the
globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and
Concord, through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and
religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can
call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake; and then begin, having a point
d’appui, below freshet and frost and fire, a place where you might found a

wall or a state, or set a lamp-post safely, or perhaps a gauge, not a
Nilometer, but a Realometer, that future ages might know how deep a
freshet of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time. If you
stand right fronting and face to face to a fact, you will see the sun glimmer
on both its surfaces, as if it were a cimeter, and feel its sweet edge dividing
you through the heart and marrow, and so you will happily conclude your
mortal career. Be it life or death, we crave only reality. If we are really
dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities; if
we are alive, let us go about our business.
Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I
see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides
away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose
bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of
the alphabet. I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day
I was born. The intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the
secret of things. I do not wish to be any more busy with my hands than is
necessary. My head is hands and feet. I feel all my best faculties
concentrated in it. My instinct tells me that my head is an organ for
burrowing, as some creatures use their snout and fore-paws, and with it I
would mine and burrow my way through these hills. I think that the richest
vein is somewhere hereabouts; so by the divining-rod and thin rising vapors
I judge; and here I will begin to mine.

Reading

With a little more deliberation in the choice of their pursuits, all men
would perhaps become essentially students and observers, for certainly their
nature and destiny are interesting to all alike. In accumulating property for
ourselves or our posterity, in founding a family or a state, or acquiring fame
even, we are mortal; but in dealing with truth we are immortal, and need
fear no change nor accident. The oldest Egyptian or Hindoo philosopher
raised a corner of the veil from the statue of the divinity; and still the
trembling robe remains raised, and I gaze upon as fresh a glory as he did,
since it was I in him that was then so bold, and it is he in me that now
reviews the vision. No dust has settled on that robe; no time has elapsed
since that divinity was revealed. That time which we really improve, or
which is improvable, is neither past, present, nor future.
My residence was more favorable, not only to thought, but to serious
reading, than a university; and though I was beyond the range of the
ordinary circulating library, I had more than ever come within the influence
of those books which circulate round the world, whose sentences were first
written on bark, and are now merely copied from time to time on to linen
paper. Says the poet Mîr Camar Uddîn Mast, “Being seated to run through
the region of the spiritual world; I have had this advantage in books. To be
intoxicated by a single glass of wine; I have experienced this pleasure when
I have drunk the liquor of the esoteric doctrines.” I kept Homer’s Iliad on
my table through the summer, though I looked at his page only now and
then. Incessant labor with my hands, at first, for I had my house to finish
and my beans to hoe at the same time, made more study impossible. Yet I
sustained myself by the prospect of such reading in future. I read one or two
shallow books of travel in the intervals of my work, till that employment
made me ashamed of myself, and I asked where it was then that I lived.
The student may read Homer or Æschylus in the Greek without danger of
dissipation or luxuriousness, for it implies that he in some measure emulate

their heroes, and consecrate morning hours to their pages. The heroic books,
even if printed in the character of our mother tongue, will always be in a
language dead to degenerate times; and we must laboriously seek the
meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a larger sense than common
use permits out of what wisdom and valor and generosity we have. The
modern cheap and fertile press, with all its translations, has done little to
bring us nearer to the heroic writers of antiquity. They seem as solitary, and
the letter in which they are printed as rare and curious, as ever. It is worth
the expense of youthful days and costly hours, if you learn only some words
of an ancient language, which are raised out of the trivialness of the street,
to be perpetual suggestions and provocations. It is not in vain that the
farmer remembers and repeats the few Latin words which he has heard.
Men sometimes speak as if the study of the classics would at length make
way for more modern and practical studies; but the adventurous student will
always study classics, in whatever language they may be written and
however ancient they may be. For what are the classics but the noblest
recorded thoughts of man? They are the only oracles which are not decayed,
and there are such answers to the most modern inquiry in them as Delphi
and Dodona never gave. We might as well omit to study Nature because she
is old. To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble
exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the
customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes
underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object.
Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written. It is
not enough even to be able to speak the language of that nation by which
they are written, for there is a memorable interval between the spoken and
the written language, the language heard and the language read. The one is
commonly transitory, a sound, a tongue, a dialect merely, almost brutish,
and we learn it unconsciously, like the brutes, of our mothers. The other is
the maturity and experience of that; if that is our mother tongue, this is our
father tongue, a reserved and select expression, too significant to be heard
by the ear, which we must be born again in order to speak. The crowds of
men who merely spoke the Greek and Latin tongues in the middle ages
were not entitled by the accident of birth to read the works of genius written
in those languages; for these were not written in that Greek or Latin which
they knew, but in the select language of literature. They had not learned the
nobler dialects of Greece and Rome, but the very materials on which they

were written were waste paper to them, and they prized instead a cheap
contemporary literature. But when the several nations of Europe had
acquired distinct though rude written languages of their own, sufficient for
the purposes of their rising literatures, then first learning revived, and
scholars were enabled to discern from that remoteness the treasures of
antiquity. What the Roman and Grecian multitude could not hear, after the
lapse of ages a few scholars read, and a few scholars only are still reading
it.
However much we may admire the orator’s occasional bursts of
eloquence, the noblest written words are commonly as far behind or above
the fleeting spoken language as the firmament with its stars is behind the
clouds. There are the stars, and they who can may read them. The
astronomers forever comment on and observe them. They are not
exhalations like our daily colloquies and vaporous breath. What is called
eloquence in the forum is commonly found to be rhetoric in the study. The
orator yields to the inspiration of a transient occasion, and speaks to the
mob before him, to those who can hear him; but the writer, whose more
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 health of
mankind, to all in any age who can understand him.
No wonder that Alexander carried the Iliad with him on his expeditions
in a precious casket. A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something
at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of
art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may be translated into every
language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips;—
not be represented on canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the
breath of life itself. The symbol of an ancient man’s thought becomes a
modern man’s speech. Two thousand summers have imparted to the
monuments of Grecian literature, as to her marbles, only a maturer 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, stand naturally and
rightfully on the shelves of every 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 aristocracy
in every society, and, more than kings or emperors, exert an influence on

mankind. When the illiterate and perhaps scornful trader has earned by
enterprise and industry his coveted leisure and independence, and is
admitted to the circles of wealth and fashion, he turns inevitably at last to
those still higher but yet inaccessible circles of intellect and genius, and is
sensible only of the imperfection of his culture and the vanity and
insufficiency of all his riches, and further proves his good sense by the
pains which he takes to secure for his children that intellectual culture
whose want he so keenly feels; and thus it is that he becomes the founder of
a family.
Those who have not learned to read the ancient classics in the language
in which they were written must have a very imperfect knowledge of the
history of the human race; for it is remarkable that no transcript of them has
ever been made into any modern tongue, unless our civilization itself may
be regarded as such a transcript. Homer has never yet been printed in
English, nor Æschylus, nor Virgil even—works as refined, as solidly done,
and as beautiful almost as the morning itself; for later writers, say what we
will of their genius, have rarely, if ever, 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 us
to attend to and appreciate them. That age will be rich indeed when those
relics which we call Classics, and the still older and more than classic but
even less known Scriptures of the nations, shall have still further
accumulated, when the 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 trophies in the forum of the
world. By such a pile we may hope to scale heaven at last.
The works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind, for
only great poets can read them. They have only been read as the multitude
read the stars, at most astrologically, not astronomically. Most men have
learned to read to serve a 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 intellectual exercise they know little or nothing; yet this only is
reading, in a high sense, not that which lulls us as a luxury and suffers the
nobler faculties to sleep the while, but what we have to stand on tip-toe to
read and devote our most alert and wakeful hours to.

I think that having learned our letters we should read the best that is in
literature, and not be forever repeating our a b abs, and words of one
syllable, in the fourth or fifth classes, sitting on the lowest and foremost
form all our lives. Most men are satisfied if they read or hear read, and
perchance have been convicted by the wisdom of one good book, the Bible,
and for the rest of their lives vegetate and dissipate their faculties in what is
called easy reading. There is a work in several volumes in our Circulating
Library entitled Little Reading, which I thought referred to a town of that
name which I had not been to. There are those who, like cormorants and
ostriches, can digest all sorts of this, even after the fullest dinner of meats
and vegetables, for they suffer nothing to be wasted. If others are the
machines to provide this provender, they are the machines to read it. They
read the nine thousandth 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 unfortunate got up on to a steeple, who had
better never have gone up as far as the belfry; and then, having needlessly
got him up there, the happy novelist rings the bell for all the world to come
together and hear, O dear! how he did get down again! For my part, I think
that they had better metamorphose all such aspiring heroes of universal
noveldom into man weathercocks, as they used to put heroes among the
constellations, and let them swing round there till they are rusty, and not
come down at all to bother honest men with their pranks. The next time the
novelist rings the bell I will not stir though the meeting-house burn down.
“The Skip of the Tip-Toe-Hop, a Romance of the Middle Ages, by the
celebrated author of ‘Tittle-Tol-Tan,’ to appear in monthly parts; a great
rush; don’t all come together.” All this they read with saucer eyes, and erect
and primitive curiosity, and with 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
skill in extracting 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.

The best books are not read even by those who are called good readers.
What does our Concord culture amount to? There is in this town, with a
very few exceptions, no taste for the best or 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 acquaintance with the English classics; and as for the recorded
wisdom of mankind, the ancient classics and Bibles, which are accessible to
all who will know of them, there are the feeblest efforts any where made to
become acquainted with them. I know a woodchopper, of middle age, who
takes a French paper, not for news as he says, for he is above that, but to
“keep himself in practice,” he being a Canadian by birth; and when I ask
him what he considers the best thing he can do in this world, he says, 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? Or
suppose he comes from reading a Greek or Latin classic in the original,
whose praises are familiar even to the so called illiterate; he will find
nobody at all to speak to, but must keep silence about it. Indeed, there is
hardly the professor in our colleges, who, if he has mastered the difficulties
of the language, has proportionally mastered the difficulties of the wit and
poetry of a Greek poet, and has any sympathy to impart to the alert and
heroic reader; and as for the sacred Scriptures, or Bibles of mankind, who in
this town can tell me even their titles? Most men do not know that any
nation but the Hebrews have had a scripture. A man, any man, will go
considerably out of his way to pick up a silver dollar; but here are golden
words, which the wisest men of antiquity have uttered, and whose 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 Reading,” and story books, which are for boys and
beginners; and our reading, our conversation and thinking, are all on a very
low level, worthy only of pygmies and manikins.
I aspire to be acquainted with wiser men than this our Concord soil has
produced, whose names are hardly known here. Or shall I hear the name of
Plato and never read his book? As if Plato were my townsman and I never
saw him,—my next neighbor and I never heard him speak or attended to the
wisdom of his words. But how actually is it? His Dialogues, which contain

what was immortal in him, lie on the next shelf, and yet I never read them.
We are underbred and low-lived and illiterate; and in this respect I confess I
do not make any very broad distinction between the illiterateness of my
townsman who cannot read at all, and the illiterateness of him who has
learned to read only what is for children and feeble intellects. We should be
as good as the worthies of antiquity, but partly by first knowing how good
they were. We are a race of tit-men, and soar but little higher in our
intellectual flights than the columns of the daily paper.
It is not all books that are as dull as their readers. There are probably
words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and
understand, would be more salutary than the morning or the spring to our
lives, and possibly put a new aspect on the face of things for us. How many
a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book. The book
exists for us perchance which will explain our miracles and reveal new
ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered.
These same questions that disturb and puzzle and confound us have in their
turn occurred to all the wise men; not one has been omitted; and each has
answered them, according to his ability, by his words and his life.
Moreover, with wisdom we shall learn liberality. The solitary hired man on
a farm in the outskirts of Concord, who has had his second birth and
peculiar religious experience, and is driven as he believes into the silent
gravity and exclusiveness by his faith, may think it is not true; but
Zoroaster, thousands of years ago, travelled the same road and had the same
experience; but he, being wise, knew it to be universal, and treated his
neighbors accordingly, and is even said to have invented and established
worship among men. 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.
We boast that we belong to the nineteenth century and are making the
most rapid strides of any nation. But consider how little this village does for
its own culture. I do not wish to flatter my townsmen, nor to be flattered by
them, for that will not advance either of us. We need to be provoked,—
goaded like oxen, as we are, into a trot. We have a comparatively decent
system of common schools, schools for infants only; but excepting the half-
starved Lyceum in the winter, and latterly the puny beginning of a library
suggested by the state, no school for ourselves. We spend more on almost
any article of bodily aliment or ailment 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 universities, and their elder inhabitants the fellows of universities,
with leisure—if they are indeed so well off—to pursue liberal studies the
rest of their lives. Shall the world be confined to one Paris or one Oxford
forever? Cannot students be boarded here and get a liberal education under
the skies of Concord? Can we not hire some Abelard to lecture to us? Alas!
what with foddering the cattle and tending the store, we are kept from
school too long, and our education is sadly neglected. In this country, the
village should in some respects take the place of the nobleman of Europe. It
should be the patron of the fine arts. It is rich enough. It wants only the
magnanimity and refinement. It can spend money enough on such things as
farmers and traders value, but it is thought Utopian to propose spending
money for things which more intelligent men know to be of far more worth.
This town has spent seventeen thousand dollars on a town-house, thank
fortune or politics, but probably it will not spend so much on living wit, the
true meat to put into that shell, in a hundred years. The 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 we live in the
nineteenth century, why should we not enjoy the advantages which the
nineteenth century offers? Why should our life be in any respect provincial?
If we will read newspapers, why not skip the gossip of Boston and take the
best newspaper in the world at once?—not be sucking the pap of “neutral
family” papers, or browsing “Olive-Branches” here in New England. Let
the reports of all the learned societies come to us, and we will see if they
know any thing. Why should we leave it to Harper & Brothers and Redding
& Co. to select our reading? As the nobleman of cultivated taste surrounds
himself with whatever conduces to his culture,—genius—learning—wit—
books—paintings—statuary—music—philosophical instruments, and the
like; so let the village do,—not stop short at a pedagogue, a parson, a
sexton, a parish library, and three 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 surrounds us.

Sounds

But while we are confined to books, though the most select and classic,
and read only particular written languages, which are themselves but
dialects and provincial, we are in danger of forgetting the language which
all things and events speak without metaphor, which alone is copious and
standard. Much is published, but little printed. The rays which stream
through the shutter will be no longer remembered when the shutter is
wholly removed. No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of
being forever on the alert. What is a course of history, or philosophy, or
poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most
admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at
what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer? Read
your fate, see what is before you, and walk on into futurity.
I did not read books the first summer; I 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 sing 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 distant highway, I was
reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in those seasons like corn in the night,
and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been. They
were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my
usual allowance. I realized what the Orientals mean by contemplation and
the forsaking of works. For the most part, I minded not how the hours went.
The day advanced as if to light some work of mine; it was morning, and lo,
now it is evening, and nothing memorable is accomplished. Instead of
singing like the birds, I silently smiled at my incessant good fortune. As the

sparrow had its trill, sitting on the hickory before my door, so had I my
chuckle or suppressed warble which he might hear out of my nest. My days
were not days of the week, bearing the stamp of any heathen deity, nor were
they minced into hours and fretted by the ticking of a clock; for I lived like
the 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 backward 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 flowers had tried me by their standard, I should
not have been found wanting. A man must find his occasions in himself, it
is true. The natural day is very calm, and will hardly reprove his indolence.
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 my amusement and never ceased to be novel. It was a
drama of many scenes and without an end. If we were always indeed
getting our living, and regulating our lives according to the last and best
mode we had learned, we should never be troubled with ennui. Follow your
genius closely enough, and it will not fail to show you a fresh prospect
every hour. Housework was a pleasant pastime. When my floor was dirty, I
rose early, and, setting all my furniture out of doors on the grass, bed and
bedstead making but 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 villagers had broken their fast the morning sun
had dried my house sufficiently to allow me to move in again, and my
meditations were almost uninterupted. 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 over them and take my seat there. It was worth the
while to see the sun shine on these things, and hear the free wind blow on
them; so much more interesting most familiar objects look out of doors than
in the house. A bird sits on the next bough, life-everlasting grows under the
table, and blackberry vines run round its legs; pine cones, chestnut burs, and
strawberry leaves are strewn about. It looked as if this was the way these
forms came to be transferred to our furniture, to tables, chairs, and
bedsteads,—because they once stood in their midst.

My house was on the side of a hill, immediately on the edge of the larger
wood, in the midst of a young forest of pitch pines and hickories, and half a
dozen rods from the pond, to which a narrow footpath led down the hill. In
my front yard grew the strawberry, blackberry, and life-everlasting,
johnswort and goldenrod, shrub-oaks and sand-cherry, blueberry and
groundnut. Near the end of May, the sand-cherry (Cerasus pumila,) adorned
the sides of the path with its delicate flowers arranged in umbels
cylindrically about its short stems, which last, in the fall, weighed down
with good sized and handsome cherries, fell over in wreaths like rays on
every side. I tasted them out of compliment to Nature, though they were
scarcely palatable. The sumach (Rhus glabra,) 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 themselves
as by magic into graceful green and tender boughs, an inch in diameter; and
sometimes, as I sat at my window, so heedlessly did they grow and tax their
weak joints, I heard a fresh and tender bough suddenly fall like a fan to the
ground, when there was not a breath of air stirring, broken off by its own
weight. In August, the large masses of berries, which, when in flower, had
attracted many wild bees, gradually assumed their bright velvety crimson
hue, and by their weight again bent down and broke the tender limbs.

As I sit at my window this summer afternoon, hawks are circling about
my clearing; the tantivy of wild pigeons, flying by twos and threes athwart
my view, or perching restless on the white-pine boughs behind my house,
gives a voice to the air; 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 couldn’t even hear the
whistle! I doubt if there is such a place in Massachusetts 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 society by this link. The men on the freight trains, who go
over the whole length of the road, bow to me as to an old acquaintance, they
pass me so often, and apparently they take me for an employee; and so I
am. I too would 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 restless city merchants are arriving within the
circle of the town, or adventurous country traders from the other side. As
they come under one horizon, they shout their warning to get off the track
to the other, heard sometimes through the circles of two towns. Here come
your groceries, country; your rations, countrymen! Nor is there any man so
independent on his farm that he can say them nay. And here’s your pay for
them! screams the countryman’s whistle; timber like long battering rams
going twenty miles an hour against the city’s walls, and chairs enough to
seat all the weary and heavy laden that dwell within them. With such huge
and lumbering civility the country hands a chair to the city. All the Indian
huckleberry hills are stripped, all the cranberry meadows are raked into the
city. Up comes the cotton, down goes the woven cloth; up comes the silk,
down goes the woollen; up come the books, but down goes the wit that
writes them.
When I meet the engine with its train of cars moving off with planetary
motion,—or, rather, like a comet, for the beholder knows not if with that
velocity and with that direction it will ever revisit this system, since its orbit
does not look like a returning curve,—with its steam cloud like a banner
streaming behind 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
hills 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 they will put into the new Mythology I don’t know), it seems
as if the earth had got a race now worthy to inhabit it. If all were as it
seems, and men made the elements their servants for noble ends! If the
cloud that hangs over the engine were the perspiration of heroic deeds, or as
beneficent as that which floats over the farmer’s fields, then the elements
and Nature herself would cheerfully accompany men on their errands and
be their escort.
I watch the passage of the morning cars with the same feeling that I do
the rising of the sun, which is hardly more regular. Their train of clouds
stretching far behind and rising higher and higher, going to heaven while
the cars are going to Boston, conceals the sun for a minute and casts my
distant field into the shade, a celestial train beside which the petty train of
cars which hugs the earth is but the barb of the spear. The stabler of the iron
horse was up early this winter morning by the light of the stars amid the
mountains, to fodder and harness his steed. Fire, too, was awakened thus
early to put the vital heat in him and get him off. If the enterprise were as
innocent as it is early! If the snow lies deep, they strap on his snow-shoes,
and with the giant plow, plow a furrow from the mountains to the seaboard,
in which the cars, like a following drill-barrow, sprinkle all the restless men
and floating merchandise in the country for seed. All day the fire-steed flies
over the country, stopping only that his master may rest, and I am awakened
by his tramp and defiant snort at midnight, when in some remote glen in the
woods he fronts the elements incased in ice and snow; and he will reach his
stall only with the morning star, to start once more on his travels without
rest or slumber. Or perchance, at evening, I hear him in his stable blowing
off the superfluous energy of the day, that he may calm his nerves and cool
his liver and brain for a few hours of iron slumber. If the enterprise were as
heroic and commanding as it is protracted and unwearied!
Far through unfrequented woods on the confines of towns, where once
only the hunter penetrated by day, in the darkest night dart these bright
saloons without the knowledge of their inhabitants; this moment stopping at
some brilliant station-house in town or city, where a social crowd is
gathered, the next in the Dismal Swamp, scaring the owl and fox. The
startings and arrivals of the cars are now the epochs in the village day. They
go and come with such regularity and precision, and their whistle can be
heard so far, that the farmers set their clocks by them, and thus one well

conducted institution regulates a whole country. Have not men improved
somewhat in punctuality since the railroad was invented? Do they not talk
and think faster in the depot than they did in the stage-office? There is
something electrifying in the atmosphere of the former place. I have been
astonished at the miracles it has wrought; that some of my neighbors, who, I
should have prophesied, once for all, would never get to Boston by so
prompt a conveyance, are on hand when the bell rings. To do things
“railroad fashion” is now the by-word; and it is worth the while to be
warned so often and so sincerely by any power to get off its track. There is
no stopping to read the riot act, no firing over the heads of the mob, in this
case. We have constructed a fate, an Atropos, that never turns aside. (Let
that be the name of your engine.) Men are advertised that at a certain hour
and minute these bolts will be shot toward particular points of the compass;
yet it interferes with no man’s business, and the children go to school on the
other track. We live the steadier for it. We are all educated thus to be sons of
Tell. The air is full of invisible bolts. Every path but your own is the path of
fate. Keep on your own track, then.
What recommends commerce to me is its enterprise and bravery. It does
not clasp its hands and pray to Jupiter. I see these men every day go about
their business with more or less courage and content, doing more even than
they suspect, and perchance better employed than they could have
consciously devised. I am less affected by their heroism who stood up for
half an hour in the front line at Buena Vista, than by the steady and cheerful
valor of the men who inhabit the snow-plough for their winter quarters;
who have not merely the three-o’-clock in the morning courage, which
Bonaparte thought was the rarest, but whose courage does not go to rest so
early, who go to sleep only when the storm sleeps or the sinews of their iron
steed are frozen. On this morning of the Great Snow, perchance, which is
still raging and chilling men’s blood, I hear the muffled tone of their engine
bell from out the fog bank of their chilled breath, which announces that the
cars are coming, without long delay, notwithstanding the veto of a New
England north-east snow storm, and I behold the ploughmen covered with
snow and rime, their heads peering, above the mould-board which is turning
down other than daisies and the nests of field-mice, like bowlders of the
Sierra Nevada, that occupy an outside place in the universe.
Commerce is unexpectedly confident and serene, alert, adventurous, and
unwearied. It is very natural in its methods withal, far more so than many

fantastic enterprises and sentimental experiments, and hence its singular
success. I am refreshed and expanded when the freight train rattles past me,
and I smell the stores which go dispensing their odors all the way from
Long Wharf to Lake Champlain, reminding me of foreign parts, of coral
reefs, and Indian oceans, and tropical climes, and the extent of the globe. I
feel more like a citizen of the world at the sight of the palm-leaf which will
cover so many flaxen New England heads the next summer, the Manilla
hemp and cocoa-nut husks, the old junk, gunny bags, scrap iron, and rusty
nails. This car-load of torn sails is more legible and interesting now than if
they should be wrought into paper and printed books. Who can write so
graphically the history of the storms they have weathered as these rents
have done? They are proof-sheets which need no correction. Here goes
lumber from the Maine woods, which did not go out to sea in the last
freshet, risen four dollars on the thousand because of what did go out or was
split up; pine, spruce, cedar,—first, second, third, and fourth qualities, so
lately all of one quality, to wave over the bear, and moose, and caribou.
Next rolls Thomaston lime, a prime lot, which will get far among the hills
before it gets slacked. These rags in bales, of all hues and qualities, the
lowest condition to which cotton and linen descend, the final result of dress,
—of patterns which are now no longer cried up, unless it be in Milwaukie,
as those splendid articles, English, French, or American prints, ginghams,
muslins, &c., gathered from all quarters both of fashion and poverty, going
to become paper of one color or a few shades only, on which forsooth will
be written tales of real life, high and low, and founded on fact! This closed
car smells of salt fish, the strong New England and commercial scent,
reminding me of the Grand Banks and the fisheries. Who has not seen a salt
fish, thoroughly cured for this world, so that nothing can spoil it, and
putting the perseverance of the saints to the blush? with which you may
sweep or pave the streets, and split your kindlings, and the teamster shelter
himself and his lading against sun wind and rain behind it,—and the trader,
as a Concord trader once did, hang it up by his door for a sign when he
commences business, until at last his oldest customer cannot tell surely
whether it be animal, vegetable, or mineral, and yet it shall be as pure as a
snowflake, and if it be put into a pot and boiled, will come out an excellent
dun fish for a Saturday’s dinner. Next Spanish hides, with the tails still
preserving their twist and the angle of elevation they had when the oxen
that wore them were careering over the pampas of the Spanish main,—a

type of all obstinacy, and evincing how almost hopeless and incurable are
all constitutional vices. I confess, that practically speaking, when I have
learned a man’s real disposition, I have no hopes of changing it for the
better or worse in this state of existence. As the Orientals say, “A cur’s tail
may be warmed, and pressed, and bound round with ligatures, and after a
twelve years’ labor bestowed upon it, still it will retain its natural form.”
The only effectual cure for such inveteracies as these tails exhibit is to make
glue of them, which I believe is what is usually done with them, and then
they will stay put and stick. Here is a hogshead of molasses or of brandy
directed to John Smith, Cuttingsville, Vermont, some trader among the
Green Mountains, who imports for the farmers near his clearing, and now
perchance stands over his bulk-head and thinks of the last arrivals on the
coast, how they may affect the price for him, telling his customers this
moment, as he has told them twenty times before this morning, that he
expects some by the next train of prime quality. It is advertised in the
Cuttingsville Times.
While these things go up other things come down. Warned by the
whizzing sound, I look up from my book and see some tall pine, hewn on
far northern hills, which has winged its way over the Green Mountains and
the Connecticut, shot like an arrow through the township within ten
minutes, and scarce another eye beholds it; going
“to be the mast
Of some great ammiral.”

And hark! here comes the cattle-train bearing the cattle of a thousand hills,
sheepcots, stables, and cow-yards in the air, drovers with their sticks, and
shepherd boys in the midst of their flocks, all but the mountain pastures,
whirled along like leaves blown from the mountains by the September
gales. The air is filled with the bleating of calves and sheep, and the
hustling of oxen, as if a pastoral valley were going by. When the old bell-
wether at the head rattles his bell, the mountains do indeed skip like rams
and the little hills like lambs. A car-load of drovers, too, in the midst, on a
level with their droves now, their vocation gone, but still clinging to their
useless sticks as their badge of office. But their dogs, where are they? It is a
stampede to them; they are quite thrown out; they have lost the scent.
Methinks I hear them barking behind the Peterboro’ Hills, or panting up the
western slope of the Green Mountains. They will not be in at the death.

Their vocation, too, is gone. Their fidelity and sagacity are below par now.
They will slink back to their kennels in disgrace, or perchance run wild and
strike a league with the wolf and the fox. So is your pastoral life whirled
past and away. But the bell rings, and I must get off the track and let the
cars go by;—
What’s the railroad to me?
I never go to see
Where it ends.
It fills a few hollows,
And makes banks for the swallows,
It sets the sand a-blowing,
And the blackberries a-growing,

but I cross it like a cart-path in the woods. I will not have my eyes put out
and my ears spoiled by its smoke and steam and hissing.

Now that the cars are gone by and all the restless world with them, and
the fishes in the pond no longer feel their rumbling, I am more alone than
ever. For the rest of the long afternoon, perhaps, my meditations are
interrupted only by the faint rattle of a carriage or team along the distant
highway.
Sometimes, on Sundays, I heard the bells, the Lincoln, Acton, Bedford,
or Concord bell, when the wind was favorable, a faint, sweet, and, as it
were, natural melody, worth importing into the wilderness. At a sufficient
distance over the woods this sound acquires a certain vibratory hum, as if
the pine needles in the horizon were the strings of a harp which it swept. All
sound heard at the greatest possible distance produces one and the same
effect, a vibration of the universal lyre, just as the intervening atmosphere
makes a distant ridge of earth interesting to our eyes by the azure tint it
imparts to it. There came to me in this case a melody which the air had
strained, and which had conversed with every leaf and needle of the wood,
that portion of the sound which the elements had taken up and modulated
and echoed from vale to vale. The echo is, to some extent, an original
sound, and therein is the magic and charm of it. It is not merely a repetition
of what was worth repeating in the bell, but partly the voice of the wood;
the same trivial words and notes sung by a wood-nymph.

