* * * * *

Left Concord, Wednesday morning, September 25th, 1850, for Quebec.

Fare $7.00 to and fro. Obliged to leave Montreal on return as soon as

Friday, October 4th. The country was new to me beyond Fitchburg.

In Ashburnham and afterwards I noticed the woodbine.[62]

[Eighty-four pages missing,—doubtless the Canada journal.]

* * * * *

However mean your life is, meet it and live; do not shun it and call it

hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are

richest. The faultfinder will find faults even in paradise. Love your

life, poor as it is. You may perchance have some pleasant, thrilling,

glorious hours, even in a poorhouse. The setting sun is reflected from

the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man’s house.

The snow melts before its door as early in the spring. I do not see

but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering

thoughts as anywhere, and, indeed, the town’s poor seem to live the

most independent lives of any. They are simply great enough to receive

without misgiving. Cultivate poverty like sage, like a garden herb. Do

not trouble yourself to get new things, whether clothes or friends.

That is dissipation. Turn the old; return to them. Things do not

change; we change. If I were confined to a corner in a garret all my

days, like a spider, the world would be just as large to me while I had

my thoughts.[63]

In all my travels I never came to the abode of the present.

I live in the angle of a leaden wall, into whose alloy was poured a

little bell-metal. Sometimes in the repose of my mid-day there reaches

my ears a confused tintinnabulum from without. It is the noise of my

contemporaries.[64]

That the brilliant leaves of autumn are not withered ones is proved by

the fact that they wilt when gathered as soon as the green.

But now, October 31st, they are all withered. This has been the most

perfect afternoon in the year. The air quite warm enough, perfectly

still and dry and clear, and not a cloud in the sky. Scarcely the song

of a cricket is heard to disturb the stillness. When they ceased their

song I do not know. I wonder that the impetus which our hearing had got

did not hurry us into deafness over a precipitous silence. There must

have been a thick web of cobwebs on the grass this morning, promising

this fair day, for I see them still through the afternoon, covering not

only the grass but the bushes and the trees. They are stretched across

the unfrequented roads from weed to weed, and broken by the legs of the

horses.

I thought to-day that it would be pleasing to study the dead and

withered plants, the ghosts of plants, which now remain in the fields,

for they fill almost as large a space to the eye as the green have

done. They live not in memory only, but to the fancy and imagination.

As we were passing through Ashburnham, by a new white house which stood

at some distance in a field, one passenger exclaimed so that all the

passengers could hear him, “There, there’s not so good a house as that

in all Canada.” And I did not much wonder at his remark. There is a

neatness as well as thrift and elastic comfort, a certain flexible

easiness of circumstance when not rich, about a New England house

which the Canadian houses do not suggest. Though of stone, they were

no better constructed than a stone barn would be with us. The only

building on which money and taste are expended is the church.[65] At

Beauport we examined a magnificent cathedral, not quite completed,

where I do not remember that there were any but the meanest houses in

sight around it.

Our Indian summer, I am tempted to say, is the finest season of the

year. Here has been such a day as I think Italy never sees.

Though it has been so warm to-day, I found some of the morning’s frost

still remaining under the north side of a wood, to my astonishment.

Why was this beautiful day made, and no man to improve it? We went

through Seven-Star (?) Lane to White Pond.

Looking through a stately pine grove, I saw the western sun falling in

golden streams through its aisles. Its west side, opposite to me, was

all lit up with golden light; but what was I to it? Such sights remind

me of houses which we never inhabit,—that commonly I am not at home in

the world. I see somewhat fairer than I enjoy or possess.

A fair afternoon, a celestial afternoon, cannot occur but we mar our

pleasure by reproaching ourselves that we do not make all our days

beautiful. The thought of what I am, of my pitiful conduct, deters me

from receiving what joy I might from the glorious days that visit me.

After the era of youth is passed, the knowledge of ourselves is an

alloy that spoils our satisfactions.

I am wont to think that I could spend my days contentedly in any

retired country house that I see; for I see it to advantage now and

without incumbrance; I have not yet imported my humdrum thoughts, my

prosaic habits, into it to mar the landscape. What is this beauty in

the landscape but a certain fertility in me? I look in vain to see it

realized but in my own life. If I could wholly cease to be ashamed of

myself, I think that all my days would be fair.

* * * * *

When I asked at the principal bookstore in Montreal to see such books

as were published there, the answer was that none were published there

but those of a statistical character and the like, that their books

came from the States.[66]

[Two thirds of a page missing]

As once he was riding past Jennie Dugan’s, was invited by her

boys to look into their mother’s spring-house. He looked in. It

_was_ a delectable place to keep butter and milk cool and sweet in

dog-days,—but there was a leopard frog swimming in the milk, and

another sitting on the edge of the pan.

[Half a page missing.]

Thou art a personality so vast and universal that I have never seen

one of thy features. I am suddenly very near to another land than can

be bought and sold; this is not Charles Miles’s swamp. This is a far,

far-away field on the confines of the actual Concord, where nature is

partially present. These farms I have myself surveyed; these lines I

have run; these bounds I have set up; they have no chemistry to fix

them; they fade from the surface of the glass (the picture); this light

is too strong for them.

[Four and two thirds pages missing.]

My dear, my dewy sister, let thy rain descend on me. I not only love

thee, but I love the best of thee; that is to love thee rarely. I do

not love thee every day. Commonly I love those who are less than thou.

I love thee only on great days. Thy dewy words feed me like the manna

of the morning. I am as much thy sister as thy brother. Thou art as

much my brother as my sister. It is a portion of thee and a portion of

me which are of kin. Thou dost not have to woo me. I do not have to woo

thee. O my sister! O Diana, thy tracks are on the eastern hills. Thou

surely passedst that way. I, the hunter, saw them in the morning dew.

My eyes are the hounds that pursue thee. Ah, my friend, what if I do

not answer thee? I hear thee. Thou canst speak; I cannot. I hear and

forget to answer. I am occupied with hearing. I awoke and thought of

thee; thou wast present to my mind. How camest thou there? Was I not

present to thee likewise?[67]

* * * * *

The oystermen had anchored their boat near the shore without regard to

the state of the tide, and when we came to it to set sail, just after

noon, we found that it was aground. Seeing that they were preparing to

push it off, I was about to take off my shoes and stockings in order

to wade to it first, but a Dutch sailor with a singular bullfrog or

trilobite expression of the eyes, whose eyes were like frog ponds in

the broad platter of his cheeks and gleamed like a pool covered with

frog-spittle, immediately offered me the use of his back. So mounting,

with my legs under his arms, and hugging him like one of [the] family,

he set me aboard of the periauger?

They then leaned their hardest against the stern, bracing their feet

against the sandy bottom in two feet of water, the Dutchman with his

broad back among them. In the most Dutch-like and easy way they applied

themselves to this labor, while the skipper tried to raise the bows,

never jerking or hustling but silently exerting what vigor was inherent

in them, doing, no doubt, their utmost endeavor, while I pushed with a

spike pole; but it was all in vain. It was decided to be unsuccessful;

we did not disturb its bed by a grain of sand. “Well, what now?” said

I. “How long have we got to wait?” “Till the tide rises,” said the

captain. But no man knew of the tide, how it was. So I went in to

bathe, looking out for sharks and chasing crabs, and the Dutchman waded

out among the mussels to spear a crab. The skipper stuck a clamshell

into the sand at the water’s edge to discover if it was rising, and the

sailors,—the Dutchman and the other,—having got more drink at Oakes’s,

stretched themselves on the seaweed close to the water’s edge [and]

went to sleep. After an hour or more we could discover no change in the

shell even by a hair’s breadth, from which we learned that it was about

the turn of the tide and we must wait some hours longer.[68]

I once went in search of the relics of a human body—a week after a

wreck—which had been cast up the day before on to the beach, though

the sharks had stripped off the flesh. I got the direction from a

lighthouse. I should find it a mile or two distant over the sand, a

dozen rods from the water, by a stick which was stuck up covered with

a cloth. Pursuing the direction pointed out, I expected that I should

have to look very narrowly at the sand to find so small an object,

but so completely smooth and bare was the beach—half a mile wide of

sand—and so magnifying the mirage toward the sea that when I was half

a mile distant the insignificant stick or sliver which marked the spot

looked like a broken mast in the sand. As if there was no other object,

this trifling sliver had puffed itself up to the vision to fill the

void; and there lay the relics in a certain state, rendered perfectly

inoffensive to both bodily and spiritual eye by the surrounding

scenery,—a slight inequality in the sweep of the shore. Alone with

the sea and the beach, attending to the sea, whose hollow roar seemed

addressed to the ears of the departed,—articulate speech to them. It

was as conspicuous on that sandy plain as if a generation had labored

to pile up a cairn there. Where there were so few objects, the least

was obvious as a mausoleum. It reigned over the shore. That dead body

possessed the shore as no living one could. It showed a title to the

sands which no living ruler could.[69]

My father was commissary at Fort Independence in the last war. He says

that the baker whom he engaged returned eighteen ounces of bread for

sixteen of flour, and was glad of the job on those terms.

* * * * *

In a pleasant spring morning all men’s sins are forgiven. You may have

known your neighbor yesterday for a drunkard and a thief, and merely

pitied or despised him, and despaired of the world; but the sun shines

bright and warm this first spring morning, and you meet him quietly,

serenely at any work, and see how even his exhausted, debauched veins

and nerves expand with still joy and bless the new day, feel the spring

influence with the innocence[70] [Two thirds of a page missing.]

* * * * *

There is a good echo from that wood to one standing on the side of

Fair Haven. It was particularly good to-day. The woodland lungs seemed

particularly sound to-day; they echoed your shout with a fuller and

rounder voice than it was given in, seeming to _mouth_ it. It was

uttered with a sort of sweeping intonation half round a vast circle,

_ore rotundo_, by a broad dell among the tree-tops passing it round to

the entrance of all the aisles of the wood. You had to choose the right

key or pitch, else the woods would not echo it with any spirit, and so

with eloquence. Of what significance is any sound if Nature does not

echo it? It does not prevail. It dies away as soon as uttered. I wonder

that wild men have not made more of echoes, or that we do not hear that

they have made more. It would be a pleasant, a soothing and cheerful

mission to go about the country in search of them,—articulating,

speaking, vocal, oracular, resounding, sonorous, hollow, prophetic

places; places wherein to found an oracle, sites for oracles, sacred

ears of Nature.

I used to strike with a paddle on the side of my boat on Walden Pond,

filling the surrounding woods with circling and dilating sound, awaking

the woods, “stirring them up,” as a keeper of a menagerie his lions

and tigers, a growl from all. All melody is a sweet echo, as it were

coincident with [the] movement of our organs. We wake the echo of the

place we are in, its slumbering music.

I should think that savages would have made a god of echo.

I will call that Echo Wood.

Crystal Water for White Pond.

There was a sawmill once on Nut Meadow Brook, near Jennie’s Road. These

little brooks have their history. They once turned sawmills. They even

used their _influence_ to destroy the primitive [forests] which grew on

their banks, and now, for their reward, the sun is let in to dry them

up and narrow their channels. Their crime rebounds against themselves.

