The Writings of

Henry D. Thoreau

Walden
 I do not propose to -write an ode to dejection, but to
brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing
on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up.
HENRY D. THOREAU

Walden
150TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

EDITED B Y J . LYNDON SHANLEY

WITH AN INTRODUCTION

BY JOHN UPDIKE

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

The Center emblem means that one of a panel of textual experts
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employed and maximum accuracy attained. The accuracy of the text
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copy according to standards set by the Center.
Copyright © 1971, 2004 by Princeton University Press,
41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540
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i joth Anniversary Edition, 2004

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10 9 8 7 6 5
Editorial Board
Editor-in-Chief, Elizabeth Hall Witherell
Executive Committee
William L. Howarth
Robert N. Hudspeth
Joseph J. Moldenhauer, Textual Editor
William Rossi
Nancy Craig Simmons

The Writings
Walden, J. Lyndon Shanley (1971)
The Maine Woods, Joseph J. Moldenhauer (1972)
Reform Papers, Wendell Glick (1973)
Early Essays and Miscellanies,
Joseph J. Moldenhauer et al. (1975)
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,
Carl F. Hovde et al. (1980)
Journal i: 1837-1844, Elizabeth Hall Witherell et al.
(1981)
Journal 2: 1842-1848, Robert Sattelmeyer( 1984)
Translations, K. P. Van Anglen (1986)
Cape Cod, Joseph J. Moldenhauer (1988)
Journal 3: 1848-1851, Robert Sattelmeyer, Mark R.
Patterson, and William Rossi (1990)
Journal 4: 1851-1852, Leonard N. Neufeldt and
Nancy Craig Simmons (1992)
Journal 5: 1852-1853, Patrick F. O'Connell (1997)
Journal 6: 1853, William Rossi and Heather Kirk
Thomas (2000)
Journal 8: 1854, Sandra Harbert Petrulionis (2002)
The Higher Law: Thoreau on Civil Disobedience and
Reform, Wendell Glick (2004)
This page intentionally left blank
Contents
Introduction by John Updike ix
Economy 3
Where I Lived,
and What I Lived For 81
Reading 99
Sounds iii
Solitude 129
Visitors 140
The Bean-Field 155
The Village 167
The Ponds 173
Baker Farm 201
Higher Laws 210
Brute Neighbors 223
House-Warming 238
Former Inhabitants;
and Winter Visitors 256
Winter Animals 271
The Pond in Winter 282
Spring 299
Conclusion 320
Index by Paul 0. Williams 335
This page intentionally left blank
Introduction
A CENTURY and a half after its initial publication,
Walden has become such a totem of the back-to-nature,
preservationist, anti-business, civil-disobedience mind-set,
and Thoreau so vivid a protester, so perfect a crank and
hermit saint, that the book itself risks being as revered
and unread as the Bible. Of the American classics densely
arisen in the middle of the nineteenth century—
Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter (1850), Melville's Moby-Dick
(1851), Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1855), to which we
might add Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin
(1854) as a nation-stirring best-seller and Emerson's es-
says as an indispensable preparation of the ground—
Walden has contributed most to America's present sense of
itself. In a time of informational overload, of clamorously
inane and ubiquitous electronic entertainment, and of a
fraught, globally challenged, ever more demanding work-
place, the urge to build a cabin in the woods and thus
reform, simplify, and cleanse one's life—"to front," in
Thoreau's ringing verb, "only the essential facts of life"—
remains strong. The vacation industry, so-called, thrives
on it, and camper sales, and the weekend recourse to
second homes in the northern forests or the western
mountains, where the pollutions of industry and commerce
are relatively light. "Simplify, simplify," Walden advises, and
we try, even though a twenty-first century attainment of
a rustic, elemental simplicity entails considerable compli-
cations of budget and transport.
Thoreau would not scorn contemporary efforts to effect
his gospel and follow his example. Walden aims at con-
version, and Thoreau's polemical purpose gives it an en-
ergy and drive missing in the meanders of the sole other
book he saw into publication during his short lifetime, A
Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849).
X INTRODUCTION

Like A Week, Walden is a farraginous memoir, and was

subject to Thoreau's habit of constant revision and ex-
pansion, going through seven known drafts, but it all
forms a defense of his eccentric reclusion. A vigorous,
humorous tone asserts itself at the outset:

I should not obtrude my affairs so much on the notice of my

readers if very particular inquiries had not been made by
my townsmen concerning my mode of life, which some
would call impertinent, though they did not appear to me
at all impertinent, but, considering the circumstances, very
natural and pertinent.

The circumstances, a malaise of drudgery and petty dis-

traction in the society around him, are described, and his
general wish "to live deliberately, to front only the essen-
tial facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to
teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had
not lived." However, he passes over a very practical mo-
tive: he wanted to be a writer and, like many another of
like ambition, needed privacy, quiet, and a "broad mar-
gin" where his mind could roam.
He built a single-room cabin on his mentor Emerson's
land, more than a mile south of Concord village, in the
spring of 1845, and moved in on July 4, declaring his own
independence. In the next two years he completed a
draft, later expanded, of A Week on the Concord and
Merrimack Rivers, based on a canoe trip he and his
brother John had taken in 1839, as well as composing the
first draft of Walden and a long essay on Thomas Carlyle,
part of which he gave as a lecture at the Concord Lyceum
in 1846. In July of 1846 he refused to pay his accumu-
lated town poll taxes, on the grounds that the national
government condoned and protected slavery, and spent
one night in jail, thus laying the basis for his celebrated
essay "Civil Disobedience." Later in that same year he
travelled for the first time to Maine and wrote most of the
 INTRODUCTION xi

essay "Ktaadn." Thoreau was twenty-seven when he took

up residence in the cabin by Walden Pond; he had gradu-
ated from Harvard nineteenth in his class, tried teaching,
helped his father in the family pencil business, did local
odd jobs for a dollar a day, lived with the Emersons for
two years as handyman and gardener, left Long Island af-
ter a brief spell of tutoring and testing the literary market,
and, despite Emerson's sponsorship and a few poems and
essays in the Transcendentalist quarterly The Dial, had
made no mark. He emerged from the cabin in 1847 as es-
sentially the Thoreau known to literary history.
His appearance was sufficiently arresting to have at-
tracted a number of descriptions. The fastidious but not
unfriendly Hawthorne, a sometime resident of Concord,
described him in 1842 as "a young man with much of wild
original nature still remaining in him. . . . He is as ugly as
sin, long-nosed, queer-mouthed, and with uncouth and
somewhat rustic, although courteous manners. . . . [He]
seems inclined to lead a sort of Indian life among civilized
men—an Indian life, I mean, as respects the absence of
any systematic effort for a livelihood." James Kendall
Hosmer recalled how an older Thoreau "stood in the
doorway with hair which looked as if it had been dressed
with a pine-cone, inattentive grey eyes, hazy with far-
away musings, an emphatic nose and disheveled attire
that bore signs of tramps in woods and swamps." His New
Bedford disciple Daniel Ricketson recalled, as phrased by
Thoreau's biographer Walter Harding, "the gentleness,
humanity, and intelligence of Thoreau's blue eyes" and
noted that "though his arms were long, his legs short,
his hands and feet large, and his shoulders markedly slop-
ing, he was strong and vigorous in his walk." His voice was
impressive, even toward the end, when tuberculosis had
weakened it. On his last journey, a rather desperate ex-
cursion to Minnesota for the possibly healing effects of
its supposedly drier climate, the minister upon whom
Xii INTRODUCTION

he called in Chicago, the Unitarian Robert Collyer, re-

membered:

His words also were as distinct and true to the ear as those
of a great singer. . . . He would hesitate for an instant now
and then, waiting for the right word, or would pause with a
pathetic patience to master the trouble in his chest, but
when he was through the sentence was perfect and entire,
lacking nothing, and the word was so purely one with the
man that when I read his books now and then I do not hear
my own voice within my reading but the voice I heard that
day.

How did Thoreau achieve his literary voice, which has

worn better, to a modern ear, than Emerson's more flu-
ent, worldly, and—to be expected from a former clergy-
man—oratorical one? The outward sweep of Emerson's
pithy, exhortative sentences rather wearies the reader
now; we feel the audience before him, basking as he
beams epigrams and encouragements into their faces.
The mood of Thoreau is more interior; the eye is not on
an audience but on a multitudinous world of sensation,
seen and named with precision. Consider these sentences
from near the beginning of A Week:

We glided noiselessly down the stream, occasionally driv-

ing a pickerel from the covert of the pads, or a bream from
her nest, and the smaller bittern now and then sailed away
on sluggish wings from some recess in the shore, or the
larger lifted itself out of the long grass at our approach, and
carried its precious legs away to deposit them in a place of
safety. The tortoises also rapidly dropped into the water, as
our boat ruffled the surface amid the willows breaking the
reflections of the trees. The banks had passed the height of
their beauty, and some of the brighter flowers showed by
their faded tints that the season was verging towards the
afternoon of the year; but this sombre tinge enhanced their
sincerity, and in the still unabated heats they seemed like
the mossy brink of some cool well.
 INTRODUCTION xiii

All is limpid observation, gliding from one bittern to an-

other, until the startling remark that fading color en-
hanced the flowers' "sincerity," as if they have been
pressing a case. The long paragraph goes on to enumerate,
with the Latin names, the flowers of the Concord mead-
ows, and ends with reminiscence of the mornings when
the writer, on the water before sunrise, witnessed the
sudden opening of water lilies to the touch of dawn sun,
when "whole fields of white blossoms seemed to flash
open before me, as I floated along, like the unfolding of a
banner." This is not exactly "nature writing," though it
holds the freshness of a continent still being explored
and catalogued, as by a Humboldt or an Audubon; it is a
live, particularized demonstration of Emerson's hopeful
boast, set forward in its most theological form in his slim
first book, Nature, that "every natural fact is a symbol of
some spiritual fact"—that Nature is at bottom Spirit, that
"Spirit alters, moulds, makes it." Emerson approvingly
quoted Swedenborg's "The visible world and the relation
of its parts, is the dial plate of the invisible" and asserted,
"The axioms of physics translate the laws of ethics." Im-
bibing Idealism from Emerson, Thoreau soaked himself
in Nature's great metaphor, and became a scientist of
sorts—"a mystic, a transcendentalist, and a natural
philosopher to boot," he later called himself—and an au-
tobiographer. He gathered, and transferred to journals
amounting in the end to two million words, rare moments
and observations of increasing refinement and subtlety,
harvested where he would. Emerson, like other re-
spectable citizens of Concord, was skeptical of enterprise
so personal and quizzical, confiding to his journal that
"Thoreau wants a little ambition in his mixture. . . . In-
stead of being the head of American engineers, he is cap-
tain of a huckleberry party." Thoreau's taste for figurative
huckleberry-gathering took him far afield, walking Cape
Cod's wave-beaten coast and ascending to the stony summit
Xiv INTRODUCTION

of Maine's Mount Ktaadn, but he always returned to the lit-

tle wilderness of Concord, a microcosm that was cosmos
enough.
F. 0. Matthiessen, in his American Renaissance, points
out how much the great writers of that renaissance owed to
the English writers of the seventeenth century—Donne and
Herbert, Marvell and Browne—with their belief in corre-
spondences between the little and the large, the inner
world of the self and the outer world of Nature. "The
heart of man," Donne wrote, "Is an epitome of God's great
book / Of creatures, and man need no farther look."
George Herbert put it, "Man is one world, and hath / An-
other to attend him," thus extending Nature into the
unseen realms of heavenly solicitude. By a great leap of
kinship, the metaphysicals of the seventeenth century ig-
nited in the spiritual descendents of seventeenth-century
Puritans a blaze of introspectively charged particulars.
Walden lives in its particulars. The long opening chap-
ter, "Economy," joyously details just how to build a
house—"a tight shingled and plastered house, ten feet
wide by fifteen long, and eight-feet posts, with a garret and a
closet, a large window on each side, two trap doors, one
door at the end, and a brick fireplace opposite"—down to a
list of expenses totalling $28. n1/. Briskly marketing to
the world his program of austerity and self-reliance, he
itemizes the few foodstuffs he paid for and the profits he ob-
tained from his seven miles of bean rows. He tells us how
to make his unleavened bread of rye and Indian meal, and
"a very good molasses either of pumpkin or beets." In
another experiment, he eats a woodchuck, enjoying it
"notwithstanding its musky flavor," though he doubts it
will become an item for the village butcher. He shares the
details of his housekeeping with us:

Housework was a pleasant pastime. When my floor was

dirty, I rose early, and, setting all my furniture out of doors
on the grass, bed and bedstead making but one budget,
 INTRODUCTION XV

dashed water on the floor, and sprinkled white sand from

the pond on it, and then with a broom scrubbed it clean and
white. . . .

Further—and this is a stroke of his sensitive, pawky

genius—he contemplates his momentarily displaced
furniture and the nuance of enchanting strangeness:

It was pleasant to see my whole household effects out on

the grass, making a little pile like a gypsy's pack, and my
three-legged table, from which I did not remove the books
and pen and ink, standing amid the pines and hicko-
ries. . . . It was worth the while to see the sun shine on
these things, and hear the free wind blow on them; so much
more interesting most familiar objects look out of doors
than in the house.

Many things, in Thoreau's liberated state, are worth

the while to see—the feeding manners of chickadees, and
the trickles of spring thaw along the railroad cut, "resem-
bling, as you look down on them, the laciniated lobed and
imbricated thalluses of some lichens." At the same mo-
ment he is "cheered by the music of a thousand tinkling
rills and rivulets whose veins are filled with the blood of
winter which they are bearing off"; at other times he
eavesdrops on "the faint wiry peep" of the baby wood-
cock being led by their mother through the swamp. In
Walden's most bravura chapter, "Sounds," he hears not
only the cries and rustles of myriad creatures but, with
surprising approval, the whistle and racket of the Fitch-
burg Railroad train as it makes its way, a hundred rods
off, along the edge of Walden Pond:

Commerce is unexpectedly confident and serene, alert, ad-

venturous, and unwearied. It is very natural in its methods
withal, far more so than many fantastic enterprises and
sentimental experiments. . . . I am refreshed and ex-
panded when the freight train rattles past me, and I smell
the stores which go dispensing their odors all the way from
Long Wharf to Lake Champlain.
XVi INTRODUCTION

His admiration of Nature is not selective; it includes the

"iron steed" that thrusts its noisy way into his woods,
earning several pages of paean capped by one of his best-
known poems, beginning "What's the railroad to me? / 1
never go to see / Where it ends."
The Concord of the 18405, where, in Thoreau's per-
ception, men "lead lives of quiet desperation," slave-
drivers of themselves with "no time to be any thing but a
machine," was by our lights a bucolic world, the steam
engine being the technological ultimate and the main la-
bor farm labor. It is the farmer, according to Thoreau,
whose "poor immortal soul" is "well nigh crushed and
smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life,
pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its
Augean stables never cleansed"; it is a farmer he encoun-
ters in the middle of the night, driving his livestock to a
dawn appointment in Boston, while the unencumbered
hermit returns to sleep in his cozy cabin. Thoreau was a
Harvard graduate and the scion of a small industrialist,
John Thoreau the pencil-manufacturer. In the local social
scale he was-something of a gentleman, and he asserts a
gentleman's prerogative in pursuing his unprofitable hob-
bies. We slightly wince, on behalf of those more tightly
bound to laborious necessity, when we read that "to main-
tain one's self on this earth is not hardship but a pastime,
if we will live simply and wisely" and that "by working
about six weeks in a year, I could meet all the expenses of
living." Not everyone is offered free land to squat on for a
personal experiment nor can draw so freely on the soci-
ety of a nearby village. Thoreau makes light of most
men's need to work, and ignores the wave of industrial
toil that is breaking upon New England. In his week on
the Concord and Merrimack Rivers he takes small note of
the factories that made of this river the New World's first
industrial zone, whose cruel exploitations Melville sought
to dramatize in his short story "The Tartarus of Maids."
 INTRODUCTION Xvii

Thoreau's protest centers on the end-product of indus-

try, the consumerism that urges us to buy its products;
his proposed remedy is doing without: "A man is rich in
proportion to the number of things which he can afford to
let alone." This includes doing without sex ("The genera-
tive energy, which, when we are loose, dissipates and
makes us unclean, when we are continent invigorates and
inspires us"), and would carry with it, as Hawthorne
sensed, an end to most of the interactions that form civi-
lization, a return to "Indian life" and beyond—to a degree
of individual independence that no human society, least
of all a tribal one, could tolerate. His retreat to the cabin
and the retreats to the land that his masterwork has
helped inspire were luxuries, financed by the surplus
that an interwoven, slave-driving economy generates.
Even so staunch a Thoreauvian as E. B. White (whose
own withdrawal to the Maine coast was financed by the
ad revenues of a New York magazine), in writing a tribute
for Walden's hundredth anniversary fifty years ago, ad-
mitted that "the plodding economist will. . . have rough
going if he hopes to emerge from the book with a clear
system of economic thought," and that Thoreau some-
times wrote as if "all his readers were male, unmarried,
and well-connected." But if it cannot be swallowed as a
cure-all, Walden can be relished as a condiment, a fla-
voring, a head-clearing spice. White, remembering how
the book heartened him when he read it in his youth, saw
Walden as "an invitation to life's dance, assuring the
troubled recipient that. . . the music is played for him,
too, if he will but listen and move his feet." "Love your
life," Thoreau wrote, "poor as it is."
Walden can be taken as an antidote to apathy and anx-
iety. With its high spirits and keen appeals to the senses,
it fortifies. Its time of writing was a troubled time for
Thoreau, young but old enough to have accomplished
more, and for the nation, laboring under the cloud of the
XViii INTRODUCTION

slavery issue and the coming Civil War. If Thoreau did not
make much of the industrial revolution, he felt the crisis
in belief whereby even the almost creedless stopgap of
Unitarianism demanded too much faith. Nature studies
led to naturalism, to philosophical materialism. "Darwin,
the naturalist," is cited early in Walden, as witness to
those "inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego" who went "naked
with impunity, while the European shivers in his
clothes"—model citizens of Thoreau's Utopia of doing
without. Walter Harding's biography, The Days of Henry
Thoreau (1965), tells us that the ailing Thoreau lived to
read, in 1860, Darwin's Origin of Species, and "took six
pages of notes on it in one of his commonplace books,
and . . . liked the book very much." But the theological
furor over the book did not engage him, nor affect his own
thinking. He had once experienced, Walden confides, "a
slight insanity in my mood" whereby Nature seemed un-
friendly, a mood quickly cancelled by a sense, in a gentle
rain, of "an infinite and unaccountable friendliness all at
once like an atmosphere sustaining me": "There can be
no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of
Nature and has his senses still."
Thoreau resembled Darwin in his patient observations
and Benjamin Franklin in his inventive practicality. Un-
like most Transcendentalists, he could do things—tend
garden and make home repairs for Emerson, or actualize
with real carpentry Bronson Alcott's fanciful vision of a
summerhouse. "I have as many trades as fingers," he says
in Walden. Between 1849 and 1861 he completed over
two hundred surveys, mostly in and around Concord. He
figures in Henry Petroskfs technological history of the
pencil (The Pencil, 1990) as the inventor, not long after
his graduation from Harvard, of a seven-foot-high grind-
ing machine that captured only the particles of graphite
fine enough to rise highest into the air; for a time,
Thoreau pencils were the best—the least gritty—in
 INTRODUCTION xix

America. We trust the narrator of Walden and his spiri-

tual aspirations better because of repeated examples of
his practical know-how. A call to ethereality begins with a
trick of fitting an ax tight to its handle:
One day, when my axe had come off and I had cut a green
hickory for a wedge, driving it with a stone, and had placed
the whole to soak in a pond hole in order to swell the wood,
I saw a striped snake run into the water, and he lay on the
bottom, apparently without inconvenience, as long as I
staid there, or more than a quarter of an hour; perhaps be-
cause he had not yet fairly come out of the torpid state. It
appeared to me that for a like reason men remain in their
present low and primitive condition; but if they should feel
the influence of the spring of springs arousing them, they
would of necessity rise to a higher and more ethereal life.

Surviving in the woods, he becomes a student of phys-

ical process. Water swells wood; dead leaves absorb the
sun's heat: "The elements . . . abetted me in making a
path through the deepest snow in the woods, for when I
had once gone through the wind blew the oak leaves into
my tracks, where they lodged, and by absorbing the rays
of the sun melted the snow, and so not only made a dry
bed for my feet, but in the night their dark line was my
guide." The pond covered with winter ice moves him to
especially close observation; as he had anatomized the
spring thaw, so the winter freezing prompts his minute
inspection of bubbles, "narrow oblong perpendicular
bubbles about half an inch long, sharp cones with the
apex upward." In a warm spell, they expand and run to-
gether, "often like silvery coins poured from a bag, one
overlapping another"; at the end of the passage he lifts
his almost microscopic examination of "the infinite num-
ber of minute bubbles" into the resounding open: "These
are the little air-guns which contribute to make the ice
crack and whoop." He veers close to the secret of microor-
ganisms when he asks, "Why is it that a bucket of water
XX INTRODUCTION

soon becomes putrid, but frozen remains sweet forever?"

