Guyot says, “The Baltic Sea has a depth of only 120 feet between

the coasts of Germany and those of Sweden” (page 82). “The Adriatic,

between Venice and Trieste, has a depth of only 130 feet.” “Between

France and England, the greatest depth does not exceed 300 feet.” The

most extensive forest, “the most gigantic wilderness,” on the earth

is in the basin of the Amazon, and extends almost unbroken more than

fifteen hundred miles. South America the kingdom of palms; nowhere

a greater number of species. “This is a sign of the preponderating

development of leaves over every other part of the vegetable growth; of

that expansion of foliage, of that _leafiness_, peculiar to warm and

moist climates. America has no plants with slender, shrunken leaves,

like those of Africa and New Holland. The Ericas, or heather, so

common, so varied, so characteristic of the flora of the Cape of Good

Hope, is a form unknown to the New World. There is nothing resembling

those Metrosideri of Africa, those dry Myrtles (Eucalyptus) and

willow-leaved acacias, whose flowers shine with the liveliest colors,

but their narrow foliage, turned edgewise to the vertical sun, casts no

shadow.”[123]

* * * * *

The white man derives his nourishment from the earth,—from the roots

and grains, the potato and wheat and corn and rice and sugar, which

often grow in fertile and pestilential river bottoms fatal to the life

of the cultivator. The Indian has but a slender hold on the earth. He

derives his nourishment in great part but indirectly from her, through

the animals he hunts.[124]

* * * * *

“Compared with the Old World, the New World is the humid side of our

planet, the _oceanic, vegetative_ world, the passive element awaiting

the excitement of a livelier impulse from without.”[125]

* * * * *

“For the American, this task is to work the virgin soil.”

“Agriculture here already assumes proportions unknown everywhere

else.”[126]

_Feb. 9._ The last half of January was warm and thawy. The swift

streams were open, and the muskrats were seen swimming and diving

and bringing up clams, leaving their shells on the ice. We had now

forgotten summer and autumn, but had already begun to anticipate

spring. Fishermen improved the warmer weather to fish for pickerel

through the ice. Before it was only the autumn landscape with a thin

layer of snow upon it; we saw the withered flowers through it; but

now we do not think of autumn when we look on this snow. That earth

is effectually buried. It is midwinter. Within a few days the cold

has set in stronger than ever, though the days are much longer now.

Now I travel across the fields on the crust which has frozen since the

January thaw, and I can cross the river in most places. It is easier to

get about the country than at any other season,—easier than in summer,

because the rivers and meadows are frozen and there is no high grass or

other crops to be avoided; easier than in December before the crust was

frozen.

* * * * *

Sir John Mandeville says, “In fro what partie of the earth that men

dwell, outher aboven or benethen, it seemeth always to hem that dwellen

there, that they gon more right than any other folk.” Again, “And yee

shulle undirstonde, that of all theise contrees, and of all theise

yles, and of all the dyverse folk, that I have spoken of before,

and of dyverse laws and of dyverse beleeves that thei have, yit is

there non of hem alle, but that thei have sum resoun within hem and

understondinge, but gif it be the fewere.”

I have heard that there is a Society for the Diffusion of Useful

Knowledge. It is said that knowledge is power and the like. Methinks

there is equal need of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Ignorance,

for what is most of our boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit

that we know something, which robs us of the advantages of our actual

ignorance.[127]

* * * * *

For a man’s ignorance sometimes is not only useful but beautiful, while

his knowledge is oftentimes worse than useless, beside being ugly.[128]

In reference to important things, whose knowledge amounts to more

than a consciousness of his ignorance? Yet what more refreshing and

inspiring knowledge than this?

How often are we wise as serpents without being harmless as doves!

Donne says, “Who are a little wise the best fools be.” Cudworth says,

“We have all of us by nature μάντευμά τε (as both Plato and Aristotle

call it), a certain divination, presage and parturient vaticination

in our minds, of some higher good and perfection than either power

or knowledge.” Aristotle himself declares, that there is λόγον τι

κρεῖττον, which is λόγον ἀρχή,—(something better than reason and

knowledge, which is the principle and original of all). Lavater says,

“Who finds the clearest not clear, thinks the darkest not obscure.”

* * * * *

My desire for knowledge is intermittent; but my desire to commune with

the spirit of the universe, to be intoxicated even with the fumes, call

it, of that divine nectar, to bear my head through atmospheres and over

heights unknown to my feet, is perennial and constant.[129]

[Illustration: _Midwinter_]

It is remarkable how few events or crises there are in our minds’

histories, how little _exercised_ we have been in our minds, how few

experiences we have had.[130]

[Four pages missing.]

The story of Romulus and Remus being suckled by a wolf is not a mere

fable; the founders of every state which has risen to eminence have

drawn their nourishment and vigor from a similar source. It is because

the children of the empire were not suckled by wolves that they were

conquered and displaced by the children of the northern forests who

were.[131]

America is the she wolf to-day, and the children of exhausted Europe

exposed on her uninhabited and savage shores are the Romulus and Remus

who, having derived new life and vigor from her breast, have founded a

new Rome in the West.

* * * * *

It is remarkable how few passages, comparatively speaking, there are in

the best literature of the day which betray any intimacy with Nature.

It is apparent enough to me that only one or two of my townsmen or

acquaintances—not more than one in many thousand men, indeed—feel or at

least obey any strong attraction drawing them toward the forest or to

Nature, but all, almost without exception, gravitate exclusively toward

men, or society.[132] The young men of Concord and in other towns

do not walk in the woods, but congregate in shops and offices. They

suck one another. Their strongest attraction is toward the mill-dam.

A thousand assemble about the fountain in the public square,—the town

pump,—be it full or dry, clear or turbid, every morning, but not one

in a thousand is in the meanwhile drinking at that fountain’s head. It

is hard for the young, aye, and the old, man in the outskirts to keep

away from the mill-dam a whole day; but he will find some excuse, as an

ounce of cloves that might be wanted, or a _New England Farmer_ still

in the office, to tackle up the horse, or even go afoot, but he will go

at some rate. This is not bad comparatively; this is because he cannot

do better. In spite of his hoeing and chopping, he is unexpressed and

undeveloped.

I do not know where to find in any literature, whether ancient or

modern, any adequate account of that Nature with which I am acquainted.

Mythology comes nearest to it of any.[133]

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

the thinker. It is not always and everywhere prosaic. Seventy thousand

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

But this is not so significant as the far simpler and more unpretending

pilgrimage to the shrines of some obscure individual, which yet makes

no bustle in the world.

I believe that Adam in paradise was not so favorably situated on

the whole as is the backwoodsman in America.[134] You all know how

miserably the former turned out,—or was turned out,—but there is some

consolation at least in the fact that it yet remains to be seen how the

western Adam in the wilderness will turn out.

In Adam’s fall

We sinned all.

In the new Adam’s rise

We shall all reach the skies.

An infusion of hemlock in our tea, if we must drink tea,—not the

poison hemlock, but the hemlock spruce, I mean,[135]—or perchance the

Arbor-Vitæ, the tree of life,—is what we want.

_Feb. 12. Wednesday._ A beautiful day, with but little snow or ice on

the ground. Though the air is sharp, as the earth is half bare the hens

have strayed to some distance from the barns. The hens, standing around

their lord and pluming themselves and still fretting a little, strive

to fetch the year about.

A thaw has nearly washed away the snow and raised the river and the

brooks and flooded the meadows, covering the old ice, which is still

fast to the bottom.

I find that it is an excellent walk for variety and novelty and

wildness, to keep round the edge of the meadow,—the ice not being

strong enough to bear and transparent as water,—on the bare ground

or snow, just between the highest water mark and the present water

line,—a narrow, meandering walk, rich in unexpected views and objects.

The line of rubbish which marks the higher tides—withered flags and

reeds and twigs and cranberries—is to my eyes a very agreeable and

significant line, which Nature traces along the edge of the meadows. It

is a strongly marked, enduring natural line, which in summer reminds

me that the water has once stood over where I walk. Sometimes the

grooved trees tell the same tale. The wrecks of the meadow, which fill

a thousand coves, and tell a thousand tales to those who can read them.

Our prairial, mediterranean shore. The gentle rise of water around

the trees in the meadow, where oaks and maples stand far out in the

sea, and young elms sometimes are seen standing close around some rock

which lifts its head above the water, as if protecting it, preventing

it from being washed away, though in truth they owe their origin and

preservation to it. It first invited and detained their seed, and now

preserves the soil in which they grow. A pleasant reminiscence of the

rise of waters, to go up one side of the river and down the other,

following this way, which meanders so much more than the river itself.

If you cannot go on the ice, you are then gently compelled to take this

course, which is on the whole more beautiful,—to follow the sinuosities

of the meadow. Between the highest water mark and the present water

line is a space generally from a few feet to a few rods in width. When

the water comes over the road, then my spirits rise,—when the fences

are carried away. A prairial walk. Saw a caterpillar crawling about on

the snow.

The earth is so bare that it makes an impression on me as if it were

catching cold.

I saw to-day something new to me as I walked along the edge of the

meadow. Every half-mile or so along the channel of the river I saw at a

distance where apparently the ice had been broken up while freezing by

the pressure of other ice,—thin cakes of ice forced up on their edges

and reflecting the sun like so many mirrors, whole fleets of shining

sails, giving a very lively appearance to the river,—where for a dozen

rods the flakes of ice stood on their edges, like a fleet beating

up-stream against the sun, a fleet of ice-boats.

It is remarkable that the cracks in the ice on the meadows sometimes

may be traced a dozen rods from the water through the snow in the

neighboring fields.

It is only necessary that man should start a fence that Nature should

carry it on and complete it. The farmer cannot plow quite up to the

rails or wall which he himself has placed, and hence it often becomes

a hedgerow and sometimes a coppice.

I found to-day apples still green under the snow, and others frozen and

thawed, sweeter far than when sound,—a sugary sweetness.[136]

There is something more than association at the bottom of the

excitement which the roar of a cataract produces. It is allied to the

circulation in our veins. We have a waterfall which corresponds even

to Niagara somewhere within us.[137] It is astonishing what a rush

and tumult a slight inclination will produce in a swollen brook. How

it proclaims its glee, its boisterousness, rushing headlong in its

prodigal course as if it would exhaust itself in half an hour! How it

spends itself! I would say to the orator and poet, Flow freely and

_lavishly_ as a brook that is full,—without stint. Perchance I have

stumbled upon the origin of the word “lavish.” It does not hesitate

to tumble down the steepest precipice and roar or tinkle as it goes,

for fear it will exhaust its fountain. The impetuosity of descending

water even by the slightest inclination! It seems to flow with ever

increasing rapidity.

It is difficult to believe what philosophers assert, that it is merely

a difference in the form of the elementary particles—as whether

they are square or globular—which makes the difference between the

steadfast, everlasting, and reposing hillside and the impetuous torrent

which tumbles down it.

It is refreshing to walk over sprout-lands, where oak and chestnut

sprouts are mounting swiftly up again into the sky, and already

perchance their sere leaves begin to rustle in the breeze and reflect

the light on the hillsides.

