Disease the Rule of Existence—Finding one’s
Faculties—Telegraphs—Moose-lipped Words—Cato’s De
Re Rustica—The Horse and Man—Health and Disease—The
Telegraph Harp—Walking in England—A Walk to
Boon’s Pond in Stow—The Farmer and His Oxen—Tempe
and Arcadia—Footpaths for Poets—Writing on Many
Subjects—Dammed Streams—The Dog of the Woods—J. J.
G. Wilkinson—Fastidiousness—A Lake by Moonlight—A
Formalist—The Fullness of Life—Creatures of
Institutions—Moments of Inspiration—Gladness—A
September Evening—Singing heard at Night—Moonlight
on the River—Fair Haven by Moonlight—Northern
Lights—Soaring Hawks—The Grass and the Year—The Sky
at Night—A Factory-Bell—Sunrise—The Color of the
Poke—The Stone-mason’s Craft—Moral Effort—Benvenuto
Cellini—An Endymion Sleep—The Mountains in the
Horizon—The Telegraph Harp—Perambulating the Bounds—A
Pigeon-Place—An Elusive Scent—The Cross-leaved Polygala.
ILLUSTRATIONS
STAR-FLOWERS (TRIENTALIS) Frontispiece
Carbon photograph (page 266)
FAIR HAVEN POND FROM THE CLIFFS Colored plate
FAIR HAVEN POND FROM THE CLIFFS 10
NOVEMBER WOODS 86
FIRST SNOW 122
MIDWINTER 150
TOWN BROOK, PLYMOUTH 364
THE JOURNAL OF HENRY DAVID THOREAU
VOLUME II
I
1850 (ÆT. 32-33)[1]
The Hindoos are more serenely and thoughtfully religious than the
Hebrews. They have perhaps a purer, more independent and impersonal
knowledge of God. Their religious books describe the first inquisitive
and contemplative access to God; the Hebrew bible a conscientious
return, a grosser and more personal repentance. Repentance is not a
free and fair highway to God. A wise man will dispense with repentance.
It is shocking and passionate. God prefers that you approach him
thoughtful, not penitent, though you are the chief of sinners. It is
only by forgetting yourself that you draw near to him.
* * * * *
The calmness and gentleness with which the Hindoo philosophers approach
and discourse on forbidden themes is admirable.
What extracts from the Vedas I have read fall on me like the light of
a higher and purer luminary, which describes a loftier course through a
purer stratum,—free from particulars, simple, universal. It rises on me
like the full moon after the stars have come out, wading through some
far summer stratum of the sky.
The Vedant teaches how, “by forsaking religious rites,” the votary may
“obtain purification of mind.”
One wise sentence is worth the state of Massachusetts many times over.
The Vedas contain a sensible account of God.
The religion and philosophy of the Hebrews are those of a wilder and
ruder tribe, wanting the civility and intellectual refinements and
subtlety of the Hindoos.
* * * * *
Man flows at once to God as soon as the channel of purity, physical,
intellectual, and moral, is open.
* * * * *
With the Hindoos virtue is an intellectual exercise, not a social and
practical one. It is a knowing, not a doing.
* * * * *
I do not prefer one religion or philosophy to another. I have no
sympathy with the bigotry and ignorance which make transient and
partial and puerile distinctions between one man’s faith or form of
faith and another’s,—as Christian and heathen. I pray to be delivered
from narrowness, partiality, exaggeration, bigotry. To the philosopher
all sects, all nations, are alike. I like Brahma, Hari, Buddha, the
Great Spirit, as well as God.
[Part of leaf missing here.]
A page with as true and inevitable and deep a meaning as a hillside,
a book which Nature shall own as her own flower, her own leaves; with
whose leaves her own shall rustle in sympathy imperishable and russet;
which shall push out with the skunk-cabbage in the spring. I am not
offended by the odor of the skunk in passing by sacred places.[2] I am
invigorated rather. It is a reminiscence of immortality borne on the
gale. O thou partial world, when wilt thou know God? I would as soon
transplant this vegetable to Polynesia or to heaven with me as the
violet.
Shoes are commonly too narrow. If you should take off a gentleman’s
shoes, you would find that his foot was wider than his shoe. Think of
his wearing such an engine! walking in it many miles year after year!
A shoe which presses against the sides of the foot is to be condemned.
To compress the foot like the Chinese is as bad as to compress the
head like the Flatheads, for the head and the foot are one body. The
narrow feet,—they greet each other on the two sides of the Pacific.
A sensible man will not follow fashion in this respect, but reason.
Better moccasins, or sandals, or even bare feet, than a tight shoe. A
wise man will wear a shoe wide and large enough, shaped somewhat like
the foot, and tied with a leather string, and so go his way in peace,
letting his foot fall at every step.
When your shoe chafes your feet, put in a mullein leaf.
* * * * *
When I ask for a garment of a particular form, my tailoress tells me
gravely, “They do not make them so now,” and I find it difficult to get
made what I want, simply because she cannot believe that I mean what
I say; it surpasses her credulity. Properly speaking, my style is as
fashionable as theirs. “They do not make them so now,” as if she quoted
the Fates! I am for a moment absorbed in thought, thinking, wondering
who _they_ are, where _they_ live. It is some Oak Hall, O call, O.
K., all correct establishment which she knows but I do not. Oliver
Cromwell. I emphasize and in imagination italicize each word separately
of that sentence to come at the meaning of it.[3]
* * * * *
Or you may walk into the foreign land of Bedford, where not even yet,
after four or five, or even seven or eight, miles, does the sky shut
down, but the airy and crystal dome of heaven arches high over all,
when you did not suspect that there was so much daylight under its
crystal dome, and from the hill eastward perchance see the small town
of Bedford standing stately on the crest of a hill like some city of
Belgrade with one hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants. I wonder if
Mr. Fitch lives there among them.
How many noble men and women must have their abode there! So it
seems,—I trust that so it is,—but I did not go into Bedford that time.
But alas! I have been into a village before now, and there was not a
man of a large soul in it. In what respect was it better than a village
of prairie-dogs.[4] I mean to hint no reproach even by implica-[part of
leaf torn off].
Sunday, May 12, 1850, visited the site of the Dustin house in the
northwest part of Haverhill, now but a slight indentation in a
corn-field, three or four feet deep, with an occasional brick and
cellar-stone turned up in plowing. The owner, Dick Kimball, made
much of the corn grown in this hole, some ears of which were sent to
Philadelphia. The apple tree which is said to have stood north from the
house at a considerable distance is gone. A brick house occupied by a
descendant is visible from the spot, and there are old cellar-holes in
the neighborhood, probably the sites of some of the other eight houses
which were burned on that day. It is a question with some which is the
site of the true Dustin house.
Also visited the same day an ancient garrison-house now occupied by
Fred. Ayer, who said it was built one hundred and fifty or one hundred
and sixty years ago by one Emerson, and that several oxen were killed
by lightning while it was building. There was also a pear tree nearly
as old as the house. It was built of larger and thicker and harder
brick than are used nowadays, and on the whole looked more durable
and still likely to stand a hundred years. The hard burnt blue-black
ends of some of the bricks were so arranged as to checker the outside.
He said it was considered the handsomest house in Haverhill when it
was built, and people used to come up from town some two miles to see
it. He thought that they were the original doors which we saw. There
were but few windows, and most of them were about two feet and a half
long and a foot or more wide, only to fire out of. The oven originally
projected outside. There were two large fireplaces. I walked into one,
by stooping slightly, and looked up at the sky. Ayer said jokingly that
some said they were so made to shoot wild geese as they flew over. The
chains and hooks were suspended from a wooden bar high in the chimney.
The timbers were of immense size.
Fourteen vessels in or to be in the port of Haverhill, laden with coal,
lumber, lime, wood, and so forth. Boys go [to] the wharf with their
fourpences to buy a bundle of laths to make a hen-house; none elsewhere
to be had.
Saw two or three other garrison-houses. Mrs. Dustin was an Emerson, one
of the family for whom I surveyed.
Measured a buttonwood tree in Haverhill, one of twenty and more set
out about 1739 on the banks of the Merrimack. It was thirteen and
eight twelfths feet in circumference at three and a half feet from the
ground.
* * * * *
Jewett’s steam mill is profitable, because the planing machine alone,
while that is running, makes shavings and waste enough to feed the
engine, to say nothing of the sawdust from the sawmill; and the engine
had not required the least repair for several years. Perhaps, as there
is not so much sawing and planing to be done in England, they therefore
may not find steam so cheap as water.
* * * * *
A single gentle rain in the spring makes the grass look many shades
greener.
It is wisest to live without any definite and recognized object from
day to day,—any particular object,—for the world is round, and we are
not to live on a tangent or a radius to the sphere. As an old poet
says, “though man proposeth, God disposeth all.”
Our thoughts are wont to run in muddy or dusty ruts.
I too revive as does the grass after rain. We are never so flourishing,
our day is never so fair, but that the sun may come out a little
brighter through mists and we yearn to live a better life. What have we
to boast of? We are made the very sewers, the cloacæ, of nature.
If the hunter has a taste for mud turtles and muskrats and skunks and
other such savage titbits, the fine lady indulges a taste for some form
of potted cheese, or jelly made of a calf’s foot, or anchovies from
over the water, and they are even. He goes to the mill-pond, she to
her preserve pot. I wonder how he, I wonder how I, can live this slimy,
beastly kind of life, eating and drinking.[5]
* * * * *
The fresh foliage of the woods in May, when the leaves are about as big
as a mouse’s ear, putting out like taller grasses and herbs.
In all my rambles I have seen no landscape which can make me forget
Fair Haven. I still sit on its Cliff in a new spring day, and look
over the awakening woods and the river, and hear the new birds sing,
with the same delight as ever. It is as sweet a mystery to me as ever,
what this world is. Fair Haven Lake in the south, with its pine-covered
island and its meadows, the hickories putting out fresh young yellowish
leaves, and the oaks light-grayish ones, while the oven-bird thrums
his sawyer-like strain, and the chewink rustles through the dry leaves
or repeats his jingle on a tree-top, and the wood thrush, the genius
of the wood, whistles for the first time his clear and thrilling
strain,—it sounds as it did the first time I heard it. The sight of
these budding woods intoxicates me,—this diet drink.
The strong-colored pine, the grass of trees, in the midst of which
other trees are but as weeds or flowers,—a little exotic.
* * * * *
In the row of buttonwood trees on the banks of the Merrimack in
Haverhill, I saw that several had been cut down, probably because
of their unsightly appearance, they all suffering from the prevalent
disease which has attacked the buttonwood of late years, and one large
one still resting on its stump where it had fallen. It seemed like a
waste of timber or of fuel, but when I inquired about it, they answered
that the millers did not like to saw it. Like other ornamental trees
which have stood by the roadside for a hundred years, the inhabitants
have been accustomed to fasten their horses to them, and have driven
many spikes into them for this purpose. One man, having carried some
buttonwood logs to mill, the miller agreed to saw them if he would make
good the injury which might be done to his saw. The other agreed to it,
but almost at the first clip they ran on to a spike and broke the saw,
and the owner of the logs cried, “Stop!” he would have no more sawed.
