I see laws which never fail, of whose failure I never conceived. Indeed

I cannot detect failure anywhere but in my fear. I do not fear that

right is not right, that good is not good, but only the annihilation of

the present existence. But only that can make me incapable of fear. My

fears are as good prophets as my hopes.

_March 20. Sunday_. My friend is cold and reserved because his love

for me is waxing and not waning. These are the early processes; the

particles are just beginning to shoot in crystals. If the mountains

came to me, I should no longer go to the mountains. So soon as that

consummation takes place which I wish, it will be past. Shall I not have

a friend in reserve? Heaven is to come. I hope this is not it.

Words should pass between friends as the lightning passes from cloud

to cloud. I don't know how much I assist in the economy of nature when

I declare a fact. Is it not an important part in the history of the

flower that I tell my friend where I found it? We do [not] wish friends

to feed and clothe our bodies,—neighbors are kind enough for that,—but

to do the like offices to ourselves.[355] We wish to spread and publish

ourselves, as the sun spreads its rays; and we toss the new thought

to the friend, and thus it is dispersed. Friends are those twain who

feel their interests to be one. Each knows that the other might as well

have said what he said. All beauty, all music, all delight springs from

apparent dualism but real unity. My friend is my real brother. I see his

nature groping yonder like my own. Does there go one whom I know? then

I go there.

The field where friends have met is consecrated forever. Man seeks

friendship out of the desire to realize a home here. As the Indian

thinks he receives into himself the courage and strength of his

conquered enemy, so we add to ourselves all the character and heart of

our friends. He is my creation. I can do what I will with him. There

is no possibility of being thwarted; the friend is like wax in the rays

that fall from our own hearts.

The friend does not take my word for anything, but he takes me. He

trusts me as I trust myself. We only need be as true to others as we

are to ourselves, that there may be ground enough for friendship. In

the beginnings of friendship,—for it does not grow,—we realize such love

and justice as are attributed to God.

Very few are they from whom we derive any _in_formation. The most only

announce and tell tales, but the friend _in_-forms.

What is all nature and human life at this moment, what the scenery and

vicinity of a human soul, but the song of an early sparrow from yonder

fences, and the cackling hens in the barn? So for one while my destiny

loiters within ear-shot of these sounds. The great busy Dame Nature is

concerned to know how many eggs her hens lay. The Soul, the proprietor

of the world, has an interest in the stacking of hay, the foddering

of cattle, and the draining of peat meadows. Away in Scythia, away in

India, they make butter and cheese for its larder.[356] I wish that in

some page of the Testament there were something like Charlemagne's egg

account. Was not Christ interested in the setting hens of Palestine?

Nature is very ample and roomy. She has left us plenty of space to

move in. As far as I can see from this window, how little life in the

landscape! The few birds that flit past do not crowd; they do not fill

the valley. The traveller on the highway has no fellow-traveller for

miles before or behind him. Nature was generous and not niggardly,

certainly.

* * * * *

How simple is the natural connection of events. We complain greatly of

the want of flow and sequence in books, but if the journalist only move

himself from Boston to New York, and speak as before, there is link

enough. And so there would be, if he were as careless of connection

and order when he stayed at home, and let the incessant progress which

his life makes be the apology for abruptness. Do I not travel as far

away from my old resorts, though I stay here at home, as though I were

on board the steamboat? Is not my life riveted together? Has not it

sequence? Do not my breathings follow each other naturally?

_March 21._[357] Who is old enough to have learned from experience?

_March 22. Tuesday._ Nothing can be more useful to a man than a

determination not to be hurried.

I have not succeeded if I have an antagonist who fails. It must be

humanity's success.

I cannot think nor utter my thought unless I have infinite room. The

cope of heaven is not too high, the sea is not too deep, for him who

would unfold a great thought. It must feed me and warm and clothe me.

It must be an entertainment to which my whole nature is invited. I must

know that the gods are to be my fellow-guests.

* * * * *

We cannot well do without our sins; they are the highway of our virtue.

_March 23. Wednesday._ Plain speech is always a desideratum. Men write

in a florid style only because they would match the simple beauties of

the plainest speech. They prefer to be misunderstood, rather than come

short of its exuberance. Hussein Effendi praises the epistolary style of

Ibrahim Pasha to the French traveller Botta, because of "the difficulty

of understanding it: there was, he said, but one person at Jidda who was

capable of understanding and explaining the Pasha's correspondence."

A plain sentence, where every word is rooted in the soil, is indeed

flowery and verdurous. It has the beauty and variety of mosaic with the

strength and compactness of masonry. All fullness looks like exuberance.

We are not rich without superfluous wealth; but the imitator only copies

the superfluity. If the words were sufficiently simple and answering to

the thing to be expressed, our sentences would be as blooming as wreaths

of evergreen and flowers.[358] You cannot fill a wine-glass quite to

the brim without heaping it. Simplicity is exuberant.

When I look back eastward over the world, it seems to be all in repose.

Arabia, Persia, Hindostan are the land of contemplation. Those Eastern

nations have perfected the luxury of idleness. Mount Sabér, according

to the French traveller and naturalist Botta, is celebrated for

producing the Kát tree. "The soft tops of the twigs and tender leaves

are eaten," says his reviewer, "and produce an agreeable soothing

excitement, restoring from fatigue, banishing sleep, and disposing to

the enjoyment of conversation." What could be more dignified than to

browse the tree-tops with the camelopard? Who would not be a rabbit or

partridge sometimes, to chew mallows and pick the apple tree buds? It

is not hard to discover an instinct for the opium and betel and tobacco

chewers.[359]

* * * * *

After all, I believe it is the style of thought entirely, and not the

style of expression, which makes the difference in books. For if I find

any thought worth extracting, I do not wish to alter the language. Then

the author seems to have had all the graces of eloquence and poetry

given him.

I am pleased to discover myself as much a pensioner in Nature as moles

and titmice. In some very direct and simple uses to which man puts

Nature he stands in this relation to her. Oriental life does not want

this grandeur. It is in Sadi and the Arabian Nights and the Fables of

Pilpay. In the New England noontide I have discovered more materials

of Oriental history than the Sanskrit contains or Sir W. Jones has

unlocked. I see why it is necessary there should be such history at

all. Was not Asia mapped in my brain before it was in any geography? In

my brain is the Sanskrit which contains the history of the primitive

times. The Vedas and their Angas are not so ancient as my serenest

contemplations.[360] My mind contemplates them, as Brahma his scribe.

* * * * *

I occasionally find myself to be nothing at all, because the gods give

me nothing to do. I cannot brag; I can only congratulate my masters.

In idleness I am of no thickness, I am thinnest wafer. I never compass

my own ends. God schemes for me.

We have our times of action and our times of reflection. The one mood

caters for the other. Now I am Alexander, and then I am Homer. One while

my hand is impatient to handle an axe or hoe, and at another to [_sic_]

pen. I am sure I write the tougher truth for these calluses on my palms.

They give firmness to the sentence. The sentences of a laboring man are

like hardened thongs, or the sinews of the deer, or the roots of the

pine.[361]

_March 24. Thursday._ Those authors are successful who do not _write

down_ to others, but make their own taste and judgment their audience.

By some strange infatuation we forget that we do not approve what yet

we recommend to others. It is enough if I please myself with writing;

I am then sure of an audience.

* * * * *

If hoarded treasures can make me rich, have I not the wealth of the

planet in my mines and at the bottom of the sea?

* * * * *

It is always singular to meet common sense in very old books, as the

Veeshnoo Sarma,—as if they could have dispensed with the experience of

later times.[362] We had not given space enough to _their_ antiquity

for the accumulation of wisdom. We meet even a trivial wisdom in them,

as if truth were already hackneyed. The present is always younger than

antiquity. A playful wisdom, which has eyes behind as well as before and

oversees itself. This pledge of sanity cannot be spared in a book, that

it sometimes reflect upon itself, that it pleasantly behold itself, that

it hold the scales over itself.[363] The wise can afford to doubt in

his wisest moment. The easiness of doubt is the ground of his assurance.

Faith keeps many doubts in her pay. If I could not doubt, I should not

believe.

It is seen in this old scripture how wisdom is older than the talent

of composition. It is a simple and not a compound rock. The story is

as slender as the thread on which pearls are strung; it is a spiral

line, growing more and more perplexed till it winds itself up and dies

like the silkworm in its cocoon. It is an interminable labyrinth. It

seems as if the old philosopher could not talk without moving, and each

motion were made the apology or occasion for a sentence, but, this being

found inconvenient, the fictitious progress of the tale was invented.

The story which winds between and around these sentences, these barrows

in the desert, these oases, is as indistinct as a camel track between

Mourzuk and Darfur, between the Pyramids and the Nile, from Gaza to

Jaffa.[364]

The great thoughts of a wise man seem to the vulgar who do not

generalize to stand far apart like isolated mounts; but science knows

that the mountains which rise so solitary in our midst are parts of a

great mountain-chain, dividing the earth, and the eye that looks into

the horizon toward the blue Sierra melting away in the distance may

detect their flow of thought. These sentences which take up your common

life so easily are not seen to run into ridges, because they are the

table-land on which the spectator stands.[365] I do not require that

the mountain-peaks be chained together, but by the common basis on

which they stand, nor that the path of the muleteer be kept open at so

much pains, when they may be bridged by the Milky Way. That they stand

frowning upon one another, or mutually reflecting the sun's rays, is

proof enough of their common basis.

* * * * *

The book should be found where the sentence is, and its connection be

as inartificial. It is the inspiration of a day and not of a moment.

The links should be gold also. Better that the good be not united than

that a bad man be admitted into their society. When men can select they

will. If there be any stone in the quarry better than the rest, they

will forsake the rest because of it. Only the good will be quarried.

In these fables the story goes unregarded, while the reader leaps from

sentence to sentence, as the traveller leaps from stone to stone while

the water rushes unheeded between them.[366]

_March 25. Friday._ Great persons are not soon learned, not even their

outlines, but they change like the mountains in the horizon as we ride

along.

* * * * *

A man's life should be as fresh as a river. It should be the same

channel, but a new water every instant.[367] Some men have no

inclination; they have no rapids nor cascades, but marshes, and

alligators, and miasma instead.[368]

How insufficient is all wisdom without love! There may be courtesy,

there may be good will, there may be even temper, there may be wit,

and talent, and sparkling conversation,—and yet the soul pine for

life. Just so sacred and rich as my life is to myself will it be to

another. Ignorance and bungling with love are better than wisdom and

skill without. Our life without love is like coke and ashes,—like the

cocoanut in which the milk is dried up. I want to see the sweet sap

of living wood in it. Men may be pure as alabaster and Parian marble,

elegant as a Tuscan villa, sublime as Terni, but if they are not in

society as retiring and inexperienced as children, we shall go join

Alaric and the Goths and Vandals. There is no milk mixed with the wine

at the entertainment.[369]

Enthusiasm which is the formless material of thought. Comparatively

speaking, I care not for the man or his designs who would make the

highest use of me short of an all-adventuring friendship. I wish by the

behavior of my friend toward me to be led to have such regard for myself

as for a box of precious ointment. I shall not be so cheap to myself if

I see that another values me.

We talk much about education, and yet none will assume the office of an

educator. I never gave any one the whole advantage of myself. I never

afforded him the culture of my love. How can I talk of charity, who at

last withhold the kindness which alone makes charity desirable? The poor

want nothing less than me myself, and I shirk charity by giving rags

and meat.

Very dangerous is the talent of composition, the striking out the heart

of life at a blow, as the Indian takes off a scalp. I feel as if my life

had grown more outward since I could express it.[370]

What can I give or what deny to another but myself?

The stars are God's dreams, thoughts remembered in the silence of his

night.

In company, that person who alone can understand you you cannot get out

of your mind.

The artist must work with indifferency. Too great interest vitiates his

work.

_March 26. Saturday._ The wise will not be imposed on by wisdom. You

can tell, but what do you know?

I thank God that the cheapness which appears in time and the world,

the trivialness of the whole scheme of things, is in my own cheap and

trivial moment. I am time and the world. I assert no independence. In me

are summer and winter, village life and commercial routine, pestilence

and famine and refreshing breezes, joy and sadness, life and death.

How near is yesterday! How far to-morrow! I have seen nails which were

driven before I was born. Why do they look old and rusty? Why does not

God make some mistake to show to us that time is a delusion? Why did I

invent time but to destroy it?

Did you ever remember the moment when you were not mean?

Is it not a satire to say that life is organic?

Where is my heart gone? They say men cannot part with it and live.

* * * * *

Are setting hens troubled with ennui? Nature is very kind; does she let

them reflect? These long March days, setting on and on in the crevice

of a hayloft, with no active employment![371] Do setting hens sleep?

* * * * *

A book should be a vein of gold ore, as the sentence is a diamond found

in the sand, or a pearl fished out of the sea.

He who does not borrow trouble does not lend it.

I must confess I have felt mean enough when asked how I was to act

on society, what errand I had to mankind. Undoubtedly I did not feel

mean without a reason, and yet my loitering is not without defense. I

would fain communicate the wealth of my life to men, would really give

them what is most precious in my gift. I would secrete pearls with the

shellfish and lay up honey with the bees for them. I will sift the

sunbeams for the public good. I know no riches I would keep back. I

have no private good, unless it be my peculiar ability to serve the

public. This is the only individual property. Each one may thus be

innocently rich. I inclose and foster the pearl till it is grown. I wish

to communicate those parts of my life which I would gladly live again

myself.

It is hard to be a good citizen of the world in any great sense; but if

we do render no interest or increase to mankind out of that talent God

gave us, we can at least preserve the principle unimpaired. One would

like to be making large dividends to society out [of] that deposited

capital in us, but he does well for the most part if he proves a secure

investment only, without adding to the stock.

In such a letter as I like there will be the most naked and direct

speech, the least circumlocution.

_March 27. Sunday._ The eye must be firmly anchored to this earth which

beholds birches and pines waving in the breeze in a certain fight, a

serene rippling light.

* * * * *

Cliffs.—Two little hawks have just come out to play, like butterflies

rising one above the other in endless alternation far below me. They

swoop from side to side in the broad basin of the tree-tops, with wider

and wider surges, as if swung by an invisible pendulum. They stoop down

on this side and scale up on that.