At evening, the distant lowing of some cow in the horizon beyond the
woods sounded sweet and melodious, and at first I would mistake it for the
voices of certain minstrels by whom I was sometimes serenaded, who might
be straying over hill and dale; but soon I was not unpleasantly disappointed
when it was prolonged into the cheap and natural music of the cow. I do not
mean to be satirical, but to express my appreciation of those youths’
singing, when I state that I perceived clearly that it was akin to the music of
the cow, and they were at length one articulation of Nature.
Regularly at half past seven, in one part of the summer, after the evening
train had gone by, the whippoorwills chanted their vespers for half an hour,
sitting on a stump by my door, or upon the ridge pole of the house. They
would begin to sing almost with as much precision as a clock, within five
minutes of a particular time, referred to the setting of the sun, every
evening. I had a rare opportunity to become acquainted with their habits.
Sometimes I heard four or five at once in different parts of the wood, by
accident one a bar behind another, and so near me that I distinguished not
only the cluck after each note, but often that singular buzzing sound like a
fly in a spider’s web, only proportionally louder. Sometimes one would
circle round and round me in the woods a few feet distant as if tethered by a
string, when probably I was near its eggs. They sang at intervals throughout
the night, and were again as musical as ever just before and about dawn.
When other birds are still the screech owls take up the strain, like
mourning women their ancient u-lu-lu. Their dismal scream is truly Ben
Jonsonian. Wise midnight hags! It is no honest and blunt tu-whit tu-who of
the poets, but, without jesting, a most solemn graveyard ditty, the mutual
consolations of suicide lovers remembering the pangs and the delights of
supernal love in the infernal groves. Yet I love to hear their wailing, their
doleful responses, trilled along the wood-side; reminding me sometimes of
music and singing birds; as if it were the dark and tearful side of music, the
regrets and sighs that would fain be sung. They are the spirits, the low
spirits and melancholy forebodings, of fallen souls that once in human
shape night-walked the earth and did the deeds of darkness, now expiating
their sins with their wailing hymns or threnodies in the scenery of their
transgressions. They give me a new sense of the variety and capacity of that
nature which is our common dwelling. Oh-o-o-o-o that I never had been
bor-r-r-r-n! sighs one on this side of the pond, and circles with the
restlessness of despair to some new perch on the gray oaks. Then—that I

never had been bor-r-r-r-n! echoes another on the farther side with
tremulous sincerity, and—bor-r-r-r-n! comes faintly from far in the Lincoln
woods.
I was also serenaded by a hooting owl. Near at hand you could fancy it
the most melancholy sound in Nature, as if she meant by this to stereotype
and make permanent in her choir the dying moans of a human being,—
some poor weak relic of mortality who has left hope behind, and howls like
an animal, yet with human sobs, on entering the dark valley, made more
awful by a certain gurgling melodiousness,—I find myself beginning with
the letters gl when I try to imitate it,—expressive of a mind which has
reached the gelatinous mildewy stage in the mortification of all healthy and
courageous thought. It reminded me of ghouls and idiots and insane
howlings. But now one answers from far woods in a strain made really
melodious by distance,—Hoo hoo hoo, hoorer hoo; and indeed for the most
part it suggested only pleasing associations, whether heard by day or night,
summer or winter.
I rejoice that there are owls. Let them do the idiotic and maniacal hooting
for men. It is a sound admirably suited to swamps and twilight woods
which no day illustrates, suggesting a vast and undeveloped nature which
men have not recognized. They represent the stark twilight and unsatisfied
thoughts which all have. All day the sun has shone on the surface of some
savage swamp, where the single spruce stands hung with usnea lichens, and
small hawks circulate above, and the chickadee lisps amid the evergreens,
and the partridge and rabbit skulk beneath; but now a more dismal and
fitting day dawns, and a different race of creatures awakes to express the
meaning of Nature there.
Late in the evening I heard the distant rumbling of wagons over bridges,
—a sound heard farther than almost any other at night,—the baying of
dogs, and sometimes again the lowing of some disconsolate cow in a distant
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 unrepentant,
trying to sing a catch in their Stygian lake,—if the Walden nymphs will
pardon the comparison, for though there are almost no weeds, there are
frogs there,—who would fain keep up the hilarious rules of their old festal
tables, 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 memory
of the past, but mere saturation and waterloggedness and distention. The
most aldermanic, with his chin upon a heart-leaf, which serves for a napkin
to his drooling chaps, under this northern shore quaffs a deep draught of the
once scorned water, and passes round the cup with the ejaculation tr-r-r-
oonk, tr-r-r-oonk, tr-r-r-oonk! 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 mark; and when this observance has made
the circuit of the shores, then ejaculates the master of ceremonies, with
satisfaction, tr-r-r-oonk! and each in his turn repeats the same down to the
least distended, leakiest, and flabbiest paunched, that there be no mistake;
and then the bowl goes round again and again, until the sun disperses the
morning mist, and only the patriarch is not under the pond, but vainly
bellowing troonk from time to time, and pausing for a reply.
I am not sure that I ever heard the sound of cock-crowing from my
clearing, and I thought that it might be worth the while to keep a cockerel
for his music merely, as a singing bird. The note of this once wild Indian
pheasant is certainly the most remarkable of any 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 this
bird to his tame stock,—to say nothing of the eggs and drumsticks. To walk
in a winter morning in a wood where these birds abounded, their native
woods, and hear the wild cockerels crow on the trees, clear and shrill for
miles over the resounding earth, drowning the feebler notes of other birds,
—think of it! It would put nations on the alert. Who would not be early to
rise, and rise earlier and earlier every successive day of his life, till he
became unspeakably healthy, wealthy, and wise? This foreign bird’s note is
celebrated by the poets of all countries along with the notes of their native
songsters. All climates agree with brave Chanticleer. He is more indigenous
even than the natives. His health is ever good, his lungs are sound, his
spirits never flag. Even the sailor on the Atlantic and Pacific is awakened by
his voice; but its shrill sound never roused me from my slumbers. I kept
neither 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 children

crying, to comfort one. An old-fashioned 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 squirrels on the roof and under
the floor, a whippoorwill on the ridge pole, a blue-jay screaming beneath
the window, a hare or woodchuck under the house, a screech-owl or a cat-
owl behind it, a flock of wild geese or a laughing loon on the pond, and a
fox to bark in the night. Not even a lark or an oriole, those mild plantation
birds, ever visited my clearing. No cockerels to crow nor hens to cackle in
the yard. No yard! but unfenced Nature reaching up to your very sills. A
young forest growing up under your meadows, and wild sumachs and
blackberry vines breaking through into your cellar; sturdy pitch pines
rubbing and creaking against the shingles for want of room, their roots
reaching quite under the house. Instead of a scuttle or a blind blown off in
the gale,—a pine tree snapped off or torn up by the roots behind your house
for fuel. Instead of no path to the front-yard gate in the Great Snow,—no
gate,—no front-yard,—and no path to the civilized world!

Solitude

This is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, and
imbibes delight through every pore. I go and come with a strange liberty in
Nature, 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
reflecting surface. Though it is now dark, the wind still blows and roars in
the wood, the waves still dash, and some creatures lull the rest with their
notes. The repose is never complete. The wildest animals do not repose, but
seek their prey now; the fox, and skunk, and rabbit, now roam the fields and
woods without fear. They are Nature’s watchmen,—links which connect the
days of animated life.
When I return to my house I find that visitors have been there and left
their cards, either a bunch of flowers, or a wreath of evergreen, or a name in
pencil on a yellow walnut leaf or a chip. They who come rarely to the
woods take some little piece of the forest into their hands to play with by
the way, which they leave, either intentionally or accidentally. One has
peeled a willow wand, woven it into a ring, and dropped it on my table. I
could always tell if visitors had called in my absence, either by the bended
twigs or grass, or the print of their shoes, 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.

There is commonly sufficient space about us. Our horizon is never quite
at our elbows. The thick wood is not just at our door, nor the pond, but
somewhat is always clearing, familiar and worn by us, appropriated and
fenced in some way, and reclaimed from Nature. For what reason have I
this vast range and circuit, some square miles of unfrequented forest, for my
privacy, abandoned to me by men? My nearest neighbor is a mile distant,
and no house is visible from any place but the hill-tops within half a mile of
my own. I have my horizon bounded by woods all to myself; a distant view
of the railroad where it touches the pond on the one hand, and of the fence
which skirts the woodland road on the other. But for the most part it is as
solitary where I live as on the prairies. It is as much Asia or Africa as New
England. I have, as it were, my own sun and moon and stars, and a little
world all to myself. At night there was never a traveller 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 Pond of their own
natures, and baited their hooks with darkness,—but they soon retreated,
usually with light baskets, and left “the world to darkness and to me,” and
the black kernel of the night was never profaned by any human
neighborhood. I believe that men are generally still a little afraid of the
dark, though the witches are all hung, and Christianity and candles have
been introduced.
Yet I experienced sometimes that the most sweet and tender, the most
innocent and encouraging society may be found in any natural object, even
for the poor misanthrope and most melancholy man. There can be no very
black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature and has his
senses still. There was never yet such a storm but it was Æolian music to a
healthy and innocent ear. Nothing can rightly compel a simple and brave
man to a vulgar sadness. While I enjoy the friendship of the seasons I trust
that nothing can make life a burden to me. The gentle rain which waters my
beans and keeps me in the house 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 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 compare myself with other men, it seems as if I
were more favored by the gods than they, beyond any deserts that I am

conscious of; as if I had a warrant and surety at their hands which my
fellows have not, and were especially guided and guarded. I do not flatter
myself, but if it be possible they flatter me. I have never felt lonesome, or in
the least oppressed by a sense of solitude, but once, and that was a few
weeks after I came to the woods, when, for an hour, I doubted if the near
neighborhood of man was not essential to a serene and healthy life. To be
alone was something unpleasant. But I was at the same time conscious of a
slight insanity in my mood, and seemed to foresee my recovery. In the
midst of a gentle rain while these thoughts prevailed, I was suddenly
sensible of such sweet and beneficent society in Nature, in the very
pattering of the drops, and in every sound and sight around my house, an
infinite and unaccountable friendliness all at once like an atmosphere
sustaining me, as made the fancied advantages of human neighborhood
insignificant, and I have never thought of them since. Every little pine
needle expanded and swelled with sympathy and befriended me. I was so
distinctly made aware of the presence of something kindred to me, even in
scenes which we are accustomed to call wild and dreary, and also that the
nearest of blood to me and humanest was not a person nor a villager, that I
thought no place could ever be strange to me again.—
“Mourning untimely consumes the sad;
Few are their days in the land of the living,
Beautiful daughter of Toscar.”

Some of my pleasantest hours were during the long rain storms in the
spring or fall, which confined me to the house for the afternoon as well as
the forenoon, soothed by their ceaseless roar and pelting; when an early
twilight ushered in a long evening in which many thoughts had time to take
root and unfold themselves. In those driving 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 little house,
which was all entry, and thoroughly 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 harmless 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 point in space. How far apart, think you, dwell the
two most distant inhabitants of yonder star, the breadth of whose disk
cannot be appreciated by our instruments? Why should I feel lonely? is not
our planet in the Milky Way? This which you put seems to me not to be the
most important question. What sort of space is that which separates a man
from his fellows and makes him solitary? I have found that no exertion of
the legs can bring two minds much nearer to one another. What do we want
most to dwell near to? Not to many men surely, the depot, the post-office,
the bar-room, the meeting-house, the school-house, the grocery, Beacon
Hill, or the Five Points, where men most congregate, but to the perennial
source of our life, whence in all our experience we have found that to issue,
as the willow stands near the water and sends out its roots in that direction.
This will vary with different natures, but this is the place where a wise man
will dig his cellar.... I one evening overtook one of my townsmen, who has
accumulated what is called “a handsome property,”—though I never got a
fair view of it,—on the Walden road, driving a pair of cattle to market, who
inquired of me how I could bring my mind to give up so many of the
comforts of life. I answered that I was very sure I liked it passably well; I
was not joking. And so I went home to my bed, and left him to pick his way
through the darkness and the mud to 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 times and places. The place where that may occur is always
the same, and indescribably pleasant to all our senses. For the most part we
allow only outlying and transient circumstances to make our occasions.
They are, in fact, the cause of our distraction. Nearest to all things is that
power which fashions their being. Next to us the grandest laws are
continually being executed. Next to us is not the workman whom we have
hired, with whom we love so well to talk, but the workman whose work we
are.
“How vast and profound is the influence of the subtile powers of Heaven
and of Earth!”
“We seek to perceive them, and we do not see them; we seek to hear
them, and we do not hear them; identified with the substance of things, they

cannot be separated from them.”
“They cause that in all the universe men purify and sanctify their hearts,
and clothe themselves in their holiday garments to offer sacrifices and
oblations to their ancestors. It is an ocean of subtile intelligences. They are
every where, above us, on our left, on our right; they environ us on all
sides.”
We are the subjects of an experiment which is not a little interesting to
me. Can we not do without the society of our gossips a little while under
these circumstances,—have our own thoughts to cheer us? Confucius says
truly, “Virtue does not remain as an abandoned orphan; it must of necessity
have neighbors.”
With thinking we may be beside ourselves in a sane sense. By a
conscious effort of the mind we can stand aloof from actions and their
consequences; and all things, good and bad, go by us like a torrent. We are
not wholly involved in Nature. I may be either the 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 actual event
which appears to concern me much more. I only know myself as a human
entity; the scene, so to speak, of thoughts and affections; and am sensible of
a certain doubleness by which I can stand as remote from myself as from
another. However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence
and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but
spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it; and that is no more I
than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the
spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination
only, so far as he was concerned. This doubleness may easily make us poor
neighbors and friends sometimes.
I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in
company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to
be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as
solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among
men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is
always alone, let him be where he will. Solitude is not measured by the
miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows. The really
diligent student in one of the crowded hives of Cambridge College is as
solitary as a dervish in the desert. The farmer can work alone in the field 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 the student can sit alone in the house
all night and most of the day without ennui and “the blues;” but he does not
realize that the student, though in the house, is still at work in his field, and
chopping in his woods, as the farmer in his, and in turn seeks the same
recreation and society that the latter does, though it may be a more
condensed form of it.
Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not
having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals
three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese
that we are. We have had to agree on a certain set of rules, called etiquette
and politeness, to make this frequent meeting tolerable and that we need not
come to open war. We meet at the post-office, and at the sociable, and about
the fireside every night; we live thick and are in each other’s way, and
stumble over one another, and I think that we thus lose some respect for one
another. Certainly less frequency would suffice for all important and hearty
communications. Consider the girls in a factory,—never alone, hardly in
their dreams. It would be better if there were but one inhabitant to a square
mile, as where I live. The value of a man is not in his skin, that we should
touch him.
I have heard of a man lost in the woods and dying of famine and
exhaustion at the foot of a tree, whose loneliness was relieved by the
grotesque visions with which, owing to bodily weakness, his diseased
imagination surrounded him, and which he believed to be real. So also,
owing to bodily and mental health and strength, we may be continually
cheered by a like but more normal and natural society, and come to know
that we are never alone.
I have a great deal of company in my house; especially in the morning,
when nobody calls. Let me suggest a few comparisons, that 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 deal
of company; he is legion. I am no more lonely than a single mullein or
dandelion in a pasture, or a bean leaf, or sorrel, or a horse-fly, or a bumble-
bee. 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 cider,—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 persons, 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 back farther
than mythology, and she can tell me the original of every fable, and on what
fact every one is founded, for the incidents occurred when she was young.
A ruddy and lusty old dame, who delights in all weathers and seasons, and
is likely to outlive all her children yet.
The indescribable innocence and beneficence of Nature,—of sun and
wind and rain, of summer and winter,—such health, such cheer, they afford
forever! and such sympathy have they ever with our race, that all Nature
would be affected, and the sun’s brightness fade, and the winds would sigh
humanely, and the clouds rain tears, and the woods shed their leaves and put
on mourning in midsummer, if any man should ever for a just cause grieve.
Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and
vegetable mould myself?
What is the pill which will keep us well, serene, contented? Not my or
thy great-grandfather’s, but our great-grandmother Nature’s universal,
vegetable, botanic medicines, by which she has kept herself young always,
outlived so many old Parrs in her day, and fed her health with their
decaying fatness. For my panacea, instead of one of those quack vials of a

mixture dipped from Acheron and the Dead Sea, which come out of those
long shallow black-schooner looking wagons which we sometimes see
made to carry bottles, let me have a draught of undiluted 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 subscription ticket to morning time in
this world. But remember, it will not keep quite till noon-day even in the
coolest cellar, 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 Æsculapius, and who is represented on monuments
holding a serpent in one hand, and in the other a cup out of which the
serpent sometimes drinks; but rather of Hebe, cupbearer to Jupiter, who was
the daughter of Juno and wild lettuce, and who had the power of restoring
gods and men to the vigor of youth. She was probably the only thoroughly
sound-conditioned, healthy, and robust young lady that ever walked the
globe, and wherever she came it was spring.

Visitors

I think that I love society as much as most, and am ready enough to
fasten myself like a bloodsucker for the time to any full-blooded man that
comes in my way. I am naturally no hermit, but might possibly sit out the
sturdiest frequenter of the bar-room, if my business called me thither.
I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three
for society. When visitors came in larger and unexpected numbers there was
but the third chair for them all, but they generally economized the room by
standing up. It 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 parted without being aware that we
had come very near to one another. Many of our houses, both public and
private, with their almost innumerable apartments, their huge halls and their
cellars for the storage of wines and other munitions of peace, appear to me
extravagantly large for their inhabitants. They are so vast and magnificent
that the latter seem to be only vermin which infest them. I am surprised
when the herald blows his summons before some Tremont or Astor or
Middlesex House, to see come creeping out over the piazza for all
inhabitants a ridiculous mouse, which soon again slinks into some hole in
the pavement.
One inconvenience I sometimes experienced in so small a house, the
difficulty of getting to a sufficient distance from my guest when we began
to utter the big thoughts in big words. You want room for your thoughts to
get into sailing trim and run a course or two before they make their port.
The bullet of your thought must have overcome its lateral and ricochet
motion and fallen into its last and steady course before it reaches the ear of
the hearer, else it may plough out again through the side of his head. Also,
our sentences wanted room to unfold and form their columns in the interval.
Individuals, like nations, must have suitable broad and natural boundaries,
even a considerable neutral ground, between them. I have found it a

singular luxury to talk across the pond to a companion on the opposite side.
In my house we were so near that we could not begin to hear,—we could
not speak low enough to be heard; as when you throw two stones into calm
water so near that they break each other’s undulations. If we are merely
loquacious and loud talkers, then we can afford to stand very near together,
cheek by jowl, and feel each other’s breath; but if we speak reservedly and
thoughtfully, we 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 cannot
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.
My “best” room, however, my withdrawing room, always ready for
company, on whose carpet the sun rarely fell, was the pine wood behind my
house. Thither in summer days, when distinguished guests came, I took
them, and a priceless domestic swept the floor and dusted the furniture and
kept the things in order.
If one guest came he sometimes partook of my frugal meal, and it was no
interruption to conversation to be stirring a hasty-pudding, or watching the
rising and maturing 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 considerate
course. The waste and decay of physical life, which so often needs repair,
seemed miraculously retarded in such a case, and the vital vigor stood its
ground. I could entertain thus a thousand as well as twenty; and if any ever
went away disappointed or hungry from my house when they found me at
home, they may depend upon it that I sympathized with them at least. So
easy is it, though many housekeepers doubt it, to establish new and better
customs in the place of the old. You need not rest your reputation on the
dinners you give. For my own part, I was never so effectually deterred from
frequenting a man’s house, by any kind of Cerberus whatever, as by the

parade one made about dining me, which I took to be a very polite and
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:—
“Arrivéd there, the little house they fill,
Ne looke for entertainment where none was;
Rest is their feast, and all things at their will:
The noblest mind the best contentment has.”

When Winslow, afterward governor of the Plymouth Colony, went with a
companion on a visit of ceremony to Massasoit on foot through the woods,
and arrived tired and hungry at his lodge, they were well received by the
king, but nothing was said about eating that day. When the night arrived, to
quote their own words,—“He laid us on the bed with himself and his wife,
they at the one end and we at the other, it being only planks laid a foot from
the ground, and a thin mat upon them. Two more of his chief men, for want
of room, pressed by and upon us; so that we were worse weary of our
lodging than of our journey.” At one o’clock the next day Massasoit
“brought two fishes that he had shot,” about thrice as big as a bream; “these
being boiled, there were at least forty looked for a share in them. The most
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 strength to travel, they departed.
As for lodging, it is true they were but poorly entertained, though what they
found an inconvenience was no doubt intended for an 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
belts tighter and said nothing about it. Another time when Winslow visited
them, it being a season of plenty with them, there was no deficiency in this
respect.
As for men, they will hardly fail one any where. I had more visitors while
I lived in the woods than at any other period in my life; I mean that I had
some. I met several there under more favorable circumstances than I could
any where else. But fewer came to see me on trivial business. In this

respect, my company was winnowed by my mere distance from town. I had
withdrawn so far within the great ocean of solitude, into which the rivers of
society empty, that for the most part, so far as my needs were concerned,
only the finest sediment was deposited around me. Beside, there were
wafted to me evidences of unexplored and uncultivated continents on the
other side.
Who should come to my lodge this morning but a true Homeric or
Paphlagonian man,—he had so suitable and poetic a name that I am sorry I
cannot print it here,—a Canadian, a woodchopper 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 of Homer, and, “if it were not for books,”
would “not know what to do rainy days,” though perhaps he has not read
one wholly through for many rainy seasons. Some priest who could
pronounce the Greek itself taught him to read his verse in the testament in
his native parish far away; and now I must translate to him, while he holds
the book, Achilles’ reproof to Patroclus for his sad countenance.—“Why are
you in tears, Patroclus, like a young girl?”—
“Or have you alone heard some news from Phthia?
They say that Menœtius lives yet, son of Actor,
And Peleus lives, son of Æacus, among the Myrmidons,
Either of whom having died, we should greatly grieve.”

He says, “That’s good.” He has a great bundle of white-oak bark under
his arm for a sick man, gathered this Sunday morning. “I suppose there’s no
harm in going after such a thing to-day,” says he. To him Homer was a great
writer, though what his writing was about he did not know. A more simple
and natural man it would be hard to find. Vice and disease, which cast such
a 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 years before to work in the States, and earn money to
buy a farm with at last, perhaps in his native country. He was cast in the
coarsest mould; a stout but sluggish body, yet gracefully carried, with a
thick sunburnt neck, dark bushy hair, and dull sleepy blue eyes, which were
occasionally lit up with expression. He wore a flat gray cloth cap, a dingy
wool-colored greatcoat, and 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
woodchucks, and coffee in a stone bottle which dangled by a string from his

belt; and sometimes he offered me a drink. He came along early, crossing
my bean-field, though without anxiety or haste to get to his work, such as
Yankees exhibit. He wasn’t a-going to hurt himself. He didn’t care if he
only earned his board. Frequently he would leave his dinner in the bushes,
when his dog had caught a woodchuck by the way, and go back a mile and a
half to dress it and leave it in the cellar of the house where he boarded, after
deliberating first for half an hour whether he could not sink it in the pond
safely till nightfall,—loving to dwell long upon these themes. He would
say, as he went by in the morning, “How thick the pigeons are! If working
every day were not my trade, I could get all the meat I should want by
hunting,—pigeons, woodchucks, rabbits, partridges,—by gosh! I could get
all I should want for a week 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 afterward might be more vigorous and a sled might slide
over the stumps; and instead of leaving a whole tree to support his corded
wood, he would pare it away to a slender stake or splinter which you could
break off with your hand at last.
He interested me because he was so quiet and solitary and so happy
withal; a well of good humor and contentment which overflowed at his
eyes. His mirth was without alloy. Sometimes I saw him at his work in the
woods, felling trees, and he would greet me with a laugh of inexpressible
satisfaction, and a salutation in Canadian French, though he spoke English
as well. When I approached him he would suspend his work, and with half-
suppressed mirth lie along the trunk of a pine which he had felled, and,
peeling off the inner bark, roll it up into a ball and chew it while he laughed
and talked. Such an exuberance of animal spirits had he that he sometimes
tumbled down and rolled on the ground with laughter at any thing which
made him think and tickled him. Looking round upon the trees he would
exclaim,—“By George! I can enjoy myself well enough here chopping; I
want no better sport.” Sometimes, when at leisure, he amused himself all
day in the woods with a pocket pistol, firing salutes to himself at regular
intervals as he walked. In the winter he had a fire by which at noon he
warmed his coffee in a kettle; and as he sat on a log to eat his dinner the
chickadees would sometimes come round 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 developed. In physical endurance and
contentment he was cousin to the pine and the rock. I asked him once if he
was not sometimes tired at night, after working all day; and he answered,
with a sincere and serious look, “Gorrappit, I never was tired in my life.”
But the intellectual and what is called spiritual man in him were slumbering
as in an infant. He had been instructed only in that innocent and ineffectual
way in which the Catholic priests teach the aborigines, by which the pupil is
never educated to the degree of consciousness, but only to the degree of
trust and reverence, and a child is not made a man, but kept a child. When
Nature made him, she gave him a strong body and contentment for his
portion, and propped him on every side with reverence and reliance, that he
might live out his 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 woodchuck to your neighbor. He had got to find
him out as you did. He would not play any part. Men paid him wages for
work, and so helped to feed and clothe him; but he never exchanged
opinions with them. He was so simply and naturally humble—if he can be
called humble who never aspires—that humility was no distinct quality in
him, nor could he conceive of it. Wiser men were demigods to him. If you
told him that such a one was coming, he did as if he thought that any thing
so grand would expect nothing of himself, but take all the responsibility on
itself, and let him be forgotten still. He never heard the sound of praise. He
particularly reverenced the writer and the preacher. Their performances
were miracles. When I told him that I wrote considerably, he thought for a
long time that it was merely the handwriting which I meant, for he could
write a remarkably good hand himself. I sometimes found the name of his
native parish handsomely written in the snow by the highway, with the
proper French accent, and knew that he had passed. I asked him if he ever
wished to write his thoughts. He said that he had read and written letters for
those who could not, but he never tried to write thoughts,—no, he could
not, he could not tell what to put first, it would kill him, and then there was
spelling to be attended to at the same time!
I heard that a distinguished wise man and reformer asked him if he did
not want the world to be changed; but he answered with a chuckle of
surprise in his Canadian accent, not knowing that the question had ever
been entertained before, “No, I like it well enough.” It would have
suggested many things to a philosopher to have dealings with him. To a

stranger he appeared to know nothing of things in general; yet I sometimes
saw in him a man whom I had not seen before, and I did not know whether
he was as wise as Shakespeare or as simply ignorant as a child, whether to
suspect him of a fine poetic consciousness or of stupidity. A townsman told
me that when he met him sauntering through the village in his small close-
fitting cap, and whistling to himself, he reminded him of a prince in
disguise.
His only books were an almanac and an arithmetic, in which last he was
considerably expert. The former was a sort of cyclopædia to him, which he
supposed to contain an abstract of human knowledge, as indeed it does to a
considerable extent. I loved to sound him on the various reforms of the day,
and he never failed to look at them in the most simple and practical light.
He had never heard of such things before. Could he do without factories? I
asked. He had worn the home-made Vermont gray, he said, and that was
good. Could he dispense with tea and coffee? Did this country afford any
beverage beside water? He had soaked hemlock leaves in water and drank
it, and thought that was better than water in warm weather. When I asked
him if he could do without money, he showed the convenience of money in
such a way as to suggest and coincide with the most philosophical accounts
of the origin of this institution, and the very derivation of the word pecunia.
If an ox were his property, and he wished to get needles and thread at the
store, he thought it would be inconvenient and impossible soon to go on
mortgaging some portion of the creature each time to that amount. He could
defend many institutions better than any philosopher, because, in describing
them as they concerned him, he gave the true reason for their prevalence,
and speculation had not suggested to him any other. At another time,
hearing Plato’s definition of a man,—a biped without feathers,—and that
one exhibited a cock plucked and called it Plato’s man, he thought it an
important difference that the knees bent the wrong way. He would
sometimes exclaim, “How I love to talk! By George, I could talk all day!” I
asked him once, when I had not seen him for many months, if he had got a
new idea this summer. “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 be
there; you think of weeds.” He would sometimes ask me first on such
occasions, if I had made any improvement. One winter day I asked him if
he was always satisfied with himself, wishing to suggest a substitute within

him for the priest without, and some higher motive for living. “Satisfied!”
said he; “some men are satisfied with one thing, and some with another.
One man, perhaps, if he has got enough, will be satisfied to sit all day with
his back to the fire and his belly to the table, by George!” Yet I never, by
any manœuvring, could get him to take the spiritual view of things; the
highest that he appeared to conceive of was a simple expediency, such as
you might expect an animal to appreciate; and this, practically, is true of
most men. If I suggested any improvement in his mode of life, he merely
answered, without expressing any regret, that it was too late. Yet he
thoroughly believed in honesty and the like virtues.
There was a certain positive originality, however slight, to be detected in
him, and I occasionally observed that he was thinking for himself and
expressing his own opinion, a phenomenon so rare that I would any day
walk ten miles to observe it, and it amounted to the re-origination of many
of the institutions of society. Though he hesitated, and perhaps failed to
express himself distinctly, he always had a presentable thought behind. Yet
his thinking was so primitive and immersed in his animal life, that, though
more promising than a merely learned man’s, it rarely ripened to any thing
which can be reported. He suggested that there might be men of genius in
the lowest grades of life, however permanently humble and illiterate, who
take their own view always, or do not pretend to see at all; who are as
bottomless even as Walden Pond was thought to be, though they may be
dark and muddy.

Many a traveller came out of his way to see me and the inside of my
house, and, as an excuse for calling, asked for a glass of water. I told them
that I drank at the pond, and pointed thither, offering to lend them a dipper.
Far off as I lived, I was not exempted from the annual visitation which
occurs, methinks, about the first of April, when every body is on the move;
and I had my share of good luck, though there were some curious
specimens among my visitors. Half-witted men from the almshouse and
elsewhere 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 making wit
the theme of our conversation; and so was compensated. Indeed, I found
some of them to be wiser than the so called overseers of the poor and
selectmen of the town, and thought it was time that the tables were turned.

With respect to wit, I learned that there was not much difference between
the half and the whole. One day, in particular, an inoffensive, simple-
minded pauper, whom with others I had often seen used as fencing stuff,
standing or sitting on a bushel in the fields to keep cattle and himself from
straying, visited me, and expressed a wish to live as I did. He told me, with
the utmost simplicity and truth, quite superior, or rather inferior, to any
thing that is called humility, that he was “deficient in intellect.” These were
his words. The Lord had made him so, yet he supposed the Lord cared as
much for him as for another. “I have always been so,” said he, “from my
childhood; I never had much mind; I was not like other children; I am weak
in the head. It was the Lord’s will, I suppose.” And there he was to prove
the truth of his words. He was a metaphysical puzzle to me. I have rarely
met a fellow-man on such promising ground,—it was so simple and sincere
and so true all that he said. 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 hospitalality; who
earnestly wish to be helped, and preface their appeal with the information
that they are resolved, for one thing, never to help themselves. I require of a
visitor that he be not actually starving, though he may have the very best
appetite in the world, however he got it. Objects of charity are not guests.
Men who did not know when their visit had terminated, though I went
about my business again, answering them from greater and greater
remoteness. Men of almost every degree of wit called on me in the
migrating season. Some who had more wits than they knew what to do
with; 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,—
“O Christian, will you send me back?”