The question evaporates, however, in the dry witticism, "It
is commonly said that this is the difference between the
affections and the intellect."
As the railroad cuts expose new geology, the commer-
cial ice-cutting in the winter of 1846-47 gives Thoreau
new opportunities for perceiving ice, remarking distinc-
tions in tint as precisely as the contemporary landscapist
Frederic Edwin Church rendered icebergs. Early in
1846, Thoreau seized the opportunity of a frozen Walden
to perform the chief technical labor of his years there.
"With compass and chain and sounding line," cutting
holes in straight lines in several directions, he sounds the
pond, presenting the reader with a drawn map, forty rods
to an inch, and a scale profile of the bottom. The pond
had been long rumored to be bottomless: "It is remark-
able how long men will believe in the bottomlessness of a
pond without taking the trouble to sound it." The sur-
veyor is proud to announce, "I can assure my readers that
Walden has a reasonably tight bottom at a not unreason-
able, though at an unusual, depth." Ponds are shallower
than we imagine: "Most ponds, emptied, would leave a
meadow no more hollow than we frequently see." Most
mysteries, by the same token, yield to the emptying ac-
tion of patient scientific examination. Readers new to
Walden may be surprised at the high proportion of its
energy given to empirical exploration and demonstra-
tion. The Romantic Nature-celebrant wears the polished
spectacles of Franklin and the philosophes. Thoreau's
purpose is to reconcile us, after centuries of hazy anthro-
pocentricity, to Nature as it is, relentless and remorse-
less. We need to be called out from the shared comforts
and illusions of village life.
We need the tonic of wildness. . . . We can never have
enough of Nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of in-
exhaustible vigor, vast and Titanic features. . . . We need to
 INTRODUCTION XXI

witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pastur-

ing freely where we never wander. We are cheered when
we observe the vulture feeding on the carrion which dis-
gusts and disheartens us and deriving health and strength
from the repast.

On the path to his little cabin, he relates, there was a

dead horse, whose aroma repulsed him but heartened
him with "the assurance it gave me of the strong appetite
and inviolable health of Nature." The vision of "Nature
red in tooth and claw," which desolated Tennyson and
other Victorian Christians, is embraced by Thoreau:

I love to see that Nature is so rife with life that myriads can
be afforded to be sacrificed and suffered to prey on one
another; that tender organizations can be so serenely
squashed out of existence like pulp—tadpoles which
herons gobble up, and tortoises and toads run over in the
road; and that sometimes it has rained flesh and blood!
With the liability to accident, we must see how little ac-
count is to be made of it. The impression made on a wise
man is that of universal innocence. . . . Compassion is a
very untenable ground.

He sounds, as it were, the fatal bottom of our organic

existence, and yet claims not merely to accept the uni-
verse, as another Transcendentalist, Margaret Fuller, put
it, but to rejoice in it.
He met his own death, at forty-four, of consumption,
with a serenity admired by much of Concord. "One world
at a time," he famously told those seeking to prepare him
for the next. He did not quite renounce personal immor-
tality; a number of his phrases tease the possibility, and
near the passages above he evokes the "wild river valley
and the woods . . . bathed in so pure and bright a light as
would have waked the dead," concluding, "There needs
no stronger proof of the immortality. All things must live
in such a light." Yet the meaning is unclear, a fillip of ani-
mal optimism after a book-length, clear-eyed exaltation
XX11 INTRODUCTION

of Nature as a chemical and molecular and mathematical

construct—Nature seized in the tightening grip of science,
and stripped of the pathetic fallacy even in the sophisti-
cated form in which Emerson's Neoplatonism couched it.
No more Idealism, no more Platonic forms, no shimmer-
ing archetypes having an existence somehow indepen-
dent of individual things. "No ideas but in things," William
Carlos Williams would say in the next century, giving
modernism a motto. The poetry of Williams and Eliot and
Pound demonstrated that things, assembled even as
enigmatic fragments, as images without spelled-out emo-
tional and logical connectives, give vitality to the lan-
guage and immediacy to the communication between
writer and reader. It is the thinginess of Thoreau's prose
that still excites us, the athleticism with which he springs
from detail to detail, image to image, while still toting
something of Transcendentalism's metaphysical burden.
Without that burden, which is considerably lighter in the
writings posthumously collected as The Maine Woods and
Cape Cod, he comes close to being merely an attentive and
eloquent travel writer. Nevertheless, the chaotic, mist-
swept top of Mount Ktaadn—"the raw materials of a
planet dropped from an unseen quarry"—and the wrecks
and wind-stunted apple trees of Cape Cod afford us the
metaphysical shudder of a man confronting in implacable
nature an image of something purifyingly bleak within
himself.
His later years, as the preachments of abolitionists and
slaveholders reached their shrill adumbration of bloody
war, were marked, even made notorious, by his fiery
championing of John Brown, whom he had briefly met in
Concord, finding him "a man of great common sense, de-
liberate and practical," endowed with "tact and pru-
dence" and the Spartan habits and spare diet of a soldier.
The peaceable Thoreau extols this grim killer for a prac-
tical reason: Brown has taken action, violent action,
 I N T R o D u c TI o N xxiii
against the sanctioned violence of the slavery-protecting
state:

It was his peculiar doctrine that a man has a perfect right to

interfere by force with the slaveholder, in order to rescue
the slave. I agree with him. . . . I do not wish to kill nor to
be killed, but I can foresee circumstances in which both
these things would be by me unavoidable. We preserve the
so-called "peace" of our community by deeds of petty vio-
lence every day.

Thoreau's recognitions endeared him to the revolutionar-

ies of the 19603; he saw the violence behind the estab-
lished order, the enslaving nature of private property,
and—a trend even stronger now than forty years ago—
the media's substitution of "the news" for private reality.
"Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths,
while reality is fabulous." The word "reality" rings
through Walden: "Let us settle ourselves, and work and
wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of
opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and
appearance . . . till we come to a hard bottom and rocks
in place, which we can call reality. . . . Be it life or death,
we crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear
the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities;
if we are alive, let us go about our business." To the dark
immensity of material Nature's indifference we can op-
pose only the brief light, like a lamp in a cabin, of our con-
sciousness; the invigorating benison of Walden is to
make us feel that the contest is equal, and fair.
The United States of 1850, at twenty-three millions,
was small enough to be addressed as a single congrega-
tion. Though famous as the man who lived alone in the
woods, as Melville was as "the man who had lived among
cannibals," Thoreau was in his gingerly fashion gregari-
ous. Visiting his friends the Loomises in Cambridge, he
was once handed, in 1856, and for an awkward moment
XXIV INTRODUCTION

was compelled to hold, upside down, the newborn Mabel

Loomis, who was to achieve fame as the first editor of
Emily Dickinson's poetry and, in the twentieth century,
as a leading instance, in Peter Gay's social history The
Tender Passion, of the sexually fulfilled and unre-
pressed Victorian female. In 1852 Thoreau, already ac-
quainted with most of New England's writers, visited
Walt Whitman in Brooklyn, in the bedroom where Whit-
man lived in slovenly style with his feeble-minded
brother. Although they differed in their estimate of the
common man, so that Whitman later diagnosed the Yan-
kee as having "a very aggravated case of supercilious-
ness," and Thoreau pronunced some of the New Yorker's
poems as "disagreeable to say the least, simply sen-
sual . . . as if the beasts spoke," both were left with
favourable impressions. "He is a great fellow," Thoreau
wrote of Whitman in a letter, and of his book of poems,
"On the whole it sounds to me very brave & American af-
ter whatever deductions. I do not believe that all the ser-
mons so called that have been preached in this land put
together are equal to it for preaching." Leaves of Grass
and Walden have emerged over time as the two great
testaments of American individualism, assuring the New
World, traditional reassurances failing, of the value,
power, and beauty of the unfettered self.

—John Updike
May, 2003
Walden
This page intentionally left blank
Economy
WHEN I wrote the following pages, or rather
the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile
from any neighbor, in a house which I had built my-
self, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Mas-
sachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my
hands only. I lived there two years and two months.
At present I am a sojourner in civilized life again.
I should not obtrude my affairs so much on the no-
tice of my readers if very particular inquiries had not
been made by my townsmen concerning my mode of
life, which some would call impertinent, though they
do not appear to me at all impertinent, but, consider-
ing the circumstances, very natural and pertinent.
Some have asked what I got to eat; if I did not feel
lonesome; if I was not afraid; and the like. Others
have been curious to learn what portion of my income
I devoted to charitable purposes; and some, who have
large families, how many poor children I maintained.
I will therefore ask those of my readers who feel no
particular interest in me to pardon me if I undertake
to answer some of these questions in this book. In
most books, the I, or first person, is omitted; in this it
will be retained; that, in respect to egotism, is the
main difference. We commonly do not remember that
it is, after all, always the first person that is speak-
ing. I should not talk so much about myself if there
were any body else whom I knew as well. Unfortu-
nately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness
of my experience. Moreover, I, on my side, require
of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere
account of his own life, and not merely what he has
heard of other men's lives; some such account as he
would send to his kindred from a distant land; for
4 ECONOMY

if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a dis-

tant land to me. Perhaps these pages are more par-
ticularly addressed to poor students. As for the rest
of my readers, they will accept such portions as apply
to them. I trust that none will stretch the seams in
putting on the coat, for it may do good service to him
whom it fits.
I would fain say something, not so much concern-
ing the Chinese and Sandwich Islanders as you who
read these pages, who are said to live in New Eng-
land; something about your condition, especially your
outward condition or circumstances in this world, in
this town, what it is, whether it is necessary that it be
as bad as it is, whether it cannot be improved as well
as not. I have travelled a good deal in Concord; and
every where, in shops, and offices, and fields, the in-
habitants have appeared to me to be doing penance
in a thousand remarkable ways. What I have heard
of Brahmins sitting exposed to four fires and looking
in the face of the sun; or hanging suspended, with
their heads downward, over flames; or looking at the
heavens over their shoulders "until it becomes impos-
sible for them to resume their natural position, while
from the twist of the neck nothing but liquids can
pass into the stomach;" or dwelling, chained for life,
at the foot of a tree; or measuring with their bodies,
like caterpillars, the breadth of vast empires; or stand-
ing on one leg on the tops of pillars,-even these forms
of conscious penance are hardly more incredible and
astonishing than the scenes which I daily witness.
The twelve labors of Hercules were trifling in com-
parison with those which my neighbors have under-
taken; for they were only twelve, and had an end; but
I could never see that these men slew or captured any
monster or finished any labor. They have no friend
lolas to burn with a hot iron the root of the hydra's
 WALDEN 5

head, but as soon as one head is crushed, two spring

up.
I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune
it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle,
and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired
than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the
open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might
have seen with clearer eyes what field they were
called to labor in. Who made them serfs of the soil?
Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is
condemned to eat only his peck of dirt? Why should
they begin digging their graves as soon as they are
born? They have got to live a man's life, pushing all
these things before them, and get on as well as they
can. How many a poor immortal soul have I met well
nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping
down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seven-
ty-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed,
and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pas-
ture, and wood-lot! The portionless, who struggle with
no such unnecessary inherited encumbrances, find it
labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic
feet of flesh.
But men labor under a mistake. The better part of
the man is soon ploughed into the soil for compost. By
a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are
employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treas-
ures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves
break through and steal. It is a fool's life, as they will
find when they get to the end of it, if not before. It
is said that Deucalion and Pyrrha created men by
throwing stones over their heads behind them: —
Inde genus durum sumus, experiensque laborum,
Et documenta damus qua simus origine nati.
Or, as Raleigh rhymes it in his sonorous way,—
6 ECONOMY

"From thence our kind hard-hearted is, enduring

pain and care,
Approving that our bodies of a stony nature are."
So much for a blind obedience to a blundering oracle,
throwing the stones over their heads behind them,
and not seeing where they fell.
Most men, even in this comparatively free country,
through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied
with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse
labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked
by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too
clumsy and tremble too much for that. Actually, the
laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day
by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest rela-
tions to men; his labor would be depreciated in the
market. He has no time to be any thing but a machine.
How can he remember well his ignorance—which his
growth requires—who has so often to use his knowl-
edge? We should feed and clothe him gratuitously
sometimes, and recruit him with our cordials, before
we judge of him. The finest qualities of our nature,
like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the
most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves
nor one another thus tenderly.
Some of you, we all know, are poor, find it hard to
live, are sometimes, as it were, gasping for breath. I
have no doubt that some of you who read this book
are unable to pay for all the dinners which you have
actually eaten, or for the coats and shoes which are
fast wearing or are already worn out, and have come to
this page to spend borrowed or stolen time, robbing
your creditors of an hour. It is very evident what
mean and sneaking lives many of you live, for my
sight has been whetted by experience; always on the
limits, trying to get into business and trying to get out
of debt, a very ancient slough, called by the Latins,
 WALDEN 7

ses alienum, another's brass, for some of their coins

were made of brass; still living, and dying, and buried
by this other's brass; always promising to pay, prom-
ising to pay, to-morrow, and dying to-day, insolvent;
seeking to curry favor, to get custom, by how many
modes, only not state-prison offences; lying, flatter-
ing, voting, contracting yourselves into a nutshell of
civility, or dilating into an atmosphere 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, or import his groceries for him;
making yourselves sick, that you may lay up some-
thing against a sick day, something to be tucked away
in an old chest, or in a stocking behind the plastering,
or, more safely, in the brick bank; no matter where,
no matter how much or how little.
I sometimes wonder that we can be so frivolous, I
may almost say, as to attend to the gross but some-
what foreign form of servitude called Negro Slavery,
there are so many keen and subtle masters that en-
slave both north and south. It is hard to have a south-
ern overseer; it is worse to have a northern one; but
worst of all when you are the slave-driver of your-
self. Talk of a divinity in man! Look at the teamster
on the highway, wending to market by day or night;
does any divinity stir within him? His highest duty to
fodder and water his horses! What is his destiny to
him compared with the shipping interests? Does not
he drive for Squire Make-a-stir? How godlike, how
immortal, is he? See how he cowers and sneaks, how
vaguely all the day he fears, not being immortal nor
divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion
of himself, a fame won by his own deeds. Public
opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own
private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it
is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate. Self-
8 ECONOMY

emancipation even in the West Indian provinces of

the fancy and imagination,—what Wilberforce is there
to bring that about? Think, also, of the ladies of the
land weaving toilet cushions against the last day, not
to betray too green an interest in their fates! As if you
could kill time without injuring eternity.
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.
From the desperate city you go into the desperate
country, and have to console yourself with the brav-
ery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but uncon-
scious despair is concealed even under what are called
the games and amusements of mankind. There is no
play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a
characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.
When we consider what, to use the words of the
catechism, is the chief end of man, and what are the
true necessaries and means of life, it appears as if
men had deliberately chosen the common mode of
living because they preferred it to any other. Yet they
honestly think there is no choice left. But alert and
healthy natures remember that the sun rose clear. It
is never too late to give up our prejudices. No way of
thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted
without proof. What every body echoes or in silence
passes by as true to-day may turn out to be falsehood
to-morrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had
trusted for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilizing rain
on their fields. What old people say you cannot do you
try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people,
and new deeds for new. Old people did not know
enough once, perchance, to fetch fresh fuel to keep
the fire a-going; new people put a little dry wood un-
der a pot, and are whirled round the globe with the
speed of birds, in a way to kill old people, as the
phrase is. Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified
 WALDEN 9

for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so

much as it has lost. One may almost doubt if the
wisest man has learned any thing of absolute value
by living. Practically, the old have no very important
advice to give the young, their own experience has
been so partial, and their lives have been such miser-
able failures, for private reasons, as they must believe;
and it may be that they have some faith left which
belies that experience, and they are only less young
than they were. I have lived some thirty years on this
planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valu-
able or even earnest advice from my seniors. They
have told me nothing, and probably cannot tell me
any thing, to the purpose. Here is life, an experiment
to a great extent untried by me; but it does not avail
me that they have tried it. If I have any experience
which I think valuable, I am sure to reflect that this
my Mentors said nothing about.
One farmer says to me, "You cannot live on vegeta-
ble food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones
with;" and so he religiously devotes a part of his day
to supplying his system with the raw material of
bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen,
which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his
lumbering plough along in spite of every obstacle.
Some things are really necessaries of life in some cir-
cles, the most helpless and diseased, which in others
are luxuries merely, and in others still are entirely
unknown.
The whole ground of human life seems to some to
have been gone over by their predecessors, both the
heights and the valleys, and all things to have been
cared for. According to Evelyn, "the wise Solomon
prescribed ordinances for the very distances of trees;
and the Roman praetors have decided how often you
may go into your neighbor's land to gather the acorns
10 ECONOMY

which fall on it without trespass, and what share be-

longs to that neighbor." Hippocrates has even left di-
rections how we should cut our nails; that is, even
with the ends of the fingers, neither shorter nor longer.
Undoubtedly the very tedium and ennui which pre-
sume to have exhausted the variety and the joys of
life are as old as Adam. But man's capacities have
never been measured; nor are we to judge of what he
can do by any precedents, so little has been tried.
Whatever have been thy failures hitherto, "be not
afflicted, my child, for who shall assign to thee what
thou hast left undone?"
We might try our lives by a thousand simple tests;
as, for instance, that the same sun which ripens my
beans illumines at once a system of earths like ours.
If I had remembered this it would have prevented
some mistakes. This was not the light in which I
hoed them. The stars are the apexes of what wonder-
ful triangles! What distant and different beings in the
various mansions of the universe are contemplating
the same one at the same moment! Nature and hu-
man life are as various as our several constitutions.
Who shall say what prospect life offers to another?
Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look
through each other's eyes for an instant? We should
live in all the ages of the world in an hour; ay, in all
the worlds of the ages. History, Poetry, Mythology!—
I know of no reading of another's experience so star-
tling and informing as this would be.
The greater part of what my neighbors call good I
believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of any
thing, it is very likely to be my good behavior. What
demon possessed me that I behaved so well? You may
say the wisest thing you can old man,-you who have
lived seventy years, not without honor of a kind,—I
hear an irresistible voice which invites me away from
 WALDEN 11

all that. One generation abandons the enterprises of

another like stranded vessels.
I think that we may safely trust a good deal more
than we do. We may waive just so much care of our-
selves as we honestly bestow elsewhere. Nature is as
well adapted to our weakness as to our strength. The
incessant anxiety and strain of some is a well nigh
incurable form of disease. We are made to exaggerate
the importance of what work we do; and yet how
much is not done by us! or, what if we had been
taken sick? How vigilant we are! determined not to
live by faith if we can avoid it; all the day long on the
alert, at night we unwillingly say our prayers and
commit ourselves to uncertainties. So thoroughly and
sincerely are we compelled to live, reverencing our
life, and denying the possibility of change. This is the
only way, we say; but there are as many ways as
there can be drawn radii from one centre. All change
is a miracle to contemplate; but it is a miracle which
is taking place every instant. Confucius said, "To
know that we know what we know, and that we do
not know what we do not know, that is true knowl-
edge." When one man has reduced a fact of the imag-
ination to be a fact to his understanding, I foresee
that all men will at length establish their lives on
that basis.