Suddenly I look up and see a new bird, probably an eagle, quite above

me, laboring with the wind not more than forty rods off. It was the

largest bird of the falcon kind I ever saw. I was never so impressed by

any flight. She sailed the air, and fell back from time to time like a

ship on her beam ends, holding her talons up as if ready for the arrows.

I never allowed before for the grotesque attitudes of our national

bird.[372]

The eagle must have an educated eye.

See what a life the gods have given us, set round with pain and

pleasure. It is too strange for sorrow; it is too strange for joy. One

while it looks as shallow, though as intricate, as a Cretan labyrinth,

and again it is a pathless depth. I ask for bread incessantly,—that my

life sustain me, as much as meat my body. No man knoweth in what hour

his life may come. Say not that Nature is trivial, for to-morrow she

will be radiant with beauty. I am as old—as old as the Alleghanies. I

was going to say Wachusett, but it excites a youthful feeling, as I were

but too happy to be so young.

_March 28. Monday._ How often must one feel, as he looks back on his

past life, that he has gained a talent but lost a character! My life

has got down into my fingers. My inspiration at length is only so much

breath as I can breathe.

Society affects to estimate men by their talents, but really feels and

knows them by their characters. What a man does, compared with what he

is, is but a small part. To require that our friend possess a certain

skill is not to be satisfied till he is something less than our friend.

Friendship should be a great promise, a perennial springtime.

I can conceive how the life of the gods may be dull and tame, if it is

not disappointed and insatiate.

* * * * *

One may well feel chagrined when he finds he can do nearly all he can

conceive.

Some books ripple on like a stream, and we feel that the author is in

the full tide of discourse. Plato and Jamblichus and Pythagoras and

Bacon halt beside them. Long, stringy, slimy thoughts which flow or run

together. They read as if written for military men or men of business,

there is such a dispatch in them, and a double-quick time, a Saratoga

march with beat of drum. But the grave thinkers and philosophers seem

not to have got their swaddling-clothes off; they are slower than a

Roman army on its march, the rear encampment to-night where the van

camped last night. The wise Jamblichus eddies and gleams like a watery

slough.

But the reviewer seizes the pen and shouts, "Forward! Alamo and

Fanning!" and after rolls the tide of war. Immediately the author

discovers himself launched, and if the slope was easy and the grease

good, does not go to the bottom.

They flow as glibly as mill-streams sucking under a race-way. The flow

is ofttimes in the poor reader who makes such haste over their pages,

as to the traveller the walls and fences seem to travel. But the most

rapid trot is no flow after all.[373]

If I cannot chop wood in the yard, can I not chop wood in my journal?

Can I not give vent to that appetite so? I wish to relieve myself of

superfluous energy. How poor is the life of the best and wisest! The

petty side will appear at last. Understand once how the best in society

live,—with what routine, with what tedium and insipidity, with what

grimness and defiance, with what chuckling over an exaggeration of the

sunshine. Altogether, are not the actions of your great man poor, even

pitiful and ludicrous?

I am astonished, I must confess, that man looks so respectable in

nature, considering the littlenesses Socrates must descend to in the

twenty-four hours, that he yet wears a serene countenance and even

adorns nature.

_March 29. Tuesday._

_March 30. Wednesday._ Though Nature's laws are more immutable than any

despot's, yet to our daily life they rarely seem rigid, but we relax

with license in summer weather. We are not often nor harshly reminded

of the things we may not do. I am often astonished to see how long, and

with what manifold infringements of the natural laws, some men I meet

in the highway maintain life. She does not deny them quarter; they do

not die without priest. All the while she rejoices, for if they are not

one part of her they are another. I am convinced that consistency is the

secret of health. How many a poor man, striving to live a pure life,

pines and dies after a life of sickness, and his successors doubt if

Nature is not pitiless; while the confirmed and consistent sot, who is

content with his rank life like mushrooms, a mass of corruption, still

dozes comfortably under a hedge. He has made his peace with himself;

there is no strife. Nature is really very kind and liberal to all

persons of vicious habits. They take great licenses with her. She does

not exhaust them with many excesses.[374]

* * * * *

How hard it is to be greatly related to mankind! They are only my uncles

and aunts and cousins. I hear of some persons greatly related, but

only he is so who has all mankind for his friend. Our intercourse with

the best grows soon shallow and trivial. They no longer inspire us.

After enthusiasm comes insipidity and blankness. The sap of all noble

schemes drieth up, and the schemers return again and again in despair

to "common sense and labor." If I could help infuse some life and heart

into society, should I not do a service? Why will not the gods mix a

little of the wine of nobleness with the air we drink? Let virtue have

some firm foothold in the earth. Where does she dwell? Who are the

salt of the earth? May not Love have some resting-place on the earth as

sure [as] the sunshine on the rock? The crystals imbedded in the cliff

sparkle and gleam from afar, as if they did certainly enrich our planet;

but where does any virtue permanently sparkle and gleam? She was sent

forth over the waste too soon, before the earth was prepared for her.

Rightfully we are to each other the gate of heaven and redeemers from

sin, but now we overlook these lowly and narrow ways. We will go over

the bald mountain-tops without going through the valleys.

* * * * *

Men do not after all meet on the ground of their real acquaintance and

actual understanding of one another, but degrade themselves immediately

into the puppets of convention. They do as if, in given circumstances,

they had agreed to know each other only so well. They rarely get to that

[point] that they inform one another gratuitously, and use each other

like the sea and woods for what is new and inspiring there.

The best intercourse and communion they have is in silence above and

behind their speech. We should be very simple to rely on words. As

it is, what we knew before always interprets a man's words. I cannot

easily remember what any man has said, but how can I forget what he is

to me? We know each other better than we are aware; we are admitted to

startling privacies with every person we meet, and in some emergency we

shall find how well we knew him. To my solitary and distant thought my

neighbor is shorn of his halo, and is seen as privately and barely as

a star through a glass.

_March 31. Thursday._ I cannot forget the majesty of that bird at the

Cliff. It was no sloop or smaller craft hove in sight, but a ship of the

line, worthy to struggle with the elements. It was a great presence, as

of the master of river and forest. His eye would not have quailed before

the owner of the soil; none could challenge his rights. And then his

retreat, sailing so steadily away, was a kind of advance. How is it that

man always feels like an interloper in nature, as if he had intruded on

the domains of bird and beast?[375]

* * * * *

The really efficient laborer will be found not to crowd his day with

work, but will saunter to his task surrounded by a wide halo of ease and

leisure. There will be a wide margin for relaxation to his day. He is

only earnest to secure the kernels of time, and does not exaggerate the

value of the husk. Why should the hen set all day? She can lay but one

egg, and besides she will not have picked up materials for a new one.

Those who work much do not work hard.[376]

* * * * *

Nothing is so rare as sense. Very uncommon sense is poetry, and has a

heroic or sweet music. But in verse, for the most part, the music now

runs before and then behind the sense, but is never coincident with it.

Given the metre, and one will make music while another makes sense. But

good verse, like a good soldier, will make its own music, and it will

march to the same with one consent. In most verse there is no inherent

music. The man should not march, but walk like a citizen. It is not time

of war but peace. Boys study the metres to write Latin verses, but it

does not help them to write English.

* * * * *

Lydgate's "Story of Thebes," intended for a Canterbury Tale, is a

specimen of most unprogressive, unmusical verse. Each line rings the

knell of its brother, as if it were introduced but to dispose of him. No

mortal man could have breathed to that cadence without long intervals of

relaxation; the repetition would have been fatal to the lungs. No doubt

there was much healthy exercise taken in the meanwhile. He should forget

his rhyme and tell his story, or forget his story and breathe himself.

In Shakespeare and elsewhere the climax may be somewhere along the line,

which runs as varied and meandering as a country road, but in Lydgate

it is nowhere but in the rhyme. The couplets slope headlong to their

confluence.

_April 2. Saturday._[377] The Prologue to the Canterbury Tales is full

of good sense and humanity, but is not transcendent poetry. It is so

good that it seems like faultfinding to esteem it second to any other.

For picturesque description of persons it is without a parallel. It did

not need inspiration, but a cheerful and easy wit. It is essentially

humorous, as no inspired poetry is. Genius is so serious as to be grave

and sublime rather. Humor takes a narrower vision—however broad and

genial it may be—than enthusiasm. Humor delays and looks back.[378]

_April 3. Sunday._ I can remember when I was more enriched by a few

cheap rays of light falling on the pond-side than by this broad sunny

day. Riches have wings, indeed. The weight of present woe will express

the sweetness of past experience. When sorrow comes, how easy it is to

remember pleasure! When, in winter, the bees cannot make new honey, they

consume the old.

Experience is in the fingers and head. The heart is inexperienced.

Sorrow singeth the sweetest strain: "The Daughters of Zion," "The Last

Sigh of the Moor."

Joy is the nectar of flowers, sorrow the honey of bees.

I thank God for sorrow. It is hard to be abused. Is not He kind still,

who lets this south wind blow, this warm sun shine on me?

I have just heard the flicker among the oaks on the hillside ushering in

a new dynasty. It is the age and youth of time. Why did Nature set this

lure for sickly mortals? Eternity could not begin with more security and

momentousness than the spring. The summer's eternity is reëstablished by

this note.[379] All sights and sounds are seen and heard both in time

and eternity. And when the eternity of any sight or sound strikes the

eye or ear, they are intoxicated with delight.

Sometimes, as through a dim haze, we see objects in their eternal

relations; and they stand like Stonehenge and the Pyramids, and we

wonder who set them up and what for.

The destiny of the soul can never be studied by the reason, for its

modes are not ecstatic. In the wisest calculation or demonstration I

but play a game with myself. I am not to be taken captive by myself.

I cannot convince myself. God must convince. I can calculate a problem

in arithmetic, but not any morality.

Virtue is incalculable, as it is inestimable. Well, man's destiny is

but virtue, or manhood. It is wholly moral, to be learned only by the

life of the soul. God cannot calculate it. He has no moral philosophy,

no ethics. The reason, before it can be applied to such a subject, will

have to fetter and restrict it. How can he, step by step, perform that

long journey who has not conceived whither he is bound? How can he

expect to perform an arduous journey without interruption who has no

passport to the end?

On one side of man is the actual, and on the other the ideal. The former

is the province of the reason; it is even a divine light when directed

upon it, but it cannot reach forward into the ideal without blindness.

The moon was made to rule by night, but the sun to rule by day. Reason

will be but a pale cloud, like the moon, when one ray of divine light

comes to illumine the soul.

How rich and lavish must be the system which can afford to let so many

moons burn all the day as well as the night, though no man stands in

need of their light! There is none of that kind of economy in Nature

that husbands its stock, but she supplies inexhaustible means to the

most frugal methods. The poor may learn of her frugality, and the rich

generosity. Having carefully determined the extent of her charity,

she establishes it forever; her almsgiving is an annuity. She supplies

to the bee only so much wax as is necessary for its cell, so that no

poverty could stint it more; but the little economist which fed the

Evangelist in the desert still keeps in advance of the immigrant, and

fills the cavities of the forest for his repast.

VII

1845-1846

(ÆT. 27-29)

_July 5. Saturday._ Walden.—Yesterday I came here to live. My house

makes me think of some mountain houses I have seen, which seemed to

have a fresher auroral atmosphere about them, as I fancy of the halls

of Olympus. I lodged at the house of a saw-miller last summer, on the

Caatskill Mountains, high up as Pine Orchard, in the blueberry and

raspberry region, where the quiet and cleanliness and coolness seemed to

be all one,—which had their ambrosial character. He was the miller of

the Kaaterskill Falls. They were a clean and wholesome family, inside

and out, like their house. The latter was not plastered, only lathed,

and the inner doors were not hung. The house seemed high-placed, airy,

and perfumed, fit to entertain a travelling god. It was so high, indeed,

that all the music, the broken strains, the waifs and accompaniments of

tunes, that swept over the ridge of the Caatskills, passed through its

aisles. Could not man be man in such an abode? And would he ever find

out this grovelling life?[380] It was the very light and atmosphere in

which the works of Grecian art were composed, and in which they rest.

They have appropriated to themselves a loftier hall than mortals ever

occupy, at least on a level with the mountain-brows of the world. There

was wanting a little of the glare of the lower vales, and in its place

a pure twilight as became the precincts of heaven. Yet so equable and

calm was the season there that you could not tell whether it was morning

or noon or evening. Always there was the sound of the morning cricket.

_July 6._ I wish to meet the facts of life—the vital facts, which are

the phenomena or actuality the gods meant to show us—face to face, and

so I came down here. Life! who knows what it is, what it does? If I am

not quite right here, I am less wrong than before; and now let us see

what they will have. The preacher, instead of vexing the ears of drowsy

farmers on their day of rest, at the end of the week,—for Sunday always

seemed to me like a fit conclusion of an ill-spent week and not the

fresh and brave beginning of a new one,—with this one other draggletail

and postponed affair of a sermon, from thirdly to fifteenthly, should

teach them with a thundering voice pause and simplicity. "Stop! Avast!

Why so fast?"[381] In all studies we go not forward but rather backward

with redoubled pauses. We always study _antiques_ with silence and

reflection. Even time has a depth, and below its surface the waves do

not lapse and roar. I wonder men can be so frivolous almost as to attend

to the gross form of negro slavery, there are so many keen and subtle

masters who subject us both. Self-emancipation in the West Indies of a

man's thinking and imagining provinces, which should be more than his

island territory,—one emancipated heart and intellect! It would knock

off the fetters from a million slaves.

_July 7._ I am glad to remember to-night, as I sit by my door, that

I too am at least a remote descendant of that heroic race of men of

whom there is tradition. I too sit here on the shore of my Ithaca, a

fellow-wanderer and survivor of Ulysses. How symbolical, significant

of I know not what, the pitch pine stands here before my door! Unlike

any glyph I have seen sculptured or painted yet, one of Nature's later

designs, yet perfect as her Grecian art. There it is, a done tree. Who

can mend it? And now where is the generation of heroes whose lives are

to pass amid these our northern pines, whose exploits shall appear to

posterity pictured amid these strong and shaggy forms? Shall there be

only arrows and bows to go with these pines on some pipe-stone quarry

at length? There is something more respectable than railroads in these

simple relics of the Indian race. What hieroglyphs shall we add to the

pipe-stone quarry?