“Heroic underwoods that take the air

With freedom, nor respect their parents’ death.”[138]

I trust that the walkers of the present day are conscious of the

blessings which they enjoy in the comparative freedom with which they

can ramble over the country and enjoy the landscape, anticipating with

compassion that future day when possibly it will be partitioned off

into so-called pleasure-grounds, where only a few may enjoy the narrow

and exclusive pleasure which is compatible with ownership,—when walking

over the surface of God’s earth shall be construed to mean trespassing

on some gentleman’s grounds, when fences shall be multiplied and man

traps and other engines invented to confine men to the public road. I

am thankful that we have yet so much room in America.[139]

_Feb. 13._ Skated to Sudbury. A beautiful, summer-like day. The

meadows were frozen just enough to bear. Examined now the fleets of

ice-flakes close at hand. They are a very singular and interesting

phenomenon, which I do not remember to have seen. I should say that

when the water was frozen about as thick as pasteboard, a violent gust

had here and there broken it up, and while the wind and waves held it

up on its edge, the increasing cold froze it in firmly. So it seemed,

for the flakes were for the most part turned one way; _i. e._ standing

on one side, you saw only their edges, on another—the northeast or

southwest—their sides. They were for the most part of a triangular

form, like a shoulder[_sic_]-of-mutton sail, slightly scalloped, like

shells. They looked like a fleet of a thousand mackerel-fishers under

a press of sail careering before a smacking breeze. Sometimes the

sun and wind had reduced them to the thinness of writing-paper, and

they fluttered and rustled and tinkled merrily. I skated through them

and strewed their wrecks around. They appear to have been elevated

expressly to reflect the sun like mirrors, to adorn the river and

attract the eye of the skater. Who will say that their principal end

is not answered when they excite the admiration of the skater? Every

half-mile or mile, as you skate up the river, you see these crystal

fleets. Nature is a great imitator and loves to repeat herself. She

wastes her wonders on the town. It impresses me as one superiority in

her art, if art it may be called, that she does not require that man

appreciate her, takes no steps to attract his attention.

[Illustration]

The trouble is in getting on and off the ice; when you are once on you

can go well enough. It melts round the edges.

Again I saw to-day, half a mile off in Sudbury, a sandy spot on the top

of a hill, where I prophesied that I should find traces of the Indians.

When within a dozen rods, I distinguished the foundation of a lodge,

and merely passing over it, I saw many fragments of the arrowhead

stone. I have frequently distinguished these localities half a mile

[off], gone forward, and picked up arrowheads.

Saw in a warm, muddy brook in Sudbury, quite open and exposed, the

skunk-cabbage spathes above water. The tops of the spathes were

frost-bitten, but the fruit [_sic_] sound. There was one partly

expanded. The first flower of the season; for it is a flower. I doubt

if there is [a] month without its flower. Examined by the botany all

its parts,—the first flower I have seen. The _Ictodes fœtidus_.

Also mosses, mingled red and green. The red will pass for the blossom.

As for antiquities, one of our old deserted country roads, marked only

by the parallel fences and cellar-hole with its bricks where the last

inhabitant died, the victim of intemperance, fifty years ago, with

its bare and exhausted fields stretching around, suggests to me an

antiquity greater and more remote from the America of the newspapers

than the tombs of Etruria. I insert the rise and fall of Rome in the

interval. This is the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.

* * * * *

It is important to observe not only the subject of our pure and

unalloyed joys, but also the secret of any dissatisfaction one may

feel.

In society, in the best institutions of men, I remark a certain

precocity. When we should be growing children, we are already little

men. Infants as we are, we make haste to be weaned from our great

mother’s breast, and cultivate our parts by intercourse with one

another.

I have not much faith in the method of restoring impoverished soils

which relies on manuring mainly and does not add some virgin soil or

muck.

Many a poor, sore-eyed student that I have heard of would grow faster,

both intellectually and physically, if, instead of sitting up so very

late to study, he honestly slumbered a fool’s allowance.[140]

I would not have every man cultivated, any more than I would have every

acre of earth cultivated. Some must be preparing a mould by the annual

decay of the forests which they sustain.[141]

Saw half a dozen cows let out and standing about in a retired meadow as

in a cow-yard.

_Feb. 14._ Consider the farmer, who is commonly regarded as the

healthiest man. He may be the toughest, but he is not the healthiest.

He has lost his elasticity; he can neither run nor jump. Health is

the free use and command of all our faculties, and equal development.

His is the health of the ox, an overworked buffalo. His joints are

stiff. The resemblance is true even in particulars. He is cast away in

a pair of cowhide boots, and travels at an ox’s pace. Indeed, in some

places he puts his foot into the skin of an ox’s shin. It would do

him good to be thoroughly shampooed to make him supple. His health is

an insensibility to all influence. But only the healthiest man in the

world is sensible to the finest influence; he who is affected by more

or less of electricity in the air.

We shall see but little way if we require to understand what we see.

How few things can a man measure with the tape of his understanding!

How many greater things might he be seeing in the meanwhile!

One afternoon in the fall, November 21st, I saw Fair Haven Pond with

its island and meadow; between the island and the shore, a strip of

perfectly smooth water in the lee of the island; and two hawks sailing

over it; and something more I saw which cannot easily be described,

which made me say to myself that the landscape could not be improved.

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

things can be; I begin to see such objects only when I leave off

understanding them, and afterwards remember that I did not appreciate

them before. But I get no further than this. How adapted these forms

and colors to our eyes, a meadow and its islands! What are these

things? Yet the hawks and the ducks keep so aloof, and nature is so

reserved! We are made to love the river and the meadow, as the wind to

ripple the water.[142]

There is a difference between eating for strength and from mere

gluttony. The Hottentots eagerly devour the marrow of the koodoo and

other antelopes raw, as a matter of course, and herein perchance have

stolen a march on the cooks of Paris. The eater of meat must come to

this. This is better than stall-fed cattle and slaughter-house pork.

Possibly they derive a certain wild-animal vigor therefrom which the

most artfully cooked meats do not furnish.[143]

We learn by the January thaw that the winter is intermittent and are

reminded of other seasons. The back of the winter is broken.

_Feb. 15._ Fatal is the discovery that our friend is fallible, that he

has prejudices. He is, then, only prejudiced in our favor. What is the

value of his esteem who does not justly esteem another?

Alas! Alas! when my friend begins to deal in confessions, breaks

silence, makes a theme of friendship (which then is always something

past), and descends to merely human relations! As long as there is a

spark of love remaining, cherish that alone. Only _that_ can be kindled

into a flame. I thought that friendship, that love was still possible

between [us]. I thought that we had not withdrawn very far asunder.

But now that my friend rashly, thoughtlessly, profanely speaks,

_recognizing_ the distance between us, that distance seems infinitely

increased.

Of our friends we do not incline to speak, to complain, to others; we

would not disturb the foundations of confidence that may still be.

* * * * *

Why should we not still continue to live with the intensity and

rapidity of infants? Is not the world, are not the heavens, as

unfathomed as ever? Have we exhausted any joy, any sentiment?

* * * * *

The author of Festus well exclaims:—

“Could we but think with the intensity

We love with, we might do great things, I think.”

_Feb. 16._ Do we call this the land of the free? What is it to be free

from King George the Fourth and continue the slaves of prejudice? What

is it [to] be born free and equal, and not to live? What is the value

of any political freedom, but as a means to moral freedom? Is it a

freedom to be slaves or a freedom to be free, of which we boast? We are

a nation of politicians, concerned about the outsides of freedom, the

means and outmost defenses of freedom. It is our children’s children

who may perchance be essentially free. We tax ourselves unjustly.

There is a part of us which is not represented. It is taxation without

representation. We quarter troops upon ourselves. In respect to virtue

or true manhood, we are essentially provincial, not metropolitan,—mere

Jonathans. We are provincial, because we do not find at home our

standards; because we do not worship truth but the reflection of truth;

because we are absorbed in and narrowed by trade and commerce and

agriculture, which are but means and not the end. We are essentially

provincial, I say, and so is the English Parliament. Mere country

bumpkins they betray themselves, when any more important question

arises for them to settle. Their natures are subdued to what they work

in!

The finest manners in the world are awkwardness and fatuity when

contrasted with a finer intelligence. They appear but as the fashions

of past days,—mere courtliness, small-clothes, and knee-buckles,—have

the vice of getting out of date; an attitude merely. The vice of

manners is that they are continually deserted by the character; they

are cast-off clothes or shells, claiming the respect of the living

creature. You are presented with the shells instead of the meat, and

it is no excuse generally that, in the case of some fish, the shells

are of more worth than the meat. The man who thrusts his manners upon

me does as if he were to insist on introducing me to his cabinet

of curiosities, when I wish to see himself. Manners are conscious;

character is unconscious.[144]

My neighbor does not recover from his formal bow so soon as I do from

the pleasure of meeting him.

* * * * *

_Feb. 18. Tuesday._ Ground nearly bare of snow. Pleasant day with a

strong south wind. Skated, though the ice was soft in spots. Saw the

skunk-cabbage in flower. Gathered nuts and apples on the bare ground,

still sound and preserving their colors, red and green, many of them.

Yesterday the river was over the road by Hubbard’s Bridge.

Surveyed White Pond yesterday, February 17th.

There is little or nothing to be remembered written on the subject

of getting an honest living. Neither the New Testament nor Poor

Richard speaks to our condition. I cannot think of a single page which

entertains, much less answers, the questions which I put to myself on

this subject. How to make the getting our living poetic! for if it is

not poetic, it is not life but death that we get. Is it that men are

too disgusted with their experience to speak of it? or that commonly

they do not question the common modes? The most practically important

of all questions, it seems to me, is how shall I get my living, and

yet I find little or nothing said to the purpose in any book. Those

who are living on the interest of money inherited, or dishonestly, _i.

e._ by false methods, acquired, are of course incompetent to answer it.

I consider that society with all its arts, has done nothing for us in

this respect. One would think, from looking at literature, that this

question had never disturbed a solitary individual’s musings. Cold and

hunger seem more friendly to my nature than those methods which men

have adopted and advise to ward them off.[145] If it were not that I

desire to do something here,—accomplish some work,—I should certainly

prefer to suffer and die rather than be at the pains to get a living by

the modes men propose.

There may be an excess even of informing light.

Niepce, a Frenchman, announced that “no substance can be exposed to

the sun’s rays without undergoing a chemical change.” Granite rocks

and stone structures and statues of metal, etc., “are,” says Robert

Hunt, “all alike destructively acted upon during the hours of sunshine,

and, but for provisions of nature no less wonderful, would soon perish

under the delicate touch of the most subtile of the agencies of the

universe.” But Niepce showed, says Hunt, “that those bodies which

underwent this change during daylight possessed the power of restoring

themselves to their original conditions during the hours of night, when

this excitement was no longer influencing them.” So, in the case of the

daguerreotype, “the picture which we receive to-night, unless we adopt

some method of securing its permanency, fades away before the morning,

and we try to restore it in vain.” (Infers) “the hours of darkness

are as necessary to the inorganic creation as we know night and sleep

are to the organic kingdom.” Such is the influence of “actinism,” that

power in the sun’s rays which produces a chemical effect.[146]

_Feb. 25._ A very windy day. A slight snow which fell last night was

melted at noon. A strong, gusty wind; the waves on the meadows make a

fine show. I saw at Hubbard’s Bridge that all the ice had been blown

up-stream from the meadows, and was collected over the channel against

the bridge in large cakes. These were covered and intermingled with a

remarkable quantity of the meadow’s crust. There was no ice to be seen

up-stream and no more downstream.

The meadows have been flooded for a fortnight, and this water has

been frozen barely thick enough to bear once only. The old ice on the

meadows was covered several feet deep. I observed from the bridge, a

few rods off northward, what looked like an island directly over the

channel. It was the crust of the meadow afloat. I reached [it] with

a little risk and found it to be four rods long by one broad,—the

surface of the meadow with cranberry vines, etc., all connected and

in their natural position, and no ice visible but around its edges. It

appeared to be the frozen crust (which was separated from the unfrozen

soil as ice is from the water beneath), buoyed up (?), perchance, by

the ice around its edges frozen to the stubble. Was there any pure

ice under it? Had there been any above it? Will frozen meadow float?