Let us consider for a moment what most of the

trouble and anxiety which I have referred to is about,
and how much it is necessary that we be troubled, or,
at least, careful. It would be some advantage to live a
primitive and frontier life, though in the midst of an
outward civilization, if only to learn what are the
gross necessaries of life and what methods have been
taken to obtain them; or even to look over the old day-
12 ECONOMY

books of the merchants, to see what it was that men

most commonly bought at the stores, what they stored,
that is, what are the grossest groceries. For the im-
provements of ages have had but little influence on
the essential laws of man's existence; as our skele-
tons, probably, are not to be distinguished from those
of our ancestors.
By the words, necessary of life, I mean whatever,
of all that man obtains by his own exertions, has
been from the first, or from long use has become, so
important to human life that few, if any, whether
from savageness, or poverty, or philosophy, ever at-
tempt to do without it. To many creatures there is in
this sense but one necessary of life, Food. To the bison
of the prairie it is a few inches of palatable grass,
with water to drink; unless he seeks the Shelter of the
forest or the mountain's shadow. None of the brute
creation requires more than Food and Shelter. The
necessaries of life for man in this climate may, ac-
curately enough, be distributed under the several
heads of Food, Shelter, Clothing, and Fuel; for not till
we have secured these are we prepared to entertain
the true problems of Me with freedom and a prospect
of success. Man has invented, not only houses, but
clothes and cooked food; and possibly from the acci-
dental discovery of the warmth of fire, and the conse-
quent use of it, at first a luxury, arose the present
necessity to sit by it. We observe cats and dogs ac-
quiring the same second nature. By proper Shelter
and Clothing we legitimately retain our own internal
heat; but with an excess of these, or of Fuel, that is,
with an external heat greater than our own internal,
may not cookery properly be said to begin? Darwin,
the naturalist, says of the inhabitants of Tierra del
Fuego, that while his own party, who were well
clothed and sitting close to a fire, were far from too
 WALDEN 13

warm, these naked savages, who were farther off, were

observed, to his great surprise, "to be streaming with
perspiration at undergoing such a roasting." So, we
are told, the New Hollander goes naked with im-
punity, while the European shivers in his clothes. Is
it impossible to combine the hardiness of these sav-
ages with the intellectualness of the civilized man?
According to Liebig, man's body is a stove, and food
the fuel which keeps up the internal combustion in
the lungs. In cold weather we eat more, in warm less.
The animal heat is the result of a slow combustion,
and disease and death take place when this is too
rapid; or for want of fuel, or from some defect in the
draught, the fire goes out. Of course the vital heat is
not to be confounded with fire; but so much for anal-
ogy. It appears, therefore, from the above list, that the
expression, animal life, is nearly synonymous with
the expression, animal heat; for while Food may be
regarded as the Fuel which keeps up the fire within
us,—and Fuel serves only to prepare that Food or to
increase the warmth of our bodies by addition from
without,—Shelter and Clothing also serve only to re-
tain the heat thus generated and absorbed.
The grand necessity, then, for our bodies, is to keep
warm, to keep the vital heat in us. What pains we
accordingly take, not only with our Food, and Cloth-
ing, and Shelter, but with our beds, which are our
night-clothes, robbing the nests and breasts of birds
to prepare this shelter within a shelter, as the mole
has its bed of grass and leaves at the end of its bur-
row! The poor man is wont to complain that this is a
cold world; and to cold, no less physical than social,
we refer directly a great part of our ails. The sum-
mer, in some climates, makes possible to man a sort
of Elysian life. Fuel, except to cook his Food, is then
unnecessary; the sun is his fire, and many of the
14 ECONOMY

fruits are sufficiently cooked by its rays; while Food

generally is more various, and more easily obtained,
and Clothing and Shelter are wholly or half unneces-
sary. At the present day, and in this country, as I find
by my own experience, a few implements, a knife, an
axe, a spade, a wheelbarrow, &c., and for the studi-
ous, lamplight, stationery, and access to a few books,
rank next to necessaries, and can all be obtained at a
trifling cost. Yet some, not wise, go to the other side
of the globe, to barbarous and unhealthy regions, and
devote themselves to trade for ten or twenty years, in
order that they may live,—that is, keep comfortably
warm,—and die in New England at last. The luxuri-
ously rich are not simply kept comfortably warm, but
unnaturally hot; as I implied before, they are cooked,
of course a la mode.
Most of the luxuries, and many of the so called
comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but
positive hinderances to the elevation of mankind.
With respect to luxuries and comforts, the wisest have
ever lived a more simple and meager life than the
poor. The ancient philosophers, Chinese, Hindoo,
Persian, and Greek, were a class than which none has
been poorer in outward riches, none so rich in in-
ward. We know not much about them. It is remark-
able that we know so much of them as we do. The
same is true of the more modern reformers and bene-
factors of their race. None can be an impartial or
wise observer of human life but from the vantage
ground of what ive should call voluntary poverty. Of
a life of luxury the fruit is luxury, whether in agri-
culture, or commerce, or literature, or art. There are
nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philoso-
phers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was
once admirable to live. To be a philosopher is not
merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a
 WALDEN 15

school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its

dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanim-
ity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of
life, not only theoretically, but practically. The suc-
cess of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a
courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly. They
make shift to live merely by conformity, practically as
their fathers did, and are in no sense the progenitors
of a nobler race of men. But why do men degenerate
ever? What makes families run out? What is the na-
ture of the luxury which enervates and destroys na-
tions? Are we sure that there is none of it in our own
lives? The philosopher is in advance of his age even
in the outward form of his life. He is not fed, shel-
tered, clothed, warmed, like his contemporaries. How
can a man be a philosopher and not maintain his
vital heat by better methods than other men?
When a man is warmed by the several modes
which I have described, what does he want next?
Surely not more warmth of the same kind, as more
and richer food, larger and more splendid houses,
finer and more abundant clothing, more numerous
incessant and hotter fires, and the like. When he has
obtained those things which are necessary to life,
there is another alternative than to obtain the super-
fluities; and that is, to adventure on life now, his
vacation from humbler toil having commenced. The
soil, it appears, is suited to the seed, for it has sent its
radicle downward, and it may now send its shoot up-
ward also with confidence. Why has man rooted him-
self thus firmly in the earth, but that he may rise in
the same proportion into the heavens above?—for the
nobler plants are valued for the fruit they bear at last
in the air and light, far from the ground, and are not
treated like the humbler esculents, which, though
they may be biennials, are cultivated only till they
16 ECONOMY

have perfected their root, and often cut down at top

for this purpose, so that most would not know them
in their flowering season.
I do not mean to prescribe rules to strong and val-
iant natures, who will mind their own affairs whether
in heaven or hell, and perchance build more mag-
nificently and spend more lavishly than the richest,
without ever impoverishing themselves, not knowing
how they live,-if, indeed, there are any such, as has
been dreamed; nor to those who find their encourage-
ment and inspiration in precisely the present condi-
tion of things, and cherish it with the fondness and
enthusiasm of lovers,—and, to some extent, I reckon
myself in this number; I do not speak to those who
are well employed, in whatever circumstances, and
they know whether they are well employed or not;—
but mainly to the mass of men who are discontented,
and idly complaining of the hardness of their lot or
of the times, when they might improve them. There
are some who complain most energetically and in-
consolably of any, because they are, as they say, do-
ing their duty. I also have in my mind that seemingly
wealthy, but most terribly impoverished class of all,
who have accumulated dross, but know not how to
use it, or get rid of it, and thus have forged their own
golden or silver fetters.

If I should attempt to tell how I have desired to

spend my life in years past, it would probably sur-
prise those of my readers who are somewhat ac-
quainted with its actual history; it would certainly
astonish those who know nothing about it. I will only
hint at some of the enterprises which I have cher-
ished.
 WALDEN 17

In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I

have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and
notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of
two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely
the present moment; to toe that line. You will pardon
some obscurities, for there are more secrets in my
trade than in most men's, and yet not voluntarily
kept, but inseparable from its very nature. I would
gladly tell all that I know about it, and never paint
"No Admittance" on my gate.
I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-
dove, and am still on their trail. Many are the travel-
lers I have spoken concerning them, describing their
tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met
one or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp
of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear be-
hind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious to recover
them as if they had lost them themselves.
To anticipate, not the sunrise and the dawn mere-
ly, but, if possible, Nature herself! How many morn-
ings, summer and winter, before yet any neighbor
was stirring about his business, have I been about
mine! No doubt, many of my townsmen have met me
returning from this enterprise, farmers starting for
Boston in the twilight, or woodchoppers going to their
work. It is true, I never assisted the sun materially in
his rising, but, doubt not, it was of the last impor-
tance only to be present at it.
So many autumn, ay, and winter days, spent out-
side the town, trying to hear what was in the wind,
to hear and carry it express! I well-nigh sunk all my
capital in it, and lost my own breath into the bargain,
running in the face of it. If it had concerned either
of the political parties, depend upon it, it would have
appeared in the Gazette with the earliest intelligence.
At other times watching from the observatory of some
18 ECONOMY

cliff or tree, to telegraph any new arrival; or waiting

at evening on the hill-tops for the sky to fall, that I
might catch something, though I never caught much,
and that, manna-wise, would dissolve again in the
sun.
For a long time I was reporter to a journal, of no
very wide circulation, whose editor has never yet seen
fit to print the bulk of my contributions, and, as is too
common with writers, I got only my labor for my
pains. However, in this case my pains were their own
reward.
For many years I was self-appointed inspector of
snow storms and rain storms, and did my duty faith-
fully; surveyor, if not of highways, then of forest
paths and all across-lot routes, keeping them open,
and ravines bridged and passable at all seasons,
where the public heel had testified to their utility.
I have looked after the wild stock of the town,
which give a faithful herdsman a good deal of trouble
by leaping fences; and I have had an eye to the un-
frequented nooks and corners of the farm; though I
did not always know whether Jonas or Solomon
worked in a particular field to-day; that was none of
my business. I have watered the red huckleberry, the
sand cherry and the nettle tree, the red pine and the
black ash, the white grape and the yellow violet,
which might have withered else in dry seasons.
In short, I went on thus for a long time, I may say
it without boasting, faithfully minding my business,
till it became more and more evident that my towns-
men would not after all admit me into the list of town
officers, nor make my place a sinecure with a moder-
ate allowance. My accounts, which I can swear to
have kept faithfully, I have, indeed, never got audited,
still less accepted, still less paid and settled. However,
I have not set my heart on that.
 WALDEN 19

Not long since, a strolling Indian went to sell bas-

kets at the house of a well-known lawyer in my neigh-
borhood. "Do you wish to buy any baskets?" he asked.
"No, we do not want any," was the reply. "What!" ex-
claimed the Indian as he went out the gate, "do you
mean to starve us?" Having seen his industrious
white neighbors so well off,-that the lawyer had only
to weave arguments, and by some magic wealth and
standing followed, he had said to himself; I will go
into business; I will weave baskets; it is a thing which
I can do. Thinking that when he had made the bas-
kets he would have done his part, and then it would
be the white man's to buy them. He had not discov-
ered that it was necessary for him to make it worth
the other's while to buy them, or at least make him
think that it was so, or to make something else which
it would be worth his while to buy. I too had woven
a kind of basket of a delicate texture, but I had not
made it worth any one's while to buy them. Yet not
the less, in my case, did I think it worth my while to
weave them, and instead of studying how to make it
worth men's while to buy my baskets, I studied rather
how to avoid the necessity of selling them. The life
which men praise and regard as successful is but one
kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the
expense of the others?
Finding that my fellow-citizens were not likely to
offer me any room in the court house, or any curacy
or living any where else, but I must shift for myself,
I turned my face more exclusively than ever to the
woods, where I was better known. I determined to go
into business at once, and not wait to acquire the
usual capital, using such slender means as I had al-
ready got. My purpose in going to Walden Pond was
not to live cheaply nor to live dearly there, but to
transact some private business with the fewest ob-
20 ECONOMY

stacles; to be hindered from accomplishing which for

want of a little common sense, a little enterprise and
business talent, appeared not so sad as foolish.
I have always endeavored to acquire strict business
habits; they are indispensable to every man. If your
trade is with the Celestial Empire, then some small
counting house on the coast, in some Salem harbor,
will be fixture enough. You will export such articles
as the country affords, purely native products, much
ice and pine timber and a little granite, always in na-
tive bottoms. These will be good ventures. To oversee
all the details yourself in person; to be at once pilot
and captain, and owner and underwriter; to buy and
sell and keep the accounts; to read every letter re-
ceived, and write or read every letter sent; to superin-
tend the discharge of imports night and day; to be
upon many parts of the coast almost at the same
time;—often the richest freight will be discharged
upon a Jersey shore;-to be your own telegraph, un-
weariedly sweeping the horizon, speaking all passing
vessels bound coastwise; to keep up a steady despatch
of commodities, for the supply of such a distant and
exorbitant market; to keep yourself informed of the
state of the markets, prospects of war and peace every
where, and anticipate the tendencies of trade and
civilization,-taking advantage of the results of all ex-
ploring expeditions, using new passages and all im-
provements in navigation;—charts to be studied, the
position of reefs and new lights and buoys to be
ascertained, and ever, and ever, the logarithmic tables
to be corrected, for by the error of some calculator
the vessel often splits upon a rock that should have
reached a friendly pier,—there is the untold fate of
La Perousej-universal science to be kept pace with,
studying the lives of all great discoverers and navi-
gators, great adventurers and merchants, from Han-
 WALDEN 21

no and the Phoenicians down to our day; in fine, ac-

count of stock to be taken from time to time, to know
how you stand. It is a labor to task the faculties of a
man,—such problems of profit and loss, of interest, of
tare and tret, and gauging of all kinds in it, as de-
mand a universal knowledge.
I have thought that Walden Pond would be a good
place for business, not solely on account of the rail-
road and the ice trade; it offers advantages which it
may not be good policy to divulge; it is a good port
and a good foundation. No Neva marshes to be filled;
though you must every where build on piles of your
own driving. It is said that a flood-tide, with a west-
erly wind, and ice in the Neva, would sweep St. Peters-
burg from the face of the earth.

As this business was to be entered into without the

usual capital, it may not be easy to conjecture where
those means, that will still be indispensable to every
such undertaking, were to be obtained. As for Cloth-
ing, to come at once to the practical part of the ques-
tion, perhaps we are led oftener by the love of novel-
ty, and a regard for the opinions of men, in procuring
it, than by a true utility. Let him who has work to do
recollect that the object of clothing is, first, to retain
the vital heat, and secondly, in this state of society,
to cover nakedness, and he may judge how much of
any necessary or important work may be accomplished
without adding to his wardrobe. Kings and queens
who wear a suit but once, though made by some tailor
or dress-maker to their majesties, cannot know the
comfort of wearing a suit that fits. They are no better
than wooden horses to hang the clean clothes on.
Every day our garments become more assimilated to
ourselves, receiving the impress of the wearer's char-
22 CLOTHING

acter, until we hesitate to lay them aside, without

such delay and medical appliances and some such
solemnity even as our bodies. No man ever stood the
lower in my estimation for having a patch in his
clothes; yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety,
commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and
unpatched clothes, than to have a sound conscience.
But even if the rent is not mended, perhaps the worst
vice betrayed is improvidence. I sometimes try my
acquaintances by such tests as this;-who could wear
a patch, or two extra seams only, over the knee?
Most behave as if they believed that their prospects
for life would be ruined if they should do it. It would
be easier for them to hobble to town with a broken
leg than with a broken pantaloon. Often if an acci-
dent happens to a gentleman's legs, they can be
mended; but if a similar accident happens to the legs
of his pantaloons, there is no help for it; for he con-
siders, not what is truly respectable, but what is re-
spected. We know but few men, a great many coats
and breeches. Dress a scarecrow in your last shift,
you standing shiftless by, who would not soonest
salute the scarecrow? Passing a cornfield the other
day, close by a hat and coat on a stake, I recognized
the owner of the farm. He was only a little more
weather-beaten than when I saw him last. I have
heard of a dog that barked at every stranger who ap-
proached his master's premises with clothes on, but
was easily quieted by a naked thief. It is an interesting
question how far men would retain their relative rank
if they were divested of their clothes. Could you, in
such a case, tell surely of any company of civilized
men, which belonged to the most respected class?
When Madam Pfeiffer, in her adventurous travels
round the world, from east to west, had got so near
home as Asiatic Russia, she says that she felt the
 WALDEN 23

necessity of wearing other than a travelling dress,

when she went to meet the authorities, for she "was
now in a civilized country, where people are
judged of by their clothes." Even in our democratic
New England towns the accidental possession of
wealth, and its manifestation in dress and equipage
alone, obtain for the possessor almost universal
respect. But they who yield such respect, numerous
as they are, are so far heathen, and need to have a
missionary sent to them. Beside, clothes introduced
sewing, a kind of work which you may call endless;
a woman's dress, at least, is never done.
A man who has at length found something to do
will not need to get a new suit to do it in; for him the
old will do, that has lain dusty in the garret for an
indeterminate period. Old shoes will serve a hero
longer than they have served his valet,—if a hero
ever has a valet,-bare feet are older than shoes, and
he can make them do. Only they who go to soirees
and legislative halls must have new coats, coats to
change as often as the man changes in them. But if
my jacket and trousers, my hat and shoes, are fit to
worship God in, they will do; will they not? Who ever
saw his old clothes,—his old coat, actually worn out,
resolved into its primitive elements, so that it was not
a deed of charity to bestow it on some poor boy, by
him perchance to be bestowed on some poorer still,
or shall we say richer, who could do with less? I say,
beware of all enterprises that require new clothes,
and not rather a new wearer of clothes. If there is not
a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit?
If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your
old clothes. All men want, not something to do with,
but something to do, or rather something to be. Per-
haps we should never procure a new suit, however
ragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted,
24 CLOTHING

so enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel like

new men in the old, and that to retain it would be
like keeping new wine in old bottles. Our moulting
season, like that of the fowls, must be a crisis in our
lives. The loon retires to solitary ponds to spend it.
Thus also the snake casts its slough, and the cater-
pillar its wormy coat, by an internal industry and ex-
pansion; for clothes are but our outmost cuticle and
mortal coil. Otherwise we shall be found sailing un-
der false colors, and be inevitably cashiered at last
by our own opinion, as well as that of mankind.
We don garment after garment, as if we grew like
exogenous plants by addition without. Our outside
and often thin and fanciful clothes are our epidermis
or false skin, which partakes not of our life, and may
be stripped off here and there without fatal injury;
our thicker garments, constantly worn, are our cellu-
lar integument, or cortex; but our shirts are our liber
or true bark, which cannot be removed without
girdling and so destroying the man. I believe that all
races at some seasons wear something equivalent to
the shirt. It is desirable that a man be clad so simply
that he can lay his hands on himself in the dark, and
that he live in all respects so compactly and prepared-
ly, that, if an enemy take the town, he can, like the
old philosopher, walk out the gate empty-handed
without anxiety. While one thick garment is, for most
purposes, as good as three thin ones, and cheap cloth-
ing can be obtained at prices really to suit customers;
while a thick coat can be bought for five dollars,
which will last as many years, thick pantaloons for
two dollars, cowhide boots for a dollar and a half a
pair, a summer hat for a quarter of a dollar, and a
winter cap for sixty-two and a half cents, or a better
be made at home at a nominal cost, where is he so
poor that, clad in such a suit, of his own earning,
 WALDEN 25

there will not be found wise men to do him rever-

ence?
When I ask for a garment of a particular form, my
tailoress tells me gravely, "They do not make them so
now," not emphasizing the "They" at all, as if she
quoted an authority as impersonal as the Fates, and
I find it difficult to get made what I want, simply
because she cannot believe that I mean what I say,
that I am so rash. When I hear this oracular
sentence, I am for a moment absorbed in thought,
emphasizing to myself each word separately that
I may come at the meaning of it, that I may
find out by what degree of consanguinity They are
related to me, and what authority they may have
in an affair which affects me so nearly; and, finally,
I am inclined to answer her with equal mystery, and
without any more emphasis of the "they,"—"It is true,
they did not make them so recently, but they do now."
Of what use this measuring of me if she does not
measure my character, but only the breadth of my
shoulders, as it were a peg to hang the coat on? We
worship not the Graces, nor the Parcas, but Fashion.
She spins and weaves and cuts with full authority.
The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveller's cap,
and all the monkeys in America do the same. I some-
times despair of getting any thing quite simple and
honest done in this world by the help of men. They
would have to be passed through a powerful press
first, to squeeze their old notions out of them, so that
they would not soon get upon their legs again, and
then there would be some one in the company with a
maggot in his head, hatched from an egg deposited
there nobody knows when, for not even fire kills these
things, and you would have lost your labor. Neverthe-
less, we will not forget that some Egyptian wheat is
said to have been handed down to us by a mummy.
26 CLOTHING

On the whole, I think that it cannot be main-

tained that dressing has in this or any country risen
to the dignity of an art. At present men make shift
to wear what they can get. Like shipwrecked sailors,
they put on what they can find on the beach, and at a
little distance, whether of space or time, laugh at
each other's masquerade. Every generation laughs at
the old fashions, but follows religiously the new. We
are amused at beholding the costume of Henry VIII.,
or Queen Elizabeth, as much as if it was that of the
King and Queen of the Cannibal Islands. All costume
off a man is pitiful or grotesque. It is only the serious
eye peering from and the sincere life passed within
it, which restrain laughter and consecrate the cos-
tume of any people. Let Harlequin be taken with a
fit of the colic and his trappings will have to serve that
mood too. When the soldier is hit by a cannon ball
rags are as becoming as purple.
The childish and savage taste of men and women
for new patterns keeps how many shaking and squint-
ing through kaleidoscopes that they may discover the
particular figure which this generation requires to-
day. The manufacturers have learned that this taste
is merely whimsical. Of two patterns which differ
only by a few threads more or less of a particular
color, the one will be sold readily, the other lie on the
shelf, though it frequently happens that after the
lapse of a season the latter becomes the most fash-
ionable. Comparatively, tattooing is not the hideous
custom which it is called. It is not barbarous merely
because the printing is skin-deep and unalterable.
I cannot believe that our factory system is the best
mode by which men may get clothing. The condition
of the operatives is becoming every day more like that
of the English; and it cannot be wondered at, since,
as far as I have heard or observed, the principal ob-
 WALDEN 27

ject is, not that mankind may be well and honestly

clad, but, unquestionably, that the corporations may
be enriched. In the long run men hit only what they
aim at. Therefore, though they should fail immedi-
ately, they had better aim at something high.