* * * * *

If we can forget, we have done somewhat; if we can remember, we have

done somewhat. Let us remember this.

* * * * *

The Great Spirit makes indifferent all times and places. The place where

he is seen is always the same, and indescribably pleasant to all our

senses. We had allowed only neighboring and transient circumstances to

make our occasions. They were, in fact, the causes of our distractions.

But nearest to all things is that power which fashions their being. Next

to us the grandest laws are being enacted and administered. Next to us

is not the workman whom we have hired, but ever the workman whose work

we are. He is at work, not in my backyard, but inconceivably nearer

than that. We are the subjects of an experiment how singular! Can we

not dispense with the society of our gossips a little while under these

circumstances?

* * * * *

My auxiliaries are the dews and rains,—to water this dry soil,—and

genial fatness in the soil itself, which for the most part is lean and

effete. My enemies are worms, cool days, and most of all woodchucks.

They have nibbled for me an eighth of an acre clean. I plant in faith,

and they reap. This is the tax I pay for ousting johnswort and the rest.

But soon the surviving beans will be too tough for woodchucks, and then

they will go forward to meet new foes.[382]

_July 14._ What sweet and tender, the most innocent and divinely

encouraging society there is in every natural object, and so in

universal nature, even for the poor misanthrope and most melancholy man!

There can be no really black melan-choly to him who lives in the midst

of nature and has still his senses. There never was yet such a storm but

it was Æolian music to the innocent ear. Nothing can compel to a vulgar

sadness a simple and brave man. While I enjoy the sweet friendship of

the seasons I trust that nothing can make life a burden to me. This rain

which is now watering my beans and keeping me in the house waters me

too. I needed it as much. And what if most are not hoed! Those who send

the rain, whom I chiefly respect, will pardon me.[383]

Sometimes, when I compare myself with other men, methinks I am favored

by the gods. They seem to whisper joy to me beyond my deserts, and that

I do have a solid warrant and surety at their hands, which my fellows

do not. I do not flatter myself, but if it were possible _they_ flatter

me. I am especially guided and guarded.[384]

* * * * *

What was seen true once, and sanctioned by the flash of Jove, will

always be true, and nothing can hinder it. I have the warrant that no

fair dream I have had need fail of its fulfillment.

Here I know I am in good company; here is the world, its centre and

metropolis, and all the palms of Asia and the laurels of Greece and the

firs of the Arctic Zone incline thither. Here I can read Homer, if I

would have books, as well as in Ionia, and not wish myself in Boston,

or New York, or London, or Rome, or Greece. In such place as this he

wrote or sang. Who should come to my lodge just now but a true Homeric

boor, one of those Paphlagonian men? Alek Therien, he called himself;

a Canadian now, a woodchopper, a post-maker; makes fifty posts—holes

them, _i. e._—in a day; and who made his last supper on a woodchuck

which his dog caught. And he too has heard of Homer, and _if it were

not for books, would not know what to do_ rainy days. Some priest once,

who could read glibly from the Greek itself, taught him reading in a

measure—his verse, at least, in his turn—away by the Trois Rivières, at

Nicolet. And now I must read to him, while he holds the book, Achilles'

reproof of Patroclus on his sad countenance.

"Why are you in tears, Patroclus, like a young child (girl)?" etc., etc.

"Or have you only heard some news from Phthia?

They say that Menœtius lives yet, son of Actor,

And Peleus lives, son of Æacus, among the Myrmidons,

Both of whom having died, we should greatly grieve."

He has a neat[385] bundle of white oak bark under his arm for a sick

man, gathered this Sunday morning. "I suppose there's no harm in going

after such a thing to-day."[386] The simple man. May the gods send him

many woodchucks.

And earlier to-day came five Lestrigones, railroad men who take care

of the road, some of them at least. They still represent the bodies of

men, transmitting arms and legs and bowels downward from those remote

days to more remote. They have some got a rude wisdom withal, thanks

to their dear experience. And one with them, a handsome younger man, a

sailor-like, Greek-like man, says: "Sir, I like your notions. I think I

shall live so myself. Only I should like a wilder country, where there

is more game. I have been among the Indians near Appalachicola. I have

lived with them. I like your kind of life. Good day. I wish you success

and happiness."

Therien said this morning (July 16th, Wednesday), "If those beans

were mine, I shouldn't like to hoe them till the dew was off." He was

going to his woodchopping. "Ah!" said I, "that is one of the notions

the farmers have got, but I don't believe it." "How thick the pigeons

are!" said he. "If working every day were not my trade, I could get

all the meat I should want by hunting,—pigeons, woodchucks, rabbits,

partridges,—by George! I could get all I should want for a week in one

day."[387]

* * * * *

I imagine it to be some advantage to live a primitive and frontier

life, though in the midst of an outward civilization. Of course all

the improvements of the ages do not carry a man backward nor forward in

relation to the great facts of his existence.[388]

Our furniture should be as simple as the Arab's or the Indian's.[389] At

first the thoughtful, wondering man plucked in haste the fruits which

the boughs extended to him, and found in the sticks and stones around

him his implements ready to crack the nut, to wound the beast, and

build his house with. And he still remembered that he was a sojourner

in nature. When he was refreshed with food and sleep he contemplated his

journey again. He dwelt in a tent in this world. He was either threading

the valleys, or crossing the plains, or climbing the mountain-tops.[390]

* * * * *

Now the best works of art serve comparatively but to dissipate the mind,

for they themselves represent transitionary and paroxysmal, not free

and absolute, thoughts.

* * * * *

Men have become the tools of their tools. The man who independently

plucked the fruits when he was hungry is become a farmer.[391]

* * * * *

There are scores of pitch pines in my field, from one to three inches

in diameter, girdled by the mice last winter. A Norwegian winter it was

for them, for the snow lay long and deep, and they had to mix much pine

meal with their usual diet. Yet these trees have not many of them died,

even in midsummer, and laid bare for a foot, but have grown a foot. They

seem to do all their gnawing beneath the snow. There is not much danger

of the mouse tribe becoming extinct in hard winters, for their granary

is a cheap and extensive one.[392]

Here is one has had her nest under my house, and came when I took my

luncheon to pick the crumbs at my feet. It had never seen the race of

man before, and so the sooner became familiar. It ran over my shoes and

up my pantaloons inside, clinging to my flesh with its sharp claws. It

would run up the side of the room by short impulses like a squirrel,

which [it] resembles, coming between the house mouse and the former. Its

belly is a little reddish, and its ears a little longer. At length, as

I leaned my elbow on the bench, it ran over my arm and round the paper

which contained my dinner. And when I held it a piece of cheese, it came

and nibbled between my fingers, and then cleaned its face and paws like

a fly.[393]

* * * * *

There is a memorable interval between the written and the spoken

language, the language read and the language heard. The one is

transient, a sound, a tongue, a dialect, and all men learn it of their

mothers. It is loquacious, fragmentary,—raw material. The other is a

reserved, select, matured expression, a deliberate word addressed to

the ear of nations and generations. The one is natural and convenient,

the other divine and instructive. The clouds flit here below, genial,

refreshing with their showers and gratifying with their tints,—alternate

sun and shade, a grosser heaven adapted to our trivial wants; but above

them repose the blue firmament and the stars. The stars are written

words and stereotyped on the blue parchment of the skies; the fickle

clouds that hide them from our view, which we on this side need, though

heaven does not, these are our daily colloquies, our vaporous, garrulous

breath.

Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.

The herd of men, the generations who speak the Greek and Latin, are

not entitled by the accident of birth to read the works of genius,

whose mother tongue speaks everywhere, and is learned by every child

who hears. The army of the Greeks and Latins are not coæternary,

though contemporary, with Homer and Plato, Virgil and Cicero. In the

transition ages, nations who loudest spoke the Greek and Latin tongues,

whose mother's milk they were, learned not their nobler dialects,

but a base and vulgar speech. The men of the Middle Ages who spoke so

glibly the language of the Roman and, in the Eastern Empire, of the

Athenian mob, prized only a cheap contemporary learning. The classics

of both languages were virtually lost and forgotten. When, after

the several nations of Europe had acquired in some degree rude and

original languages of their own, sufficient for the arts of life and

conversation, then the few scholars beheld with advantage from this

more distant standpoint the treasures of antiquity, and a new Latin

age commenced, the era of reading. Those works of genius were then

first classical. All those millions who had spoken Latin and Greek

had not read Latin and Greek. The time had at length arrived for the

written word, the _scripture_, to be heard. What the multitude could

not _hear_, after the lapse of centuries a few scholars _read_. This is

the matured thought which was not spoken in the market-place, unless it

be in a market-place where the free genius of mankind resorts to-day.

There is something very choice and select in a written word. No wonder

Alexander carried his Homer in a precious casket on his expeditions. A

word which may be translated into every dialect, and suggests a truth

to every mind, is the most perfect work of human art; and as it may

be breathed and taken on our lips, and, as it were, become the product

of our physical organs, as its sense is of our intellectual, it is the

nearest to life itself.[394] It is the simplest and purest channel by

which a revelation may be transmitted from age to age. How it subsists

itself whole and undiminished till the intelligent reader is born to

decipher it! There are the tracks of Zoroaster, of Confucius and Moses,

indelible in the sands of the remotest times.

* * * * *

There are no monuments of antiquity comparable to the classics for

interest and importance. It does not need that the scholar should be

an antiquarian, for these works of art have such an immortality as the

works of nature, and are modern at the same time that they are ancient,

like the sun and stars, and occupy by right no small share of the

present. This palpable beauty is the treasured wealth of the world and

the proper inheritance of each generation. Books, the oldest and the

best, stand rightfully on the shelves of every cottage. They have not to

plead their cause, but they enlighten their readers and it is gained.

When the illiterate and scornful rustic earns his imagined leisure and

wealth, he turns inevitably at last—he or his children—to these still

higher and yet inaccessible circles; and even when his descendant has

attained to move in the highest rank of the wise men of his own age

and country, he will still be sensible only of the imperfection of his

culture and the vanity and inefficiency of his intellectual wealth, if

his genius will not permit him to listen with somewhat of the equanimity

of an equal to the fames of godlike men, which yet, as it were, form an

invisible upper class in every society.[395]

* * * * *

I have carried an apple in my pocket to-night—a sopsivine, they call

it—till, now that I take my handkerchief out, it has got so fine a

fragrance that it really seems like a friendly trick of some pleasant

dæmon to entertain me with.[396] It is redolent of sweet-scented

orchards, of innocent, teeming harvests. I realize the existence of a

goddess Pomona, and that the gods have really intended that men should

feed divinely, like themselves, on their own nectar and ambrosia. They

have so painted this fruit, and freighted it with such a fragrance,

that it satisfies much more than an animal appetite. Grapes, peaches,

berries, nuts, etc., are likewise provided for those who will sit at

their sideboard. I have felt, when partaking of this inspiring diet,

that my appetite was an indifferent consideration; that eating became

a sacrament, a method of communion, an ecstatic exercise, a mingling

of bloods, and [a] sitting at the communion table of the world; and so

have not only quenched my thirst at the spring but the health of the

universe.

The indecent haste and grossness with which our food is swallowed have

cast a disgrace on the very act of eating itself. But I do believe that,

if this process were rightly conducted, its aspect and effects would

be wholly changed, and we should receive our daily life and health,

Antæus-like, with an ecstatic delight, and, with upright front, an

innocent and graceful behavior, take our strength from day to day. This

fragrance of the apple in my pocket has, I confess, deterred me from

eating of it. I am more effectually fed by it another way.

It is, indeed, the common notion that this fragrance is the only food

of the gods, and inasmuch as we are partially divine we are compelled

to respect it.

Tell me, ye wise ones, if ye can,

Whither and whence the race of man.

For I have seen his slender clan

Clinging to hoar hills with their feet,

Threading the forest for their meat.

Moss and lichens, bark and grain

They rake together with might and main,

And they digest them with anxiety and pain.

I meet them in their rags and unwashed hair,

Instructed to eke out their scanty fare—

Brave race—with a yet humbler prayer.

Beggars they are, aye, on the largest scale.

They beg their daily bread at heaven's door,

And if their this year's crop alone should fail,

They neither bread nor begging would know more.

They are the titmen of their race,

And hug the vales with mincing pace

Like Troglodytes, and fight with cranes.

We walk 'mid great relations' feet.

What they let fall alone we eat.

We are only able

To catch the fragments from their table.

These elder brothers of our race,

By us unseen, with larger pace

Walk o'er our heads, and live our lives,

Embody our desires and dreams,

Anticipate our hoped-for gleams.

We grub the earth for our food.

We know not what is good.

Where does the fragrance of our orchards go,

Our vineyards, while we toil below?

A finer race and finer fed

Feast and revel above our head.

The tints and fragrance of the flowers and fruits

Are but the crumbs from off their table,

While we consume the pulp and roots.

Sometimes we do assert our kin,

And stand a moment where once they have been.

We hear their sounds and see their sights,

And we experience their delights.

But for the moment that we stand

Astonished on the Olympian land,

We do discern no traveller's face,

No elder brother of our race,

To lead us to the monarch's court

And represent our case;

But straightway we must journey back,

Retracing slow the arduous track,

Without the privilege to tell,

Even, the sight we know so well.[397]

In my father's house are many mansions.

Who ever explored the mansions of the air? Who knows who his neighbors

are? We seem to lead our human lives amid a concentric system of

worlds, of realm on realm, close bordering on each other, where dwell

the unknown and the imagined races, as various in degree as our own

thoughts are,—a system of invisible partitions more infinite in number

and more inconceivable in intricacy than the starry one which science

has penetrated.

When I play my flute to-night, earnest as if to leap the bounds [of] the

narrow fold where human life is penned, and range the surrounding plain,

I hear echo from a neighboring wood, a stolen pleasure, occasionally

not rightfully heard, much more for other ears than ours, for 'tis the

reverse of sound. It is not our own melody that comes back to us, but an

amended strain. And I would only hear myself as I would hear my echo,

corrected and repronounced for me. It is as when my friend reads my

verse.