You still find the traces of ancient dams where the simple brooks

were taught to use their influence to destroy the primitive forests on

their borders, and now for penalty they flow in shrunken channels, with

repentant and plaintive tinkling through the wood, being by an evil

spirit turned against their neighbor forests.

What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free,

meandering brook.

* * * * *

You must walk like a camel, which is said to be the only beast which

ruminates when it walks.

* * * * *

The actual life of men is not without a dramatic interest to the

thinker. It is not in all its respects prosaic. Seventy thousand

pilgrims proceed annually to Mecca from the various nations of Islam.

* * * * *

I was one evening passing a retired farmhouse which had a smooth green

plat before it, just after sundown, when I saw a hen turkey which had

gone to roost on the front fence with her wings outspread over her

young now pretty well advanced, who were roosting on the next rail

a foot or two below her. It completed a picture of rural repose and

happiness such as I had not seen for a long time. A particularly neat

and quiet place, where the very ground was swept around the wood-pile.

The neighboring fence of roots, agreeable forms for the traveller to

study, like the bones of marine monsters and the horns of mastodons or

megatheriums.

* * * * *

You might say of a philosopher that he was in this world as a spectator.

* * * * *

A squaw came to our door to-day with two pappooses, and said, “Me

want a pie.” Theirs is not common begging. You are merely the rich

Indian who shares his goods with the poor. They merely offer you an

opportunity to be generous and hospitable.

Equally simple was the observation which an Indian made at Mr. Hoar’s

door the other day, who went there to sell his baskets. “No, we don’t

want any,” said the one who went to the door. “What! do you mean to

starve us?” asked the Indian in astonishment, as he was going out

[_sic_] the gate. The Indian seems to have said: I too will do like the

white man; I will go into business. He sees his white neighbors well

off around him, and he thinks that if he only enters on the profession

of basket-making, riches will flow in unto him as a matter of course;

just as the lawyer weaves arguments, and by some magical means wealth

and standing follow. He thinks that when he has made the baskets he

has done his part, now it is yours to buy them. He has not discovered

that it is necessary for him to make it worth your while to buy them,

or make some which it will be worth your while to buy. With great

simplicity he says to himself: I too will be a man of business; I will

go into trade. It isn’t enough simply to make baskets. You have got to

sell them.[71]

* * * * *

I have an uncle who once, just as he stepped on to the dock at New

York from a steamboat, saw some strange birds in the water and called

to [a] Gothamite to know what they were. Just then his hat blew off

into the dock, and the man answered by saying, “Mister, your hat is

off,” whereupon my uncle, straightening himself up, asked again with

vehemence, “Blast you, sir, I want to know what those birds are.” By

the time that he had got this information, a sailor had recovered his

hat.

_Nov. 8._ The stillness of the woods and fields is remarkable at this

season of the year. There is not even the creak of a cricket to be

heard. Of myriads of dry shrub oak leaves, not one rustles. Your own

breath can rustle them, yet the breath of heaven does not suffice to.

The trees have the aspect of waiting for winter. The autumnal leaves

have lost their color; they are now truly sere, dead, and the woods

wear a sombre color. Summer and harvest are over. The hickories,

birches, chestnuts, no less than the maples, have lost their leaves.

The sprouts, which had shot up so vigorously to repair the damage which

the choppers had done, have stopped short for the winter. Everything

stands silent and expectant. If I listen, I hear only the note of a

chickadee,—our most common and I may say native bird, most identified

with our forests,—or perchance the scream of a jay, or perchance from

the solemn depths of these woods I hear tolling far away the knell

of one departed. Thought rushes in to fill the vacuum. As you walk,

however, the partridge still bursts away. The silent, dry, almost

leafless, certainly fruitless woods. You wonder what cheer that bird

can find in them. The partridge bursts away from the foot of a shrub

oak like its own dry fruit, immortal bird! This sound still startles

us. Dry goldenrods, now turned gray and white, lint our clothes as we

walk. And the drooping, downy seed-vessels of the epilobium remind us

of the summer. Perchance you will meet with a few solitary asters in

the dry fields, with a little color left. The sumach is stripped of

everything but its cone of red berries.

This is a peculiar season, peculiar for its stillness. The crickets

have ceased their song. The few birds are well-nigh silent. The tinted

and gay leaves are now sere and dead, and the woods wear a sombre

aspect. A carpet of snow under the pines and shrub oaks will make it

look more cheerful. Very few plants have now their spring. But thoughts

still spring in man’s brain. There are no flowers nor berries to speak

of. The grass begins to die at top. In the morning it is stiff with

frost. Ice has been discovered in somebody’s tub very early this morn,

of the thickness of a dollar. The flies are betwixt life and death.

The wasps come into the houses and settle on the walls and windows. All

insects go into crevices. The fly is entangled in a web and struggles

vainly to escape, but there is no spider to secure him; the corner

of the pane is a deserted camp. When I lived in the woods the wasps

came by thousands to my lodge in November, as to winter quarters,

and settled on my windows and on the walls over my head, sometimes

deterring visitors from entering. Each morning, when they were numbed

with cold, I swept some of them out. But I did not trouble myself

to get rid of them. They never molested me, though they bedded with

me, and they gradually disappeared into what crevices I do not know,

avoiding winter.[72] I saw a squash-bug go slowly behind a clapboard to

avoid winter. As some of these melon seeds come up in the garden again

in the spring, so some of these squash-bugs come forth. The flies are

for a long time in a somnambulic state. They have too little energy or

_vis vitæ_ to clean their wings or heads, which are covered with dust.

They buzz and bump their heads against the windows two or three times a

day, or lie on their backs in a trance, and that is all,—two or three

short spurts. One of these mornings we shall hear that Mr. Minott had

to break the ice to water his cow. And so it will go on till the ground

freezes. If the race had never lived through a winter, what would they

think was coming?

[Illustration: _November Woods_]

Walden Pond has at last fallen a little. It has been so high over

the stones—quite into the bushes—that walkers have been excluded from

it.[73] There has been no accessible shore. All ponds have been high.

The water stood higher than usual in the distant ponds which I visited

and had never seen before. It has been a peculiar season. At Goose

Pond, I notice that the birches of one year’s growth from the stumps

standing in the water are all dead, apparently killed by the water,

unless, like the pine, they die down after springing from the stump.

It is warm somewhere any day in the year. You will find some nook

in the woods generally, at mid-forenoon of the most blustering day,

where you may forget the cold. I used to resort to the northeast side

of Walden, where the sun, reflected from the pine woods on the stony

shore, made it the fireside of the pond. It is so much pleasanter and

wholesomer to be warmed by the sun when you can, than by a fire.

I saw to-day a double reflection on the pond of the cars passing, one

beneath the other, occasioned by a bright rippled streak on the surface

of the water, from which a second reflection sprang.

* * * * *

One who would study lichens must go into a new country where the rocks

have not been burned.

* * * * *

Therien says that the Canadians say _marche-donc_ to their horses; and

that the acid fruit must be spelled _painbéna_.[74] He says that the

French acre or _arpent_ is ten perches by ten, of eighteen feet each.

_Nov. 9._ It is a pleasant surprise to walk over a hill where an old

wood has recently been cut off, and, on looking round, to see, instead

of dense ranks of trees almost impermeable to light, distant well-known

blue mountains in the horizon and perchance a white village over an

expanded open country. I now take this in preference to all my old

familiar walks. So a new prospect and walks can be created where we

least expected it. The old men have seen other prospects from these

hills than we do. There was the old Kettell place, now Watt’s, which

I surveyed for him last winter and lotted off, where twenty-five years

ago I played horse in the paths of a thick wood and roasted apples and

potatoes in an old pigeon-place[75] and gathered fruit at the pie-apple

tree. A week or two after I surveyed it, it now being rotten and

going to waste, I walked there and was surprised to find the place and

prospect which I have described.

I found many fresh violets (_Viola pedata_) to-day (November 9th) in

the woods.

Saw a cat on the Great Fields, wilder than a rabbit, hunting artfully.

I remember to have seen one once walking about the stony shore at

Walden Pond. It is not often that they wander so far from the houses.

I once, however, met with a cat with young kittens in the woods, quite

wild.[76]

The leaves of the larch are now yellow and falling off. Just a month

ago, I observed that the white pines were parti-colored, green and

yellow, the needles of the previous year now falling. Now I do not

observe any yellow ones, and I expect to find that it is only for a

few weeks in the fall after the new leaves have done growing that there

are any yellow and falling,—that there is a season when we may say the

old pine leaves are now yellow, and again, they are fallen. The trees

were not so tidy then; they are not so full now. They look best when

contrasted with a field of snow.

A rusty sparrow or two only remains to people the drear spaces. It goes

to roost without neighbors.

It is pleasant to observe any growth in a wood. There is the pitch

pine field northeast of Beck Stow’s Swamp, where some years ago I went

a-blackberrying and observed that the pitch pines were beginning to

come in, and I have frequently noticed since how fairly they grew,

dotting the plain as evenly as if dispersed by art. To-day I was aware

that I walked in a pitch pine wood, which ere long, perchance, I may

survey and lot off for a wood auction and see the choppers at their

work. There is also the old pigeon-place field by the Deep Cut. I

remember it as an open grassy field. It is now one of our most pleasant

woodland paths. In the former place, near the edge of the old wood, the

young pines line each side of the path like a palisade, they grow so

densely. It never rains but it pours, and so I think when I see a young

grove of pitch pines crowding each other to death in this wide world.

These are destined for the locomotive’s maw. These branches, which it

has taken so many years to mature, are regarded even by the woodman as

“trash.”

Delicate, dry, feathery (perchance fescue) grasses growing out of a

tuft, gracefully bending over the pathway. I do not know what they are,

but they belong to the season.

The chickadees, if I stand long enough, hop nearer and nearer

inquisitively, from pine bough to pine bough, till within four or five

feet, occasionally lisping a note.

The pitcher-plant, though a little frost-bitten and often cut off by

the mower, now stands full of water in the meadows. I never found one

that had not an insect in it.

I sometimes see well-preserved walls running straight through the midst

of high and old woods, built, of course, when the soil was cultivated

many years ago, and am surprised to see slight stones still lying one

upon another, as the builder placed them, while this huge oak has grown

up from a chance acorn in the soil.

Though a man were known to have only one acquaintance in the world,

yet there are so many men in the world, and they are so much alike,

that when he spoke what might be construed personally, no one would

know certainly whom he meant. Though there were but two on a desolate

island, they would conduct toward each other in this respect as if each

had intercourse with a thousand others.

* * * * *

I saw in Canada two or three persons wearing homespun gray greatcoats,

with comical and conical hoods which fell back on their backs between

the shoulders, like small bags ready to be turned up over the head when

need was, though then a hat usurped that place. I saw that these must

be what are called capots. They looked as if they would be convenient

and proper enough as long as the coats were new and tidy, but as if

they would soon come to look like rags and unsightly.[77]

_Nov. 11._ Gathered to-day the autumnal dandelion (?) and the common

dandelion.

Some farmers’ wives use the white ashes of corn-cobs instead of

pearlash.

I am attracted by a fence made of white pine roots. There is, or rather

was, one (for it has been tipped into the gutter this year) on the road

to Hubbard’s Bridge which I can remember for more than twenty years.