One real runaway slave, among the rest, whom I helped to forward toward
the northstar. Men of one idea, like a hen with one chicken, and that a
duckling; men of a thousand ideas, and unkempt heads, like those hens

which are made to take charge of a hundred chickens, all in pursuit of one
bug, a score of them lost in every morning’s dew,—and become frizzled
and mangy in consequence; men of ideas instead of legs, a sort of
intellectual centipede that made you crawl all over. One man proposed a
book in which visitors should write their names, as at the White Mountains;
but, alas! I have too good a memory to make that necessary.
I could not but notice some of the peculiarities of my visitors. Girls and
boys and young women generally seemed glad to be in the woods. They
looked in the pond and at the flowers, and improved their time. Men of
business, even farmers, thought only of solitude and employment, and of
the great distance at which I dwelt from something or other; and though
they said that they loved a ramble in the woods occasionally, it was obvious
that they did not. Restless committed men, whose time was all taken up in
getting a living or keeping it; ministers who spoke of God as if they enjoyed
a monopoly of the subject, who could not bear all kinds of opinions;
doctors, lawyers, uneasy housekeepers who pried into my cupboard and bed
when I was out,—how came Mrs. —— to know that my sheets were not as
clean as hers?—young men who had ceased to be young, and had
concluded that it was safest to follow the beaten track of the professions,—
all these generally said that it was not possible to do so much good in my
position. Ay! there was the rub. The old and infirm and the timid, of
whatever age or sex, thought most of sickness, and sudden accident and
death; to them life seemed full of danger,—what danger is there if you don’t
think of any?—and they thought that a prudent man would carefully select
the safest position, where Dr. B. might be on hand at a moment’s warning.
To them the village was literally a com-munity, a league for mutual defence,
and you would suppose that they would not go a-huckleberrying without a
medicine chest. The amount of it is, if a man is alive, there is always danger
that he may die, though the danger must be allowed to be less in proportion
as he is dead-and-alive to begin with. A man sits as many risks as he runs.
Finally, there were the self-styled reformers, the greatest bores of all, who
thought that I was forever singing,—
This is the house that I built;
This is the man that lives in the house that I built;

but they did not know that the third line was,—

These are the folks that worry the man
That lives in the house that I built.

I did not fear the hen-harriers, for I kept no chickens; but I feared the men-
harriers rather.
I had more cheering visitors than the last. Children come a-berrying,
railroad men taking a Sunday morning walk in clean shirts, fishermen and
hunters, poets and philosophers; in short, all honest pilgrims, who came out
to the woods for freedom’s sake, and really left the village behind, I was
ready to greet with,—“Welcome, Englishmen! welcome, Englishmen!” for I
had had communication with that race.

The Bean-Field

Meanwhile my beans, the length of whose rows, added together, was
seven miles already planted, were impatient to be hoed, for the earliest had
grown considerably before the latest were in the ground; indeed they were
not easily to be put off. What was the meaning of this so steady and self-
respecting, this small Herculean labor, I knew not. I came to love my rows,
my beans, though so many more than I wanted. They attached me to the
earth, and so I got strength like Antæus. But why should I raise them? Only
Heaven knows. This was my curious labor all summer,—to make this
portion of the earth’s surface, which had yielded only cinquefoil,
blackberries, johnswort, and the like, before, sweet wild fruits and pleasant
flowers, produce 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 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 fertility 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 clean. But what right had I to oust johnswort and the rest,
and break up their ancient herb garden? Soon, however, the remaining
beans will be too tough for them, and go forward to meet new foes.
When I was four years old, as I well remember, I was brought from
Boston to this my native town, through these very woods 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, preparing another
aspect for new infant eyes. Almost the same johnswort springs from the
same perennial root in this pasture, and even I have at length helped to
clothe that fabulous landscape of my infant dreams, and one of the results

of my presence and influence is seen in these bean leaves, corn blades, and
potato vines.
I planted about two acres and a half of upland; and as it was only about
fifteen years since the land was cleared, and I myself had got out two or
three cords of stumps, I did not give it any manure; but in the course of the
summer it appeared by the arrowheads which I turned up in hoeing, 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 this very crop.
Before yet any woodchuck or squirrel had run across the road, or the sun
had got above the shrub oaks, while all the dew was on, though the farmers
warned me against it,—I would advise you to do all your work if possible
while the dew is on,—I began to level the ranks of haughty weeds in my
bean-field and throw dust upon their heads. Early in the morning I worked
barefooted, dabbling like a plastic artist in the dewy and crumbling sand,
but later in the day the sun blistered my feet. There the sun lighted me to
hoe beans, pacing slowly backward and forward over that yellow gravelly
upland, between the long green rows, fifteen rods, the one end terminating
in a shrub oak copse where I could rest in the shade, the other in a
blackberry field where the green berries deepened their tints by the time I
had made another bout. Removing the weeds, putting fresh soil about the
bean stems, and encouraging this weed which I had sown, making the
yellow soil express its summer thought in bean leaves and blossoms rather
than in wormwood and piper and millet grass, making the earth say beans
instead of grass,—this was my daily work. As I had little aid from horses or
cattle, or hired men or boys, or improved implements of husbandry, I was
much slower, and became much more intimate with my beans than usual.
But labor of the hands, even when pursued to the verge of drudgery, is
perhaps never the worst form of idleness. It has a constant and imperishable
moral, and to the scholar it yields a classic result. A very agricola
laboriosus was I to travellers bound westward through Lincoln and
Wayland to nobody knows where; they sitting at their ease in gigs, with
elbows on knees, and reins loosely hanging in festoons; I the home-staying,
laborious native of the soil. But soon my homestead was out of their sight
and thought. It was the only open and cultivated field for a great distance on
either side of the road; so they made the most of it; and sometimes the man
in the field heard more of travellers’ gossip and comment than was meant

for his ear: “Beans so late! peas so late!”—for I continued to plant when
others had begun to hoe,—the ministerial 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
grateful 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 and a half of furrows, and
only a hoe for cart and two hands to draw it,—there being an aversion to
other carts and horses,—and chip dirt far away. Fellow-travellers as they
rattled by compared it aloud with the fields which they had passed, so that I
came to know how I stood in the agricultural world. This was one field not
in Mr. Coleman’s report. And, by the way, who estimates the value of the
crop which nature yields in the still wilder fields unimproved by man? The
crop of English hay is carefully weighed, the moisture calculated, the
silicates and the 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 returning to their wild and
primitive state that I cultivated, and my hoe played the Ranz des Vaches 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, he cries,—“Drop it, drop it,—cover it up,
cover it up,—pull it up, pull it up, pull it up.” But this was not corn, and so
it was safe from such enemies as he. You may wonder what his rigmarole,
his amateur Paganini performances on one string or on twenty, have to do
with your planting, and yet prefer it to leached ashes or plaster. It was a
cheap sort of top dressing in which I had entire faith.
As I drew a still fresher soil about the rows with my hoe, I disturbed the
ashes of unchronicled nations who in primeval years lived under these
heavens, and their small implements of war and hunting were brought to the
light of this modern day. They lay mingled with other natural stones, some
of which bore the marks of having been burned by Indian fires, and some
by the sun, and also bits of pottery and glass brought hither by the recent

cultivators of the soil. When my hoe tinkled against the stones, that music
echoed to the woods and the sky, and was an accompaniment to my labor
which yielded an instant and immeasurable crop. It was no longer beans
that I hoed, nor I that hoed beans; and I remembered with as much pity as
pride, if I remembered at all, my acquaintances who had gone to the city to
attend the oratorios. The night-hawk circled overhead in the sunny
afternoons—for I sometimes made a day of it—like a mote in the eye, or in
heaven’s eye, falling from time to time with a swoop and a sound as if the
heavens were rent, torn at last to very rags and tatters, and yet a seamless
cope remained; small imps that fill the air and lay their eggs on the ground
on bare sand or rocks on the tops of hills, where few have found them;
graceful and slender like ripples caught up from the pond, as leaves are
raised by the wind to float in the heavens; such kindredship is in Nature.
The hawk is aerial brother of the wave which he sails over and surveys,
those his perfect air-inflated wings answering to the elemental 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 winnowing 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 of the inexhaustible entertainment which the
country offers.
On gala days 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 puffball had burst; and when there was a military
turnout of which I was ignorant, I have sometimes had a vague sense all the
day of some sort of itching and disease in the horizon, as if some eruption
would break out there soon, either 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.” It seemed by the
distant hum as if somebody’s bees had swarmed, and that the neighbors,
according to Virgil’s advice, by a faint tintinnabulum 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 their
minds were bent on the honey with which it was smeared.
I felt proud to know that the liberties of Massachusetts and of our
fatherland were in such safe keeping; and as I turned to my hoeing again I
was filled with an inexpressible confidence, and pursued my labor
cheerfully with a calm trust in the future.
When there were several bands of musicians, it sounded as if all the
village was a vast bellows, and all the buildings expanded and collapsed
alternately with a din. But sometimes it was a really noble and inspiring
strain that reached these woods, and the trumpet that sings of fame, and I
felt as if I could spit a Mexican with a good relish,—for why should we
always stand for trifles?—and looked round for a woodchuck or a skunk to
exercise my chivalry upon. These martial strains seemed as far away as
Palestine, and reminded me of a march of crusaders in the horizon, with a
slight 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.
It was a singular experience that long acquaintance which I cultivated
with beans, what with planting, and hoeing, and harvesting, and threshing,
and picking over and selling them,—the last was the hardest of all,—I
might add eating, for I did taste. I was determined to know beans. When
they were growing, I used to hoe from five o’clock in the morning till noon,
and commonly spent the rest of the day about other affairs. Consider the
intimate and curious acquaintance one makes with various kinds of weeds,
—it will bear some iteration in the account, for there was no little iteration
in the labor,—disturbing their delicate organizations so ruthlessly, and
making such invidious distinctions with his hoe, levelling whole ranks of
one species, and sedulously cultivating another. That’s Roman wormwood,
—that’s pigweed,—that’s sorrel,—that’s piper-grass,—have at him, chop
him up, turn his roots upward 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 be as green as a leek
in two days. A long war, not with cranes, but with weeds, those Trojans who
had sun and rain and dews on their side. Daily the beans saw me come to

their rescue armed with a hoe, and thin the ranks of their enemies, filling up
the trenches with weedy dead. Many a lusty crest-waving Hector, that
towered a whole foot above his crowding comrades, fell before my weapon
and rolled in the dust.
Those summer days which some of my contemporaries devoted to the
fine arts in Boston or Rome, 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 eat, for I
am by nature a Pythagorean, so far as beans are concerned, whether they
mean porridge or voting, and exchanged them for rice; but, perchance, as
some must work in fields if only for the sake of tropes and expression, to
serve a parable-maker one day. It was on the whole a rare amusement,
which, continued too long, might have become a dissipation. Though I gave
them no manure, and did not hoe them all 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 lætation whatsoever comparable to this
continual motion, repastination, and turning of the mould with the spade.”
“The earth,” he adds elsewhere, “especially if fresh, has a certain
magnetism in it, by which it attracts the salt, power, or virtue (call it either)
which gives it life, and is the logic of all the labor and stir we keep about it,
to sustain us; all dungings and other sordid temperings being but the vicars
succedaneous to this improvement.” Moreover, this being one of those
“worn-out and exhausted lay fields which enjoy their sabbath,” had
perchance, as Sir Kenelm Digby thinks likely, attracted “vital spirits” from
the air. I harvested twelve bushels of beans.
But to be more particular, for it is complained that Mr. Coleman has
reported chiefly the expensive experiments of gentlemen farmers, my
outgoes were,—
For a hoe,.................................. $ 0.54
Ploughing, harrowing, and furrowing,......... 7.50 Too
much.
Beans for seed,.............................. 3.12½
Potatoes for seed,........................... 1.33
Peas for seed,............................... 0.40
Turnip seed,................................. 0.06
White line for crow fence,................... 0.02
Horse cultivator and boy three hours,........ 1.00
Horse and cart to get crop,.................. 0.75

————
In all,................................. $14.72½

My income was (patrem familias vendacem, non emacem esse oportet),
from
Nine bushels and twelve quarts of beans sold,. $16.94
Five " large potatoes,.................... 2.50
Nine " small,............................. 2.25
Grass,.......................................... 1.00
Stalks,......................................... 0.75
————
In all,................................... $23.44
Leaving a pecuniary profit,
as I have elsewhere said, of.............. $8.71½.

This is the result 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 careful to select fresh round and unmixed seed. First
look out for worms, and supply vacancies by planting anew. Then look out
for woodchucks, if it is an exposed place, for they will nibble off the earliest
tender leaves almost clean as they go; and again, when the young tendrils
make their appearance, they have notice of it, and will shear them off with
both buds and young pods, sitting erect like a squirrel. But above all harvest
as early as possible, if you would escape frosts and have a fair and salable
crop; you may save much loss by this means.
This further experience also I gained. I said to myself, I will not plant
beans and corn with so much industry another summer, but such seeds, if
the seed is not lost, as sincerity, truth, simplicity, faith, innocence, and the
like, and see if they will not grow in this soil, even with less toil and
manurance, and sustain me, for surely it has not been exhausted for these
crops. Alas! I said this to myself; but now another summer is gone, and
another, and another, and I am obliged to say to you, Reader, that the seeds
which I planted, if indeed they were the seeds of those virtues, were
wormeaten or had lost their vitality, and so did not come up. Commonly
men will only be brave as their fathers were brave, or timid. This generation
is very sure to plant corn and beans each new year precisely as the Indians
did centuries ago and taught the first settlers to do, as if there were a fate in
it. I saw an old man the other day, to my astonishment, making the holes
with a hoe for the seventieth time at least, and not for himself to lie down

in! But why should not the New Englander try new adventures, and not lay
so much stress on his grain, his potato and grass crop, and his orchards,—
raise other crops than these? Why concern ourselves so much about our
beans for seed, and not be concerned at all about a new generation of men?
We should really be fed and cheered if when we met a man we were sure to
see that some of the qualities which I have named, which we all prize more
than those other productions, but which are for the most part broadcast and
floating in the air, had taken root and grown in him. Here comes such a
subtile and ineffable quality, for instance, as truth or justice, though the
slightest amount or new variety of it, along the road. Our ambassadors
should be instructed to send home such seeds as these, and Congress help to
distribute them over all the land. We should never stand upon ceremony
with sincerity. We should never cheat and insult and banish one another by
our meanness, if there were present the kernel of worth and friendliness. We
should not meet thus in haste. Most men I do not meet at all, for they seem
not to have time; they are busy about their beans. We would not deal with a
man thus plodding ever, leaning on a hoe or a spade as a staff between his
work, not as a mushroom, but partially risen out of the earth, something
more than erect, like swallows alighted and walking on the ground:—
“And as he spake, his wings would now and then
Spread, as he meant to fly, then close again,”

so that we should suspect that we might be conversing with an angel. Bread
may not always nourish us; but it always does us good, it even takes
stiffness out of our joints, and makes us supple and buoyant, when we knew
not what ailed us, to recognize any generosity in man or Nature, to share
any unmixed and heroic joy.
Ancient poetry and mythology suggest, at least, that husbandry was once
a sacred art; but it is pursued with irreverent haste and heedlessness by us,
our object being to have large farms and large crops merely. We have no
festival, nor procession, nor ceremony, 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 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, (maximeque pius quæstus), and
according to Varro 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 they 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. They all reflect and absorb his
rays alike, and the former make but a small part of the glorious picture
which he beholds in his daily course. In his view the earth is all equally
cultivated like a garden. Therefore we should receive the benefit of his light
and heat with a corresponding trust and magnanimity. What though I value
the seed of these beans, and harvest that in the fall of the year? This broad
field which I have looked at so long looks not to me as the principal
cultivator, but away from me to influences more genial to it, which water
and make it green. These beans have results which are not harvested by me.
Do they not grow for woodchucks partly? The ear of wheat (in Latin spica,
obsoletely speca, from spe, hope) should not be the only hope of the
husbandman; its kernel or grain (granum from gerendo, bearing) is not all
that it bears. How, then, can our harvest fail? Shall I not rejoice also at the
abundance of the weeds whose seeds are the granary of the birds? It matters
little comparatively whether the fields fill the farmer’s barns. The true
husbandman will cease from anxiety, as the squirrels manifest no concern
whether the woods will bear chestnuts this year or not, and finish his labor
with every day, relinquishing all claim to the produce of his fields, and
sacrificing in his mind not only his first but his last fruits also.

The Village

After hoeing, or perhaps reading and writing, in the forenoon, I usually
bathed again in the pond, swimming across one of its coves for a stint, and
washed the dust of labor from my person, or smoothed out the last wrinkle
which study had made, and for the afternoon was absolutely free. Every day
or two I strolled to the village to hear some of the gossip which is
incessantly going on there, circulating either from mouth to mouth, or from
newspaper to newspaper, and which, taken in homœopathic doses, was
really as refreshing in its way as the rustle of leaves and the peeping of
frogs. As I walked in the woods to see the birds and squirrels, so I walked in
the village to see the men and boys; instead of the wind among the pines I
heard the carts rattle. In one direction from my house there was a colony of
muskrats in the river meadows; under the grove of elms and buttonwoods in
the other horizon was a village of busy men, as curious to me as if they had
been prairie dogs, each sitting at the mouth of its burrow, or running over to
a neighbor’s to gossip. I went there frequently to observe their habits. The
village appeared to me a great news room; and on one side, to support it, as
once at Redding & Company’s on State Street, they kept nuts and raisins, or
salt and meal and other groceries. Some have such a vast appetite for the
former commodity, that is, the news, and such sound digestive organs, that
they can sit forever in public avenues without stirring, and let it simmer and
whisper through them like the Etesian winds, or as if inhaling ether, it only
producing numbness and insensibility to pain,—otherwise it would often be
painful to hear,—without affecting the consciousness. I hardly ever failed,
when I rambled through the village, to see a row of such worthies, either
sitting on a ladder sunning themselves, with their bodies inclined forward
and their eyes glancing along the line this way and that, from time to time,
with a voluptuous expression, or else leaning against a barn with their hands
in their pockets, like caryatides, as if to prop it up. They, being commonly
out of doors, heard whatever was in the wind. These are the coarsest mills,

in which all gossip is first rudely digested or cracked up before it is emptied
into finer and more delicate hoppers within doors. I observed that the vitals
of the village were the grocery, the bar-room, the post-office, and the bank;
and, as a necessary part of the machinery, they kept a bell, a big gun, and a
fire-engine, at convenient places; and the houses were so arranged as to
make the most of mankind, in lanes and fronting one another, so that every
traveller had to run the gantlet, and every man, woman, and child might get
a lick at him. Of course, those who were stationed nearest to the head of the
line, where they could most see and be seen, and have the first blow at him,
paid the highest prices for their places; and the few straggling inhabitants in
the outskirts, where long gaps in the line began to occur, and the traveller
could get over walls or turn aside into cow paths, and so escape, paid a very
slight ground or window tax. Signs were hung out on all sides to allure him;
some to catch him by the appetite, as the tavern and victualling cellar; some
by the fancy, as the dry goods store and the jeweller’s; and others by the
hair or the feet or the skirts, as the barber, the shoemaker, or the tailor.
Besides, there was a still more terrible standing invitation to call at every
one of these houses, and company expected about these times. For the most
part I escaped wonderfully from these dangers, either by proceeding at once
boldly and without deliberation to the goal, as is recommended to those
who run the gantlet, or by keeping my thoughts on high things, like
Orpheus, who, “loudly singing the praises of the gods to his lyre, drowned
the voices of the Sirens, and kept out of danger.” Sometimes I bolted
suddenly, and nobody could tell my whereabouts, for I did not stand much
about gracefulness, and never hesitated at a gap in a fence. I was even
accustomed to make an irruption into some houses, where I was well
entertained, and after learning the kernels and very last sieve-ful of news,
what had subsided, the prospects of war and peace, and whether the world
was likely to hold together much longer, I was let out through the rear
avenues, and so escaped to the woods again.
It was very pleasant, when I stayed late in town, to launch myself into the
night, especially if it was dark and tempestuous, and set sail from some
bright village parlor or lecture room, with a bag of rye or Indian meal upon
my shoulder, for my snug harbor in the woods, having made all tight
without and withdrawn under hatches with a merry crew of thoughts,
leaving only my outer man at the helm, or even tying up the helm when it
was plain sailing. I had many a genial thought by the cabin fire “as I

sailed.” I was never cast away nor distressed in any weather, though I
encountered some severe storms. It is darker in the woods, even in common
nights, than most suppose. I frequently had to look up at the opening
between the trees above the path in order to learn my route, and, where
there was no cart-path, to feel with my feet the faint track which I had worn,
or steer by the known relation of particular trees which I felt with my hands,
passing between two pines for instance, not more than eighteen inches
apart, in the midst of the woods, invariably, in the darkest night. Sometimes,
after coming home thus late in a dark and muggy night, when my feet felt
the path which my eyes could not see, dreaming and absent-minded all the
way, until I was aroused by having to raise my hand to lift the latch, I have
not been able to recall a single step of my walk, and I have thought that
perhaps my body would find its way home if its master should forsake it, as
the hand finds its way to the mouth without assistance. Several times, when
a visitor chanced to stay into evening, and it proved a dark night, I was
obliged to conduct him to the cart-path in the rear of the house, and then
point out to him the direction he was to pursue, and in keeping which he
was to be guided rather by his feet than his eyes. One very dark night I
directed thus on their way two young men who had been fishing in the
pond. They lived about a mile off through the woods, and were quite used
to the route. A day or two after one of them told me that they wandered
about the greater part of the night, close by their own premises, and did not
get home till toward morning, by which time, as there had been several
heavy showers in the mean while, and the leaves were very wet, they were
drenched to their skins. I have heard of many going astray even in the
village streets, when the darkness was so thick that you could cut it with a
knife, as the saying is. Some who live in the outskirts, having come to town
a-shopping in their wagons, have been obliged to put up for the night; and
gentlemen and ladies making a call have gone half a mile out of their way,
feeling the sidewalk only with their feet, and not knowing when they
turned. It is a surprising and memorable, as well as valuable experience, to
be lost in the woods any time. Often in a snow storm, even by day, one will
come out upon a well-known road and yet find it impossible to tell which
way leads to the village. Though he knows that he has 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 in Siberia. By night, of course, the perplexity is
infinitely greater. In our most trivial walks, we are constantly, though

unconsciously, steering like pilots by certain well-known beacons and
headlands, and if we go beyond our usual course we still carry in our minds
the bearing of some neighboring cape; and not till we are completely lost,
or turned round,—for a man needs only to be turned round once with his
eyes shut in this world to be lost,—do we appreciate the vastness and
strangeness of Nature. Every man has to learn the points of compass again
as often as 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 related, I did not pay a tax to, or recognize the
authority of, the state which buys and sells men, women, and children, like
cattle at the door of its senate-house. I had gone down to the woods for
other purposes. But, wherever a man goes, men will pursue and paw him
with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their
desperate odd-fellow society. It is true, I might have resisted forcibly with
more or less effect, might have run “amok” against society; but I preferred
that society should run “amok” against me, it being the desperate party.
However, I was released the next day, obtained my mended shoe, and
returned to the woods in season to get my dinner of huckleberries on 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 windows. I never fastened my door night
or day, though I was to be absent several days; not even when the next fall I
spent a fortnight in the woods of Maine. And yet my house was more
respected than if it had been surrounded by a file of soldiers. The tired
rambler could rest and warm himself by my fire, the literary amuse himself
with the few books on my table, or the curious, by opening my closet door,
see what was left of my dinner, and what prospect I had of a supper. Yet,
though many people of every class came this way to the pond, I suffered no
serious inconvenience from these sources, and I never missed anything but
one small book, a volume of Homer, which perhaps was improperly gilded,
and this I trust a soldier of our camp has found by this time. I am
convinced, that if all men were to live as simply as I then did, thieving and
robbery would be unknown. These take place only in communities where

some have got more than is sufficient while others have not enough. The
Pope’s Homers would soon get properly distributed.—
“Nec bella fuerunt,
Faginus astabat dum 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.”

The Ponds

Sometimes, having had a surfeit of human society and gossip, and worn
out all my village friends, I rambled still farther westward than I habitually
dwell, into yet more unfrequented parts of the town, “to fresh woods and
pastures new,” or, while the sun was setting, made my supper of
huckleberries and blueberries on Fair Haven Hill, and laid up a store for
several days. The fruits do not yield their true flavor to the purchaser of
them, nor to him who raises them for the market. There is but one way to
obtain it, yet few take that way. If you would know the flavor of
huckleberries, ask the cow-boy or the partridge. It is a vulgar error to
suppose that you have tasted huckleberries who never plucked them. A
huckleberry never reaches Boston; they have not been known there since
they grew on her three hills. The ambrosial and essential part of the fruit is
lost with the bloom which is rubbed off in the market cart, and they become
mere provender. As long as Eternal Justice reigns, not one innocent
huckleberry can be transported thither from the country’s hills.
Occasionally, after my hoeing was done for the day, I joined some
impatient companion who had been fishing on the pond since morning, as
silent and motionless as a duck or a floating leaf, and, after practising
various kinds of philosophy, had concluded commonly, by the time I
arrived, that he belonged to the ancient sect of Cœnobites. There was one
older man, an excellent fisher and skilled in all kinds of woodcraft, who
was pleased to look upon my house as a building erected for the
convenience of fishermen; and I was equally pleased when he sat in my
doorway to arrange his lines. 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 harmonized well enough with my philosophy. Our
intercourse was thus altogether one of unbroken harmony, far more pleasing
to remember than if it had been carried on by speech. When, as was

commonly the case, I had none to commune with, I used to raise the echoes
by striking with a paddle on the side of my boat, filling the surrounding
woods with circling and dilating sound, stirring them up as the keeper of a
menagerie his wild beasts, until I elicited a growl from every wooded vale
and hill-side.
In warm evenings I frequently sat in the boat playing the flute, and saw
the perch, which I seemed to have charmed, hovering around me, and the
moon travelling over the ribbed bottom, which was strewed with the wrecks
of the forest. Formerly I had come to this pond adventurously, from time to
time, in dark summer nights, with a companion, and making a fire close to
the water’s edge, which we thought attracted the fishes, we caught pouts
with a bunch of worms strung on a thread; and when we had done, far in the
night, 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 I had made my home by
the shore.
Sometimes, after staying in a village parlor till the family had all retired,
I have returned to the woods, and, partly with a view to the next day’s
dinner, spent the hours of midnight fishing from a boat by moonlight,
serenaded by owls and foxes, and hearing, from time to time, the creaking
note of some unknown bird close at hand. These experiences were very
memorable and valuable to me,—anchored in forty feet of water, and
twenty or thirty rods from the shore, surrounded sometimes by thousands of
small perch and shiners, dimpling the surface with their tails in the
moonlight, and communicating by a long flaxen line with mysterious
nocturnal fishes which had their dwelling forty feet below, or sometimes
dragging sixty feet of line about the pond as I drifted in the gentle night
breeze, now and then feeling a slight vibration along it, indicative of some
life prowling about its extremity, of dull uncertain blundering purpose there,
and slow to make up its mind. At length you slowly raise, pulling hand over
hand, some horned pout squeaking and squirming to the upper air. It was
very queer, especially in dark nights, when your thoughts had wandered to
vast and cosmogonal themes in other spheres, to feel this faint jerk, which
came to interrupt your dreams and link you to Nature again. It seemed as if
I might next cast my line upward into the air, as well as downward into this

element, which was scarcely more dense. Thus I caught two fishes as it
were with one hook.