As for a Shelter, I will not deny that this is now a

necessary of life, though there are instances of men
having done without it for long periods in colder
countries than this. Samuel Laing says that "The
Laplander in his skin dress, and in a skin bag which
he puts over his head and shoulders, will sleep night
after night on the snow in a degree of cold which
would extinguish the life of one exposed to it in any
woollen clothing." He had seen them asleep thus. Yet
he adds, "They are not hardier than other people."
But, probably, man did not live long on the earth
without discovering the convenience which there is in
a house, the domestic comforts, which phrase may
have originally signified the satisfactions of the house
more than of the family; though these must be ex-
tremely partial and occasional in those climates
where the house is associated in our thoughts with
winter or the rainy season chiefly, and two thirds of
the year, except for a parasol, is unnecessary. In our
climate, in the summer, it was formerly almost solely
a covering at night. In the Indian gazettes a wigwam
was the symbol of a day's march, and a row of them
cut or painted on the bark of a tree signified that so
many times they had camped. Man was not made so
large limbed and robust but that he must seek to
narrow his world, and wall in a space such as fitted
him. He was at first bare and out of doors; but though
this was pleasant enough in serene and warm
weather, by daylight, the rainy season and the winter,
28 SHELTER

to say nothing of the torrid sun, would perhaps have

nipped his race in the bud if he had not made haste
to clothe himself with the shelter of a house. Adam
and Eve, according to the fable, wore the bower be-
fore other clothes. Man wanted a home, a place of
warmth, or comfort, first of physical warmth, then
the warmth of the affections.
We may imagine a time when, in the infancy of
the human race, some enterprising mortal crept into
a hollow in a rock for shelter. Every child begins the
world again, to some extent, and loves to stay out
doors, even in wet and cold. It plays house, as well as
horse, having an instinct for it. Who does not remem-
ber the interest with which when young he looked at
shelving rocks, or any approach to a cave? It was the
natural yearning of that portion of our most primi-
tive ancestor which still survived in us. From the cave
we have advanced to roofs of palm leaves, of bark
and boughs, of linen woven and stretched, of grass
and straw, of boards and shingles, of stones and tiles.
At last, we know not what it is to live in the open air,
and our lives are domestic in more senses than we
think. From the hearth to the field is a great distance.
It would be well perhaps if we were to spend more of
our days and nights without any obstruction between
us and the celestial bodies, if the poet did not speak
so much from under a roof, or the saint dwell there
so long. Birds do not sing in caves, nor do doves
cherish their innocence in dovecots.
However, if one designs to construct a dwelling
house, it behooves him to exercise a little Yankee
shrewdness, lest after all he find himself in a work-
house, a labyrinth without a clew, a museum, an
almshouse, a prison, or a splendid mausoleum in-
stead. Consider first how slight a shelter is absolutely
necessary. I have seen Penobscot Indians, in this
 WALDEN 29

town, living in tents of thin cotton cloth, while the

snow was nearly a foot deep around them, and I
thought that they would be glad to have it deeper to
keep out the wind. Formerly, when how to get my liv-
ing honestly, with freedom left for my proper pur-
suits, was a question which vexed me even more
than it does now, for unfortunately I am become
somewhat callous, I used to see a large box by the
railroad, six feet long by three wide, in which the
laborers locked up their tools at night, and it sug-
gested to me that every man who was hard pushed
might get such a one for a dollar, and, having bored a
few auger holes in it, to admit the air at least, get
into it when it rained and at night, and hook down
the lid, and so have freedom in his love, and in his
soul be free. This did not appear the worst, nor by
any means a despicable alternative. You could sit up
as late as you pleased, and, whenever you got up, go
abroad without any landlord or house-lord dogging
you for rent. Many a man is harassed to death to pay
the rent of a larger and more luxurious box who
would not have frozen to death in such a box as this.
I am far from jesting. Economy is a subject which
admits of being treated with levity, but it cannot so
be disposed of. A comfortable house for a rude and
hardy race, that lived mostly out of doors, was once
made here almost entirely of such materials as Na-
ture furnished ready to their hands. Gookin, who was
superintendent of the Indians subject to the Massa-
chusetts Colony, writing in 1674, says, "The best of
their houses are covered very neatly, tight and warm,
with barks of trees, slipped from their bodies at those
seasons when the sap is up, and made into great
flakes, with pressure of weighty timber, when they
are green. . . . The meaner sort are covered with mats
which they make of a kind of bulrush, and are also
30 SHELTER

indifferently tight and warm, but not so good as the

former. . . . Some I have seen, sixty or a hundred
feet long and thirty feet broad. . . . I have often lodged
in their wigwams, and found them as warm as the
best English houses." He adds, that they were com-
monly carpeted and lined within with well-wrought
embroidered mats, and were furnished with various
utensils. The Indians had advanced so far as to regu-
late the effect of the wind by a mat suspended over
the hole in the roof and moved by a string. Such a
lodge was in the first instance constructed in a day
or two at most, and taken down and put up in a few
hours; and every family owned one, or its apartment
in one.
In the savage state every family owns a shelter as
good as the best, and sufficient for its coarser and
simpler wants; but I think that I speak within bounds
when I say that, though the birds of the air have their
nests, and the foxes their holes, and the savages their
wigwams, in modern civilized society not more than
one half the families own a shelter. In the large
towns and cities, where civilization especially pre-
vails, the number of those who own a shelter is a very
small fraction of the whole. The rest pay an annual
tax for this outside garment of all, become indis-
pensable summer and winter, which would buy a vil-
lage of Indian wigwams, but now helps to keep them
poor as long as they live. I do not mean to insist here
on the disadvantage of hiring compared with owning,
but it is evident that the savage owns his shelter be-
cause it costs so little, while the civilized man hires
his commonly because he cannot afford to own it;
nor can he, in the long run, any better afford to hire.
But, answers one, by merely paying this tax the poor
civilized man secures an abode which is a palace com-
pared with the savage's. An annual rent of from twen-
 WALDEN 31

ty-five to a hundred dollars, these are the country

rates, entitles him to the benefit of the improvements
of centuries, spacious apartments, clean paint and
paper, Rumford fireplace, back plastering, Venetian
blinds, copper pump, spring lock, a commodious cel-
lar, and many other things. But how happens it that
he who is said to enjoy these things is so commonly
a poor civilized man, while the savage, who has them
not, is rich as a savage? If it is asserted that civiliza-
tion is a real advance in the condition of man,—and I
think that it is, though only the wise improve their
advantages,—it must be shown that it has produced
better dwellings without making them more costly;
and the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will
call life which is required to be exchanged for it, im-
mediately or in the long run. An average house in
this neighborhood costs perhaps eight hundred dol-
lars, and to lay up this sum will take from ten to fif-
teen years of the laborer's life, even if he is not en-
cumbered with a family;—estimating the pecuniary
value of every man's labor at one dollar a day, for if
some receive more, others receive less;—so that he
must have spent more than half his life commonly
before his wigwam will be earned. If we suppose him
to pay 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?
It may be guessed that I reduce almost the whole
advantage of holding this superfluous property as a
fund in store against the future, so far as the indi-
vidual is concerned, mainly to the defraying of fu-
neral expenses. But perhaps a man is not required to
bury himself. Nevertheless this points to an important
distinction between the civilized man and the savage;
and, no doubt, they have designs on us for our bene-
fit, in making the life of a civilized people an institu-
32 SHELTER

tion, in which the life of the individual is to a great

extent absorbed, in order to preserve and perfect that
of the race. But I wish to show at what a sacrifice this
advantage is at present obtained, and to suggest that
we may possibly so live as to secure all the advantage
without suffering any of the disadvantage. What mean
ye by saying that the poor ye have always with you,
or that the fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the
children's teeth are set on edge?
"As I live, saith the Lord God, ye shall not have
occasion any more to use this proverb in Israel."
"Behold all souls are mine; as the soul of the father,
so also the soul of the son is mine: the soul that sin-
neth it shall die."
When I consider my neighbors, the farmers of Con-
cord, who are at least as well off as the other classes,
I find that for the most part they have been toiling
twenty, thirty, or forty years, that they may become
the real owners of their farms, which commonly they
have inherited with encumbrances, or else bought
with hired money,—and we may regard one third of
that toil as the cost of their houses,—but commonly
they have not paid for them yet. It is true, the en-
cumbrances sometimes outweigh the value of the
farm, so that the farm itself becomes one great en-
cumbrance, and still a man is found to inherit it, be-
ing well acquainted with it, as he says. On applying
to the assessors, I am surprised to leam that they
cannot at once name a dozen in the town who own
their farms free and clear. If you would know the
history of these homesteads, inquire at the bank
where they are mortgaged. The man who has actually
paid for his farm with labor on it is so rare that
every neighbor can point to him. I doubt if there are
three such men in Concord. What has been said of
the merchants, that a very large majority, even nine-
 WALDKN 33

ty-seven in a hundred, are sure to fail, is equally true

of the farmers. With regard to the merchants, how-
ever, one of them says pertinently that a great part of
their failures are not genuine pecuniary failures, but
merely failures to fulfil their engagements, because
it is inconvenient; that is, it is the moral character
that breaks down. But this puts an infinitely worse
face on the matter, and suggests, beside, that prob-
ably not even the other three succeed in saving their
souls, but are perchance bankrupt in a worse sense
than they who fail honestly. Bankruptcy and repudia-
tion are the spring-boards from which much of our
civilization vaults and turns its somersets, but the
savage stands on the unelastic plank of famine. Yet
the Middlesex Cattle Show goes off here with eclat
annually, as if all the joints of the agricultural ma-
chine were suent.
The farmer is endeavoring to solve the problem of
a livelihood by a formula more complicated than the
problem itself. To get his shoestrings he speculates in
herds of cattle. With consummate skill he has set his
trap with a hair spring to catch comfort and inde-
pendence, and then, as he turned away, got his own
leg into it. This is the reason he is poor; and for a
similar reason we are all poor in respect to a thou-
sand savage comforts, though surrounded by luxuries.
As Chapman sings,—
"The false society of men—
—for earthly greatness
AH heavenly comforts rarefies to air."

And when the farmer has got his house, he may

not be the richer but the poorer for it, and it be the
house that has got him. As I understand it, that was
a valid objection urged by Momus against the house
which Minerva made, that she "had not made it mov-
34 SHELTER

able, by which means a bad neighborhood might be

avoided;" and it may still be urged, for our houses
are such unwieldy property that we are often im-
prisoned rather than housed in them; and the bad
neighborhood to be avoided is our own scurvy selves.
I know one or two families, at least, in this town,
who, for nearly a generation, have been wishing to
sell their houses in the outskirts and move into the
village, but have not been able to accomplish it, and
only death will set them free.
Granted that the majority are able at last either to
own or hire the modern house with all its improve-
ments. While civilization has been improving our
houses, it has not equally improved the men who are
to inhabit them. It has created palaces, but it was not
so easy to create noblemen and kings. And if the
civilized man's pursuits are no worthier than the
savage's, if he is employed the greater part of his life
in obtaining gross necessaries and comforts merely,
why should he have a better dwelling than the former?
But how do the poor minority fare? Perhaps it will
be found, that just in proportion as some have been
placed in outward circumstances above the savage,
others have been degraded below him. The luxury of
one class is counterbalanced by the indigence of an-
other. On the one side is the palace, on the other are
the almshouse and "silent poor". The myriads who
built the pyramids to be the tombs of the Pharaohs
were fed on garlic, and it may be were not decently
buried themselves. The mason who finishes the cor-
nice of the palace returns at night perchance to a hut
not so good as a wigwam. It is a mistake to suppose
that, in a country where the usual evidences of civi-
lization exist, the condition of a very large body of
the inhabitants may not be as degraded as that of
savages. I refer to the degraded poor, not now to the
 WALDEN 35

degraded rich. To know this I should not need to look

farther than to the shanties which every where border
our railroads, that last improvement in civilization;
where I see in my daily walks human beings living
in sties, and all winter with an open door, for the
sake of light, without any visible, often imaginable,
wood pile, and the forms of both old and young are
permanently contracted by the long habit of shrink-
ing from cold and misery, and the development of
all their limbs and faculties is checked. It certainly
is fair to look at that class by whose labor the works
which distinguish this generation are accomplished.
Such too, to a greater or less extent, is the condition of
the operatives of every denomination in England,
which is the great workhouse of the world. Or I could
refer you to Ireland, which is marked as one of the
white or enlightened spots on the map. Contrast the
physical condition of the Irish with that of the North
American Indian, or the South Sea Islander, or any
other savage race before it was degraded by contact
with the civilized man. Yet I have no doubt that that
people's rulers are as wise as the average of civilized
rulers. Their condition only proves what squalidness
may consist with civilization. I hardly need refer now
to the laborers in our Southern States who produce
the staple exports of this country, and are themselves
a staple production of the South. But to confine my-
self to those who are said to be in moderate circum-
stances.
Most men appear never to have considered what a
house is, and are actually though needlessly poor all
their lives because they think that they must have
such a one as their neighbors have. As if one were to
wear any sort of coat which the tailor might cut out
for him, or, gradually leaving off palmleaf hat or cap
of woodchuck skin, complain of hard times because
36 SHELTER

he could not afford to buy him a crown I It is possible

to invent a house still more convenient and luxurious
than we have, which yet all would admit that man
could not afford to pay for. Shall we always study to
obtain more of these things, and not sometimes to be
content with less? Shall the respectable citizen thus
gravely teach, by precept and example, the necessity
of the young man's providing a certain number of
superfluous glow-shoes, and umbrellas, and empty
guest chambers for empty guests, before he dies? Why
should not our furniture be as simple as the Arab's or
the Indian's? When I think of the benefactors of the
race, whom we have apotheosized as messengers from
heaven, bearers of divine gifts to man, I do not see
in my mind any retinue at their heels, any car-load
of fashionable furniture. Or what if I were to allow—
would it not be a singular allowance?—that our fur-
niture should be more complex than the Arab's, in
proportion as we are morally and intellectually his
superiors! At present our houses are cluttered and
defiled with it, and a good housewife would sweep
out the greater part into the dust hole, and not leave
her morning's work undone. Morning work! By the
blushes of Aurora and the music of Memnon, what
should be man's morning work in this world? I had
three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terri-
fied to find that they required to be dusted daily,
when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still,
and I threw them out the window in disgust How,
then, could I have a furnished house? I would rather
sit in the open air, for no dust gathers on the grass,
unless where man has broken ground.
It is the luxurious and dissipated who set the fash-
ions which the herd so diligently follow. The traveller
who stops at the best houses, so called, soon dis-
covers this, for the publicans presume him to be a
 WALDEN 37

Sardanapalus, and if he resigned himself to their

tender mercies he would soon be completely emascu-
lated. I think that in the railroad car we are inclined
to spend more on luxury than on safety and conveni-
ence, and it threatens without attaining these to be-
come no better than a modern drawing room, with its
divans, and ottomans, and sunshades, and a hundred
other oriental things, which we are taking west with
us, invented for the ladies of the harem and the
effeminate natives of the Celestial Empire, which
Jonathan should be ashamed to know the names of.
I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to
myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion. I would
rather ride on earth in an ox cart with a free circula-
tion, than go to heaven in the fancy car of an excur-
sion train and breathe a malaria all the way.
The very simplicity and nakedness of man's life in
the primitive ages imply this advantage at least, that
they left him still but a sojourner in nature. When he
was refreshed with food and sleep he contemplated
his journey again. He dwelt, as it were, in a tent in
this world, and was either threading the valleys, or
crossing the plains, or climbing the mountain tops.
But lol men have become the tools of their tools. The
man who independently plucked the fruits when he
was hungry is become a farmer; and he who stood
under a tree for shelter, a housekeeper. We now no
longer camp as for a night, but have settled down on
earth and forgotten heaven. We have adopted Chris-
tianity merely as an improved method of agri-culture.
We have built for this world a family mansion, and
for the next a family tomb. The best works of art are
the expression of man's struggle to free himself from
this condition, but the effect of our art is merely to
make this low state comfortable and that higher state
to be forgotten. There is actually no place in this vil-
38 SHELTER

lage for a work of fine art, if any had come down to

us, to stand, for our lives, our houses and streets, fur-
nish no proper pedestal for it. There is not a nail to
hang a picture on, nor a shelf to receive the bust of a
hero or a saint. When I consider how our houses are
built and paid for, or not paid for, and their internal
economy managed and sustained, I wonder that the
floor does not give way under the visitor while he is
admiring the gewgaws upon the mantel-piece, and let
him through into the cellar, to some solid and honest
though earthy foundation. I cannot but perceive that
this so called rich and refined life is a thing jumped
at, and I do not get on in the enjoyment of the fine
arts which adorn it, my attention being wholly occu-
pied with the jump; for I remember that the greatest
genuine leap, due to human muscles alone, on record,
is that of certain wandering Arabs, who are said to
have cleared twenty-five feet on level ground. With-
out factitious support, man is sure to come to earth
again beyond that distance. The first question which
I am tempted to put to the proprietor of such great
impropriety is, Who bolsters you? Are you one of the
ninety-seven who fail? or of the three who succeed?
Answer me these questions, and then perhaps I may
look at your bawbles and find them ornamental. The
cart before the horse is neither beautiful nor useful.
Before we can adorn our houses with beautiful ob-
jects the walls must be stripped, and our lives must
be stripped, and beautiful housekeeping and beauti-
ful living be laid for a foundation: now, a taste for
the beautiful is most cultivated out of doors, where
there is no house and no housekeeper.
Old Johnson, in his "Wonder-Working Providence,"
speaking of the first settlers of this town, with whom
he was contemporary, tells us that "they burrow them-
selves in the earth for their first shelter under some
 WALDEN 39

hillside, and, casting the soil aloft upon timber, they

make a smoky fire against the earth, at the highest
side." They did not "provide them houses," says he,
"till the earth, by the Lord's blessing, brought forth
bread to feed them," and the first year's crop was so
light that "they were forced to cut their bread very
thin for a long season." The secretary of the Province
of New Netherland, writing in Dutch, in 1650, for
the information of those who wished to take up land
there, states more particularly, that "those in New
Netherland, and especially in New England, who
have no means to build farm houses at first according
to their wishes, dig a square pit in the ground, cellar
fashion, six or seven feet deep, as long and as broad
as they think proper, case the earth inside with wood
all round the wall, and line the wood with the bark of
trees or something else to prevent the caving in of the
earth; floor this cellar with plank, and wainscot it
overhead for a ceiling, raise a roof of spars clear up,
and cover the spars with bark or green sods, so that
they can live dry and warm in these houses with their
entire families for two, three, and four years, it being
understood that partitions are run through those cel-
lars which are adapted to the size of the family. The
wealthy and principal men in New England, in the
beginning of the colonies, commenced their first
dwelling houses in this fashion for two reasons;
firstly, in order not to waste time in building, and not
to want food the next season; secondly, in order not
to discourage poor laboring people whom they brought
over in numbers from Fatherland. In the course of
three or four years, when the country became adapted
to agriculture, they built themselves handsome
houses, spending on them several thousands."
In this course which our ancestors took there was
a show of prudence at least, as if their principle were
40 BUILDING THE H O U S E

to satisfy the more pressing wants first. But are the

more pressing wants satisfied now? When I think of
acquiring for myself one of our luxurious dwellings,
I am deterred, for, so to speak, the country is not yet
adapted to human culture, and we are still forced to
cut our spiritual bread far thinner than our fore-
fathers did their wheaten. Not that all architectural
ornament is to be neglected even in the rudest peri-
ods; but let our houses first be lined with beauty,
where they come in contact with our lives, like the
tenement of the shellfish, and not overlaid with it.
But, alas I I have been inside one or two of them,
and know what they are lined with.
Though we are not so degenerate but that we might
possibly live in a cave or a wigwam or wear skins to-
day, it certainly is better to accept the advantages,
though so dearly bought, which the invention and in-
dustry of mankind offer. In such a neighborhood as
this, boards and shingles, lime and bricks, are
cheaper and more easily obtained than suitable caves,
or whole logs, or bark in sufficient quantities, or even
well-tempered clay or flat stones. I speak understand-
ingly on this subject, for I have made myself ac-
quainted with it both theoretically and practically.
With a little more wit we might use these materials
so as to become richer than the richest now are, and
make our civilization a blessing. The civilized man is
a more experienced and wiser savage. But to make
haste to my own experiment.