Had ice which originally supported it from above melted except about

the edges? When the ice melts or the soil thaws, of course it falls

to the bottom, wherever it may be. Here is another agent employed in

the distribution of plants. I have seen where a smooth shore which I

frequented for bathing was in one season strewn with these hummocks,

bearing the button-bush with them, which have now changed the character

of the shore. There were many rushes and lily-pad stems on the ice. Had

the ice formed about them as they grew, broken them off when it floated

away, and so they were strewn about on it?

_Feb. 26. Wednesday._ Examined the floating meadow again to-day. It

is more than a foot thick, the under part much mixed with ice,—ice

and muck. It appeared to me that the meadow surface had been heaved by

the frost, and then the water had run down and under it, and finally,

when the ice rose, lifted it up, wherever there was ice enough mixed

with it to float it. I saw large cakes of ice with other large cakes,

the latter as big as a table, on top of them. Probably the former rose

while the latter were already floating about. The plants scattered

about were bulrushes and lily-pad stems.

Saw five red-wings and a song sparrow (?) this afternoon.

_Feb. 27._ Saw to-day on Pine Hill behind Mr. Joseph Merriam’s house

a Norway pine, the first I have seen in Concord. Mr. Gleason pointed

it out to me as a singular pine which he did not know the name of. It

was a very handsome tree, about twenty-five feet high. E. Wood thinks

that he has lost the surface of two acres of his meadow by the ice. Got

fifteen cartloads out of a hummock left on another meadow. Blue-joint

was introduced into the first meadow where it did not grow before.

* * * * *

Of two men, one of whom knows nothing about a subject, and, what is

extremely rare, knows that he knows nothing, and the other really knows

something about it, but thinks that he knows all,—what great advantage

has the latter over the former? which is the best to deal with? I do

not know that knowledge amounts to anything more definite than a novel

and grand surprise, or a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of

all that we had called knowledge before; an indefinite sense of the

grandeur and glory of the universe. It is the lighting up of the mist

by the sun. But man cannot be said to know in any higher sense, [any

more] than he can look serenely and with impunity in the face of the

sun.[147]

A culture which imports much muck from the meadows and deepens

the soil, not that which trusts to heating manures and improved

agricultural implements only.

* * * * *

How, when a man purchases a thing, he is determined to get and get hold

of it, using how many expletives and how long a string of synonymous

or similar terms signifying possession, in the legal process! What’s

mine’s my own. An old deed of a small piece of swamp land, which I have

lately surveyed at the risk of being mired past recovery, says that

“the said Spaulding his Heirs and Assigns, shall and may from this (?)

time, and at all times forever hereafter, by force and virtue of these

presents, lawfully, peaceably and quietly have, hold, use, occupy,

possess and enjoy the said swamp,” etc.

* * * * *

Magnetic iron, being anciently found in _Magnesia_,—hence _magnes_, or

magnet,—employed by Pliny and others. Chinese appear to have discovered

the magnet very early, A. D. 121 and before (?); used by them to steer

ships in 419; mentioned by an Icelander, 1068; in a French poem, 1181;

in Torfæus’ History of Norway, 1266. Used by De Gama in 1427. Leading

stone, hence loadstone.

The peroxide of hydrogen, or ozone, at first thought to be a chemical

curiosity merely, is found to be very generally diffused through

nature.

The following bears on the floating ice which has risen from the bottom

of the meadows. Robert Hunt says: “Water conducts heat downward but

very slowly; a mass of ice will remain undissolved but a few inches

under water on the surface of which ether or any other inflammable

body is burning. If ice swam beneath the surface, the summer sun would

scarcely have power to thaw it; and thus our lakes and seas would be

gradually converted into solid masses.”

The figures of serpents, of griffins, flying dragons, and other

embellishments of heraldry, the eastern idea of the world on an

elephant, that on a tortoise, and that on a serpent again, etc.,

usually regarded as mythological in the common sense of that word,

are thought by some to “indicate a faint and shadowy knowledge of a

previous state of organic existence,” such as geology partly reveals.

The fossil tortoise has been found in Asia large enough to support an

elephant.

Ammonites, snake-stones, or petrified snakes have been found from of

old, often decapitated.

In the northern part of Great Britain the fossil remains of encrinites

are called “St. Cuthbert’s beads.” “Fiction dependent on truth.”

Westward is heaven, or rather heavenward is the west. The way to heaven

is from east to west round the earth. The sun leads and shows it. The

stars, too, light it.

Nature and man; some prefer the one, others the other; but that is all

_de gustibus_. It makes no odds at what well you drink, provided it be

a well-head.

Walking in the woods, it may be, some afternoon, the shadow of the

wings of a thought flits across the landscape of my mind, and I am

reminded how little eventful are our lives. What have been all these

wars and rumors of wars, and modern discoveries and improvements

so-called? A mere irritation in the skin. But this shadow which is so

soon past, and whose substance is not detected, suggests that there

are events of importance whose interval is to us a true historic

period.[148]

The lecturer is wont to describe the Nineteenth Century, the

American [of] the last generation, in an off-hand and triumphant

strain, wafting him to paradise, spreading his fame by steam and

telegraph, recounting the number of wooden stopples he has whittled.

But who does not perceive that this is not a sincere or pertinent

account of any man’s or nation’s life? It is the hip-hip-hurrah

and mutual-admiration-society style. Cars go by, and we know their

substance as well as their shadow. They stop and we get into them. But

those sublime thoughts passing on high do not stop, and we never get

into them. Their conductor is not like one of us.

I feel that the man who, in his conversation with me about the life

of man in New England, lays much stress on railroads, telegraphs, and

such enterprises does not go below the surface of things. He treats the

shallow and transitory as if it were profound and enduring. In one of

the mind’s avatars, in the interval between sleeping and waking, aye,

even in one of the interstices of a Hindoo dynasty, perchance, such

things as the Nineteenth Century, with all its improvements, may come

and go again. Nothing makes a deep and lasting impression but what is

weighty.

Obey the law which reveals, and not the law revealed.

I wish my neighbors were wilder.

A wildness whose glance no civilization could endure.[149]

He who lives according to the highest law is in one sense lawless. That

is an unfortunate discovery, certainly, that of a law which binds us

where we did not know that we were bound. Live free, child of the mist!

He for whom the law is made, who does not obey the law but whom the

law obeys, reclines on pillows of down and is wafted at will whither

he pleases, for man is superior to all laws, both of heaven and earth,

when he takes his liberty.[150]

Wild as if we lived on the marrow of antelopes devoured raw.[151]

There would seem to be men in whose lives there have been no events of

importance, more than in the beetle’s which crawls in our path.

_March 19._ The ice in the pond is now soft and will not bear a heavy

stone thrown from the bank. It is melted for a rod from the shore. The

ground has been bare of snow for some weeks, but yesterday we had a

violent northeast snow-storm, which has drifted worse than any the past

winter. The spring birds—ducks and geese, etc.—had come, but now the

spring seems far off.

No good ever came of obeying a law which you had discovered.

_March 23._ For a week past the elm buds have been swollen. The willow

catkins have put out. The ice still remains in Walden, though it will

not bear. Mather Howard saw a large meadow near his house which had

risen up but was prevented from floating away by the bushes.

_March 27._ Walden is two-thirds broken up. It will probably be quite

open by to-morrow night.

_March 30._ Spring is already upon us. I see the tortoises, or rather

I hear them drop from the bank into the brooks at my approach. The

catkins of the alders have blossomed. The pads are springing at the

bottom of the water. The pewee is heard, and the lark.

* * * * *

“It is only the squalid savages and degraded boschmen of creation that

have their feeble teeth and tiny stings steeped in venom, and so made

formidable,”—ants, centipedes, and mosquitoes, spiders, wasps, and

scorpions.—HUGH MILLER.

To attain to a true relation to one human creature is enough to make a

year memorable.

The man for whom law exists—the man of forms, the conservative—is a

tame man.

CARRYING OFF SIMS

A recent English writer (De Quincey),[152] endeavoring to account for

the atrocities of Caligula and Nero, their monstrous and anomalous

cruelties, and the general servility and corruption which they imply,

observes that it is difficult to believe that “the descendants of a

people so severe in their habits” as the Romans had been “could thus

rapidly” have degenerated and that, “in reality, the citizens of Rome

were at this time a new race, brought together from every quarter

of the world, but especially from Asia.” A vast “proportion of the

ancient citizens had been cut off by the sword,” and such multitudes

of emancipated slaves from Asia had been invested with the rights of

citizens “that, in a single generation, Rome became almost transmuted

into a baser metal.” As Juvenal complained, “the Orontes ... had

mingled its impure waters with those of the Tiber.” And “probably,

in the time of Nero, not one man in six was of pure Roman descent.”

Instead of such, says another, “came Syrians, Cappadocians, Phrygians,

and other enfranchised slaves.” “These in half a century had sunk so

low, that Tiberius pronounced her [Rome’s][153] very senators to be

_homines ad servitutem natos_, men born to be slaves.”[154]

So one would say, in the absence of particular genealogical evidence,

that the vast majority of the inhabitants of the city of Boston,

even those of senatorial dignity,—the Curtises, Lunts, Woodburys,

and others,—were not descendants of the men of the Revolution,—the

Hancocks, Adamses, Otises,—but some “Syrians, Cappadocians, and

Phrygians,” merely, _homines ad servitutem natos_, men born to be

slaves. But I would have done with comparing ourselves with our

ancestors, for on the whole I believe that even they, if somewhat

braver and less corrupt than we, were not men of so much principle and

generosity as to go to war in behalf of another race in their midst. I

do not believe that the North will soon come to blows with the South

on this question. It would be too bright a page to be written in the

history of the race at present.

* * * * *

There is such an officer, if not such a man, as the Governor of

Massachusetts. What has he been about the last fortnight? He has

probably had as much as he could do to keep on the fence during this

moral earthquake. It seems to me that no such keen satire, no such

cutting insult, could be offered to that man, as the absence of all

inquiry after him in this crisis. It appears to [have] been forgotten

that there was such a man or such an office. Yet no doubt he has been

filling the gubernatorial chair all the while. One Mr. Boutwell,—so

named, perchance, because he goes about well to suit the prevailing

wind.[155]

In ’75 two or three hundred of the inhabitants of Concord assembled

at one of the bridges with arms in their hands to assert the right

of three millions to tax themselves, to have a voice in governing

themselves. About a week ago the authorities of Boston, having the

sympathy of many of the inhabitants of Concord, assembled in the gray

of the dawn, assisted by a still larger armed force, to send back a

perfectly innocent man, and one whom they knew to be innocent, into a

slavery as complete as the world ever knew. Of course it makes not the

least difference—I wish you to consider this—who the man was,—whether

he was Jesus Christ or another,—for inasmuch as ye did it unto the

least of these his brethren ye did it unto him. Do you think _he_ would

have stayed here in liberty and let the black man go into slavery in

his stead? They sent him back, I say, to live in slavery with other

three millions—mark that—whom the same slave power, or slavish power,

North and South, holds in that condition,—three millions who do not,

like the first mentioned, assert the right to govern themselves but

simply to run away and stay away from their prison.