They are difficult to split, beside, and make poor timber at best,
being very liable to warp.
The “itinerary distance” between two points, a convenient expression.
[Illustration: _Fair Haven Pond from the Cliffs_]
Humboldt says, “It is still undetermined where life is most abundant:
whether on the earth or in the fathomless depths of the ocean.”
* * * * *
It was a _mirage_, what in Sanscrit, according to Humboldt, is called
“the thirst of the gazelle.”
* * * * *
Nothing memorable was ever accomplished in a prosaic mood of mind.
The heroes and discoverers have found true more than was previously
believed, only when they were expecting and dreaming of something more
than their contemporaries dreamed of,—when they were in a frame of mind
prepared in some measure for the truth.
Referred to the world’s standard, the hero, the discoverer, is insane,
its greatest men are all insane. At first the world does not respect
its great men. Some rude and simple nations go to the other extreme and
reverence all kinds of insanity. Humboldt says, speaking of Columbus
approaching the New World: “The grateful coolness of the evening air,
the ethereal purity of the starry firmament, the balmy fragrance of
flowers, wafted to him by the land breeze, all led him to suppose (as
we are told by Herrera, in the Decades (5)), that he was approaching
the garden of Eden, the sacred abode of our first parents. The Orinoco
seemed to him one of the four rivers which, according to the venerable
tradition of the ancient world, flowed from Paradise, to water and
divide the surface of the earth, newly adorned with plants.”
Expeditions for the discovery of El Dorado, and also of the Fountain of
Youth, led to real, though perhaps not compensatory, discoveries.[6]
* * * * *
I have heard my brother playing on his flute at evening half a
mile off through the houses of the village, every note with perfect
distinctness. It seemed a more beautiful communication with me than
the sending up of a rocket would have been. So, if I mistake not, the
sound of blasting rocks has been heard from down the river as far as
Lowell,—some twenty miles by its course,—where they were making a deep
cut for the railroad.
* * * * *
The sand cherry (_Prunus depressa_ Pursh., _Cerasus pumila_ Mx.) grew
about my door, and near the end of May enlivened my yard with its
umbels arranged cylindrically about its short branches. In the fall,
weighed down with the weight of its large and handsome cherries, it
fell over in wreath-like rays on every side. I tasted them out of
compliment to nature, but I never learned to love them.[7]
If the long-continued rains cause the seeds to rot in the ground and
destroy the potatoes in the low lands, they are good for the grass on
the uplands, though the farmers say it is not so sweet.[8]
* * * * *
As I walked, I was intoxicated with the slight spicy odor of the
hickory buds and the bruised bark of the black birch, and, in the fall,
the pennyroyal.
Many a time I have expected to find a woodchuck, or rabbit, or a gray
squirrel, when it was the ground-robin rustling the leaves.
I have been surprised to discover the amount and the various kinds of
life which a single shallow swamp will sustain. On the south side of
the pond, not more than a quarter of a mile from it, is a small meadow
of ten or a dozen acres in the woods, considerably lower than Walden,
and which by some is thought to be fed by the former by a subterranean
outlet,—which is very likely, for its shores are quite springy and its
supply of water is abundant and unfailing,—indeed tradition says that a
sawmill once stood over its outlet, though its whole extent, including
its sources, is not more than I have mentioned,—a meadow through which
the Fitchburg Railroad passes by a very high causeway, which required
many a carload of sand, where the laborers for a long time seemed
to make no progress, for the sand settled so much in the night that
by morning they were where they were the day before, and finally the
weight of the sand forced upward the adjacent crust of the meadow with
the trees on it many feet, and cracked it for some rods around. It is a
wet and springy place throughout the summer, with a ditch-like channel,
and in one part water stands the year round, with cat-o’-nine-tails and
tussocks and muskrats’ cabins rising above it, where good cranberries
may be raked if you are careful to anticipate the frost which visits
this cool hollow unexpectedly early. Well, as I was saying, I heard a
splashing in the shallow and muddy water and stood awhile to observe
the cause of it. Again and again I heard and saw the commotion, but
could not guess the cause of it,—what kind of life had its residence
in that insignificant pool. We sat down on the hillside. Ere long a
muskrat came swimming by as if attracted by the same disturbance, and
then another and another, till three had passed, and I began to suspect
that they were at the bottom of it. Still ever and anon I observed
the same commotion in the waters over the same spot, and at length
I observed the snout of some creature slyly raised above the surface
after each commotion, as if to see if it were observed by foes, and
then but a few rods distant I saw another snout above the water and
began to divine the cause of the disturbance. Putting off my shoes
and stockings, I crept stealthily down the hill and waded out slowly
and noiselessly about a rod from the firm land, keeping behind the
tussocks, till I stood behind the tussock near which I had observed the
splashing. Then, suddenly stooping over it, I saw through the shallow
but muddy water that there was a mud turtle there, and thrusting in my
hand at once caught him by the claw, and, quicker than I can tell it,
heaved him high and dry ashore; and there came out with him a large
pout just dead and partly devoured, which he held in his jaws. It was
the pout in his flurry and the turtle in his struggles to hold him fast
which had created the commotion. There he had lain, probably buried
in the mud at the bottom up to his eyes, till the pout came sailing
over, and then this musky lagune had put forth in the direction of
his ventral fins, expanding suddenly under the influence of a more
than vernal heat,—there are sermons in stones, aye and mud turtles at
the bottoms of the pools,—in the direction of his ventral fins, his
tender white belly, where he kept no eye; and the minister squeaked
his last.[9] Oh, what an eye was there, my countrymen! buried in mud
up to the lids, meditating on what? sleepless at the bottom of the
pool, at the top of the bottom, directed heavenward, in no danger from
motes. Pouts expect their foes not from below. Suddenly a mud volcano
swallowed him up, seized his midriff; he fell into those relentless
jaws from which there is no escape, which relax not their hold even in
death.[10] There the pout might calculate on remaining until nine days
after the head was cut off. Sculled through Heywood’s shallow meadow,
not thinking of foes, looking through the water up into the sky. I saw
his [the turtle’s] brother sunning and airing his broad back like a
ship bottom up which had been scuttled,—foundered at sea. I had no idea
that there was so much going on in Heywood’s meadow.
The pickerel commonly lie perfectly still at night, like sticks, in
very shallow water near the shore near a brook’s mouth. I have seen
a large one with a deep white wound from a spear, cutting him half in
two, unhealed and unhealable, fast asleep, and forked him into my boat.
I have struck a pickerel sound asleep and knew that I cut him almost
in two, and the next moment heard him go ashore several rods off; for
being thus awakened in their dreams they shoot off with one impulse,
intending only to abandon those parts, without considering exactly
to what places they shall go. One night a small pickerel, which the
boat had probably struck in his sleep, leaped into the boat and so was
secured without a wound.
The chub is a soft fish and tastes like boiled brown paper salted.
I was as interested in the discovery of limestone as if it had been
gold, and wondered that I had never thought of it before. Now all
things seemed to radiate round limestone, and I saw how the farmers
lived near to, or far from, a locality of limestone. I detected it
sometimes in walls, and surmised from what parts it was probably
carted; or when I looked down into an old deserted well, I detected
it in the wall, and found where the first settlers had quarried it
extensively. I read a new page in the history of these parts in the
old limestone quarries and kilns where the old settlers found the
materials of their houses; and I considered that, since it was found
so profitable even at Thomaston to burn lime with coal dust, perchance
these quarries might be worked again.[11]
When the rocks were covered with snow, I even uncovered them with my
hands, that I might observe their composition and strata, and thought
myself lucky when the sun had laid one bare for me; but [now] that they
are all uncovered I pass by without noticing them. There is a time for
everything.
We are never prepared to believe that our ancestors lifted large stones
or built thick walls. I find that I must have supposed that they built
their bank walls of such as a single man could handle. For since we
have put their lives behind us we can think of no sufficient motive
for such exertion. How can their works be so visible and permanent and
themselves so transient? When I see a stone which it must have taken
many yoke of oxen to move, lying in a bank wall which was built two
hundred years ago, I am curiously surprised, because it suggests an
energy and force of which we have no memorials. Where are the traces
of the corresponding moral and intellectual energy? I am not prepared
to believe that a man lived here so long ago who could elevate into a
wall and properly aline a rock of great size and fix it securely,—such
an Archimedes. I walk over the old corn-fields, it is true, where the
grassy corn-hills still appear in the woods, but there are no such
traces of them there. Again, we are wont to think that our ancestors
were all stalwart men, because only their most enduring works have
come down to us. I think that the man who lifted so large a rock in
the course of his ordinary work should have had a still larger for his
monument.
I noticed a singular instance of ventriloquism to-day in a male chewink
singing on the top of a young oak. It was difficult to believe that the
last part of his strain, the concluding jingle, did not proceed from a
different quarter, a woodside many rods off. _Hip-you, he-he-he-he._ It
was long before I was satisfied that the last part was not the answer
of his mate given in exact time. I endeavored to get between the two;
indeed, I seemed to be almost between them already.
I have not seen Walden so high for many years; it is within four feet
of the pond-hole in Hubbard’s woods.
The river is higher than it has been at this season for many years.
When the far mountains are invisible, the near ones look the higher.
The oldest nature is elastic. I just felt myself raised upon the swell
of the eternal ocean, which came rolling this way to land.
When my eye ranges over some thirty miles of this globe’s surface,—an
eminence green and waving, with sky and mountains to bound it,—I am
richer than Crœsus.
The variously colored blossoms of the shrub oaks now, in May, hanging
gracefully like ear-drops, or the similar blossoms of the large oaks.
I have noticed the effect of a flag set up on a hill in the country. It
tames the landscape, subdues it to itself. The hill looks as if it were
a military post. Our green, wild country landscape is gathered under
the folds of a flag.
* * * * *
A lively appearance is imparted to the landscape as seen from
Nawshawtuct, by the flood on the meadows,—by the alternation of land
and water, of green and of light colors. The frequent causeways, and
the hedgerows (?) jutting into the meadows, and the islands, have an
appearance full of light and life.
To-day, May 31st, a red and white cow, being uneasy, broke out of
the steam-mill pasture and crossed the bridge and broke into Elijah
Wood’s grounds. When he endeavored to drive her out by the bars, she
boldly took to the water, wading first through the meadows full of
ditches, and swam across the river, about forty rods wide at this
time, and landed in her own pasture again. She was a buffalo crossing
her Mississippi. This exploit conferred some dignity on the herd in my
eyes, already dignified, and reflectedly on the river, which I looked
on as a kind of Bosphorus.