Near the end of March, 1845, I borrowed an axe

and went down to the woods by Walden Pond, near-
est to where I intended to build my house, and began
to cut down some tall arrowy white pines, still in
their youth, for timber. It is difficult to begin without
 WALDEN 41

borrowing, but perhaps it is the most generous course

thus to permit your fellow-men to have an interest in
your enterprise. The owner of the axe, as he released
his hold on it, said that it was the apple of his eye;
but I returned it sharper than I received it. It was a
pleasant hillside where I worked, covered with pine
woods, through which I looked out on the pond, and
a small open field in the woods where pines and hick-
ories were springing up. The ice in the pond was not
yet dissolved, though there were some open spaces,
and it was all dark colored and saturated with water.
There were some slight flurries of snow during the
days that I worked there; but for the most part when
I came out on to the railroad, on my way home, its
yellow sand heap stretched away gleaming in the hazy
atmosphere, and the rails shone in the spring sun,
and I heard the lark and pewee and other birds al-
ready come to commence another year with us. They
were pleasant spring days, in which the winter of
man's discontent was thawing as well as the earth,
and the life that had lain torpid began to stretch it-
self. One day, when my axe had come off and I had
cut a green hickory for a wedge, driving it with a
stone, and had placed the whole to soak in a pond
hole in order to swell the wood, I saw a striped snake
run into the water, and he lay on the bottom, appar-
ently without inconvenience, as long as I staid there,
or more than a quarter of an hour; perhaps because
he had not yet fairly come out of the torpid state. It
appeared to me that for a like reason men remain in
their present low and primitive condition; but if they
should feel the influence of the spring of springs
arousing them, they would of necessity rise to a
higher and more ethereal life. I had previously seen
the snakes in frosty mornings in my path with por-
tions of their bodies still numb and inflexible, wait-
42 BUILDING THE H O U S E

ing for the sun to thaw them. On the ist of April it

rained and melted the ice, and in the early part of the
day, which was very foggy, I heard a stray goose
groping about over the pond and cackling as if lost,
or like the spirit of the fog.
So I went on for some days cutting and hewing
timber, and also studs and rafters, all with my narrow
axe, not having many communicable or scholar-like
thoughts, singing to myself,—
Men say they know many things;
But lo! they have taken wings,—
The arts and sciences,
And a thousand appliances;
The wind that blows
Is all that any body knows.
I hewed the main timbers six inches square, most of
the studs on two sides only, and the rafters and floor
timbers on one side, leaving the rest of the bark on,
so that they were just as straight and much stronger
than sawed ones. Each stick was carefully mortised
or tenoned by its stump, for I had borrowed other
tools by this time. My days in the woods were not
very long ones; yet I usually carried my dinner of
bread and butter, and read the newspaper in which
it was wrapped, at noon, sitting amid the green pine
boughs which I had cut off, and to my bread was im-
parted some of their fragrance, for my hands were
covered with a thick coat of pitch. Before I had done
I was more the friend than the foe of the pine tree,
though I had cut down some of them, having become
better acquainted with it. Sometimes a rambler in the
wood was attracted by the sound of my axe, and we
chatted pleasantly over the chips which I had made.
By the middle of April, for I made no haste in my
work, but rather made the most of it, my house was
framed and ready for the raising. I had already
 WALDEN 43

bought the shanty of James Collins, an Irishman who

worked on the Fitchburg Railroad, for boards. James
Collins' shanty was considered an uncommonly fine
one. When I called to see it he was not at home. I
walked about the outside, at first unobserved from
within, the window was so deep and high. It was of
small dimensions, with a peaked cottage roof, and not
much else to be seen, the dirt being raised five feet
all around as if it were a compost heap. The roof was
the soundest part, though a good deal warped and
made brittle by the sun. Door-sill there was none, but
a perennial passage for the hens under the door
board. Mrs. C. came to the door and asked me to view
it from the inside. The hens were driven in by my
approach. It was dark, and had a dirt floor for the
most part, dank, clammy, and aguish, only here a board
and there a board which would riot bear removal.
She lighted a lamp to show me the inside of the roof
and the walls, and also that the board floor extended
under the bed, warning me not to step into the cellar,
a sort of dust hole two feet deep. In her own words,
they were "good boards overhead, good boards all
around, and a good window,"—of two whole squares
originally, only the cat had passed out that way
lately. There was a stove, a bed, and a place to sit, an
infant in the house where it was born, a silk parasol,
gilt-framed looking-glass, and a patent new coffee
mill nailed to an oak sapling, all told. The bargain
was soon concluded, for James had in the mean while
returned. I to pay four dollars and twenty-five cents
to-night, he to vacate at five to-morrow morning, sell-
ing to nobody else meanwhile: I to take possession at
six. It were well, he said, to be there early, and an-
ticipate certain indistinct but wholly unjust claims
on the score of ground rent and fuel. This he assured
me was the only encumbrance. At six I passed him
44 B U I L D I N G THE H O U S E

and his family on the road. One large bundle held

their all,-bed, coffee-mill, looking-glass, hens,-all but
the cat, she took to the woods and became a wild cat,
and, as I learned afterward, trod in a trap set for
woodchucks, and so became a dead cat at last.
I took down this dwelling the same morning, draw-
ing the nails, and removed it to the pond side by small
cartloads, spreading the boards on the grass there to
bleach and warp back again in the sun. One early
thrush gave me a note or two as I drove along the
woodland path. I was informed treacherously by a
young Patrick that neighbor Seeley, an Irishman, in
the intervals of the carting, transferred the still tolera-
ble, straight, and drivable nails, staples, and spikes to
his pocket, and then stood when I came back to pass
the time of day, and look freshly up, unconcerned,
with spring thoughts, at the devastation; there being
a dearth of work, as he said. He was there to repre-
sent spectatordom, and help make this seemingly in-
significant event one with the removal of the gods of
Troy.
I dug my cellar in the side of a hill sloping to the
south, where a woodchuck had formerly dug his bur-
row, down through sumach and blackberry roots, and
the lowest stain of vegetation, six feet square by
seven deep, to a fine sand where potatoes would not
freeze in any winter. The sides were left shelving,
and not stoned; but the sun having never shone on
them, the sand still keeps its place. It was but two
hours' work. I took particular pleasure in this break-
ing of ground, for in almost all latitudes men dig
into the earth for an equable temperature. Under the
most splendid house in the city is still to be found the
cellar where they store their roots as of old, and long
after the superstructure has disappeared posterity
 WALDEN 45

remark its dent in the earth. The house is still but a

sort of porch at the entrance of a burrow.
At length, in the beginning of May, with the help
of some of my acquaintances, rather to improve so
good an occasion for neighborliness than from any
necessity, I set up the frame of my house. No man was
ever more honored in the character of his raisers than
I. They are destined, I trust, to assist at the raising of
loftier structures one day. I began to occupy my house
on the 4th of July, as soon as it was boarded and
roofed, for the boards were carefully feather-edged
and lapped, so that it was perfectly impervious to
rain; but before boarding I laid the foundation of a
chimney at one end, bringing two cartloads of stones
up the hill from the pond in my arms. I built the
chimney after my hoeing in the fall, before a fire
became necessary for warmth, doing my cooking in
the mean while out of doors on the ground, early in
the morning: which mode I still think is in some re-
spects more convenient and agreeable than the usual
one. When it stormed before my bread was baked, I
fixed a few boards over the fire, and sat under them
to watch my loaf, and passed some pleasant hours
in that way. In those days, when my hands were
much employed, I read but little, but the least scraps
of paper which lay on the ground, my holder, or
tablecloth, afforded me as much entertainment, in
fact answered the same purpose as the Iliad.

It would be worth the while to build still more de-

liberately than I did, considering, for instance, what
foundation a door, a window, a cellar, a garret, have
in the nature of man, and perchance never raising
any superstructure until we found a better reason for
46 ARCHITECTURE

it than our temporal necessities even. There is some

of the same fitness in a man's building his own house
that there is in a bird's building its own nest. Who
knows but if men constructed their dwellings with
their own hands, and provided food for themselves
and families simply and honestly enough, the poetic
faculty would be universally developed, as birds uni-
versally sing when they are so engaged? But alas! we
do like cowbirds and cuckoos, which lay their eggs in
nests which other birds have built, and cheer no
traveller with their chattering and unmusical notes.
Shall we forever resign the pleasure of construction
to the carpenter? What does architecture amount to
in the experience of the mass of men? I never in all
my walks came across a man engaged in so simple
and natural an occupation as building his house. We
belong to the community. It is not the tailor alone
who is the ninth part of a man; it is as much the
preacher, and the merchant, and the farmer. Where
is this division of labor to end? and what object does
it finally serve? No doubt another may also think for
me; but it is not therefore desirable that he should do
so to the exclusion of my thinking for myself.
True, there are architects so called in this country,
and I have heard of one at least possessed with the
idea of making architectural ornaments have a core
of truth, a necessity, and hence a beauty, as if it were
a revelation to him. All very well perhaps from his
point of view, but only a little better than the com-
mon dilettantism. A sentimental reformer in archi-
tecture, he began at the cornice, not at the founda-
tion. It was only how to put a core of truth within the
ornaments, that every sugar plum in fact might have
an almond or caraway seed in it,—though I hold that
almonds are most wholesome without the sugar,—and
not how the inhabitant, the indweller, might build
 WALDEN 47

truly within and without, and let the ornaments take

care of themselves. What reasonable man ever sup-
posed that ornaments were something outward and
in the skin merely,-that the tortoise got his spotted
shell, or the shellfish its mother-o'-pearl tints, by such
a contract as the inhabitants of Broadway their Trin-
ity Church? But a man has no more to do with the
style of architecture of his house than a tortoise with
that of its shell: nor need the soldier be so idle as to
try to paint the precise color of his virtue on his
standard. The enemy will find it out. He may turn
pale when the trial comes. This man seemed to me to
lean over the cornice and timidly whisper his half
truth to the rude occupants who really knew it better
than he. What of architectural beauty I now see, I
know has gradually grown from within outward, out
of the necessities and character of the indweller, who
is the only builder,—out of some unconscious truth-
fulness, and nobleness, without ever a thought for
the appearance; and whatever additional beauty of
this kind is destined to be produced will be preceded
by a like unconscious beauty of life. The most inter-
esting dwellings in this country, as the painter knows,
are the most unpretending, humble log huts and cot-
tages of the poor commonly; it is the life of the in-
habitants whose shells they are, and not any peculiar-
ity in their surfaces merely, which makes them pic-
turesque; and equally interesting will be the citizen's
suburban box, when his life shall be as simple and as
agreeable to the imagination, and there is as little
straining after effect in the style of his dwelling. A
great proportion of architectural ornaments are liter-
ally hollow, and a September gale would strip them
off, like borrowed plumes, without injury to the sub-
stantials. They can do without architecture who have
no olives nor wines in the cellar. What if an equal ado
48 ARCHITECTURE

were made about the ornaments of style in literature,

and the architects of our bibles spent as much time
about their cornices as the architects of our churches
do? So are made the belles-lettres and the beaux-arts
and their professors. Much it concerns a man, for-
sooth, how a few sticks are slanted over him or under
him, and what colors are daubed upon his box. It
would signify somewhat, if, in any earnest sense, he
slanted them and daubed it; but the spirit having de-
parted out of the tenant, it is of a piece with con-
structing his own coffin,-the architecture of the grave,
and "carpenter" is but another name for "coffin-
maker." One man says, in his despair or indifference
to life, take up a handful of the earth at your feet,
and paint your house that color. Is he thinking of his
last and narrow house? Toss up a copper for it as
well. What an abundance of leisure he must have!
Why do you take up a handful of dirt? Better paint
your house your own complexion; let it turn pale or
blush for you. An enterprise to improve the style of
cottage architecture! When you have got my orna-
ments ready I will wear them.
Before winter I built a chimney, and shingled the
sides of my house, which were already impervious
to rain, with imperfect and sappy shingles made of
the first slice of the log, whose edges I was obliged to
straighten with a plane.
I have thus a tight shingled and plastered house,
ten feet wide by fifteen long, and eight-feet posts,
with a garret and a closet, a large window on each
side, two trap doors, one door at the end, and a brick
fireplace opposite. The exact cost of my house, paying
the usual price for such materials as I used, but not
counting the work, all of which was done by myself,
was as follows; and I give the details because very
few are able to tell exactly what their houses cost,
 WALDEN 49
and fewer still, if any, the separate cost of the various
materials which compose them : —

Boards, $8 031/2, , mostly shanty

boards.
Refuse shingles for roof
and sides, 4 00
Laths, 1 25
Two second-hand windows
with glass, 2 43
One thousand old brick, 4 00
Two casks of lime, 2 40 That was high.
Hair, 0 31 More than I needed.
Mantle-tree iron, 0 15
Nails, 3 90
Hinges and screws, 0 14
Latch, 0 10
Chalk, 0 01
I carried a good part
Transportation, 1 40 on my back.

In all, $28 IZVz

These are all the materials excepting the timber

stones and sand, which I claimed by squatter's right.
I have also a small wood-shed adjoining, made chiefly
of the stuff which was left after building the house.
I intend to build me a house which will surpass
any on the main street in Concord in grandeur and
luxury, as soon as it pleases me as much and will cost
me no more than my present one.
I thus found that the student who wishes for a
shelter can obtain one for a lifetime at an expense not
greater than the rent which he now pays annually. If
I seem to boast more than is becoming, my excuse is
that I brag for humanity rather than for myself; and
my shortcomings and inconsistencies do not affect the
truth of my statement. Notwithstanding much cant
and hypocrisy,—chaff which I find it difficult to separ-
ate from my wheat, but for which I am as sorry as
any man,—I will breathe freely and stretch myself in
50 ECONOMY

this respect, it is such a relief to both the moral and

physical system; and I am resolved that I will not
through humility become the devil's attorney. I will
endeavor to speak a good word for the truth. At Cam-
bridge College the mere rent of a student's room,
which is only a little larger than my own, is thirty
dollars each year, though the corporation had the ad-
vantage of building thirty-two side by side and under
one roof, and the occupant suffers the inconvenience
of many and noisy neighbors, and perhaps a resi-
dence in the fourth story. I cannot but think that if
we had more true wisdom in these respects, not only
less education would be needed, because, forsooth,
more would already have been acquired, but the pe-
cuniary expense of getting an education would in a
great measure vanish. Those conveniences which the
student requires at Cambridge or elsewhere cost him
or somebody else ten times as great a sacrifice of life
as they would with proper management on both sides.
Those things for which the most money is demanded
are never the things which the student most wants.
Tuition, for instance, is an important item in the
term bill, while for the far more valuable education
which he gets by associating with the most cultivated
of his contemporaries no charge is made. The mode
of founding a college is, commonly, to get up a sub-
scription of dollars and cents, and then following
blindly the principles of a division of labor to its ex-
treme, a principle which should never be followed
but with circumspection,-to call in a contractor who
makes this a subject of speculation, and he employs
Irishmen or other operatives actually to lay the foun-
dations, while the students that are to be are said to be
fitting themselves for it; and for these oversights suc-
cessive generations have to pay. I think that it would
be better than this, for the students, or those who de-
 WALDEN 51

sire to be benefited by it, even to lay the foundation

themselves. The student who secures his coveted
leisure and retirement by systematically shirking any
labor necessary to man obtains but an ignoble and
unprofitable leisure, defrauding himself of the experi-
ence which alone can make leisure fruitful. "But,"
says one, "you do not mean that the students should
go to work with their hands instead of their heads?"
I do not mean that exactly, but I mean something
which he might think a good deal like that; I mean
that they should not play life, or study it merely,
while the community supports them at this expensive
game, but earnestly live it from beginning to end.
How could youths better learn to live than by at once
trying the experiment of living? Methinks this would
exercise their minds as much as mathematics. If I
wished a boy to know something about the arts and
sciences, for instance, I would not pursue the common
course, which is merely to send him into the neigh-
borhood of some professor, where any thing is pro-
fessed and practised but the art of life;—to survey
the world through a telescope or a microscope, and
never with his natural eye; to study chemistry, and
not learn how his bread is made, or mechanics, and
not learn how it is earned; to discover new satellites
to Neptune, and not detect the motes in his eyes, or
to what vagabond he is a satellite himself; or to be
devoured by the monsters that swarm all around him,
while contemplating the monsters in a drop of vine-
gar. Which would have advanced the most at the end
of a month,-the boy who had made his own jack-
knife from the ore which he had dug and smelted,
reading as much as would be necessary for this,—or
the boy who had attended the lectures on metallurgy
at the Institute in the mean while, and had received
a Rodgers' penknife from his father? Which would
52 ECONOMY

be most likely to cut his fingers?—To my astonish-

ment I was informed on leaving college that I had
studied navigation!—why, if I had taken one turn
down the harbor I should have known more about it.
Even the poor student studies and is taught only
political economy, while that economy of living which
is synonymous with philosophy is not even sincerely
professed in our colleges. The consequence is, that
while he is reading Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Say,
he runs his father in debt irretrievably.
As with our colleges, so with a hundred "modern
improvements"; there is an illusion about them; there
is not always a positive advance. The devil goes on
exacting compound interest to the last for his early
share and numerous succeeding investments in them.
Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which
distract our attention from serious things. They are
but improved means to an unimproved end, an end
which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as rail-
roads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great
haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine
to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have noth-
ing important to communicate. Either is in such a
predicament as the man who was earnest to be intro-
duced to a distinguished deaf woman, but when he
was presented, and one end of her ear trumpet was
put into his hand, had nothing to say. As if the main
object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly. We
are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the
old world some weeks nearer to the new; but per-
chance the first news that will leak through into the
broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess
Adelaide has the whooping cough. After all, the man
whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry
the most important messages; he is not an evangelist,
nor does he come round eating locusts and wild
 WALDEN 53

honey. I doubt if Flying Childers ever carried a peck

of corn to mill.
One says to me, "I wonder that you do not lay up
money; you love to travel; you might take the cars
and go to Fitchburg to-day and see the country." But
I am wiser than that. I have learned that the swiftest
traveller is he that goes afoot. I say to my friend,
Suppose we try who will get there first. The distance
is thirty miles; the fare ninety cents. That is almost
a day's wages. I remember when wages were sixty
cents a day for laborers on this very road. Well, I
start now on foot, and get there before night; I have
travelled at that rate by the week together. You will
in the mean while have earned your fare, and arrive
there some time to-morrow, or possibly this evening,
if you are lucky enough to get a job in season. In-
stead of going to Fitchburg, you will be working here
the greater part of the day. And so, if the railroad
reached round the world, I think that I should keep
ahead of you; and as for seeing the country and get-
ting experience of that kind, I should have to cut
your acquaintance altogether.
Such is the universal law, which no man can ever
outwit, and with regard to the railroad even we may
say it is as broad as it is long. To make a railroad
round the world available to all mankind is equiv-
alent to grading the whole surface of the planet. Men
have an indistinct notion that if they keep up this
activity of joint stocks and spades long enough all
will at length ride somewhere, in next to no time,
and for nothing; but though a crowd rushes to the
depot, and the conductor shouts "All aboard!" when
the smoke is blown away and the vapor condensed, it
will be perceived that a few are riding, but the rest
are run over,-and it will be called, and will be, "A
melancholy accident." No doubt they can ride at last
54 ECONOMY

who shall have earned their fare, that is, if they sur-
vive so long, but they will probably have lost their
elasticity and desire to travel by that time. This
spending of the best part of one's life earning money
in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the
least valuable part of it, reminds me of the English-
man who went to India to make a fortune first, in
order that he might return to England and live the
life of a poet. He should have gone up garret at once.
"What!" exclaim a million Irishmen starting up from
all the shanties in the land, "is not this railroad which
we have built a good thing?" Yes, I answer, compar-
atively good, that is, you might have done worse; but
I wish, as you are brothers of mine, that you could
have spent your time better than digging in this dirt.

Before I finished my house, wishing to earn ten or

twelve dollars by some honest and agreeable method,
in order to meet my unusual expenses, I planted about
two acres and a half of light and sandy soil near it
chiefly with beans, but also a small part with potatoes,
corn, peas, and turnips. The whole lot contains eleven
acres, mostly growing up to pines and hickories, and
was sold the preceding season for eight dollars and
eight cents an acre. One farmer said that it was "good
for nothing but to raise cheeping squirrels on." I put
no manure on this land, not being the owner, but
merely a squatter, and not expecting to cultivate so
much again, and I did not quite hoe it all once. I got
out several cords of stumps in ploughing, which sup-
plied me with fuel for a long time, and left small
circles of virgin mould, easily distinguishable through
the summer by the greater luxuriance of the beans
there. The dead and for the most part unmerchant-
able wood behind my house, and the driftwood from
 WALDEN 55
the pond, have supplied the remainder of my fuel. I
was obliged to hire a team and a man for the plough-
ing, though I held the plough myself. My farm out-
goes for the first season were, for implements, seed,
work, &c., $14 72Vz. The seed corn was given me.
This never costs any thing to speak of, unless you
plant more than enough. I got twelve bushels of
beans, and eighteen bushels of potatoes, beside some
peas and sweet corn. The yellow corn and turnips
were too late to come to any thing. My whole income
from the farm was
$23 44.
Deducting the outgoes, 14 72V2
there are left, $ 8 7P/2,

beside produce consumed and on hand at the time

this estimate was made of the value of $4 50,—the
amount on hand much more than balancing a little
grass which I did not raise. All things considered,
that is, considering the importance of a man's soul
and of to-day, notwithstanding the short time occu-
pied by my experiment, nay, partly even because of
its transient character, I believe that that was doing
better than any farmer in Concord did that year.
The next year I did better still, for I spaded up all
the land which I required, about a third of an acre,
and I learned from the experience of both years, not
being in the least awed by many celebrated works on
husbandry, Arthur Young among the rest, that if one
would live simply and eat only the crop which he
raised, and raise no more than he ate, and not ex-
change it for an insufficient quantity of more luxuri-
ous and expensive things, he would need to cultivate
only a few rods of ground, and that it would be
cheaper to spade up that than to use oxen to plough
it, and to select a fresh spot from time to time than
56 ECONOMY

to manure the old, and he could do all his necessary

farm work as it were with his left hand at odd hours
in the summer; and thus he would not be tied to an
ox, or horse, or cow, or pig, as at present. I desire
to speak impartially on this point, and as one not
interested in the success or failure of the present
economical and social arrangements. I was more in-
dependent than any farmer in Concord, for I was not
anchored to a house or farm, but could follow the
bent of my genius, which is a very crooked one, every
moment. Beside being better off than they already,
if my house had been burned or my crops had failed,
I should have been nearly as well off as before.
I am wont to think that men are not so much the
keepers of herds as herds are the keepers of men, the
former are so much the freer. Men and oxen ex-
change work; but if we consider necessary work only,
the oxen will be seen to have greatly the advantage,
their farm is so much the larger. Man does some of
his part of the exchange work in his six weeks of hay-
ing, and it is no boy's play. Certainly no nation that
lived simply in all respects, that is, no nation of phi-
losophers, would commit so great a blunder as to use
the labor of animals. True, there never was and is
not likely soon to be a nation of philosophers, nor am
I certain it is desirable that there should be. How-
ever, I should never have broken a horse or bull and
taken him to board for any work he might do for me,
for fear I should become a horse-man or a herds-man
merely; and if society seems to be the gainer by so
doing, are we certain that what is one man's gain is
not another's loss, and that the stable-boy has equal
cause with his master to be satisfied? Granted that
some public works would not have been constructed
without this aid, and let man share the glory of such
with the ox and horse; does it follow that he could
 WALDEN 57

not have accomplished works yet more worthy of him-

self in that case? When men begin to do, not merely
unnecessary or artistic, but luxurious and idle work,
with their assistance, it is inevitable that a few do all
the exchange work with the oxen, or, in other words,
become the slaves of the strongest. Man thus not only
works for the animal within him, but, for a symbol
of this, he works for the animal without him. Though
we have many substantial houses of brick or stone,
the prosperity of the farmer is still measured by the
degree to which the barn overshadows the house. This
town is said to have the largest houses for oxen cows
and horses hereabouts, and it is not behindhand in
its public buildings; but there are very few halls for
free worship or free speech in this county. It should
not be by their architecture, but why not even by their
power of abstract thought, that nations should seek
to commemorate themselves? How much more ad-
mirable the Bhagvat-Geeta than all the ruins of the
East! Towers and temples are the luxury of princes.
A simple and independent mind does not toil at the
bidding of any prince. Genius is not a retainer to
any emperor, nor is its material silver, or gold, or
marble, except to a trifling extent. To what end, pray,
is so much stone hammered? In Arcadia, when I was
there, I did not see any hammering stone. Nations
are possessed with an insane ambition to perpetuate
the memory of themselves by the amount of ham-
mered stone they leave. What if equal pains were
taken to smooth and polish their manners? One piece
of good sense would be more memorable than a mon-
ument as high as the moon. I love better to see stones
in place. The grandeur of Thebes was a vulgar gran-
deur. More sensible is a rod of stone wall that bounds
an honest man's field than a hundred-gated Thebes
that has wandered farther from the true end of life.
58 ARCHITECTURE