It is almost as indestructible as a wall and certainly requires fewer

repairs. It is light, white, and dry withal, and its fantastic forms

are agreeable to my eye. One would not have believed that any trees

had such snarled and gnarled roots. In some instances you have a coarse

network of roots as they interlaced on the surface perhaps of a swamp,

which, set on its edge, really looks like a fence, with its paling

crossing at various angles, and root repeatedly growing into root,—a

rare phenomenon above ground,—so as to leave open spaces, square and

diamond-shaped and triangular, quite like a length of fence. It is

remarkable how white and clean these roots are, and that no lichens,

or very few, grow on them; so free from decay are they. The different

branches of the roots continually grow into one another, so as to make

grotesque figures, sometimes rude harps whose resonant strings of roots

give a sort of musical sound when struck, such as the earth spirit

might play on. Sometimes the roots are of a delicate wine-color here

and there, an evening tint. No line of fence could be too long for

me to study each individual stump. Rocks would have been covered with

lichens by this time. Perhaps they are grown into one another that they

may stand more firmly.

Now is the time for wild apples. I pluck them as a wild fruit native

to this quarter of the earth, fruit of old trees that have been dying

ever since I was a boy and are not yet dead. From the appearance of

the tree you would expect nothing but lichens to drop from it, but

underneath your faith is rewarded by finding the ground strewn with

spirited fruit. Frequented only by the woodpecker, deserted now by the

farmer, who has not faith enough to look under the boughs.[78] Food for

walkers. Sometimes apples red inside, perfused with a beautiful blush,

faery food, too beautiful to eat,—apple of the evening sky, of the

Hesperides.[79]

This afternoon I heard a single cricket singing, chirruping, in a bank,

the only one I have heard for a long time, like a squirrel or a little

bird, clear and shrill,—as I fancied, like an evening robin, singing

in this evening of the year. A very fine and poetical strain for such a

little singer. I had never before heard the cricket so like a bird. It

is a remarkable note. The earth-song.

That delicate, waving, feathery dry grass which I saw yesterday is to

be remembered with the autumn. The dry grasses are not dead for me. A

beautiful form has as much life at one season as another.

I notice that everywhere in the pastures minute young fragrant

life-everlasting, with only four or five flat-lying leaves and

thread-like roots, all together as big as a fourpence, spot the ground,

like winter rye and grass which roots itself in the fall against

another year. These little things have bespoken their places for the

next season. They have a little pellet of cotton or down in their

centres, ready for an early start in the spring.

The autumnal (?) dandelion is still bright.

I saw an old bone in the woods covered with lichens, which looked like

the bone of an old settler, which yet some little animal had recently

gnawed, and I plainly saw the marks of its teeth, so indefatigable is

Nature to strip the flesh from bones and return it to dust again. No

little rambling beast can go by some dry and ancient bone but he must

turn aside and try his teeth upon it. An old bone is knocked about till

it becomes dust; Nature has no mercy on it. It was quite too ancient

to suggest disagreeable associations. It was like a piece of dry pine

root. It survives like the memory of a man. With time all that was

personal and offensive wears off. The tooth of envy may sometimes

gnaw it and reduce it more rapidly, but it is much more a prey to

forgetfulness. Lichens grow upon it, and at last, in what moment no

man knows, it has completely wasted away and ceases to be a bone any

longer.

The fields are covered now with the empty cups of the _Trichostema

dichotomum_, all dry.

We had a remarkable sunset to-night. I was walking in the meadow, the

source of Nut Meadow Brook.[80]

[Two pages missing.]

We walked in so pure and bright a light, so softly and serenely

bright, I thought I had never bathed in such a golden flood, without

a ripple or a murmur to it. The west side of every wood and rising

ground gleamed like the boundary of Elysium.[81] An adventurous spirit

turns the evening into morning. A little black brook in the midst of

the marsh, just beginning to meander, winding slowly round a decaying

stump,—an artery of the meadow.[82]

Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout

in the milk.

A people who would begin by burning the fences and let the forest

stand! I saw the fences half consumed, their ends lost in the middle

of the prairie, and some worldly miser with a surveyor looking after

his bounds, while heaven had taken place around him, and he did not see

the angels around, but was looking for an old post-hole in the midst of

paradise. I looked again and saw him standing in the middle of a boggy

Stygian fen, surrounded by devils, and he had found his bounds without

a doubt, three little stones where a stake had been driven, and,

looking nearer, I saw that the Prince of Darkness was his surveyor.[83]

_Nov. 14._ Saw to-day, while surveying in the Second Division woods, a

singular round mound in a valley, made perhaps sixty or seventy years

ago. Cyrus Stow thought it was a pigeon-bed, but I soon discovered

the coal and that it was an old coal-pit. I once mistook one in the

Maine woods for an Indian mound. The indestructible charcoal told the

tale. I had noticed singular holes and trenches in the former wood, as

if a fox had been dug out. The sun has probably been let in here many

times, and this has been a cultivated field; and now it is clothed in

a savage dress again. The wild, rank, luxuriant place is where mosses

and lichens abound. We find no heroes’ cairns except those of heroic

colliers, who once sweated here begrimed and dingy, who lodged here,

tending their fires, who lay on a beetle here, perchance, to keep

awake.

_Nov. 15._ I saw to-day a very perfect lichen on a rock in a meadow.

It formed a perfect circle about fifteen inches in diameter though the

rock was uneven, and was handsomely shaded by a darker stripe of older

leaves, an inch or more wide, just within its circumference, like a

rich lamp-mat. The recent growth on the outside, half an inch in width,

was a sort of tea-green or bluish-green color.

The ivy berries are now sere and yellowish, or sand-colored, like the

berries of the dogwood.

The farmers are now casting out their manure, and removing the

muck-heap from the shore of ponds where it will be inaccessible in the

winter; or are doing their fall plowing, which destroys many insects

and mellows the soil. I also see some pulling their turnips, and even

getting in corn which has been left out notwithstanding the crows.

Those who have wood to sell, as the weather grows colder and people can

better appreciate the value of fuel, lot off their woods and advertise

a wood auction.

* * * * *

You can tell when a cat has seen a dog by the size of her tail.

_Nov. 16._ I found three good arrowheads to-day behind Dennis’s. The

season for them began some time ago, as soon as the farmers had sown

their winter rye, but the spring, after the melting of the snow, is

still better.

I am accustomed to regard the smallest brook with as much interest for

the time being as if it were the Orinoco or Mississippi. What is the

difference, I would like to know, but mere size? And when a tributary

rill empties in, it is like the confluence of famous rivers I have read

of. When I cross one on a fence, I love to pause in mid-passage and

look down into the water, and study its bottom, its little mystery.

There is none so small but you may see a pickerel regarding you with

a wary eye, or a pygmy trout glance from under the bank, or in spring,

perchance, a sucker will have found its way far up its stream. You are

sometimes astonished to see a pickerel far up some now shrunken rill,

where it is a mere puddle by the roadside. I have stooped to drink at

a clear spring no bigger than a bushel basket in a meadow, from which a

rill was scarcely seen to dribble away, and seen lurking at its bottom

two little pickerel not so big as my finger, sole monarchs of this

their ocean, and who probably would never visit a larger water.

In literature it is only the wild that attracts us. Dullness is only

another name for tameness. It is the untamed, uncivilized, free, and

wild thinking in Hamlet, in the Iliad, and in all the scriptures and

mythologies that delights us,—not learned in the schools, not refined

and polished by art. A truly good book is something as wildly natural

and primitive, mysterious and marvellous, ambrosial and fertile, as

a fungus or a lichen.[84] Suppose the muskrat or beaver were to turn

his views [_sic_] to literature, what fresh views of nature would he

present! The fault of our books and other deeds is that they are too

humane, I want something speaking in some measure to the condition of

muskrats and skunk-cabbage as well as of men,—not merely to a pining

and complaining coterie of philanthropists.

I discover again about these times that cranberries are good to eat in

small quantities as you are crossing the meadows.

I hear deep amid the birches some row among the birds or the squirrels,

where evidently some mystery is being developed to them. The jay is on

the alert, mimicking every woodland note. What _has_ happened? Who’s

dead? The twitter retreats before you, and you are never let into the

secret. Some tragedy surely is being enacted, but murder will out. How

many little dramas are enacted in the depth of the woods at which man

is not present!

When I am considering which way I will walk, my needle is slow to

settle, my compass varies by a few degrees and does not always point

due southwest; and there is good authority for these variations in the

heavens. It pursues the straighter course for it at last, like the ball

which has come out of a rifle, or the quoit that is twirled when cast.

To-day it is some particular wood or meadow or deserted pasture in that

direction that is my southwest.[85]

I love my friends very much, but I find that it is of no use to go

to see them. I hate them commonly when I am near them. They belie

themselves and deny me continually.

Somebody shut the cat’s tail in the door just now, and she made such

a caterwaul as has driven two whole worlds out of my thoughts. I saw

unspeakable things in the sky and looming in the horizon of my mind,

and now they are all reduced to a cat’s tail. Vast films of thought

floated through my brain, like clouds pregnant with rain enough to

fertilize and restore a world, and now they are all dissipated.

There is a place whither I should walk to-day. Though oftenest I fail

to find, when by accident I ramble into it, great is my delight. I have

stood by my door sometimes half an hour, irresolute as to what course

I should take.[86]

Apparently all but the evergreens and oaks have lost their leaves now.

It is singular that the shrub oaks retain their leaves through the

winter. Why do they?

The walnut trees spot the sky with black nuts. Only catkins are seen on

the birches.

I saw the other day a dead limb which the wind or some other cause had

broken nearly off, which had lost none of its leaves, though all the

rest of the tree, which was flourishing, had shed them.

There seems to be in the fall a sort of attempt at a spring, a

rejuvenescence, as if the winter were not expected by a part of nature.

Violets, dandelions, and some other flowers blossom again, and mulleins

and innumerable other plants begin again to spring and are only checked

by the increasing cold. There is a slight uncertainty whether there

will be any winter this year.

I was pleased to-day to hear a great noise and trampling in the woods

produced by some cows which came running toward their homes, which

apparently had been scared by something unusual, as their ancestors

might have been by wolves. I have known sheep to be scared in the same

[way] and a whole flock to run bleating to me for protection.

What shall we do with a man who is afraid of the woods, their solitude

and darkness? What salvation is there for him? God is silent and

mysterious.

Some of our richest days are those in which no sun shines outwardly,

but so much the more a sun shines inwardly. I love nature, I love

the landscape, because it is so sincere. It never cheats me. It never

jests. It is cheerfully, musically earnest. I lie and relie [_sic_] on

the earth.

Land where the wood has been cut off and is just beginning to come up

again is called sprout land.

The sweet-scented life-everlasting has not lost its scent yet, but

smells like the balm of the fields.

The partridge-berry leaves checker the ground on the side of

moist hillsides in the woods. Are _they_ not properly called

_checker_-berries?

The era of wild apples will soon be over. I wander through old orchards

of great extent, now all gone to decay, all of native fruit which for

the most part went to the cider-mill. But since the temperance reform

and the general introduction of grafted fruit, no wild apples, such as

I see everywhere in deserted pastures, and where the woods have grown

up among them, are set out. I fear that he who walks over these hills

a century hence will not know the pleasure of knocking off wild apples.

Ah, poor man! there are many pleasures which he will be debarred from!