I love to see the domestic animals reassert their native rights,—any
evidence that they have not lost their original wild habits and
vigor.[12]
There is a sweet wild world which lies along the strain of the wood
thrush—the rich intervales which border the stream of its song—more
thoroughly genial to my nature than any other.[13]
The blossoms of the tough and vivacious shrub oak are very handsome.
* * * * *
I visited a retired, now almost unused, graveyard in Lincoln to-day,
where five British soldiers lie buried who fell on the 19th April, ’75.
Edmund Wheeler, grandfather of William, who lived in the old house now
pulled down near the present, went over the next day and carted them
to this ground. A few years ago one Felch, a phrenologist, by leave of
the selectmen dug up and took away two skulls. The skeletons were very
large, probably those of grenadiers. William Wheeler, who was present,
told me this. He said that he had heard old Mr. Child, who lived
opposite, say that when one soldier was shot he leaped right up his
full length out of the ranks and fell dead; and he, William Wheeler,
saw a bullet-hole through and through one of the skulls.
Close by stood a stone with this inscription:—
In memory of
Sippio Brister
a man of Colour
who died
Nov 1. 1820
Æt. 64.
But that is not telling us that he lived.[14]
* * * * *
There was one Newell, a tailor, his neighbor, who became a Universalist
minister. Breed put on his sign:—
Tailoring and barbering done with speed
By John C Newell & John C Breed.[15]
The water was over the turnpike below Master Cheney’s when I returned
(May 31st, 1850).
[A third of a page torn out here.]
that these fences, to a considerable extent, will be found to mark
natural divisions, especially if the land is not very minutely
divided,—mowing (upland and meadow) pasture, woodland, and the
different kinds of tillage. There will be found in the farmer’s motive
for setting a fence here or there some conformity to natural limits.
These artificial divisions no doubt have the effect of increasing the
area and variety to the traveller. These various fields taken together
appear more extensive than a single prairie of the same size would. If
the divisions corresponded [A third of a page torn out here.]
The year has many seasons more than are recognized in the almanac.
There is that time about the first of June, the beginning of summer,
when the buttercups blossom in the now luxuriant grass and I am first
reminded of mowing and of the dairy. Every one will have observed
different epochs. There is the time when they begin to drive cows
to pasture,—about the 20th of May,—observed by the farmer, but a
little arbitrary year by year. Cows spend their winters in barns and
cow-yards, their summers in pastures. In summer, therefore, they may
low with emphasis, “To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new.” I
sometimes see a neighbor or two united with their boys and hired men
to drive their cattle to some far-off country pasture, fifty or sixty
miles distant in New Hampshire, early in the morning, with their sticks
and dogs. It is a memorable time with the farmers’ boys, and frequently
their first journey from home. The herdsman in some mountain pasture
is expecting them. And then in the fall, when they go up to drive
them back, they speculate as to whether Janet or Brindle will know
them. I heard such a boy exclaim on such an occasion, when the calf of
the spring returned a heifer, as he stroked her side, “She knows me,
father; she knows me.” Driven up to be the cattle on a thousand hills.
I once set fire to the woods. Having set out, one April day, to go to
the sources of Concord River in a boat with a single companion, meaning
to camp on the bank at night or seek a lodging in some neighboring
country inn or farmhouse, we took fishing tackle with us that we might
fitly procure our food from the stream, Indian-like. At the shoemaker’s
near the river, we obtained a match, which we had forgotten. Though
it was thus early in the spring, the river was low, for there had not
been much rain, and we succeeded in catching a mess of fish sufficient
for our dinner before we had left the town, and by the shores of Fair
Haven Pond we proceeded to cook them. The earth was uncommonly dry, and
our fire, kindled far from the woods in a sunny recess in the hillside
on the east of the pond, suddenly caught the dry grass of the previous
year which grew about the stump on which it was kindled. We sprang to
extinguish it at first with our hands and feet, and then we fought it
with a board obtained from the boat, but in a few minutes it was beyond
our reach; being on the side of a hill, it spread rapidly upward,
through the long, dry, wiry grass interspersed with bushes.
“Well, where will this end?” asked my companion. I saw that it might be
bounded by Well Meadow Brook on one side, but would, perchance, go to
the village side of the brook. “It will go to town,” I answered. While
my companion took the boat back down the river, I set out through the
woods to inform the owners and to raise the town. The fire had already
spread a dozen rods on every side and went leaping and crackling wildly
and irreclaimably toward the wood. That way went the flames with wild
delight, and we felt that we had no control over the demonic creature
to which we had given birth. We had kindled many fires in the woods
before, burning a clear space in the grass, without ever kindling such
a fire as this.
As I ran toward the town through the woods, I could see the smoke over
the woods behind me marking the spot and the progress of the flames.
The first farmer whom I met driving a team, after leaving the woods,
inquired the cause of the smoke. I told him. “Well,” said he, “it
is none of my stuff,” and drove along. The next I met was the owner
in his field, with whom I returned at once to the woods, running all
the way. I had already run two miles. When at length we got into the
neighborhood of the flames, we met a carpenter who had been hewing
timber, an infirm man who had been driven off by the fire, fleeing
with his axe. The farmer returned to hasten more assistance. I, who was
spent with running, remained. What could I do alone against a front of
flame half a mile wide?
I walked slowly through the wood to Fair Haven Cliff, climbed to the
highest rock, and sat down upon it to observe the progress of the
flames, which were rapidly approaching me, now about a mile distant
from the spot where the fire was kindled. Presently I heard the sound
of the distant bell giving the alarm, and I knew that the town was on
its way to the scene. Hitherto I had felt like a guilty person,—nothing
but shame and regret. But now I settled the matter with myself shortly.
I said to myself: “Who are these men who are said to be the owners
of these woods, and how am I related to them? I have set fire to the
forest, but I have done no wrong therein, and now it is as if the
lightning had done it. These flames are but consuming their natural
food.” (It has never troubled me from that day to this more than if the
lightning had done it. The trivial fishing was all that disturbed me
and disturbs me still.) So shortly I settled it with myself and stood
to watch the approaching flames.[16] It was a glorious spectacle, and
I was the only one there to enjoy it. The fire now reached the base of
the cliff and then rushed up its sides. The squirrels ran before it in
blind haste, and three pigeons dashed into the midst of the smoke. The
flames flashed up the pines to their tops, as if they were powder.
When I found I was about to be surrounded by the fire, I retreated
and joined the forces now arriving from the town. It took us several
hours to surround the flames with our hoes and shovels and by back
fires subdue them. In the midst of all I saw the farmer whom I first
met, who had turned indifferently away saying it was none of his stuff,
striving earnestly to save his corded wood, his stuff, which the fire
had already seized and which it after all consumed.
It burned over a hundred acres or more and destroyed much young wood.
When I returned home late in the day, with others of my townsmen, I
could not help noticing that the crowd who were so ready to condemn the
individual who had kindled the fire did not sympathize with the owners
of the wood, but were in fact highly elate and as it were thankful for
the opportunity which had afforded them so much sport; and it was only
half a dozen owners, so called, though not all of them, who looked sour
or grieved, and I felt that I had a deeper interest in the woods, knew
them better and should feel their loss more, than any or all of them.
The farmer whom I had first conducted to the woods was obliged to ask
me the shortest way back, through his own lot. Why, then, should the
half-dozen owners [and] the individuals who set the fire alone feel
sorrow for the loss of the wood, while the rest of the town have their
spirits raised? Some of the owners, however, bore their loss like men,
but other some declared behind my back that I was a “damned rascal;”
and a flibbertigibbet or two, who crowed like the old cock, shouted
some reminiscences of “burnt woods” from safe recesses for some years
after. I have had nothing to say to any of them. The locomotive engine
has since burned over nearly all the same ground and more, and in some
measure blotted out the memory of the previous fire. For a long time
after I had learned this lesson I marvelled that while matches and
tinder were contemporaries the world was not consumed; why the houses
that have hearths were not burned before another day; if the flames
were not as hungry now as when I waked them. I at once ceased to regard
the owners and my own fault,—if fault there was any in the matter,—and
attended to the phenomenon before me, determined to make the most of
it. To be sure, I felt a little ashamed when I reflected on what a
trivial occasion this had happened, that at the time I was no better
employed than my townsmen.
That night I watched the fire, where some stumps still flamed at
midnight in the midst of the blackened waste, wandering through the
woods by myself; and far in the night I threaded my way to the spot
where the fire had taken, and discovered the now broiled fish,—which
had been dressed,—scattered over the burnt grass.
This has been a cool day, though the first of summer. The prospect of
the meadows from Lee’s Hill was very fine. I observe that the shadows
of the trees are very distinct and heavy in such a day, falling
on the fresh grass. They are as obvious as the trees themselves by
mid-afternoon. Commonly we do not make much account of the distinct
shadows of objects in the landscape.
What is bare and unsightly is covered by the water now. The verdure
seems to spring directly from its bosom; there are no stems nor roots.
The meadows are so many mirrors reflecting the light,—toward sunset
dazzlingly bright.
* * * * *
I visited this afternoon (June 3d) Goodman’s Hill in Sudbury, going
through Lincoln over Sherman’s Bridge and Round Hill, and returning
through the Corner. It probably affords the best view of Concord River
meadows of any hill. The horizon is very extensive as it is, and if the
top were cleared so that you could get the western view, it would be
one of the most extensive seen from any hill in the county. The most
imposing horizons are those which are seen from tops of hills rising
out of a river valley. The prospect even from a low hill has something
majestic in it in such a case. The landscape is a vast amphitheatre
rising to its rim in the horizon. There is a good view of Lincoln
lying high up in among the hills. You see that it is the highest town
hereabouts, and hence its fruit. The river at this time looks as large
as the Hudson. I think that a river-valley town is much the handsomest
and largest-featured,—like Concord and Lancaster, for instance, natural
centres. Upon the hills of Bolton, again, the height of land between
the Concord and Nashua, I have seen how the peach flourishes. Nobscot,
too, is quite imposing as seen from the west side of Goodman’s Hill.
On the western side of a continuation of this hill is Wadsworth’s
battle-field.[17]
Returning, I saw in Sudbury twenty-five nests of the new (cliff?)
swallow under the eaves of a barn. They seemed particularly social and
loquacious neighbors, though their voices are rather squeaking. Their
nests, built side by side, looked somewhat like large hornets’ nests,
enough so to prove a sort of connection. Their activity, sociability,
and chattiness make them fit pensioners and neighbors of man—summer
companions—for the barn-yard.
* * * * *
The last of May and the first of June the farmers are everywhere
planting their corn and beans and potatoes.
* * * * *
To-day, June 4th, I have been tending a burning in the woods. Ray was
there. It is a pleasant fact that you will know no man long, however
low in the social scale, however poor, miserable, intemperate, and
worthless he may appear to be, a mere burden to society, but you will
find at last that there is something which he understands and can do
better than any other. I was pleased to hear that one man had sent Ray
as the one who had had the most experience in setting fires of any man
in Lincoln. He had experience and skill as a burner of brush.