The borders of our plot are set with flowers, whose seeds were blown

from more Elysian fields adjacent. They are the pot-herbs of the gods,

which our laborious feet have never reached, and fairer fruits and

unaccustomed fragrance betray another realm's vicinity. There, too, is

Echo found, with which we play at evening. There is the abutment of the

rainbow's arch.[398]

_Aug. 6._ Walden.—I have just been reading a book called "The Crescent

and the Cross,"[399] till now I am somewhat ashamed of myself. Am I

sick, or idle, that I can sacrifice my energy, America, and to-day to

this man's ill-remembered and indolent story? Carnac and Luxor are but

names, and still more desert sand and at length a wave of the great

ocean itself are needed to wash away the filth that attaches to their

grandeur. Carnac! Carnac! this is Carnac for me, and I behold the

columns of a larger and a purer temple.[400] May our childish and fickle

aspirations be divine, while we descend to this mean intercourse. Our

reading should be heroic, in an unknown tongue, a dialect always but

imperfectly learned, through which we stammer line by line, catching but

a glimmering of the sense, and still afterward admiring its unexhausted

hieroglyphics, its untranslated columns. Here grow around me nameless

trees and shrubs, each morning freshly sculptured, rising new stories

day by day, instead of hideous ruins,—their myriad-handed worker

uncompelled as uncompelling. This is my Carnac; that its unmeasured

dome. The measuring art man has invented flourishes and dies upon this

temple's floor, nor ever dreams to reach that ceiling's height. Carnac

and Luxor crumble underneath. Their shadowy roofs let in the light once

more reflected from the ceiling of the sky.

Behold these flowers! Let us be up with Time, not dreaming of three

thousand years ago. Erect ourselves and let those columns lie, not stoop

to raise a foil against the sky. Where is the _spirit_ of that time but

in this present day, this present line? Three thousand years ago are

not agone; they are still lingering here this summer morn.

And Memnon's mother sprightly greets us now;

Wears still her youthful blushes on her brow.

And Carnac's columns, why stand they on the plain?

T' enjoy our opportunities they would fain remain.

This is my Carnac, whose unmeasured dome

Shelters the measuring art and measurer's home,

Whose propylæum is the system high [?]

And sculptured façade the visible sky.

Where there is memory which compelleth Time, the Muses' mother, and the

Muses nine, there are all ages, past and future time,—unwearied memory

that does not forget the actions of the past, that does not forego

to stamp them freshly, that Old Mortality, industrious to retouch the

monuments of time, in the world's cemetery throughout every clime.[401]

* * * * *

The student may read Homer or Æschylus in the original Greek; for to do

so implies to emulate their heroes,—the consecration of morning hours

to their pages.

The heroic books, though printed in the character of our mother tongue,

are always written in a foreign language, dead to idle and degenerate

times, and we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line,

conjecturing a larger sense than the text renders us, at last, out of

our own valor and generosity.[402]

* * * * *

A man must find his own occasion in himself. The natural day is very

calm, and will hardly reprove our indolence. If there is no elevation

in our spirits, the pond will not seem elevated like a mountain tarn,

but a low pool, a silent muddy water, a place for fishermen.

I sit here at my window like a priest of Isis, and observe the phenomena

of three thousand years ago, yet unimpaired. The tantivy of wild

pigeons, an ancient race of birds, gives a voice to the air, flying by

twos and threes athwart my view or perching restless on the white pine

boughs occasionally; a fish hawk dimples the glassy surface of the pond

and brings up a fish; and for the last half-hour I have heard the rattle

of railroad cars conveying travellers from Boston to the country.[403]

* * * * *

After the evening train has gone by and left the world to silence and

to me, the whip-poor-will chants her vespers for half an hour. And when

all is still at night, the owls take up the strain, like mourning women

their ancient ululu. Their most dismal scream is truly Ben-Jonsonian.

Wise midnight hags! It is no honest and blunt tu-whit tu-who of the

poets, but, without jesting, a most solemn graveyard ditty,—but the

mutual consolations of suicide lovers remembering the pangs and the

delights of supernal love in the infernal groves. And yet I love to hear

their wailing, their doleful responses, trilled along the woodside,

reminding me sometimes of music and singing birds, as if it were the

dark and tearful side of music, the regrets and sighs, that would fain

be sung. The spirits, the _low_ spirits and melancholy forebodings,

of fallen spirits who once in human shape night-walked the earth and

did the deeds of darkness, now expiating with their wailing hymns,

threnodiai, their sins in the very scenery of their transgressions. They

give me a new sense of the vastness and mystery of that nature which

is the common dwelling of us both. "Oh-o-o-o-o that I never had been

bor-or-or-or-orn!" sighs one on this side of the pond, and circles in

the restlessness of despair to some new perch in the gray oaks. Then,

"That I never had been bor-or-or-or-orn!" echoes one on the further

side, with a tremulous sincerity, and "Bor-or-or-or-orn" comes faintly

from far in the Lincoln woods.[404]

* * * * *

And then the frogs, bullfrogs; they are the more sturdy spirits of

ancient wine-bibbers and wassailers, still unrepentant, trying to sing

a catch in their Stygian lakes. They would fain keep up the hilarious

good fellowship and all the rules of their old round tables, but they

have waxed hoarse and solemnly grave and serious their voices, mocking

at mirth, and their wine has lost its flavor and is only liquor to

distend their paunches, and never comes sweet intoxication to drown

the memory of the past, but mere saturation and water-logged dullness

and distension. Still the most aldermanic, with his chin upon a pad,

which answers for a napkin to his drooling chaps, under the eastern

shore quaffs a deep draught of the once scorned water, and passes

round the cup with the ejaculation _tr-r-r-r-r-oonk, tr-r-r-r-r-oonk,

tr-r-r-r-oonk!_ and straightway comes over the water from some distant

cove the selfsame password, where the next in seniority and girth has

gulped down to his mark; and when the strain has made the circuit of

the shores, then ejaculates the master of ceremonies with satisfaction

_tr-r-r-r-oonk!_ and each in turn repeats the sound, down to the least

distended, leakiest, flabbiest paunched, that there be no mistake; and

the bowl goes round again, until the sun dispels the morning mist, and

only the patriarch is not under the pond, but vainly bellowing _troonk_

from time to time, pausing for a reply.[405]

* * * * *

All nature is classic and akin to art. The sumach and pine and hickory

which surround my house remind me of the most graceful sculpture.

Sometimes their tops, or a single limb or leaf, seems to have grown to a

distinct expression as if it were a symbol for me to interpret. Poetry,

painting, and sculpture claim at once and associate with themselves

those perfect specimens of the art of nature,—leaves, vines, acorns,

pine cones, etc. The critic must at last stand as mute though contented

before a true poem as before an acorn or a vine leaf. The perfect work

of art is received again into the bosom of nature whence its material

proceeded, and that criticism which can only detect its unnaturalness

has no longer any office to fulfill. The choicest maxims that have come

down to us are more beautiful or integrally wise than they are wise to

our understandings. This wisdom which we are inclined to pluck from

their stalk is the point only of a single association. Every natural

form—palm leaves and acorns, oak leaves and sumach and dodder—are

[_sic_] untranslatable aphorisms.

* * * * *

Twenty-three years since, when I was five years old, I was brought from

Boston to this pond, away in the country,—which was then but another

name for the extended world for me,—one of the most ancient scenes

stamped on the tablets of my memory, the oriental Asiatic valley of my

world, whence so many races and inventions have gone forth in recent

times. That woodland vision for a long time made the drapery of my

dreams. That sweet solitude my spirit seemed so early to require that

I might have room to entertain my thronging guests, and that speaking

silence that my ears might distinguish the significant sounds. Somehow

or other it at once gave the preference to this recess among the pines,

where almost sunshine and shadow were the only inhabitants that varied

the scene, over that tumultuous and varied city, as if it had found its

proper nursery.

Well, now, to-night my flute awakes the echoes over this very water,

but one generation of pines has fallen, and with their stumps I have

cooked my supper, and a lusty growth of oaks and pines is rising all

around its brim and preparing its wilder aspect for new infant eyes.

Almost the same johnswort springs from the same perennial root in this

pasture. Even I have at length helped to clothe that fabulous landscape

of my imagination, and one result of my presence and influence is seen

in these bean leaves and corn blades and potato vines.[406]

* * * * *

As difficult to preserve is the tenderness of your nature as the bloom

upon a peach.

Most men are so taken up with the cares and rude practice of life that

its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. Literally, the laboring man

has not leisure for a strict and lofty integrity day by day; he cannot

afford to sustain the fairest and noblest relations. His labor will

depreciate in the market.

How can he remember well his ignorance who has so often to use his

knowledge.

_Aug. 15._ The sounds heard at this hour, 8.30, are the distant

rumbling of wagons over bridges,—a sound farthest heard of any human at

night,—the baying of dogs, the lowing of cattle in distant yards.[407]

What if we were to obey these fine dictates, these divine suggestions,

which are addressed to the mind and not to the body, which are certainly

true,—not to eat meat, not to buy, or sell, or barter, etc., etc., etc.?

* * * * *

I will not plant beans another summer, but sincerity, truth, simplicity,

faith, trust, innocence, and see if they will not grow in this soil

with such manure as I have, and sustain me.[408] When a man meets a

man, it should not be some uncertain appearance and falsehood, but

the personification of great qualities. Here comes truth, perchance,

personified, along the road.[409] Let me see how Truth behaves. I have

not seen enough of her. He shall utter no foreign word, no doubtful

sentence, and I shall not make haste to part with him.

I would not forget that I deal with infinite and divine qualities in

my fellow. All men, indeed, are divine in their core of light, but that

is indistinct and distant to me, like the stars of the least magnitude,

or the galaxy itself, but my kindred planets show their round disks and

even their attendant moons to my eye.

Even the tired laborers I meet on the road, I really meet as travelling

gods, but it is as yet, and must be for a long season, without speech.

_Aug. 23. Saturday._ I set out this afternoon to go a-fishing for

pickerel to eke out my scanty fare of vegetables. From Walden I went

through the woods to Fair Haven, but by the way the rain came on again,

and my fates compelled me to stand a half-hour under a pine, piling

boughs over my head, and wearing my pocket handkerchief for an umbrella;

and when at length I had made one cast over the pickerel-weed, the

thunder gan romblen in the heven with that grisly steven that Chaucer

tells of.[410] (The gods must be proud, with such forked flashes and

such artillery to rout a poor unarmed fisherman.) I made haste to

the nearest hut for a shelter. This stood a half a mile off the road,

and so much the nearer to the pond. There dwelt a shiftless Irishman,

John Field, and his wife, and many children, from the broad-faced boy

that ran by his father's side to escape the rain to the wrinkled and

sibyl-like, crone-like infant, not knowing whether to take the part of

age or infancy, that sat upon its father's knee as in the palaces of

nobles, and looked out from its home in the midst of wet and hunger

inquisitively upon the stranger, with the privilege of infancy; the

young creature not knowing but it might be the last of a line of kings

instead of John Field's poor starveling brat, or, I should rather

say, still knowing that it was the last of a noble line and the hope

and cynosure of the world. An honest, hard-working, but shiftless man

plainly was John Field; and his wife, she too was brave to cook so many

succeeding dinners in the recesses of that lofty stove; with round,

greasy face and bare breast, still thinking to improve her condition one

day; with the never absent mop in hand, and yet no effects of it visible

anywhere. The chickens, like members of the family, stalked about the

room, too much humanized to roast well. They stood and looked in my eye

or pecked at my shoe. He told me his story, how hard he worked bogging

for a neighbor, at ten dollars an acre and the use of the land with

manure for one year, and the little broad-faced son worked cheerfully

at his father's side the while, not knowing, alas! how poor a bargain

he had made. Living, John Field, alas! without arithmetic; failing to

live.

"Do you ever fish?" said I. "Oh yes, I catch a mess when I am lying

by; good perch I catch." "What's your bait?" "I catch shiners with

fishworms, and bait the perch with them." "You'd better go now, John,"

said his wife, with glistening, hopeful face. But poor John Field

disturbed but a couple of fins, while I was catching a fair string,

and he said it was his luck; and when he changed seats luck changed

seats too. Thinking to live by some derivative old-country mode in this

primitive new country, _e. g._ to catch perch with shiners.[411]

* * * * *

I find an instinct in me conducting to a mystic spiritual life, and also

another to a primitive savage life.

* * * * *

Toward evening, as the world waxes darker, I am permitted to see the

woodchuck stealing across my path, and tempted to seize and devour it.

The wildest, most desolate scenes are strangely familiar to me.[412]

* * * * *

Why not live a hard and emphatic life, not to be avoided, full of

adventures and work, learn much in it, travel much, though it be only in

these woods? I sometimes walk across a field with unexpected expansion

and long-missed content, as if there were a field worthy of me. The

usual daily boundaries of life are dispersed, and I see in what field

I stand.

When on my way this afternoon, Shall I go down this long hill in the

rain to fish in the pond? I ask myself. And I say to myself: Yes, roam

far, grasp life and conquer it, learn much and live. Your fetters are

knocked off; you are really free. Stay till late in the night; be unwise

and daring. See many men far and near, in their fields and cottages

before the sun sets, though as if many more were to be seen. And yet

each _rencontre_ shall be so satisfactory and simple that no other shall

seem possible. Do not repose every night as villagers do. The noble life

is continuous and unintermitting. At least, live with a longer radius.

Men come home at night only from the next field or street, where their

household echoes haunt, and their life pines and is sickly because

it breathes its own breath. Their shadows morning and evening reach

farther than their daily steps. But come home from far, from ventures

and perils, from enterprise and discovery and crusading, with faith

and experience and character.[413] Do not rest much. Dismiss prudence,

fear, conformity. Remember only what is promised. Make the day light

you, and the night hold a candle, though you be falling from heaven to

earth "from morn to dewy eve a summer's day."

For Vulcan's fall occupied a day, but our highest aspirations and

performances fill but the interstices of time.

* * * * *

Are we not reminded in our better moments that we have been needlessly

husbanding somewhat, perchance our little God-derived capital, or

title to capital, guarding it by methods we know? But the most diffuse

prodigality a better wisdom teaches,—that we _hold_ nothing. We are not

what we were. By usurers' craft, by Jewish methods, we strive to retain

and increase the divinity in us, when infinitely the greater part of

divinity is out of us.