Notwithstanding the prevalence of the Baldwin and the Porter, I doubt

if as extensive orchards are set out to-day in this town as there were

a century ago, when these vast straggling cider-orchards were planted.

Men stuck in a tree then by every wall-side and let it take its chance.

I see nobody planting trees to-day in such out of the way places, along

almost every road and lane and wall-side, and at the bottom of dells

in the wood. Now that they have grafted trees and pay a price for them,

they collect them into a plot by their houses and fence them in.[87]

My Journal should be the record of my love. I would write in it only

of the things I love, my affection for any aspect of the world, what

I love to think of. I have no more distinctness or pointedness in my

yearnings than an expanding bud, which does indeed point to flower and

fruit, to summer and autumn, but is aware of the warm sun and spring

influence only. I feel ripe for something, yet do nothing, can’t

discover what that thing is. I feel fertile merely. It is seedtime with

me. I have lain fallow long enough.

Notwithstanding a sense of unworthiness which possesses me, not without

reason, notwithstanding that I regard myself as a good deal of a scamp,

yet for the most part the spirit of the universe is unaccountably

kind to me, and I enjoy perhaps an unusual share of happiness. Yet I

question sometimes if there is not some settlement to come.

_Nov. 17._ It is a strange age of the world this, when empires,

kingdoms, and republics come a-begging to our doors and utter their

complaints at our elbows. I cannot take up a newspaper but I find that

some wretched government or other, hard pushed and on its last legs,

is interceding with me, the reader, to vote for it,—more importunate

than an Italian beggar. Why does it not keep its castle in silence, as

I do? The poor President, what with preserving his popularity and doing

his duty, does not know what to do. If you do not read the newspapers,

you may be impeached for treason. The newspapers are the ruling power.

What Congress does is an afterclap. Any other government is reduced to

a few marines at Fort Independence. If a man neglects to read the Daily

Times, government will go on its knees to him; this is the only treason

in these days. The newspapers devote some of their columns specially to

government and politics without charge, and this is all that saves it,

but I never read those columns.[88]

I found this afternoon, in a field of winter rye, a snapping turtle’s

egg, white and elliptical like a pebble, mistaking it for which I broke

it. The little turtle was perfectly formed, even to the dorsal ridge,

which was distinctly visible.

* * * * *

“Chesipooc Sinus” is on Wytfliet’s Map of 159-.

Even the Dutch were forward to claim the great river of Canada. In a

map of New Belgium in Ogilby’s “America,” 1670, the St. Lawrence is

also called “De Groote Rivier van Niew Nederlandt.”[89]

On this same map, east of Lake Champlain, called “Lacus Irocoisiensis”

or in Dutch “Meer der Irocoisen,” is a chain of mountains answering to

the Green Mountains of Vermont, and “Irocoisia,” or the country of the

Iroquois, between the mountains and the lake.

_Nov. 19._ The first really cold day. I find, on breaking off a shrub

oak leaf, a little life at the foot of the leafstalk, so that a part

of the green comes off. It has not died quite down to the point of

separation, as it will do, I suppose, before spring. Most of the oaks

have lost their leaves except on the lower branches, as if they were

less exposed and less mature there, and felt the changes of the seasons

less. The leaves have either fallen or withered long since, yet I

found this afternoon, cold as it is,—and there has been snow in the

neighborhood,—some sprouts which had come up this year from the stump

of a young black-looking oak, covered still with handsome fresh red

and green leaves, very large and unwithered and unwilted. It was on

the south side of Fair Haven in a warm angle, where the wood was cut

last winter and the exposed edge of the still standing wood running

north and south met the cliff at right angles and served for a fence to

keep off the wind. There were one or two stumps here whose sprouts had

fresh leaves which transported me back to October. Yet the surrounding

shrub oak leaves were as dry and dead as usual. There were also some

minute birches only a year old, their leaves still freshly yellow, and

some young wild apple trees apparently still growing, their leaves as

green and tender as in summer. The goldenrods, one or more species of

the white and some yellow ones, were many of them still quite fresh,

though elsewhere they are all whitish and dry. I saw one whose top

rose above the edge of a rock, and so much of it was turned white and

dry; but the lower part of its raceme was still yellow. Some of the

white species seemed to have started again as if for another spring.

They had sprung up freshly a foot or more, and were budded to blossom,

fresh and green. And sometimes on the same stem were old and dry and

white downy flowers, and fresh green blossom-buds not yet expanded. I

saw there some _pale_ blue asters still bright, and the mullein leaves

still large and green, one green to its top. And I discovered that when

I put my hand on the mullein leaves they felt decidedly warm, but the

radical leaves of the goldenrods felt cold and clammy. There was also

the columbine, its leaves still alive and green; and I was pleased to

smell the pennyroyal which I had bruised, though this dried up long

ago. Each season is thus drawn out and lingers in certain localities,

as the birds and insects know very well. If you penetrate to some

warm recess under a cliff in the woods, you will be astonished at the

amount of summer life that still flourishes there. No doubt more of

the summer’s life than we are aware thus slips by and outmanœuvres the

winter, gliding from fence to fence. I have no doubt that a diligent

search in proper places would discover many more of our summer flowers

thus lingering till the snow came, than we suspect. It is as if the

plant made no preparation for winter.

Now that the grass is withered and the leaves are withered or fallen,

it begins to appear what is evergreen: the partridge[-berry] and

checkerberry, and wintergreen leaves even, are more conspicuous.

The old leaves have been off the pines now for a month.

I once found a kernel of corn in the middle of a deep wood by Walden,

tucked in behind a lichen on a pine, about as high as my head, either

by a crow or a squirrel. It was a mile at least from any corn-field.

Several species plainly linger till the snow comes.

_Nov. 20._ It is a common saying among country people that if you eat

much fried hasty pudding it will make your hair curl. My experience,

which was considerable, did not confirm this assertion.

Horace Hosmer was picking out to-day half a bushel or more of a

different and better kind of cranberry, as he thought, separating them

from the rest. They are very dark red, shaded with lighter, harder and

more oblong, somewhat like the fruit of the sweet-briar or a Canada red

plum, though I have no common cranberry to compare with them. He says

that they grow apart from the others. I must see him about it. It may

prove to be one more of those instances in which the farmer detects

a new species and makes use of the knowledge from year to year in his

profession, while the botanist expressly devoted to such investigation

has failed to observe it.

The farmer, in picking over many bushels of cranberries year after

year, finds at length, or has forced upon his observation, a new

species of that berry, and avails himself thereafter of his discovery

for many years before the naturalist is aware of the fact.

Desor, who has been among the Indians at Lake Superior this summer,

told me the other day that they had a particular name for each species

of tree, as of the maple, but they had but one word for flowers; they

did not distinguish the species of the last.

It is often the unscientific man who discovers the new species. It

would be strange if it were not so. But we are accustomed properly to

call that only a scientific discovery which knows the relative value of

the thing discovered, uncovers a fact to mankind.

_Nov. 21._ For a month past the grass under the pines has been covered

with a new carpet of pine leaves. It is remarkable that the old leaves

turn and fall in so short a time.

Some of the densest and most impenetrable clumps of bushes I have

seen, as well on account of the closeness of their branches as of their

thorns, have been wild apples. Its [_sic_] branches as stiff as those

of the black spruce on the tops of mountains.[90]

I saw a herd of a dozen cows and young steers and oxen on Conantum

this afternoon, running about and frisking in unwieldy sport like

huge rats. Any sportiveness in cattle is unexpected. They even played

like kittens, in their way; shook their heads, raised their tails, and

rushed up and down the hill.[91]

The witch-hazel blossom on Conantum has for the most part lost its

ribbons now.

Some distant angle in the sun where a lofty and dense white pine wood,

with mingled gray and green, meets a hill covered with shrub oaks,

affects me singularly, reinspiring me with all the dreams of my youth.

It is a place far away, yet actual and where we have been. I saw the

sun falling on a distant white pine wood whose gray and moss-covered

stems were visible amid the green, in an angle where this forest

abutted on a hill covered with shrub oaks. It was like looking into

dreamland. It is one of the avenues to my future. Certain coincidences

like this are accompanied by a certain flash as of hazy lightning,

flooding all the world suddenly with a tremulous serene light which it

is difficult to see long at a time.

I saw Fair Haven Pond with its island, and meadow between the island

and the shore, and a strip of perfectly still and smooth water in the

lee of the island, and two hawks, fish hawks perhaps, sailing over

it. I did not see how it could be improved. Yet I do not see what

these things can be. I begin to see such an object when I cease to

_understand_ it and see that I did not realize or appreciate it before,

but I get no further than this. How adapted these forms and colors to

my eye! A meadow and an island! What are these things? Yet the hawks

and the ducks keep so aloof! and Nature is so reserved! I am made

to love the pond and the meadow, as the wind is made to ripple the

water.[92]

As I looked on the Walden woods eastward across the pond, I saw

suddenly a white cloud rising above their tops, now here, now there,

marking the progress of the cars which were rolling toward Boston far

below, behind many hills and woods.

October must be the month of ripe and tinted leaves. Throughout

November they are almost entirely withered and sombre, the few that

remain. In this month the sun is valued. When it shines warmer or

brighter we are sure to observe it. There are not so many colors to

attract the eye. We begin to remember the summer. We walk fast to keep

warm. For a month past I have sat by a fire.

Every sunset inspires me with the desire to go to a _West_ as distant

and as fair as that into which the sun goes down.[93]

I get nothing to eat in my walks now but wild apples, sometimes some

cranberries, and some walnuts. The squirrels have got the hazelnuts and

chestnuts.

_Nov. 23._ To-day it has been finger-cold.[94] Unexpectedly I found ice

by the side of the brooks this afternoon nearly an inch thick. Prudent

people get in their barrels of apples to-day.[95] The difference of

the temperature of various localities is greater than is supposed.

If I was surprised to find ice on the sides of the brooks, I was much

more surprised to find quite a pond in the woods, containing an acre

or more, quite frozen over so that I walked across it. It was in a cold

corner, where a pine wood excluded the sun. In the larger ponds and the

river, of course, there is no ice yet. It is a shallow, weedy pond.

I lay down on the ice and looked through at the bottom. The plants

appeared to grow more uprightly than on the dry land, being sustained

and protected by the water. Caddis-worms were everywhere crawling about

in their handsome quiver-like sheaths or cases.

The wild apples, though they are more mellow and edible, have for some

time lost their beauty, as well as the leaves, and now too they are

beginning to freeze. The apple season is well-nigh over. Such, however,

as are frozen while sound are not unpleasant to eat when the spring sun

thaws them.[96]

I find it to be the height of wisdom not to endeavor to oversee myself

and live a life of prudence and common sense, but to see over and above

myself, entertain sublime conjectures, to make myself the thoroughfare

of thrilling thoughts, live all that can be lived. The man who is

dissatisfied with himself, what can he not do?

_Nov. 24._ Plucked a buttercup on Bear Hill to-day.