The scenery of Walden is on a humble scale, and, though very beautiful,
does not approach to grandeur, nor can it much concern one who has not
long frequented it or lived by its shore; yet this pond is so remarkable for its
depth and purity as to merit a particular description. It is a clear and deep
green well, half a mile long and a mile and three quarters in circumference,
and contains about sixty-one and a half acres; a perennial spring in the
midst of pine and oak woods, without any visible inlet or outlet except by
the clouds and evaporation. The surrounding hills rise abruptly from the
water to the height of forty to eighty feet, though on the 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 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 color. The sea, however,
is said to be blue one day and green another without any perceptible change
in the atmosphere. I have seen our river, when, the landscape being covered
with snow, both water and ice were almost as green as grass. Some consider
blue “to be the color of pure water, whether liquid or solid.” But, looking
directly down into our waters from a boat, they are seen to be of very
different colors. Walden is blue at one time and green at another, even from
the same point of view. Lying between the earth and the heavens, it partakes
of the color of both. Viewed from a hill-top it reflects 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 hill-top,
it is of a vivid green next the shore. Some have referred this to the reflection
of the verdure; but it is equally green there against the railroad sand-bank,
and in the spring, before the leaves are expanded, and it may be simply the
result of the prevailing blue mixed with the yellow of the sand. Such is the
color of its iris. This is that portion, also, where in the spring, the ice being
warmed by the heat of the sun reflected from the bottom, and also

transmitted through the earth, melts first and forms a narrow canal about the
still frozen middle. Like the rest of our waters, when much agitated, in clear
weather, so that the surface of the waves may reflect the sky at the right
angle, or because there is more light mixed with it, it appears at a little
distance of a darker blue than the sky itself; and at such a time, being on its
surface, and looking with divided vision, so as to see the reflection, I have
discerned a matchless and indescribable light blue, such as watered or
changeable silks and sword blades suggest, more cerulean than the sky
itself, alternating with the original dark green on the opposite sides of the
waves, which last appeared but muddy in comparison. It is a vitreous
greenish blue, as I remember it, like those patches of the winter sky seen
through cloud vistas in the west before sundown. Yet a single glass of its
water held up to the light is as colorless as an equal quantity of air. It is well
known that a large plate of glass will have a green tint, owing, as the
makers say, to its “body,” but a small piece of the same will be colorless.
How large a body of Walden water would be required to reflect a green tint
I have never proved. The water of our river is black or a very dark brown to
one looking directly down on it, and, like that of most ponds, 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 unnatural, which, as the limbs are magnified and
distorted withal, produces a monstrous effect, making fit studies for a
Michael Angelo.
The water is so transparent that the bottom can easily be discerned at the
depth of twenty-five or thirty feet. Paddling over it, you may see, many feet
beneath the surface the schools of perch and shiners, perhaps only an inch
long, yet the former easily distinguished by their transverse bars, and you
think that they must be ascetic fish that find a subsistence there. Once, in
the winter, many years ago, when I had been cutting holes through the ice in
order to catch pickerel, as I stepped ashore I tossed my axe back on to the
ice, but, as if some evil genius had directed it, it slid four or five rods
directly into one of the holes, where the water was twenty-five feet deep.
Out of curiosity, I lay down on the ice and looked through the hole, until I
saw the axe a little on one side, standing on its head, with its helve erect and
gently swaying to and fro with the pulse of the pond; and there it might
have stood erect and swaying till in the course of time the handle rotted off,
if I had not disturbed it. Making another hole directly over it with an ice

chisel which I had, and cutting down the longest birch which I could find in
the neighborhood with my knife, I made a slip-noose, which I attached to its
end, and, letting it down carefully, passed it over the knob of the handle,
and drew it by a line along the birch, and so pulled the axe out again.
The shore is composed of a belt of smooth rounded white stones like
paving stones, excepting one or two short sand beaches, and is so steep that
in many places a single leap will carry you into water over your head; and
were it not for its remarkable transparency, that would be the last to be seen
of its bottom till it rose on the opposite side. Some think it is bottomless. It
is nowhere muddy, and a casual observer would say that there were no
weeds at all in it; and of noticeable plants, except in the little meadows
recently overflowed, which do not properly belong to it, a closer scrutiny
does not detect a flag nor a bulrush, nor even a lily, yellow or white, but
only a few small heart-leaves and potamogetons, 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 two and a half miles westerly; but, though I am acquainted with most
of the ponds within a dozen miles of this centre I do not know a third of this
pure and well-like character. 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! Perhaps on that spring morning
when Adam and Eve were driven out of Eden Walden Pond was already in
existence, and even then breaking up in a gentle spring rain accompanied
with mist and a southerly wind, and covered with myriads of ducks and
geese, which had not heard of the fall, when still such pure lakes sufficed
them. Even then it had commenced to rise and fall, and had clarified its
waters and colored them of the hue they now wear, and obtained a patent 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 nymphs presided over it in the Golden
Age? It is a gem of the first water which Concord wears in her coronet.

Yet perchance the first who came to this well have left some trace of their
footsteps. I have been surprised to detect encircling the pond, even where 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 and receding
from the water’s edge, as old probably as the race of man here, worn by the
feet of aboriginal hunters, and still from time to time unwittingly trodden by
the present occupants of the land. This is particularly distinct to one
standing on the middle of the pond in winter, just after a light snow has
fallen, appearing as a clear undulating white line, unobscured by weeds and
twigs, and very obvious a quarter of a mile off in many places where in
summer it is hardly distinguishable close at hand. The snow reprints it, as it
were, in clear white type alto-relievo. The ornamented grounds of villas
which will one day be built here may still preserve some trace of this.
The pond rises and falls, but whether regularly or not, and within what
period, nobody knows, though, as usual, many pretend to know. It is
commonly higher in the winter and lower in the summer, though not
corresponding to the general wet and dryness. I can remember when it was
a foot or two lower, and also when it was at least five feet higher, than when
I lived by it. There is a narrow sand-bar running into it, with very deep
water on one side, on which I helped boil a kettle of chowder, some six rods
from the main shore, about the year 1824, which it has not been possible to
do for twenty-five years; and on the other hand, my friends used to listen
with incredulity when I told them, that a few years later I was accustomed
to fish from a boat in a secluded cove in the woods, fifteen rods from the
only shore they knew, which place was long since converted into a meadow.
But the pond has risen 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 fishing goes on again in the meadow. This makes a
difference of level, at the outside, of six or seven feet; and yet the water
shed by the surrounding hills is insignificant in amount, and this overflow
must be referred to causes which affect the deep springs. This same summer
the pond has begun to fall again. It is remarkable that this fluctuation,
whether periodical or not, appears thus to require many years for its
accomplishment. I have observed one rise and a part of two falls, and I
expect that a dozen or fifteen years hence the water will again be as low as I
have ever known it. Flint’s Pond, a mile eastward, allowing for the
disturbance occasioned by its inlets and outlets, and the smaller

intermediate ponds also, sympathize with Walden, and recently attained
their greatest height at the same time with the latter. The same is true, as far
as my observation goes, of White Pond.
This rise and fall of Walden at long intervals serves this use at least; the
water standing at this great height for a year or more, though it makes it
difficult to walk round it, kills the shrubs and trees which have sprung up
about its edge since the last rise, pitch-pines, birches, alders, aspens, and
others, and, falling again, leaves an unobstructed shore; for, unlike many
ponds and all waters which are subject to a daily tide, its shore is cleanest
when the water is lowest. On the side of the pond next my house, a row of
pitch pines fifteen feet high has been killed and tipped over as if by a lever,
and thus a stop put to their encroachments; and their size indicates how
many years have elapsed since the last rise to this height. By this fluctuation
the pond asserts its title to a shore, and thus the shore is shorn, and the trees
cannot hold it by right of possession. These are the lips of the lake on which
no beard grows. It licks its chaps from time to time. When the water is at its
height, the alders, willows, and maples send forth a mass of fibrous red
roots several feet long from all sides of their stems in the water, and to the
height of three or four feet from the ground, in the effort to maintain
themselves; and I have known the high-blueberry bushes about the shore,
which commonly produce no fruit, bear an abundant crop under these
circumstances.
Some have been puzzled to tell how the shore became so regularly paved.
My townsmen have all heard the tradition, the oldest people tell me that
they heard it in their youth, that anciently the Indians were holding a pow-
wow upon a hill here, which rose as high into the heavens as the pond now
sinks deep into the earth, and they used much profanity, as the story goes,
though this vice is one of which the Indians were never guilty, and while
they were thus engaged the hill shook and suddenly sank, and only one old
squaw, named Walden, escaped, and from her the pond was named. It has
been conjectured that when the hill shook these stones rolled down its side
and became the present shore. It is very certain, at any rate, that once there
was no pond here, and now there is one; and this Indian fable does not in
any respect conflict with the account of that ancient settler whom I have
mentioned, who remembers so well when he first came here with his
divining rod, saw a thin vapor rising from the sward, and the hazel pointed
steadily downward, and he concluded to dig a well here. As for the stones,

many still think that they are hardly to be accounted for by the action of the
waves on these hills; but I observe that the surrounding hills are remarkably
full of the same kind of stones, so that they have been obliged to pile them
up in walls on both sides of the railroad cut nearest the pond; and,
moreover, there are most stones where the shore is most abrupt; so that,
unfortunately, it is no longer a mystery to me. I detect the paver. If the name
was not derived from that of some English locality,—Saffron Walden, for
instance,—one might suppose that it was called originally Walled-in Pond.
The pond was my well ready dug. For four months in the year its water is
as cold as it is pure at all times; and I think that it is then as good as any, if
not the best, in the town. In the winter, all water which is exposed to the air
is colder than springs and wells which are protected from it. The
temperature of the pond water which had stood in the room where I sat
from five o’clock in the afternoon till noon the next day, the sixth of March,
1846, the thermometer having been up to 65° or 70° some of the time,
owing partly to the sun on the roof, was 42°, or one degree colder than the
water of one of the coldest wells in the village just drawn. The temperature
of the Boiling Spring the same day was 45°, or the warmest of any water
tried, though it is the coldest that I know of in summer, when, beside,
shallow and stagnant surface water is not mingled with it. Moreover, in
summer, Walden never becomes so warm as most water which is exposed to
the sun, on account of its depth. In the warmest weather I usually placed a
pailful in my cellar, where it became cool in the night, and remained so
during the day; though I also resorted to a spring in the neighborhood. It
was as good when a week old as the day it was dipped, and had no taste of
the pump. Whoever camps for a week in summer by the shore of a pond,
needs only bury a pail of water a few feet deep in the shade of his camp to
be independent of the luxury of ice.
There have been caught in Walden pickerel, one weighing seven pounds,
to say nothing of another which carried off a reel with great velocity, which
the fisherman safely set down at eight pounds because he did not see him,
perch and pouts, some of each weighing over two pounds, shiners, chivins
or roach (Leuciscus pulchellus), a very few breams, and a couple of eels,
one weighing four pounds,—I am thus particular because the weight of a
fish is commonly its only title to fame, and these are the only eels I have
heard of here;—also, I have a faint recollection of a little fish some five
inches long, with silvery sides and a greenish back, somewhat dace-like in

its character, which I mention here chiefly to link my facts to fable.
Nevertheless, this pond is not very fertile in fish. Its pickerel, though not
abundant, are its chief boast. I have seen at one time lying on the ice
pickerel of at least three different kinds; a long and shallow one, steel-
colored, most like those caught in the river; a bright golden kind, with
greenish reflections and remarkably deep, which is the most common here;
and another, golden-colored, and shaped like the last, but peppered on the
sides with small dark brown or black spots, intermixed with a few faint
blood-red ones, very much like a trout. The specific name reticulatus would
not apply to this; it should be guttatus rather. These are all very firm fish,
and weigh more than their size promises. The shiners, pouts, and perch also,
and indeed all the fishes which inhabit this pond, are much cleaner,
handsomer, and firmer fleshed than those in the river and most other ponds,
as the water is purer, and they can easily be distinguished from them.
Probably many ichthyologists would make new varieties of some of them.
There are also a clean race of frogs and tortoises, and a few muscels in it;
muskrats and minks leave their traces about it, and occasionally a travelling
mud-turtle visits it. Sometimes, when I pushed off my boat in the morning, I
disturbed a great mud-turtle which had secreted himself under the boat in
the night. Ducks and geese frequent it in the spring and fall, the white-
bellied swallows (Hirundo bicolor) skim over it, and the peetweets (Totanus
macularius) “teter” along its stony shores all summer. I have sometimes
disturbed a fishhawk sitting on a white-pine over the water; but I doubt if it
is ever profaned by the wing of a gull, like Fair Haven. At most, it tolerates
one annual loon. These are all the animals of consequence which frequent it
now.
You may see from a boat, in calm weather, near the sandy eastern shore,
where the water is eight or ten feet deep, and also in some other parts of the
pond, some circular heaps half a dozen feet in diameter by a foot in height,
consisting of small stones less than a hen’s egg in size, where all around is
bare sand. At first you wonder if the Indians could have formed them on the
ice for any purpose, and so, when the ice melted, they sank to the bottom;
but they are too regular and some of them plainly too fresh for that. They
are similar to those found in rivers; but as there are no suckers nor lampreys
here, I know not by what fish they could be made. Perhaps they are the
nests of the chivin. These lend a pleasing mystery to the bottom.

The shore is irregular enough not to be monotonous. I have in my mind’s
eye the western indented with deep bays, the bolder northern, and the
beautifully scalloped southern shore, where successive capes overlap each
other and suggest unexplored coves between. The forest has never so good
a setting, nor is so distinctly beautiful, as when seen from the middle of a
small lake amid hills which rise from the water’s edge; for the water in
which it is reflected not only makes the best foreground in such a case, but,
with its winding shore, the most natural and agreeable boundary to it. There
is no rawness nor imperfection in its edge there, as where the axe has
cleared a part, or a cultivated field abuts on it. The trees have ample room to
expand on the water side, and each sends forth its most vigorous branch in
that direction. There Nature has woven a natural selvage, and the eye rises
by just gradations from the low shrubs of the shore to the highest trees.
There are few traces of man’s hand to be seen. The water laves the shore as
it did a thousand years ago.
A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is
earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own
nature. The fluviatile trees next the shore are the slender eyelashes which
fringe it, and the wooded hills and cliffs around are its overhanging brows.
Standing on the smooth sandy beach at the east end of the pond, in a
calm September afternoon, when a slight haze makes the opposite shore
line indistinct, I have seen whence came the expression, “the glassy surface
of a lake.” When you invert your head, it looks like a thread of finest
gossamer stretched across the valley, and gleaming against the distant pine
woods, separating one stratum of the atmosphere from another. You would
think that you could walk dry under it to the opposite hills, and that the
swallows which skim over might perch on it. Indeed, they sometimes dive
below this line, as it were by mistake, and are undeceived. As you look over
the pond westward you are obliged to employ both your hands to defend
your eyes against the reflected as well as the true sun, for they are equally
bright; and if, between the two, you survey its surface critically, it is
literally as smooth as glass, except where the skater insects, at equal
intervals scattered over its 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 congealed, 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 part; for not a pickerel or shiner picks
an insect from this smooth surface but it manifestly disturbs the equilibrium
of the whole lake. It is wonderful with what elaborateness this simple fact is
advertised,—this piscine murder will out,—and from my distant perch I
distinguish the circling undulations when they are half a dozen rods in
diameter. You can even detect a water-bug (Gyrinus) ceaselessly
progressing over the smooth surface a quarter of a mile off; for they furrow
the water slightly, making a conspicuous ripple bounded by two diverging
lines, but the skaters glide over it without rippling it perceptibly. When the
surface is considerably agitated there are no skaters nor water-bugs on it,
but apparently, in calm days, they leave their havens and adventurously
glide forth from the shore by short impulses till they completely cover it. It
is a soothing employment, on one of those fine days in the fall when all the
warmth of the sun is fully appreciated, to sit on a stump on such a height as
this, overlooking the pond, and study the dimpling circles which are
incessantly inscribed on its otherwise invisible surface amid the reflected
skies and trees. Over this great expanse there is no disturbance but it is thus
at once gently smoothed away and assuaged, as, when a vase of water is
jarred, the trembling circles seek the shore and all is smooth again. Not a
fish can leap or an insect fall on the pond but it is thus reported in circling
dimples, in lines of beauty, as it were the constant welling up of its fountain,
the gentle pulsing of its life, the heaving of its breast. The thrills of joy and
thrills of pain are 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 morning. Every motion of an oar or an insect produces a
flash of light; and if an oar falls, how sweet the echo!
In such a day, in September or October, Walden is a perfect forest mirror,
set round with stones as precious to my eye as if fewer or rarer. Nothing so
fair, so pure, and at the same time so large, as a lake, perchance, lies on the
surface of the earth. Sky water. It needs no fence. Nations come and go

without defiling it. It is a mirror which no stone can crack, whose
quicksilver will never wear off, whose gilding Nature continually repairs;
no storms, no dust, can dim its surface ever fresh;—a mirror in which all
impurity presented to it sinks, swept and dusted by the sun’s hazy brush,—
this the light dust-cloth,—which retains no breath that is breathed on it, but
sends its own to float as clouds high above its surface, and be reflected in
its bosom still.
A field of water betrays the spirit that is in the air. It is continually
receiving new life and motion from above. It is intermediate in its nature
between land and sky. On land only the grass and trees wave, but the water
itself is rippled by the wind. I see where the breeze dashes across it by the
streaks or flakes of light. It is remarkable that we can look down on its
surface. We shall, perhaps, look down thus on the surface of air at length,
and mark where a still subtler spirit sweeps over it.
The skaters and water-bugs finally disappear in the latter part of October,
when the severe frosts have come; and then and in November, usually, in a
calm day, there is absolutely nothing to ripple the surface. One November
afternoon, in the calm at the end of a rain storm of several days’ duration,
when the sky was still completely overcast and the air was full of mist, I
observed that the pond was remarkably smooth, so that it was difficult to
distinguish its surface; though it no longer reflected the bright tints of
October, but the sombre November colors of the surrounding hills. Though
I passed over it as gently as possible, the slight undulations produced by my
boat extended almost as far as I could see, and gave a ribbed appearance to
the reflections. But, as I was looking over the surface, I saw here and there
at a distance a faint glimmer, as if some skater insects which had escaped
the frosts might be collected there, or, perchance, the surface, being so
smooth, betrayed where a spring welled up from the bottom. Paddling
gently to one of these places, I was surprised to find myself surrounded by
myriads of small perch, about five inches long, of a rich bronze color in the
green water, sporting there, and constantly rising to the surface and
dimpling it, sometimes leaving bubbles on it. In such transparent and
seemingly bottomless water, reflecting the clouds, I seemed to be floating
through the air as in a balloon, and their swimming impressed me as a kind
of flight or hovering, as if they were a compact flock of birds passing just
beneath my level on the right or left, their fins, like sails, set all around
them. There were many such schools in the pond, apparently improving the

short season before winter would draw an icy shutter over their broad
skylight, sometimes giving to the surface an appearance as if a slight breeze
struck it, or a few rain-drops fell there. When I approached carelessly and
alarmed them, they made a sudden splash and rippling with their tails, as if
one had struck the water with a brushy bough, and instantly took refuge in
the depths. At length the wind rose, the mist increased, and the waves began
to run, and the perch leaped much higher than before, half out of water, a
hundred black points, three inches long, at once above the surface. Even as
late as the fifth of December, one year, I saw some dimples on the surface,
and thinking it was going to rain hard immediately, the air being full of
mist, I made haste to take my place at the oars and row homeward; already
the rain seemed rapidly increasing, though I felt none on my cheek, and I
anticipated a thorough soaking. But suddenly the dimples ceased, for they
were produced by the perch, which the noise of my oars had seared into the
depths, and I saw their schools dimly disappearing; so I spent a dry
afternoon after all.
An old man who used to frequent this pond nearly sixty years ago, when
it was dark with surrounding forests, tells me that in those days he
sometimes saw it all alive with ducks and other water fowl, and that there
were many eagles about it. He came here a-fishing, and used an old log
canoe which he found on the shore. It was made of two white-pine logs dug
out and pinned together, and was cut off square at the ends. It was very
clumsy, but lasted a great many years before it became water-logged and
perhaps sank to the bottom. He did not know whose it was; it belonged to
the pond. He used to make a cable for his anchor of strips of hickory bark
tied together. An old man, a potter, who lived by the pond before the
Revolution, told him once that there was an iron chest at the bottom, and
that he had seen it. Sometimes it would come floating up to the shore; but
when you went toward it, it would go back into deep water and disappear. I
was pleased to hear of the old log canoe, which took the place of an Indian
one of the same material but more graceful construction, which perchance
had first been a tree on the bank, and then, as it were, fell into the water, to
float there for a generation, the most proper vessel for the lake. I remember
that when I first looked into these depths there were many large trunks to be
seen indistinctly lying on the bottom, which had either been blown over
formerly, or left on the ice at the last cutting, when wood was cheaper; but
now they have mostly disappeared.

When I first paddled a boat on Walden, it was completely surrounded by
thick and lofty pine and oak woods, and in some of its coves 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 forenoon, 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 attractive and
productive industry. Many a forenoon have I stolen away, preferring to
spend thus the most valued part of the day; for I was rich, if not in money,
in sunny hours and summer days, and spent them lavishly; nor do I regret
that I did not waste more of them in the workshop or the teacher’s desk. But
since I left those shores the woodchoppers have still further laid them
waste, and now for many a year there will be no more rambling through the
aisles of the wood, with occasional vistas through which you see the water.
My Muse may be excused if she is silent henceforth. How can you expect
the birds to sing when their groves are cut down?
Now the trunks of trees on the bottom, and the old log canoe, and the
dark surrounding woods, are gone, and the villagers, who scarcely know
where it lies, instead of going to the pond to bathe or drink, are thinking to
bring its water, which should be as sacred as the Ganges at least, to the
village in a pipe, to wash their dishes with!—to earn their Walden by the
turning of a cock or drawing of a plug! That devilish Iron Horse, whose ear-
rending neigh is heard throughout the town, has muddied the Boiling Spring
with his foot, and he it is that has browsed off all the woods on Walden
shore, that Trojan horse, with a thousand men in his belly, introduced by
mercenary Greeks! Where is the country’s champion, the Moore of Moore
Hill, to meet him at the Deep Cut and thrust an avenging lance between the
ribs of the bloated pest?
Nevertheless, of all the characters I have known, perhaps Walden wears
best, and best preserves its purity. Many men have been likened to it, but
few deserve that honor. Though the woodchoppers have laid bare first this
shore and then that, and the Irish have built their sties by it, and the railroad
has infringed on its border, and the ice-men have skimmed it once, it is

itself unchanged, the same water which my youthful eyes fell on; all the
change is in me. It has not acquired one permanent wrinkle after all its
ripples. It is perennially young, and I may stand and see a swallow dip
apparently to pick an insect from its surface as of yore. It struck me again
tonight, as if I had not seen it almost daily for more than twenty years,—
Why, here is Walden, the same woodland lake that I discovered so many
years ago; where a forest was cut down last winter another is springing up
by its shore as lustily as ever; the same thought is welling up to its surface
that was then; it is the same liquid joy and happiness to itself and its Maker,
ay, and it may be to me. It is the work of a brave man surely, in whom there
was no guile! He rounded this water with his hand, deepened and clarified it
in his thought, and in his will bequeathed it to Concord. I see by its face that
it is visited by the same reflection; and I can almost say, Walden, is it you?
It is no dream of mine,
To ornament a line;
I cannot come nearer to God and Heaven
Than I live to Walden even.
I am its stony shore,
And the breeze that passes o’er;
In the hollow of my hand
Are its water and its sand,
And its deepest resort
Lies high in my thought.

The cars never pause to look at it; yet I fancy that the engineers and
firemen and 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 proposes that it be called “God’s
Drop.”
I have said that Walden has no visible inlet nor outlet, but it is on the one
hand distantly and indirectly related to Flint’s Pond, which is more elevated,
by a chain of small ponds coming from that quarter, and on the other
directly and manifestly to Concord River, which is lower, by a similar chain
of ponds through which in some other geological period it may have
flowed, and by a little digging, which God forbid, it can be made to flow
thither again. If by living thus reserved and austere, like a hermit in the
woods, so long, it has acquired such wonderful purity, who would not regret

that the comparatively impure waters of Flint’s Pond should be mingled
with it, or itself should ever go to waste its sweetness in the ocean wave?

Flint’s, 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 ninety-seven acres, and is more fertile in fish; but it is
comparatively shallow, and not remarkably pure. A walk through the woods
thither was often my recreation. It was worth the while, if only to feel the
wind blow on your cheek freely, and see the waves run, and remember the
life of mariners. I went a-chestnutting there in the fall, on windy days, when
the nuts were dropping into the water and were washed to my feet; and one
day, as I crept along its sedgy shore, the fresh spray blowing in my face, I
came upon the mouldering wreck of a boat, the sides gone, and hardly more
than the impression of its flat bottom left amid the rushes; yet its model was
sharply defined, as if it were a large decayed pad, with its veins. It was as
impressive a wreck as one could imagine on the 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 north end of this pond, made firm
and hard to the feet of the wader by the pressure of the water, and the rushes
which grew in Indian file, in waving lines, corresponding to these marks,
rank behind rank, as if the waves had planted them. There also I have
found, in considerable quantities, curious balls, composed apparently of
fine grass or roots, of pipewort perhaps, from half an inch to four inches in
diameter, and perfectly spherical. These wash back and forth in shallow
water on a sandy bottom, and are sometimes cast on the shore. They are
either solid grass, or have a little sand in the middle. At first you would say
that they were formed by the action of the waves, like a pebble; yet the
smallest are made of equally coarse materials, half an inch long, and they
are produced only at one season of the year. Moreover, the waves, I suspect,
do not so much construct as wear down a material which has already
acquired consistency. They preserve their form when dry for an indefinite
period.
Flint’s Pond! Such is the poverty of our nomenclature. What right had the
unclean and stupid farmer, whose farm abutted on this sky water, whose
shores he has ruthlessly laid bare, to give his name to it? Some skin-flint,

who loved better the reflecting surface of a dollar, or a bright cent, in which
he could see his own brazen face; who regarded even the wild ducks which
settled in it as trespassers; his fingers grown into 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 saw it, who never bathed
in it, who never loved it, who never protected it, who never spoke a good
word for it, nor thanked God that he had made it. Rather let it be named
from the fishes that swim in it, the wild fowl or quadrupeds which frequent
it, the wild flowers which grow by its shores, or some wild man or child the
thread of whose history is interwoven 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 thought only of its money value; whose presence
perchance cursed all the shore; who exhausted the land around it, and would
fain have exhausted the waters within it; who regretted only that it was not
English hay or cranberry meadow,—there was nothing to redeem it,
forsooth, in his eyes,—and would have drained and sold it for the mud at its
bottom. It did not turn his mill, and it was no privilege to him to behold it. I
respect not his labors, his farm where every thing 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 to market for his god as it is; on whose farm
nothing grows free, whose fields bear no crops, whose meadows no
flowers, whose trees no fruits, but dollars; who loves not the beauty of his
fruits, whose fruits are not ripe for him till they are turned to dollars. Give
me the poverty that enjoys true wealth. Farmers are respectable and
interesting to me in proportion as they are poor,—poor farmers. A model
farm! where the house stands like a fungus in a muck-heap, chambers for
men, horses, oxen, and swine, cleansed and uncleansed, all contiguous to
one another! Stocked with men! A great grease-spot, redolent of manures
and buttermilk! Under a high state of cultivation, being manured with the
hearts and brains of men! As if you were to raise your potatoes in the
church-yard! Such is a model farm.
No, no; if the fairest features of the landscape are to be named after men,
let them be the noblest and worthiest men alone. 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 Flint’s; 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
beyond Fair-Haven. This is my lake country. These, with Concord River,
are my water privileges; and night and day, year in year out, they grind such
grist as I carry to them.
Since the woodcutters, and the railroad, and I myself have profaned
Walden, perhaps the most attractive, if not the most beautiful, of all our
lakes, the gem of the woods, is White Pond;—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-Pine Lake, from the following circumstance. About
fifteen years ago you could see the top of a pitch-pine, of the kind called
yellow-pine hereabouts, though it is not a distinct species, projecting above
the surface in deep water, many rods from the shore. It was even supposed
by some that the pond had sunk, and this was one of the primitive forest
that formerly stood there. I find that even so long ago as 1792, in a
“Topographical Description of the Town of Concord,” by one of its citizens,
in the Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, the author, after
speaking of Walden and White Ponds, adds: “In the middle of the latter may
be seen, when the water is very low, a tree which appears as if it grew in the
place where it now stands, although the roots are fifty feet below the
surface of the water; the top of this tree is broken off, and at 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 winter, and he had been getting out ice in the
forenoon, and had resolved that in the afternoon, with the aid of his

neighbors, he would take out the old yellow-pine. He sawed a channel in
the ice toward the shore, and hauled it over and along and out on to the ice
with oxen; but, before he 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 waterlogged, while
the butt-end was still dry and light, had drifted out and sunk wrong end up.
His father, eighty years old, could not remember when it was not there.
Several pretty large logs may still be seen lying on the bottom, where,
owing to the undulation of the surface, they look like huge water snakes in
motion.
This pond has rarely been profaned by a boat, for there is little in it to
tempt a fisherman. Instead of the white lily, which requires mud, or the
common sweet flag, the blue flag (Iris versicolor) grows thinly in the pure
water, rising from the stony bottom all around the shore, where it is visited
by 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 crystals 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 precious
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 Kohinoor. They are too pure to have a market value; they
contain no muck. How much more beautiful than our lives, how much more
transparent than our characters, are they! We never learned meanness of
them. How much fairer than the pool before the farmer’s door, in which his
ducks swim! Hither the clean wild ducks come. Nature has no human
inhabitant who appreciates her. The birds with their plumage and their notes
are in harmony with the flowers, but what youth or maiden conspires with
the wild luxuriant beauty of Nature? She flourishes most alone, far from the
towns where they reside. Talk of heaven! ye disgrace earth.

Baker Farm

Sometimes I rambled to pine groves, standing like temples, or like fleets
at sea, full-rigged, with wavy boughs, and rippling with light, so soft and
green and shady that the Druids would have forsaken their oaks to worship
in them; or to the cedar wood beyond Flint’s Pond, where the trees, covered
with hoary blue berries, spiring higher and higher, are fit to stand before
Valhalla, and the creeping juniper covers the ground with wreaths full of
fruit; or to swamps where the usnea lichen hangs in festoons from the
white-spruce trees, and toad-stools, round tables of the swamp gods, cover
the ground, and more beautiful fungi adorn the stumps, like butterflies or
shells, vegetable winkles; where the swamp-pink and dogwood grow, the
red 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
forget his home with their beauty, and he is dazzled and tempted by
nameless other wild forbidden fruits, too fair for mortal taste. Instead of
calling on some scholar, I paid many a visit to particular trees, of kinds
which are rare in this neighborhood, standing far away in the middle of
some pasture, or in the depths of a wood or swamp, or on a 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 all its details, of which, excepting scattered specimens, I
know but one small grove of sizable trees left in the township, supposed by
some to have been planted by the pigeons that were once baited with beech
nuts near by; it is worth the while to see the silver grain sparkle when you
split this wood; the bass; the hornbeam; the Celtis occidentalis, or false elm,
of which we have but one well-grown; some taller mast of a pine, a shingle
tree, or a more perfect hemlock than usual, standing like a pagoda in the
midst of the woods; and many others I could mention. These were the
shrines I visited both summer and winter.

Once it chanced that I stood in the very abutment of a rainbow’s arch,
which filled the lower stratum of the atmosphere, tinging the grass and
leaves around, and dazzling me as if I looked through colored crystal. It was
a lake of rainbow light, in which, for a short while, I lived like a dolphin. If
it had lasted longer it might have tinged my employments and life. As I
walked on the railroad causeway, I used to wonder at the halo of light
around my shadow, and would 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.
Benvenuto Cellini tells us in his memoirs, that, after a certain terrible dream
or vision which he had during his confinement in the castle of St. Angelo, a
resplendent light appeared over the shadow of his head at morning and
evening, whether he was in Italy or France, and it was particularly
conspicuous when the grass was moist with dew. This was probably the
same phenomenon to which I have referred, which is especially observed in
the morning, but also at other times, and even by moonlight. Though a
constant one, it is not commonly noticed, and, in the case of an excitable
imagination like Cellini’s, it would be basis enough for superstition. Beside,
he tells us that he showed it to very few. But are they not indeed
distinguished who are conscious that they are regarded at all?