You must burn against the wind always, and burn slowly. When the
fire breaks over the hoed line, a little system and perseverance
will accomplish more toward quelling it than any man would believe.
It fortunately happens that the experience acquired is oftentimes
worth more than the wages. When a fire breaks out in the woods, and
a man fights it too near and on the side, in the heat of the moment,
without the systematic coöperation of others, he is disposed to think
it a desperate case, and that this relentless fiend will run through
the forest till it is glutted with food; but let the company rest
from their labors a moment, and then proceed more deliberately and
systematically, giving the fire a wider berth, and the company will
be astonished to find how soon and easily they will subdue it. The
woods themselves furnish one of the best weapons with which to contend
with the fires that destroy them,—a pitch pine bough. It is the best
instrument to thrash it with. There are few men who do not love better
to give advice than to give assistance.
However large the fire, let a few men go to work deliberately but
perseveringly to rake away the leaves and hoe off the surface of the
ground at a convenient distance from the fire, while others follow with
pine boughs to thrash it with when it reaches the line, and they will
finally get round it and subdue it, and will be astonished at their own
success.
A man who is about to burn his field in the midst of woods should rake
off the leaves and twigs for the breadth of a rod at least, making no
large heaps near the outside, and then plow around it several furrows
and break them up with hoes, and set his fire early in the morning,
before the wind rises.
As I was fighting the fire to-day, in the midst of the roaring and
crackling,—for the fire seems to snort like a wild horse,—I heard
from time to time the dying strain, the last sigh, the fine, clear,
shrill scream of agony, as it were, of the trees breathing their last,
probably the heated air or the steam escaping from some chink. At first
I thought it was some bird, or a dying squirrel’s note of anguish, or
steam escaping from the tree. You sometimes hear it on a small scale
in the log on the hearth. When a field is burned over, the squirrels
probably go into the ground. How foreign is the yellow pine to the
green woods—and what business has it here?
The fire stopped within a few inches of a partridge’s nest to-day, June
4th, whom we took off in our hands and found thirteen creamy-colored
eggs. I started up a woodcock when I went to a rill to drink, at the
westernmost angle of R. W. E.’s wood-lot.
To-night, June 5th, after a hot day, I hear the first peculiar summer
breathing of the frogs.
When all is calm, a small whirlwind will suddenly lift up the blazing
leaves and let them fall beyond the line, and set all the woods in
a blaze in a moment. Or some slight almost invisible cinder, seed of
fire, will be wafted from the burnt district on to the dry turf which
covers the surface and fills the crevices of many rocks, and there it
will catch as in tinder, and smoke and smoulder, perchance, for half
an hour, heating several square yards of ground where yet no fire is
visible, until it spreads to the leaves and the wind fans it into a
blaze.
Men go to a fire for entertainment. When I see how eagerly men will
run to a fire, whether in warm or in cold weather, by day or by night,
dragging an engine at their heels, I am astonished to perceive how good
a purpose the love of excitement is made to serve. What other force,
pray, what offered pay, what disinterested neighborliness could ever
effect so much? No, these are boys who are to be dealt with, and these
are the motives that prevail. There is no old man or woman dropping
into the grave but covets excitement.
Yesterday, when I walked to Goodman’s Hill, it seemed to me that the
atmosphere was never so full of fragrance and spicy odors. There is a
great variety in the fragrance of the apple blossoms as well as their
tints. Some are quite spicy. The air seemed filled with the odor of
ripe strawberries, though it is quite too early for them. The earth was
not only fragrant but sweet and spicy to the smell, reminding us of
Arabian gales and what mariners tell of the spice islands. The first
of June, when the lady’s-slipper and the wild pink have come out in
sunny places on the hillsides, then the summer is begun according to
the clock of the seasons.
Here it is the 8th of June, and the grass is growing apace. In the
front yards of the village they are already beginning to cut it. The
fields look luxuriant and verdurous, but, as the weather is warmer, the
atmosphere is not so clear. In distant woods the partridge sits on her
eggs, and at evening the frogs begin to dream and boys begin to bathe
in the river and ponds.
Cultivate the habit of early rising. It is unwise to keep the head long
on a level with the feet.
* * * * *
The cars come and go with such regularity and precision, and the
whistle and rumble are heard so far, that town clocks and family clocks
are already half dispensed with, and it is easy to foresee that one
extensive well-conducted and orderly institution like a railroad will
keep time and order for a whole country. The startings and arrivals of
the cars are the epochs in a village day.[18]
* * * * *
Not till June can the grass be said to be waving in the fields. When
the frogs dream, and the grass waves, and the buttercups toss their
heads, and the heat disposes to bathe in the ponds and streams, then is
summer begun.
June 9th, 1850, Walden is still rising, though the rains have ceased
and the river has fallen very much. I see the pollen of the pitch pine
now beginning to cover the surface of the pond. Most of the pines
at the north-northwest end have none, and on some there is only one
pollen-bearing flower.
* * * * *
I saw a striped snake which the fire in the woods had killed, stiffened
and partially blackened by the flames, with its body partly coiled up
and raised from the ground, and its head still erect as if ready to
dart out its tongue and strike its foe. No creature can exhibit more
venom than a snake, even when it is not venomous, strictly speaking.
The fire ascended the oak trees very swiftly by the moss which fringed
them.
* * * * *
It has a singular effect on us when we hear the geologist apply
his terms to Judea,—speak of “limestone” and “blocks of trap and
conglomerate, boulders of sandstone and quartz” there. Or think of a
chemical analysis of the water of the Dead Sea!
The pitch and white pines are two years or more maturing their seed.
Certain rites are practiced by the Smrities (among the Hindoos) at the
digging of wells.
In early times the Brahmans, though they were the legislators of India,
possessed no executive power and lived in poverty; yet they were for
the most part independent and respected.
Galbraith’s Math. Tables, Edinburgh, 1834. For descriptions of
instruments he refers to Jones’s edition of Adam’s Geom. and Graphical
Essays, Biot’s Traité d’Astronomie Physique, Base du Système Métrique,
Woodhouse’s, Vince’s, and Pearson’s Treatises of Astronomy. For
problems connected with trigonometrical surveying, to the third volume
of Hutton’s Course of Math. by Dr. O. Gregory, Baron Zach’s work on the
Attraction of Mountains, the Base du Système de Métrique Décimal, and
Puissant’s Géodesie.
Olive or red seems the fittest color for a man, a denizen of the woods.
The _pale white man_! I do not wonder that the African pitied him.[19]
The white pine cones are now two inches long, curved sickle-like from
the topmost branches, reminding you of the tropical trees which bear
their fruit at their heads.[20]
The life in us is like the water in the river; it may rise this year
higher than ever it was known to before and flood the uplands—even this
may be the eventful year—and drown out all our muskrats.[21]
There [are] as many strata at different levels of life as there are
leaves in a book. Most men probably have lived in two or three. When
on the higher levels we can remember the lower levels, but when on the
lower we cannot remember the higher.
My imagination, my love and reverence and admiration, my sense of the
miraculous, is not so excited by any event as by the remembrance of my
youth. Men talk about Bible miracles because there is no miracle in
their lives. Cease to gnaw that crust. There is ripe fruit over your
head.
Woe to him who wants a companion, for he is unfit to be the companion
even of himself.
We inspire friendship in men when we have contracted friendship with
the gods.
When we cease to sympathize with and to be personally related to men,
and begin to be universally related, then we are capable of inspiring
others with the sentiment of love for us.
We hug the earth. How rarely we mount! How rarely we climb a tree! We
might get a little higher, methinks. That pine would make us dizzy. You
can see the mountains from it as you never did before.[22]
Shall not a man have his spring as well as the plants?
The halo around the shadow is visible both morning and evening.[23]
* * * * *
After this and some other fires in the woods which I helped to put
out, a more effectual system by which to quell them occurred to me.
When the bell rings, hundreds will run to a fire in the woods without
carrying any implement, and then waste much time after they get there
either in doing nothing or what is worse than nothing, having come
mainly out of curiosity, it being as interesting to see it burn as
to put it out. I thought that it would be well if forty or fifty men
in every country town should enroll themselves into a company for
this purpose and elect suitable officers. The town should provide a
sufficient number of rakes, hoes, and shovels, which it should be the
duty of certain of the company to convey to [the] woods in a wagon,
together with the drum, on the first alarm, people being unwilling to
carry their own tools for fear they will be lost. When the captain or
one of the numerous vice-captains arrives, having inspected the fire
and taken his measures, let him cause the roll to be called, however
the men may be engaged, and just take a turn or two with his men to
form them into sections and see where they are. Then he can appoint and
equip his rake-men and his hoe-men and his bough-men, and drop them at
the proper places, always retaining the drummer and a scout; and when
he has learned through his scout that the fire has broken out in a new
place, he, by beat of drum, can take up one or two men of each class—as
many as can be spared—and repair to the scene of danger.
One of my friends suggests instead of the drum some delicious music,
adding that then he would come. It might be well, to refresh the men
when wearied with work, and cheer them on their return. Music is the
proper regulator.
* * * * *
So, far in the East, among the Yezidis, or Worshippers of the Devil, so
called, and the Chaldæans, and so forth, you may hear these remarkable
disputations on doctrinal points.[24]
* * * * *
Any reverence, even for a material thing, proceeds from an elevation of
character. Layard, speaking of the reverence for the sun exhibited by
the Yezidis, or Worshippers of the Devil, says: “They are accustomed to
kiss the object on which its first beams fall; and I have frequently,
when travelling in their company at sunrise, observed them perform this
ceremony. For fire, as symbolic, they have nearly the same reverence;
they never spit into it, but frequently pass their hands through the
flame, kiss them, and rub them over their right eyebrow, or sometimes
over the whole face.”
Who taught the oven-bird to conceal her nest? It is on the ground,
yet out of sight. What cunning there is in nature! No man could have
arranged it more artfully for the purpose of concealment. Only the
escape of the bird betrays it.
I observe to-night, June 15th, the air over the river by the Leaning
Hemlocks filled with myriads of newly fledged insects drifting and
falling as it were like snowflakes from the maples, only not so white.
Now they drift up the stream, now down, while the river below is
dimpled with the fishes rising to swallow the innumerable insects which
have fallen [into] it and are struggling with it. I saw how He fed
his fish. They, swimming in the dark nether atmosphere of the river,
rose lazily to its surface to swallow such swimmers of the light upper
atmosphere as sank to its bottom.[25]
I picked up to-day the lower jaw of a hog, with white and sound teeth
and tusks, which reminded me that there was an animal health and vigor
distinct from the spiritual health. This animal succeeded by other
means than temperance and purity.[26]
There are thirty-eight lighthouses in Massachusetts. The light on the
Highlands of Neversink is visible the greatest distance, _viz_. thirty
miles. There are two there, one revolving, one not.