I have certain friends whom I visit occasionally, but I commonly part

from them early with a certain bitter-sweet sentiment. That which we

love is so mixed and entangled with that we hate in one another that

we are more grieved and disappointed, aye, and estranged from one

another, by meeting than by absence. Some men may be my acquaintances

merely, but one whom I have been accustomed to regard, to idealize, to

have dreams about as a friend, and mix up intimately with myself, can

never degenerate into an acquaintance. I must know him on that higher

ground or not know him at all. We do not confess and explain, because

we would fain be so intimately related as to understand each other

without speech. Our friend must be broad. His must be an atmosphere

coextensive with the universe, in which we can expand and breathe. For

the most part we are smothered and stifled by one another. I go and see

my friend and try his atmosphere. If our atmospheres do not mingle, if

we repel each other strongly, it is of no use to stay.

_Nov. 25._ I feel a little alarmed when it happens that I have walked

a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit. I would

fain forget all my morning’s occupation, my obligations to society. But

sometimes it happens that I cannot easily shake off the village; the

thought of some work, some surveying, will run in my head, and I am not

where my body is, I am out of my senses. In my walks I would return to

my senses like a bird or a beast. What business have I in the woods, if

I am thinking of something out of the woods?[97]

This afternoon, late and cold as it is, has been a sort of Indian

summer. Indeed, I think that we have summer days from time to time

the winter through, and that it is often the snow on the ground makes

the whole difference. This afternoon the air was indescribably clear

and exhilarating, and though the thermometer would have shown it to be

cold, I thought that there was a finer and purer warmth than in summer;

a wholesome, intellectual warmth, in which the body was warmed by the

mind’s contentment. The warmth was hardly sensuous, but rather the

satisfaction of existence.

I found Fair Haven skimmed entirely over, though the stones which I

threw down on it from the high bank on the east broke through. Yet the

river was open. The landscape looked singularly clean and pure and dry,

the air, like a pure glass, being laid over the picture, the trees so

tidy, stripped of their leaves; the meadows and pastures, clothed with

clean dry grass, looked as if they had been swept; ice on the water and

winter in the air, but yet not a particle of snow on the ground. The

woods, divested in great part of their leaves, are being ventilated.

It is the season of perfect works, of hard, tough, ripe twigs, not of

tender buds and leaves. The leaves have made their wood, and a myriad

new withes stand up all around pointing to the sky, able to survive the

cold. It is only the perennial that you see, the iron age of the year.

These expansions of the river skim over before the river itself takes

on its icy fetters. What is the analogy?

I saw a muskrat come out of a hole in the ice. He is a man wilder

than Ray or Melvin. While I am looking at him, I am thinking what he

is thinking of me. He is a different sort of a man, that is all. He

would dive when I went nearer, then reappear again, and had kept open

a place five or six feet square so that it had not frozen, by swimming

about in it. Then he would sit on the edge of the ice and busy himself

about something, I could not see whether it was a clam or not. What a

cold-blooded fellow! thoughts at a low temperature, sitting perfectly

still so long on ice covered with water, mumbling a cold, wet clam in

its shell. What safe, low, moderate thoughts it must have! It does not

get on to stilts. The generations of muskrats do not fail. They are not

preserved by the legislature of Massachusetts.

Boats are drawn up high which will not be launched again till spring.

There is a beautiful fine wild grass which grows in the path in sprout

land, now dry, white, and waving, in light beds soft to the touch.

I experience such an interior comfort, far removed from the sense

of cold, as if the thin atmosphere were rarefied by heat, were the

medium of invisible flames, as if the whole landscape were one great

hearthside, that where the shrub oak leaves rustle on the hillside, I

seem to hear a crackling fire and see the pure flame, and I wonder that

the dry leaves do not blaze into yellow flames.

I find but little change yet on the south side of the Cliffs; only the

leaves of the wild apple are a little frostbitten on their edges and

curled dry there; but some wild cherry leaves and blueberries are still

fresh and tender green and red, as well as all the other leaves and

plants which I noticed there the other day.

When I got up so high on the side of the Cliff the sun was setting

like an Indian-summer sun. There was a purple tint in the horizon. It

was warm on the face of the rocks, and I could have sat till the sun

disappeared, to dream there. It was a mild sunset such as is to be

attended to. Just as the sun shines into us warmly and serenely, our

Creator breathes on us and re-creates us.

_Nov. 26._ An inch of snow on ground this morning,—our first.

Went to-night to see the Indians, who are still living in tents. Showed

the horns of the moose, the black moose they call it, that goes in

lowlands. Horns three or four feet wide. (The red moose they say is

another kind; runs on mountains and has horns six feet wide.) Can move

their horns. The broad, flat side portions of the horns are covered

with hair, and are so soft when the creature is alive that you can run

a knife through them.[98] They color the lower portions a darker color

by rubbing them on alders, etc., to harden them. Make _kee-nong-gun_

or pappoose cradle, of the broad part of the horn, putting a rim on

it. Once scared, will run all day. A dog will hang to their lips and be

carried along and swung against a tree and drop off. Always find two or

three together. Can’t run on glare ice, but can run in snow four feet

deep. The caribou can run on ice.[99] Sometimes spear them with a sharp

pole, sometimes with a knife at the end of a pole. Signs, good or bad,

from the turn of the horns. Their caribou-horns had been gnawed by mice

in their wigwams. The moose-horns and others are not gnawed by mice

while the creature is alive. Moose cover themselves with water, all but

noses, to escape flies.[100] About as many now as fifty years ago.

Imitated the sounds of the moose, caribou, and deer with a birch-bark

horn, which last they sometimes make very long. The moose can be heard

eight or ten miles sometimes,—a loud sort of bellowing sound, clearer,

more sonorous than the looing of cattle. The caribou’s, a sort of

snort; the small deer, like a lamb.

Made their clothes of the young moose-skin. Cure the meat by smoking

it; use no salt in curing it, but when they eat it.

Their spear very serviceable. The inner, pointed part, of a hemlock

knot; the side spring pieces, of hickory. Spear salmon, pickerel,

trout, chub, etc.; also by birch-bark light at night, using the other

end of spear as pole.

[Illustration]

Their sled, _jeborgon_ or _jebongon_ (?), one foot wide, four or

five long, of thin wood turned up in front; draw by a strong rope of

basswood bark.

Canoe of moose-hide. One hide will hold three or four. Can be taken

apart and put together very quickly. Can take out cross-bars and bring

the sides together. A very convenient boat to carry and cross streams

with. They say they did not make birch canoes till they had edge tools.

The birches the lightest. They think our birches the same, only second

growth.

Their _kee-nong-gun_, or cradle, has a hoop to prevent the child

being hurt when it falls. Can’t eat dirt; can be hung up out of way of

snakes.

_Aboak-henjo_ [?], a birch-bark vessel for water. Can boil meat in it

with hot stones; takes a long time. Also a vessel of birch bark, shaped

like a pan. Both ornamented by scratching the bark, which is wrong side

out. Very neatly made. Valued our kettles much.

[Illustration]

Did not know use of eye in axe. Put a string through it and wore it

round neck. Cut toes.

Did not like gun. Killed one moose; scared all the rest.

The _squaw-heegun_ for cooking, a mere stick put through the game and

stuck in the ground slanted over the fire, a spit. Can be eating one

side while the other is doing.

The _ar-tu-e-se_, a stick, string, and bunch of leaves, which they toss

and catch on the point of the stick. Make great use of it. Make the

clouds go off the sun with it.

Snowshoes of two kinds; one of same shape at both ends so that the

Mohawks could not tell which way they were going. (Put some rags in the

heel-hole to make a toe-mark?)

[Illustration: Side View]

[Illustrations]

Log trap to catch many kinds of animals. Some for bears let the log

fall six or seven feet. First there is a frame, then the little stick

which the animal moves, presses down, as he goes through under the log;

then the crooked stick is hung over the top of the frame, and holds

up the log by a string; the weight of the log on this keeps the little

stick up.

A drizzling and misty day this has been, melting the snow. The mist,

divided into a thousand ghostly forms, was blowing across Walden.

Mr. Emerson’s Cliff Hill, seen from the railroad through the mist,

looked like a dark, heavy, frowning New Hampshire mountain. I do not

understand fully why hills look so much larger at such a time, unless,

being the most distant we see and in the horizon, we suppose them

farther off and so magnify them. I think there can be no looming about

it.

_Nov. 28. Thursday._ Cold drizzling and misty rains, which have melted

the little snow. The farmers are beginning to pick up their dead wood.

Within a day or two the walker finds gloves to be comfortable, and

begins to think of an outside coat and of boots. Embarks in his boots

for the winter voyage.

The Indian talked about “our folks” and “your folks,” “my grandfather”

and “my grandfather’s cousin,” Samoset.

It is remarkable, but nevertheless true, as far as my observation

goes, that women, to whom we commonly concede a somewhat finer and

more sibylline nature, yield a more implicit obedience even to their

animal instincts than men. The nature in them is stronger, the reason

weaker. There are, for instance, many young and middle-aged men among

my acquaintance—shoemakers, carpenters, farmers, and others—who have

scruples about using animal food, but comparatively few girls or women.

The latter, even the most refined, are the most intolerant of such

reforms. I think that the reformer of the severest, as well as finest,

class will find more sympathy in the intellect and philosophy of man

than in the refinement and delicacy of woman. It is, perchance, a

part of woman’s conformity and easy nature. Her savior must not be too

strong, stern, and intellectual, but charitable above all things.

The thought of its greater independence and its closeness to nature

diminishes the pain I feel when I see a more interesting child than

usual destined to be brought up in a shanty. I see that for the present

the child is happy and is not puny, and has all the wonders of nature

for its toys. Have I not faith that its tenderness will in some way be

cherished and protected, as the buds of the spring in the remotest and

wildest wintry dell no less than in the garden plot and summer-house?

I am the little Irish boy

That lives in the shanty.

I am four years old to-day

And shall soon be one and twenty.

I shall grow up

And be a great man,

And shovel all day

As hard as I can.

Down in the Deep Cut,

* * * * *

Where the men lived

Who made the railroad.

For supper

I have some potato

And sometimes some bread,

And then, if it’s cold,

I go right to bed.

I lie on some straw

Under my father’s coat.

At recess I play

With little Billy Gray,

And when school is done,

Then home I run.

And if I meet the cars,

I get on the other track,

And then I know whatever comes

I needn’t look back.

My mother does not cry,

And my father does not scold,

For I am a little Irish boy,

And I’m four years old.

Every day I go to school

Along the railroad.

It was so cold it made me cry

The day that it snowed.

And if my feet ache

I do not mind the cold,

For I am a little Irish boy,

And I’m four years old.[101]

_Nov. 29._ Still misty, drizzling weather without snow or ice. The

puffballs, with their open rays, checker the path-side in the woods,

but they are not yet dry enough to make much dust. Damp weather in the

fall seems to cause them to crack open, _i. e._ their outer skin. They

look white like the shells of five-fingers on the shore.

The trees and shrubs look larger than usual when seen through the mist,

perhaps because, though near, yet being in the visible horizon and

there being nothing beyond to compare them with, we naturally magnify

them, supposing them further off.

It is very still yet in the woods. There are no leaves to rustle, no

crickets to chirp, and but few birds to sing.

The pines standing in the ocean of mist, seen from the Cliffs, are

trees in every stage of transition from the actual to the imaginary.