* * * * *

Most men have forgotten that it was ever morning; but a few serene

memories, healthy and wakeful natures, there are who assure us that the

sun rose clear, heralded by the singing of birds,—this very day's sun,

which rose before Memnon was ready to greet it.

* * * * *

In all the dissertations on language, men forget the language that

is, that is really universal, the inexpressible meaning that is in all

things and everywhere, with which the morning and evening teem. As if

language were especially of the tongue of course. With a more copious

learning or understanding of what is published, the present _languages_,

and all that they express, will be forgotten.

* * * * *

The rays which streamed through the crevices will be no more remembered

when the shadow is wholly removed.

* * * * *

Left house on account of plastering, Wednesday, November 12th, at night;

returned Saturday, December 6th.[414]

* * * * *

Though the race is not so degenerated but a man might possibly live

in a cave to-day and keep himself warm by furs, yet, as caves and wild

beasts are not plenty enough to accommodate all at the present day, it

were certainly better to accept the advantages which the invention and

industry of mankind offer. In thickly settled civilized communities,

boards and shingles, lime and brick, are cheaper and more easily come by

than suitable caves, or the whole logs, or bark in sufficient quantity,

or even well-tempered clay or flat stones.[415] A tolerable house for

a rude and hardy race that lived much out of doors was once made here

without any of these last materials. According to the testimony of the

first settlers of Boston, an Indian wigwam was as comfortable in winter

as an English house with all its wainscotting, and they had advanced so

far as to regulate the effect of the wind by a mat suspended over the

hole in the roof, which was moved by a string. Such a lodge was, in the

first instance, constructed in a day or two and taken down and put up

again in a few hours, and every family had one.[416]

* * * * *

Thus, to try our civilization by a fair test, in the ruder states of

society every family owns a shelter as good as the best, and sufficient

for its ruder and simpler wants; but in modern civilized society, though

the birds of the air have their nests, and woodchucks and foxes their

holes, though each one is commonly the owner of his coat and hat though

never so poor, yet not more than one man in a thousand owns a shelter,

but the nine hundred and ninety-nine pay an annual tax for this outside

garment of all, indispensable summer and winter, which would buy a

village of Indian wigwams and contributes to keep them poor as long

as they live. But, answers one, by simply paying this annual tax the

poorest man secures an abode which is a palace compared to the Indian's.

An annual rent of from twenty to sixty or seventy dollars entitles him

to the benefit of all the improvements of centuries,—Rumford fireplace,

back plastering, Venetian blinds, copper pump, spring lock, etc.,

etc.[417] But while civilization has been improving our houses, she has

not equally improved the men who should occupy them. She has created

palaces, but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings. The mason

who finishes the cornice of the palace returns at night, perchance, to

a hut no better than a wigwam.[418] If she claims to have made a real

advance in the welfare of man, she must show how she has produced better

dwellings without making them more costly. And the cost of a thing, it

will be remembered, is the amount of life it requires to be exchanged

for it, immediately or in the long run. An average house costs perhaps

from one thousand to fifteen hundred dollars, and to earn this sum will

require from fifteen to twenty years of the day laborer's life, even

if he is not incumbered with a family; so that he must spend more than

half his life before a wigwam can be earned; and if we suppose he pays

a rent instead, this is but a doubtful choice of evils. Would the savage

have been wise to exchange his wigwam for a palace on these terms?[419]

When I consider my neighbors, the farmers of Concord, for instance, who

are at least as well off as the other classes, what are they about? For

the most part I find that they have been toiling ten, twenty, or thirty

years to pay for their farms, and we may set down one half of that toil

to the cost of their houses; and commonly they have not yet paid for

them.[420] This is the reason they are poor; and for similar reasons we

are all poor in respect to a thousand savage comforts, though surrounded

by luxuries.[421]

* * * * *

But most men do not know what a house is, and the mass are actually

poor all their days because they think they must have such an one as

their neighbor's. As if one were to wear any sort of coat the tailor

might cut out for him, or, gradually leaving off palm-leaf hat and cap

of woodchuck-skin, should complain of hard times because he could not

buy him a crown![422]

* * * * *

It reflects no little dignity on Nature, the fact that the Romans once

inhabited her,—that from this same unaltered hill, forsooth, the Roman

once looked out upon the sea, as from a signal station. The vestiges of

military roads, of houses and tessellated courts and baths,—Nature need

not be ashamed of these relics of her children. The hero's cairn,—one

doubts at length whether his relations or Nature herself raised the

hill. The whole earth is but a hero's cairn. How often are the Romans

flattered by the historian and antiquary! Their vessels penetrated

into this frith and up that river of some remote isle. Their military

monuments still remain on the hills and under the sod of the valleys.

The oft-repeated Roman story is written in still legible characters

in every quarter of the old world, and but to-day a new coin is dug up

whose inscription repeats and confirms their fame. Some "Judæa Capta,"

with a woman mourning under a palm tree, with silent argument and

demonstration puts at rest whole pages of history.[423]

The Earth

Which seems so barren once gave birth

To heroes, who o'erran her plains,

Who plowed her seas and reaped her grains.

Some make the mythology of the Greeks to have been borrowed from that of

the Hebrews, which however is not to be proved by analogies,—the story

of Jupiter dethroning his father Saturn, for instance, from the conduct

of Cham towards his father Noah, and the division of the world among

the three brothers. But the Hebrew fable will not bear to be compared

with the Grecian. The latter is infinitely more sublime and divine. The

one is a history of mortals, the other a history of gods and heroes,

therefore not so ancient. The one god of the Hebrews is not so much of

a gentleman, not so gracious and divine, not so flexible and catholic,

does not exert so intimate an influence on nature as many a one of the

Greeks. He is not less human, though more absolute and unapproachable.

The Grecian were youthful and living gods, but still of godlike or

divine race, and had the virtues of gods. The Hebrew had not all of

the divinity that is in man, no real love for man, but an inflexible

justice. The attribute of the one god has been infinite power, not

grace, not humanity, nor love even,—wholly masculine, with no sister

Juno, no Apollo, no Venus in him. I might say that the one god was not

yet apotheosized, not yet become the current material of poetry.[424]

* * * * *

The wisdom of some of those Greek fables is remarkable. The god Apollo

(Wisdom, Wit, Poetry) condemned to serve, keep the sheep of _King_

Admetus. So is poetry allied to the state.

* * * * *

To Æacus, Minos, Rhadamanthus, judges in hell, only naked men came to

be judged. As Alexander Ross comments, "In this world we must not look

for Justice; when we are stript of all, then shall we have it. For here

something will be found about us that shall corrupt the Judge." When the

island of Ægina was depopulated by sickness at the instance of Æacus,

Jupiter turned the ants into men, _i. e._ made men of the inhabitants

who lived meanly like ants.[425]

* * * * *

The hidden significance of these fables which has been detected, the

ethics running parallel to the poetry and history, is not so remarkable

as the readiness with which they may be made to express any truth.

They are the skeletons of still older and more universal truths than

any whose flesh and blood they are for the time made to wear. It is

like striving to make the sun and the wind and the sea signify. What

signifies it?[426]

* * * * *

Piety, that carries its father on its shoulders.[427]

* * * * *

Music was of three kinds,—mournful, martial, and effeminate,—Lydian,

Doric, and Phrygian. Its inventors Amphion, Thamyris, and Marsyas.

Amphion was bred by shepherds. He caused the stones to follow him and

built the walls of Thebes by his music. All orderly and harmonious or

beautiful structures may be said to be raised to a slow music.

Harmony was begotten of Mars and Venus.

* * * * *

Antæus was the son of Neptune and the Earth. All physical bulk and

strength is of the earth and mortal. When it loses this _point d'appui_

it is weakness; it cannot soar. And so, _vice versa_, you can interpret

this fable to the credit of the earth.

* * * * *

They all provoked or challenged the gods,—Amphion, Apollo and Diana,

and was killed by them; Thamyris, the Muses, who conquered him in music,

took away his eyesight and melodious voice, and broke his lyre. Marsyas

took up the flute which Minerva threw away, challenged Apollo, was

flayed alive by him, and his death mourned by Fauns, Satyrs, and Dryads,

whose tears produced the river which bears his name.

* * * * *

The fable which is truly and naturally composed, so as to please the

imagination of a child, harmonious though strange like a wild-flower,

is to the wise man an apothegm and admits his wisest interpretation.

When we read that Bacchus made the Tyrrhenian mariners mad, so that they

leaped into the sea, mistaking it for "a meadow full of flowers," and

so became dolphins, we are not concerned about the historical truth of

this, but rather a higher, poetical truth. We seem to hear the music of

a thought, and care not if our intellect be not gratified.[428]

* * * * *

The mythologies, those vestiges of ancient poems, the world's

inheritance, still reflecting some of their original hues, like the

fragments of clouds tinted by the departed sun, the wreck of poems,

a retrospect as [of] the loftiest fames,—what survives of oldest

fame,—some fragment will still float into the latest summer day and

ally this hour to the morning of creation. These are the materials and

hints for a history of the rise and progress of the race. How from

the condition of ants it arrived at the condition of men, how arts

were invented gradually,—let a thousand surmises shed some light on

this story. We will not be confined by historical, even geological,

periods, which would allow us to doubt of a progress in human events.

If we rise above this wisdom for the day, we shall expect that

this morning of the race, in which they have been supplied with the

simplest necessaries,—with corn and wine and honey and oil and fire and

articulate speech and agricultural and other arts,—reared up by degrees

from the condition of ants to men, will be succeeded by a day of equally

progressive splendor; that, in the lapse of the divine periods, other

divine agents and godlike men will assist to elevate the race as much

above its present condition.

* * * * *

Aristæus "found out honey and oil." "He obtained of Jupiter and Neptune,

that the pestilential heat of the dog-days, wherein was great mortality,

should be mitigated with wind."[429]

_Dec. 12. Friday._ The pond skimmed over on the night of this day,

excepting a strip from the bar to the northwest shore. Flint's Pond has

been frozen for some time.[430]

_Dec. 16, 17, 18, 19, 20._ Pond _quite free_ from ice, not yet having

been frozen quite over.

_Dec. 23. Tuesday._ The pond froze over last night entirely for the

first time, yet so as not to be safe to walk upon.[431]

* * * * *

I wish to say something to-night not of and concerning the Chinese and

Sandwich-Islanders, but _to_ and concerning you who hear me, who are

said to live in New England; something about your condition, especially

your outward condition or circumstances in this world, in this town;

what it is, whether it is necessarily as bad as it is, whether it can't

be improved as well as not.[432]

It is generally admitted that some of you are poor, find it hard to get

a living, haven't always something in your pockets, haven't paid for all

the dinners you've actually eaten, or all your coats and shoes, some

of which are already worn out. All this is very well known to all by

hearsay and by experience. It is very evident what a mean and sneaking

life you live, always in the hampers, always on the limits, trying to

get into business and trying to get out of debt, a very ancient slough,

called by the Latins _aes alienum_, another's brass,—some of their

coins being made of brass,—and still so many living and dying and buried

to-day by another's brass; always promising to pay, promising to pay,

with interest, to-morrow perhaps, and die to-day, insolvent; seeking

to curry favor, to get custom, lying, flattering, voting, contracting

yourselves into a nutshell of civility or dilating into a world of thin

and vaporous generosity, that you may persuade your neighbor to let you

make his [shoes, or his hat, or his coat, or his carriage, etc.].[433]

* * * * *

There is a civilization going on among brutes as well as men. Foxes

are forest dogs. I hear one barking raggedly, wildly, demoniacally in

the darkness to-night, seeking expression, laboring with some anxiety,

striving to be a dog outright that he may carelessly run in the

street, struggling for light. He is but a faint man, before pygmies; an

imperfect, burrowing man. He has come up near to my window, attracted

by the light, and barked a vulpine curse at me, then retreated.[434]

* * * * *

Reading suggested by Hallam's History of Literature.

1. "Abelard and Heloise."

2. Look at Luigi Pulci. His "Morgante Maggiore," published in 1481,

"was to the poetical romances of chivalry what Don Quixote was to their

brethren in prose."

3. Leonardo da Vinci. The most remarkable of his writings still in

manuscript. For his universality of genius, "the first name of the

fifteenth century."

4. Read Boiardo's "Orlando Innamorato," published between 1491 and 1500,

for its influence on Ariosto and its intrinsic merits. Its sounding

names repeated by Milton in "Paradise Regained."

* * * * *

Landor's works are:—

A small volume of poems, 1793, out of print.

Poems of "Gebir," "Chrysaor," the "Phoceans," etc. The "Gebir" eulogized

by Southey and Coleridge.

Wrote verses in Italian and Latin.

The dramas "Andrea of Hungary," "Giovanna of Naples," and "Fra Rupert."

"Pericles and Aspasia."

"Poems from the Arabic and Persian," 1800, pretending to be translations.

"A Satire upon Satirists, and Admonition to Detractors," printed 1836,

not published.

Letters called "High and Low Life in Italy."

"Imaginary Conversations."

"Pentameron and Pentalogia."

"Examination of William Shakspeare before Sir Thomas Lucy, Knt.,

touching Deer-stealing."

* * * * *

_Vide_ again Richard's sail in "Richard First and the Abbot."[435]

Phocion's remarks in conclusion of "Eschines and Phocion."

"Demosthenes and Eubulides."

In Milton and Marvel, speaking of the Greek poets, he says, "There is a

sort of refreshing odor flying off it perpetually; not enough to oppress

or to satiate; nothing is beaten or bruised; nothing smells of the

stalk; the flower itself is half-concealed by the Genius of it hovering

round."

Pericles and Sophocles.

Marcus Tullius Cicero and his brother Quintus. In this a sentence on

Sleep and Death.

Johnson and Tooke, for a criticism on words.

* * * * *

It is worth the while to have lived a primitive wilderness life at

some time, to know what are, after all, the necessaries of life and

what methods society has taken to supply them. I have looked over the

old day-books of the merchants with the same view,—to see what it was

shopmen bought. They are the grossest groceries.[436] Salt is perhaps

the most important article in such a list, and most commonly bought at

the stores, of articles commonly thought to be necessaries,—salt, sugar,

molasses, cloth, etc.,—by the farmer. You will see why stores or shops

exist, not to furnish tea and coffee, but salt, etc. Here's the rub,

then.