The fantastic open light crosses which the limbs of the larch make,
seen against the sky, of the sky-blue color its foliage.
In a swamp where the trees stand up to their knees, two or three feet
deep, in the fine bushes as in a moss bed.
The arbor-vitæ fans, rich, heavy, elaborate, like bead-work.
_June 20._ I can see from my window three or four cows in a pasture on
the side of Fair Haven Hill, a mile and a half distant. There is but
one tree in the pasture, and they are all collected and now reposing in
its shade, which, as it is early though sultry, is extended a good way
along the ground. It makes a pretty landscape. That must have been an
epoch in the history of the cow when they discovered to stand in the
shadow of a tree. I wonder if they are wise enough to recline on the
north side of it, that they may not be disturbed so soon. It shows the
importance of leaving trees for shade in the pastures as well as for
beauty. There is a long black streak, and in it the cows are collected.
How much more they will need this shelter at noon! It is a pleasant
life they lead in the summer,—roaming in well-watered pastures,
grazing, and chewing the cud in the shade,—quite a philosophic life
and favorable for contemplation, not like their pent-up winter life
in close and foul barns. If only they could say as on the prairies,
“To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new.”
Cattle and horses, however, retain many of their wild habits or
instincts wonderfully. The seeds of instinct are preserved under their
thick hides, like seeds in the bowels of the earth, an indefinite
period.[27] I have heard of a horse which his master could not catch
in his pasture when the first snowflakes were falling, who persisted in
wintering out. As he persisted in keeping out of his reach, his master
finally left him. When the snow had covered the ground three or four
inches deep, the horse pawed it away to come at the grass,—just as
the wild horses of Michigan do, who are turned loose by their Indian
masters,—and so he picked up a scanty subsistence. By the next day he
had had enough of free life and pined for his stable, and so suffered
himself to be caught.
A blacksmith, my neighbor, heard a great clattering noise the other day
behind his shop, and on going out found that his mare and his neighbor
the pumpmaker’s were fighting. They would run at one another, then turn
round suddenly and let their heels fly. The rattling of their hoofs one
against the other was the noise he heard. They repeated this several
times with intervals of grazing, until one prevailed. The next day they
bore the marks of some bruises, some places where the skin was rucked
up, and some swellings.
* * * * *
And then for my afternoon walks I have a garden, larger than any
artificial garden that I have read of and far more attractive to
me,—mile after mile of embowered walks, such as no nobleman’s grounds
can boast, with animals running free and wild therein as from the
first,—varied with land and water prospect, and, above all, so retired
that it is extremely rare that I meet a single wanderer in its mazes.
No gardener is seen therein, no gates nor [_sic_]. You may wander away
to solitary bowers and brooks and hills.
* * * * *
The ripple marks on the sandy bottom of Flint’s Pond, where the rushes
grow, feel hard to the feet of the wader, though the sand is really
soft,—made firm perchance by the weight of the water.[28]
The rushes over the water are white with the exuviæ, the skeletons,
of insects,—like blossoms,—which have deposited their eggs on their
tops. The skeletons looked like those of shad-flies, though some living
insects were not.
I have seen crimson-colored eggs painting the leaves of the black birch
quite beautifully.
* * * * *
And now the ascending sun has contracted the shadow of the solitary
tree, and they are compelled to seek the neighboring wood for shelter.
_June 21._ The flowers of the white pine are now in their prime, but I
see none of their pollen on the pond.
* * * * *
This piece of rural pantomime, this bucolic, is enacted before me every
day. Far over the hills on that fair hillside, I look into the pastoral
age.
* * * * *
But these are only the disadvantages of a fire. It is without doubt
an advantage on the whole. It sweeps and ventilates the forest floor,
and makes it clear and clean. It is nature’s besom. By destroying the
punier underwood it gives prominence to the larger and sturdier trees,
and makes a wood in which you can go and come. I have often remarked
with how much more comfort and pleasure I could walk in woods through
which a fire had run the previous year. It will clean the forest floor
like a broom perfectly smooth and clear,—no twigs left to crackle
underfoot, the dead and rotten wood removed,—and thus in the course of
two or three years new huckleberry fields are created for the town,—for
birds and men.
When the lightning burns the forest its Director makes no apology to
man, and I was but His agent. Perhaps we owe to this accident partly
some of the noblest natural parks. It is inspiriting to walk amid the
fresh green sprouts of grass and shrubbery pushing upward through the
charred surface with more vigorous growth.
* * * * *
Wherever a man goes men will pursue and paw him with their dirty
institutions.[29]
Sometimes an arrowhead is found with the mouldering shaft still
attached. (_Vide_ Charles Hubbard.) A little boy from Compton, R. I.,
told me that his father found an arrowhead sticking in a dead tree and
nearly buried in it. Where is the hand that drew that bow? The arrow
shot by the Indian is still found occasionally, sticking in the trees
of our forest.
It is astonishing how much information is to be got out of very
unpromising witnesses. A wise man will avail himself of the observation
of all. Every boy and simpleton has been an observer in some field,—so
many more senses they are, differently located. Will inquire of eyes
what they have seen, of ears what they have heard, of hands what they
have done, of feet where they have been.
_July 16._ I have not yet been able to collect half a thimbleful of the
pollen of the pine on Walden, abundant as it was last summer.
There is in our yard a little pitch pine four or five years old and not
much more than a foot high, with small cones on it but no male flowers;
and yet I do not know of another pitch pine tree within half a mile.
* * * * *
Many men walk by day; few walk by night. It is a very different season.
Instead of the sun, there are the moon and stars; instead of the wood
thrush, there is the whip-poor-will; instead of butterflies, fireflies,
winged sparks of fire! who would have believed it? What kind of life
and cool deliberation dwells in a spark of fire in dewy abodes? Every
man carries fire in his eye, or in his blood, or in his brain. Instead
of singing birds, the croaking of frogs and the intenser dream of
crickets. The potatoes stand up straight, the corn grows, the bushes
loom, and, in a moonlight night, the shadows of rocks and trees and
bushes and hills are more conspicuous than the objects themselves. The
slightest inequalities in the ground are revealed by the shadows; what
the feet find comparatively smooth appears rough and diversified to
the eye. The smallest recesses in the rocks are dim and cavernous; the
ferns in the wood appear to be of tropical size; the pools seen through
the leaves become as full of light as the sky. “The light of day takes
refuge in their bosom,” as the Purana says of the ocean. The woods are
heavy and dark. Nature slumbers. The rocks retain the warmth of the sun
which they have absorbed all night.[30]
The names of those who bought these fields of the red men, the wild men
of the woods, are Buttrick, Davis, Barrett, Bulkley, etc., etc. (_Vide_
History.) Here and there still you will find a man with Indian blood in
his veins, an eccentric farmer descended from an Indian chief; or you
will see a solitary pure-blooded Indian, looking as wild as ever among
the pines, one of the last of the Massachusetts tribes, stepping into
a railroad car with his gun.
Still here and there an Indian squaw with her dog, her only companion,
lives in some lone house, insulted by school-children, making baskets
and picking berries her employment. You will meet her on the highway,
with few children or none, with melancholy face, history, destiny;
stepping after her race; who had stayed to tuck them up in their long
sleep. For whom berries condescend to grow. I have not seen one on
the Musketaquid for many a year, and some who came up in their canoes
and camped on its banks a dozen years ago had to ask me where it came
from. A lone Indian woman without children, accompanied by her dog,
wearing the shroud of her race, performing the last offices for her
departed race. Not yet absorbed into the elements again; a daughter of
the soil; one of the nobility of the land. The white man an imported
weed,—burdock and mullein, which displace the ground-nut.
* * * * *
As a proof that oysters do not move, I have been told by a Long Island
oysterman that they are found in large clusters surrounding the parent
oyster in the position in which they must have grown, the young being
several years old.
I find the actual to be far less real to me than the imagined. Why
this singular prominence and importance is given to the former, I do
not know. In proportion as that which possesses my thoughts is removed
from the actual, it impresses me. I have never met with anything
so truly visionary and accidental as some actual events. They have
affected me less than my dreams. Whatever actually happens to a man is
wonderfully trivial and insignificant,—even to death itself, I imagine.
He complains of the fates who drown him, that they do not touch _him_.
They do not deal directly with him. I have in my pocket a button which
I ripped off the coat of the Marquis of Ossoli[31] on the seashore
the other day. Held up, it intercepts the light and casts a shadow,—an
_actual_ button so called,—and yet all the life it is connected with
is less substantial to me than my faintest dreams. This stream of
events which we consent to call actual, and that other mightier stream
which alone carries us with it,—what makes the difference? On the one
our bodies float, and we have sympathy with it through them; on the
other, our spirits. We are ever dying to one world and being born into
another, and possibly no man knows whether he is at any time dead in
the sense in which he affirms that phenomenon of another, or not. Our
thoughts are the epochs of our life: all else is but as a journal of
the winds that blew while we were here.[32]
I do not think much of the actual. It is something which we have long
since done with. It is a sort of vomit in which the unclean love to
wallow.
There was nothing at all remarkable about them. They were simply some
bones lying on the beach. They would not detain a walker there more
than so much seaweed. I should think that the fates would not take
the trouble to show me any bones again, I so slightly appreciate the
favor.[33]
Do a little more of that work which you have sometime confessed to
be good, which you feel that society and your justest judge rightly
demands of you. Do what you reprove yourself for not doing. Know
that you are neither satisfied nor dissatisfied with yourself without
reason. Let me say to you and to myself in one breath, Cultivate the
tree which you have found to bear fruit in your soil. Regard not your
past failures nor successes. All the past is equally a failure and
a success; it is a success in as much as it offers you the present
opportunity. Have you not a pretty good thinking faculty, worth more
than the rarest gold watch? Can you not pass a judgment on something?
Does not the stream still rise to its fountain-head in you? Go to
the devil and come back again. Dispose of evil. Get punished once for
all. Die, if you can. Depart. Exchange your salvation for a glass of
water. If you know of any risk to run, run it. If you don’t know of
any, enjoy confidence. Do not trouble yourself to be religious; you
will never get a thank-you for it. If you can drive a nail and have any
nails to drive, drive them. If you have any experiments you would like
to try, try them; now’s your chance. Do not entertain doubts, if they
are not agreeable to you. Send them to the tavern. Do not eat unless
you are hungry; there’s no need of it. Do not read the newspapers.
Improve every opportunity to be melancholy. Be as melancholy as you can
be, and note the result. Rejoice with fate. As for health, consider
yourself well, and mind your business. Who knows but you are dead
already? Do not stop to be scared yet; there are more terrible things
to come, and ever to come. Men die of fright and live of confidence.
Be not simply obedient like the vegetables; set up your own Ebenezer.