I set out one afternoon to go a-fishing to Fair-Haven, through the woods,
to eke out my scanty 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,—
“Thy entry is a pleasant field,
Which some mossy fruit trees yield
Partly to a ruddy brook,
By gliding musquash undertook,
And mercurial trout,
Darting about.”

I thought of living there before I went to Walden. I “hooked” the apples,
leaped the brook, and scared the musquash and the trout. It was one of those
afternoons which 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 up a shower, which compelled
me to stand half an hour under a pine, piling boughs over my head, and

wearing my handkerchief for a shed; and when at length I had made one
cast over the pickerel-weed, standing up to my middle in water, I found
myself suddenly in the shadow of a cloud, and the thunder began to rumble
with such emphasis that I could do no more than listen to it. The gods must
be proud, thought I, with such forked flashes to rout a poor unarmed
fisherman. So I made haste for shelter to the nearest hut, which stood half a
mile from any road, but so much the nearer to the pond, and had long been
uninhabited:—
“And here a poet builded,
In the completed years,
For behold a trivial cabin
That to destruction steers.”

So the Muse fables. But therein, as I found, dwelt now John Field, an
Irishman, and his wife, and several children, from the broad-faced boy who
assisted his father at his work, and now came running by his side from the
bog to escape the rain, to the wrinkled, 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 midst of wet and hunger inquisitively upon the stranger, with
the privilege of infancy, not knowing but it was the last of a noble line, and
the hope and cynosure of the world, instead of John Field’s poor starveling
brat. There we sat together under that part of the roof which leaked the
least, while it showered and thundered without. I had sat there many times
of old before the ship was built that floated his family to America. An
honest, hard-working, but shiftless man plainly was John Field; and his
wife, she too was brave to cook so many successive dinners in the recesses
of that lofty stove; with round greasy face and bare breast, still thinking to
improve her condition one day; with the never absent mop in one hand, and
yet no effects of it visible anywhere. The chickens, which had also taken
shelter here from the rain, stalked about the room like members of the
family, too humanized methought to roast well. They stood and looked in
my eye or pecked at my shoe significantly. Meanwhile my host told me his
story, how hard he worked “bogging” for a neighboring farmer, turning up a
meadow with a spade or bog hoe at the rate of ten dollars an acre and the
use of the land with manure for one year, and his little broad-faced son
worked cheerfully at his father’s side the while, not knowing how poor a
bargain the latter had made. I tried to help him with my experience, telling
him that he was one of my nearest neighbors, and that I too, who came a-

fishing here, and looked like a loafer, was getting my living like himself;
that I lived in a tight, light, and clean house, which hardly cost more than
the annual rent of such a ruin as his commonly amounts to; and how, if he
chose, he might in a month or two build himself a palace of his own; that I
did not use tea, nor coffee, nor butter, nor milk, nor fresh meat, and so did
not have to work to get them; again, as I did not work hard, I did not have
to eat hard, and it cost me but a trifle for my food; but as he began with tea,
and coffee, and butter, and milk, and beef, he had to work hard to pay for
them, and when he had worked hard he had to eat hard again to repair the
waste of his system,—and so it was as broad as it was long, indeed it was
broader than it was long, for he was discontented and wasted his life into
the bargain; and yet he had rated it as a gain in coming to America, that here
you could get tea, and coffee, and meat every day. But the only true
America is that country where you are at liberty to pursue such a mode of
life as may enable you to do without these, and where the state does not
endeavor to compel you to sustain the slavery and war and other
superfluous expenses which directly or indirectly result from the use of
such things. For I purposely talked to him as if he were a philosopher, or
desired to be one. I should be glad if all the meadows on the earth were left
in a wild state, if that were the consequence of men’s beginning to redeem
themselves. A man will not need to study history to find out what is best for
his own culture. But alas! the culture of an Irishman is an enterprise to be
undertaken with a sort of moral bog hoe. I told him, that as he worked so
hard at bogging, he required thick boots and stout clothing, which yet were
soon soiled and worn out, but I wore light shoes and thin clothing, which
cost not half so much, though he might think that I was dressed like a
gentleman, (which, however, was not the case,) and in an hour or two,
without labor, but as a recreation, I could, if I wished, catch as many fish as
I should want for two days, or earn enough money to support me a week. If
he and his family would live simply, they might all go a-huckleberrying 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. It 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 entering wedge, and rout it in detail;

—thinking to deal with it roughly, as one should handle a thistle. But they
fight at an overwhelming disadvantage,—living, John Field, alas! without
arithmetic, and failing so.
“Do you ever fish?” I asked. “Oh yes, I catch a mess now and then when
I am lying by; good perch I catch.” “What’s your bait?” “I catch shiners
with fish-worms, and bait the perch with them.” “You’d better go now,
John,” said his wife, with glistening and hopeful face; but John demurred.
The shower was now over, and a rainbow above the eastern woods
promised a fair evening; so I took my departure. When I had got without I
asked for a drink, hoping to get a sight of the well bottom, to complete my
survey of the premises; but there, alas! are shallows and quicksands, and
rope broken withal, and bucket irrecoverable. Meanwhile the right culinary
vessel was selected, water was seemingly distilled, and after consultation
and long delay passed out to the thirsty one,—not yet suffered to cool, not
yet to settle. Such gruel sustains life here, I thought; so, shutting my eyes,
and excluding the motes by a skilfully directed under-current, I drank to
genuine hospitality the heartiest draught I could. I am not squeamish in such
cases when manners are concerned.
As I was leaving the Irishman’s roof after the rain, bending my steps
again to the pond, my haste to catch pickerel, wading in retired meadows, in
sloughs and bog-holes, in forlorn and savage places, appeared for an instant
trivial to me who had been sent to school and college; but as I ran down the
hill toward the reddening west, with the rainbow over my shoulder, and
some faint tinkling sounds borne to my ear through the cleansed air, from I
know not what quarter, my Good Genius seemed to say,—Go fish and hunt
far and wide day by day,—farther and wider,—and rest thee by many
brooks and hearth-sides without misgiving. Remember thy Creator in the
days of thy youth. Rise free from care before the dawn, and seek
adventures. Let the noon find thee by other lakes, and the night overtake
thee everywhere at home. There are no larger fields than these, no worthier
games than may 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.” * *

“Debate with no man hast thou,
With questions art never perplexed,
As tame at the first sight as now,
In thy plain russet gabardine dressed.” * *

“Come ye who love,
And ye who hate,
Children of the Holy Dove,
And Guy 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 household echoes haunt, and their life pines because it breathes its
own breath over again; their shadows morning and evening reach farther
than their daily steps. We should come home from far, from adventures, and
perils, and discoveries every day, with new experience and character.
Before I had reached the pond some fresh impulse had brought out John
Field, with altered mind, letting go “bogging” ere this sunset. But he, poor
man, disturbed only a couple of fins while I was catching a fair string, and
he said it was his luck; but when we changed seats in the boat luck changed
seats too. Poor John Field!—I trust he does not read this, unless he will
improve by it,—thinking to live by some derivative old country mode in
this primitive new country,—to catch perch with shiners. It is good bait
sometimes, I allow. With his horizon all his own, yet he a poor man, born to
be poor, with his inherited Irish poverty or poor life, his Adam’s
grandmother and boggy ways, not to rise in this world, he nor his posterity,
till their wading webbed bog-trotting feet get talaria to their heels.

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 that I was hungry then, except for
that wildness which he represented. Once or twice, however, while I lived at
the pond, I found myself ranging the woods, like a half-starved hound, with
a strange abandonment, seeking some kind of venison which I might
devour, and no morsel could have been too savage for me. The wildest
scenes had become unaccountably familiar. I found in myself, and still find,
an instinct toward a higher, or, as it is named, spiritual life, as do most men,
and another toward a primitive rank and savage one, and I reverence them
both. I love the wild not less than the good. The wildness and adventure that
are in fishing still recommended 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 employment 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. Fishermen, hunters, woodchoppers, and others, spending
their lives in the fields and woods, in a peculiar sense a part of Nature
themselves, are often in a more favorable mood for observing her, in the
intervals of their pursuits, than philosophers or poets even, who approach
her with expectation. She is not afraid to exhibit herself to them. The
traveller on the prairie is naturally a hunter, on the head waters of the
Missouri and Columbia a trapper, and at the Falls of St. Mary a fisherman.
He who is only a traveller learns things at second-hand and by the halves,
and is poor authority. We are most interested when science reports what
those men already know practically or instinctively, for that alone is a true
humanity, or account of human experience.

They mistake who assert that the Yankee has few amusements, because
he has not so many public holidays, and men and boys do not play so many
games as they do in England, for here the more primitive but solitary
amusements of hunting fishing and the like have not yet given place to the
former. Almost every New England boy among my contemporaries
shouldered a 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 increased humanity, but
to an increased scarcity of game, for perhaps the hunter is the greatest
friend of the animals hunted, not excepting the Humane Society.
Moreover, when at the pond, I wished sometimes to add fish to my fare
for variety. I have actually fished from the same kind of necessity that the
first fishers did. Whatever humanity I might conjure up against it was all
factitious, and concerned my philosophy more than my feelings. I speak of
fishing only now, for I had long felt differently about 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 affected. I did not pity the
fishes nor the worms. This was habit. As for fowling, during the last years
that I carried a gun my excuse was that I was studying ornithology, and
sought only new or rare birds. But I confess that I am now inclined to think
that there is a finer way of studying ornithology than this. It requires so
much closer attention to the habits of the birds, that, if for that reason only, I
have been willing to omit the gun. Yet notwithstanding the objection on the
score of humanity, I am compelled to doubt if equally valuable sports are
ever substituted for these; and when some of my friends have asked me
anxiously about their boys, whether they should let them hunt, I have
answered, yes,—remembering that it was one of the best parts of my
education,—make them hunters, though sportsmen only at first, if possible,
mighty hunters at last, so that they shall not find game large enough for
them in this or any vegetable wilderness,—hunters as well as fishers of
men. Thus far I am of the opinion of Chaucer’s nun, who
“yave not of the text a pulled hen
That saith that hunters ben not holy men.”

There is a period in the history of the individual, as of the race, when the
hunters are the “best men,” as the Algonquins called them. We cannot but
pity the boy who has never fired a gun; he is no more humane, while his
education has been sadly neglected. This was my answer with respect to
those youths who were bent on this pursuit, trusting that they would soon
outgrow it. No humane being, past the thoughtless age of boyhood, will
wantonly murder any creature which holds its life by the same tenure that
he does. The hare in its extremity cries like a child. I warn you, mothers,
that my sympathies do not always make the usual phil-anthropic
distinctions.
Such is oftenest the young man’s introduction to the forest, and the most
original part of himself. He goes thither at first as a hunter and fisher, until
at last, if he has the seeds of a better life in him, he distinguishes his proper
objects, as a poet or naturalist it may be, and leaves the gun and fish-pole
behind. The mass of men are still and always young in this respect. In some
countries a hunting parson is no uncommon sight. Such a one might make a
good shepherd’s dog, but is far from being the Good Shepherd. I have been
surprised to consider that the only obvious employment, except wood-
chopping, ice-cutting, or the like business, which ever to my knowledge
detained at Walden Pond for a whole half day any of my fellow-citizens,
whether fathers or children of the town, with just one exception, was
fishing. Commonly they did not think that they were lucky, or well paid for
their time, unless they got a long string of fish, though they had the
opportunity of seeing the pond all the while. They might go there a
thousand times before the sediment of fishing would sink to the bottom and
leave their purpose pure; but no doubt such a clarifying process would be
going on all the while. The governor and his council faintly remember the
pond, for they went 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 forever.
Yet even they expect to go to heaven at last. If the legislature regards it, it is
chiefly to regulate the number of hooks to be used there; but they know
nothing about the hook of hooks with which to angle for the pond itself,
impaling the legislature for a bait. Thus, even in civilized communities, the
embryo man passes through the hunter stage of development.
I have found repeatedly, of late years, that I cannot fish without falling a
little in self-respect. I have tried it again and again. I have skill at it, and,
like many of my fellows, a certain instinct for it, which revives from time to

time, but always when I have done I feel that it would have been better if I
had not fished. I think that I do not mistake. It is a faint intimation, yet so
are the first streaks of 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 wisdom; at present I
am no fisherman at all. But I see that if I were to live in a wilderness I
should again be tempted to become a fisher and hunter in earnest. Beside,
there is something essentially unclean about this diet and all flesh, and I
began to see where housework commences, and whence the endeavor,
which costs so much, to wear a tidy and respectable appearance each day, to
keep the house sweet and free from all ill odors and sights. Having been my
own butcher and scullion and cook, as well as the gentleman for whom the
dishes were served up, I can speak from an unusually complete experience.
The practical objection to animal food in my case was its uncleanness; and,
besides, when I had caught and cleaned and cooked and eaten my fish, they
seemed not to have fed me essentially. It was insignificant and unnecessary,
and cost more than it came to. A little bread or a few potatoes would have
done as well, with less trouble and filth. Like many of my contemporaries, I
had rarely for many years used animal food, or tea, or coffee, &c.; not so
much because of any ill effects which I had traced to them, as because they
were not agreeable to my imagination. The repugnance to animal food is
not the effect of experience, but is an instinct. It appeared more beautiful to
live low and 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 preserve his higher or poetic faculties in the best condition
has been particularly inclined to abstain from animal food, and from much
food of any kind. It is a significant fact, stated by entomologists, I find it in
Kirby and Spence, that “some insects in their perfect state, though furnished
with organs of feeding, make no use of them;” and they lay it down as “a
general rule, that almost all insects in this state eat much less than in that of
larvæ. 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 imagination; but this, I think, is to be fed when we feed the body;
they should both sit down at the same table. Yet perhaps this may be done.
The fruits eaten temperately need not make us ashamed of our appetites, nor
interrupt the worthiest pursuits. But put an extra condiment into your dish,
and it will poison you. It is not worth the while to live by rich cookery.
Most men would feel shame if caught preparing with their own hands
precisely such a dinner, whether of animal or vegetable food, as is every
day prepared for them by others. Yet till this is otherwise we are not
civilized, and, if gentlemen and ladies, are not true men and women. This
certainly suggests what change is to be made. It may be vain to ask why the
imagination will not be reconciled to flesh and fat. I am satisfied that it is
not. Is it not a reproach that man is a carnivorous animal? True, he can and
does live, in a great measure, by preying on other animals; but this is a
miserable way,—as any one who will go to snaring rabbits, or slaughtering
lambs, may learn,—and he will be regarded as a benefactor of his race who
shall teach man to confine himself to a more innocent and wholesome diet.
Whatever my own practice may be, I have no doubt that it is a part of the
destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating
animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when
they came in contact with the more civilized.
If one listens to the faintest but constant suggestions of his genius, which
are certainly true, he sees not to what extremes, or even insanity, it may lead
him; and yet that way, as he grows more resolute and faithful, his road lies.
The faintest assured objection which one healthy man feels will at length
prevail over the arguments and customs of mankind. No man ever followed
his genius till it misled him. Though the result were bodily weakness, yet
perhaps no one can say that the consequences were to be regretted, for these
were a life in conformity to higher principles. If the day and the night are
such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers
and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal,—that
is your success. All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause
momentarily to bless yourself. The greatest gains and values are farthest
from being appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they exist. We soon
forget them. They are the highest reality. Perhaps the facts most astounding
and most real are never communicated by man to man. The true harvest of
my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of

morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow
which I have clutched.
Yet, for my part, I was never unusually squeamish; I could sometimes eat
a fried rat with a good relish, if it were necessary. I am glad to have drunk
water so long, for the same reason that I prefer the natural sky to an opium-
eater’s heaven. I would fain keep sober always; and there are infinite
degrees of drunkenness. I believe that water is the only drink for a wise
man; wine is not so noble a liquor; and think of dashing the hopes of a
morning with a cup of warm coffee, or of an evening with a dish of tea! Ah,
how low I fall when I am tempted by them! Even music may be
intoxicating. Such apparently slight causes destroyed Greece and Rome,
and will destroy England and America. Of all ebriosity, who does not prefer
to be intoxicated by the air he breathes? I have found it to be the most
serious objection to coarse labors long continued, that they compelled me to
eat and drink coarsely also. But to tell the truth, I find myself at present
somewhat less particular in these respects. I carry less religion to the table,
ask no blessing; not because I am wiser than I was, but, I am obliged to
confess, because, however much it is to be regretted, with years I have
grown more coarse and indifferent. Perhaps these questions are entertained
only in youth, as most believe of poetry. My practice is “nowhere,” my
opinion is here. Nevertheless I am far from regarding myself as one of those
privileged ones to whom the Ved refers when it says, that “he who has true
faith in the Omnipresent Supreme Being may eat all that exists,” that is, is
not bound to inquire what is his food, or who prepares it; and even in their
case it is to be observed, as a Hindoo commentator has remarked, that the
Vedant limits this privilege to “the time of distress.”
Who has not sometimes derived an inexpressible satisfaction from his
food in which appetite had no share? I have been thrilled to think that I
owed a mental perception to the commonly gross sense of taste, that I have
been inspired through the palate, that some berries which I had eaten on a
hill-side had fed my genius. “The soul not being mistress of herself,” says
Thseng-tseu, “one looks, and one does not see; one listens, and one does not
hear; one eats, and one does not know the savor of food.” He who
distinguishes the true savor of his food can never be a glutton; he who does
not cannot be otherwise. A puritan may go to his brown-bread crust with as
gross an appetite as ever an alderman to his turtle. Not that food which
entereth into the mouth defileth a man, but the appetite with which it is

eaten. It is neither the quality nor the quantity, but the devotion to sensual
savors; when that which is eaten is not a viand to sustain our animal, or
inspire our spiritual life, but food for the worms that possess us. If the
hunter has a taste for mud-turtles, muskrats, and other such savage tid-bits,
the fine lady indulges a taste for jelly made of a calf’s foot, or for sardines
from over the sea, and they are even. He goes to the mill-pond, she to her
preserve-pot. The wonder is how they, how you and I, can live this slimy,
beastly life, eating and drinking.
Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant’s truce
between virtue and vice. Goodness is the only investment that never fails.
In the music of the harp which trembles round the world it is the insisting
on this which thrills us. The harp is the travelling patterer for the Universe’s
Insurance Company, recommending its laws, and our little goodness is all
the assessment that we pay. Though the youth at last grows indifferent, the
laws of the universe are not indifferent, but are forever on the side of the
most sensitive. Listen to every zephyr for some reproof, for it is surely
there, and he is unfortunate who does not hear it. We cannot touch a string
or move a stop but the charming moral transfixes us. Many an irksome
noise, go a long way off, is heard as music, a proud sweet satire on the
meanness of our lives.
We are conscious of an animal in us, which awakens in proportion as our
higher nature slumbers. It is reptile and sensual, and perhaps cannot be
wholly expelled; like the worms which, even in life and health, occupy our
bodies. Possibly we may withdraw from it, but never change its nature. I
fear that it may enjoy a certain health of its own; that we may be well, yet
not pure. The other day I picked up the lower jaw of a hog, with white and
sound teeth and tusks, which suggested that there was an animal health and
vigor distinct from the spiritual. This creature succeeded by other means
than temperance and purity. “That in which men differ from brute beasts,”
says Mencius, “is a thing very inconsiderable; the common herd lose it very
soon; superior men preserve it carefully.” Who knows what sort of life
would result if we had attained to purity? If I knew so wise a man as could
teach me purity I would go to seek him forthwith. “A command over our
passions, and over the external senses of the body, and good acts, are
declared by the Ved to be indispensable in the mind’s approximation to
God.” Yet the spirit can for the time pervade and control every member and
function of the body, and transmute what in form is the grossest sensuality

into purity and devotion. The generative energy, which, when we are loose,
dissipates and makes us unclean, when we are continent invigorates and
inspires us. Chastity is the flowering of man; and what are called Genius,
Heroism, Holiness, and the like, are but various fruits which succeed it.
Man flows at once to God when the channel of purity is open. By turns our
purity inspires and our impurity casts us down. He is blessed who is assured
that the animal is dying out in him day by day, and the divine being
established. Perhaps there is none but has cause for shame on account of the
inferior and brutish nature to which he is allied. I fear that we are such gods
or demigods only as fauns and satyrs, the divine allied to beasts, the
creatures 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 this 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 he’s those devils too which did incline
Them to a headlong rage, and made them worse.”

All sensuality is one, though it takes many forms; all purity is one. It is
the same whether a man eat, or drink, or cohabit, or sleep sensually. They
are but one appetite, and we only need to see a person do any one of these
things to know how great a sensualist he is. The impure can neither stand
nor sit with purity. When the reptile is attacked at one mouth of his burrow,
he shows himself at another. If you would be chaste, you must be
temperate. What 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 and purity; from sloth ignorance and sensuality. In the student
sensuality is a sluggish habit of mind. An unclean person is universally a
slothful one, one who sits by a stove, whom the sun shines on prostrate,
who reposes without being fatigued. If you would avoid uncleanness, and
all the sins, work earnestly, though it be at cleaning a stable. Nature is hard
to be overcome, but she must be overcome. What avails it that you are
Christian, if you are not purer than the heathen, if you deny yourself no
more, if you are not more religious? I know of many systems of religion
esteemed heathenish whose precepts fill the reader with shame, and

provoke him to new endeavors, though it be to the performance of rites
merely.
I hesitate to say these things, but it is not because of the subject,—I care
not how obscene my words are,—but because I cannot speak of them
without betraying my impurity. We discourse freely without shame of one
form of sensuality, and are silent about another. We are so degraded that we
cannot speak simply of the necessary functions of human nature. In earlier
ages, in some countries, every function was reverently spoken of and
regulated by law. Nothing was too trivial for the 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 he
worships, after a style purely his own, nor can he get off by hammering
marble instead. We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our
own flesh and blood and bones. Any nobleness begins at once to refine a
man’s features, any meanness or sensuality to imbrute them.
John Farmer sat at his door one September evening, after a hard day’s
work, his mind still running on his labor more or less. Having bathed, he sat
down to re-create his intellectual man. It was a rather cool evening, and
some of his neighbors were apprehending a frost. He had not attended to the
train of his thoughts long when he heard some one playing on a flute, and
that sound harmonized with his mood. Still he thought of his work; but the
burden of his thought was, that though this kept running in his head, and he
found himself planning and contriving it against his will, yet it concerned
him very little. It was no more than the scurf of his skin, which was
constantly shuffled off. But the notes of the flute came home to his ears out
of a different sphere from that he worked in, and suggested work for certain
faculties which slumbered in him. They gently did away with the street, and
the village, and the state in which he lived. A voice said to him,—Why do
you stay here and live this mean moiling life, when a glorious existence is
possible for you? Those same stars twinkle over other fields than these.—
But how to come out of this condition and actually migrate thither? All that
he could think of was to practise some new austerity, to let his mind
descend into his body and redeem it, and treat himself with ever increasing
respect.

Brute Neighbors

Sometimes I had a companion in my fishing, 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 doing now. I have not heard so much
as a locust over the sweet-fern these three hours. The pigeons are all asleep
upon their roosts,—no flutter from them. Was that a farmer’s noon horn
which sounded from beyond the woods just now? The hands are coming in
to boiled salt beef and cider and Indian bread. Why will men worry
themselves so? He that does not eat need not work. I wonder how much
they have reaped. Who would live there where a body can never think for
the barking of Bose? And O, the housekeeping! to keep bright the devil’s
door-knobs, and scour his tubs this bright day! Better not keep a house. Say,
some hollow tree; and then for morning calls and dinner-parties! Only a
woodpecker tapping. O, they swarm; the sun is too warm there; they are
born too far into life for me. I have water from the spring, and a loaf of
brown bread on the shelf.—Hark! I hear a rustling of the leaves. Is it some
ill-fed village hound yielding to the instinct of the chase? or the lost pig
which is said to be in these woods, whose tracks I saw after the rain? It
comes on apace; my 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! That’s the greatest thing I have
seen 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. It is the
only trade I have learned. Come, let’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 while. But that we may

not be delayed, you shall be digging the bait meanwhile. Angle-worms are
rarely to be met with in these parts, where the soil was never fattened with
manure; the race is nearly extinct. The sport of digging the bait is nearly
equal to that of catching the fish, when one’s appetite is not too keen; and
this you may have all to yourself 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
weeding. 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 to me. If it would do any good, I would whistle for them. When they
make us an offer, is it wise to say, We will think of it? My thoughts have left
no track, and I cannot find the path again. What was it that I was thinking
of? It 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 but 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; but they will do for
the smaller fry; they do not cover up the hook so much. Those village
worms are quite too large; a shiner may make a meal off one without
finding the skewer.
Hermit. Well, then, let’s be off. Shall we to the Concord? There’s good
sport there if the water be not too high.

Why do precisely these objects which we behold make a world? Why has
man just these species of animals for his neighbors; as if nothing but a
mouse could have filled this crevice? I suspect that Pilpay & Co. have put
animals to their best use, for they are all beasts of burden, in a sense, made
to carry some portion of our thoughts.

The mice which haunted my house were not the common ones, which are
said to have been introduced into the country, but a wild native kind not
found in the village. I sent one to a distinguished naturalist, and it interested
him much. When I was building, one of these had its nest underneath the
house, and before I had laid the second floor, and swept out the shavings,
would come out regularly at lunch time and pick up the crumbs at my feet.
It probably had never seen a man before; and it soon became quite familiar,
and would run over my shoes and up my clothes. It could readily ascend the
sides of the room by short impulses, like a squirrel, which it resembled in
its motions. At length, as I leaned with my elbow on the bench one day, it
ran up my clothes, and along my sleeve, and round and round the paper
which held my dinner, while I kept the latter close, and dodged and played
at bopeep with it; and when at last I held still a piece of cheese between my
thumb and finger, it came and nibbled it, sitting in my hand, and afterward
cleaned its face and paws, like a fly, and walked away.
A phœbe soon built in my shed, and a robin for protection in a pine
which grew against the house. In June the partridge (Tetrao umbellus,)
which is so shy a bird, led her brood past my windows, from the woods in
the rear to the front of my house, clucking and calling to them like a hen,
and in all her behavior proving herself the hen of the woods. The young
suddenly disperse on your approach, at a signal from the mother, as if a
whirlwind had swept them away, and they so exactly resemble the dried
leaves and twigs that many a traveler has placed his foot in the midst of a
brood, and heard the whir of the old bird as she flew off, and her anxious
calls and mewing, or seen her trail her wings to attract his attention, without
suspecting their neighborhood. The parent will sometimes roll and spin
round before you in such a dishabille, that you cannot, for a few moments,
detect what kind of creature it is. The young squat still and flat, often
running their heads under a leaf, and mind only their mother’s directions
given from a distance, nor will your approach make them run again and
betray themselves. You may even tread on them, or have your eyes on them
for a minute, without discovering them. I have held them in my open hand
at such a time, and still their only care, obedient to their mother and their
instinct, was to squat there without fear or trembling. So perfect is this
instinct, that once, when I had laid them on the leaves again, and one
accidentally fell on its side, it was found with the rest in exactly the same
position ten minutes afterward. They are not callow like the young of most

birds, but more perfectly developed and precocious even than chickens. The
remarkably adult yet innocent expression of their open and serene eyes is
very memorable. All intelligence seems reflected in them. They suggest not
merely the purity of infancy, but a wisdom clarified by experience. Such an
eye was not born when the bird was, but is 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 these innocents to fall a prey to
some prowling beast or bird, or gradually mingle with the decaying leaves
which they so much resemble. It is said that when hatched by a hen they
will directly disperse on some alarm, and so are lost, for they never hear the
mother’s call which gathers them again. These were my hens and chickens.
It is remarkable how many creatures live wild and free though secret in
the woods, and still sustain themselves in the neighborhood of towns,
suspected by hunters only. How retired the otter manages to live here! He
grows to be four feet long, as big as a small boy, perhaps without any
human being getting a glimpse of him. I formerly saw the raccoon in the
woods behind where my house is built, and probably still heard their
whinnering at night. Commonly I rested an hour or two in the shade at
noon, after planting, and ate my lunch, and read a little by a spring which
was the source of a swamp and of a brook, oozing from under Brister’s Hill,
half a mile from my field. The approach to this was through a succession of
descending grassy hollows, full of young pitch-pines, into a larger wood
about the swamp. There, in a very secluded and shaded spot, under a
spreading white-pine, there was yet a clean, firm sward to sit on. I had dug
out the spring and made a well of clear gray water, where I could dip up a
pailful without roiling it, and thither I went for this purpose almost every
day in midsummer, when the pond was warmest. Thither, too, the 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, spying
me, she would leave her young and circle round and round me, nearer and
nearer till within four or five feet, pretending broken wings and legs, to
attract my attention, and get off her young, who would already have taken
up their march, with faint wiry peep, single file through the swamp, as she
directed. Or I heard the peep of the young when I could not see the parent
bird. There too the turtle-doves sat over the spring, or fluttered from 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 exhibit 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, and black,
fiercely contending with one another. Having once got hold they never let
go, but struggled and wrestled and rolled on the chips incessantly. Looking
farther, I was surprised to find that the chips were covered with such
combatants, that it was not a 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;
internecine war; the red republicans on the one hand, and the black
imperialists on the other. On every side they were engaged in deadly
combat, yet without any noise that I could hear, and human soldiers never
fought so resolutely. I watched a couple that were fast locked in each
other’s embraces, in a little sunny valley amid the chips, now at noon-day
prepared to fight till the sun went down, or life went out. The smaller red
champion had fastened himself like a vice to his adversary’s front, and
through all the tumblings on that field never for an instant ceased to gnaw at
one of his feelers near the root, having already caused the other to go by the
board; while the stronger black one dashed him from side to side, and, as I
saw on looking nearer, had already divested him of several of his members.
They fought with more pertinacity than 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 excitement, who either had despatched his
foe, or had not yet taken part in the battle; probably the latter, for he had
lost none of his limbs; whose mother had charged him to return with his
shield or upon it. Or perchance he was some Achilles, who had nourished
his wrath apart, and had now come to avenge or rescue his Patroclus. He
saw this unequal combat from afar,—for the blacks were nearly twice the
size of the red,—he drew near with rapid pace till he stood on his guard
within half an inch of the combatants; then, watching his opportunity, he

