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 is 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, besides, shallow and stagnant surface water is not
mingled with it. Moreover, in summer, Walden never becomes so warm as
most water which is exposed to the sun, on account of its depth. In the
warmest weather I usually placed a pailful in my cellar, where it became
cool in the night, and remained so during the day; though I also
resorted to a spring in the neighborhood. It was as good when a 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 (_Leucisus 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_[67] would not apply to this; it should be _guttatus_[68]
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 mussels 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 or 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 the 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 hilltop you can see a fish leap in almost any
part; for not a pickerel or shiner picks an insect from this smooth
surface but it manifestly disturbs the equilibrium of the whole lake. It
is wonderful with what elaborateness this simple fact is
advertised--this piscine murder will out--and from my distant perch I
distinguish the circling undulations when they are half a dozen rods in
diameter. You can even detect a water-bug (_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, on 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 somber November
colors of the surrounding hills. Though I passed over it as gently as
possible, the slight undulations produced by my boat extended almost as
far as I could see, and gave a ribbed appearance to the reflections.
But, as I was looking over the surface, I saw here and there at a
distance a faint glimmer, as if some skater insects which had escaped
the frosts might be collected there, or, 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 plash 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 scared 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 at the teacher's desk. But since I left those shores the
wood-choppers 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 Hall,[69] 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 wood-choppers 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 to-night, as if I had not seen it
almost daily for more than twenty years--Why, here is Walden, the same
woodland lake that I discovered so many years ago; where a forest was
cut down last winter another is springing up by its shore as lustily as
ever; the same thought is welling up to its surface that was then; it is
the same liquid joy and happiness to itself and its Maker, 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 or 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?
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 65: From Chapter IX of "Walden," 1854.]
[Footnote 66: The Castalian Fountain on Mount Parnassus was sacred to
Apollo and the Muses.]
[Footnote 67: With net-like markings.]
[Footnote 68: Speckled.]
[Footnote 69: The hero of an old ballad.]
SELECTIONS FROM RUSKIN
A. LEAFAGE OF TREES[70]