The religion and civilization which are barbaric and

heathenish build splendid temples; but what you
might call Christianity does not. Most of the stone a
nation hammers goes toward its tomb only. It buries
itself alive. As for the Pyramids, there is nothing to
wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many
men could be found degraded enough to spend their
lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby,
whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have
drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the
dogs. I might possibly invent some excuse for them
and him, but I have no time for it. As for the religion
and love of art of the builders, it is much the same
all the world over, whether the building be an Egyp-
tian temple or the United States Bank. It costs more
than it comes to. The mainspring is vanity, assisted
by the love of garlic and bread and butter. Mr. Bal-
com, a promising young architect, designs it on the
back of his Vitruvius, with hard pencil and ruler,
and the job is let out to Dobson & Sons, stonecutters.
When the thirty centuries begin to look down on it,
mankind begin to look up at it. As for your high tow-
ers and monuments, there was a crazy fellow once
in this town who undertook to dig through to China,
and he got so far that, as he said, he heard the
Chinese pots and kettles rattle; but I think that I
shall not go out of my way to admire the hole which
he made. Many are concerned about the monuments
of the West and the East,-to know who built them.
For my part, I should like to know who in those days
did not build them,—who were above such trifling.
But to proceed with my statistics.
By surveying, carpentry, and day-labor of various
other kinds in the village in the mean while, for I
have as many trades as fingers, I had earned $13 34.
 WALDEN 59

The expense of food for eight months, namely, from

July 4th to March ist, the time when these estimates
were made, though I lived there more than two
years,—not counting potatoes, a little green corn, and
some peas, which I had raised, nor considering the
value of what was on hand at the last date, was

Rice, $1 73V2
Molasses, 1 73 Cheapest form of the saccharine.
Rye meal, 1 043/4
Indian meal, 0 993/4 Cheaper than rye.
Pork, 0 22
Costs more than Indian meal,
Flour, 0 88 both money and trouble.
Sugar, 0 80
Lard, 0 65
Apples, 0 25
Dried apple, 0 22
Sweet potatoes, 0 10
One pumpkin, 0 6
One watermelon, 0 2
Salt, 0 3

Yes, I did eat $8 74, all told; but I should not thus
unblushingly publish my guilt, if I did not know that
most of my readers were equally guilty with myself,
and that their deeds would look no better in print.
The next year I sometimes caught a mess of fish for
my dinner, and once I went so far as to slaughter a
woodchuck which ravaged my bean-field,—effect his
transmigration, as a Tartar would say,—and devour
him, partly for experiment's sake; but though it af-
forded me a momentary enjoyment, notwithstanding
a musky flavor, I saw that the longest use would not
make that a good practice, however it might seem to
have your woodchucks ready dressed by the village
butcher.
Clothing and some incidental expenses within the
60 ECONOMY

same dates, though little can be inferred from this

item, amounted to
$8 403/4
Oil and some household utensils, 2 00

So that all the pecuniary outgoes, excepting for wash-

ing and mending, which for the most part were done
out of the house, and their bills have not yet been
received,—and these are all and more than all the
ways by which money necessarily goes out in this
part of the world,—were
House, $28 12'/2
Farm one year, 14 72V2
Food eight months, 8 74
Clothing, Sec., eight months, 8 403/4
Oil, &c., eight months, 2 00

In all, $61 993/4

I address myself now to those of my readers who

have a living to get. And to meet this I have for farm
produce sold
$23 44
Earned by day-lahor, 13 34

In all, $36 78,

which subtracted from the sum of the outgoes leaves

a balance of $25 21% on the one side,—this being
very nearly the means with which I started, and the
measure of expenses to be incurred,—and on the
other, beside the leisure and independence and health
thus secured, a comfortable house for me as long as
I choose to occupy it.
These statistics, however accidental and therefore
uninstructive they may appear, as they have a certain
completeness, have a certain value also. Nothing was
given me of which I have not rendered some account.
It appears from the above estimate, that my food
 WALDEN 61

alone cost me in money about twenty-seven cents a

week. It was, for nearly two years after this, rye and
Indian meal without yeast, potatoes, rice, a very little
salt pork, molasses, and salt, and my drink water. It
was fit that I should live on rice, mainly, who loved
so well the philosophy of India. To meet the objec-
tions of some inveterate cavillers, I may as well state,
that if I dined out occasionally, as I always had done,
and I trust shall have opportunities to do again, it
was frequently to the detriment of my domestic ar-
rangements. But the dining out, being, as I have
stated, a constant element, does not in the least affect
a comparative statement like this.
I learned from my two years' experience that it
would cost incredibly little trouble to obtain one's
necessary food, even in this latitude; that a man may
use as simple a diet as the animals, and yet retain
health and strength. I have made a satisfactory din-
ner, satisfactory on several accounts, simply off a.
dish of purslane (Portulaca oleracea) which I gath-
ered in my cornfield, boiled and salted. I give the
Latin on account of the savoriness of the trivial name.
And pray what more can a reasonable man desire, in
peaceful times, in ordinary noons, than a sufficient
number of ears of green sweet-corn boiled, with the
addition of salt? Even the little variety which I used
was a yielding to the demands of appetite, and not
of health. Yet men have come to such a pass that they
frequently starve, not for want of necessaries, but for
want of luxuries; and I know a good woman who
thinks that her son lost his life because he took to
drinking water only.
The reader will perceive that I am treating the sub-
ject rather from an economic than a dietetic point of
view, and he will not venture to put my abstemious-
ness to the test unless he has a well-stocked larder.
62 BREAD

Bread I at first made of pure Indian meal and salt,

genuine hoe-cakes, which I baked before my fire out
of doors on a shingle or the end of a stick of timber
sawed off in building my house; but it was wont to
get smoked and to have a piny flavor. I tried flour
also; but have at last found a mixture of rye and
Indian meal most convenient and agreeable. In cold
weather it was no little amusement to bake several
small loaves of this in succession, tending and turn-
ing them as carefully as an Egyptian his hatching
eggs. They were a real cereal fruit which I ripened,
and they had to my senses a fragrance like that of
other noble fruits, which I kept in as long as possible
by wrapping them in cloths. I made a study of the
ancient and indispensable art of bread-making, con-
sulting such authorities as offered, going back to the
primitive days and first invention of the unleavened
kind, when from the wildness of nuts and meats men
first reached the mildness and refinement of this diet,
and travelling gradually down in my studies through
that accidental souring of the dough which, it is
supposed, taught the leavening process, and through
the various fermentations thereafter, till I came to
"good, sweet, wholesome bread," the staff of life.
Leaven, which some deem the soul of bread, the
spiritus which fills its cellular tissue, which is reli-
giously preserved like the vestal fire,—some precious
bottle-full, I suppose, first brought over in the May-
flower, did the business for America, and its influ-
ence is still rising, swelling, spreading, in cerealian
billows over the land,—this seed I regularly and faith-
fully procured from the village, till at length one
morning I forgot the rules, and scalded my yeast; by
which accident I discovered that even this was not
indispensable,—for my discoveries were not by the
synthetic but analytic process,-and I have gladly
 WALDEN 63

omitted it since, though most housewives earnestly

assured me that safe and wholesome bread without
yeast might not be, and elderly people prophesied a
speedy decay of the vital forces. Yet I find it not to be
an essential ingredient, and after going without it for
a year am still in the land of the living; and I am
glad to escape the trivialness of carrying a bottle-full
in my pocket, which would sometimes pop and dis-
charge its contents to my discomfiture. It is simpler
and more respectable to omit it. Man is an animal
who more than any other can adapt himself to all
climates and circumstances. Neither did I put any sal
soda, or other acid or alkali, into my bread. It would
seem that I made it according to the recipe which
Marcus Porcius Cato gave about two centuries before
Christ. "Panem depsticium sic facito. Manus morta-
riumque bene lavato. Farinam in mortarium indito,
aquae paulatim addito, subigitoque pulchre. Ubi bene
subegeris, defingito, coquitoque sub testu." Which I
take to mean—"Make kneaded bread thus. Wash your
hands and trough well. Put the meal into the trough,
add water gradually, and knead it thoroughly. When
you have kneaded it well, mould it, and bake it under
a cover," that is, in a baking-kettle. Not a word about
leaven. But I did not always use this staff of life. At
one time, owing to the emptiness of my purse, I saw
none of it for more than a month.
Every New Englander might easily raise all his
own breadstuffs in this land of rye and Indian corn,
and not depend on distant and fluctuating markets
for them. Yet so far are we from simplicity and inde-
pendence that, in Concord, fresh and sweet meal is
rarely sold in the shops, and hominy and corn in a
still coarser form are hardly used by any. For the
most part the farmer gives to his cattle and hogs the
grain of his own producing, and buys flour, which is
64 BREAD

at least no more wholesome, at a greater cost, at the

store. I saw that I could easily raise my bushel or
two of rye and Indian corn, for the former will grow
on the poorest land, and the latter does not require
the best, and grind them in a hand-mill, and so do
without rice and pork; and if I must have some con-
centrated sweet, I found by experiment that I could
make a very good molasses either of pumpkins or
beets, and I knew that I needed only to set out a few
maples to obtain it more easily still, and while these
were growing I could use various substitutes beside
those which I have named, "For," as the Forefathers
sang,-
"we can make liquor to sweeten our lips
Of pumpkins and parsnips and walnut-tree chips."
Finally, as for salt, that grossest of groceries, to ob-
tain this might be a fit occasion for a visit to the sea-
shore, or, if I did without it altogether, I should
probably drink the less water. I do not learn that the
Indians ever troubled themselves to go after it.
Thus I could avoid all trade and barter, so far as my
food was concerned, and having a shelter already,
it would only remain to get clothing and fuel. The
pantaloons which I now wear were woven in a farm-
er's family,—thank Heaven there is so much virtue
still in man; for I think the fall from the farmer to
the operative as great and memorable as that from
the man to the farmer;—and in a new country fuel is
an encumbrance. As for a habitat, if I were not per-
mitted still to squat, I might purchase one acre at the
same price for which the land I cultivated was sold—
namely, eight dollars and eight cents. But as it was,
I considered that I enhanced the value of the land by
squatting on it.
There is a certain class of unbelievers who some-
times ask me such questions as, if I think that I can
 WALDEN 65

live on vegetable food alone; and to strike at the root

of the matter at once,—for the root is faith,—I am ac-
customed to answer such, that I can live on board
nails. If they cannot understand that, they cannot
understand much that I have to say. For my part, I
am glad to hear of experiments of this kind being
tried; as that a young man tried for a fortnight to
live on hard, raw corn on the ear, using his teeth for
all mortar. The squirrel tribe tried the same and suc-
ceeded. The human race is interested in these experi-
ments, though a few old women who are incapaci-
tated for them, or who own their thirds in mills, may
be alarmed.

My furniture, part of which I made myself, and

the rest cost me nothing of which I have not rendered
an account, consisted of a bed, a table, a desk, three
chairs, a looking-glass three inches in diameter, a
pair of tongs and andirons, a kettle, a skillet, and a
frying-pan, a dipper, a wash-bowl, two knives and
forks, three plates, one cup, one spoon, a jug for oil, a
jug for molasses, and a japanned lamp. None is so poor
that he need sit on a pumpkin. That is shiftlessness.
There is a plenty of such chairs as I like best in the
village garrets to be had for taking them away. Furni-
ture! Thank God, I can sit and I can stand without
the aid of a furniture warehouse. What man but a
philosopher would not be ashamed to see his furni-
ture packed in a cart and going up country exposed
to the light of heaven and the eyes of men, a beg-
garly account of empty boxes? That is Spaulding's
furniture. I could never tell from inspecting such a
load whether it belonged to a so called rich man or a
poor one; the owner always seemed poverty-stricken.
Indeed, the more you have of such things the poorer
66 FURNITURE

you are. Each load looks as if it contained the con-

tents of a dozen shanties; and if one shanty is poor,
this is a dozen times as poor. Pray, for what do we
move ever but to get rid of our furniture, our exuviae; at
last to go from this world to another newly furnished,
and leave this to be burned? It is the same as if all
these traps were buckled to a man's belt, and he
could not move over the rough country where our
lines are cast without dragging them,-dragging his
trap. He was a lucky fox that left his tail in the trap.
The muskrat will gnaw his third leg off to be free.
No wonder man has lost his elasticity. How often he
is at a dead set! "Sir, if I may be so bold, what do you
mean by a dead set?" If you are a seer, whenever
you meet a man you will see all that he owns, ay,
and much that he pretends to disown, behind him,
even to his kitchen furniture and all the trumpery
which he saves and will not burn, and he will appear
to be harnessed to it and making what headway he
can. I think that the man is at a dead set who has
got through a knot hole or gateway where his sledge
load of furniture cannot follow him. I cannot but feel
compassion when I hear some trig, compact-looking
man, seemingly free, all girded and ready, speak of
his "furniture," as whether it is insured or not. "But
what shall I do with my furniture?" My gay butterfly
is entangled in a spider's web then. Even those who
seem for a long while not to have any, if you inquire
more narrowly you will find have some stored in
somebody's barn. I look upon England to-day as an
old gentleman who is travelling with a great deal of
baggage, trumpery which has accumulated from long
housekeeping, which he has not the courage to burn;
great trunk, little trunk, bandbox and bundle. Throw
away the first three at least. It would surpass the
powers of a well man nowadays to take up his bed
 WALDEN 67

and walk, and I should certainly advise a sick one to

lay down his bed and run. When I have met an im-
migrant tottering under a bundle which contained his
all,—looking like an enormous wen which had grown
out of the nape of his neck,—I have pitied him, not
because that was his all, but because he had all that
to carry. If I have got to drag my trap, I will take
care that it be a light one and do not nip me in a
vital part. But perchance it would be wisest never to
put one's paw into it.
I would observe, by the way, that it costs me noth-
ing for curtains, for I have no gazers to shut out but
the sun and moon, and I am willing that they should
look in. The moon will not sour milk nor taint meat
of mine, nor will the sun injure my furniture or fade
my carpet, and if he is sometimes too warm a friend,
I find it still better economy to retreat behind some
curtain which nature has provided, than to add a
single item to the details of housekeeping. A lady
once offered me a mat, but as I had no room to spare
within the house, nor time to spare within or without
to shake it, I declined it, preferring to wipe my feet
on the sod before my door. It is best to avoid the
beginnings of evil.
Not long since I was present at the auction of a
deacon's effects, for his life had not been ineffectual: —
"The evil that men do lives after them."
As usual, a great proportion was trumpery which had
begun to accumulate in his father's day. Among the
rest was a dried tapeworm. And now, after lying half
a century in his garret and other dust holes, these
things were not burned; instead of a bonfire, or puri-
fying destruction of them, there was an auction, or
increasing of them. The neighbors eagerly collected
to view them, bought them all, and carefully trans-
68 FURNITURE

ported them to their garrets and dust holes, to lie

there till their estates are settled, when they will start
again. When a man dies he kicks the dust.
The customs of some savage nations might, per-
chance, be profitably imitated by us, for they at least
go through the semblance of casting their slough an-
nually; they have the idea of the thing, whether they
have the reality or not. Would it not be well if we
were to celebrate such a "busk," or "feast of first
fruits," as Bartram describes to have been the custom
of the Mucclasse Indians? "When a town celebrates
the busk," says he, "having previously provided them-
selves with new clothes, new pots, pans, and other
household utensils and furniture, they collect all their
worn out clothes and other despicable things, sweep
and cleanse their houses, squares, and the whole
town, of their filth, which with all the remaining
grain and other old provisions they cast together into
one common heap, and consume it with fire. After
having taken medicine, and fasted for three days, all
the fire in the town is extinguished. During this fast
they abstain from the gratification of every appetite
and passion whatever. A general amnesty is pro-
claimed; all malefactors may return to their town.-"
"On the fourth morning, the high priest, by rub-
bing dry wood together, produces new fire in the pub-
lic square, from whence every habitation in the town
is supplied with the new and pure flame."
They then feast on the new corn and fruits and
dance and sing for three days, "and the four follow-
ing days they receive visits and rejoice with their
friends from neighboring towns who have in like
manner purified and prepared themselves."
The Mexicans also practised a similar purification
at the end of every fifty-two years, in the belief that
it was time for the world to come to an end.
 WALDEN 69

I have scarcely heard of a truer sacrament, that is,

as the dictionary defines it, "outward and visible sign
of an inward and spiritual grace," than this, and I
have no doubt that they were originally inspired di-
rectly from Heaven to do thus, though they have no
biblical record of the revelation.

For more than five years I maintained myself thus

solely by the labor of my hands, and I found, that by
working about six weeks in a year, I could meet all
the expenses of living. The whole of my winters, as
well as most of my summers, I had free and clear for
study. I have thoroughly tried school-keeping, and
found that my expenses were in proportion, or rather
out of proportion, to my income, for I was obliged to
dress and train, not to say think and believe, accord-
ingly, and I lost my time into the bargain. As I did
not teach for the good of my fellow-men, but simply
for a livelihood, this was a failure. I have tried trade;
but I found that it would take ten years to get under
way in that, and that then I should probably be on
my way to the devil. I was actually afraid that I
might by that time be doing what is called a good
business. When formerly I was looking about to see
what I could do for a living, some sad experience in
conforming to the wishes of friends being fresh in
my mind to tax my ingenuity, I thought often and
seriously of picking huckleberries; that surely I could
do, and its small profits might suffice,-for my great-
est skill has been to want but little,-so little capital
it required, so little distraction from my wonted
moods, I foolishly thought. While my acquaintances
went unhesitatingly into trade or the professions, I
contemplated this occupation as most like theirs;
ranging the hills all summer to pick the berries which
70 ECONOMY

came in my way, and thereafter carelessly dispose of

them; so, to keep the flocks of Admetus. I also
dreamed that I might gather the wild herbs, or carry
evergreens to such villagers as loved to be reminded
of the woods, even to the city, by hay-cart loads. But
I have since learned that trade curses every thing it
handles; and though you trade in messages from
heaven, the whole curse of trade attaches to the
business.
As I preferred some things to others, and especially
valued my freedom, as I could fare hard and yet suc-
ceed well, I did not wish to spend my time in earning
rich carpets or other fine furniture, or delicate cook-
ery, or a house in the Grecian or the Gothic style just
yet. If there are any to whom it is no interruption to
acquire these things, and who know how to use them
when acquired, I relinquish to them the pursuit.
Some are "industrious," and appear to love labor for
its own sake, or perhaps because it keeps them out
of worse mischief; to such I have at present nothing
to say. Those who would not know what to do with
more leisure than they now enjoy, I might advise to
work twice as hard as they do,—work till they pay for
themselves, and get their free papers. For myself I
found that the occupation of a day-laborer was the
most independent of any, especially as it required
only thirty or forty days in a year to support one.
The laborer's day ends with the going down of the
sun, and he is then free to devote himself to his
chosen pursuit, independent of his labor; but his em-
ployer, who speculates from month to month, has no
respite from one end of the year to the other.
In short, I am convinced, both by faith and experi-
ence, that to maintain one's self on this earth is not
a hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and
wisely; as the pursuits of the simpler nations are still
 WALDEN 71

the sports of the more artificial. It is not necessary

that a man should earn his living by the sweat of his
brow, unless he sweats easier than I do.
One young man of my acquaintance, who has in-
herited some acres, told me that he thought he should
live as I did, if he had the means. I would not have
any one adopt my mode of living on any account; for,
beside that before he has fairly learned it I may have
found out another for myself, I desire that there may
be as many different persons in the world as possible;
but I would have each one be very careful to find out
and pursue his own way, and not his father's or his
mother's or his neighbor's instead. The youth may
build or plant or sail, only let him not be hindered
from doing that which he tells me he would like to
do. It is by a mathematical point only that we are
wise, as the sailor or the fugitive slave keeps the
polestar in his eye; but that is sufficient guidance for
all our life. We may not arrive at our port within a
calculable period, but we would preserve the true
course.
Undoubtedly, in this case, what is true for one is
truer still for a thousand, as a large house is not more
expensive than a small one in proportion to its size,
since one roof may cover, one cellar underlie, and one
wall separate several apartments. But for my part, I
preferred the solitary dwelling. Moreover, it will com-
monly be cheaper to build the whole yourself than to
convince another of the advantage of the common
wall; and when you have done this, the common par-
tition, to be much cheaper, must be a thin one, and
that other may prove a bad neighbor, and also not
keep his side in repair. The only cooperation which
is commonly possible is exceedingly partial and su-
perficial; and what little true cooperation there is, is
as if it were not, being a harmony inaudible to men.
72 PHILANTHROPY

If a man has faith he will cooperate with equal faith

every where; if he has not faith, he will continue to
live like the rest of the world, whatever company he
is joined to. To cooperate, in the highest as well as
the lowest sense, means to get our living together. I
heard it proposed lately that two young men should
travel together over the world, the one without money,
earning his means as he went, before the mast and
behind the plough, the other carrying a bill of ex-
change in his pocket. It was easy to see that they
could not long be companions or cooperate, since one
would not operate at all. They would part at the first
interesting crisis in their adventures. Above all, as I
have implied, the man who goes alone can start to-
day; but he who travels with another must wait till
that other is ready, and it may be a long time before
they get off.