sprang upon the black warrior, and commenced his operations near the root
of his right fore-leg, leaving the foe to select among his own members; and
so there were three united for life, as if a new kind of attraction had been
invented which put all other locks and cements to shame. I should not have
wondered by this time to find that they had their respective musical bands
stationed on some eminent chip, and playing their national airs the while, to
excite the slow and cheer the dying combatants. I was myself excited
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
Austerlitz or Dresden. Concord Fight! Two killed on the patriots’ side, and
Luther Blanchard wounded! Why here every ant was a Buttrick,—“Fire! for
God’s sake fire!”—and thousands shared the fate of Davis and Hosmer.
There was not one hireling there. I have no doubt that it was a principle
they fought for, as much as our ancestors, and not to avoid a three-penny
tax on their tea; and the results of this battle will be as important and
memorable to those whom it concerns as those of the battle of Bunker Hill,
at least.
I took up the chip on which the three I have particularly described were
struggling, carried it into my house, and placed it under a tumbler on my
window-sill, in order to see the issue. Holding a microscope to the first-
mentioned red ant, I saw that, though he was assiduously gnawing at the
near fore-leg of his enemy, having severed his remaining feeler, his own
breast was all torn away, exposing what vitals he had there to the jaws of
the black warrior, whose breastplate was apparently too thick for him to
pierce; and the dark carbuncles of the sufferer’s eyes shone with ferocity
such as war only could excite. They struggled half an hour longer under the
tumbler, and when I looked again the black soldier had severed the heads of
his foes from their bodies, and the still living heads were hanging on either
side of him like ghastly trophies at his saddle-bow, still apparently as firmly
fastened as ever, and he was endeavoring with feeble struggles, being
without feelers and with only the remnant of a leg, and I know not how
many other wounds, to divest himself of them; which at length, after half an
hour more, he accomplished. I raised the glass, and he went off over the
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 be 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 feelings excited and harrowed by
witnessing the struggle, the ferocity and carnage, of a human battle before
my door.
Kirby and Spence tell us that the battles of ants have long been celebrated
and the date of them recorded, though they say that Huber is the only
modern author who appears to have witnessed them. “Æneas Sylvius,” say
they, “after giving a very circumstantial account of one contested with great
obstinacy by a great and small species on the trunk of a pear tree,” adds that
“‘This action was fought in the pontificate of Eugenius the Fourth, in the
presence of Nicholas Pistoriensis, an eminent lawyer, who related the whole
history of the battle with the greatest fidelity.’ A similar engagement
between great and small ants is recorded by Olaus Magnus, in which the
small ones, being victorious, are said to have buried the bodies of their own
soldiers, but left those of their giant enemies a prey to the birds. This event
happened previous to the expulsion of the tyrant Christiern the Second from
Sweden.” The battle which I witnessed took place in the Presidency of Polk,
five years before the passage of Webster’s Fugitive-Slave Bill.
Many a village 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 rarely wander so far from home. The surprise
was mutual. Nevertheless the most domestic cat, which has lain on a rug all
her days, appears quite at home in the woods, and, by her sly and stealthy
behavior, proves herself more native there than the regular inhabitants.
Once, when berrying, I met with a cat with young kittens in the woods,
quite wild, and they all, like their mother, had their backs up and were
fiercely spitting at me. A few years before I lived in the woods there was
what was called a “winged cat” in one of the 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 pronoun,) but her
mistress told me that she came into the neighborhood a little more than a
year before, in April, and was finally taken into their house; that she was of
a dark brownish-gray color, with a white spot on her throat, and white feet,
and had a large bushy tail like a fox; that in the winter the fur grew thick
and flatted out along her sides, forming stripes ten or twelve inches long by
two and a half wide, and under her chin like a muff, the upper side loose,
the under matted like felt, and in the spring these appendages dropped off.
They gave me a pair of her “wings,” which I keep still. There is no
appearance of a membrane about them. Some thought it was part flying-
squirrel or some other wild animal, which is not impossible, for, according
to naturalists, prolific hybrids have been produced by the union of the
marten and domestic cat. This would have been the right kind of cat for me
to keep, if I had kept any; for why should not a poet’s cat be winged as well
as his horse?
In the fall the loon (Colymbus glacialis) came, as usual, to moult and
bathe in the pond, making the woods ring with his wild laughter before I
had risen. At rumor of his arrival all the Mill-dam sportsmen are on the
alert, in gigs and on foot, two by two and three by three, with patent rifles
and conical balls and spy-glasses. They come rustling through the woods
like autumn leaves, at least ten men to one loon. Some station themselves
on this side of the pond, some on that, for the poor bird cannot be
omnipresent; if he dive here he must come up there. But now the kind
October wind rises, rustling the leaves and rippling the surface of the water,
so that no loon can be heard or seen, though his foes sweep the pond with
spy-glasses, and make the woods resound with their discharges. The waves
generously rise and dash angrily, taking sides with all water-fowl, and our
sportsmen must beat a retreat to town and shop and unfinished jobs. But
they were too often successful. When I went to get a pail of water early in
the morning I frequently saw this stately bird sailing out of my cove within
a few rods. If I endeavored to overtake him in a boat, in order to see how he
would manœuvre, he would dive and be completely lost, so that I did not
discover him again, sometimes, till the latter part of the day. But I was more
than a match for him on the surface. He commonly went off in a rain.

As I was paddling along the north shore one very calm October
afternoon, for such days especially they settle on to the lakes, like the
milkweed down, having looked in vain over the pond for a loon, suddenly
one, sailing out from the shore toward the middle a few rods in front of me,
set up his wild laugh and betrayed himself. I pursued with a paddle and he
dived, but when he came up I was nearer than before. He dived again, but I
miscalculated the direction he would take, and we were fifty rods apart
when he came to the surface this time, for I had helped to widen the
interval; and again he laughed long and loud, and with more reason than
before. He manœuvred so cunningly that I could not get within half a dozen
rods of him. Each time, when he came to the surface, turning his head this
way and that, he cooly surveyed the water and the land, and apparently
chose his course so that he might come up where there was the widest
expanse of water and at the greatest distance from the boat. It was
surprising how quickly he made up his mind and put his resolve into
execution. He led me at once to the widest part of the pond, and could not
be driven from it. While he was thinking one thing in his brain, I was
endeavoring to divine his thought in mine. It was a pretty game, played on
the smooth surface of the pond, a man against a loon. Suddenly your
adversary’s checker disappears beneath the board, and the problem is to
place yours nearest to where his will appear again. Sometimes he would
come up unexpectedly on the opposite side of me, having apparently passed
directly under the boat. So long-winded was he and so unweariable, that
when he had swum farthest he would immediately plunge 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! Yet he appeared to know his course as
surely under water as on the surface, and swam much faster there. Once or
twice I saw a ripple where he approached the surface, just put his head out
to reconnoitre, and instantly dived again. I found that it was as well for me
to rest on my oars and wait his reappearing as to endeavor to calculate
where he would rise; for again and again, when I was straining my eyes
over the surface one way, I would suddenly be startled by his unearthly

laugh behind me. But why, after displaying so much cunning, did he
invariably betray himself the moment he came up by that loud laugh? Did
not his white breast enough betray him? He was indeed a silly loon, I
thought. I could commonly hear the splash of the water when he came up,
and so also detected him. But after an hour he seemed as fresh as ever,
dived as willingly and swam yet farther than at first. It was surprising to see
how serenely he sailed off with unruffled breast when he came to the
surface, doing all the work with his webbed feet beneath. His usual note
was this demoniac laughter, yet somewhat like that of a water-fowl; but
occasionally, when he had balked me most successfully and come up a long
way off, he uttered a long-drawn unearthly howl, probably more like that of
a wolf than any bird; as when a beast puts his muzzle to the ground and
deliberately howls. This was his looning,—perhaps the wildest sound that 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 was by this time overcast, the pond was so smooth that I could see
where he broke the surface when I did not hear him. His white breast, the
stillness of the air, and the smoothness of the water were all against him. At
length, having come up fifty rods off, he uttered one of those prolonged
howls, as if calling on the god of loons to aid him, and immediately there
came a wind from the east and rippled the surface, and filled the whole air
with misty rain, and I was impressed as if it were the prayer of the loon
answered, and his god was angry with me; and so I left him disappearing far
away on the tumultuous surface.
For hours, in fall days, I watched the ducks cunningly tack and veer and
hold the middle of the pond, far from the sportsman; tricks which they will
have less need to practise in Louisiana bayous. When compelled to rise they
would sometimes circle round and round and over the pond at a
considerable height, from which they could easily see to other ponds and
the river, like black motes in the sky; and, when I thought they had gone off
thither long since, they would settle down by a slanting flight of a quarter of
a mile on to a distant part which was left free; but what beside safety they
got by sailing in the middle of Walden I do not know, unless they love its
water for the same reason that I do.

House-Warming

In October I went a-graping to the river meadows, and loaded myself
with clusters more precious for their beauty and fragrance than for food.
There too I admired, though I did not gather, the cranberries, small waxen
gems, pendants of the meadow grass, pearly and red, which the farmer
plucks with an ugly rake, leaving the smooth meadow in a snarl, heedlessly
measuring them by the bushel and the dollar only, and sells the spoils of the
meads to Boston and New York; destined to be jammed, to satisfy the tastes
of lovers of Nature there. So butchers rake the tongues of bison out of the
prairie grass, regardless of the torn and drooping plant. The barberry’s
brilliant fruit was likewise food for my eyes merely; but I collected a small
store of wild apples for coddling, which the proprietor and travellers had
overlooked. When chestnuts were ripe I laid up half a bushel for winter. It
was very exciting at that season to roam the then boundless chestnut woods
of Lincoln,—they now sleep their long sleep under the railroad,—with a
bag on my shoulder, and a stick to open burrs with in my hand, for I did not
always wait for the frost, amid the rustling of leaves and the loud reproofs
of the red-squirrels and the jays, whose half-consumed nuts I sometimes
stole, for the burrs which they had selected were sure to contain sound ones.
Occasionally I climbed and shook the trees. They grew also behind my
house, and one large tree, which almost overshadowed it, was, when in
flower, a bouquet which scented the whole neighborhood, but the squirrels
and the jays got most of its fruit; the last coming in flocks early in the
morning and picking the nuts out of the burrs before they fell. I relinquished
these trees to them and visited the more distant woods composed wholly of
chestnut. These nuts, as far as they went, were a good substitute for bread.
Many other substitutes might, perhaps, be found. Digging one day for fish-
worms, I discovered the ground-nut (Apios tuberosa) on its string, the
potato of the aborigines, a sort of fabulous fruit, which I had begun to doubt
if I had ever dug and eaten in childhood, as I had told, and had not dreamed

it. I had often since seen its crimpled red velvety blossom supported by the
stems of other plants without knowing it to be the same. Cultivation has
well nigh exterminated it. It has a sweetish taste, much like that of a
frostbitten potato, and I found it better boiled than roasted. This tuber
seemed like a faint promise of Nature to rear her own children and feed
them simply here at some future period. In these days of fatted cattle and
waving grain-fields this humble root, which was once the totem of an Indian
tribe, is quite forgotten, or known only by its flowering vine; but let wild
Nature reign here once more, and the tender and luxurious English grains
will probably disappear before a myriad of foes, and without the care of
man the crow may carry back even the last seed of corn to the great
cornfield of the Indian’s God in the south-west, whence he is said to have
brought it; 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 Indian Ceres or Minerva must have been the inventor and bestower of
it; and when the reign of poetry commences here, its leaves and string of
nuts may be represented on our works of art.
Already, by the first of September, I had seen two or three small maples
turned scarlet across the pond, beneath where the white stems of three
aspens diverged, at the point of a promontory, next the water. Ah, many a
tale their color told! And gradually from week to week the character of each
tree came out, and it admired itself reflected in the smooth mirror of the
lake. Each morning the manager of this gallery substituted some new
picture, distinguished by more brilliant or harmonious coloring, for the old
upon the walls.
The wasps came by thousands to my lodge in October, as to winter
quarters, and settled on my windows within and on the walls over-head,
sometimes deterring visitors from entering. Each morning, when they were
numbed with cold, I swept some of them out, but I did not trouble myself
much to get rid of them; I even felt complimented by their regarding my
house as a desirable shelter. They never molested me seriously, though they
bedded with me; and they gradually disappeared, into what crevices I do not
know, avoiding winter and unspeakable cold.
Like the wasps, before I finally went into winter quarters in November, I
used to resort to the north-east side of Walden, which the sun, reflected

from the pitch-pine woods and the stony shore, made the fire-side of the
pond; it is so much pleasanter and wholesomer to be warmed by the sun
while you can be, than by an artificial fire. I thus warmed myself by the still
glowing embers which the summer, like a departed hunter, had left.

When I came to build my chimney I studied masonry. My bricks being
second-hand ones required to be cleaned with a trowel, so that I learned
more than usual of the qualities of bricks and trowels. The mortar on them
was fifty years old, and was said to be still growing harder; but this is one
of those sayings which men love to repeat whether they are true or not.
Such sayings themselves grow harder and adhere more firmly with age, and
it would take many blows with a trowel to clean an old wiseacre of them.
Many of the villages of Mesopotamia are built of second-hand bricks of a
very good quality, obtained from the ruins of Babylon, and the cement on
them is older and probably harder still. However that may be, I was struck
by the peculiar toughness of the steel which bore so many violent blows
without being worn out. As my bricks had been in a chimney before, though
I did not read the name of Nebuchadnezzar on them, I picked out as many
fire-place bricks as I could find, to save work and waste, and I filled the
spaces between the bricks about the fire-place with stones from the pond
shore, and also made my mortar with the white sand from the same place. I
lingered most about the fireplace, as the most vital part of the house.
Indeed, I worked so deliberately, that though I commenced at the ground in
the morning, a course of bricks raised a few inches above the floor served
for my pillow at night; yet I did not get a stiff neck for it that I remember;
my stiff neck is of older date. I took a poet to board for a fortnight about
those times, which caused me to be put to it for room. He brought his own
knife, though I had two, and we used to scour them by thrusting them into
the earth. He shared with me the labors of cooking. I was pleased to see my
work rising so square and solid by degrees, and reflected, that, if it
proceeded slowly, it was calculated to endure a long time. The chimney is
to some extent an independent structure, standing on the ground and rising
through the house to the heavens; even after the house is burned it still
stands sometimes, and its importance and independence are apparent. This
was toward the end of summer. It was now November.

The north wind had already begun to cool the pond, though it took many
weeks of steady blowing to accomplish it, it is so deep. When I began to
have a fire at evening, before I plastered my house, the chimney carried
smoke particularly well, because of the numerous chinks between the
boards. Yet I passed some cheerful evenings in that cool and airy apartment,
surrounded by the rough brown boards full of knots, and rafters with the
bark on high overhead. My house never pleased my eye so much after it
was plastered, though I was obliged to confess that it was more
comfortable. Should not every apartment in which man dwells be lofty
enough to create some obscurity over-head, where flickering shadows may
play at evening about the rafters? These forms are more agreeable to the
fancy and imagination than fresco paintings or other the most expensive
furniture. I now first began to inhabit my house, I may say, when I began to
use it for warmth as well as shelter. I had got a couple of old fire-dogs to
keep the wood from the hearth, and it did me good to see the soot form on
the back of the chimney which I had built, and I poked the fire with more
right and more satisfaction than usual. My dwelling was small, and I could
hardly entertain an echo in it; but it seemed larger for being a single
apartment and remote from neighbors. All the attractions of a house were
concentrated in one room; it was kitchen, chamber, parlor, and keeping-
room; and whatever satisfaction parent or child, master or servant, derive
from living in a house, I enjoyed it all. Cato says, the master of a family
(patremfamilias) must have in his rustic villa “cellam oleariam, vinariam,
dolia multa, uti lubeat caritatem expectare, et rei, et virtuti, et gloriæ erit,”
that is, “an oil and wine cellar, many casks, so that it may be pleasant to
expect hard times; it will be for his advantage, and virtue, and glory.” I had
in my cellar a firkin of potatoes, about two quarts of peas with the weevil in
them, and on my shelf a little rice, a jug of molasses, and of rye and Indian
meal a peck each.
I sometimes dream of a larger and more populous house, standing in a
golden age, of enduring materials, and without ginger-bread work, which
shall still consist of only one room, a vast, rude, substantial, primitive hall,
without ceiling or plastering, with bare rafters and purlins supporting a sort
of lower heaven over one’s head,—useful to keep off rain and snow; where
the king and queen posts stand out to receive your homage, when you have
done reverence to the prostrate Saturn of an older dynasty on stepping over
the sill; a cavernous house, wherein you must reach up a torch upon a pole

to see the roof; where some may live in the fire-place, some in the recess of
a window, and some on settles, some at one end of the hall, some at another,
and some aloft on rafters with the spiders, if they choose; a house which
you have got into when you have opened the outside door, and the
ceremony is over; where the weary traveller may wash, and eat, and
converse, and sleep, without further journey; such a shelter as you would be
glad to reach in a tempestuous night, containing all the essentials of a
house, and nothing for house-keeping; where you can see all the treasures
of the house at one view, and every thing hangs upon its peg, that a man
should use; at once kitchen, pantry, parlor, chamber, store-house, and garret;
where you can see so necessary a thing as a barrel or a ladder, so convenient
a thing as a cupboard, and hear the pot boil, and pay your respects to the
fire that cooks your dinner and the oven that bakes your bread, and the
necessary furniture and utensils are the chief ornaments; where the washing
is not put out, nor the fire, nor the mistress, and perhaps you are sometimes
requested to move from off the trap-door, when the cook would descend
into the cellar, and so learn whether the ground is solid or hollow beneath
you without stamping. A house whose inside is as open and manifest as a
bird’s nest, and you cannot go in at the front door and out at the back
without seeing some of its inhabitants; where to be a guest is to be
presented with the freedom of the house, and not to be carefully excluded
from seven eighths of it, shut up in a particular cell, and told to make
yourself at home there,—in solitary confinement. Nowadays the host does
not admit you to his hearth, but has got the mason to build one for yourself
somewhere in his alley, and hospitality is the art of keeping you at the
greatest distance. There is as much secrecy about the cooking as if he had a
design to poison you. I am aware that I have been on many a man’s
premises, and might have been legally ordered off, but I am not aware that I
have been in many men’s houses. I might visit in my old clothes a king and
queen who lived simply in such a house as I have described, if I were going
their way; but backing out of a modern palace will be all that I shall desire
to learn, if ever I am caught in one.
It would seem as if the very language of our parlors would lose all its
nerve and degenerate into palaver wholly, our lives pass at such remoteness
from its symbols, and its metaphors and tropes are necessarily so far
fetched, through slides and dumb-waiters, as it were; in other words, the
parlor is so far from the kitchen and workshop. The dinner even is only the

parable of a dinner, commonly. As if only the savage dwelt near enough to
Nature and Truth to borrow a trope from them. How can the scholar, who
dwells away in the North West Territory or the Isle of Man, tell what is
parliamentary in the kitchen?
However, only one or two of my guests were ever bold enough to stay
and eat a hasty-pudding with me; but when they saw that crisis approaching
they beat a hasty retreat rather, as if it would shake the house to its
foundations. Nevertheless, it stood through a great many hasty-puddings.
I did not plaster till it was freezing weather. I brought over some whiter
and cleaner sand for this purpose from the opposite shore of the pond in a
boat, a sort of conveyance which would have tempted me to go much
farther if necessary. My house had in the mean while been shingled down to
the ground on every side. In lathing I was pleased to be able to send home
each nail with a single blow of the hammer, and it was my ambition to
transfer the plaster from the board to the wall neatly and rapidly. I
remembered the story of a conceited fellow, who, in fine clothes, was wont
to lounge about the village once, giving advice to workmen. Venturing one
day to substitute deeds for words, he turned up his cuffs, seized a plasterer’s
board, and having loaded his trowel without mishap, with a complacent
look toward the lathing overhead, made a bold gesture thitherward; and
straightway, to his complete discomfiture, received the whole contents in
his ruffled bosom. I admired anew the economy and convenience of
plastering, which so effectually shuts out the cold and takes a handsome
finish, and I learned the various casualties to which the plasterer is liable. I
was surprised to see how thirsty the bricks were which drank up all the
moisture in my plaster before I had smoothed it, and how many pailfuls of
water it takes to christen a new hearth. I had the previous winter made a
small quantity of lime by burning the shells of the Unio fluviatilis, which
our river affords, for the sake of the experiment; so that I knew where my
materials came from. I might have got good limestone within a mile or two
and burned it myself, if I had cared to do so.

The pond had in the mean while skimmed over in the shadiest and
shallowest coves, some days or even weeks before the general freezing. The
first ice is especially interesting and perfect, being hard, dark, and
transparent, and affords the best opportunity that ever offers for examining

the bottom where it is shallow; for you can lie at your length on ice only an
inch thick, like a skater insect on the surface of the water, and study the
bottom at your leisure, only two or three inches distant, like a picture
behind a glass, and the water is necessarily always smooth then. There are
many furrows in the sand where some creature has travelled about and
doubled on its tracks; and, for wrecks, it is strewn with the cases of cadis
worms made of minute grains of white quartz. Perhaps these have creased
it, for you find some of their cases in the furrows, though they are deep and
broad for them to make. But the ice itself is the object of most interest,
though you must improve the earliest opportunity to study it. If you
examine it closely the morning after it freezes, you find that the greater part
of the bubbles, which at first appeared to be within it, are against its under
surface, and that more are continually rising from the bottom; while the ice
is as yet comparatively solid and dark, that is, you see the water through it.
These bubbles are from an eightieth to an eighth of an inch in diameter,
very clear and beautiful, and you see your face reflected in them through
the ice. There may be thirty or forty of them to a square inch. There are also
already within the ice narrow oblong perpendicular bubbles about half an
inch long, sharp cones with the apex upward; or oftener, if the ice is quite
fresh, minute spherical bubbles one directly above another, like a string of
beads. But these within the ice are not so numerous nor obvious as those
beneath. I sometimes used to cast on stones to try the strength of the ice,
and those which broke through carried in air with them, which formed very
large and conspicuous white bubbles beneath. One day when I came to the
same place forty-eight hours afterward, I found that those large bubbles
were still perfect, though an inch more of ice had formed, as I could see
distinctly by the seam in the edge of a cake. But as the last two days had
been very warm, like an Indian summer, the ice was not now transparent,
showing the dark green color of the water, and the bottom, but opaque and
whitish or gray, and though twice as thick was hardly stronger than before,
for the air bubbles had greatly expanded under this heat and run together,
and lost their regularity; they were no longer one directly over another, but
often like silvery coins poured from a bag, one overlapping another, or in
thin flakes, as if occupying slight cleavages. The beauty of the ice was
gone, and it was too late to study the bottom. Being curious to know what
position my great bubbles occupied with regard to the new ice, I broke out a
cake containing a middling sized one, and turned it bottom upward. The

new ice had formed around and under the bubble, so that it was included
between the two ices. It was wholly in the lower ice, but close against the
upper, and was flattish, or perhaps slightly lenticular, with a rounded edge, a
quarter of an inch deep by four inches in diameter; and I was surprised to
find that directly under the bubble the ice was melted with great regularity
in the form of a saucer reversed, to the height of five eighths of an inch in
the middle, leaving a thin partition there between the water and the bubble,
hardly an eighth of an inch thick; and in many places the small bubbles in
this partition had burst out downward, and probably there was no ice at all
under the largest bubbles, which were a foot in diameter. I inferred that the
infinite number of minute bubbles which I had first seen against the under
surface of the ice were now frozen in likewise, and that each, in its degree,
had operated like a burning glass on the ice beneath to melt and rot it. These
are the little air-guns which contribute to make the ice crack and whoop.

At length the winter set in in good earnest, just as I had finished
plastering, and the wind began to howl around the house as if it had not had
permission to do so till then. Night after night the geese came lumbering in
in the dark with a clangor and a whistling of wings, even after the ground
was covered with snow, some to alight in Walden, and some flying low over
the woods toward Fair Haven, bound for Mexico. Several times, when
returning from the village at ten or eleven o’clock at night, I heard the tread
of a flock of geese, or else ducks, on the dry leaves in the woods by a pond-
hole behind my dwelling, where they had come up to feed, and the faint
honk or quack of their leader as they hurried off. In 1845 Walden froze
entirely over for the first time on the night of the 22d of December, Flint’s
and other shallower ponds and the river having been frozen ten days or
more; in ’46, the 16th; in ’49, about the 31st; and in ’50, about the 27th of
December; in ’52, the 5th of January; in ’53, the 31st of December. The
snow had already covered the ground since the 25th of November, and
surrounded me suddenly with the scenery of winter. I withdrew yet farther
into my shell, and endeavored to keep a bright fire both within my house
and within my breast. My employment out of doors now was to collect the
dead wood in the forest, bringing it in my hands or on my shoulders, or
sometimes trailing a dead pine tree under each arm to my shed. An old
forest fence which had seen its best days was a great haul for me. I

sacrificed it to Vulcan, for it was past serving the god Terminus. How much
more interesting an event is that man’s supper who has just been forth in the
snow to hunt, nay, you might say, steal, the fuel to cook it with! His bread
and meat are sweet. There are enough fagots and waste wood of all kinds in
the forests of most of our towns to support many fires, but which at present
warm none, and, some think, hinder the growth of the young wood. There
was also the drift-wood of the pond. In the course of the summer I had
discovered a raft of pitch-pine logs with the bark on, pinned together by the
Irish when the railroad was built. This I hauled up partly on the shore. After
soaking two years and then lying high six months it was perfectly sound,
though waterlogged past drying. I amused myself one winter day with
sliding this piecemeal across the pond, nearly half a mile, skating behind
with one end of a log fifteen feet long on my shoulder, and the other on the
ice; or I tied several logs together with a birch withe, and then, with a
longer birch or alder which had a hook at the end, dragged them across.
Though completely waterlogged and almost as heavy as lead, they not only
burned long, but made a very hot fire; nay, I thought that they burned better
for the soaking, as if the pitch, being confined by the water, burned longer,
as in a lamp.
Gilpin, in his account of the forest borderers of England, says that “the
encroachments of trespassers, and the houses and fences thus raised on the
borders of the forest,” were “considered as great nuisances by the old forest
law, and were severely punished under the name of purprestures, as tending
ad terrorem ferarum—ad nocumentum forestæ, &c.,” to the frightening of
the game and the detriment of the forest. But I was interested in the
preservation of the venison and the vert more than the hunters or
woodchoppers, and as much as though I had been the Lord Warden himself;
and if any part was burned, though I burned it myself by accident, I grieved
with a grief that lasted longer and was more inconsolable than that of the
proprietors; nay, I grieved when it was cut down by the proprietors
themselves. I would that our farmers when they cut down a forest felt some
of that awe which the old Romans did when they came to thin, or let in the
light to, a consecrated grove (lucum conlucare), that is, would believe that it
is sacred to some god. The Roman made an expiatory offering, and prayed,
Whatever god or goddess thou art to whom this grove is sacred, be
propitious to me, my family, and children, &c.

It is remarkable what a value is still put upon wood even in this age and
in this new country, a value more permanent and universal than that of gold.
After all our discoveries and inventions no man will go by a pile of wood. It
is as precious to us as it was to our Saxon and Norman ancestors. If they
made their bows of it, we make our gun-stocks of it. Michaux, more than
thirty years ago, says that the price of wood for fuel in New York and
Philadelphia “nearly equals, and sometimes exceeds, that of the best wood
in Paris, though this immense capital annually requires more than three
hundred thousand cords, and is surrounded to the distance of three hundred
miles by cultivated plains.” In this town the price of wood rises almost
steadily, and the only question is, how much higher it is to be this year than
it was the last. Mechanics and tradesmen who come in person to the forest
on no other errand, are sure to attend the wood auction, and even pay a high
price for the privilege of gleaning after the woodchopper. It is now many
years that men have resorted to the forest for fuel and the materials of the
arts; the New Englander and the New Hollander, the Parisian and the Celt,
the farmer and Robinhood, Goody Blake and Harry Gill, in most parts of
the world the prince and the peasant, the scholar and the savage, equally
require still a few sticks from the forest to warm them and cook their food.
Neither could I do without them.
Every man looks at his wood-pile with a kind of affection. I love to have
mine before my window, and the more chips the better to remind me of my
pleasing work. I had an old axe which nobody claimed, with which by
spells in winter days, on the sunny side of the house, I played about the
stumps which I had got out of my bean-field. As my driver prophesied
when I was ploughing, they warmed me twice, once while I was splitting
them, and again when they were on the fire, so that no fuel could give out
more heat. As for the axe, I was advised to get the village blacksmith to
“jump” it; but I jumped him, and, putting a hickory helve from the woods
into it, made it do. If it was dull, it was at least hung true.
A few pieces of fat pine were a great treasure. It is interesting to
remember how much of this food for fire is still concealed in the bowels of
the earth. In previous years I had often gone “prospecting” over some bare
hill-side, where a pitch-pine wood had formerly stood, and got out the fat
pine roots. They are almost indestructible. Stumps thirty or forty years old,
at least, will still be sound at the core, though the sapwood has all become
vegetable mould, as appears by the scales of the thick bark forming a ring

level with the earth four or five inches distant from the heart. With axe and
shovel you explore this mine, and follow the marrowy store, yellow as beef
tallow, or as if you had struck on a vein of gold, deep into the earth. But
commonly I kindled my fire with the dry leaves of the forest, which I had
stored up in my shed before the snow came. Green hickory finely split
makes the woodchopper’s kindlings, when he has a camp in the woods.
Once in a while I got a little of this. When the villagers were lighting their
fires beyond the horizon, I too gave notice to the various wild inhabitants of
Walden vale, by a smoky streamer from my chimney, that I was awake.—
Light-winged Smoke, Icarian bird,
Melting thy pinions in thy upward flight,
Lark without song, and messenger of dawn,
Circling above the hamlets as thy nest;
Or else, departing dream, and shadowy form
Of midnight vision, gathering up thy skirts;
By night star-veiling, and by day
Darkening the light and blotting out the sun;
Go thou my incense upward from this hearth,
And ask the gods to pardon this clear flame.