I see how I could supply myself with every other article which I need,

without using the shops, and to obtain this might be the fit occasion

for a visit to the seashore. Yet even salt cannot strictly speaking be

called a necessary of human life, since many tribes do not use it.

* * * * *

"Have you seen my hound, sir? I want to know!—what! a lawyer's office?

law books?—if you've seen anything of a hound about here. Why, what do

you do here?" "I live here. No, I haven't." "Haven't you heard one in

the woods anywhere?" "Oh, yes, I heard one this evening." "What do you

do here?" "But he was some way off." "Which side did he seem to be?"

"Well, I should think he [was] the other side of the pond." "This is a

large dog; makes a large track. He's been out hunting from Lexington for

a week. How long have you lived here?" "Oh, about a year." "Somebody

said there was a man up here had a camp in the woods somewhere, and

he'd got him." "Well, I don't know of anybody. There's Britton's camp

over on the other road. It may be there." "Isn't there anybody in these

woods?" "Yes, they are chopping right up here behind me." "How far is

it?" "Only a few steps. Hark a moment. There, don't you hear the sound

of their axes?"[437]

* * * * *

Therien, the woodchopper, was here yesterday, and while I was cutting

wood, some chickadees hopped near pecking the bark and chips and the

potato-skins I had thrown out. "What do you call them," he asked. I told

him.

"What do _you_ call them," asked I. "_Mezezence_[?]," I think he said.

"When I eat my dinner in the woods," said he, "sitting very still,

having kindled a fire to warm my coffee, they come and light on my arm

and peck at the potato in my fingers. I like to have the little fellers

about me."[438] Just then one flew up from the snow and perched on the

wood I was holding in my arms, and pecked it, and looked me familiarly

in the face. _Chicadee-dee-dee-dee-dee_, while others were whistling

phebe,—_phe-bee_,—in the woods behind the house.[439]

_March 26, 1846._ The change from foul weather to fair, from dark,

sluggish hours to serene, elastic ones, is a memorable crisis which all

things proclaim. The change from foulness to serenity is instantaneous.

Suddenly an influx of light, though it was late, filled my room. I

looked out and saw that the pond was already calm and full of hope as

on a summer evening, though the ice was dissolved but yesterday. There

seemed to be some intelligence in the pond which responded to the unseen

serenity in a distant horizon. I heard a robin in the distance,—the

first I had heard this spring,—repeating the assurance. The green pitch

[pine] suddenly looked brighter and more erect, as if now entirely

washed and cleansed by the rain. I knew it would not rain any more. A

serene summer-evening sky seemed darkly reflected in the pond, though

the clear sky was nowhere visible overhead. It was no longer the end

of a season, but the beginning. The pines and shrub oaks, which had

before drooped and cowered the winter through with myself, now recovered

their several characters and in the landscape revived the expression

of an immortal beauty. Trees seemed all at once to be fitly grouped,

to sustain new relations to men and to one another. There was somewhat

cosmical in the arrangement of nature. O the evening robin, at the close

of a New England day! If I could ever find the twig he sits upon! Where

does the minstrel really roost? We perceive it is not the bird of the

ornithologist that is heard,—the _Turdus migratorius_.

The signs of fair weather are seen in the bosom of ponds before they are

recognized in the heavens. It is easy to tell by looking at any twig of

the forest whether its winter is past or not.[440]

We forget how the sun looks on our fields, as on the forests and the

prairies, as they reflect or absorb his rays. It matters not whether we

stand in Italy or on the prairies of the West, in the eye of the sun the

earth is all equally cultivated like a garden, and yields to the wave

of an irresistible civilization.

This broad field, which I have looked on so long, looks not to me as

the farmer, looks away from me to the sun, and attends to the harmony of

nature. These beans have results which are not harvested in the autumn

of the year. They do not mind, if I harvest them, who waters and makes

them grow? Our grain-fields make part of a beautiful picture which the

sun beholds in his daily course, and it matters little comparatively

whether they fill the barns of the husbandman. The true husbandman will

cease from anxiety and labor with every day, and relinquish all claim

to the produce of his fields.[441]

The avaricious man would fain plant by himself.

A flock of geese has just got in late, now in the dark flying low

over the pond. They came on, indulging at last like weary travellers

in complaint and consolation, or like some creaking evening mail late

lumbering in with regular anserine clangor. I stood at my door and could

hear their wings when they suddenly spied my light and, ceasing their

noise, wheeled to the east and apparently settled in the pond.[442]

_March 27._ This morning I saw the geese from the door through the mist

sailing about in the middle of the pond, but when I went to the shore

they rose and circled round like ducks over my head, so that I counted

them,—twenty-nine. I after saw thirteen ducks.[443]

VIII

1845-1847

(ÆT. 27-30)

[The small and much mutilated journal which begins here appears to

belong to the Walden period (1845-47), but the entries are undated.]

THE HERO[444]

What doth he ask?

Some worthy task,

Never to run

Till that be done,

That never done

Under the sun.

Here to begin

All things to win

By his endeavor

Forever and ever.

Happy and well

On this ground to dwell,

This soil subdue,

Plant, and renew.

By might and main

Health and strength gain,

So to give nerve

To his slenderness;

Yet some mighty pain

He would sustain,

So to preserve

His tenderness.

Not be deceived,

Of suff'ring bereaved,

Not lose his life

By living too well,

Nor escape strife

In his lonely cell,

And so find out heaven

By not knowing hell.

Strength like the rock

To withstand any shock,

Yet some Aaron's rod,

Some smiting by God,

Occasion to gain

To shed human tears

And to entertain

Still demonic fears.

Not once for all, forever, blest,

Still to be cheered out of the west;

Not from his heart to banish all sighs;

Still be encouraged by the sunrise;

Forever to love and to love and to love,

Within him, around him, beneath him, above.

To love is to know, is to feel, is to be;

At once 'tis his birth and his destiny.

Having sold all,

Something would get,

Furnish his stall

With better yet,—

For earthly pleasures

Celestial pains,

Heavenly losses

For earthly gains.

Still to begin—unheard-of sin

A fallen angel—a risen man

Never returns to where he began.

Some childlike labor

Here to perform,

Some baby-house

To keep out the storm,

And make the sun laugh

While he doth warm,

And the moon cry

To think of her youth,

The months gone by,

And wintering truth.

How long to morning?

Can any tell?

How long since the warning

On our ears fell?

The bridegroom cometh

Know we not well?

Are we not ready,

Our packet made,

Our hearts steady,

Last words said?

Must we still eat

The bread we have spurned?

Must we rekindle

The faggots we've burned?

Must we go out

By the poor man's gate?

Die by degrees,

Not by new fate?

Is there no road

This way, my friend?

Is there no road

Without any end?

Have you not seen

In ancient times

Pilgrims go by here

Toward other climes,

With shining faces

Youthful and strong

Mounting this hill

With speech and with song?

Oh, my good sir,

I know not the ways;

Little my knowledge,

Though many my days.

When I have slumbered,

I have heard sounds

As travellers passing

Over my grounds.

'Twas a sweet music

Wafted them by;

I could not tell

If far off or nigh.

Unless I dreamed it,

This was of yore,

But I never told it

To mortal before;

Never remembered

But in my dreams

What to me waking

A miracle seems.

If you will give of your pulse or your grain,

We will rekindle those flames again.

Here will we tarry, still without doubt,

Till a miracle putteth that fire out.

* * * * *

At midnight's hour I raised my head.

The owls were seeking for their bread;

The foxes barked, impatient still

At their wan [?] fate they bear so ill.

I thought me of eternities delayed

And of commands but half obeyed.

The night wind rustled through the glade,

As if a force of men there staid;

The word was whispered through the ranks,

And every hero seized his lance.

The word was whispered through the ranks,

Advance!

To live to a good old age such as the ancients reached, serene and

contented, dignifying the life of man, leading a simple, epic country

life in these days of confusion and turmoil,—that is what Wordsworth

has done. Retaining the tastes and the innocence of his youth. There is

more wonderful talent, but nothing so cheering and world-famous as this.

The life of man would seem to be going all to wrack and pieces, and no

instance of permanence and the ancient natural health, notwithstanding

Burns, and Coleridge, and Carlyle. It will not do for men to die young;

the greatest genius does not die young. Whom the gods love most do

indeed die young, but not till their life is matured, and their years

are like those of the oak, for they are the products half of nature and

half of God. What should nature do without old men, not children but

men?

The life of men, not to become a mockery and a jest, should last a

respectable term of years. We cannot spare the age of those old Greek

Philosophers. They live long who do not live for a near end, who still

forever look to the immeasurable future for their manhood.

* * * * *

All dramas have but one scene. There is but one stage for the peasant

and for the actor, and both on the farm and in the theatre the curtain

rises to reveal the same majestic scenery. The globe of earth is poised

in space for his stage under the foundations of the theatre, and the

cope of heaven, out of reach of the scene-shifter, overarches it. It

is always to be remembered by the critic that all actions are to be

regarded at last as performed from a distance upon some rood of earth

and amid the operations of nature.

Rabelais, too, inhabited the soil of France in sunshine and shade in

those years; and his life was no "farce" after all.

I seek the present time,

No other clime,

Life in to-day,—

Not to sail another way,—

To Paris or to Rome,

Or farther still from home.

That man, whoe'er he is,

Lives but a moral death

Whose life is not coeval

With his breath.

My feet forever stand

On Concord fields,

And I must live the life

Which their soil yields.

What are deeds done

Away from home?

What the best essay

On the Ruins of Rome?

The love of the new,

The unfathomed blue,

The wind in the wood,

All future good,

The sunlit tree,

The small chickadee,

The dusty highways,

What Scripture says,

This pleasant weather,

And all else together,

The river's meander,

All things, in short,

Forbid me to wander

In deed or in thought.

In cold or in drouth,

Not seek the sunny South,

But make my whole tour

In the sunny present hour.

For here if thou fail,

Where can'st thou prevail?

If you love not

Your own land most,

You'll find nothing lovely

On a distant coast.

If you love not

The latest sunset,

What is there in pictures

Or old gems set?

If no man should travel

Till he had the means,

There'd be little travelling

For kings or for queens.

The means, what are they?

They are the wherewithal

Great expenses to pay,

Life got, and some to spare,

Great works on hand,

And freedom from care,

Plenty of time well spent

To use,

Clothes paid for and no rent

In your shoes,

Something to eat

And something to burn,

And above all no need to return.

Then they who come back,

Say, have they not failed,

Wherever they've ridden,

Or steamed it, or sailed?

All your grass hay'd,

All your debts paid,

All your wills made;

Then you might as well have stay'd,

For are you not dead,

Only not buried?

The way unto "to-day,"

The railroad to "here,"

They never'll grade that way

Nor shorten it, I fear.

There are plenty of depots

All the world o'er,

But not a single station

At a man's door.

If he would get near

To the secret of things,

He'll not have to hear

When the engine bell rings.

Exaggeration! was ever any virtue attributed to a man without

exaggeration? was ever any vice, without infinite exaggeration? Do

we not exaggerate ourselves to ourselves, or do we often recognize

ourselves for the actual men we are? The lightning is an exaggeration

of light. We live by exaggeration. Exaggerated history is poetry, and

is truth referred to a new standard. To a small man every greater one

is an exaggeration. No truth was ever expressed but with this sort of

emphasis, so that for the time there was no other truth. The value of

what is really valuable can never be exaggerated. You must speak loud to

those who are hard of hearing; so you acquire a habit of speaking loud

to those who are not. In order to appreciate any, even the humblest,

man, you must not only understand, but you must first love him; and

there never was such an exaggerator as love. Who are we? Are we not all

of us great men? And yet what [are] we actually? Nothing, certainly, to

speak of. By an immense exaggeration we appreciate our Greek poetry and

philosophy, Egyptian ruins, our Shakespeares and Miltons, our liberty

and Christianity. We give importance to this hour over all other hours.

We do not live by justice, but [by grace.][445]

* * * * *

Love never perjures itself, nor is it mistaken.

* * * * *

He is not the great writer, who is afraid to let the world know that he

ever committed an impropriety. Does it not know that all men are mortal?

* * * * *

Carlyle told R. W. E. that he first discovered that he was not a jackass

on reading "Tristram Shandy" and Rousseau's "Confessions," especially

the last. His first essay is an article in _Fraser's Magazine_ on two

boys quarrelling.

* * * * *

Youth wants something to look up to, to look forward to; as the little

boy who inquired of me the other day, "How long do those old-agers

live?" and expressed the intention of compassing two hundred summers at

least. The old man who cobbles shoes without glasses at a hundred, and

cuts a handsome swath at a hundred and five, is indispensable to give

dignity and respectability to our life.

* * * * *

From all points of the compass, from the earth beneath and the heavens

above, have come these inspirations and been entered duly in the order

of their arrival in the journal. Thereafter, when the time arrived, they

were winnowed into lectures, and again, in due time, from lectures into

essays. And at last they stand, like the cubes of Pythagoras, firmly on

either basis; like statues on their pedestals, but the statues rarely

take hold of hands. There is only such connection and series as is

attainable in the galleries. And this affects their immediate practical

and popular influence.

* * * * *

Carlyle, we should say, more conspicuously than any other, though with

little enough expressed or even conscious sympathy, represents the

Reformer class. In him the universal plaint is most settled and serious.

Until the thousand named and nameless grievances are righted, there will

be no repose for him in the lap of Nature or the seclusion of science

and literature. And all the more for not being the visible acknowledged

leader of any class.[446]

* * * * *

All places, all positions—all things in short—are a medium happy or

unhappy. Every realm has its centre, and the nearer to that the better

while you are in it. Even health is only the happiest of all mediums.

There may be excess, or there may be deficiency; in either case there

is disease. A man must only be _virtuous_ enough.

* * * * *

I had one neighbor within half a mile for a short time when I first

went to the woods, Hugh Quoil, an Irishman who had been a soldier at

Waterloo, Colonel Quoil, as he was called,—I believe that he had killed

a colonel and ridden off his horse,—who lived from hand—sometimes to

mouth,—though it was commonly a glass of rum that the hand carried. He

and his wife awaited their fate together in an old ruin in Walden woods.