But all this is very selfish, I have heard some of my

townsmen say. I confess that I have hitherto indulged
very little in philanthropic enterprises. I have made
some sacrifices to a sense of duty, and among others
have sacrificed this pleasure also. There are those who
have used all their arts to persuade me to undertake
the support of some poor family in the town; and if I
had nothing to do,-for the devil finds employment for
the idle,—I might try my hand at some such pastime
as that. However, when I have thought to indulge my-
self in this respect, and lay their Heaven under an
obligation by maintaining certain poor persons in all
respects as comfortably as I maintain myself, and
have even ventured so far as to make them the offer,
they have one and all unhesitatingly preferred to re-
main poor. While my townsmen and women are de-
voted in so many ways to the good of their fellows,
 WALDEN 73

I trust that one at least may be spared to other and

less humane pursuits. You must have a genius for
charity as well as for any thing else. As for Doing-
good, that is one of the professions which are full.
Moreover, I have tried it fairly, and, strange as it may
seem, am satisfied that it does not agree with my
constitution. Probably I should not consciously and
deliberately forsake my particular calling to do the
good which society demands of me, to save the uni-
verse from annihilation; and I believe that a like but
infinitely greater steadfastness elsewhere is all that
now preserves it. But I would not stand between any
man and his genius; and to him who does this work,
which I decline, with his whole heart and soul and
life, I would say, Persevere, even if the world call it
doing evil, as it is most likely they will.
I am far from supposing that my case is a peculiar
one; no doubt many of my readers would make a sim-
ilar defence. At doing something,—I will not engage
that my neighbors shall pronounce it good,—I do not
hesitate to say that I should be a capital fellow to
hire; but what that is, it is for my employer to find
out. What good I do, in the common sense of that
word, must be aside from my main path, and for the
most part wholly unintended. Men say, practically,
Begin where you are and such as you are, without
aiming mainly to become of more worth, and with
kindness aforethought go about doing good. If I were
to preach at all in this strain, I should say rather, Set
about being good. As if the sun should stop when he
had kindled his fires up to the splendor of a moon or
a star of the sixth magnitude, and go about like a
Robin Goodfellow, peeping in at every cottage win-
dow, inspiring lunatics, and tainting meats, and
making darkness visible, instead of steadily increas-
ing his genial heat and beneficence till he is of such
74 PHILANTHROPY

brightness that no mortal can look him in the face,

and then, and in the mean while too, going about the
world in his own orbit, doing it good, or rather, as a
truer philosophy has discovered, the world going
about him getting good. When Phaeton, wishing to
prove his heavenly birth by his beneficence, had the
sun's chariot but one day, and drove out of the beaten
track, he burned several blocks of houses in the lower
streets of heaven, and scorched the surface of the
earth, and dried up every spring, and made the great
desert of Sahara, till at length Jupiter hurled him
headlong to the earth with a thunderbolt, and the
sun, through grief at his death, did not shine for
a year.
There is no odor so bad as that which arises from
goodness tainted. It is human, it is divine, carrion. If
I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my
house with the conscious design of doing me good, I
should run for my life, as from that dry and parching
wind of the African deserts called the simoom, which
fills the mouth and nose and ears and eyes with dust
till you are suffocated, for fear that I should get some
of his good done to me,—some of its virus mingled
with my blood. No,—in this case I would rather suffer
evil the natural way. A man is not a good man to me
because he will feed me if I should be starving, or
warm me if I should be freezing, or pull me out of a
ditch if I should ever fall into one. I can find you a
Newfoundland dog that will do as much. Philan-
thropy is not love for one's fellow-man in the broadest
sense. Howard was no doubt an exceedingly kind and
worthy man in his way, and has his reward; but,
comparatively speaking, what are a hundred Howards
to us, if their philanthropy do not help us in our best
estate, when we are most worthy to be helped? I
never heard of a philanthropic meeting in which it
 WALDEN 75

was sincerely proposed to do any good to me, or the

like of me.
The Jesuits were quite balked by those Indians
who, being burned at the stake, suggested new modes
of torture to their tormentors. Being superior to physi-
cal suffering, it sometimes chanced that they were
superior to any consolation which the missionaries
could offer; and the law to do as you would be done
by fell with less persuasiveness on the ears of those,
who, for their part, did not care how they were done
by, who loved their enemies after a new fashion, and
came very near freely forgiving them all they did.
Be sure that you give the poor the aid they most
need, though it be your example which leaves them
far behind. If you give money, spend yourself with it,
and do not merely abandon it to them. We make
curious mistakes sometimes. Often the poor man is
not so cold and hungry as he is dirty and ragged and
gross. It is partly his taste, and not merely his mis-
fortune. If you give him money, he will perhaps buy
more rags with it. I was wont to pity the clumsy Irish
laborers who cut ice on the pond, in such mean and
ragged clothes, while I shivered in my more tidy and
somewhat more fashionable garments, till, one bitter
cold day, one who had slipped into the water came to
my house to warm him, and I saw him strip off three
pairs of pants and two pairs of stockings ere he got
down to the skin, though they were dirty and ragged
enough, it is true, and that he could afford to refuse
the extra garments which I offered him, he had so
many intra ones. This ducking was the very thing he
needed. Then I began to pity myself, and I saw that it
would be a greater charity to bestow on me a flannel
shirt than a whole slop-shop on him. There are a
thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who
is striking at the root, and it may be that he who
76 PHILANTHROPY

bestows the largest amount of time and money on the

needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce
that misery which he strives in vain to relieve. It is
the pious slave-breeder devoting the proceeds of every
tenth slave to buy a Sunday's liberty for the rest. Some
show their kindness to the poor by employing them
in their kitchens. Would they not be kinder if they
employed themselves there? You boast of spending a
tenth part of your income in charity; may be you
should spend the nine tenths so, and done with it.
Society recovers only a tenth part of the property
then. Is this owing to the generosity of him in whose
possession it is found, or to the remissness of the
officers of justice?
Philanthropy is almost the only virtue which is suf-
ficiently appreciated by mankind. Nay, it is greatly
overrated; and it is our selfishness which overrates it.
A robust poor man, one sunny day here in Concord,
praised a fellow-townsman to me, because, as he said,
he was kind to the poor; meaning himself. The kind
uncles and aunts of the race are more esteemed than
its true spiritual fathers and mothers. I once heard a
reverend lecturer on England, a man of learning and
intelligence, after enumerating her scientific, literary,
and political worthies, Shakspeare, Bacon, Cromwell,
Milton, Newton, and others, speak next of her Chris-
tian heroes, whom, as if his profession required it of
him, he elevated to a place far above all the rest, as
the greatest of the great. They were Penn, Howard,
and Mrs. Fry. Every one must feel the falsehood and
cant of this. The last were not England's best men
and women; only, perhaps, her best philanthropists.
I would not subtract any thing from the praise that
is due to philanthropy, but merely demand justice for
all who by their lives and works are a blessing to
mankind. I do not value chiefly a man's uprightness
 WALDEN 77

and benevolence, which are, as it were, his stem and

leaves. Those plants of whose greenness withered we
make herb tea for the sick, serve but a humble use,
and are most employed by quacks. I want the flower
and fruit of a man; that some fragrance be wafted
over from him to me, and some ripeness flavor our
intercourse. His goodness must not be a partial and
transitory act, but a constant superfluity, which costs
him nothing and of which he is unconscious. This is
a charity that hides a multitude of sins. The philan-
thropist too often surrounds mankind with the re-
membrance of his own cast-off griefs as an atmos-
phere, and calls it sympathy. We should impart our
courage, and not our despair, our health and ease,
and not our disease, and take care that this does not
spread by contagion. From what southern plains
comes up the voice of wailing? Under what latitudes
reside the heathen to whom we would send light?
Who is that intemperate and brutal man whom we
would redeem? If any thing ail a man, so that he does
not perform his functions, if he have a pain in his
bowels even,—for that is the seat of sympathy,—he
forthwith sets about reforming-the world. Being a
microcosm himself, he discovers, and it is a true dis-
covery, and he is the man to make it,-that the world
has been eating green apples; to his eyes, in fact, the
globe itself is a great green apple, which there is
danger awful to think of that the children of men will
nibble before it is ripe; and straightway his drastic
philanthropy seeks out the Esquimaux and the Pata-
gonian, and embraces the populous Indian and Chi-
nese villages; and thus, by a few years of philan-
thropic activity, the powers in the mean while using
him for their own ends, no doubt, he cures himself of
his dyspepsia, the globe acquires a faint blush on one
or both of its cheeks, as if it were beginning to be
78 PHILANTHROPY

ripe, and life loses its crudity and is once more sweet
and wholesome to live. I never dreamed of any
enormity greater than I have committed. I never
knew, and never shall know, a worse man than my-
self.
I believe that what so saddens the reformer is not
his sympathy with his fellows in distress, but, though
he be the holiest son of God, is his private ail. Let
this be righted, let the spring come to him, the morn-
ing rise over his couch, and he will forsake his gen-
erous companions without apology. My excuse for not
lecturing against the use of tobacco is, that I never
chewed it; that is a penalty which reformed tobacco-
chewers have to pay; though there are things enough
I have chewed, which I could lecture against. If you
should ever be betrayed into any of these philan-
thropies, do not let your left hand know what your
right hand does, for it is not worth knowing. Rescue
the drowning and tie your shoe-strings. Take your
time, and set about some free labor.
Our manners have been corrupted by communica-
tion with the saints. Our hymn-books resound with a
melodious cursing of God and enduring him forever.
One would say that even the prophets and redeemers
had rather consoled the fears than confirmed the
hopes of man. There is nowhere recorded a simple
and irrepressible satisfaction with the gift of life, any
memorable praise of God. All health and success does
me good, however far off and withdrawn it may ap-
pear; all disease and failure helps to make me sad
and does me evil, however much sympathy it may
have with me or I with it. If, then, we would indeed
restore mankind by truly Indian, botanic, magnetic,
or natural means, let us first be as simple and well
as Nature ourselves, dispel the clouds which hang
over our own brows, and take up a little life into our
 WALDEN 79

pores. Do not stay to be an overseer of the poor, but

endeavor to become one of the worthies of the world.
I read in the Gulistan, or Flower Garden, of Sheik
Sadi of Shiraz, that "They asked a wise man, saying;
Of the many celebrated trees which the Most High
God has created lofty and umbrageous, they call none
azad, or free, excepting the cypress, which bears no
fruit; what mystery is there in this? He replied; Each
has its appropriate produce, and appointed season,
during the continuance of which it is fresh and
blooming, and during their absence dry and withered;
to neither of which states is the cypress exposed, be-
ing always flourishing; and of this nature are the
azads, or religious independents.-Fix not thy heart
on that which is transitory; for the Dijlah, or Tigris,
will continue to flow through Bagdad after the race
of caliphs is extinct: if thy hand has plenty, be lib-
eral as the date tree; but if it affords nothing to give
away, be an azad, or free man, like the cypress."
 C O M P L E M E N T A L VERSES
THE PRETENSIONS OF POVERTY

"Thou dost presume too much, poor needy wretch,

To claim a station in the firmament,
Because thy humble cottage, or thy tub,
Nurses some lazy or pedantic virtue
In the cheap sunshine or by shady springs,
With roots and pot-herbs; where thy right hand,
Tearing those humane passions from the mind,
Upon whose stocks fair blooming virtues flourish,
Degradeth nature, and benumbeth sense,
And, Gorgon-like, turns active men to stone.
We not require the dull society
Of your necessitated temperance,
Or that unnatural stupidity
That knows nor joy nor sorrow; nor your forc'd
Falsely exalted passive fortitude
Above the active. This low abject brood,
That fix their seats in mediocrity,
Become your servile minds; but we advance
Such virtues only as admit excess,
Brave, bounteous acts, regal magnificence,
All-seeing prudence, magnanimity
That knows no bound, and that heroic virtue
For which antiquity hath left no name,
But patterns only, such as Hercules,
Achilles, Theseus. Back to thy loath'd cell;
And when thou seest the new enlightened sphere,
Study to know but what those worthies were."
T. CAREW
Where I Lived,
and What I Lived For

Ax a certain season of our life we are ac-

customed to consider every spot as the possible site
of a house. I have thus surveyed the country on every
side within a dozen miles of where I live. In imagina-
tion I have bought all the farms in succession, for
all were to be bought, and I knew their price. I
walked over each farmer's premises, tasted his wild
apples, discoursed on husbandry with him, took his
farm at his price, at any price, mortgaging it to him
in my mind; even put a higher price on it,—took
every thing but a deed of it,—took his word for his
deed, for I dearly love to talk,—cultivated it, and him
too to some extent, I trust, and withdrew when I had
enjoyed it long enough, leaving him to carry it on.
This experience entitled me to be regarded as a sort
of real-estate broker by my friends. Wherever I sat,
there I might live, and the landscape radiated from
me accordingly. What is a house but a sedes, a seat?—
better if a country seat. I discovered many a site for
a house not likely to be soon improved, which some
might have thought too far from the village, but to
my eyes the village was too far from it. Well, there I
might live, I said; and there I did live, for an hour, a
summer and a winter life; saw how I could let the
years run off, buffet the winter through, and see the
spring come in. The future inhabitants of this region,
wherever they may place their houses, may be sure
that they have been anticipated. An afternoon suf-
ficed to lay out the land into orchard woodlot and
pasture, and to decide what fine oaks or pines should
be left to stand before the door, and whence each
82 WHERE I LIVED

blasted tree could be seen to the best advantage; and

then I let it lie, fallow perchance, for a man is rich
in proportion to the number of things which he can
afford to let alone.
My imagination carried me so far that I even had
the refusal of several farms,—the refusal was all I
wanted,—but I never got my fingers burned by actual
possession. The nearest that I came to actual posses-
sion was when I bought the Hollowell Place, and had
begun to sort my seeds, and collected materials with
which to make a wheelbarrow to carry it on or off
with; but before the owner gave me a deed of it, his
wife—every man has such a wife—changed her mind
and wished to keep it, and he offered me ten dollars
to release him. Now, to speak the truth, I had but te
cents in the world, and it surpassed my arithmetic to
tell, if I was that man who had ten cents, or who had
a farm, or ten dollars, or all together. However, I let
him keep the ten dollars and the farm too, for I had
carried it far enough; or rather, to be generous, I sold
him the farm for just what I gave for it, and, as he
was not a rich man, made him a present of ten dol
lars, and still had my ten cents, and seeds, and ma-
terials for a wheelbarrow left. I found thus that I had
been a rich man without any damage to my poverty.
But I retained the landscape, and I have since an-
nually carried off what it yielded without a wheel-
barrow. With respect to landscapes,—
"I am monarch of all I survey,
My right there is none to dispute."
I have frequently seen a poet withdraw, having en-
joyed the most valuable part of a farm, while the
crusty farmer supposed that he had got a few wild
apples only. Why, the owner does not know it for
many years when a poet has put his farm in rhyme,
 WALDEN 83

the most admirable kind of invisible fence, has fairly

impounded it, milked it, skimmed it, and got all the
cream, and left the farmer only the skimmed milk.
The real attractions of the Hollowell farm, to me,
were; its complete retirement, being about two miles
from the village, half a mile from the nearest neigh-
bor, and separated from the highway by a broad field;
its bounding on the river, which the owner said pro-
tected it by its fogs from frosts in the spring, though
that was nothing to me; the gray color and ruinous
state of the house and barn, and the dilapidated
fences, which put such an interval between me and
the last occupant; the hollow and lichen-covered
apple trees, gnawed by rabbits, showing what kind of
neighbors I should have; but above all, the recollec-
tion I had of it from my earliest voyages up the river,
when the house was concealed behind a dense grove
of red maples, through which I heard the house-dog
bark. I was in haste to buy it, before the proprietor
finished getting out some rocks, cutting down the
hollow apple trees, and grubbing up some young
birches which had sprung up in the pasture, or, in
short, had made any more of his improvements. To
enjoy these advantages I was ready to carry it on;
like Atlas, to take the world on my shoulders,-! never
heard what compensation he received for that,—and
do all those things which had no other motive or ex-
cuse but that I might pay for it and be unmolested in
my possession of it; for I knew all the while that it
would yield the most abundant crop of the kind I
wanted if I could only afford to let it alone. But it
turned out as I have said.
All that I could say, then, with respect to farming
on a large scale, (I have always cultivated a garden,)
was, that I had had my seeds ready. Many think that
seeds improve with age. I have no doubt that time
84 WHERE I LIVED

discriminates between the good and the bad; and

when at last I shall plant, I shall be less likely to be
disappointed. But I would say to my fellows, once
for all, As long as possible live free and uncom-
mitted. It makes but little difference whether you are
committed to a farm or the county jail.
Old Cato, whose "De Re Rustica" is my "Cultiva-
tor," says, and the only translation I have seen makes
sheer nonsense of the passage, "When you think of
getting a farm, turn it thus in your mind, not to buy
greedily; nor spare your pains to look at it, and do
not think it enough to go round it once. The oftener
you go there the more it will please you, if it is good."
I think I shall not buy greedily, but go round and
round it as long as I live, and be buried in it first,
that it may please me the more at last.