Just a week afterward, those inhabitants of this town who especially

sympathize with the authorities of Boston in this their deed caused the

bells to be rung and the cannon to be fired to celebrate the courage

and the love of liberty of those men who assembled at the bridge. As if

_those_ three millions had fought for the right to be free themselves,

but to hold in slavery three million others. Why, gentlemen, even

consistency, though it is much abused, is sometimes a virtue. Every

humane and intelligent inhabitant of Concord, when he or she heard

those bells and those cannon, thought not so much of the events of the

19th of April, 1775, as of the event of the 12th of April, 1851.

I wish my townsmen to consider that, whatever the human law may be,

neither an individual nor a nation can ever deliberately commit the

least act of injustice without having to pay the penalty for it. A

government which deliberately enacts injustice, and persists in it!—it

will become the laughing-stock of the world.

Much as has been said about American slavery, I think that commonly

we do not yet realize what slavery is. If I were seriously to propose

to Congress to make mankind into sausages, I have no doubt that most

would smile at my proposition and, if any believed me to be in earnest,

they would think that I proposed something much worse than Congress had

ever done. But, gentlemen, if any of you will tell me that to make a

man into a sausage would be much worse—would be any worse—than to make

him into a slave,—than it was then to enact the fugitive slave law,—I

shall here accuse him of foolishness, of intellectual incapacity, of

making a distinction without a difference. The one is just as sensible

a proposition as the other.[156]

When I read the account of the carrying back of the fugitive into

slavery, which was read last Sunday evening, and read also what was not

read here, that the man who made the prayer on the wharf was Daniel

Foster of _Concord_, I could not help feeling a slight degree of

pride because, of all the towns in the Commonwealth, Concord was the

only one distinctly named as being represented in that new tea-party,

and, as she had a place in the first, so would have a place in this,

the last and perhaps next most important chapter of the History of

Massachusetts. But my second feeling, when I reflected how short a

time that gentleman has resided in this town, was one of doubt and

shame, because the _men_ of Concord in recent times have done nothing

to entitle them to the honor of having their town named in such a

connection.

I hear a good deal said about trampling this law under foot. Why, one

need not go out of his way to do that. This law lies not at the level

of the head or the reason. Its natural habitat is in the dirt. It was

bred and has its life only in the dust and mire, on a level with the

feet; and he who walks with freedom, unless, with a sort of quibbling

and Hindoo mercy, he avoids treading on every venomous reptile, will

inevitably tread on it, and so trample it under foot.

It has come to this, that the friends of liberty, the friends of the

slave, have shuddered when they have understood that his fate has been

left to the legal tribunals, so-called, of the country to be decided.

The people have no faith that justice will be awarded in such a case.

The judge may decide this way or that; it is a kind of accident

at best. It is evident that he is not a competent authority in so

important a case. I would not trust the life of my friend to the judges

of all the Supreme Courts in the world put together, to be sacrificed

or saved by precedent. I would much rather trust to the sentiment of

the people, which would itself be a precedent to posterity. In their

vote you would get something worth having at any rate, but in the other

case only the trammelled judgment of an individual, of no significance,

be it which way it will.

I think that recent events will be valuable as a criticism on the

administration of justice in our midst, or rather as revealing what

are the true sources of justice in any community. It is to some extent

fatal to the courts when the people are compelled to go behind the

courts. They learn that the courts are made for fair weather and for

very civil cases.[157]

[Two pages missing.]

let us entertain opinions of our own;[158] let us be a town and not

a suburb, as far from Boston in this sense as we were by the old road

which led through Lexington; a place where tyranny may ever be met with

firmness and driven back with defeat to its ships.

Concord has several more bridges left of the same sort, which she is

taxed to maintain. Can she not raise men to defend them?

* * * * *

As for measures to be adopted, among others I would advise

abolitionists to make as earnest and vigorous and persevering an

assault on the press, as they have already made, and with effect too,

on the church. The church has decidedly improved within a year or

two, aye, even within a fortnight; but the press is, almost without

exception, corrupt. I believe that in this country the press exerts a

greater and a more pernicious influence than the church. We are not a

religious people, but we are a nation of politicians. We do not much

care for, we do not read, the Bible, but we do care for and we do read

the newspaper. It is a bible which we read every morning and every

afternoon, standing and sitting, riding and walking. It is a bible

which every man carries in his pocket, which lies on every table and

counter, which the mail and thousands of missionaries are continually

dispersing. It is the only book which America has printed, and is

capable of exerting an almost inconceivable influence for good or for

bad. The editor is [a] preacher whom you voluntarily support. Your tax

is commonly one cent, and it costs nothing for pew hire. But how many

of these preachers preach the truth? I repeat the testimony of many

an intelligent traveller, as well as my own convictions, when I say

that probably no country was ever ruled by so mean a class of tyrants

as are the editors of the periodical press in _this_ country. Almost

without exception the tone of the press is mercenary and servile. The

_Commonwealth_, and the _Liberator_, are the only papers, as far as

I know, which make themselves heard in condemnation of the cowardice

and meanness of the authorities of Boston as lately exhibited. The

other journals, almost without exception,—as the _Advertiser_, the

_Transcript_, the _Journal_, the _Times_, _Bee_, _Herald_, etc.,—by

their manner of referring to and speaking of the Fugitive Slave Law or

the carrying back of the slave, insult the common sense of the country.

And they do this for the most part, because they think so to secure the

approbation of their patrons, and also, one would think, because they

are not aware that a sounder sentiment prevails to any extent.

But, thank fortune, this preacher can be more easily reached by the

weapons of the reformer than could the recreant priest. The _free_ men

of New England have only to refrain from purchasing and reading these

sheets, have only to withhold their cents, to kill a score of them at

once.[159]

* * * * *

Mahomet made his celestial journey in so short a time that “on his

return he was able to prevent the complete overturn of a vase of water,

which the angel Gabriel had struck with his wing on his departure.”

When he took refuge in a cave near Mecca, being on his flight

(Hegira) to Medina, “by the time that the Koreishites [who were close

behind][160] reached the mouth of the cavern, an acacia tree had sprung

up before it, in the spreading branches of which a pigeon had made

its nest, and laid its eggs, and over the whole a spider had woven its

web.”

He said of himself, “I am no king, but the son of a Koreishite woman,

who ate flesh dried in the sun.”

He exacted “a tithe of the productions of the earth, where it was

fertilized by brooks and rain; and a twentieth part where its fertility

was the result of irrigation.”

_April 22._ Had mouse-ear in blossom for a week. Observed the crowfoot

on the Cliffs in abundance, and the saxifrage. The wind last Wednesday,

April 16th, blew down a hundred pines on Fair Haven Hill.

Having treated my friend ill, I wished to apologize; but, not meeting

him, I made an apology to myself.

It is not the invitation which I hear, but which I feel, that I obey.

_April 26._ The judge whose words seal the fate of a man for the

longest time and furthest into eternity is not he who merely pronounces

the verdict of the law, but he, whoever he may be, who, from a love

of truth and unprejudiced by any custom or enactment of men, utters a

true opinion or _sentence_ concerning him. He it is that _sentences_

him.[161] More fatal, as affecting his good or ill fame, is the

utterance of the least inexpugnable truth concerning him, by the

humblest individual, than the sentence of the supremest court in the

land.

* * * * *

Gathered the mayflower and cowslips yesterday, and saw the houstonia,

violets, etc. Saw a dandelion in blossom.

* * * * *

Are they Americans, are they New-Englanders, are they inhabitants

of Concord,—Buttricks and Davises and Hosmers by name,—who read and

support the Boston _Herald_, _Advertiser_, _Traveller_, _Journal_,

_Transcript_, etc., etc., _Times_? Is that the _Flag of our Union_?

Could slavery suggest a more complete servility? Is there any dust

which such conduct does not lick and make fouler still with its slime?

Has not the Boston _Herald_ acted its part well, served its master

faithfully? How could it have gone lower on its belly? How can a man

stoop lower than he is low? do more than put his extremities in the

place of that head he has? than make his head his _lower_ extremity?

And when I say the Boston _Herald_ I mean the Boston press, with such

few and slight exceptions as need not be made. When I have taken up

this paper or the Boston _Times_, with my cuffs turned up, I have

heard the gurgling of the sewer through every column; I have felt

that I was handling a paper picked out of the public sewers, a leaf

from the gospel of the gambling-house, the groggery, and the brothel,

harmonizing with the gospel of the Merchants’ Exchange.[162]

I do not know but there are some who, if they were tied to the

whipping-post and could but get one hand free, would use it to ring

the bells and fire the cannon to celebrate their liberty. It reminded

me of the Roman Saturnalia, on which even the slaves were allowed to

take some liberty. So some of you took the liberty to ring and fire.

That was the extent of your freedom; and when the sound of the bells

died away, your liberty died away also, and when the powder was all

expended, your liberty went off with the smoke. Nowadays men wear a

fool’s-cap and call it a liberty-cap. The joke could be no broader

if the inmates of the prisons were to subscribe for all the powder to

be used in such salutes, and hire their jailors to do the firing and

ringing for them.[163]

_April 29._ Every man, perhaps, is inclined to think his own situation

singular in relation to friendship. Our thoughts would imply that other

men _have_ friends, though we have not. But I do not know of two whom

I can speak of as standing in this relation to one another. Each one

makes a standing offer to mankind, “On such and such terms I will give

myself to you;” but it is only by a miracle that his terms are ever

accepted.

We have to defend ourselves even against those who are nearest to

friendship with us.

What a difference it is!—to perform the pilgrimage of life in the

society of a mate, and not to have an acquaintance among all the tribes

of men!

What signifies the census—this periodical numbering of men—to one who

has no friend?

I distinguish between my _actual_ and my _real_ communication with

individuals. I _really_ communicate with my friends and congratulate

myself and them on our relation and rejoice in their presence and

society oftenest when they are personally absent. I remember that not

long ago, as I laid my head on my pillow for the night, I was visited

by an inexpressible joy that I was permitted to know and be related

to such mortals as I was then actually related to; and yet no special

event that I could think of had occurred to remind me of any with

whom I was connected, and by the next noon, perchance, those essences

that had caused me joy would have receded somewhat. I experienced a

remarkable gladness in the thought that they existed. Their existence

was then blessed to me. Yet such has never been my actual waking

relation to any.

Every one experiences that, while his relation to another actually may

be one of distrust and disappointment, he may still have relations to

him ideally and so really, in spite of both. He is faintly conscious of

a confidence and satisfaction somewhere, and all further intercourse is

based on this experience of success.

The very dogs and cats incline to affection in their relation to man.

It often happens that a man is more humanely related to a cat or dog

than to any human being. What bond is it relates us to any animal we

keep in the house but the bond of affection? In a degree we grow to

love one another.

_April 30._ What is a chamber to which the sun does not rise in the

morning? What is a chamber to which the sun does not set at evening?

Such are often the chambers of the mind, for the most part.

Even the cat which lies on a rug all day commences to prowl about the

fields at night, resumes her ancient forest habits. The most tenderly

bred grimalkin steals forth at night,—watches some bird on its perch

for an hour in the furrow, like a gun at rest. She catches no cold;

it is her nature. Caressed by children and cherished with a saucer of

milk. Even she can erect her back and expand her tail and spit at her

enemies like the wild cat of the woods. Sweet Sylvia!

What is the singing of birds, or any natural sound, compared with the

voice of one we love?

To one we love we are related as to nature in the spring. Our dreams

are mutually intelligible. We take the census, and find that there is

one.

Love is a mutual confidence whose foundations no one knows. The one I

love surpasses all the laws of nature in sureness. Love is capable of

any wisdom.