Of man’s “_dis_obedience and the fruit,” etc. Do not engage to find
things as you think they are. Do what nobody can do for you. Omit to do
everything else.[34]
* * * * *
According to Lieutenant Davis, the forms, extent, and distribution of
sand-bars and banks are principally determined by tides, not by winds
and waves.[35] On sand-bars recently elevated above the level of the
ocean, fresh water is obtained by digging a foot or two. It is very
common for wells near the shore to rise and fall with the tide. It is
an interesting fact that the low sand-bars in the midst of the ocean,
even those which are laid bare only at low tide, are reservoirs of
fresh water at which the thirsty mariner can supply himself. Perchance,
like huge sponges, they hold the rain and dew which falls on them, and
which, by capillary attraction, is prevented from mingling with the
surrounding brine.[36]
It is not easy to make our lives respectable to ourselves by any course
of activity. We have repeatedly to withdraw ourselves into our shells
of thought like the tortoise, somewhat helplessly; and yet there is
even more than philosophy in that. I do not love to entertain doubts
and questions.
I am sure that my acquaintances mistake me. I am not the man they take
me for. On a little nearer view they would find me out. They ask my
advice on high matters, but they do not even know how poorly on’t I
am for hats and shoes. I have hardly a shift. Just as shabby as I am
in my outward apparel,—aye, and more lamentably shabby, for nakedness
is not so bad a condition after all,—am I in my inward apparel. If I
should turn myself inside out, my rags and meanness would appear. I am
something to him that made me, undoubtedly, but not much to any other
that he has made.[37] All I can say is that I live and breathe and have
my thoughts.
What is peculiar in the life of a man consists not in his obedience,
but his opposition, to his instincts. In one direction or another he
strives to live a supernatural life.
Would it not be worth the while to discover nature in Milton?[38] Be
native to the universe. I, too, love Concord best, but I am glad when
I discover, in oceans and wildernesses far away, the materials out of
which a million Concords can be made,—indeed, unless I discover them, I
am lost myself,—that there too I am at home. Nature is as far from me
as God, and sometimes I have thought to go West after her. Though the
city is no more attractive to me than ever, yet I see less difference
between a city and some dismallest swamp than formerly. It is a swamp
too dismal and dreary, however, for me. I would as lief find a few owls
and frogs and mosquitoes less. I prefer even a more cultivated place,
free from miasma and crocodiles, and I will take my choice.[39]
From time to time I overlook the promised land, but I do not feel that
I am travelling toward it. The moment I begin to look there, men and
institutions get out of the way that I may see. I see nothing permanent
in the society around me, and am not quite committed to any of its
ways.
* * * * *
The heaven-born Numa, or Lycurgus, or Solon, gravely makes laws to
regulate the exportation of tobacco. Will a divine legislator legislate
for slaves, or to regulate the exportation of tobacco? What shall a
State say for itself at the last day, in which this is a principal
production?
What have grave, not to say divine, legislators—Numas, Lycurguses,
Solons—to do with the exportation or the importation of tobacco.
There was a man appealed to me the other day, “Can you give me a chaw
of tobacco?” I _legislated_ for him. Suppose you were to submit the
question to any _son of God_, in what State would you get it again?[40]
Do not waste any reverence on my attitude. I manage to sit up where I
have dropped. Except as you reverence the evil one,—or rather the evil
_myriad_. As for missing friends,—fortunate perhaps is he who has any
to miss, whose place a thought will not supply. I have an ideal friend
in whose place actual persons sometimes stand for a season. The last
I may often miss, but the first I recover when I am myself again. What
if we do miss one another? have we not agreed upon a rendezvous? While
each travels his own way through the wood with serene and inexpressible
joy, though it be on his hands and knees over the rocks and fallen
trees, he cannot but be on the right way; there is no wrong way to him.
I have found myself as well off when I have fallen into a quagmire, as
in an armchair in the most hospitable house. The prospect was pretty
much the same. Without anxiety let us wander on, admiring whatever
beauty the woods exhibit.[41]
Do you know on what bushes a little peace, faith, and contentment grow?
Go a-berrying early and late after them.[42] Miss our friends! It is
not easy to get rid of them. We shall miss our bodies directly.
* * * * *
As to conforming outwardly, and living your own life inwardly, I have
not a very high opinion of that course. Do not let your right hand know
what your left hand does in that line of business. I have no doubt it
will prove a failure.[43]
The wind through the blind just now sounded like the baying of a
distant hound,—somewhat plaintive and melodious.
The railroad cuts make cliffs for swallows.
* * * * *
Getting into Patchogue late one night in an oyster-boat, there was a
drunken Dutchman aboard whose wit reminded me of Shakespeare. When we
came to leave the beach, our boat was aground, and we were detained
three hours waiting for the tide. In the meanwhile two of the fishermen
took an extra dram at the beach house. Then they stretched themselves
on the seaweed by the shore in the sun to sleep off the effects of
their debauch. One was an inconceivably broad-faced young Dutchman,—but
oh! of such a peculiar breadth and heavy look, I should not know
whether to call it more ridiculous or sublime. You would say that
he had humbled himself so much that he was beginning to be exalted.
An indescribable mynheerish stupidity. I was less disgusted by their
filthiness and vulgarity, because I was compelled to look on them as
animals, as swine in their sty. For the whole voyage they lay flat on
their backs on the bottom of the boat, in the bilge-water and wet with
each bailing, half insensible and wallowing in their vomit. But ever
and anon, when aroused by the rude kicks or curses of the skipper, the
Dutchman, who never lost his wit nor equanimity, though snoring and
rolling in the vomit produced by his debauch, blurted forth some happy
repartee like an illuminated swine. It was the earthiest, slimiest wit
I ever heard. The countenance was one of a million. It was unmistakable
Dutch. In the midst of a million faces of other races it could not be
mistaken. It told of Amsterdam. I kept racking my brains to conceive
how he could have been born in America, how lonely he must feel, what
he did for fellowship. When we were groping up the narrow creek of
Patchogue at ten o’clock at night, keeping our boat off, now from this
bank, now from that, with a pole, the two inebriates roused themselves
betimes. For in spite of their low estate they seemed to have all their
wits as much about them as ever, aye, and all the self-respect they
ever had. And the Dutchman gave wise directions to the steerer, which
were not heeded. Suddenly rousing himself up where the sharpest-eyed
might be bewildered in the darkness, he leaned over the side of the
boat and pointed straight down into the creek, averring that that
identical hole was a first-rate place for eels. And again he roused
himself at the right time and declared what luck he had once had with
his pots (not his cups) in another place, which we were floating over
in the dark. At last he suddenly stepped on to another boat which
was moored to the shore, with a divine ease and sureness, saying,
“Well, good-night, take care of yourselves, I can’t be with you any
longer.” He was one of the few remarkable men whom I have met. I have
been impressed by one or two men in their cups. There was really a
divinity stirred within them, so that in their case I have reverenced
the drunken, as savages the insane, man. So stupid that he could never
be intoxicated. When I said, “You have had a hard time of it to-day,”
he answered with indescribable good humor out of the very midst of his
debauch, with watery eyes, “Well, it doesn’t happen every day.” It was
happening then.[44] He had taken me aboard on his back, the boat lying
a rod from the shore, before I knew his condition. In the darkness our
skipper steered with a pole on the bottom, for an oysterman knows the
bottom of his bay as well as the shores, and can tell where he is by
the soundings.[45]
* * * * *
There was a glorious lurid sunset to-night, accompanied with many
sombre clouds, and when I looked into the west with my head turned, the
grass had the same fresh green, and the distant herbage and foliage in
the horizon the same bark blue, and the clouds and sky the same bright
colors beautifully mingled and dissolving into one another, that I have
seen in pictures of tropical landscapes and skies. Pale saffron skies
with faint fishes of rosy clouds dissolving in them. A blood-stained
sky. I regretted that I had an impatient companion. What shall we make
of the fact that you have only to stand on your head a moment to be
enchanted with the beauty of the landscape?
I met with a man on the beach who told me that when he wanted to jump
over a brook he held up one leg a certain height, and then, if a line
from his eye through his toe touched the opposite bank, he knew that
he could jump it. I asked him how he knew when he held his leg at the
right angle, and he said he knew the hitch very well. An Irishman told
me that he held up one leg and if he could bring his toe in a range
with his eye and the opposite bank he knew that he could jump it. Why,
I told him, I can blot out a star with my toe, but I would not engage
to jump the distance. It then appeared that he knew when he had got his
leg at the right height by a certain hitch there was in it. I suggested
that he should connect his two ankles with a string.[46]
* * * * *
I knew a clergyman who, when any person died, was wont to speak of that
portion of mankind who survived as living monuments of God’s mercy. A
negative kind of life to live!
* * * * *
I can easily walk ten, fifteen, twenty, any number of miles, commencing
at my own door, without going by any house, without crossing a road
except where the fox and the mink do. Concord is the oldest inland town
in New England, perhaps in the States, and the walker is peculiarly
favored here. There are square miles in my vicinity which have no
inhabitant. First along by the river, and then the brook, and then the
meadow and the woodside. Such solitude! From a hundred hills I can see
civilization and abodes of man afar. These farmers and their works are
scarcely more obvious than woodchucks.[47]
* * * * *
As I was going by with a creaking wheelbarrow, one of my neighbors, who
heard the music, ran out with his grease-pot and brush and greased the
wheels.
That is a peculiar season when about the middle of August the farmers
are getting their meadow-hay. If you sail up the river, you will see
them in all meadows, raking hay and loading it on to carts, great
towering [?] teams, under which the oxen stand like beetles, chewing
the cud, waiting for men to put the meadow on. With the heaviest load
they dash aside to crop some more savory grass,—the half-broken steers.
* * * * *
There was reason enough for the first settler’s selecting the elm out
of all the trees of the forest with which to ornament his villages. It
is beautiful alike by sunlight and moonlight, and the most beautiful
specimens are not the largest. I have seen some only twenty-five or
thirty years old, more graceful and healthy, I think, than any others.
It is almost become a villageous tree,—like martins and bluebirds.
The high blueberry has the wildest flavor of any of the huckleberry
tribe. It is a little mithridatic. It is like eating a poisonous berry
which your nature makes harmless. I derive the same pleasure as if I
were eating dog-berries, nightshade, and wild parsnip with impunity.
Man and his affairs,—Church and State and school, trade and commerce
and agriculture,—Politics,—for that is the word for them all here
to-day,—I am pleased to see how little space it occupies in the
landscape. It is but a narrow field. That still narrower highway yonder
leads to it. I sometimes direct the traveller[48] [Two pages missing.]
And once again,
When I went a-maying,
And once or twice more
I had seen thee before,
For there grow the mayflower
(_Epigæa repens_)
And the mountain cranberry
And the screech owl _strepens_.
O whither dost thou go?