Hard green wood just cut, though I used but little of that, answered my
purpose better than any other. I sometimes left a good fire when I went to
take a walk in a winter afternoon; and when I returned, three or four hours
afterward, it would be still alive and glowing. My house was not empty
though I was gone. It was as if I had left a cheerful housekeeper behind. It
was I and Fire that lived there; and commonly my housekeeper proved
trustworthy. One day, however, as I was splitting wood, I thought that I
would just look in at the window and see if the house was not on fire; it was
the only time I remember to have been particularly anxious on this score; so
I looked and saw that a spark had caught my bed, and I went in and
extinguished it when it had burned a place as big as my hand. But my house
occupied so sunny and sheltered a position, and its roof was so low, that I
could afford to let the fire go out in the middle of almost any winter day.
The moles nested in my cellar, nibbling every third potato, and making a
snug bed even there of some hair left after plastering and of brown paper;
for even the wildest animals love comfort and warmth as well as man, and
they survive the winter only because they are so careful to secure them.
Some of my friends spoke as if I was coming to the woods on purpose to
freeze myself. The animal merely makes a bed, which he warms with his

body, in a sheltered place; but man, having discovered fire, boxes up some
air in a spacious apartment, and warms that, instead of robbing himself,
makes that his bed, in which he can move about divested of more cumbrous
clothing, maintain a kind of summer in the midst of winter, and by means of
windows even admit the light, and with a lamp lengthen out the day. Thus
he goes a step or two beyond instinct, and saves a little time for the fine
arts. Though, when I had been exposed to the rudest blasts a long time, my
whole body began to grow torpid, when I reached the genial atmosphere of
my house I soon recovered my faculties and prolonged my life. But the
most luxuriously housed has little to boast of in this respect, nor need we
trouble ourselves to speculate how the human race may be at last destroyed.
It would be easy to cut their threads any time with a little sharper blast from
the north. We go on dating from Cold Fridays and Great Snows; but a little
colder Friday, or greater snow, would put a period to man’s existence on the
globe.
The next winter I used a small cooking-stove for economy, since I did not
own the forest; but it did not keep fire so well as the open fire-place.
Cooking was then, for the most part, no longer a poetic, but merely a
chemic process. It will soon be forgotten, in these days of stoves, that we
used to roast potatoes in the ashes, after the Indian fashion. The stove not
only took up room and scented the house, but it concealed the fire, and I felt
as if I had lost a companion. You can always see a face in the fire. The
laborer, looking into it at evening, purifies his thoughts of the dross and
earthiness which they have accumulated during the day. But I could no
longer sit and look into the fire, and the pertinent words of a poet recurred
to me with new force.—
“Never, bright flame, may be denied to me
Thy dear, life imaging, close sympathy.
What but my hopes shot upward e’er so bright?
What but my fortunes sunk so low in night?

Why art thou banished from our hearth and hall,
Thou who art welcomed and beloved by all?
Was thy existence then too fanciful
For our life’s common light, who are so dull?
Did thy bright gleam mysterious converse hold
With our congenial souls? secrets too bold?
Well, we are safe and strong, for now we sit
Beside a hearth where no dim shadows flit,
Where nothing cheers nor saddens, but a fire

Warms feet and hands—nor does to more aspire;
By whose compact utilitarian heap
The present may sit down and go to sleep,
Nor fear the ghosts who from the dim past walked,
And with us by the unequal light of the old wood fire talked.”

Former Inhabitants and Winter Visitors

I weathered some merry snow storms, and spent some cheerful winter
evenings by my fire-side, while the snow whirled wildly without, and even
the hooting of the owl was hushed. For many weeks I met no one in my
walks but those who came occasionally to cut wood and sled it to the
village. The elements, however, abetted me in making a path through the
deepest snow in the woods, for when I had once gone through the wind
blew the oak leaves into my tracks, where they lodged, and by absorbing
the rays of the sun melted the snow, and so not only made a dry bed for my
feet, but in the night their dark line was my guide. For human society I was
obliged to conjure up the former occupants of these woods. Within the
memory of many of my townsmen the road near which my house stands
resounded with the laugh and gossip of inhabitants, and the woods which
border it were notched and dotted here and there with their little gardens
and dwellings, though it was then much more shut in by the forest than
now. In some places, within my own remembrance, the pines would scrape
both sides of a 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 variety, and lingered longer in his memory.
Where now firm open fields stretch from the village to the woods, it then
ran through a maple swamp on a foundation of logs, the remnants of which,
doubtless, still underlie the present dusty highway, from the Stratton, now
the Alms House, Farm, to Brister’s Hill.
East of my bean-field, across the road, lived Cato Ingraham, slave of
Duncan Ingraham, Esquire, gentleman, of Concord village, who built his
slave a house, 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 patch among the walnuts, which he

let grow up till he should be old and need them; but a younger and whiter
speculator got them at last. He too, however, occupies an equally narrow
house at present. Cato’s half-obliterated cellar hole still remains, though
known to few, being concealed from the traveller by a fringe of pines. It is
now filled with the smooth sumach (Rhus glabra,) and one of the earliest
species of golden-rod (Solidago stricta) grows there luxuriantly.
Here, by the very corner of my field, still nearer to town, Zilpha, a
colored woman, had her little house, where she spun linen for the
townsfolk, making the Walden Woods ring with her shrill singing, for she
had a loud and notable voice. At length, in the war of 1812, her dwelling
was set on fire by English soldiers, prisoners on parole, when she was away,
and her cat and dog and hens were all burned up together. She led a hard
life, and somewhat inhumane. One old frequenter of these woods
remembers, that as he passed her house one noon he heard her muttering to
herself over her gurgling pot,—“Ye are all bones, bones!” I have seen
bricks amid the oak copse there.
Down the road, on the right hand, on Brister’s Hill, lived Brister
Freeman, “a handy Negro,” slave of Squire Cummings once,—there where
grow still the apple-trees which Brister planted and tended; large old trees
now, but their fruit still wild and ciderish to my taste. Not long since I read
his epitaph in the old Lincoln burying-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 Brister,”—Scipio Africanus he had
some title to be called,—“a man of color,” as if he were discolored. It also
told me, with staring emphasis, when he died; which was but an indirect
way of informing me that he ever lived. With him dwelt Fenda, his
hospitable wife, who told fortunes, yet pleasantly,—large, round, and black,
blacker than any of the children of night, such a dusky orb as never rose on
Concord before or since.
Farther down the hill, on the left, on the old road in the woods, are marks
of some homestead of the Stratton family; whose orchard once covered all
the slope of Brister’s Hill, but was long since killed out by pitch pines,
excepting a few stumps, whose 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
mythological character, to have his biography written one day; who first
comes in the guise of a friend or hired man, and then robs and murders the
whole family,—New-England Rum. But history must not yet tell the
tragedies enacted here; let time intervene in some measure to assuage and
lend an azure tint to them. Here the most indistinct and dubious tradition
says that once a tavern stood; the well the same, which tempered the
traveller’s beverage and refreshed his steed. Here then men saluted one
another, and heard and told the news, and went their ways again.
Breed’s hut was standing only a dozen years ago, though it had long been
unoccupied. It was about the size of mine. It was set on fire by mischievous
boys, one Election night, if I do not mistake. I lived on the edge of the
village then, and had just lost myself over Davenant’s Gondibert, that
winter that I labored with a lethargy,—which, by the way, I never knew
whether to regard as a family complaint, having an uncle who goes to sleep
shaving himself, and is obliged to sprout potatoes in a cellar Sundays, in
order to keep awake and keep the Sabbath, or as the consequence of my
attempt to read Chalmers’ collection of English poetry without skipping. It
fairly overcame my 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 before,—barn, shop, or dwelling-house, or all together. “It’s Baker’s
barn,” cried one. “It is the Codman place,” affirmed another. And then fresh
sparks went up above the wood, as if the roof fell in, and we all shouted
“Concord to the rescue!” Wagons shot past with furious speed and crushing
loads, bearing, perchance, among the rest, the agent of the Insurance
Company, who was bound to go however far; and ever and anon the engine
bell tinkled behind, more slow and sure; and rearmost of all, as it was
afterward whispered, came they who set the fire and gave the alarm. Thus
we kept on like true idealists, rejecting the evidence of our senses, until at a
turn in the road we heard the crackling and actually felt the heat of the fire
from over the wall, and realized, alas! that we were there. The very nearness
of the fire but cooled our ardor. At first we thought to throw a frog-pond on
to it; but concluded to let it burn, it was so far gone and so worthless. So we
stood round our engine, jostled one another, expressed our sentiments

through speaking-trumpets, or in lower tone referred to the great
conflagrations which the world has witnessed, including Bascom’s shop,
and, between ourselves, we thought that, were we there in season with our
“tub,” and a full frog-pond by, we could turn that threatened last and
universal one into another flood. We finally retreated without doing any
mischief,—returned to sleep and Gondibert. But as for Gondibert, I would
except that passage in the preface about wit being the soul’s powder,—“but
most of mankind are strangers to wit, as Indians are to powder.”
It chanced that I walked that way across the fields the following night,
about the same hour, and hearing a low moaning at this spot, I drew near in
the dark, and discovered the only survivor of the family that I know, the
heir of both its virtues and its vices, who alone was interested in this
burning, lying on his stomach and looking over the cellar wall at the still
smouldering cinders 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 treasure, which he
remembered, concealed between the stones, where there was absolutely
nothing but a heap of bricks and ashes. The house being gone, he looked at
what there was left. He was soothed by the sympathy which my mere
presence implied, and showed me, as well as the darkness permitted, where
the well was covered up; which, thank Heaven, could never be burned; and
he groped long about the wall to find the well-sweep which his father had
cut and mounted, feeling for the iron hook or staple by which a burden had
been fastened to the heavy end,—all that he could now cling to,—to
convince me that it was no common “rider.” I felt it, and still remark it
almost daily in my walks, for by 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 furnished 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 wished to
know what had become of him. I had read of the potter’s clay and wheel in
Scripture, but it had never occurred to me that the pots we use were not
such as had come down unbroken from those days, or grown on trees like
gourds somewhere, and I was pleased to hear that so fictile an art was ever
practiced in my neighborhood.
The last inhabitant of these woods before me was an Irishman, Hugh
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 world, and was capable of
more civil speech than you could well attend to. He wore a great coat in
mid-summer, being affected with the trembling delirium, and his face was
the color of carmine. He died in the road at the foot of Brister’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 comrades avoided it as “an
unlucky castle,” I visited it. There lay his old clothes curled up by use, as if
they were himself, upon his raised plank bed. His pipe lay broken on the
hearth, instead of a bowl broken at the fountain. The last could never have
been the symbol of his death, for he confessed to me that, though he had
heard of Brister’s Spring, he had never seen it; and soiled cards, kings of
diamonds spades and hearts, were scattered over the floor. One black
chicken which the administrator could not catch, black as night and as
silent, not even croaking, awaiting Reynard, still went to roost in the next
apartment. In the rear there was the dim outline of a garden, which had been
planted but had never received its first hoeing, owing to those terrible
shaking fits, though it was now harvest time. It was over-run with Roman
wormwood and beggar-ticks, which last stuck to my clothes for all fruit.
The skin of a woodchuck was freshly stretched upon the back of the house,
a trophy of his last Waterloo; but no warm cap or mittens would he want
more.

Now only a dent in the earth marks the site of these dwellings, with
buried cellar stones, and strawberries, raspberries, thimble-berries, hazel-
bushes, and sumachs growing in the sunny sward there; some pitch-pine or
gnarled oak occupies what was the chimney nook, and a sweet-scented
black-birch, perhaps, waves where the door-stone was. Sometimes the well
dent is visible, where once a spring oozed; now dry and tearless grass; or it
was covered deep,—not to be discovered till some late day,—with a flat
stone under the sod, when the last of the race departed. What a sorrowful
act must that be,—the covering up of wells! coincident with the opening of
wells of tears. These cellar dents, like deserted fox burrows, old holes, are
all that is left where once were the stir and bustle of human life, and “fate,
free-will, foreknowledge absolute,” in some form and dialect or other were
by turns discussed. But all I can learn of their conclusions 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 generation after the door and lintel and
the sill are gone, unfolding its sweet-scented flowers each spring, to be
plucked by the musing traveller; planted and tended once by children’s
hands, in front-yard plots,—now standing by wall-sides in retired pastures,
and giving place to new-rising forests;—the last of that stirp, sole survivor
of that family. Little did the dusky children think that the puny slip with its
two eyes only, which they stuck in the ground in the shadow of the house
and daily watered, would root itself so, and outlive them, and house itself in
the rear that shaded it, and grown man’s garden and orchard, and tell their
story faintly to the lone wanderer a half century after they had grown up
and died,—blossoming as fair, and smelling as sweet, as in that first spring.
I mark its still tender, civil, cheerful, lilac colors.
But this small village, germ of something more, why did it fail while
Concord keeps its ground? Were there no natural advantages,—no water
privileges, forsooth? Ay, the deep Walden Pond and cool Brister’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 pottery business have thrived here, making the wilderness to
blossom like the rose, and a numerous posterity have inherited the land of
their fathers? The sterile soil would at least have been proof against a low-
land degeneracy. Alas! how little does the memory of these human

inhabitants enhance the beauty of the landscape! Again, perhaps, Nature
will try, with me for a first settler, and my house raised last spring to be the
oldest in the hamlet.
I am not aware that any man has ever built on the spot which I occupy.
Deliver me from a city built on the site of a more ancient city, whose
materials are ruins, whose gardens cemeteries. The soil is blanched and
accursed there, and before that becomes necessary the earth itself will be
destroyed. With 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 fortnight at a time, but
there I lived as snug as a meadow mouse, or as cattle and poultry which are
said to have survived for a long time buried in drifts, even without food; or
like that early settler’s family in the town of Sutton, in this state, whose
cottage was completely covered by the great snow of 1717 when he was
absent, and an Indian 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 of! When the farmers
could not get to the woods and swamps with their teams, and were obliged
to cut down the shade trees before their houses, and when the crust was
harder, cut off the trees in the swamps, ten feet from the ground, as it
appeared the next spring.
In the deepest snows, the path which I used from the highway to my
house, about half a mile long, might have been represented by a meandering
dotted line, with wide intervals between the dots. For a week of even
weather I took exactly the same number of steps, and of the same length,
coming and going, stepping deliberately and with the precision of a pair of
dividers in my own deep tracks,—to such routine the winter reduces us,—
yet often they were filled with heaven’s own blue. But no weather interfered
fatally with my walks, or rather my going abroad, for I frequently tramped
eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a
beech-tree, or a yellow-birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines;
when the ice and snow causing their limbs to droop, and so sharpening their
tops, had changed the pines into fir-trees; wading to the tops of the highest

hills when the snow was nearly two feet deep on a level, and shaking down
another snow-storm on my head at every step; or sometimes creeping and
floundering thither on my hands and knees, when the hunters had gone into
winter quarters. One afternoon I amused myself by watching a barred owl
(Strix nebulosa) 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 open his eyes wide; but their lids soon
fell again, and he began to nod. I too felt a slumberous influence after
watching him half an hour, as he sat thus with his eyes half open, like a cat,
winged brother of the cat. There was only a narrow slit left between their
lids, by which 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 having his dreams disturbed; and when
he launched himself off and flapped through the pines, spreading his wings
to unexpected breadth, I could not hear the slightest sound from them. Thus,
guided amid the pine boughs rather by a delicate sense of their
neighborhood than by sight, feeling his twilight way as it were with his
sensitive pinions, he found a new perch, where he might in peace await the
dawning of his day.
As I walked over the long causeway made for the railroad through the
meadows, I encountered many a blustering 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 carriage
road from Brister’s Hill. For I came to town still, like a friendly Indian,
when the contents of the broad open fields were all piled up between the
walls of the Walden road, and half an hour sufficed to obliterate the tracks
of the last traveller. And when I returned new drifts would have formed,
through which I floundered, where the busy north-west wind had been
depositing the powdery snow round a sharp angle in the road, and not a
rabbit’s track, nor even the fine print, the small type, of a meadow mouse
was to be seen. Yet I rarely failed to find, even in mid-winter, some warm
and springly swamp where the grass and the skunk-cabbage still put forth

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 woodchopper 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 their farms;” who donned a
frock instead of a professor’s gown, and is as ready to extract the moral out
of church or state as to haul a load of manure from his barn-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 our teeth
on many a nut which wise squirrels have long since abandoned, for those
which have the thickest shells are commonly empty.
The one who came from farthest to my lodge, through deepest snows and
most dismal tempests, was a poet. A farmer, a hunter, a soldier, a reporter,
even a philosopher, may be daunted; but nothing can deter a poet, for he is
actuated by pure love. Who can predict his comings and goings? His
business calls him out at all hours, even when doctors sleep. We made that
small house ring with boisterous mirth and resound with the murmur of
much sober talk, making amends then to Walden vale for the long silences.
Broadway was still and deserted in comparison. At suitable intervals there
were regular salutes of laughter, which might have been referred
indifferently to the last uttered or the forth-coming jest. We made many a
“bran new” theory of life over a thin dish of gruel, which combined the
advantages of conviviality with the clear-headedness which philosophy
requires.
I should not forget that during my last winter at the pond there was
another welcome visitor, who at one time came through the village, through
snow and rain and darkness, till he saw my lamp through the trees, and
shared with me some long winter evenings. One of the last of the
philosophers,—Connecticut gave him to the world,—he peddled first her
wares, afterwards, as he declares, his brains. These he peddles still,
prompting God and disgracing man, bearing for fruit his brain only, like the
nut its kernel. I think that he must be the man of the most faith of any alive.

His words and attitude always suppose a better state of things than other
men are acquainted with, and he will be the last man to be disappointed as
the ages revolve. He has no venture in the present. But though
comparatively disregarded now, when his day comes, laws unsuspected by
most will take effect, and masters of families and rulers will come to him
for advice.—
“How blind that cannot see serenity!”

A true friend of man; almost the only friend of human progress. An Old
Mortality, say rather an Immortality, with unwearied patience and faith
making plain the image engraven in men’s bodies, the God of whom they
are but defaced and leaning monuments. With his hospitable intellect he
embraces children, beggars, insane, and scholars, and entertains the thought
of all, adding to it commonly some breadth and elegance. I think that he
should keep a caravansary on the world’s highway, where philosophers of
all nations might put up, and on his sign should be printed, “Entertainment
for man, but not for his beast. Enter ye that have leisure and a quiet mind,
who earnestly seek the right road.” He is perhaps the sanest man and has the
fewest crotchets of any I chance to know; the same yesterday and
tomorrow. Of yore we had sauntered and talked, and effectually put the
world behind us; for he was pledged to no institution in it, freeborn,
ingenuus. Whichever way we turned, it seemed that the heavens and the
earth had met together, since he enhanced the beauty of the landscape. A
blue-robed man, whose fittest roof is the overarching sky which reflects his
serenity. I do not see how he can ever die; Nature cannot spare him.
Having each some shingles of thought well dried, we sat and whittled
them, trying our knives, and admiring the clear yellowish grain of the
pumpkin pine. We 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 bank, but came and went grandly, like the clouds
which float through the western sky, and the mother-o’-pearl flocks which
sometimes form and dissolve there. There we worked, revising mythology,
rounding a fable here and there, and building castles in the air for which
earth offered no worthy foundation. Great Looker! Great Expecter! to
converse with whom was a New England Night’s Entertainment. Ah! such
discourse we had, hermit and philosopher, and the old settler I have spoken
of,—we three,—it expanded and racked my little house; I should not dare to

say how many pounds’ weight there was above the atmospheric pressure on
every circular inch; it opened its seams so that they had to be calked with
much dulness thereafter to stop the consequent leak;—but I had enough of
that kind of oakum already picked.
There was one other with whom I had “solid seasons,” long to be
remembered, at his house in the village, and who looked in upon me from
time to time; but I had no more for society there.
There too, as every where, I sometimes expected 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 pleases, to
await the arrival of a guest.” I often performed this duty of hospitality,
waited long enough to milk a whole herd of cows, but did not see the man
approaching from the town.

Winter Animals

When the ponds were firmly frozen, they afforded not only new and
shorter routes to many points, but new views from their surfaces of the
familiar landscape around them. When I crossed Flint’s Pond, after it was
covered with snow, though I had often paddled about and skated over it, it
was so unexpectedly wide and so strange that I could think of nothing but
Baffin’s Bay. The Lincoln hills rose up around me at the extremity of a
snowy plain, in which I did not remember to have stood before; and the
fishermen, at an indeterminable distance over the ice, moving slowly about
with their wolfish dogs, passed for sealers or Esquimaux, or in misty
weather loomed like fabulous creatures, and I did not know whether they
were giants or pygmies. I took this course when I went to lecture in Lincoln
in the evening, travelling in no road and passing no house between my own
hut and the lecture room. In Goose Pond, which lay in my way, a colony of
muskrats dwelt, and raised their cabins high above the ice, though none
could be seen abroad when I crossed it. Walden, being like the rest usually
bare of snow, or with only shallow and interrupted drifts on it, was my yard,
where I could walk freely when the snow was nearly two feet deep on a
level elsewhere and the villagers were confined to their streets. There, far
from the village street, and except at very long intervals, from the jingle of
sleigh-bells, I slid 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 melodious note of a hooting owl indefinitely far; such a sound as the
frozen earth would yield if struck with a suitable plectrum, the very lingua
vernacula of Walden Wood, and quite familiar to me at last, though I never
saw the bird while it was making it. I seldom opened my door in a winter
evening without hearing it; Hoo hoo hoo, hoorer, hoo, sounded sonorously,
and the first three syllables accented somewhat like how der do; or

sometimes hoo hoo 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, stepping to the door, heard the sound of their wings like a
tempest in the woods as they flew low over my house. They passed over the
pond toward Fair Haven, seemingly deterred from settling by my light, their
commodore honking all the while with a regular beat. Suddenly an
unmistakable cat-owl from very near me, with the most harsh and
tremendous voice I ever heard from any inhabitant of the woods, responded
at regular intervals to the goose, as if determined to expose and disgrace
this intruder from Hudson’s Bay by exhibiting a greater compass and
volume of voice in a native, and boo-hoo him out of Concord horizon. What
do you mean by alarming the citadel at this time of night consecrated to
me? Do you think I am ever caught napping at such an hour, and that I have
not got lungs and a larynx as well as yourself? Boo-hoo, boo-hoo, boo-hoo!
It was one of the most thrilling discords I ever heard. And yet, if you had a
discriminating ear, there were in it the elements of a concord such as these
plains never saw nor heard.
I also heard the whooping of the ice in the pond, my great bed-fellow in
that part of Concord, as if it were restless in its bed and would fain turn
over, were troubled with flatulency and had 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, barking raggedly
and demoniacally like forest dogs, as if laboring with some anxiety, or
seeking expression, struggling for light and to be dogs outright and run
freely in the streets; for if we take the ages into our account, may there not
be a civilization going on among brutes as well as men? They seemed to me
to be rudimental, burrowing men, still standing on their defence, awaiting
their transformation. Sometimes one came near to my window, attracted by
my light, barked a vulpine curse at me, and then retreated.
Usually the red squirrel (Sciurus Hudsonius) waked me in the dawn,
coursing over the roof and up and down the sides of the house, as if sent out
of the woods for this purpose. In the course of the winter I threw out half a
bushel of ears of sweet-corn, which had not got ripe, on to the snow crust

by my door, and was amused by watching the motions of the various
animals which were baited by it. In the twilight and the night the rabbits
came regularly and made a hearty meal. All day long the red squirrels came
and went, and afforded me much entertainment by their manœuvres. One
would approach at first warily through the shrub-oaks, running over the
snow crust by fits and starts like a leaf blown by the wind, now a few paces
this way, with wonderful speed and waste of energy, making inconceivable
haste with his “trotters,” as if it were for a wager, and now as many paces
that way, but never getting on more than half a rod at a time; and then
suddenly pausing with a ludicrous expression and a gratuitous somerset, as
if all the eyes in the universe were fixed on him,—for all the motions of a
squirrel, even in the most solitary recesses of the forest, imply spectators as
much as those of a dancing girl,—wasting more time in delay and
circumspection than would have sufficed to walk the whole distance,—I
never saw one walk,—and then suddenly, before you could say Jack
Robinson, he would be in the top of a young pitch-pine, winding up his
clock and chiding all imaginary spectators, soliloquizing and talking to all
the universe at the same time,—for no reason that I could ever detect, or he
himself was aware of, I suspect. At length he would reach the corn, and
selecting a suitable ear, frisk about in the same uncertain trigonometrical
way to the top-most stick of my wood-pile, before my window, where he
looked me in the face, and there sit for hours, supplying himself with a new
ear from time to time, nibbling at first voraciously and throwing the half-
naked cobs about; till at length he grew more dainty still and played with
his food, tasting only the inside of the kernel, and the ear, which was held
balanced over the stick by one paw, slipped from his careless grasp and fell
to the ground, when he would look over at it with a ludicrous expression of
uncertainty, as if suspecting that it had life, with a mind not made up
whether to get it again, or a new one, or be off; now thinking of corn, then
listening to hear what was in the wind. So the little impudent fellow would
waste many an ear in a forenoon; till at last, seizing some longer and
plumper one, considerably bigger than himself, and skilfully balancing it,
he would set out with it to the woods, like a tiger with a buffalo, by the
same zig-zag course and frequent pauses, scratching along with it as if it
were too heavy for him and falling all the while, making its fall a diagonal
between a perpendicular and horizontal, being determined to put it through
at any rate;—a singularly frivolous and whimsical fellow;—and so he

would get off with it to where he lived, perhaps carry it to the top of a pine
tree forty or fifty rods distant, and I would afterwards find the cobs strewn
about the woods in various directions.
At length the jays arrive, whose discordant screams were heard long
before, as they were warily making their approach an eighth of a mile off,
and in a stealthy and sneaking manner they flit from tree to tree, nearer and
nearer, and pick up the kernels which the squirrels have dropped. Then,
sitting on a pitch-pine bough, they attempt to swallow in their haste a kernel
which is too big for their throats and chokes them; and after great labor they
disgorge it, and spend an hour in the endeavor to crack it by repeated blows
with their bills. They were manifestly thieves, and I had not much respect
for them; but the squirrels, though at first shy, went to work as if they were
taking what was their own.
Meanwhile also came the chickadees in flocks, which, picking up the
crumbs the squirrels had dropped, flew to the nearest twig, and, placing
them under their claws, hammered away at them with their little bills, as if
it were an insect in the bark, till they were sufficiently reduced for their
slender throats. A little flock of these tit-mice came daily to pick a dinner
out of my wood-pile, or the crumbs at my door, with faint flitting lisping
notes, like the tinkling of icicles in the grass, or else with sprightly day day
day, or more rarely, in spring-like days, a wiry summery phe-be from the
wood-side. They were so familiar that at length one alighted on an armful of
wood which I was carrying in, and pecked at the sticks without fear. I once
had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment while I was hoeing in
a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that
circumstance than I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn.
The squirrels also grew at last to be quite familiar, and occasionally stepped
upon my shoe, when that was the nearest way.
When the ground was not yet quite covered, and again near the end of
winter, when the snow was melted on my south hill-side and about my
wood-pile, the partridges came out of the woods morning and evening to
feed there. Whichever side you walk in the woods the partridge bursts away
on whirring wings, jarring the snow from the dry leaves and twigs on high,
which comes sifting down in the sun-beams like golden dust; for this brave
bird is not to be scared by winter. It is frequently covered up by drifts, and,
it is said, “sometimes plunges from on wing into the soft snow, where it

remains concealed for a day or two.” I used to start them in the open land
also, where they had come out of the woods at sunset to “bud” the wild
apple-trees. They will come regularly every evening to particular trees,
where the cunning sportsman lies in wait for them, and the distant orchards
next the woods suffer thus not a little. I am glad that the partridge gets fed,
at any rate. It is Nature’s own bird which lives on buds and diet-drink.
In dark winter mornings, or in short winter afternoons, I sometimes heard
a pack of hounds threading all the woods with hounding cry and yelp,
unable to resist the instinct of the chase, and the note of the hunting horn at
intervals, proving that man was in the rear. The woods ring again, and yet
no fox bursts forth on to the open level of the pond, nor following pack
pursuing their Actæon. And perhaps at evening I see the hunters returning
with a single brush trailing from their sleigh for a trophy, seeking their inn.
They tell me that if the fox would remain in the bosom of the frozen earth
he would be safe, or if 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 leap off far to one side, and he appears to know
that water will not retain his scent. A hunter told me that he once saw a fox
pursued by hounds burst out on to Walden when the ice was covered with
shallow 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 every thing else for this. One day a man came to my hut from
Lexington to inquire after his hound that made a large track, and had been
hunting for a week by himself. But I fear that he was not the wiser for all I
told him, for every time I attempted to answer his questions he interrupted
me by asking, “What do you do here?” He had lost a dog, but found a man.
One old hunter who has a dry tongue, who used to come to bathe in
Walden once every year when the water was warmest, and at such times
looked in upon me, told me that many years ago he took his gun one
afternoon and went out for a cruise in Walden Wood; and as he walked the
Wayland road he heard the cry of hounds approaching, and ere long a fox

leaped the wall into the road, and as quick as thought leaped the other wall
out of the road, and his swift bullet had not touched him. Some way behind
came an old hound and her three pups in full pursuit, hunting on their own
account, and disappeared again in the woods. Late in the afternoon, as he
was resting in the thick woods south of Walden, he heard the voice of the
hounds far over toward Fair Haven still pursuing the fox; and on they came,
their hounding cry which made all the woods ring sounding nearer and
nearer, now from Well-Meadow, now from the Baker Farm. For a long time
he stood still and listened to their music, so sweet to a hunter’s ear, when
suddenly the fox appeared, threading the solemn aisles with an easy
coursing pace, whose sound was concealed by a sympathetic rustle of the
leaves, swift and still, keeping the 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 compassion 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 the rock lay dead on
the ground. The hunter still kept his place and listened to the hounds. Still
on they came, and now the near woods resounded through all their aisles
with their demoniac cry. At length the old hound burst into view with
muzzle to the ground, and snapping the air as if possessed, and ran directly
to the rock; but spying the dead fox she suddenly ceased her hounding as if
struck dumb with amazement, and walked round and round him in silence;
and one by one her pups arrived, and, like their mother, were sobered into
silence by the mystery. Then the hunter came forward and stood in their
midst, and the mystery was solved. They waited in silence while he skinned
the fox, then followed the brush 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. He did not find his hounds that night, but the next day learned that
they had crossed the river and put up at a farm-house for the night, whence,
having been well fed, they took their departure early in the morning.
The hunter who told me this could remember one Sam Nutting, who used
to hunt bears on Fair 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

Bugine,—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 entry. 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 ½ a Catt skin 0—1
—4½;” of course, a wild-cat, for Stratton was a sergeant in the old French
war, and would not have got credit for hunting less noble game. Credit is
given for deer skins also, and they were daily sold. One man still preserves
the horns of the last deer that was killed in this vicinity, and another has told
me the particulars of the hunt in which his uncle was engaged. The hunters
were formerly a numerous and merry crew here. I remember well one gaunt
Nimrod who would catch up a leaf by the road-side and play a strain on it
wilder and more melodious, if my memory serves me, than any hunting-
horn.
At midnight, when there was a moon, I sometimes met with hounds in
my path prowling about the woods, which would skulk out of my way, as if
afraid, and stand silent amid the bushes till I had passed.
Squirrels and wild mice disputed for my store of nuts. There were scores
of pitch-pines around my house, from one to four inches in diameter, which
had been gnawed by mice the previous winter,—a Norwegian winter for
them, for the snow lay long and deep, and they were obliged to mix a large
proportion of pine bark with their other diet. These trees were alive and
apparently flourishing at mid-summer, and many of them had grown a foot,
though completely girdled; but after another winter such were without
exception dead. It is remarkable that a single mouse should thus be allowed
a whole pine tree for its dinner, gnawing round instead of up and down it;
but perhaps it is necessary in order to thin these trees, which are wont to
grow up densely.
The hares (Lepus Americanus) were very familiar. One had her form
under my house all winter, separated from me only by the flooring, and she
startled me each morning by her hasty departure when I began to stir,—
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 hardly be distinguished when still. Sometimes in the twilight
I alternately lost and recovered sight of one sitting motionless under my

window. When I opened my door in the evening, off they would go with a
squeak and a bounce. Near at hand they only excited my pity. One evening
one sat by my door two paces from me, at first trembling with fear, yet
unwilling to move; a poor wee thing, lean and bony, with ragged ears and
sharp nose, scant tail and slender paws. It looked as if Nature no longer
contained the breed of nobler bloods, but stood on her last toes. Its large
eyes appeared young and unhealthy, almost dropsical. I took a step, and lo,
away it scud with an elastic spring over the snow crust, straightening its
body and its limbs into graceful length, and soon put the forest between me
and itself,—the wild free venison, asserting its vigor and the dignity of
Nature. Not without reason was its slenderness. Such then was its nature.
(Lepus, levipes, light-foot, some think.)
What is a country without rabbits and partridges? They are among the
most simple and indigenous animal products; ancient and venerable
families known to antiquity as to modern times; of the very hue and
substance of Nature, nearest allied to leaves and to the ground,—and to one
another; it is either winged or it is legged. It is hardly as if you had seen a
wild creature when a rabbit or a partridge bursts away, only a natural one, as
much to be expected as rustling leaves. The partridge and the rabbit are still
sure to thrive, like true natives of the soil, whatever revolutions occur. If the
forest is cut off, the sprouts and bushes which spring up afford them
concealment, and they become more numerous than ever. That must be a
poor country 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.