“He that hath love and judgment too

Sees more than any other doe.”

By our very mutual attraction, and our attraction to all other spheres,

kept properly asunder. Two planets which are mutually attracted, being

at the same time attracted by the sun, preserve equipoise and harmony.

Does not the history of chivalry and knight-errantry suggest or point

to another relation to woman than leads to marriage, yet an elevating

and all-absorbing one, perchance transcending marriage? As yet men know

not one another, nor does man know woman.

I am sure that the design of my maker when he has brought me nearest

to woman was not the propagation, but rather the maturation, of the

species. Man is capable of a love of woman quite transcending marriage.

I observe that the _New York Herald_ advertises situations wanted by

“respectable young women” by the column, but never by respectable young

men, rather “intelligent” and “smart” ones; from which I infer that the

public opinion of New York does not require young men to be respectable

in the same sense in which it requires young women to be so.

May it consist with the health of some bodies to be impure?

IV

MAY, 1851

(ÆT. 33)

_May 1._ Observed the _Nuphar advena_, yellow water-lily, in blossom;

also the _Laurus Benzoin_, or fever-bush, spice-wood, near William

Wheeler’s in Lincoln, resembling the witch-hazel. It is remarkable that

this aromatic shrub, though it grows by the roadside and does not hide

itself, may be, as it were, effectually concealed, though it blossoms

every spring. It may be observed only once in many years.

The blossom-buds of the peach have expanded just enough to give a

slight peach tint to the orchards.

In regard to purity, I do not know whether I am much worse or better

than my acquaintances. If I confine my thought to myself, I appear,

whether by constitution or by education, irrevocably impure, as if

I should be shunned by my fellow-men if they knew me better, as if I

were of two inconsistent natures; but again, when I observe how the

mass of men speak of woman and of chastity,—with how little love and

reverence,—I feel that so far I am unaccountably better than they. I

think that none of my acquaintances has a greater love and admiration

for chastity than I have. Perhaps it is necessary that one should

actually stand low himself in order to reverence what is high in

others.

All distant landscapes seen from hilltops are veritable pictures,

which will be found to have no actual existence to him who travels

to them. “’T is distance lends enchantment to the view.” It is the

bare landscape without this depth of atmosphere to glass it. The

distant river-reach seen in the north from the Lincoln Hill, high in

the horizon, like the ocean stream flowing round Homer’s shield, the

rippling waves reflecting the light, is unlike the same seen near at

hand. Heaven intervenes between me and the object. By what license do

I call it Concord River. It redeems the character of rivers to see them

thus. They were worthy then of a place on Homer’s shield.

As I looked to-day from Mt. Tabor in Lincoln to the Waltham hill, I

saw the same deceptive slope, the near hill melting into the further

inseparably, indistinguishably; it was one gradual slope from the

base of the near hill to the summit of the further one, a succession

of copse-woods, but I knew that there intervened a valley two or

three miles wide, studded with houses and orchards and drained by a

considerable stream. When the shadow of a cloud passed over the nearer

hill, I could distinguish its shaded summit against the side of the

other.

* * * * *

I had in my mind’s eye a silent gray tarn which I had seen the summer

before high up on the side of a mountain, Bald Mountain, where the

half-dead spruce trees stood far in the water draped with wreathy mist

as with usnea moss, made of dews, where the mountain spirit bathed;

whose bottom was high above the surface of other lakes. Spruces whose

dead limbs were more in harmony with the mists which draped them.

The forenoon that I moved to my house, a poor old lame fellow who had

formerly frozen his feet hobbled off the road, came and stood before my

door with one hand on each door-post, looking into the house, and asked

for a drink of water. I knew that rum or something like it was the only

drink he loved, but I gave him a dish of warm pond water, which was all

I had, nevertheless, which to my astonishment he drank, being used to

drinking.

Nations! What are nations? Tartars! and Huns! and Chinamen! Like

insects they swarm. The historian strives in vain to make them

memorable. It is for want of a man that there are so many men. It is

individuals that populate the world.

THE SPIRIT OF LODIN

“I look down from my height on nations,

And they become ashes before me;

Calm is my dwelling in the clouds;

Pleasant are the great fields of my rest.”[164]

Man is as singular as God.

* * * * *

There is a certain class of unbelievers who sometimes ask me such

questions as, if I think that I can live on vegetable food alone; and

to strike at the root of the matter at once, I am accustomed to answer

such, “Yes, I can live on board nails.” If they cannot understand that,

they cannot understand much that I have to say. That cuts the matter

short with them. For my own part, I am glad to hear of experiments of

this kind being tried; as that a young man tried for a fortnight to see

if he could live on hard, raw corn on the ear, using his tooth for his

only mortar. The squirrel tribe tried the same and succeeded. The human

race is interested in these experiments, though a few old women may be

alarmed, who own their thirds in mills.[165]

* * * * *

Khaled would have his weary soldiers vigilant still; apprehending a

midnight sally from the enemy, “Let no man sleep,” said he. “We shall

have rest enough after death.” Would such an exhortation be understood

by Yankee soldiers?

* * * * *

Omar answered the dying Abu Beker: “O successor to the apostle of God!

spare me from this burden. I have no need of the Caliphat.” “But the

Caliphat has need of you!” replied the dying Abu Beker.

* * * * *

“Heraclius had heard of the mean attire of the Caliph Omar, and asked

why, having gained so much wealth by his conquests, he did not go

richly clad like other princes? They replied, that he cared not for

this world, but for the world to come, and sought favor in the eyes

of God alone. ‘In what kind of a palace does he reside?’ asked the

emperor. ‘In a house built of mud.’ ‘Who are his attendants?’ ‘Beggars

and the poor.’ ‘What tapestry does he sit upon?’ ‘Justice and equity.’

‘What is his throne?’ ‘Abstinence and true knowledge.’ ‘What is his

treasure?’ ‘Trust in God.’ ‘And who are his guard?’ ‘The bravest of the

Unitarians.’”

It was the custom of Ziyad, once governor of Bassora, “wherever he held

sway, to order the inhabitants to leave their doors open at night, with

merely a hurdle at the entrance to exclude cattle, engaging to replace

any thing that should be stolen: and so effective was his police, that

no robberies were committed.”

Abdallah was “so fixed and immovable in prayer, that a pigeon once

perched upon his head mistaking him for a statue.”

_May 6. Monday._ The Harivansa describes a “substance called

_Poroucha_, a spiritual substance known also under the name of Mahat,

spirit united to the five elements, soul of being, now enclosing

itself in a body like ours, now returning to the eternal body; it is

mysterious wisdom, the perpetual sacrifice made by the virtue of the

_Yoga_, the fire which animates animals, shines in the sun, and is

mingled with all bodies. Its nature is to be born and to die, to pass

from repose to movement. The spirit led astray by the senses, in the

midst of the creation of Brahma, engages itself in works and knows

birth, as well as death. The organs of the senses are its paths, and

its work manifests itself in this creation of Brahma. Thought tormented

by desires, is like the sea agitated by the wind. Brahma has said: the

heart filled with strange affections is to be here below purified by

wisdom. Here below even, clothed already as it were in a luminous form,

let the spirit, though clogged by the bonds of the body, prepare for

itself an abode sure and permanent.

“He who would obtain final emancipation must abstain from every

exterior action. The operation which conducts the pious and penitent

Brahman to the knowledge of the truth, is all interior, intellectual,

mental. They are not ordinary practices which can bring light into the

soul.

“The Mouni who desires his final emancipation will have care evening

and morning to subdue his senses, to fix his mind on the divine

essence, and to transport himself by the force of his soul to the

eternal abode of Vichnou. Although he may have engaged in works, he

does not wear the clog of them, because his soul is not attached to

them. A being returns to life in consequence of the affection which he

has borne for terrestrial things: he finds himself emancipated, when he

has felt only indifference for them.

“The Richis mingle with nature, which remains strange to their senses.

Luminous and brilliant they cover themselves with a humid vapor, under

which they seem no more to exist, although existing always, like the

thread which is lost and confounded in the woof.

“Free in this world, as the birds in the air, disengaged from every

kind of chain.

“Thus the Yogin, absorbed in contemplation, contributes for his part

to creation: he breathes a divine perfume, he hears wonderful things.

Divine forms traverse him without tearing him, and united to the

nature which is proper to him, he goes, he acts, as animating original

matter.”

Like some other preachers, I have added my texts—derived from the

Chinese and Hindoo scriptures—long after my discourse was written.

* * * * *

A commentary on the Sankhya Karika says, “By external knowledge worldly

distinction is acquired; by internal knowledge, liberation.”

* * * * *

The Sankhya Karika says, “By attainment of perfect knowledge, virtue

and the rest become causeless; yet soul remains awhile invested with

body, as the potter’s wheel continues whirling from the effect of the

impulse previously given to it.”

* * * * *

I rejoice that horses and steers have to [be] _broken_ before they can

be made the slaves of men, and that men themselves have some wild oats

still left to sow before they become submissive members of society.

Undoubtedly all men are not equally fit subjects for civilization,

and because the majority, like dogs and sheep, are tame by inherited

disposition, is no reason why the others should have their natures

broken, that they may be reduced to the same level. Men are in the

main alike, but they were made several in order that [they] might

be various. If a low use is to be served, one man will do nearly or

quite as well as another; if a high one, individual excellence is to

be regarded. Any man can stop a hole to keep the wind away, but no

other man can serve that use which the author of this illustration did.

Confucius says, “The skins of the tiger and the leopard when they are

tanned, are as the skins of the dog and the sheep tanned.” But it is

not the part of a true culture to tame tigers, any more than it is to

make sheep ferocious. It is evident, then, that tanning their skins for

shoes and the like is not the best use to which they can be put.[166]

* * * * *

How important is a constant intercourse with nature and the

contemplation of natural phenomena to the preservation of moral and

intellectual health! The discipline of the schools or of business can

never impart such serenity to the mind. The philosopher contemplates

human affairs as calmly and from as great a remoteness as he does

natural phenomena. The ethical philosopher needs the discipline of

the natural philosopher. He approaches the study of mankind with great

advantages who is accustomed to the study of nature.

The Brahman Saradwata, says the Dharma Sacontala, was at first

confounded on entering the city, “but now,” says he, “I look on it as

the freeman on the captive, as a man just bathed in pure water on a man

smeared with oil and dust.”

_May 10._ Heard the snipe over the meadows this evening.

_May 12._ Heard the golden robin and the bobolink.

But where she has her seat,—whether in Westford or in Boxboro,—not

even the assessors know. Inquire perchance of that dusky family on

the cross-road, which is said to have Indian blood in their veins.

Or perchance where this old cellar-hole now grassed over is faintly

visible, Nature once had her dwelling. Ask the crazy old woman who

brings huckleberries to the village, but who lives nobody knows where.

* * * * *

If I have got false teeth, I trust that I have not got a false

conscience. It is safer to employ the dentist than the priest to repair

the deficiencies of nature.

By taking the ether the other day I was convinced how far asunder a man

could be separated from his senses. You are told that it will make you

unconscious, but no one can imagine what it is to be unconscious—how

far removed from the state of consciousness and all that we call “this

world”—until he has experienced it. The value of the experiment is

that it does give you experience of an interval as between one life and

another,—a greater space than you ever travelled. You are a sane mind

without organs,—groping for organs,—which if it did not soon recover

its old senses would get new ones. You expand like a seed in the

ground. You exist in your roots, like a tree in the winter. If you have

an inclination to travel, take the ether; you go beyond the furthest

star.