The near are more distinct, the distant more faint, till at last they

are a mere shadowy cone in the distance. What, then, are these solid

pines become? You can command only a circle of thirty or forty rods

in diameter. As you advance, the trees gradually come out of the mist

and take form before your eyes. You are reminded of your dreams. Life

looks like a dream. You are prepared to see visions. And now, just

before sundown, the night wind blows up more mist through the valley,

thickening the veil which already hung over the trees, and the gloom of

night gathers early and rapidly around. Birds lose their way.

II

DECEMBER, 1850

(ÆT. 33)

_Dec. 1._ It is quite mild and pleasant to-day. I saw a little

green hemisphere of moss which looked as if it covered a stone, but,

thrusting my cane into it, I found it was nothing but moss, about

fifteen inches in diameter and eight or nine inches high. When I broke

it up, it appeared as if the annual growth was marked by successive

layers half an inch deep each. The lower ones were quite rotten, but

the present year’s quite green, the intermediate white. I counted

fifteen or eighteen. It was quite solid, and I saw that it continued

solid as it grew by branching occasionally, just enough to fill the

newly gained space, and the tender extremities of each plant, crowded

close together, made the firm and compact surface of the bed. There was

a darker line separating the growths, where I thought the surface had

been exposed to the winter. It was quite saturated with water, though

firm and solid.

_Dec. 2._ The woodpeckers’ holes in the apple trees are about a fifth

of an inch deep or just through the bark and half an inch apart.

They must be the decaying trees that are most frequented by them, and

probably their work serves to relieve and ventilate the tree and, as

well, to destroy its enemies.

The barberries are shrivelled and dried. I find yet cranberries hard

and not touched by the frost.

_Dec. 4. Wednesday._ Fair Haven Pond is now open, and there is no snow.

It is a beautiful, almost Indian-summer, afternoon, though the air is

more pure and glassy. The shrub oak fire burns briskly as seen from the

Cliffs. The evergreens are greener than ever. I notice the row of dwarf

willows advanced into the water in Fair Haven, three or four rods from

the dry land, just at the lowest water-mark. You can get no disease but

cold in such an atmosphere.

Though the sun is now an hour high, there is a peculiar bright light on

the pines and on their stems. The lichens on their bark reflect it. In

the horizon I see a succession of the brows of hills, bare or covered

with wood,—look over the eyebrows of the recumbent earth. These are

separated by long valleys filled with vapory haze.

If there is a little more warmth than usual at this season, then the

beautiful air which belongs to winter is perceived and appreciated.

_Dec. 6._ Being at Newburyport this evening, Dr. (H. C.?) Perkins

showed me the circulations in the nitella, which is slightly different

from the chara, under a microscope. I saw plainly the circulation,

looking like bubbles going round in each joint, up one side and down

the other of a sort of white line, and sometimes a dark-colored mote

appeared to be carried along with them. He said that the circulation

could be well seen in the common celandine, and moreover that when a

shade was cast on it by a knife-blade the circulation was reversed.

Ether would stop it, or the death of the plant.

He showed me a green clamshell,—_Anodon fluviatilis_,—which he said was

a _female_ with young, found in a pond near by.

Also the head of a Chinook or Flathead.

Also the humerus of a mylodon (of Owen) from Oregon. Some more remains

have been found in Missouri, and a whole skeleton in Buenos Ayres. A

digging animal.

He could not catch his frogs asleep.

_Dec. 8._ It snowed in the night of the 6th, and the ground is now

covered,—our first snow, two inches deep. A week ago I saw cows being

driven home from pasture. Now they are kept at home. Here’s an end to

their grazing. The farmer improves this first slight snow to accomplish

some pressing jobs,—to move some particular rocks on a drag, or the

like. I perceive how quickly he has seized the opportunity. I see

no tracks now of cows or men or boys beyond the edge of the wood.

Suddenly they are shut up. The remote pastures and hills beyond the

woods are now closed to cows and cowherds, aye, and to cowards. I am

struck by this sudden solitude and remoteness which these places have

acquired. The dear privacy and retirement and solitude which winter

makes possible! carpeting the earth with snow, furnishing more than

woolen feet to all walkers, cronching the snow only. From Fair Haven I

see the hills and fields, aye, and the icy woods in the corner shine,

gleam with the dear old wintry sheen. Those are not surely the cottages

I have seen all summer. They are some cottages which I have in my mind.

[Illustration: _First Snow_]

Now Fair Haven Pond is open and ground is covered with snow and ice; a

week or two ago the pond was frozen and the ground was still bare.

Still those particular red oak leaves which I had noticed are quite

unwilted under the cliffs, and the apple leaves, though standing

in snow and ice and incrusted with the latter, still ripe red, and

_tender_ fresh green leaves.

It is interesting to observe the manner in which the plants bear

their snowy burden. The dry calyx leaves, like an oblong cup, of the

_Trichostema dichotomum_ have caught the rain or melting snow, and so

this little butter-boat is filled with a frozen pure drop which stands

up high above the sides of the cup,—so many pearly drops covering the

whole plant,—in the wood-paths. The pennyroyal there also retains its

fragrance under the ice and snow.

I find that the indigo-weed, whose _shade_ still stands and holds its

black seed-vessels, is not too humble to escape enemies. Almost every

seed-vessel, which contains half a dozen seeds or more, contains also a

little black six-legged bug about as big as a bug [_sic_], which gnaws

the seeds; and sometimes I find a grub, though it is now cold weather

and the plant is covered with ice. Not only our peas and grain have

their weevils, but the fruit of the indigo-weed!

This evening for the first time the new moon is reflected from the

frozen snow-crust.

_Dec. 13._ The river froze over last night,—skimmed over.

_Dec. 16._ Walden is open still. The river is probably open again.

There are wild men living along the shores of the Frozen Ocean.

Who shall say that there is not as great an interval between the

civilized man and the savage as between the savage and the brute? The

undiscovered polar regions are the home of men.

I am struck with the difference between my feet and my hands. My feet

are much nearer to foreign or inanimate matter or nature than my hands;

they are more brute, they are more like the earth they tread on, they

are more clod-like and lumpish, and I scarcely animate them.

Last Sunday, or the 14th, I walked on Loring’s Pond to three or four

islands there which I had never visited, not having a boat in the

summer. On one containing an acre or two, I found a low, branching

shrub frozen into the edge of the ice, with a fine spicy scent

somewhat like sweet-fern and a handsome imbricate bud. When I rubbed

the dry-looking fruit in my hands, it felt greasy and stained them a

permanent yellow, which I could not wash out; it lasted several days,

and my fingers smelled medicinal. I conclude that it is sweet-gale, and

we named the island Myrica Island.

On those unfrequented islands, too, I noticed the red osier or willow,

that common hard-berried plant with small red buds,[102] apparently two

kinds of swamp-pink buds, some yellow, some reddish, a brittle, rough

yellowish bush with handsome pinkish shoots; in one place in the meadow

the greatest quantity of wild rose hips of various forms that I ever

saw, now slightly withered; they were as thick as winterberries.

I noticed a bush covered with cocoons which were artfully concealed by

two leaves wrapped round them, one still hanging by its stem, so that

they looked like a few withered leaves left dangling. The worm, having

first encased itself in another leaf for greater protection, folded

more loosely around itself one of the leaves of the plant, taking care,

however, to encase the leaf-stalk and the twig with a thick and strong

web of silk, so far from depending on the strength of the stalk, which

is now quite brittle. The strongest fingers cannot break it, and the

cocoon can only be got off by slipping it up and off the twig. There

they hang themselves secure for the winter, proof against cold and the

birds, ready to become butterflies when new leaves push forth.[103]

The snow everywhere was covered with snow-fleas like pepper. When

you hold a mass in your hand, they skip and are gone before you know

it. They are so small that they go through and through the new snow.

Sometimes when collected they look like some powder which the hunter

has spilled in the path.

_Dec. 17._ Flint’s Pond apparently froze completely over last night.

It is about two inches thick. Walden is only slightly skimmed over a

rod from the shore. I noticed, where it had been frozen for some time

near the shore of Flint’s Pond and the ice was thicker and whiter,

there were handsome spider-shaped dark places, where the under ice had

melted, and the water had worn it running through,—a handsome figure on

the icy carpet.

I noticed when the snow first came that the days were very sensibly

lengthened by the light being reflected from the snow. Any work which

required light could be pursued about half an hour longer. So that we

may well pray that the ground may not be laid bare by a thaw in these

short winter days.

_Dec. 19._ Yesterday I tracked a partridge in the new-fallen snow, till

I came to where she took to flight, and I could track her no further. I

see where the snowbirds have picked the seeds of the Roman wormwood and

other weeds and have covered the snow with the shells and husks. The

smilax berries are as plump as ever. The catkins of the alders are as

tender and fresh-looking as ripe mulberries. The dried choke-cherries

so abundant in the swamp are now quite sweet. The witch-hazel is

covered with fruit and drops over gracefully like a willow, the yellow

foundation of its flowers still remaining. I find the sweet-gale

(_Myrica_) by the river also. The wild apples are frozen as hard as

stones, and rattle in my pockets, but I find that they soon thaw when

I get to my chamber and yield a sweet cider.[104] I am astonished that

the animals make no more use of them.

_Dec. 22._ The apples are now thawed. This is their first thawing.

Those which a month ago were sour, crabbed, and uneatable are now

filled with a rich, sweet cider which I am better acquainted with

than with wine. And others, which have more substance, are a sweet and

luscious food,—in my opinion of more worth than the pineapples which

are imported from the torrid zone. Those which a month ago I tasted

and repented of it, which the farmer willingly left on the tree, I

am now glad to find have the property of hanging on like the leaves

of the shrub oak. It is a way to keep cider sweet without boiling.

Let the frost come to freeze them first solid as stones, and then the

sun or a warm winter day—for it takes but little heat—to thaw them,

and they will seem to have borrowed a flavor from heaven through the

medium of the air in which they hang. I find when I get home that they

have thawed in my pocket and the ice is turned to cider. But I suspect

that after the second freezing and thawing they will not be so good.

I bend to drink the cup and save my lappets. What are the half-ripe

fruits of the torrid south, to this fruit matured by the cold of the

frigid north. There are those crabbed apples with which I cheated my

companion, and kept a smooth face to tempt him to eat. Now we both

greedily fill our pockets with them, and grow more social with their

wine. Was there one that hung so high and sheltered by the tangled

branches that our sticks could not dislodge it? It is a fruit never

brought to market that I am aware of,—quite distinct from the apple of

the markets, as from dried apple and cider. It is not every winter that

produces it in perfection.[105]

In winter I can explore the swamps and ponds. It is a dark-aired

winter day, yet I see the summer plants still peering above the snow.

There are but few tracks in all this snow. It is the Yellow Knife

River or the Saskatchewan. The large leafy lichens on the white pines,

especially on the outside of the wood, look almost a golden yellow

in the light reflected from the snow, while deeper in the wood they

are ash-colored. In the swamps the dry, yellowish-colored fruit of

the poison dogwood hangs like jewelry on long, drooping stems. It is

pleasant to meet it, it has so much character relatively to man. Here

is a stump on which a squirrel has sat and stripped the pine cones of a

neighboring tree. Their cores and scales lie all around. He knew that

they contained an almond[106] before the naturalist did. He has long

been a close observer of Nature; opens her caskets. I see more tracks

in the swamps than elsewhere.