What life he got—or what means of death—he got by ditching.

I never was much acquainted with Hugh Quoil, though sometimes I met him

in the path, and now do believe that a solid shank-bone, and skull which

no longer aches, lie somewhere, and can still be produced, which once

with garment of flesh and broadcloth were called and hired to do work

as Hugh Quoil. He was a man of manners and gentlemanlike, as one who

had seen the world, and was capable of more civil speech than you could

well attend to. At a distance he had seemingly a ruddy face as of biting

January, but nearer at hand it was bright carmine. It would have burnt

your finger to touch his cheek. He wore a straight-bodied snuff-colored

coat which had long been familiar with him, and carried a turf-knife in

his hand—instead of a sword. He had fought on the English side before,

but he fought on the Napoleon side now. Napoleon went to St. Helena;

Hugh Quoil came to Walden Pond. I heard that he used to tell travellers

who inquired about myself that —— and Thoreau owned the _farm_ together,

but Thoreau lived on the _place_ and carried it on.[447]

He was thirstier than I, and drank more, probably, but not out of

the pond. That was never the lower for him. Perhaps I ate more than

he. The last time I met him, the only time I spoke with him, was at

the foot of the hill on the highway as I was crossing to the spring

one summer afternoon, the pond water being too warm for me. I was

crossing the road with a pail in my hand, when Quoil came down the

hill, wearing his snuff-colored coat, as if it were winter, and shaking

with delirium-tremens. I hailed him and told him that my errand was to

get water at a spring close by, only at the foot of the hill over the

fence. He answered, with stuttering and parched lips, bloodshot eye,

and staggering gesture, he'd like to see it. "Follow me there, then."

But I had got my pail full and back before he scaled the fence. And he,

drawing his coat about him, to warm him, or to cool him, answered in

delirium-tremens, hydrophobia dialect, which is not easy to be written

here, he'd heard of it, but had never seen it; and so shivered his way

along to town,—to liquor and to oblivion.

On Sundays, brother Irishmen and others, who had gone far astray

from steady habits and the village, crossed my bean-field with empty

jugs toward Quoil's. But what for? Did they sell rum there? I asked.

"Respectable people they," "Know no harm of them," "Never heard that

they drank too much," was the answer of all wayfarers. They went by

sober, stealthy, silent, skulking (no harm to get elm bark Sundays);

returned loquacious, sociable, having long intended to call on you.

At length one afternoon Hugh Quoil, feeling better, perchance, with

snuff-colored coat, as usual, paced solitary and soldier-like, thinking

[of] Waterloo, along the woodland road to the foot of the hill by

the spring; and there the Fates met him, and threw him down in his

snuff-colored coat on the gravel, and got ready to cut his thread;

but not till travellers passed, who would raise him up, get him

perpendicular, then settle, settle quick; but legs, what are they? "Lay

me down," says Hugh hoarsely. "House locked up—key—in pocket—wife in

town." And the Fates cut, and there he lay by the wayside, five feet

ten, and looking taller than in life.

He has gone away; his house here "all tore to pieces." What kind of

fighting or ditching work he finds to do now, how it fares with him,

whether his thirst is quenched, whether there is still some semblance of

that carmine cheek, struggles still with some liquid demon—perchance on

more equal terms—till he swallow him completely, I cannot by any means

learn. What his salutation is now, what his January-morning face, what

he thinks of Waterloo, what start he has gained or lost, what work still

for the ditcher and forester and soldier now, there is no evidence. He

was here, the likes of him, for a season, standing light in his shoes

like a faded gentleman, with gesture almost learned in drawing-rooms;

wore clothes, hat, shoes, cut ditches, felled wood, did farm work for

various people, kindled fires, worked enough, ate enough, drank too

much. He was one of those unnamed, countless sects of philosophers who

founded no school.

Now that he was gone, and his wife was gone too,—for she could not

support the solitude,—before it was too late and the house was torn

down, I went over to make a call. Now that Irishmen with jugs avoided

the old house, I visited it,—an "unlucky castle now," said they. There

lay his old clothes curled up by habit, as if it were himself, upon his

raised plank bed. His pipe lay broken on the hearth; and scattered about

were soiled cards—king of diamonds, hearts, spades—on the floor. One

black chicken, which they could not catch, still went to roost in the

next apartment, stepping silent over the floor, frightened by the sound

of its own wings, black as night and as silent, too, not even croaking;

awaiting Reynard, its god actually dead. There was the dim outline of a

garden which had been planted, but had never received its first hoeing,

now overrun with weeds, with burs and cockles, which stick to your

clothes; as if in the spring he had contemplated a harvest of corn and

beans before that strange trembling of the limbs overtook him. Skin of

woodchuck fresh-stretched, never to be cured, met once in bean-field by

the Waterloo man with uplifted hoe; no cap, no mittens wanted. Pipe on

hearth no more to be lighted, best buried with him.[448]

* * * * *

No thirst for glory, only for strong drink.

* * * * *

Only the convalescent are conscious of the health of nature.

* * * * *

In case of an embargo there will be found to be old clothes enough in

everybody's garret to last till the millennium. We are fond of news,

novelties, new things. The bank-bill that is torn in two will pass if

you save the pieces, if you have only got the essential piece with the

signatures. Lowell and Manchester and Fall River think you will let go

their broadcloth currency when it is torn; but hold on, have an eye to

the signature about the back of it, and endorse the man's name from whom

you received it, and they will be the first to fail and find nothing at

all in their garrets. Every day our garments become more assimilated to

the man that wears them, more near and dear to us, and not finally to

be laid aside but with such delay and medical appliance and solemnity

as our other mortal coil.[449] We know, after all, but few men, a great

many coats and breeches. Dress a scarecrow with your last shift, you

standing shiftless by, who would not soonest address the scarecrow and

salute it?[450]

King James loved his old shoes best. Who does not? Indeed these new

clothes are often won and worn only after a most painful birth. At

first movable prisons, oyster-shells which the tide only raises, opens,

and shuts, washing in what scanty nutriment may be afloat. How many

men walk over the limits, carrying their limits with them? In the

stocks they stand, not without gaze of multitudes, only without rotten

eggs, in torturing boots, the last wedge but one driven. Why should

we be startled at death? Life is constant putting off of the mortal

coil,—coat, cuticle, flesh and bones, all old clothes.

Not till the prisoner has got some rents in his prison walls,

possibility of egress without lock and key some day,—result of steel

watch-spring rubbing on iron grate, or whatever friction and wear and

tear,—will he rest contented in his prison.

Clothes brought in sewing, a kind of work you may call endless.[451]

A man who has at length found out something important to do will not

have to get a new suit to do it in. For him the old will do, lying

dusty in the garret for an indefinite period. Old shoes will serve a

hero longer than they have served his valet. Bare feet are the oldest

of shoes, and he can make them do. Only they who go to legislature

and soirées,—they must have new coats, coats to turn as often as the

man turns in them. Who ever saw his old shoes, his old coat, actually

worn out, returned to their original elements, so that it was not [a]

deed [of] charity to bestow them on some poorer boy, and by him to be

bestowed on some poorer still, or shall we say on some richer who can

do with less?[452]

* * * * *

Over eastward of my bean-field lived Cato Ingraham, slave, born slave,

perhaps, of Duncan Ingraham, Esquire, gentleman, of Concord village,

who built him a house and gave him permission to live in Walden Woods,

for which no doubt he was thanked; and then, on the northeast corner,

Zilpha, colored woman of fame; and down the road, on the right hand,

Brister, colored man, on Brister's Hill, where grow still those little

wild apples he tended, now large trees, but still wild and ciderish

to my taste; and farther still you come to Breed's location, and again

on the left, by well and roadside, Nutting lived. Farther up the road,

at the pond's end, Wyman, the potter, who furnished his townsmen with

earthenware,—the squatter.[453]

Now only a dent in the earth marks the site of most of these human

dwellings; sometimes the well-dent where a spring oozed, now dry and

tearless grass, or covered deep,—not to be discovered till late days by

accident,—with a flat stone under the sod. These dents, like deserted

fox-burrows, old holes, where once was the stir and bustle of human life

overhead, and man's destiny, "fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute,"

were all by turns discussed.

Still grows the vivacious lilac for a generation after the last vestige

else is gone, unfolding still its early sweet-scented blossoms in the

spring, to be plucked only by the musing traveller; planted, tended,

weeded [?], watered by children's hands in front-yard plot,—now by

wall-side in retired pasture, or giving place to a new rising forest.

The last of that stirp, sole survivor of that family. Little did

the dark children think that that weak slip with its two eyes which

they watered would root itself so, and outlive them, and house in

the rear that shaded it, and grown man's garden and field, and tell

their story to the retired wanderer a half-century after they were no

more,—blossoming as fair, smelling as sweet, as in that first spring.

Its still cheerful, tender, civil lilac colors.[454]

The woodland road, though once more dark and shut in by the forest,

resounded with the laugh and gossip of inhabitants, and was notched

and dotted here and there with their little dwellings. Though now but

a humble rapid passage to neighboring villages or for the woodman's

team, it once delayed the traveller longer, and was a lesser village in

itself.[455]

You still hear from time to time the whinnering of the raccoon, still

living as of old in hollow trees, washing its food before it eats it.

The red fox barks at night. The loon comes in the fall to sail and

bathe in the pond, making the woods ring with its wild laughter in the

early morning, at rumor of whose arrival all Concord sportsmen are

on the alert, in gigs, on foot, two by two, three [by three], with

patent rifles, patches, conical balls, spy-glass or open hole over

the barrel. They seem already to hear the loon laugh; come rustling

through the woods like October leaves, these on this side, those on

that, for the poor loon cannot be omnipresent; if he dive here, must

come up somewhere. The October wind rises, rustling the leaves, ruffling

the pond water, so that no loon can be seen rippling the surface. Our

sportsmen scour, sweep the pond with spy-glass in vain, making the

woods ring with rude [?] charges of powder, for the loon went off in

that morning rain with one loud, long, hearty laugh, and our sportsmen

must beat a retreat to town and stable and daily routine, shop work,

unfinished jobs again.[456]

Or in the gray dawn the sleeper hears the long ducking gun explode over

toward Goose Pond, and, hastening to the door, sees the remnant of

a flock, black duck or teal, go whistling by with outstretched neck,

with broken ranks, but in ranger order. And the silent hunter emerges

into the carriage road with ruffled feathers at his belt, from the dark

pond-side where he has lain in his bower since the stars went out.

And for a week you hear the circling clamor, clangor, of some solitary

goose through the fog, seeking its mate, peopling the woods with a

larger life than they can hold.[457]

For hours in fall days you shall watch the ducks cunningly tack and

veer and hold the middle of the pond, far from the sportsman on the

shore,—tricks they have learned and practiced in far Canada lakes or in

Louisiana bayous.[458]

The waves rise and dash, taking sides with all waterfowl.[459]

* * * * *

Then in dark winter mornings, in short winter afternoons, the pack

of hounds, threading all woods with hounding cry and yelp, unable to

resist the instinct of the chase, and note of hunting-horn at intervals,

showing that man too is in the rear. And the woods ring again, and yet

no fox bursts forth on to the open level of the pond, and no following

pack after their Actæon.[460]

* * * * *

But this small village, germ of something more, why did it fail while

Concord grows apace? No natural advantages, no water privilege, only

the deep Walden Pond and cool Brister's Spring,—privileges to drink

long, healthy, pure draughts, alas, all unimproved by those men but

to dilute their glass. Might not the basket-making, stable-broom,

mat-making, corn-parching, potters' business have thrived here, making

the wilderness to blossom as the rose? Now, all too late for commerce,

this waste, depopulated district has its railroad too. And transmitted

the names of unborn Bristers, Catos, Hildas,[461] Zilphas to a remote

and grateful posterity.

Again Nature will try, with me for a first settler, and my house raised

last spring to be the oldest in the settlement.

The sterile soil would have been proof against any lowland

degeneracy.[462]

Farmers far and near call it the paradise of beans.

And here, too, on winter days, while yet is cold January, and snow and

ice lie thick, comes the prudent, foreseeing landlord or housekeeper

(anticipating thirst) from the village, to get ice to cool his summer

drink,—a grateful beverage if he should live, if time should endure so

long. How few so wise, so industrious, to lay up treasures which neither

rust nor melt, "to cool their summer drink" one day!

And cut off the solid pond, the element and air of fishes, held fast

with chain and stake like corded wood, all through favoring, willing,

kind, permitting winter air to wintery cellar, to underlie the summer

there. And cut and saw the cream of the pond, unroof the house of

fishes.[463]

And in early mornings come men with fishing-reels and slender lunch, men

of real faith, and let down their fine lines and live minnows through

the snowy field to hook the pickerel and perch.[464]

* * * * *

With buried well-stones, and strawberries, raspberries, thimble-berries

growing on the sunny sward there; some pitchy pine or gnarled oak in

the chimney-nook, or the sweet-scented black birch where the doorstone

was.[465]

Breed's,—history must not yet tell the tragedies enacted there. Let time

intervene to assuage and lend an azure atmospheric tint to them.[466]

* * * * *

There is something pathetic in the sedentary life of men who have

travelled. They must naturally die when they leave the road.

What seems so fair and poetic in antiquity—almost fabulous—is realized,

too, in Concord life. As poets and historians brought their work to the

Grecian games, and genius wrestled there as well as strength of body, so

have we seen works of kindred genius read at our Concord games, by their

author, in their own Concord amphitheatre. It is virtually repeated by

all ages and nations.[467]

* * * * *

Moles nesting in your cellar and nibbling every third potato.[468]

A whole rabbit-warren only separated from you by the flooring.

To be saluted when you stir in the dawn by the hasty departure

of Monsieur,—thump, thump, thump, striking his head against the

floor-timbers.[469] Squirrels and field mice that hold to a community

of property in your stock of chestnuts.

The blue jays suffered few chestnuts to reach the ground, resorting to

your single tree in flocks in the early morning, and picking them out

of the burs at a great advantage.