It is not necessary for them to take ether, who in their sane and

waking hours are ever translated by a thought; nor for them to see with

their hindheads, who sometimes see from their foreheads; nor listen to

the spiritual knockings, who attend to the intimations of reason and

conscience.

_May 16._ Heard the whip-poor-will this evening. A splendid full moon

to-night. Walked from 6.30 to 10 P. M. Lay on a rock near a meadow,

which had absorbed and retained much heat, so that I could warm my back

on it, it being a cold night. I found that the side of the sand-hill

was cold on the surface, but warm two or three inches beneath.[167]

If there is a more splendid moonlight than usual, only the belated

traveller observes it. When I am outside, on the outskirts of the town,

enjoying the still majesty of the moon, I am wont to think that all men

are aware of this miracle, that they too are silently worshipping this

manifestation of divinity elsewhere. But when I go into the house I

am undeceived; they are absorbed in checkers or chess or novel, though

they may have been advertised of the brightness through the shutters.

In the moonlight night what intervals are created! The rising moon is

related to the near pine tree which rises above the forest, and we get

a juster notion of distance. The moon is only somewhat further off and

on one side. There may be only three objects,—myself, a pine tree, and

the moon, nearly equidistant.

Talk of demonstrating the rotation of the earth on its axis,—see the

moon rise, or the sun!

The moonlight reveals the beauty of trees. By day it is so light and in

this climate so _cold_ commonly, that we do not perceive their shade.

We do not know when we are beneath them.

* * * * *

According to Michaux, the canoe birch (_Betula papyracea_) ceases

below the forty-third degree of latitude. Sections of the wood from

just below the first ramification are used to inlay mahogany, in these

parts. It is brought from Maine for fuel.

Common white birch (_B. populifolia_) not found south of Virginia.

Its epidermis incapable of being divided like the canoe birch and the

European white.

The common alder (_Alnus serrulata_) blooms in January.

The locust (_Robinia Pseudacacia_) was one of the earliest trees

introduced into Europe from America (by one Robin, about 1601); now

extensively propagated in England, France, and Germany. Used for

trunnels to the exclusion of all others in the Middle and Southern

States. Instead of decaying, acquire hardness with time.

_May 18. Sunday._ Lady’s-slipper almost fully blossomed. The log of

a canoe birch on Fair Haven, cut down the last winter, more than a

foot in diameter at the stump; one foot in diameter at ten feet from

the ground. I observed that all parts of the epidermis exposed to the

air and light were white, but the inner surfaces, freshly exposed,

were a buff or salmon-color. Sinclair says that in winter it is white

throughout. But this was cut before the sap flowed??! Was there any

sap in the log? I counted about fifty rings. The shrub oaks are now

blossoming. The scarlet tanagers are come. The oak leaves of all colors

are just expanding, and are more beautiful than most flowers. The

hickory buds are almost leaves. The landscape has a new life and light

infused into it. The deciduous trees are springing, to countenance

the pines, which are evergreen. It seems to take but one summer day

to fetch the summer in. The turning-point between winter and summer

is reached. The birds are in full blast. There is a peculiar freshness

about the landscape; you scent the fragrance of new leaves, of hickory

and sassafras, etc. And to the eye the forest presents the tenderest

green. The blooming of the apple trees is becoming general.

I think that I have made out two kinds of poplar,—the _Populus

tremuloides_, or American aspen, and the _P. grandidentata_, or large

American aspen, whose young leaves are downy.

* * * * *

Michaux says that the locust begins to convert its sap into perfect

wood from the third year; which is not done by the oak, the chestnut,

the beech, and the elm till after the tenth or the fifteenth year.

He quotes the saying, “The foot of the owner is the best manure for

his land.” “He” is Augustus L. Hillhouse, who writes the account of the

olive at the request of Michaux.

The elder Michaux found the balsam poplar (_P. balsamifera_) very

abundant on Lake St. John and the Saguenay River, where it is eighty

feet high and three feet in diameter. This, however, is distinct

from the _P. candicans_, heart-leaved balsam poplar, which M. finds

hereabouts, though never in the woods, and does not know where it came

from.

He praises the Lombardy poplar because, its limbs being compressed

about the trunk, it does not interfere with the walls of a house nor

obstruct the windows.

No wood equal to our black ash for oars, so pliant and elastic

and strong, second only to hickory for handspikes; used also for

chair-bottoms and riddles.

The French call the nettle-tree _bois inconnu_.

Our white elm (_Ulmus Americana_) “the most magnificent vegetable of

the temperate zone.”

The _Pinus mitis_, yellow pine, or spruce pine, or short-leaved pine. A

two-leaved pine widely diffused, but not found northward beyond certain

districts of Connecticut and Massachusetts. In New Jersey fifty or

sixty feet high and fifteen to eighteen inches in diameter. Sometimes

three leaves on fresh shoots; smallest of pine cones; seeds cast first

year. Very excellent wood for houses, masts, decks, yards, beams, and

cabins, next in durability to the long-leaved pine. Called at Liverpool

New York pine. Its regular branches make it to be called spruce pine

sometimes.

_Pinus australis_, or long-leaved pine, an invaluable tree, called

yellow pine, pitch pine, and broom pine where it grows; in the North,

Southern pine and red pine; in England, Georgia pitch pine. First

appears at Norfolk, Virginia; thence stretches six hundred miles

southwest. Sixty or seventy feet high, by fifteen to eighteen inches;

leaves a foot long, three in a sheath; negroes use them for brooms.

Being stronger, more compact and durable, because the resin is equally

distributed, and also fine-grained and susceptible of a bright polish,

it is preferred to every other pine. In naval architecture, most

esteemed of all pines,—keels, beams, side-planks, trunnels, etc. For

decks preferred to yellow pine,—and flooring houses. Sold for more

at Liverpool than any other pine. Moreover it supplies nearly all the

resinous matter used and exported. Others which contain much pitch are

more dispersed. At present (1819) this business is confined to North

Carolina.

M. says the branches of resinous trees consist almost wholly of

_wood_, of which the organization is even more perfect than in the

body of the tree. They use dead wood for the tar, etc., in which it has

accumulated.

Says the vicinity of Brunswick, Me., and Burlington, Vt., are the most

northerly limits of the pitch pine or _P. rigida_. (I saw what I should

have called a pitch pine at Montmorency.)

White pine (_P. Strobus_) most abundant between forty-third and

forty-seventh degrees, one hundred and eighty feet by seven and

eight twelfths the largest. “The loftiest and most valuable” of the

productions of the New Hampshire forest.

The black spruce is called _épinette noire_ and _épinette à la bière_

in Canada. From its strength best substitute for oak and larch. Used

here for rafters and preferred to hemlock; tougher than white pine, but

more liable to crack.

The white spruce (_Abies alba_) called _épinette blanche_ in Canada.

Not so large as the last and wood inferior.

Hemlock spruce (_Abies Canadensis_) called _pérusse_ in Canada. In

Maine, Vermont, and upper New Hampshire, three fourths of the evergreen

woods, the rest being black spruce. Belongs to cold regions; begins

to appear about Hudson’s Bay. Its fibre makes the circuit of stocks

fifteen or twenty inches in diameter in ascending five or six feet.

Old trees have their circles separated, and the boards are _shaky_.

Decays rapidly when exposed to the air. It is firmer, though coarser,

than the white pine; affords tighter hold to nails. Used in Maine for

threshing-floors, resisting indentation. Most common use sheathing of

houses, to be covered with clapboards. Used for laths.

White cedar (_Cupressus thyoides_). “The perfect wood resists the

succession of dryness and moisture longer than that of any other

species;” hence for shingles.

Larch (_Larix Americana_); in Canada _épinette rouge_; _tamarack_ by

the Dutch. Male aments appear before the leaves. Wood superior to any

pine or spruce in strength and durability. Used in Maine for knees.

Cedar of Lebanon (_Larix cedrus_) largest and most majestic of resinous

trees of the Old World and one of the finest vegetable productions of

the globe.

Cedar Island in Lake Champlain northern limit of red cedar (_Juniperus

Virginiana_). Eastward, not beyond Wiscasset. Seeds mature at beginning

of fall and _sown at once_; shoot next spring. Gin made from them.

Arbor-vitæ (_Thuya occidentalis_), the only species of _Thuya_ in the

New World. Lake St. John in Canada its northern limit; abounds between

48° 50´ and 45°. The posts last thirty-five or forty years, and the

rails sixty, or three or four times as long as those of any other

species. In northern New England States the best for fences; last

longer in clay than sand.

The superiority of mahogany in the fineness of its grain and its

hardness, which make it susceptible of a brilliant polish. Native trees

in Northern States used in cabinet making are black, yellow, and canoe

birches, red-flowering curled maple, bird’s-eye maple, wild cherry, and

sumach.

The circle[s] of peck and other measures made at Hingham of black, red,

or gray oak are “always of a dull blue color, produced by the gallic

acid of the wood acting upon the iron vessel in which it is boiled.”

White ash used for sieve rims, rake heads and handles, scythe handles,

pulleys, etc. Rake teeth of the mockernut hickory.

In New York and Philadelphia “the price [of wood for fuel][168] nearly

equals and sometimes exceeds that of the best wood in Paris, though

this immense capital annually requires more than 300,000 cords, and is

surrounded to the distance of 300 miles by cultivated plains.” Said in

book of 1819.

_May 19._ Found the _Arum triphyllum_ and the nodding trillium, or

wake-robin, in Conant’s Swamp. An ash also in bloom there, and the

sassafras quite striking. Also the fringed polygala by Conantum wood.

* * * * *

Sinclair says the hornbeam is called “swamp beech” in Vermont.

_May 20. Tuesday._ There is, no doubt, a perfect analogy between the

life of the human being and that of the vegetable, both of the body and

the mind. The botanist Gray says:—

“The organs of plants are of two sorts:—1. Those of _Vegetation_,

which are concerned in growth,—by which the plant takes in the aërial

and earthy matters on which it lives, and elaborates them into the

materials of its own organized substance; 2. Those of _Fructification_

or _Reproduction_, which are concerned with the propagation of the

species.”

So is it with the human being. I am concerned first to come to my

_Growth_, intellectually and morally (and physically, of course, as

a means to this, for the body is the symbol of the soul), and then to

bear my _Fruit_, do my _Work_, _propagate_ my kind, not only physically

but _morally_, not only in body but in mind.

“The organs of vegetation are the _Root_, _Stem_, and _Leaves_. The

_Stem_ is the axis and original basis of the plant.”

“The first point of the stem preëxists in the embryo (_i. e._ in the

rudimentary plantlet contained within the seed): it is here called the

radicle.” Such is the rudiment of mind, already partially developed,

more than a bud, but pale, having never been exposed to the light, and

slumbering coiled up, packed away in the seed, unfolded [_sic_].

Consider the still pale, rudimentary, infantine, radicle-like thoughts

of some students, which who knows what they might expand to, if they

should ever come to the light and air, if they do not become rancid and

perish in the seed. It is not every seed that will survive a thousand

years. Other thoughts further developed, but yet pale and languid, like

shoots grown in a cellar.

“The plant ... develops from the first in two opposite directions,

_viz._ upwards [to expand in the light and air] to produce and continue

the stem (or _ascending axis_), and downwards [avoiding the light][169]

to form the root (or _descending_ axis). The former is ordinarily or in

great part aërial, the latter subterranean.”