_Dec. 23._ Here is an old-fashioned snow-storm. There is not much

passing on railroads. The engineer says it is three feet deep above.

Walden is frozen, one third of it, though I thought it was all frozen

as I stood on the shore on one side only. There is no track on the

Walden road. A traveller might cross it in the woods and not be sure it

was a road. As I pass the farmers’ houses I observe the cop [_sic_] of

the sled propped up with a stick to prevent its freezing into the snow.

The needles of the pines are drooping like cockerels’ feathers after a

rain, and frozen together by the sleety snow. The pitch pines now bear

their snowy fruit.

I can discern a faint foot or sled path sooner when the ground is

covered with snow than when it is bare. The depression caused by the

feet or the wheels is more obvious; perhaps the light and shade betray

it, but I think it is mainly because the grass and weeds rise above it

on each side and leave it blank, and a blank space of snow contrasts

more strongly with the woods or grass than bare or beaten ground.

Even the surface of the snow is wont to be in waves like billows of the

ocean.

_Dec. 24._ In walking across the Great Meadows to-day on the

snow-crust, I noticed that the fine, dry snow which was blown over the

surface of the frozen field, when I [looked] westward over it or toward

the sun, looked precisely like steam curling up from its surface, as

sometimes from a wet roof when the sun comes out after a rain.

The snow catches only in the hollows and against the reeds and grass,

and never rests there, but when it has formed a broad and shallow drift

or a long and narrow one like a winrow on the ice, it blows away again

from one extremity, and leaves often a thin, tongue-like projection at

one end, some inches above the firm crust.

I observe that there are many dead pine-needles sprinkled over the

snow, which had not fallen before.

Saw a shrike pecking to pieces a small bird, apparently a snowbird. At

length he took him up in his bill, almost half as big as himself, and

flew slowly off with his prey dangling from his beak. I find that I had

not associated such actions with my idea of birds. It was not birdlike.

It is never so cold but it melts somewhere. Our mason well remarked

that he had sometimes known it to be melting and freezing at the same

time on a particular side of a house; while it was melting on the roof

the icicles [were] forming under the eaves. It is always melting and

freezing at the same time when icicles are formed.

Our thoughts are with those among the dead into whose sphere we are

rising, or who are now rising into our own. Others we inevitably

forget, though they be brothers and sisters. Thus the departed may

be nearer to us than when they were present. At death our friends and

relations either draw nearer to us and are found out, or depart further

from us and are forgotten. Friends are as often brought nearer together

as separated by death.

_Dec. 26. Thursday._ The pine woods seen from the hilltops, now that

the ground is covered with snow, are not green but a dark brown,

greenish-brown perhaps. You see dark patches of wood. There are still

half a dozen fresh ripe red and glossy oak leaves left on the bush

under the Cliffs.

Walden not yet more than half frozen over.

_Dec. 30._ In R. Gordon Cumming’s “Hunter’s Life in South Africa,”[107]

I find an account of the honey-bird, which will lead a person to a wild

bees’ nest and, having got its share of the spoil, will sometimes lead

to a second and third. (Vol. I, page 49.)

He saw dry sheep’s dung burning, and after eighteen months it was

burning still. One heap was said to have burned seven years. Remarkable

for burning slowly. (Page 62.)

He came across a Boer who manufactured ashes by burning a particular

bush and sold it to the richer Boers. (Page 71.)

He says that the oryx or gemsbok, a kind of antelope, never tastes

water. Lives on the deserts. (Page 94.)

The Bushmen conceal water in ostrich eggs at regular intervals across

the desert, and so perform long journeys over them safely. (Page 101.)

The hatching of ostrich eggs not left to heat of sun. (Page 105.) The

natives empty them by a small aperture at one end, fill with water, and

cork up the hole with grass. (Page 106.)

The Hottentots devoured the marrow of a koodoo raw as a matter of

course.[108]

The Bechuanas use “the assagai,” “a sort of light spear or javelin”

with a shaft six feet long, which they will send through a man’s body

at a hundred yards. (Page 201.)

The Bakatlas smelt and work in iron quite well; make spears,

battle-axes, knives, needles, etc., etc. (Page 207.)

The skin of the eland just killed, like that of most other antelopes,

emits the most delicious perfume of trees and grass. (Page 218.)[109]

When waiting by night for elephants to approach a fountain, he “heard

a low rumbling noise ..., caused (as the Bechuanas affirmed) by the

bowels of the elephants which were approaching the fountain.” (Page

261.)

“A child can put a hundred of them [elephants][110] to flight by

passing at a quarter of a mile to windward.” (Page 263.)

It is incredible how many “goodly” trees an elephant will destroy,

sometimes wantonly. (265.)

An elephant’s friend will protect its wounded companion at the risk of

its own life. (268.)

The rhinoceros-birds stick their bills in the ear of the rhinoceros

and wake him up when the hunter is approaching. They live on ticks and

other parasitic insects on his body. He perfectly understands their

warning. He has chased a rhinoceros many miles on horseback and fired

many shots before he fell, and all the while the birds remained by

him, perched on his back and sides, and as each bullet struck him they

ascended about six feet into the air, uttering a cry of alarm, and

then resumed their position. Sometimes they were swept off his back

by branches of trees. When the rhinoceros was shot at midnight, they

have remained by his body thinking him asleep, and on the hunter’s

approaching in the morning have tried to wake him up. (Page 293.)

The Bechuanas make a pipe in a few moments by kneading moistened earth

with their knuckles on a twig, until a hole is established, then one

end of the aperture is enlarged with their fingers for a bowl. (Page

306.)

_Dec. 31._ I observe that in the cut by Walden Pond the sand and stones

fall from the overhanging bank and rest on the snow below; and thus,

perchance, the stratum deposited by the side of the road in the winter

can permanently be distinguished from the summer one by some faint

seam, to be referred to the peculiar conditions under which it was

deposited.

The pond has been frozen over since I was there last.

Certain meadows, as Heywood’s, contain warmer water than others and are

slow to freeze. I do not remember to have crossed this with impunity

in all places. The brook that issues from it is still open completely,

though the thermometer was down to eight below zero this morning.

The blue jays evidently notify each other of the presence of an

intruder, and will sometimes make a great chattering about it, and so

communicate the alarm to other birds and to beasts.

III

JANUARY-APRIL, 1851

(ÆT. 33)

_Jan. 2._ Saw at Clinton last night a room at the gingham-mills which

covers one and seven-eighths acres and contains 578 looms, not to speak

of spindles, both throttle and mule. The rooms all together cover three

acres. They were using between three and four hundred horse-power, and

kept an engine of two hundred horse-power, with a wheel twenty-three

feet in diameter and a band ready to supply deficiencies, which have

not often occurred. Some portion of the machinery—I think it was where

the cotton was broken up, lightened up, and mixed before being matted

together—revolved eighteen hundred times in a minute.

I first saw the pattern room where patterns are made by a hand loom.

There were two styles of warps ready for the woof or filling. The

operator must count the threads of the woof, which in the mill is done

by the machinery. It was the ancient art of weaving, the shuttle flying

back and forth, putting in the filling. As long as the warp is the

same, it is but one “style,” so called.

The cotton should possess a long staple and be clean and free from

seed. The Sea Island cotton has a long staple and is valuable for

thread. Many bales are thoroughly mixed to make the goods of one

quality. The cotton is then torn to pieces and thoroughly lightened

up by cylinders armed with hooks and by fans; then spread, a certain

weight on a square yard, and matted together, and torn up and matted

together again two or three times over; then the matted cotton fed

to a cylindrical card, a very thin web of it, which is gathered into

a copper trough, making six (the six-card machines) flat, rope-like

bands, which are united into one at the railway head and drawn. And

this operation of uniting and drawing or stretching goes on from one

machine to another until the thread is spun, which is then dyed (calico

is printed after being woven),—having been wound off on to reels and so

made into skeins,—dyed and dried by steam; then, by machinery, wound

on to spools for the warp and the woof. From a great many spools the

warp is drawn off over cylinders and different-colored threads properly

mixed and arranged. Then the ends of the warp are drawn through the

harness of the loom by hand. The operator knows the succession of

red, blue, green, etc., threads, having the numbers given her, and

draws them through the harness accordingly, keeping count. Then the

woof is put in, or it is _woven_!! Then the inequalities or nubs are

picked off by girls. If _they_ discover any imperfection, they tag it,

and if necessary the wages of the weaver are reduced. Now, I think,

it is passed over a red-hot iron cylinder, and the fuzz singed off,

then washed with wheels with cold water; then the water forced out by

centrifugal force within horizontal wheels. Then it is starched, the

ends stitched together by machinery; then stretched smooth, dried, and

ironed by machinery; then measured, folded, and packed.

This the agent, Forbes, says is the best gingham-mill in this country.

The goods are better than the imported. The English have even stolen

their name Lancaster Mills, calling them “Lancasterian.”

The machinery is some of it peculiar, part of the throttle spindles (?)

for instance.

The coach-lace-mill, only place in this country where it is made by

machinery; made of thread of different materials, as cotton, worsted,

linen, as well as colors, the raised figure produced by needles

inserted woof fashion. Well worth examining further. Also pantaloon

stuffs made in same mill and dyed after being woven, the woolen not

taking the same dye with the cotton; hence a slight parti-colored

appearance. These goods are sheared, _i. e._ a part of the nap taken

off, making them smoother. Pressed between pasteboards.

The Brussels carpets made at the carpet-factory said to be the best in

the world. Made like coach lace, only wider.

Erastus (?) Bigelow inventor of what is new in the above machinery;

and, with his brother and another, owner of the carpet-factory.

I am struck by the fact that no work has been shirked when a piece of

cloth is produced. Every thread has been counted in the finest web;

it has not been matted together. The operator has succeeded only by

patience, perseverance, and fidelity.

* * * * *

The direction in which a railroad runs, though intersecting another at

right angles, may cause that one will be blocked up with snow and the

other be comparatively open even for great distances, depending on the

direction of prevailing winds and valleys. There are the Fitchburg and

Nashua & Worcester.

_Jan. 4._ The longest silence is the most pertinent question most

pertinently put. Emphatically silent. The most important question,

whose answers concern us more than any, are never put in any other way.

It is difficult for two strangers, mutually well disposed, so truly

to bear themselves toward each other that a feeling of falseness and

hollowness shall not soon spring up between them. The least anxiety

to behave truly vitiates the relation. I think of those to whom I am

at the moment truly related, with a joy never expressed and never to

be expressed, before I fall asleep at night, though I am hardly on

speaking terms with them these years. When I think of it, I am truly

related to them.

_Jan. 5._ The catkins of the alders are now frozen stiff!!

Almost all that my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be

bad. If I repent of anything, it is of my good behavior. What demon

possessed me that I behaved so well? You may say the wisest thing you

can, old man,—you who have lived seventy years, not without honor of

a kind,—I hear an irresistible voice, the voice of my destiny, which

invites me away from all that.[111]

_Jan. 7._ The snow is sixteen inches deep at least, but [it] is a mild

and genial afternoon, as if it were the beginning of a January thaw.

Take away the snow and it would not be winter but like many days in

the fall. The birds acknowledge the difference in the air; the jays are

more noisy, and the chickadees are oftener heard.