Which way dost thou flow?
Thou art the way.
Thou art a road
Which Dante never trode.
Not many they be
Who enter therein,
Only the guests of the
Irishman Quin.[49]
There was a cross-eyed fellow used to help me survey,—he was my
stake-driver,—and all he said was, at every stake he drove, “There, I
shouldn’t like to undertake to pull _that_ up with my teeth.”
It sticks in my _crop_. That’s a good phrase. Many things stick there.
The man of wild habits,
Partridges and rabbits,
Who has no cares
Only to set snares,
Who liv’st all alone,
Close to the bone,
And where life is sweetest
Constantly eatest.
Where they once dug for money,
But never found “ony.”
To market fares
With early apples and pears.
When the spring stirs my blood
With the instinct to travel,
I can get enough gravel
On the Old Marlborough Road.
If you’ll leave your abode
With your fancy unfurled,
You may go round the world
By the Old Marlborough Road.
Nobody repairs it,
For nobody wears it.
It is a living way,
As the Christians say.
What is it, what is it,
But a direction out there
And the bare possibility
Of going somewhere?
Great guide-_boards_ of stone,
But travellers none.
It is worth going there to see
Where you might be.
They’re a great endeavor
To be something for ever.
They are a monument to somebody,
To some selectman
Who thought of the plan.
What king
Did the thing,
I am still wondering.
Cenotaphs of the towns
Named on their crowns;
Huge as Stonehenge;
Set up how or when,
By what selectmen?
Gourgas or Lee,
Clark or Darby?
Blank tablets of stone,
Where a traveller might groan,
And in one sentence
Grave all that is known;
Which another might read,
In his extreme need.
I know two or three
Sentences, _i. e._,
That might there be.
Literature that might stand
All over the land.
Which a man might remember
Till after December,
And read again in the spring,
After the thawing.[50]
Old meeting-house bell,
I love thy music well.
It peals through the air,
Sweetly full and fair,
As in the early times,
When I listened to its chimes.
I walk over the hills, to compare _great_ things with _small_, as
through a gallery of pictures, ever and anon looking through a gap in
the wood, as through the frame of a picture, to a more distant wood
or hillside, painted with several more coats of air. It is a cheap but
pleasant effect. To a landscape in picture, glassed with air.
What is a horizon without mountains?
* * * * *
A field of water betrays the spirit that is in the air. It has new life
and motion. It is intermediate between land and sky. On land, only the
grass and trees wave, but the water itself is _rippled_ by the wind.
I see the breeze dash across it in streaks and flakes of light. It is
somewhat singular that we should _look down_ on the surface of water.
We shall look down on the surface of air next, and mark where a still
subtler spirit sweeps over _it_.[51]
Without inlet it lies,
Without outlet it flows.
From and to the skies
It comes and it goes.
I am its source,
And my life is its course.
I am its stony shore
And the breeze that passes o’er.[52]
[Two thirds of a page missing.]
All that the money-digger had ever found was a pine-tree shilling, once
as he was dunging out. He was paid much more for dunging out, but he
valued more the money which he found. The boy thinks most of the cent
he found, not the cent he earned; for it suggests to him that he may
find a great deal more, but he knows that he can’t earn _much_, and
perhaps did not deserve that.
[Two pages missing.]
Among the worst of men that ever lived.
However, we did seriously attend,
A little space we let our thoughts ascend,
Experienced our religion and confessed
’T was good for us to be there,—be anywhere.
Then to a heap of apples we addressed,
And cleared a five-rail fence with hand on the topmost rider
_sine_ care.
Then our Icarian thoughts returned to ground,
And we went on to heaven the long way round.
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-flowing,
And blackberries a-growing.[53]
_Aug. 31._
TALL AMBROSIA
Among the signs of autumn I perceive
The Roman wormwood (called by learned men
_Ambrosia elatior_, food for gods,
For by impartial science the humblest weed
Is as well named as is the proudest flower)
Sprinkles its yellow dust over my shoes
As I brush through the now neglected garden.
We trample under foot the food of gods
And spill their nectar in each drop of dew.
My honest shoes, fast friends that never stray
Far from my couch, thus powdered, countrified,
Bearing many a mile the marks of their adventure,
At the post-house disgrace the Gallic gloss
Of those well-dressed ones who no morning dew
Nor Roman wormwood ever have gone through,
Who never walk, but are _transported_ rather,
For what old crime of theirs I do not gather.
The gray blueberry bushes, venerable as oaks,—why is not their fruit
poisonous? Bilberry called _Vaccinium corymbosum_; some say _amœnum_,
or blue bilberry, and _Vaccinium disomorphum_ Mx., black bilberry. Its
fruit hangs on into September, but loses its wild and sprightly taste.
Th’ ambrosia of the Gods’s a weed on earth,
Their nectar is the morning dew which on-
Ly our shoes taste, for they are simple folks.
’T is very fit the ambrosia of the gods
Should be a weed on earth, as nectar is
The morning dew which our shoes brush aside;
For the gods are simple folks, and we should pine upon their
humble fare.
The purple flowers of the humble trichostema mingled with the wormwood,
smelling like it; and the spring-scented, dandelion-scented primrose,
yellow primrose. The swamp-pink (_Azalea viscosa_), its now withered
pistils standing out.
The odoriferous sassafras, with its delicate green stem, its
three-lobed leaf, tempting the traveller to bruise it, it sheds so
rare a perfume on him, equal to all the spices of the East. Then its
rare-tasting root bark, like nothing else, which I used to dig. The
first navigators freighted their ships with it and deemed it worth its
weight in gold.
The alder-leaved clethra (_Clethra alnifolia_), sweet-smelling queen of
the swamp; its long white racemes.
We are most apt to remember and cherish the flowers which appear
earliest in the spring. I look with equal affection on those which are
the latest to bloom in the fall.
The choke-berry (_Pyrus arbutifolia_).
The beautiful white waxen berries of the cornel, either _Cornus alba_
or _paniculata_, white-berried or panicled, beautiful both when full
of fruit and when its cymes are naked; delicate red cymes or stems of
berries; spreading its little fairy fingers to the skies, its little
palms; fairy palms they might be called.
One of the viburnums, _Lentago_ or _pyrifolium_ or _nudum_, with its
poisonous-looking fruit in cymes, first greenish-white, then red, then
purple, or all at once.
The imp-eyed, red, velvety-looking berry of the swamps.[54]
The spotted polygonum (_Polygonum Persicaria_), seen in low lands amid
the potatoes now, wild prince’s-feather (?), slight flower that does
not forget to grace the autumn.
The late whortleberry—dangleberry—that ripens now that other
huckleberries and blueberries are shrivelled and spoiling, September
1st; dangle down two or three inches; can rarely find many. They have
a more transparent look, large, blue, long-stemmed, dangling, fruit of
the swamp concealed.
I detect the pennyroyal which my feet have bruised. Butter-and-eggs
still hold out to bloom.
* * * * *
I notice that cows never walk abreast, but in single file commonly,
making a narrow cow-path, or the herd walks in an irregular and loose
wedge. They retain still the habit of all the deer tribe, acquired when
the earth was all covered with forest, of travelling from necessity in
narrow paths in the woods.
At sundown a herd of cows, returning homeward from pasture over a
sandy knoll, pause to paw the sand and challenge the representatives
of another herd, raising a cloud of dust between the beholder and
the setting sun. And then the herd boys rush to mingle in the fray
and separate the combatants, two cows with horns interlocked, the one
pushing the other down the bank.
My grandmother called her cow home at night from the pasture over the
hill, by thumping on a mortar out of which the cow was accustomed to
eat salt.
At Nagog I saw a hundred bushels of huckleberries in one field.
* * * * *
The Roman wormwood, pigweed, a stout, coarse red-topped (?) weed
(_Amaranthus hybridus_), and spotted polygonum; these are the lusty
growing plants now, September 2d.
Tall, slender, minute white-flowered weed in gardens, annual fleabane
(_Erigeron Canadensis_).
* * * * *
One of my neighbors, of whom I borrowed a horse, cart, and harness
to-day, which last was in a singularly dilapidated condition,
considering that he is a wealthy farmer, did not know but I would make
a book about it.
* * * * *
As I was stalking over the surface of this planet in the dark to-night,
I started a plover resting on the ground and heard him go off with
whistling wings.
* * * * *
My friends wonder that I love to walk alone in solitary fields and
woods by night. Sometimes in my loneliest and wildest midnight walk
I hear the sound of the whistle and the rattle of the cars, where
perchance some of those very friends are being whirled by night over,
as they think, a well-known, safe, and public road. I see that men
do not make or choose their own paths, whether they are railroads
or trackless through the wilds, but what the powers permit each one
enjoys. My solitary course has the same sanction that the Fitchburg
Railroad has. If they have a charter from Massachusetts and—what is
of much more importance—from Heaven, to travel the course and in the
fashion they do, I have a charter, though it be from Heaven alone,
to travel the course I do,—to take the necessary lands and pay the
damages. It is by the grace of God in both cases.
* * * * *
Now, about the first of September, you will see flocks of small birds
forming compact and distinct masses, as if they were not only animated
by one spirit but actually held together by some invisible fluid or
film, and will hear the sound of their wings rippling or fanning the
air as they flow through it, flying, the whole mass, ricochet like a
single bird,—or as they flow over the fence. Their mind must operate
faster than man’s, in proportion as their bodies do.
* * * * *
What a generation this is! It travels with some brains in its hat,
with a couple of spare cigars on top of them. It carries a heart in its
breast, covered by a lozenge in its waistcoat pocket.
* * * * *
John Garfield brought me this morning (September 6th) a young great
heron (_Ardea Herodias_), which he shot this morning on a pine tree
on the North Branch. It measured four feet, nine inches, from bill
to toe and six feet in alar extent, and belongs to a different race
from myself and Mr. Frost. I am glad to recognize him for a native of
America,—why not an American citizen?
In the twilight, when you can only see the outlines of the trees in
the horizon, the elm-tops indicate where the houses are. I have looked
afar over fields and even over distant woods and distinguished the
conspicuous graceful, sheaf-like head of an elm which shadowed some
farmhouse. From the northwest (?) part of Sudbury you can see an elm on
the Boston road, on the hilltop in the horizon in Wayland, five or six
miles distant. The elm is a tree which can be distinguished farther off
perhaps than any other. The wheelwright still makes his hubs of it, his
spokes of white oak, his fellies of yellow oak, which does not crack on
the corners. In England, ’tis said, they use the ash for fellies.
There is a little grove in a swampy place in Conantum where some
rare things grow,—several bass trees, two kinds of ash, sassafras,
maidenhair fern, the white-berried plant (ivory?), etc., etc., and the
sweet viburnum (?) in the hedge near by.
This will be called the wet year of 1850. The river is as high now,
September 9th, as in the spring, and hence the prospects and the
reflections seen from the village are something novel.