So the mind develops from the first in two opposite directions: upwards

to expand in the light and air; and downwards avoiding the light to

form the root. One half is aërial, the other subterranean. The mind

is not well balanced and firmly planted, like the oak, which has not

as much root as branch, whose roots like those of the white pine are

slight and near the surface. One half of the mind’s development must

still be root,—in the embryonic state, in the womb of nature, more

unborn than at first. For each successive new idea or bud, a new

rootlet in the earth. The growing man penetrates yet deeper by his

roots into the womb of things. The infant is comparatively near the

surface, just covered from the light; but the man sends down a tap-root

to the centre of things.

The mere logician, the mere reasoner, who weaves his arguments as

a tree its branches in the sky,—nothing equally developed in the

roots,—is overthrown by the first wind.

As with the roots of the plant, so with the roots of the mind, the

branches and branchlets of the root “are mere repetitions for the

purpose of multiplying the absorbing points, which are chiefly the

growing or newly formed extremities, sometimes termed _spongelets_. It

bears no other organs.”

So this organ of the mind’s development, the _Root_, bears no organs

but spongelets or absorbing points.

Annuals, which perish root and all the first season, especially have

slender and thread-like fibrous roots. But biennials are particularly

characterized by distended, fleshy roots containing starch, a stock

for future growth, to be consumed during their second or flowering

season,—as carrots, radishes, turnips. Perennials frequently have

many thickened roots clustered together, tuberous or palmate roots,

fasciculated or clustered as in the dahlia, pæony, etc.

Roots may spring from any part of the stem under favorable

circumstances; “that is to say in darkness and moisture, as when

covered by the soil or resting on its surface.”

That is, the most clear and ethereal ideas (Antæus-like) readily ally

themselves to the earth, to the primal womb of things. They put forth

roots as soon as branches; they are eager to be _soiled_. No thought

soars so high that it sunders these apron-strings of its mother.

The thought that comes to light, that pierces the empyrean on the

other side, is wombed and rooted in darkness, a moist and fertile

darkness,—its roots in Hades like the tree of life. No idea is so

soaring but it will readily put forth roots. Wherever there is an

air-and-light-seeking bud about to expand, it may become in the earth

a darkness-seeking root. Even swallows and birds-of-paradise _can_ walk

on the ground. To quote the sentence from Gray entire: “Roots not only

spring from the root-end of the primary stem in germination, but also

from any subsequent part of the stem under favorable circumstances,

that is to say, in darkness and moisture, as when covered by the soil

or resting on its surface.”

No thought but is connected as strictly as a flower, with the

earth. The mind flashes not so far on one side but its rootlets, its

spongelets, find their way instantly on the other side into a moist

darkness, uterine,—a low bottom in the heavens, even miasma-exhaling to

such immigrants as are not acclimated. A cloud is uplifted to sustain

its roots. Imbosomed in clouds as in a chariot, the mind drives through

the boundless fields of space. Even there is the dwelling of Indra.

I might here quote the following, with the last—of roots: “They may

even strike in the open air and light, as is seen in the copious aërial

rootlets by which the Ivy, the Poison Ivy, and the Trumpet Creeper

climb and adhere to the trunks of trees or other bodies; and also in

Epiphytes or Air-plants, of most warm regions, which have no connection

whatever with the soil, but germinate and grow high in air on the

trunks or branches of trees, etc.; as well as in some terrestrial

plants, such as the Banian and Mangrove, that send off aërial roots

from their trunks or branches, which finally reach the ground.”

So, if our light-and-air-seeking tendencies extend too widely for our

original root or stem, we must send downward new roots to ally us to

the earth.

Also there are parasitic plants which have their roots in the branches

or roots of other trees, as the mistletoe, the beech-drops, etc. There

are minds which so have their roots in other minds as in the womb of

nature,—if, indeed, most are not such?!

_May 21. Wednesday._ Yesterday I made out the black and the white

ashes. A double male white ash in Miles’s Swamp, and two black ashes

with sessile leaflets. A female white ash near railroad, in Stow’s

land. The white ashes by Mr. Pritchard’s have no blossoms, at least as

yet.

If I am right, the _black_ ash is improperly so called, from the color

of its bark being lighter than the white. Though it answers to the

description in other respects, even to the elder-like odor of the

leaves, I should like still to see a description of the yellow ash

which grows in made [_sic_].

The day before yesterday I found the male sassafras in abundance but no

female.

The leaves of my new pine on Merriam’s or Pine Hill are of intermediate

length between those of the yellow pine and the Norway pine. I can

find no cone to distinguish the tree by; but, as the leaves are

_semicylindrical_ and not _hollowed_ I think it must be the red

or Norway Pine, though it does not look very red, and is _spruce_!

answering perhaps to the description of the yellow pine, which is

sometimes called spruce pine.

To-day examined the flowers of the _Nemopanthes Canadensis_,—a genus of

a single species, says Emerson. It bears the beautiful crimson velvety

berry of the swamps, and is what I have heard called the cornel. Common

name wild holly.

* * * * *

I have heard now within a few days that peculiar dreaming sound of the

frogs[170] which belongs to the summer,—their midsummer night’s dream.

Only that thought and that expression are good which are musical.

I think that we are not commonly aware that man is our

contemporary,—that in this strange, outlandish world, so barren, so

prosaic, fit not to live in but merely to pass through, that even here

so divine a creature as man does actually live. Man, the crowning fact,

the god we know. While the earth supports so rare an inhabitant, there

is somewhat to cheer us. Who shall say that there is no God, if there

is a _just_ man. It is only within a year that it has occurred to me

that there is such a being actually existing on the globe. Now that I

perceive that it is so, many questions assume a new aspect. We have not

only the idea and vision of the divine ourselves, but we have brothers,

it seems, who have this idea also. Methinks my neighbor is better than

I, and his thought is better than mine. There is a representative of

the divinity on earth, of [whom] all things fair and noble are to

be expected. We have the material of heaven here. I think that the

standing miracle to man is man. Behind the paling yonder, come rain

or shine, hope or doubt, there dwells a man, an actual being who can

sympathize with our sublimest thoughts.

The revelations of nature are infinitely glorious and cheering, hinting

to us of a remote future, of possibilities untold; but startlingly near

to us some day we find a fellow-man.

The frog had eyed the heavens from his marsh, until his mind was filled

with visions, and he saw more than belongs to this fenny earth. He

mistrusted that he was become a dreamer and visionary. Leaping across

the swamp to his fellow, what was his joy and consolation to find that

he too had seen the same sights in the heavens, he too had dreamed the

same dreams!

From nature we turn astonished to this _near_ but supernatural fact.

I think that the existence of man in nature is the divinest and most

startling of all facts. It is a fact which few have realized.

I can go to my neighbors and meet on ground as elevated as we could

expect to meet upon if we were now in heaven.

“And we live,

We of this mortal mixture, in the same law

As the pure colorless intelligence

Which dwells in Heaven, and the dead Hadean shades.”

I do not think that man can understand the _importance_ of man’s

existence, its bearing on the other phenomena of life, until it shall

become a remembrance to him the survivor that such a being or such a

race once existed on the earth. Imagine yourself alone in the world,

a musing, wondering, reflecting spirit, _lost_ in thought, and imagine

thereafter the creation of man!—man made in the image of God!

Looking into a book on dentistry the other day, I observed a list of

authors who had written on this subject. There were Ran and Tan and

Yungerman, and I was impressed by the fact that there was nothing in

a name. It was as if they had been named by the child’s rigmarole of

_Iery [wiery] ichery van, tittle-tol-tan_, etc. I saw in my mind a herd

of wild creatures swarming over the earth, and to each one its own

herdsman had affixed some barbarous name, or sound, or syllables, in

his own dialect,—so in a thousand languages. Their names were seen to

be as meaningless exactly as Bose or Tray, the names of dogs.[171] Men

get named no better.

We seem to be distinct ourselves, never repeated, and yet we bear

no names which express a proportionate distinctness; they are quite

accidental. Take away their names, and you leave men a wild herd,

distinguished only by their individual qualities. It is as if you were

to give names in the Caffre dialect to the individuals in a herd of

spring-boks or gnus.

We have but few patronymics, but few Christian names, in proportion

to the number of us. Is it that men ceased to be original when genuine

and original names ceased to be given. Have we not enough character to

establish a new patronymic.

Methinks it would be some advantage to philosophy if men were _named_

merely in the gross, as they are known. It would only be necessary to

know the genus and, perchance, the species and variety, to know the

individual.

I will not allow _mere names_ to make distinctions for me, but still

see men in herds for all _them_. A familiar name cannot make a man less

strange to me. It may be given to a savage who retains in secret his

own wild title earned in the woods. I see that the neighbor who wears

the familiar epithet of William or Edwin takes it off with his jacket.

It does not adhere to him when asleep or when in anger, or aroused by

any passion or inspiration. I seem to hear pronounced by some of his

kin at such a time his original wild name in some jaw-breaking or else

melodious tongue. As the names of the Poles and Russians are to us, so

are ours to them.

Our names are as cheap as the names given to dogs. We know what are

dogs’ names; we know what are men’s names. Sometimes it would be

significant and truer, it would lead to generalization, it would avoid

exaggeration, to say, “_There was a man_ who said or did—,” instead of

designating him by some familiar, but perchance delusive, name.

We hardly believe that every private soldier in a Roman army had a name

of his own.[172]

It is interesting to see how the names of famous men are repeated,—even

of great poets and philosophers. The poet is not known to-day even by

his neighbors to be more than a common man. He is perchance the butt

of many. The proud farmer looks down [on] and boorishly ignores him,

or regards him as a loafer who treads down his grass, but perchance

in course of time the poet will have so succeeded that some of the

farmer’s posterity, though equally boorish with their ancestor, will

bear the poet’s name. The boor names his boy Homer, and so succumbs

unknowingly to the bard’s victorious fame. Anything so fine as poetic

genius he cannot more directly recognize. The unpoetic farmer names his

child Homer.

You have a wild savage in you, and a savage name is perchance somewhere

recorded as yours.[173]

_May 23. Friday._ And wilder still there grows elsewhere, I hear,

a native and aboriginal crab-apple, _Malus_ (as Michaux, or, as

Emerson has it, _Pyrus_) _coronaria_ in Southern States, and also

_angustifolia_ in the Middle States; whose young leaves “have a

bitter and slightly aromatic taste” (Michaux), whose beautiful flowers

perfume the air to a great distance. “The apples ... are small, green,

intensely acid, and very odoriferous. Some farmers make cider of them,

which is said to be excellent: they make very fine sweet-meats also,

by the addition of a large quantity of sugar” (Michaux). Celebrated

for “the beauty of its flowers, and for the sweetness of its perfume”

(Michaux).[174]

Michaux says that the wild apple of Europe has yielded to cultivation

nearly three hundred species in France alone. Emerson says, referring

to Loudon, “In 1836, the catalogue and the gardens of the London

Horticultural Society contained upwards of 1400 distinct sorts, and new

ones are every year added.”

But here are species which they have not in their catalogue, not to

mention the varieties which the crab might yield to cultivation.[175]

This genus, so kind to the human race, the _Malus_ or _Pyrus_;

_Rosaceæ_ the family, or others say _Pomaceæ_. Its flowers are perhaps

the most beautiful of any tree. I am frequently compelled to turn

and linger by some more than usually beautiful two-thirds-expanded

blossoms.[176] If such were not so common, its fame would be loud as

well as wide. Its most copious and delicious blossoms.

But our wild apple is wild perchance like myself, who belong not to

the aboriginal race here, but have strayed into the woods from the

cultivated stock,[177]—where the birds, where winged thoughts or

agents, have planted or are planting me. Even these at length furnish

hardy stocks for the orchard.