The Pond in Winter

After 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
satisfied face, and no question on her lips. I awoke to an answered question,
to Nature and daylight. The snow lying deep on the earth dotted with young
pines, and the very slope of the hill on which my house is placed, seemed to
say, Forward! Nature puts no question and answers none which we mortals
ask. She has long ago taken her resolution. “O Prince, our eyes contemplate
with admiration and transmit to the soul the wonderful and varied spectacle
of this universe. The night veils without doubt a part of this glorious
creation; but day comes to reveal to us this great work, which extends from
earth even into the plains of the ether.”
Then to my morning work. First I take an axe and pail and go in search of
water, if that be not a dream. After a cold and snowy night it needed a
divining rod to find it. Every winter the liquid and trembling surface of the
pond, which was so sensitive to every breath, and reflected every light and
shadow, becomes solid to the depth of a foot or a foot and a half, so that it
will support the heaviest teams, and perchance the snow covers it to an
equal depth, and it is not to be distinguished from any level field. Like the
marmots in the surrounding hills, it closes its eye-lids 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, corresponding to the cool and even temperament of the
inhabitants. Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.

Early in the morning, while all things are crisp with frost, men come with
fishing reels and slender lunch, and let down their fine lines through the
snowy field to take pickerel and perch; wild men, who instinctively follow
other fashions and trust other authorities than their townsmen, and by their
goings and comings stitch towns together in parts where else they would be
ripped. They sit and eat their luncheon in stout fear-naughts on the dry oak
leaves on the shore, as wise in natural lore as the citizen is in artificial. They
never consulted with books, and know and can tell much less than they
have done. The things which they 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 summer pond, as if he kept summer locked up at
home, or knew where she had retreated. How, pray, did he get these in mid-
winter? 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 raises the
moss and bark gently with his knife in search of insects; the former lays
open logs to their core with his axe, and moss and bark fly far and wide. He
gets his living by barking trees. Such a man has some right to fish, and I
love to see Nature carried out in him. The perch swallows the grub-worm,
the pickerel swallows the perch, and the fisher-man swallows the pickerel;
and so all the chinks in the scale of being are filled.
When I strolled around the pond in misty weather I was sometimes
amused by the primitive mode which some 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 having 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 alders loomed through the mist at regular
intervals as you walked half way round the pond.
Ah, the pickerel of Walden! when I see them lying on the ice, or in the
well which the fisherman cuts in the ice, making a little hole to admit the
water, I am always surprised by their rare beauty, as if they were fabulous
fishes, they are so foreign to the streets, even to the woods, foreign as
Arabia to our Concord life. They possess a quite dazzling and transcendent
beauty which separates them by a wide interval from the cadaverous cod
and haddock whose fame is trumpeted in our streets. They are not green like

the pines, nor gray like the stones, nor blue like the sky; but they have, to
my eyes, if possible, yet rarer colors, like flowers and precious stones, as if
they were the pearls, the animalized nuclei or crystals of the Walden water.
They, of course, are Walden all over and all through; are themselves small
Waldens in the animal kingdom, Waldenses. It is surprising that they are
caught here,—that in this deep and capacious spring, far beneath the rattling
teams and 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 translated before his
time to the thin air of heaven.

As I was desirous to recover the long lost bottom of Walden Pond, I
surveyed it carefully, before the ice broke up, early in ’46, with compass
and chain and sounding line. There have been many stories told about the
bottom, or rather no bottom, of this pond, which certainly had no
foundation for themselves. It is remarkable how long men will believe in
the bottomlessness of a pond without taking the trouble to sound it. I have
visited two such Bottomless Ponds in one walk in this neighborhood. Many
have believed that Walden reached quite through to the other side of the
globe. Some who have lain flat on the ice for a long time, looking down

through the 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 any body to drive it, the undoubted source of the Styx and entrance to
the Infernal Regions from these parts. Others have gone down from the
village with a “fifty-six” and a wagon load of inch rope, but yet have failed
to find any bottom; for while the “fifty-six” was resting by the way, they
were paying out the rope in the vain attempt to fathom their truly
immeasurable capacity for marvellousness. But I can assure my readers that
Walden has a reasonably tight bottom at a not unreasonable, though at an
unusual, depth. I fathomed it easily with a cod-line and a stone weighing
about a pound and a half, and could tell accurately when the stone left the
bottom, by having to pull so much harder before the water got underneath
to help me. The greatest depth was exactly one hundred and two feet; to
which may be added the five feet which it has risen since, making one
hundred and seven. This is a remarkable depth for so small an area; yet not
an inch of it can be spared by the imagination. What if all ponds were
shallow? Would it not react on the minds of men? I am thankful that this
pond was made deep and pure for a symbol. While men believe in the
infinite some ponds will be thought to be bottomless.
A factory owner, hearing what depth I had found, thought that it could
not be true, for, judging from his acquaintance with dams, sand would not
lie at so steep an angle. But the deepest ponds are not so deep in proportion
to their area as most suppose, and, if drained, would not leave very
remarkable valleys. They are not like cups between the hills; for this one,
which is so unusually deep for its area, appears in a vertical section through
its centre not deeper than a shallow plate. Most ponds, emptied, would
leave a meadow no more hollow than we frequently see. William Gilpin,
who is so admirable in all that relates to landscapes, and usually so correct,
standing at the head of Loch Fyne, in Scotland, which he describes as “a
bay of salt water, sixty or seventy fathoms deep, four miles in breadth,” and
about fifty miles long, surrounded by mountains, observes, “If we could
have seen it immediately after the diluvian crash, or whatever convulsion of
Nature occasioned it, before the waters gushed in, what a horrid chasm
must it have appeared!
So high as heaved the tumid hills, so low
Down sunk a hollow bottom broad and deep,

Capacious bed of waters—.”

But if, using the shortest diameter of Loch Fyne, we apply these proportions
to Walden, which, as we have seen, appears already in a vertical section
only like a shallow plate, it will appear four times as shallow. So much for
the increased horrors of the chasm of 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 unsuspecting
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 has been necessary to conceal their history. But it is easiest, as they
who work on the highways know, to find the hollows by the puddles after a
shower. The amount of it is, the imagination give it the least license, dives
deeper and soars higher than Nature goes. So, probably, the depth of the
ocean will be found to be very inconsiderable compared with its breadth.
As I sounded through the ice I could determine the shape of the bottom
with greater accuracy than is possible in surveying harbors which do not
freeze over, and I was surprised at its general regularity. In the deepest part
there are several acres more level than almost any field which is exposed to
the sun wind and plough. In one instance, on a line arbitrarily chosen, the
depth did not vary more than one foot in thirty rods; and generally, near the
middle, I could calculate the variation for each one hundred feet in any
direction beforehand within three or four inches. Some are accustomed to
speak of deep and dangerous holes even in quiet sandy ponds like this, but
the effect of water under these circumstances is to level all inequalities. The
regularity of the bottom and its conformity to the shores and the range of
the neighboring hills were so perfect that a distant promontory betrayed
itself in the soundings quite across the pond, and its direction could be
determined by observing the opposite shore. Cape becomes bar, and plain
shoal, and valley and gorge deep water and channel.
When I had mapped the pond by the scale of ten rods to an inch, and put
down the soundings, more than a hundred in all, I observed this remarkable
coincidence. Having noticed that the number indicating the greatest depth
was apparently in the centre of the map, I laid a rule on the map lengthwise,
and then breadthwise, and found, to my surprise, that the line of greatest
length intersected the line of greatest breadth exactly at the point of greatest

depth, notwithstanding that the middle is so nearly level, the outline of the
pond far from regular, and the extreme length and breadth were got by
measuring into the coves; and I said to myself, Who knows but this hint
would conduct to the deepest part of the ocean as well as of a pond or
puddle? Is not this the rule also for the height of mountains, regarded as the
opposite of valleys? We know that a hill is not highest at its narrowest part.
Of five coves, three, or all which had been sounded, were observed to
have a bar quite across their mouths and deeper water within, so that the
bay tended to be an expansion of water within the land not only horizontally
but vertically, and to form a basin or independent pond, the direction of the
two capes showing the course of the bar. Every harbor on the sea-coast,
also, has its bar at its entrance. In proportion as the mouth of the cove was
wider compared with its length, the water over the bar was deeper
compared with that in the basin. Given, then, the length and breadth of the
cove, and the character of the surrounding shore, and you have almost
elements enough to make out a formula for all cases.
In order to see how nearly I could guess, with this experience, at the
deepest point in a pond, by observing the outlines of its surface and the
character of its shores alone, I made a plan of White Pond, which contains
about forty-one acres, and, like this, has no island in it, nor any visible inlet
or outlet; and as the line of greatest breadth fell very near the line of least
breadth, where two opposite capes approached each other and two opposite
bays receded, I ventured to mark a point a short distance from the latter
line, but still on the line of greatest length, as the deepest. The deepest part
was found to be within one hundred feet of this, still farther in the direction
to which I had inclined, and was only one foot deeper, namely, sixty feet.
Of course, a stream running through, or an island in the pond, would make
the problem much more complicated.
If we knew all the laws of Nature, we should need only one fact, or the
description of one actual phenomenon, to infer all the particular results at
that point. Now we know only a few laws, and our result is vitiated, not, of
course, by any confusion or irregularity in Nature, but by our ignorance of
essential elements in the calculation. Our notions of law and harmony are
commonly confined to those instances which we detect; but the harmony
which results from a far greater number of seemingly conflicting, but really
concurring, laws, which we have not detected, is still more wonderful. The

particular laws are as our points of view, as, to the traveller, a mountain
outline varies with every step, and it has an infinite number of profiles,
though absolutely but one form. Even when cleft or bored through it is not
comprehended in its entireness.
What I have observed of the pond is no less true in ethics. It is the law of
average. Such a rule of the two diameters not only guides us toward the sun
in the system and the heart in man, but draw lines through the length and
breadth of the aggregate of a man’s particular daily behaviors and waves of
life into his coves and inlets, and where they intersect will be the height or
depth of his character. Perhaps we need only to know how his shores trend
and his adjacent country or circumstances, to infer his depth and concealed
bottom. If he is surrounded by mountainous circumstances, an Achillean
shore, whose peaks overshadow and are reflected in his bosom, they
suggest a corresponding depth in him. But a low and smooth shore proves
him shallow on that side. In our bodies, a bold projecting brow falls off to
and indicates a corresponding depth of thought. Also there is a bar across
the entrance of our every cove, or particular inclination; each is our harbor
for a season, in which we are detained and partially land-locked. These
inclinations are not whimsical usually, but their form, size, and direction are
determined by the promontories of the shore, the ancient axes of elevation.
When this bar is gradually increased by storms, tides, or currents, or there is
a subsidence of the waters, so that it reaches to the surface, that which was
at first but an inclination in the shore in which a thought was harbored
becomes an individual lake, cut off from the ocean, wherein the thought
secures its own conditions, changes, perhaps, from salt to fresh, becomes a
sweet sea, dead sea, or a marsh. At the advent of each individual into this
life, may we not suppose that such a bar has risen to the surface
somewhere? It is true, we are such poor navigators that our thoughts, for the
most part, stand off and on upon a harborless coast, are conversant only
with the bights of the bays of poesy, or steer for the public ports of entry,
and go into the dry docks of science, where they merely refit for this world,
and no natural currents concur to individualize them.
As for the inlet or outlet of Walden, I have not discovered any but rain
and snow and evaporation, though perhaps, with a thermometer and a line,
such places may be found, for where the water flows into the pond it will
probably be coldest in summer and warmest in winter. When the ice-men
were at work here in ’46–7, the cakes sent to the shore were one day

rejected by those who were stacking them up there, not being thick enough
to lie side by side with the rest; and the cutters thus discovered that the ice
over a small space was two or three inches thinner than elsewhere, which
made them think that there was an inlet there. They also showed me in
another place what they thought was a “leach hole,” through which the
pond leaked out under a hill into a neighboring meadow, pushing me out on
a cake of ice to see it. It was a small cavity under ten feet of water; but I
think that I can warrant the pond not to need soldering till they find a worse
leak than that. One has suggested, that if such a “leach hole” should be
found, its connection with the meadow, if any existed, might be proved by
conveying some colored powder or sawdust to the mouth of the hole, and
then putting a strainer over the spring in the meadow, which would catch
some of the particles carried through by the current.
While I was surveying, the ice, which was sixteen inches thick, undulated
under a slight wind like water. It is well known that a level cannot be used
on ice. At one rod from the shore its greatest fluctuation, when observed by
means of a level on land directed toward a graduated staff on the ice, was
three quarters of an inch, though the ice appeared firmly attached to the
shore. It was probably greater in the middle. Who knows but if our
instruments were delicate enough we might detect an undulation in the crust
of the earth? When two legs of my level were on the shore and the third on
the ice, and the sights were directed over the latter, a rise or fall of the ice of
an almost infinitesimal amount made a difference of several feet on a tree
across the pond. When I began to cut holes for sounding, there were three or
four inches of water on the ice under a deep snow which had sunk it thus
far; but the water began immediately to run into these holes, and continued
to run for two days in deep streams, which wore away the ice on every side,
and contributed essentially, if not mainly, to dry the surface of the pond; for,
as the water ran in, it raised and floated the ice. This was somewhat like
cutting a hole in the bottom of a ship to let the water out. When such holes
freeze, and a rain succeeds, and finally a new freezing forms a fresh smooth
ice over all, it is beautifully mottled internally by dark figures, shaped
somewhat like a spider’s web, what you may call ice rosettes, produced by
the channels worn by the water flowing from all sides to a centre.
Sometimes, also, when the ice was covered with shallow puddles, I saw a
double shadow of myself, one standing on the head of the other, one on the
ice, the other on the trees or hill-side.

While yet it is cold January, and snow and ice are thick and solid, the
prudent landlord comes from the village to get ice to cool his summer drink;
impressively, even pathetically wise, to foresee the heat and thirst of July
now in January,—wearing a thick coat and mittens! when so many things
are not provided for. It may be that he lays up no treasures in this world
which will cool his summer drink in the next. He cuts and saws the solid
pond, unroofs the house of fishes, and carts off their very element and air,
held fast by chains and stakes like corded wood, through the favoring
winter air, to wintry cellars, to underlie the summer there. It looks like
solidified azure, as, far off, it is drawn through the streets. These ice-cutters
are a merry race, full of jest and sport, and when I went among them they
were wont to invite me to saw pit-fashion with them, I standing underneath.
In the winter of ’46–7 there came a hundred men of Hyperborean
extraction swoop down on to our pond one morning, with many car-loads of
ungainly-looking farming tools, sleds, ploughs, drill-barrows, turf-knives,
spades, saws, rakes, and each man was armed with a double-pointed pike-
staff, such as is not described in the New-England Farmer or the Cultivator.
I did not know whether they had come to sow a crop of winter rye, or some
other kind of grain recently introduced from Iceland. As I saw no manure, I
judged that they meant to skim the land, as I had done, thinking the soil was
deep and had lain fallow long enough. They said that a gentleman farmer,
who was behind the scenes, wanted to double his money, which, as I
understood, amounted to half a million already; but in order to cover each
one of his dollars with another, he took off the only coat, ay, the skin itself,
of Walden Pond in the midst of a hard winter. They went to work at once,
ploughing, harrowing, rolling, furrowing, in admirable order, as if they were
bent on making this a model farm; but when I was looking sharp to see
what kind of seed they dropped into the furrow, a gang of fellows by my
side suddenly began to hook up the virgin mould itself, with a peculiar jerk,
clean down to the sand, or rather the water,—for it was a very springy soil,
—indeed all the terra firma there was,—and haul it away on sleds, and then
I guessed that they must be cutting peat in a bog. So they came and went
every day, with a peculiar shriek from the locomotive, from and to some
point of the polar regions, as it seemed to me, like a flock of arctic snow-
birds. But sometimes Squaw Walden had her revenge, and a hired man,
walking behind his team, slipped through a crack in the ground down
toward Tartarus, and he who was so brave before suddenly became but the

ninth part of a man, almost gave up his animal heat, and was glad to take
refuge in my house, and acknowledged that there was some virtue in a
stove; or sometimes the frozen soil took a piece of steel out of a
ploughshare, or a plough got set in the furrow and had to be cut out.
To speak literally, a hundred Irishmen, with Yankee overseers, came from
Cambridge every day to get out the ice. They divided it into cakes by
methods too well known to require description, and these, being sledded to
the shore, were rapidly hauled off on to an ice platform, and raised by
grappling irons and block and tackle, worked by horses, on to a stack, as
surely as so many barrels of flour, and there placed evenly side by side, and
row upon row, as if they formed the solid base of an obelisk designed to
pierce the clouds. They told me that in a good day they could get out a
thousand tons, which was the yield of about one acre. Deep ruts and “cradle
holes” were worn in the ice, as on terra firma, by the passage of the sleds
over the same track, and the horses invariably ate their oats out of cakes of
ice hollowed out like buckets. They stacked up the cakes thus in the open
air in a pile thirty-five feet high on one side and six or seven rods square,
putting hay between the outside layers to exclude the air; for when the
wind, though never so cold, finds a passage through, it will wear large
cavities, leaving slight supports or studs only here and there, and finally
topple it down. At first it looked like a vast blue fort or Valhalla; but when
they began to tuck the coarse meadow hay into the crevices, and this
became covered with rime and icicles, it looked like a venerable moss-
grown and hoary ruin, built of azure-tinted marble, the abode of Winter, that
old man we see in the almanac,—his shanty, as if he had a design to estivate
with us. They calculated that not twenty-five per cent of this would reach its
destination, and that two or three per cent would be wasted in the cars.
However, a still greater part of this heap had a different destiny from what
was intended; for, either because the ice was found not to keep so well as
was expected, containing more air than usual, or for some other reason, it
never got to market. This heap, made in the winter of ’46–7 and estimated
to contain ten thousand tons, was finally covered with hay and boards; and
though it was unroofed the following July, and a part of it carried off, the
rest remaining exposed to the sun, it stood over that summer and the next
winter, and was not quite melted till September 1848. Thus the pond
recovered the greater part.

Like the water, the Walden ice, seen near at hand, has a green tint, but at
a distance is beautifully blue, and you can easily tell it from the white ice of
the river, or the merely greenish ice of some ponds, a quarter of a mile off.
Sometimes one of those great cakes slips from the ice-man’s sled into the
village street, and lies there for a week like a great emerald, an object of
interest to all passers. I have noticed that a portion of Walden which in the
state of water was green will often, when frozen, appear from the same
point of view blue. So the hollows about this pond will, sometimes, in the
winter, be filled with a greenish water somewhat like its own, but the next
day will have frozen blue. Perhaps the blue color of water and ice is due to
the light and air they contain, and the most transparent is the bluest. Ice is
an interesting subject for contemplation. They told me that they had some in
the ice-houses at Fresh Pond five years old which was as good as ever. Why
is it that a bucket of water soon becomes putrid, but frozen remains sweet
forever? It is commonly said that this is the difference between the
affections and the intellect.
Thus for sixteen days I saw from my window a hundred men at work like
busy husbandmen, with teams and horses and apparently all the implements
of farming, such a picture as we see on the first page of the almanac; and as
often as I looked out I was reminded of the fable of the lark and the reapers,
or the parable of the sower, and the like; and now they are all gone, and in
thirty days more, probably, I shall look from the same window on the pure
sea-green Walden water there, reflecting the clouds and the trees, and
sending up its evaporations in solitude, and no traces will appear that a man
has ever stood there. Perhaps I shall hear a solitary loon laugh as he dives
and plumes himself, or shall see a lonely fisher in his boat, like a floating
leaf, beholding his form reflected in the waves, where lately a hundred men
securely labored.
Thus it appears that the sweltering inhabitants of Charleston and New
Orleans, of Madras and Bombay and Calcutta, drink at my well. In the
morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy
of the Bhagvat Geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have
elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature
seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to
a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our
conceptions. I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there
I meet the servant of the Bramin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra,

who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the
root of a tree with his crust and water jug. I meet his servant come to draw
water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same
well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the
Ganges. With favoring winds it is wafted past the site of the fabulous
islands of Atlantis and the Hesperides, makes the periplus of Hanno, and,
floating by Ternate and Tidore and the mouth of the Persian Gulf, melts in
the tropic gales of the Indian seas, and is landed in ports of which
Alexander only heard the names.

Spring

The opening of large tracts by the ice-cutters commonly causes a pond to
break up earlier; for the water, agitated by the wind, even in cold weather,
wears away the surrounding ice. But such was not the effect on Walden that
year, for she had soon got a thick new garment to take the place of the old.
This pond never breaks up so soon as the others in this neighborhood, on
account both of its greater depth and its having no stream passing through it
to melt or wear away the ice. I never knew it to open in the course of a
winter, not excepting that of ’52–3, which gave the ponds so severe a trial.
It commonly opens about the first of April, a week or ten days later than
Flint’s Pond and Fair-Haven, beginning to melt on the north side and in the
shallower parts where it began to freeze. It indicates better than any water
hereabouts the absolute progress of the season, being least affected by
transient changes of temperature. A severe cold of a few days’ duration in
March may very much retard the opening of the former ponds, while the
temperature of Walden increases almost uninterruptedly. A thermometer
thrust into the middle of Walden on the 6th of March, 1847, stood at 32°, or
freezing point; near the shore at 33°; in the middle of Flint’s Pond, the same
day, at 32½°; at a dozen rods from the shore, in shallow water, under ice a
foot thick, at 36°. This difference of three and a half degrees between the
temperature of the deep water and the shallow in the latter pond, and the
fact that a great proportion of it is comparatively shallow, show why it
should break up so much sooner than Walden. The ice in the shallowest part
was at this time several inches thinner than in the middle. In mid-winter the
middle had been the warmest and the ice thinnest there. So, also, every one
who has waded about the shores of the pond in summer must have
perceived how much warmer the water is close to the shore, where only
three or four inches deep, than a little distance out, and on the surface where
it is deep, than near the bottom. In spring the sun not only exerts an
influence through the increased temperature of the air and earth, but its heat

passes through ice a foot or more thick, and is reflected from the bottom in
shallow water, and so also warms the water and melts the under side of the
ice, at the same time that it is melting it more directly above, making it
uneven, and causing the air bubbles which it contains to extend themselves
upward and downward until it is completely honeycombed, and at last
disappears suddenly in a single spring rain. Ice has its grain as well as
wood, and when a cake begins to rot or “comb,” that is, assume the
appearance of honey-comb, whatever may be its position, the air cells are at
right angles with what was the water surface. Where there is a rock or a log
rising near to the surface the ice over it is much thinner, and is frequently
quite dissolved by this reflected heat; and I have been told that in the
experiment at Cambridge to freeze water in a shallow wooden pond, though
the cold air circulated underneath, and so had access to both sides, the
reflection of the sun from the bottom more than counterbalanced this
advantage. When a warm rain in the middle of the winter melts off the
snow-ice from Walden, and leaves a hard dark or transparent ice on the
middle, there will be a strip of rotten though thicker white ice, a rod or more
wide, about the shores, created by this reflected heat. Also, as I have said,
the bubbles themselves within the ice operate as burning-glasses to melt the
ice beneath.
The phenomena of the year take place every day in a pond on a small
scale. Every morning, generally speaking, the shallow water is being
warmed more rapidly than the deep, though it may not be made so warm
after all, and every evening it is being cooled more rapidly until the
morning. The day is an epitome of the year. The night is the winter, the
morning and evening are the spring and fall, and the noon is the summer.
The cracking and booming of the ice indicate a change of temperature. One
pleasant morning after a cold night, February 24th, 1850, having gone to
Flint’s Pond to spend the day, I noticed with surprise, that when I struck the
ice with the head of my axe, it resounded like a gong for many rods around,
or as if I had struck on a tight drum-head. The pond began to boom about an
hour after sunrise, when it felt the influence of the sun’s rays slanted upon it
from over the hills; it stretched itself and yawned like a waking man with a
gradually increasing tumult, which was kept up three or four hours. It took a
short siesta at noon, and boomed once more toward night, as the sun was
withdrawing his influence. In the right stage of the weather a pond fires its
evening gun with great regularity. But in the middle of the day, being full of

cracks, and the air also being less elastic, it had completely lost its
resonance, and probably fishes and muskrats could not then have been
stunned by a blow on it. The fishermen say that the “thundering of the
pond” scares the fishes and prevents their biting. The pond does not thunder
every evening, and I cannot tell surely when to expect its thundering; but
though I may perceive no difference in the weather, it does. Who would
have suspected so large and cold and thick-skinned a thing to be so
sensitive? Yet it has its law to which it thunders obedience when it should as
surely as the buds expand in the spring. The earth is all alive and covered
with papillæ. The largest pond is as sensitive to atmospheric changes as the
globule of mercury in its tube.

One attraction in coming to the woods to live was that I should have
leisure and opportunity to see the spring come in. The ice in the pond at
length begins to be honey-combed, and I can set my heel in it as I walk.
Fogs and rains and warmer suns are gradually melting the snow; the days
have grown sensibly longer; and I see how I shall get through the winter
without adding to my wood-pile, for large fires are no longer necessary. I
am on the alert for the first signs of spring, to hear the chance note of some
arriving bird, or the striped squirrel’s chirp, for his stores must be now
nearly exhausted, or see the woodchuck venture out of his winter quarters.
On the 13th of March, after I had heard the bluebird, song-sparrow, and red-
wing, the ice was still nearly a foot thick. As the weather grew warmer it
was not sensibly worn away by the water, nor broken up and floated off as
in rivers, but, though it was completely melted for half a rod in width about
the shore, the middle was merely honey-combed and saturated with water,
so that you could put your foot through it when six inches thick; but by the
next day evening, perhaps, after a warm rain followed by fog, it would have
wholly disappeared, all gone off with the fog, spirited away. One year I
went across the middle only five days before it disappeared entirely. In
1845 Walden was first completely open on the 1st of April; in ’46, the 25th
of March; in ’47, the 8th of April; in ’51, the 28th of March; in ’52, the 18th
of April; in ’53, the 23d of March; in ’54, about the 7th of April.
Every incident connected with the breaking up of the rivers and ponds
and the settling of the weather is particularly interesting to us who live in a
climate of so great extremes. When the warmer days come, they who dwell