* * * * *
Roman wormwood, pigweed, amaranth, polygonum, and one or two coarse
kinds of grass reign now in the cultivated fields.
Though the potatoes have man with all his implements on their side,
these rowdy and rampant weeds completely bury them, between the last
hoeing and the digging. The potatoes hardly succeed with the utmost
care: these weeds only ask to be _let alone_ a little while. I judge
that they have not got the rot. I sympathize with all this luxuriant
growth of weeds. Such is the year. The weeds grow as if in sport and
frolic.
* * * * *
You might say green as green-briar.
I do not know whether the practice of putting indigo-weed about horses’
tackling to keep off flies is well founded, but I hope it is, for I
have been pleased to notice that wherever I have occasion to tie a
horse I am sure to find indigo-weed not far off, and therefore this,
which is so universally dispersed, would be the fittest weed for this
purpose.
The thistle is now in bloom, which every child is eager to clutch
once,—just a child’s handful.
* * * * *
The prunella, self-heal, small purplish-flowered plant of low grounds.
* * * * *
Charles[55] grew up to be a remarkably eccentric man. He was of large
frame, athletic, and celebrated for his feats of strength. His lungs
were proportionally strong. There was a man who heard him named once,
and asked if it was the same Charles Dunbar whom he remembered when he
was a little boy walking on the coast of Maine. A man came down to the
shore and hailed a vessel that was sailing by. He should never forget
that man’s name.
* * * * *
It was well grassed, and delicate flowers grew in the middle of the
road.
I saw a delicate flower had grown up two feet high
Between the horses’ path and the wheel-track,
Which Dakin’s and Maynard’s wagons had
Passed over many a time.
An inch more to right or left had sealed its fate,
Or an inch higher. And yet it lived and flourished
As much as if it had a thousand acres
Of untrodden space around it, and never
Knew the danger it incurred.
It did not borrow trouble nor invite an
Evil fate by apprehending it.[56]
For though the distant market-wagon
Every other day inevitably rolled
This way, it just as inevitably rolled
In those ruts. And the same
Charioteer who steered the flower
Upward guided the horse and cart aside from it.
There were other flowers which you would say
Incurred less danger, grew more out of the way,
Which no cart rattled near, no walker daily passed,
But at length one rambling deviously—
For no rut restrained—plucked them,
And then it appeared that they stood
Directly in his way, though he had come
From farther than the market-wagon.
And then it appeared that this brave flower which grew between the
wheel and horse did actually stand farther out of the way than that
which stood in the wide prairie where the man of science plucked it.
To-day I climbed a handsome rounded hill
Covered with hickory trees, wishing to see
The country from its top, for low hills
Show unexpected prospects. I looked
Many miles over a woody lowland
Toward Marlborough, Framingham, and Sudbury;
And as I sat amid the hickory trees
And the young sumachs, enjoying the prospect, a neat herd of cows
approached, of unusually fair proportions and smooth, clean skins,
evidently petted by their owner, who must have carefully selected
them. One more confiding heifer, the fairest of the herd, did by
degrees approach as if to take some morsel from our hands, while
our hearts leaped to our mouths with expectation and delight. She by
degrees drew near with her fair limbs progressive, making pretense of
browsing; nearer and nearer, till there was wafted toward us the bovine
fragrance,—cream of all the dairies that ever were or will be,—and
then she raised her gentle muzzle toward us, and snuffed an honest
recognition within hand’s reach. I saw ’t was possible for his herd to
inspire with love the herdsman. She was as delicately featured as a
hind. Her hide was mingled white and fawn-color, and on her muzzle’s
tip there was a white spot not bigger than a daisy, and on her side
toward me the map of Asia plain to see.
Farewell, dear heifer! Though thou forgettest me, my prayer to heaven
shall be that thou may’st not forget thyself. There was a whole bucolic
in her snuff. I saw her name was Sumach. And by the kindred spots I
knew her mother, more sedate and matronly, with full-grown bag; and
on her sides was Asia, great and small, the plains of Tartary, even to
the pole, while on her daughter it was Asia Minor. She not disposed to
wanton with the herdsman.
And as I walked, she followed me, and took an apple from my hand, and
seemed to care more for the hand than apple. So innocent a face as I
have rarely seen on any creature, and I have looked in face of many
heifers. And as she took the apple from my hand, I caught the apple
of her eye. She smelled as sweet as the clethra blossom. There was no
sinister expression. And for horns, though she had them, they were so
well disposed in the right place, bent neither up nor down, I do not
now remember she had any. No horn was held toward me.[57]
_Sept. 11. Wednesday._ The river higher than I ever knew it at this
season, as high as in the spring.
* * * * *
Yesterday, September 14, walked to White Pond in Stow, on the
Marlborough road, having passed one pond called sometimes Pratt’s
Pond, sometimes Bottomless Pond, in Sudbury. Saw afterward another pond
beyond Willis’s also called Bottomless Pond, in a thick swamp. To name
two ponds bottomless when both of them have a bottom! Verily men choose
darkness rather than light.[58]
The farmers are now cutting—topping—their corn, gathering their early
fruit, raking their cranberries, digging their potatoes, etc.
Everything has its use, and man seeks sedulously for the best article
for each use. The watchmaker finds the oil of the porpoise’s jaw the
best for oiling his watches. Man has a million eyes, and the race knows
infinitely more than the individual. Consent to be wise through your
race.
* * * * *
Autumnal mornings, when the feet of countless sparrows are heard like
rain-drops on the roof by the boy who sleeps in the garret.
* * * * *
Villages with a single long street lined with trees, so straight and
wide that you can see a chicken run across it a mile off.
_Sept. 19._ The gerardia, yellow trumpet-like flower. Veiny-leaved
hawkweed (leaves handsome, radical excepting one or two; know
them well) (_Hieracium venosum_), flower like a dandelion.
Canada snapdragon, small pea-like blue flower in the wood-paths,
(_Antirrhinum Canadense_). Pine-weed, thickly branched low weed with
red seed-vessels, in wood-paths and fields, (_Sarothra gentianoides_).
Cucumber-root (_Medeola_). Tree-primrose. Red-stemmed cornel. The very
minute flower which grows now in the middle of the Marlborough road.
* * * * *
I am glad to have drunk water so long, as I prefer the natural sky
to an opium-eater’s heaven,—would keep sober always, and lead a
sane life not indebted to stimulants. Whatever my practice may be, I
believe that it is the only drink for a wise man, and only the foolish
habitually use any other. Think of dashing the hopes of a morning with
a cup of coffee, or of an evening with a dish of tea! Wine is not a
noble liquor, except when it is confined to the pores of the grape.
Even music is wont to be intoxicating. Such apparently slight causes
destroyed Greece and Rome, and will destroy England and America.[59]
I have seen where the rain dripped from the trees on a sand-bank on
the Marlborough road, that each little pebble which had protected the
sand made the summit of a sort of basaltic column of sand,—a phenomenon
which looked as if it might be repeated on a larger scale in nature.
The goldenrods and asters impress me not like individuals but great
families covering a thousand hills and having a season to themselves.
The indigo-weed turns black when dry, and I have been interested to
find in each of its humble seed-vessels a worm.
The Deep Cut is sometimes excited to productiveness by a rain in
midsummer. It impresses me somewhat as if it were a cave, with all its
stalactites turned wrong side outward. Workers in bronze should come
here for their patterns.
Those were carrots which I saw naturalized in Wheeler’s field. It was
four or five years since he planted there.
To-day I saw a sunflower in the woods.
It is pleasant to see the _Viola pedata_ blossoming again now, in
September, with a beauty somewhat serener than that of these yellow
flowers.
The trees on the bank of the river have white furrows worn about them,
marking the height of the freshets, at what levels the water has stood.
Water is so much more fine and sensitive an element than earth. A
single boatman passing up or down unavoidably shakes the whole of a
wide river, and disturbs its every reflection. The air is an element
which our voices shake still further than our oars the water.
The red maples on the river, standing far in the water when the
banks are overflown and touched by the earliest frosts, are memorable
features in the scenery of the stream at this season.
Now you can scent the ripe grapes far off on the banks as you row
along. Their fragrance is finer than their flavor.
My companion said he would drink when the boat got under the bridge,
because the water would be cooler in the shade, though the stream
quickly passes through the piers from shade to sun again. It is
something beautiful, the act of drinking, the stooping to imbibe some
of this widespread element, in obedience to instinct, without whim. We
do not so simply drink in other influences.
It is pleasant to have been to a place by the way a river went.
The forms of trees and groves change with every stroke of the oar.
It seems hardly worth the while to risk the dangers of the sea between
Leghorn and New York for the sake of a cargo of juniper berries and
bitter almonds.
Oh, if I could be intoxicated on air and water![60] on hope and memory!
and always see the maples standing red in the midst of the waters on
the meadow!
Those have met with losses, who have lost their children. I saw the
widow this morning whose son was drowned.
That I might never be blind to the beauty of the landscape! To hear
music without any vibrating cord!
A family in which there was singing in the morning. To hear a neighbor
singing! All other speech sounds thereafter like profanity. A man
cannot sing falsehood or cowardice; he must sing truth and heroism to
attune his voice to some instrument. It would be noblest to sing with
the wind. I have seen a man making himself a viol, patiently and fondly
paring the thin wood and shaping it, and when I considered the end of
the work he was ennobled in my eyes. He was building himself a ship
in which to sail to new worlds. I am much indebted to my neighbor who
will now and then in the intervals of his work draw forth a few strains
from his accordion. Though he is but a learner, I find when his strains
cease that I have been elevated.
The question is not whether you drink, but what liquor.
* * * * *
Plucked a wild rose the 9th of October on Fair Haven Hill.
Butter-and-eggs, which blossomed several months ago, still freshly [in]
bloom (October 11th).
He knew what shrubs were best for withes.
This is a remarkable year. Huckleberries are still quite abundant and
fresh on Conantum. There have been more berries than pickers or even
worms. (October 9th.)
I am always exhilarated, as were the early voyagers, by the sight
of sassafras (_Laurus Sassafras_). The green leaves bruised have the
fragrance of lemons and a thousand spices. To the same order belong
cinnamon, cassia, camphor.
Hickory is said to be an Indian name. (Nuttall’s continuation of
Michaux.)
The seed vessel of the sweet-briar is a very beautiful glossy
elliptical fruit. What with the fragrance of its leaves, its blossom,
and its fruit, it is thrice crowned.
* * * * *
I observed to-day (October 17th) the small blueberry bushes by the
path-side, now blood-red, full of white blossoms as in the spring, the
blossoms of spring contrasting strangely with the leaves of autumn. The
former seemed to have expanded from sympathy with the maturity of the
leaves.
* * * * *
Walter Colton in his “California”[61] says, “Age is no certain evidence
of merit, since folly runs to seed as fast as wisdom.”
The imagination never forgives an insult.