Many herbs are not crushed by the snow.

I do not remember to have seen fleas except when the weather was mild

and the snow damp.

I must live above all in the present.

* * * * *

Science does not embody all that men know, only what is for men of

science. The woodman tells me how he caught trout in a box trap, how

he made his trough for maple sap of pine logs, and the spouts of sumach

or white ash, which have a large pith. He can relate his facts to human

life.

The knowledge of an unlearned man is living and luxuriant like a

forest, but covered with mosses and lichens and for the most part

inaccessible and going to waste; the knowledge of the man of science is

like timber collected in yards for public works, which still supports

a green sprout here and there, but even this is liable to dry rot.

I felt my spirits rise when I had got off the road into the open

fields, and the sky had a new appearance. I stepped along more

buoyantly. There was a warm sunset over the wooded valleys, a yellowish

tinge on the pines. Reddish dun-colored clouds like dusky flames stood

over it. And then streaks of blue sky were seen here and there. The

life, the joy, that is in blue sky after a storm! There is no account

of the blue sky in history. Before I walked in the ruts of travel; now

I adventured. This evening a fog comes up from the south.

If I have any conversation with a scamp in my walk, my afternoon is

wont to be spoiled.

The squirrels and apparently the rabbits have got all the frozen apples

in the hollow behind Miles’s. The rabbits appear to have devoured what

the squirrels dropped and left. I see the tracks of both leading from

the woods on all sides to the apple trees.

_Jan. 8._ The smilax (green-briar) berries still hang on like small

grapes. The thorn of this vine is very perfect, like a straight dagger.

The light of the setting sun falling on the snow-banks to-day made them

glow almost yellow.

The hills seen from Fair Haven Pond make a wholly new landscape;

covered with snow and yellowish green or brown pines and shrub

oaks, they look higher and more massive. Their white mantle relates

them to the clouds in the horizon and to the sky. Perchance what is

light-colored looks loftier than what is dark.

You might say of a very old and withered man or woman that they hung

on like a shrub oak leaf, almost to a second spring. There was still a

little life in the heel of the leaf-stalk.

_Jan. 10._ The snow shows how much of the mountains in the horizon are

covered with forest. I can also see plainer as I stand on a hill what

proportion of the township is in forest.

Got some excellent frozen-thawed apples off of Annursnack, soft and

luscious as a custard and free from worms and rot. Saw a partridge

budding, but they did not appear to have pecked the apples.

There was a remarkable sunset; a mother-of-pearl sky seen over the

Price farm; some small clouds, as well as the edges of large ones, most

brilliantly painted with mother-of-pearl tints through and through. I

never saw the like before. Who can foretell the sunset,—what it will

be?

The near and bare hills covered with snow look like mountains, but the

mountains in the horizon do not look higher than hills.

I frequently see a hole in the snow where a partridge has squatted, the

mark or form of her tail very distinct.

The chivalric and heroic spirit, which once belonged to the chevalier

or rider only, seems now to reside in the walker. To represent the

chivalric spirit we have no longer a knight, but a walker, errant.[112]

I speak not of pedestrianism, or of walking a thousand miles in a

thousand successive hours.

The Adam who daily takes a turn in his garden.

Methinks I would not accept of the gift of life, if I were required

to spend as large a portion of it sitting foot up or with my legs

crossed, as the shoemakers and tailors do. As well be tied neck and

heels together and cast into the sea. Making acquaintance with my

extremities.

I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who

understood the art of taking walks daily,—not [to] exercise the legs

or body merely, nor barely to recruit the spirits, but positively

to exercise both body and spirit, and to succeed to the highest and

worthiest ends by the abandonment of all specific ends,—who had a

genius, so to speak, for sauntering. And this word “saunter,” by the

way, is happily derived “from idle people who roved about the country

[in the Middle Ages][113] and asked charity under pretence of going

_à la Sainte Terre_,” to the Holy Land, till, perchance, the children

exclaimed, “There goes a _Sainte-Terrer_,” a Holy-Lander. They who

never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed

mere idlers and vagabonds.[114]

* * * * *

[Four pages missing.]

[Perhaps I am more] than usually jealous of my freedom. I feel that my

connections with and obligations to society are at present very slight

and transient. Those slight labors which afford me a livelihood, and

by which I am serviceable to my contemporaries, are as yet a pleasure

to me, and I am not often reminded that they are a necessity. So far

I am successful, and only he is successful in his business who makes

that pursuit which affords him the highest pleasure sustain him. But I

foresee that if my wants should be much increased the labor required to

supply them would become a drudgery. If I should sell both my forenoons

and afternoons to society, neglecting my peculiar calling, there would

be nothing left worth living for. I trust that I shall never thus sell

my birthright for a mess of pottage.[115]

F. Andrew Michaux says that “the species of large trees are much more

numerous in North America than in Europe: in the United States there

are more than one hundred and forty species that exceed thirty feet in

height; in France there are but thirty that attain this size, of which

eighteen enter into the composition of the forests, and seven only are

employed in building.”[116]

The perfect resemblance of the chestnut, beech, and hornbeam in Europe

and the United States rendered a separate figure unnecessary.

He says the white oak “is the only oak on which a few of the dried

leaves persist till the circulation is renewed in the spring.”

Had often heard his father say that “the fruit of the common European

walnut, in its natural state, is harder than that of the American

species just mentioned [the pacane-nut hickory][117] and inferior to it

in size and quality.”

* * * * *

The arts teach us a thousand lessons. Not a yard of cloth can be woven

without the most thorough fidelity in the weaver. The ship must be made

_absolutely_ tight before it is launched.

* * * * *

It is an important difference between two characters that the one is

satisfied with a happy but level success but the other as constantly

elevates his aim. Though my life is low, if my spirit looks upward

habitually at an elevated angle, it is as it were redeemed. When the

desire to be better than we are is really sincere we are instantly

elevated, and so far better already.

I lose my friends, of course, as much by my own ill treatment and ill

valuing of them, prophaning of them, cheapening of them, as by their

cheapening of themselves, till at last, when I am prepared to [do] them

justice, I am permitted to deal only with the memories of themselves,

their ideals still surviving in me, no longer with their actual selves.

We exclude ourselves, as the child said of the stream in which he

bathed head or foot. (_Vide_ Confucius.)

* * * * *

It is something to know when you are addressed by Divinity and not by

a common traveller. I went down cellar just now to get an armful of

wood and, passing the brick piers with my wood and candle, I heard,

methought, a commonplace suggestion, but when, as it were by accident,

I reverently attended to the hint, I found that it was the voice

of a god who had followed me down cellar to speak to me. How many

communications may we not lose through inattention!

I would fain keep a journal which should contain those thoughts and

impressions which I am most liable to forget that I have had; which

would have in one sense the greatest remoteness, in another, the

greatest nearness to me.

’T is healthy to be sick sometimes.

* * * * *

I do not know but the reason why I love some Latin verses more than

whole English poems is simply in the elegant terseness and conciseness

of the language, an advantage which the individual appears to have

shared with his nation.

* * * * *

When we can no longer ramble in the fields of nature, we ramble in the

fields of thought and literature. The old become readers. Our heads

retain their strength when our legs have become weak.

English literature from the days of the minstrels to the Lake Poets,

Chaucer and Spenser and Shakspeare and Milton included, breathes no

quite fresh and, in this sense, wild strain. It is an essentially tame

and civilized literature, reflecting Greece and Rome. Her wilderness

is a greenwood, her wild man a Robin Hood. There is plenty of genial

love of nature in her poets, but [not so much of nature herself.] Her

chronicles inform us when her wild animals, but not when the wild man

in her, became extinct.[118] There was need of America. I cannot think

of any poetry which adequately expresses this yearning for the Wild,

the _wilde_.[119]

* * * * *

Ovid says:—

Nilus in extremum fugit perterritus orbem,

Occuluitque caput, quod adhuc latet.

(Nilus, terrified, fled to the extremity of the globe,

And hid his head, which is still concealed.)

And we moderns must repeat, “_Quod adhuc latet_.” Phaëton’s epitaph:—

Hic situs est Phaëton, currûs auriga paterni;

Quem si non tenuit, magnis tamen excidit ausis.

His sister Lampetie _subitâ radice retenta est_. All the sisters were

changed to trees while they were in vain beseeching their mother not to

break their branches. _Cortex in verba novissima venit._

His brother Cycnus, lamenting the death of Phaëton killed by Jove’s

lightning, and the metamorphosis of his sisters, was changed into a

swan,—

nec se coeloque, Jovique

Credit, ut injustè missi memor ignis ab illo.

(Nor trusts himself to the heavens

Nor to Jove, as if remembering the fire unjustly sent by him),

_i. e._ against Phaëton. (Reason why the swan does not fly.)

... precibusque minas regaliter addit.

([Jove] royally adds threats to prayers.)

Callisto _miles erat Phoebes_, _i. e._ a huntress.

... (neque enim coelestia tingi

Ora decet lachrymis).

(For it is not becoming that the faces of the celestials be tinged

with tears,—keep a stiff upper lip.)

How much more fertile a nature has Grecian mythology its root in

than English literature! The nature which inspired mythology still

flourishes. Mythology is the crop which the Old World bore before its

soil was exhausted. The West is preparing to add its fables to those of

the East.[120] A more fertile nature than the Mississippi Valley.

None of your four-hour nights for me. The wise man will take a fool’s

allowance. The corn would not come to much if the nights were but four

hours long.

The soil in which those fables grew is deep and inexhaustible.

* * * * *

Lead cast by the Balearian sling:—

Volat illud, et incandescit eundo;

Et, quos non habuit, sub nubibus invenit ignes.

(That flies and grows hot with going,

And fires which it had not finds amid the clouds.)

* * * * *

I went some months ago to see a panorama of the Rhine. It was like

a dream of the Middle Ages. I floated down its historic stream in

something more than imagination, under bridges built by the Romans and

repaired by later heroes, past cities and castles whose very names were

music to me,—made my ears tingle,—and each of which was the subject

of a legend. There seemed to come up from its waters and its vine-clad

hills and valleys a hushed music as of crusaders departing for the Holy

Land. There were Ehrenbreitstein and Rolandseck and Coblentz, which I

knew only in history. I floated along through the moonlight of history

under the spell of enchantment. It was as if I remembered a glorious

dream,—as if I had been transported to a heroic age and breathed an

atmosphere of chivalry. Those times appeared far more poetic and heroic

than these.

Soon after I went to see the panorama of the Mississippi, and as

I fitly worked my way upward in the light of to-day, and saw the

steamboats wooding up, and looked up the Ohio and the Missouri, and

saw its unpeopled cliffs, and counted the rising cities,[121] and saw

the Indians removing west across the stream, and heard the legends

of Dubuque and of Wenona’s Cliff,—still thinking more of the future

than of the past or present,—I saw that this was a Rhine stream of a

different kind.[122]

* * * * *

The Old World, with its vast deserts and its arid and elevated steppes

and table-lands, contrasted with the New World with its humid and

fertile valleys and savannas and prairies and its boundless primitive

forests, is like the exhausted Indian corn lands contrasted with the

peat meadows. America requires some of the sand of the Old World to be

carted on to her rich but as yet unassimilated meadows.

* * * * *