The crop of blackberries small; berries not yet grown. Ground-nuts not

dug.

* * * * *

One wonders how so much, after all, was expressed in the old way, so

much here depends upon the emphasis, tone, pronunciation, style, and

spirit of the reading. No writer uses so profusely all the aids to

intelligibility which the printer's art affords. You wonder how others

had contrived to write so many pages without emphatic, italicized words,

they are so expressive, so natural and indispensable, here. As if none

had ever used the demonstrative pronoun demonstratively. In another's

sentences the thought, though immortal, is, as it were, embalmed and

does not _strike_ you, but here it is so freshly living, not purified

by the ordeal of death, that it stirs in the very extremities, the

smallest particles and pronouns are all alive with it.—You must not

say it, but _it_. It is not simple it, your it or mine, but _it_. His

books are solid, workmanlike, like all that England does. They tell

of endless labor done, well done, and all the rubbish swept away, like

this bright cutlery which glitters in the windows, while the coke and

ashes, turnings, filings, borings, dust lie far away at Birmingham,

unheard of. The words did not come at the command of grammar but of a

tyrannous, inexorable meaning; not like the standing soldiers, by vote

of Parliament, but any able-bodied countryman pressed into the service.

It is no China war, but a revolution. This style is worth attending

to as one of the most important features of the man that we at this

distance know.[470]

* * * * *

What are the men of New England about? I have travelled some in New

England, especially in Concord, and I found that no enterprise was on

foot which it would not disgrace a man to take part in. They seemed to

be employed everywhere in shops and offices and fields. They seemed,

like the Brahmins of the East, to be doing penance in a thousand

curious, unheard-of ways, their endurance surpassing anything I had ever

seen or heard of,—Simeon Stylites, Brahmins looking in the face of the

sun, standing on one leg, dwelling at the roots of trees, nothing to

it; any of the twelve labors of Hercules to be matched,—the Nemean lion,

Lernæan hydra, Œnœan stag, Erymanthian boar, Augean stables, Stymphalian

birds, Cretan bull, Diomedes' mares, Amazonian girdle, monster Geryon,

Hesperian apples, three-headed Cerberus, nothing at all in comparison,

being only twelve and having an end. For I could never see that these

men ever slew or captured any of their monsters, or finished any of

their labors. They have no "friend Iolaus to burn, with a hot iron,

the root" of the hydra's head; for as soon as one head is crushed, two

spring up.[471]

Men labor under a mistake; they are laying up treasures which moth and

rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. Northern Slavery,

or the slavery which includes the Southern, Eastern, Western, and all

others.[472]

It is hard to have a Southern overseer; it is worse to have a Northern

one; but worst of all when you are yourself the slave-driver. Look at

the lonely teamster on the highway, wending to market by day or night;

is he a son of the morning, with somewhat of divinity in him, fearless

because immortal, going to receive his birthright, greeting the sun as

his fellow, bounding with youthful, gigantic strength over his mother

earth? See how he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely, indefinitely all the

day he fears, not being immortal, not divine, the slave and prisoner of

his own opinion of himself, fame which he has earned by his own deeds.

Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with private opinion. What I

think of myself, that determines my fate.[473]

I see young men, my equals, who have inherited from their spiritual

father a soul,—broad, fertile, uncultivated,—from their earthly father

a farm,—with cattle and barns and farming tools, the implements of the

picklock and the counterfeiter. Better if they had been born in the

open pasture and suckled by a wolf, or perhaps cradled in a manger, that

they might have seen with clear eye what was the field they were called

to labor in. The young man has got to live a man's life, then, in this

world, pushing all these things before him, and get on as well as he

can. How many a poor immortal soul I have met, well-nigh crushed and

smothered, creeping slowly down the road of life, pushing before it a

barn seventy-five by forty feet and one hundred acres of land,—tillage,

pasture, wood-lot! This dull, opaque garment of the flesh is load enough

for the strongest spirit, but with such an earthly garment superadded

the spiritual life is soon plowed into the soil for compost. It's a

fool's life, as they will all find when they get to the end of it. The

man that goes on accumulating property when the bare necessaries of life

are cared for is a fool and knows better.[474]

There is a stronger desire to be respectable to one's neighbors than to

one's self.

However, such distinctions as poet, philosopher, literary man, etc., do

not much assist our final estimate. We do not lay much stress on them;

"a man's a man for a' that." Any writer who interests us much is all

and more than these.

It is not simple dictionary it.[475]

Talent at making books solid, workmanlike, graceful, which may be

read.[476]

Some idyllic chapter or chapters are needed.

In the French Revolution are Mirabeau, king of men; Danton, Titan of

the Revolution; Camille Desmoulins, poetic editor; Roland, heroic woman;

Dumouriez, first efficient general: on the other side, Marat, friend of

the people; Robespierre; Tinville, infernal judge; St. Just; etc., etc.

* * * * *

Nutting and Le Gros by the wall-side. The Stratten house and barn where

the orchard covered all the slope of Brister's Hill,—now killed out by

the pines.

Brister Freeman, a handy negro, slave once of Squire Cummings (?), and

Fenda, his hospitable, pleasant wife, large, round, black, who told

fortunes, blacker than all the children of night, such a dusky orb as

had never risen on Concord before.

Zilpha's little house where "she was spinning linen," making the

Walden woods ring with her shrill singing,—a loud, shrill, remarkable

voice,—when once she was away to town, set on fire by English soldiers

on parole, in the last war, and cat and dog and hens all burned up.

Boiling her witch's dinner, and heard muttering to herself over the

gurgling pot by silent traveller, "Ye are all bones, bones."

And Cato, the Guinea negro,—his house and little patch among the

walnuts,—who let the trees grow up till he should be old, and Richardson

got them.

Where Breed's house stood tradition says a tavern once stood, the well

the same, and all a swamp between the woods and town, and road made on

logs.[477]

* * * * *

Bread I made pretty well for awhile, while I remembered the rules; for

I studied this out methodically, going clear back to the primitive days

and first invention of the unleavened kind, and coming gradually down

through that lucky accidental souring of the dough which taught men the

leavening process, and all the various fermentations thereafter, till

you get to "good, sweet, wholesome bread," the staff of life. I went

on very well, mixing rye and flour and Indian and potato with success,

till one morning I had forgotten the rules, and thereafter scalded the

yeast,—killed it out,—and so, after the lapse of a month, was glad after

all to learn that such palatable staff of life could be made out of the

dead and scalt creature and risings that lay flat.

I have hardly met with the housewife who has gone so far with this

mystery. For all the farmers' wives pause at yeast. Given this and they

can make bread. It is the axiom of the argument. What it is, where it

came from, in what era bestowed on man, is wrapped in mystery. It is

preserved religiously, like the vestal fire, and its virtue is not yet

run out. Some precious bottleful, first brought over in the Mayflower,

did the business for America, and its influence is still rising,

swelling, spreading like Atlantic billows over the land,—the soul of

bread, the spiritus, occupying its cellular tissue.[478]

* * * * *

The way to compare men is to compare their respective ideals. The actual

man is too complex to deal with.

Carlyle is an earnest, honest, heroic worker as literary man and

sympathizing brother of his race.

Idealize a man, and your notion takes distinctness at once.

Carlyle's talent is perhaps quite equal to his genius.[479]

Striving [?] to live in reality,—not a general critic, philosopher, or

poet.

Wordsworth, with very feeble talent, has not so great and admirable as

unquestionable and persevering genius.

Heroism, heroism is his word,—his thing.

He would realize a brave and adequate human life, and die hopefully at

last.

* * * * *

Emerson again is a critic, poet, philosopher, with talent not so

conspicuous, not so adequate to his task; but his field is still higher,

his task more arduous. Lives a far more intense life; seeks to realize

a divine life; his affections and intellect equally developed. Has

advanced farther, and a new heaven opens to him. Love and Friendship,

Religion, Poetry, the Holy are familiar to him. The life of an Artist;

more variegated, more observing, finer perception; not so robust,

elastic; practical enough in his own field; faithful, a judge of men.

There is no such general critic of men and things, no such trustworthy

and faithful man. More of the divine realized in him than in any. A

poetic critic, reserving the unqualified nouns for the gods.

* * * * *

Alcott is a geometer, a visionary, the Laplace of ethics, more

intellect, less of the affections, sight beyond talents, a substratum of

practical skill and knowledge unquestionable, but overlaid and concealed

by a faith in the unseen and impracticable. Seeks to realize an entire

life; a catholic observer; habitually takes in the farthest star and

nebula into his scheme. Will be the last man to be disappointed as the

ages revolve. His attitude is one of greater faith and expectation

than that of any man I know; with little to show; with undue share,

for a philosopher, of the weaknesses of humanity. The most hospitable

intellect, embracing high and low. For children how much that means,

for the insane and vagabond, for the poet and scholar![480]

* * * * *

Emerson has special talents unequalled. The divine in man has had no

more easy, methodically distinct expression. His personal influence upon

young persons greater than any man's. In his world every man would be

a poet, Love would reign, Beauty would take place, Man and Nature would

harmonize.

* * * * *

When Alcott's day comes, laws unsuspected by most will take effect,[481]

the system will crystallize according to them, all seals and falsehood

will slough off, everything will be in its place.

_Feb. 22_ [no year]. Jean Lapin sat at my door to-day, three paces from

me, at first trembling with fear, yet unwilling to move; a poor, wee

thing, lean and bony, with ragged ears and sharp nose, scant tail and

slender paws. It looked as if nature no longer contained the breed of

nobler bloods, the earth stood on its last legs. Is nature, too, unsound

at last? I took two steps, and lo, away he scud with elastic spring

over the snowy crust into the bushes, a free creature of the forest,

still wild and fleet; and such then was his nature, and his motion

asserted its vigor and dignity. Its large eye looked at first young

and diseased, almost dropsical, unhealthy. But it bound[ed] free, the

venison, straightening its body and its limbs into graceful length, and

soon put the forest between me and itself.[482]

* * * * *

Emerson does not consider things in respect to their essential utility,

but an important partial and relative one, as works of art perhaps. His

probes pass one side of their centre of gravity. His exaggeration is of

a part, not of the whole.

* * * * *

How many an afternoon has been stolen from more profitable, if not

more attractive, industry,—afternoons when a good run of custom might

have been expected on the main street, such as tempt the ladies out

a-shopping,—spent, I say, by me away in the meadows, in the well-nigh

hopeless attempt to set the river on fire or be set on fire by it, with

such tinder as I had, with such flint as I was. Trying at least to make

it flow with milk and honey, as I had heard of, or liquid gold, and

drown myself without getting wet,—a laudable enterprise, though I have

not much to show for it.

So many autumn days spent outside the town, trying to hear what was

in the wind, to hear it and carry it express. I well-nigh sunk all

my capital in it, and lost my own breath into the bargain, by running

in the face of it. Depend upon it, if it had concerned either of the

parties, it would have appeared in the yeoman's gazette, the _Freeman_,

with other earliest intelligence.

For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snow-storms and

rain-storms, and did my duty faithfully, though I never received one

cent for it.

Surveyor, if not of higher ways, then of forest paths and all across-lot

routes, keeping many open ravines bridged and passable at all seasons,

where the public heel had testified to the importance of the same,

all not only without charge, but even at considerable risk and

inconvenience. Many a mower would have forborne to complain had he been

aware of the invisible public good that was in jeopardy.

So I went on, I may say without boasting, I trust, faithfully minding my

business without a partner, till it became more and more evident that my

townsmen would not, after all, admit me into the list of town officers,

nor make the place a sinecure with moderate allowance.

I have looked after the wild stock of the town, which pastures in

common, and every one knows that these cattle give you a good deal of

trouble in the way of leaping fences. I have counted and registered

all the eggs I could find at least, and have had an eye to all nooks

and corners of the farm, though I didn't always know whether Jonas

or Solomon worked in a particular field to-day; that was none of my

business. I only knew him for one of the men, and trusted that he was as

well employed as I was. I had to make my daily entries in the general

farm book, and my duties may sometimes have made me a little stubborn

and unyielding.

Many a day spent on the hilltops waiting for the sky to fall, that

I might catch something, though I never caught much, only a little,

manna-wise, that would dissolve again in the sun.

My accounts, indeed, which I can swear to have been faithfully kept,

I have never got audited, still less accepted, still less paid and

settled. However, I haven't set my heart upon _that_.

I have watered the red huckleberry and the sand cherry and the hoopwood

[?] tree, and the cornel and spoonhunt and yellow violet, which might

have withered else in dry seasons. The white grape.

To find the bottom of Walden Pond, and what inlet and outlet it might

have.

* * * * *

I found at length that, as they were not likely to offer me any office

in the court-house, any curacy or living anywhere else, I must shift

for myself, I must furnish myself with the necessaries of life.

Now watching from the observatory of the Cliffs or Annursnack to

telegraph any new arrival, to see if Wachusett, Watatic, or Monadnock

had got any nearer. Climbing trees for the same purpose. I have

been reporter for many years to one of the journals of no very wide

circulation, and, as is too common, got only my pains for my labor.

Literary contracts are little binding.[483]

The unlimited anxiety, strain, and care of some persons is one very

incurable form of disease. Simple arithmetic might have corrected it;

for the life of every man has, after all, an epic integrity, and Nature

adapts herself to our weaknesses and deficiencies as well as talents.

No doubt it is indispensable that we should do _our_ work between sun

and sun, but only a wise man will know what that is. And yet how much

work will be left undone, put off to the next day, and yet the system

goes on!

We presume commonly to take care of ourselves, and trust as little as

possible. Vigilant more or less all our days, we say our prayers at

night and commit ourselves to uncertainties, as if in our very days

and most vigilant moments the great part were not a necessary trust

still.[484] How serenity, anxiety, confidence, fear paint the heavens

for us.

All the laws of nature will bend and adapt themselves to the least

motion of man.

All change is a miracle to contemplate, but it is a miracle which is

taking place unobserved every instant; when all is ready it takes place,

and only a miracle could stay it.

We [are] compelled to live so thoroughly and sincerely, reflecting on

our steps, reverencing our life, that we never make allowance for the

possible changes.

We may waive just so much care of ourselves as we devote of care

elsewhere.[485]

IX

1837-1847

(ÆT. 20-30)