You might call one _Malus oculata_; another _M. Iridis_; _M. cum

parvuli dæmonis oculis_, or Imp-eyed; Blue-Jay Apple, or _M. corvi

cristati_; Wood-Dell Apple (_M. silvestri-vallis_); Field-Dell Apple

(_M. campestri-vallis_); Meadow Apple (_M. pratensis_); Rock Meadow

Apple (_saxopratensis_); Partridge or Grouse Apple or bud [_sic_];

Apple of the Hesperides (_Malus Hesperidum_); Woodside Apple;

Wood Apple (_M. silvatica_); the Truant’s Apple (_M. cessatoris_);

Saunterer’s Apple (_M. erronis vel vagabundi_); the Wayside Apple

(_M. trivialis_); Beauty of the Air (_decus aëris_); December-eating;

Frozen-thawed (_gelato-soluta_ or _gelata regelata_); the Concord Apple

(_M. Concordiensis_); the Brindled Apple; Wine of New England (_M.

vinosa_); the Chickaree Apple; the Green Apple (_M. viridis_); the

Dysentery or Cholera-morbus Apple.[178]

Distinctly related things are strangely near in _fact_, brush one

another with their jackets. Perchance this window-seat in which we sit

discoursing Transcendentalism, with only Germany and Greece stretching

behind our minds, was made so deep because this was a few years ago a

garrison-house, with thick log walls, bullet-proof, behind which men

sat to escape the wild red man’s bullet and the arrow and the tomahawk,

and bullets fired by Indians are now buried in its walls. Pythagoras

seems near compared with them.

_May 24. Saturday._ Our most glorious experiences are a kind of regret.

Our regret is so sublime that we may mistake it for triumph. It is

the painful, plaintively sad surprise of our Genius remembering our

past lives and contemplating what is possible. It is remarkable that

men commonly never refer to, never hint at, any crowning experiences

when the common laws of their being were unsettled and the divine and

eternal laws prevailed in them. Their lives are not revolutionary; they

never recognize any other than the local and temporal authorities. It

is a regret so divine and inspiring, so genuine, based on so true and

distinct a contrast, that it surpasses our proudest boasts and the

fairest expectations.

My most sacred and memorable life is commonly on awaking in the

morning. I frequently awake with an atmosphere about me as if my

unremembered dreams had been divine, as if my spirit had journeyed to

its native place, and, in the act of reëntering its native body, had

diffused an elysian fragrance around.

The Genius says: “Ah! That is what you were! That is what you may yet

be!” It is glorious for us to be able to regret even such an existence.

A sane and growing man revolutionizes every day. What institutions of

man can survive a morning experience? A single night’s sleep, if we

have indeed slumbered and forgotten anything and grown in our sleep,

puts them behind us like the river Lethe. It is no unusual thing for

him to see the kingdoms of this world pass away.[179]

* * * * *

It is an interesting inquiry to seek for the medicines which will

cure our ails in the plants which grow around us. At first we are not

disposed to believe that man and plants are so intimately related. Very

few plants have been medically examined. And yet this is the extent

of most men’s botany; and it is more extensive than would at first be

supposed. The botanist is startled by some countryman’s familiarity

with an obscure plant to him rare and strange. He, who has been an

observer for some years, knows not what it is, but the unobserving

countryman, who sees nothing but what is thrust upon him, or the old

woman who rarely goes out of the house, shows an easy familiarity with

it and can call it by name.

I am struck by the fact that, though any important individual

experience is rare, though it is so rare that the individual is

conscious of a relation to his maker transcending time and space and

earth, though any knowledge of, or communication from, “Providence”

is the rarest thing in the world, yet men very easily, regarding

themselves in the gross, speak of carrying out the designs of

Providence as nations. How often the Saxon man talks of carrying out

the designs of Providence, as if he had some knowledge of Providence

and His designs. Men allow themselves to associate Providence and

designs of Providence with their dull, prosaic, every-day thoughts

of things. That language is usurped by the stalest and deadest

prose, which can only report the most choice poetic experience. This

“Providence” is the stalest jest in the universe. The office-boy sweeps

out his office “by the leave of Providence.”

_May 25._ A fine, freshening air, a little hazy, that bathes and washes

everything, saving the day from extreme heat. Walked to the hills south

of Wayland by the road by Deacon Farrar’s. First vista just beyond

Merron’s (?), looking west down a valley, with a verdant-columned elm

at the extremity of the vale and the blue hills and horizon beyond.

These are the resting-places in a walk. We love to see any part of the

earth tinged with blue, cerulean, the color of the sky, the celestial

color. I wonder that houses are not oftener located mainly that they

may command particular rare prospects, every convenience yielding to

this. The farmer would never suspect what it was you were buying, and

such sites would be the cheapest of any. A site where you might avail

yourself of the art of Nature for three thousand years, which could

never be materially changed or taken from you, a noble inheritance

for your children. The true sites for human dwellings are unimproved.

They command no price in the market. Men will pay something to look

into a travelling showman’s box, but not to look upon the fairest

prospects on the earth. A vista where you have the near green horizon

contrasted with the distant blue one, terrestrial with celestial earth.

The prospect of a vast horizon must be accessible in our neighborhood.

Where men of enlarged views may be educated. An unchangeable kind of

wealth, a _real_ estate.

There we found the celandine in blossom and the _Ranunculus bulbosus_,

which we afterwards saw _double_ in Wayland, having nine petals.

The _Pyrus arbutifolia_, variety _melanocarpa_. Gray makes also the

variety _erythrocarpa_. Is this the late red choke-berry of the swamps?

and is the former the earlier black one of the swamps?

By Farrar’s the _Nepeta Glechoma_, a kind of mint. Linnæus calls it

_Glechoma hederacea_. Looks somewhat like catnep.

The marsh-marigold, _Caltha palustris_, improperly called cowslip.

The white oak, _Quercus alba_. And the commonest scrub oak, the bear or

black oak, _Q. ilicifolia_.

The chinquapin, or dwarf chestnut, oak, the smallest of our oaks, _Q.

prinoides_.

The _Cratægus coccinea_ (?), or scarlet-fruited thorn (?)

Another glorious vista with a wide horizon at the yellow Dutch house,

just over the Wayland line, by the black spruce, heavy and dark as

night, which we could see two or three miles as a landmark. Now at

least, before the deciduous trees have fully expanded their leaves, it

is remarkably black. It is more stoutly and irregularly branched than

Holbrook’s spruces—has a much darker foliage; but the cone scales of

both are slightly waved or notched. Are they, then, both black spruce?

The cones are enough like, and the thickness of the leaves; their

color enough unlike. Here is a view of the Jenkins house, the fish-pole

house, and Wachusett beyond.

Noticed what I think must be a young poison sumach[180] abundant by the

roadside in woods, with last year’s berries, with small greenish-yellow

flowers, but leaves not pinnatifid, three together; from one to two

feet high. What is it?

_Alnus serrulata_, the common alder, with a grayish stem, leaves smooth

on both sides.

_Alnus incana_, the speckled alder, downy on under side of leaves.

The hard-berried plant seems to be _Andromeda ligustrina_ (?) of Gray,

_A. paniculata_ of Bigelow, _Lyonia paniculata_ of Emerson.

Thyme-leaved veronica, little bluish-white, streak-petalled flower by

road sides. _Silene Pennsylvanica._

What is the orange-yellow aster-like flower of the meadows now in

blossom with a sweet-smelling stem when bruised?[181]

What the delicate pinkish and yellowish flower with hoary-green stem

and leaves, of rocky hills.[182]

Saw Bunker Hill Monument and Charlestown from the Wayland hills, and

across the valleys to Milton Hill.[183] Westward, or west by south,

an island in a pond or in the river (!which see!) A grand horizon.

Probably saw the elm between Wayland and Weston which is seen so far

in the horizon from the northwest part of Sudbury. A good, a rare place

this must be to view the Sudbury or Wayland meadows a little earlier.

Came back across lots to the black spruce.

Now, at 8.30 o’clock P. M., I hear the dreaming of the frogs.[184] So

it seems to me, and so significantly passes my life away. It is like

the dreaming of frogs in a summer evening.

_May 27._ I saw an organ-grinder this morning before a rich man’s

house, thrilling the street with harmony, loosening the very

paving-stones and tearing the routine of life to rags and tatters, when

the lady of the house shoved up a window and in a semiphilanthropic

tone inquired if he wanted anything to eat. But he, very properly it

seemed to me, kept on grinding and paid no attention to her question,

feeding her ears with melody unasked for. So the world shoves up its

window and interrogates the poet, and sets him to gauging ale casks in

return. It seemed to me that the music suggested that the recompense

should be as fine as the gift. It would be much nobler to enjoy the

music, though you paid no money for it, than to presume always a

beggarly relation. It is after all, perhaps, the best instrumental

music that we have.

_May 28._ The trees now begin to shade the streets. When the sun

gets high in the sky the trees give shade. With oppressive heats come

refreshing shadows.

The buttercups spot the churchyard.

_May 29._ It is evident that the virtues of plants are almost

completely unknown to us, and we esteem the few with which we are

better acquainted unreasonably above the many which are comparatively

unknown to us. Bigelow says: “It is a subject of some curiosity to

consider, if the knowledge of the present Materia Medica were by any

means to be lost, how many of the same articles would again rise

into notice and use. Doubtless a variety of new substances would

develop unexpected powers, while perhaps the poppy would be shunned

as a deleterious plant, and the cinchona might grow unmolested upon

the mountains of Quito.” Sawyer regards _Nux vomica_ among the most

valuable. B. says (1817): “We have yet to discover our anodynes and

our emetics, although we abound in bitters, astringents, aromatics,

and demulcents. In the present state of our knowledge we could not

well dispense with opium and ipecacuanha, yet a great number of foreign

drugs, such as gentian, columbo, chamomile, kino, catechu, cascarilla,

canella, etc., for which we pay a large annual tax to other countries,

might in all probability be superseded by the indigenous products of

our own. It is certainly better that our own country people should have

the benefit of collecting such articles, than that we should pay for

them to the Moors of Africa, or the Indians of Brazil.”

The thorn-apple (_Datura Stramonium_) (apple of Peru, devil’s-apple,

Jamestown-weed) “emigrates with great facility, and often springs

up in the ballast of ships, and in earth carried from one country to

another.” It secretes itself in the hold of vessels and migrates. It

is a sort of cosmopolitan weed, a roving weed. What adventures! What

historian knows when first it came into a country! He quotes Beverly’s

“History of Virginia” as saying that some soldiers in the days of

Bacon’s rebellion, having eaten some of this plant, which was boiled

for salad by mistake, were made natural fools and buffoons by it for

eleven days, without injury to their bodies (? ?).

The root of a biennial or perennial will accumulate the virtues of the

plant more than any other part.

B. says that Pursh states that the sweet-scented goldenrod (_Solidago

odora_) “has for some time [_i. e._ before 1817][185] been an article

of exportation to China, where it fetches a high price.” And yet it is

known to very few New-Englanders.

“No botanist,” says B., “even if in danger of starving in a wilderness,

would indulge his hunger on a root or fruit taken from an unknown

plant of the natural order _Luridæ_, of the _Multisiliquæ_, or the

_umbelliferous aquatics_. On the contrary he would not feel a moment’s

hesitation in regard to any of the _Gramina_, the fruit of the

_Pomaceæ_ and several other natural families of plants, which are known

to be uniformly innocent in their effects.”