The present was my next experiment of this kind,

which I purpose to describe more at length; for con-
venience, putting the experience of two years into
one. As I have said, I do not propose to write an ode
to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in
the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake
my neighbors up.
When first I took up my abode in the woods, that
is, began to spend my nights as well as days there,
which, by accident, was on Independence Day, or the
fourth of July, 1845, my house was not finished for
winter, but was merely a defence against the rain,
without plastering or chimney, the walls being of
rough weather-stained boards, with wide chinks,
which made it cool at night. The upright white hewn
studs and freshly planed door and window casings
gave it a clean and airy look, especially in the morn-
ing, when its timbers were saturated with dew, so
 WALDEN 85

that I fancied that by noon some sweet gum would

exude from them. To my imagination it retained
throughout the day more or less of this auroral char-
acter, reminding me of a certain house on a moun-
tain which I had visited the year before. This was an
airy and unplastered cabin, fit to entertain a travel-
ling god, and where a goddess might trail her gar-
ments. The winds which passed over my dwelling
were such as sweep over the ridges of mountains,
bearing the broken strains, or celestial parts only, of
terrestrial music. The morning wind forever blows,
the poem of creation is uninterrupted; but few are
the ears that hear it. Olympus is but the outside of
the earth every where.
The only house I had been the owner of before, if
I except a boat, was a tent, which I used occasionally
when making excursions in the summer, and this is
still rolled up in my garret; but the boat, after passing
from hand to hand, has gone down the stream of
time. With this more substantial shelter about me, I
had made some progress toward settling in the world.
This frame, so slightly clad, was a sort of crystalliza-
tion around me, and reacted on the builder. It was
suggestive somewhat as a picture in outlines. I did
not need to go out doors to take the air, for the at-
mosphere within had lost none of its freshness. It
was not so much within doors as behind a door where
I sat, even in the rainiest weather. The Harivansa
says, "An abode without birds is like a meat without
seasoning." Such was not my abode, for I found my-
self suddenly neighbor to the birds; not by having
imprisoned one, but having caged myself near them.
I was not only nearer to some of those which com-
monly frequent the garden and the orchard, but to
those wilder and more thrilling songsters of the for-
est which never, or rarely, serenade a villager,—the
86 WHERE I LIVED

wood-thrush, the veery, the scarlet tanager, the field-

sparrow, the whippoorwill, and many others.
I was seated by the shore of a small pond, about a
mile and a half south of the village of Concord and
somewhat higher than it, in the midst of an extensive
wood between that town and Lincoln, and about two
miles south of that our only field known to fame,
Concord Battle Ground; but I was so low in the woods
that the opposite shore, half a mile off, like the rest,
covered with wood, was my most distant horizon. For
the first week, whenever I looked out on the pond it
impressed me like a tarn high up on the side of a
mountain, its bottom far above the surface of other
lakes, and, as the sun arose, I saw it throwing off its
nightly clothing of mist, and here and there, by de-
grees, its soft ripples or its smooth reflecting surface
was revealed, while the mists, like ghosts, were stealth-
ily withdrawing in every direction into the woods, as
at the breaking up of some nocturnal conventicle. The
very dew seemed to hang upon the trees later into the
day than usual, as on the sides of mountains.
This small lake was of most value as a neighbor in
the intervals of a gentle rain storm in August, when,
both air and water being perfectly still, but the sky
overcast, mid-afternoon had all the serenity of eve-
ning, and the wood-thrush sang around, and was
heard from shore to shore. A lake like this is never
smoother than at such a time; and the clear portion
of the air above it being shallow and darkened by
clouds, the water, full of light and reflections, be-
comes a lower heaven itself so much the more im-
portant. From a hill top near by, where the wood had
been recently cut off, there was a pleasing vista
southward across the pond, through a wide indenta-
tion in the hills which form the shore there, where
their opposite sides sloping toward each other sug-
 WALDEN 87

gested a stream flowing out in that direction through

a wooded valley, but stream there was none. That
way I looked between and over the near green hills to
some distant and higher ones in the horizon, tinged
with blue. Indeed, by standing on tiptoe I could catch
a glimpse of some of the peaks of the still bluer and
more distant mountain ranges in the north-west,
those true-blue coins from heaven's own mint, and
also of some portion of the village. But in other direc-
tions, even from this point, I could not see over or be-
yond the woods which surrounded me. It is well to
have some water in your neighborhood, to give buoy-
ancy to and float the earth. One value even of the
smallest well is, that when you look into it you see
that earth is not continent but insular. This is as
important as that it keeps butter cool. When I looked
across the pond from this peak toward the Sudbury
meadows, which in time of flood I distinguished ele-
vated perhaps by a mirage in their seething valley,
like a coin in a basin, all the earth beyond the pond
appeared like a thin crust insulated and floated even
by this small sheet of intervening water, and I was
reminded that this on which I dwelt was but dry land.
Though the view from my door was still more con-
tracted, I did not feel crowded or confined in the least.
There was pasture enough for my imagination. The
low shrub-oak plateau to which the opposite shore
arose, stretched away toward the prairies of the West
and the steppes of Tartary, affording ample room for
all the roving families of men. "There are none happy
in the world but beings who enjoy freely a vast hori-
zon,"—said Damodara, when his herds required new
and larger pastures.
Both place and time were changed, and I dwelt
nearer to those parts of the universe and to those eras
in history which had most attracted me. Where I lived
88 W H A T I L I V E D FOR

was as far off as many a region viewed nightly by

astronomers. We are wont to imagine rare and de-
lectable places in some remote and more celestial
corner of the system, behind the constellation of
Cassiopeia's Chair, far from noise and disturbance. I
discovered that my house actually had its site in such
a withdrawn, but forever new and unprofaned, part
of the universe. If it were worth the while to settle in
those parts near to the Pleiades or the Hyades, to Al-
debaran or Altair, then I was really there, or at an
equal remoteness from the life which I had left be-
hind, dwindled and twinkling with as fine a ray to
my nearest neighbor, and to be seen only in moon-
less nights by him. Such was that part of creation
where I had squatted;—

"There was a shepherd that did live,

And held his thoughts as high
As were the mounts whereon his flocks
Did hourly feed him by."

What should we think of the shepherd's life if his

flocks always wandered to higher pastures than his
thoughts?
Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make
my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence,
with Nature herself. I have been as sincere a wor-
shipper of Aurora as the Greeks. I got up early and
bathed in the pond; that was a religious exercise, and
one of the best things which I did. They say that
characters were engraven on the bathing tub of king
Tching-thang to this effect: "Renew thyself com-
pletely each day; do it again, and again, and forever
again." I can understand that. Morning brings back
the heroic ages. I was as much affected by the faint
hum of a mosquito making its invisible and unimag-
inable tour through my apartment at earliest dawn,
 WALDEN 89

when I was sitting with door and windows open, as I

could be by any trumpet that ever sang of fame. It
was Homer's requiem; itself an Iliad and Odyssey in
the air, singing its own wrath and wanderings. There
was something cosmical about it; a standing adver-
tisement, till forbidden, of the everlasting vigor and
fertility of the world. The morning, which is the most
memorable season of the day, is the awakening hour.
Then there is least somnolence in us; and for an
hour, at least, some part of us awakes which slum-
bers all the rest of the day and night. Little is to be
expected of that day, if it can be called a day, to
which we are not awakened by our Genius, but by
the mechanical nudgings of some servitor, are not
awakened by our own newly-acquired force and as-
pirations from within, accompanied by the undula-
tions of celestial music, instead of factory bells, and
a fragrance filling the air-to a higher life than we
fell asleep from; and thus the darkness bear its fruit,
and prove itself to be good, no less than the light.
That man who does not believe that each day con-
tains an earlier, more sacred, and auroral hour than
he has yet profaned, has despaired of life, and is
pursuing a descending and darkening way. After a
partial cessation of his sensuous life, the soul of man,
or its organs rather, are reinvigorated each day, and
his Genius tries again what noble life it can make.
All memorable events, I should say, transpire in
morning time and in a morning atmosphere. The Ve-
das say, "All intelligences awake with the morning."
Poetry and art, and the fairest and most memorable
of the actions of men, date from such an hour. All
poets and heroes, like Memnon, are the children of
Aurora, and emit their music at sunrise. To him
whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with
the sun, the day is a perpetual morning. It matters
90 W H A T I L I V E D FOR

not what the clocks say or the attitudes and labors of

men. Morning is when I am awake and there is a
dawn in me. Moral reform is the effort to throw off
sleep. Why is it that men give so poor an account of
their day if they have not been slumbering? They
are not such poor calculators. If they had not been
overcome with drowsiness they would have performed
something. The millions are awake enough for phys-
ical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough
for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hun-
dred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake
is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was
quite awake. How could I have looked him in the
face?
We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves
awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite ex-
pectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our
soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact
than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his
life by a conscious endeavor. It is something to be
able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue,
and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far
more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere
and medium through which we look, which morally
we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the
highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life,
even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his
most elevated and critical hour. If we refused, or
rather used up, such paltry information as we get,
the oracles would distinctly inform us how this might
be done.
I went to the woods because I wished to live de-
liberately, to front only the essential facts of life,
and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and
not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear;
 WALDEN 91

nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was

quite necessary. 1 wanted to live deep and suck out
all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-
like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a
broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a cor-
ner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved
to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine
meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the
world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience,
and be able to give a true account of it in my next ex-
cursion. For most men, it appears to me, are in a
strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil
or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that
it is the chief end of man here to "glorify God and
enjoy him forever."
Still we live meanly, like ants; though the fable
tells us that we were long ago changed into men; like
pygmies we fight with cranes; it is error upon error,
and clout upon clout, and our best virtue has for its
occasion a superfluous and evitable wretchedness.
Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man
has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers,
or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and
lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say,
let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred
or a thousand; instead of a million count half a
dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail.
In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life,
such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and
thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man
has to live, if he would not founder and go to the
bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckon-
ing, and he must be a great calculator indeed who
succeeds. Simplify, simplify. Instead of three meals
a day, if it be necessary eat but one; instead of a
hundred dishes, five; and reduce other things in pro-
92 W H A T I L I V E D FOR

portion. Our life is like a German Confederacy, made

up of petty states, with its boundary forever fluctuat-
ing, so that even a German cannot tell you how it is
bounded at any moment. The nation itself, with all
its so called internal improvements, which, by the
way, are all external and superficial, is just such an un-
wieldy and overgrown establishment, cluttered with
furniture and tripped up by its own traps, ruined by
luxury and heedless expense, by want of calculation
and a worthy aim, as the million households in the
land; and the only cure for it as for them is in a rigid
economy, a stern and more than Spartan simplicity
of life and elevation of purpose. It lives too fast. Men
think that it is essential that the Nation have com-
merce, and export ice, and talk through a telegraph,
and ride thirty miles an hour, without a doubt,
whether they do or not; but whether we should live
like baboons or like men, is a little uncertain. If we
do not get out sleepers, and forge rails, and devote
days and nights to the work, but go to tinkering upon
our lives to improve them, who will build railroads?
And if railroads are not built, how shall we get to
heaven in season? But if we stay at home and mind
our business, who will want railroads? We do not
ride on the railroad; it rides upon us. Did you ever
think what those sleepers are that underlie the rail-
road? Each one is a man, an Irish-man, or a Yankee
man. The rails are laid on them, and they are covered
with sand, and the cars run smoothly over them.
They are sound sleepers, I assure you. And every few
years a new lot is laid down and run over; so that, if
some have the pleasure of riding on a rail, others
have the misfortune to be ridden upon. And when
they run over a man that is walking in his sleep, a
supernumerary sleeper in the wrong position, and
wake him up, they suddenly stop the cars, and make
 WALDEN 93

a hue and cry about it, as if this were an exception. I

am glad to know that it takes a gang of men for every
five miles to keep the sleepers down and level in their
beds as it is, for this is a sign that they may some-
time get up again.
Why should we live with such hurry and waste of
life? We are determined to be starved before we are
hungry. Men say that a stitch in time saves nine, and
so they take a thousand stitches to-day to save nine
to-morrow. As for work, we haven't any of any conse-
quence. We have the Saint Vitus' dance, and cannot
possibly keep our heads still. If I should only give a
few pulls at the parish bell-rope, as for a fire, that is,
without setting the bell, there is hardly a man on his
farm in the outskirts of Concord, notwithstanding
that press of engagements which was his excuse so
many times this morning, nor a boy, nor a woman,
I might almost say, but would forsake all and follow
that sound, not mainly to save property from the
flames, but, if we will confess the truth, much more
to see it burn, since burn it must, and we, be it
known, did not set it on fire,—or to see it put out, and
have a hand in it, if that is done as handsomely; yes,
even if it were the parish church itself. Hardly a man
takes a half hour's nap after dinner, but when he
wakes he holds up his head and asks, "What's the
news?" as if the rest of mankind had stood his sen-
tinels. Some give directions to be waked every half
hour, doubtless for no other purpose; and then, to pay
for it, they tell what they have dreamed. After a
night's sleep the news is as indispensable as the break-
fast. "Pray tell me any thing new that has happened
to a man any where on this globe",-and he reads it
over his coffee and rolls, that a man has had his eyes
gouged out this morning on the Wachito River; never
dreaming the while that he lives in the dark un-
94 W H A T I L I V E D FOR

fathomed mammoth cave of this world, and has but

the rudiment of an eye himself.
For my part, I could easily do without the post-
office. I think that there are very few important com-
munications made through it. To speak critically, I
never received more than one or two letters in my
life—I wrote this some years ago—that were worth the
postage. The penny-post is, commonly, an institution
through which you seriously offer a man that penny
for his thoughts which is so often safely offered in
jest. And I am sure that I never read any memorable
news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed,
or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house
burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat
blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Rail-
road, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grass-
hoppers in the winter,-we never need read of an-
other. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the
principle, what do you care for a myriad instances
and applications? To a philosopher all news, as it is
called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old
women over their tea. Yet not a few are greedy after
this gossip. There was such a rush, as I hear, the
other day at one of the offices to learn the foreign
news by the last arrival, that several large squares of
plate glass belonging to the establishment were
broken by the pressure,—news which I seriously think
a ready wit might write a twelvemonth or twelve
years beforehand with sufficient accuracy. As for
Spain, for instance, if you know how to throw in
Don Carlos and the Infanta, and Don Pedro and
Seville and Granada, from time to time in the right
proportions,—they may have changed the names a
little since I saw the papers,—and serve up a bull-fight
when other entertainments fail, it will be true to the
letter, and give us as good an idea of the exact state
 WALDEN 95

or ruin of things in Spain as the most succinct and

lucid reports under this head in the newspapers: and
as for England, almost the last significant scrap of
news from that quarter was the revolution of 1649;
and if you have learned the history of her crops for
an average year, you never need attend to that thing
again, unless your speculations are of a merely pecu-
niary character. If one may judge who rarely looks
into the newspapers, nothing new does ever happen
in foreign parts, a French revolution not excepted.
What news! how much more important to know
what that is which was never old! "Kieou-pe-yu ( great
dignitary of the state of Wei) sent a man to Khoung-
tseu to know his news. Khoung-tseu caused the mes-
senger to be seated near him, and questioned him in
these terms: What is your master doing? The mes-
senger answered with respect: My master desires to
diminish the number of his faults, but he cannot
accomplish it. The messenger being gone, the philoso-
pher remarked: What a worthy messenger! What a
worthy messenger!" The preacher, instead of vexing
the ears of drowsy farmers on their day of rest at
the end of the week,—for Sunday is the fit conclusion
of an ill-spent week, and not the fresh and brave be-
ginning of a new one,—with this one other draggle-tail
of a sermon, should shout with thundering voice,—
"Pause! Avast! Why so seeming fast, but deadly
slow?"
Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest
truths, while reality is fabulous. If men would stead-
ily observe realities only, and not allow themselves to
be deluded, life, to compare it with such things as
we know, would be like a fairy tale and the Arabian
Nights' Entertainments. If we respected only what is
inevitable and has a right to be, music and poetry
would resound along the streets. When we are un-
96 W H A T I L I V E D FOR

hurried and wise, we perceive that only great and

worthy things have any permanent and absolute
existence,—that petty fears and petty pleasures are
but the shadow of the reality. This is always ex-
hilarating and sublime. By closing the eyes and slum-
bering, and consenting to be deceived by shows, men
establish and confirm their daily life of routine and
habit every where, which still is built on purely il-
lusory foundations. Children, who play life, discern
its true law and relations more clearly than men, who
fail to live it worthily, but who think that they are
wiser by experience, that is, by failure. I have read in
a Hindoo book, that "there was a king's son, who, be
ing expelled in infancy from his native city, was
brought up by a forester, and, growing up to ma-
turity in that state, imagined himself to belong to the
barbarous race with which he lived. One of his father's
ministers having discovered him, revealed to him
what he was, and the misconception of his character
was removed, and he knew himself to be a prince. So
soul," continues the Hindoo philosopher, "from the
circumstances in which it is placed, mistakes its own
character, until the truth is revealed to it by some
holy teacher, and then it knows itself to be Brahme."
I perceive that we inhabitants of New England live
this mean life that we do because our vision does not
penetrate the surface of things. We think that that is
which appears to be. If a man should walk through
this town and see only the reality, where, think you,
would the "Mill-dam" go to? If he should give us an
account of the realities he beheld there, we should
not recognize the place in his description. Look at a
meeting-house, or a court-house, or a jail, or a shop,
or a dwelling-house, and say what that thing really is
before a true gaze, and they would all go to pieces in
your account of them. Men esteem truth remote, in
 WALDEN 97

the outskirts of the system, behind the farthest star,

before Adam and after the last man. In eternity there
is indeed something true and sublime. But all these
times and places and occasions are now and here.
God himself culminates in the present moment, and
will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages.
And we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sub-
lime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and
drenching of the reality which surrounds us. The
universe constantly and obediently answers to our
conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track
is laid for us. Let us spend our lives in conceiving
then. The poet or the artist never yet had so fair and
noble a design but some of his posterity at least could
accomplish it.
Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and
not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mos-
quito's wing that falls on the rails. Let us rise early
and fast, or break fast, gently and without perturba-
tion; let company come and let company go, let the
bells ring and the children cry,—determined to make
a day of it. Why should we knock under and go with
the stream? Let us not be upset and overwhelmed in
that terrible rapid and whirlpool called a dinner,
situated in the meridian shallows. Weather this dan-
ger and you are safe, for the rest of the way is down
hill. With unrelaxed nerves, with morning vigor, sail
by it, looking another way, tied to the mast like
Ulysses. If the engine whistles, let it whistle till it is
hoarse for its pains. If the bell rings, why should we
run? We will consider what kind of music they are
like. Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our
feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion,
and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and ap-
pearance, that alluvion which covers the globe,
through Paris and London, through New York and
98 W H A T I L I V E D FOR

Boston and Concord, through church and state,

through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we
come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we
can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake; and
then begin, having a point d'appui, below freshet and
frost and fire, a place where you might found a wall
or a state, or set a lamp-post safely, or perhaps a
gauge, not a Nilometer, but a Realometer, that future
ages might know how deep a freshet of shams and
appearances had gathered from time to time. If you
stand right fronting and face to face to a fact, you
will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it
were a cimeter, and feel its sweet edge dividing you
through the heart and marrow, and so you will hap-
pily conclude your mortal career. Be it life or death, we
crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear
the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities;
if we are alive, let us go about our business.
Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at
it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and de-
tect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away,
but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the
sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count
one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. I have
always been regretting that I was not as wise as the
day I was born. The intellect is a cleaver; it discerns
and rifts its way into the secret of things. I do not
wish to be any more busy with my hands than is
necessary. My head is hands and feet. I feel all my
best faculties concentrated in it. My instinct tells me
that my head is an organ for burrowing, as some
creatures use their snout and fore-paws, and with it
I would mine and burrow my way through these hills.
I think that the richest vein is somewhere hereabouts;
so by the divining rod and thin rising vapors I judge;
and here I will begin to mine.
Reading

WITH a little more deliberation in the choice

of their pursuits, all men would perhaps become es-
sentially students and observers, for certainly their
nature and destiny are interesting to all alike. In ac-
cumulating property for ourselves or our posterity, in
founding a family or a state, or acquiring fame even,
we are mortal; but in dealing with truth we are im-
mortal, and need fear no change nor accident. The
oldest Egyptian or Hindoo philosopher raised a cor-
ner of the veil from the statue of the divinity; and
still the trembling robe remains raised, and I gaze
upon as fresh a glory as he did, since it was I in him
that was then so bold, and it is he in me that now
reviews the vision. No dust has settled on that robe;
no time has elapsed since that divinity was revealed.
That time which we really improve, or which is im-
provable, is neither past, present, nor future.
My residence was more favorable, not only to
thought, but to serious reading, than a university;
and though I was beyond the range of the ordinary
circulating library, I had more than ever come within
the influence of those books which circulate round
the world, whose sentences were first written on bark,
and are now merely copied from time to time on to
linen paper. Says the poet Mir Camar Uddin Mast,
"Being seated to run through the region of the spir-
itual world; I have had this advantage in books. To be
intoxicated by a single glass of wine; I have experi-
enced this pleasure when I have drunk the liquor of
the esoteric doctrines." I kept Homer's Iliad on my
table through the summer, though I looked at his
page only now and then. Incessant labor with my
hands, at first, for I had my house to finish and my
100 READING

beans to hoe at the same time, made more study

impossible. Yet I sustained myself by the prospect of
such reading in future. I read one or two shallow
books of travel in the intervals of my work, till that
employment made me ashamed of myself, and I
asked where it was then that I lived.
The student may read Homer or Jischylus in the
Greek without danger of dissipation or luxuriousness,
for it implies that he in some measure emulate their
heroes, and consecrate morning hours to their pages.
The heroic books, even if printed in the character of
our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead
to degenerate times; and we must laboriously seek
the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a
larger sense than common use permits out of what
wisdom and valor and generosity we have. The mod-
ern cheap and fertile press, with all its translations,
has done little to bring us nearer to the heroic writers
of antiquity. They seem as solitary, and the letter in
which they are printed as rare and curious, as ever.
It is worth the expense of youthful days and costly
hours, if you leam only some words of an ancient
language, which are raised out of the trivialness of
the street, to be perpetual suggestions and provoca-
tions. It is not in vain that the farmer remembers
and repeats the few Latin words which he has heard.
Men sometimes speak as if the study of the classics
would at length make way for more modern and prac-
tical studies; but the adventurous student will always
study classics, in whatever language they may be writ-
ten and however ancient they may be. For what are the
classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man?
They are the only oracles which are not decayed, and
there are such answers to the most modern inquiry in
them as Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might as
well omit to study Nature because she is old. To read
 WALDEN 101

well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble

exercise, and one that will task the reader more than
any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It
requires a training such as the athletes underwent,
the steady intention almost of the whole life to this
object. Books must be read as deliberately and re-
servedly as they were written. It is not enough even to
be able to speak the language of that nation by which
they are written, for there is a memorable interval
between the spoken and the written language, the
language heard and the language read. The one is
commonly transitory, a sound, a tongue, a dialect
merely, almost brutish, and we learn it unconscious-
ly, like the brutes, of our mothers. The other is the
maturity and experience of that; if that is our mother
tongue, this is our father tongue, a reserved and
select expression, too significant to be heard by the
ear, which we must be born again in order to speak.
The crowds of men who merely spoke the Greek and
Latin tongues in the middle ages were not entitled by
the accident of birth to read the works of genius writ-
ten in those languages; for these were not written in
that Greek or Latin which they knew, but in the se-
lect language of literature. They had not learned the
nobler dialects of Greece and Rome, but the very ma-
terials on which they were written were waste paper
to them, and they prized instead a cheap contempo-
rary literature. But when the several nations of Eu-
rope had acquired distinct though rude written lan-
guages of their own, sufficient for the purposes of
their rising literatures, then first learning revived,
and scholars were enabled to discern from that re-
moteness the treasures of antiquity. What the Roman
and Grecian multitude could not hear, after the lapse
of ages a few scholars read, and a few scholars only
are still reading it.
102 READING

However much we may admire the orator's occa-

sional bursts of eloquence, the noblest written words
are commonly as far behind or above the fleeting
spoken language as the firmament with its stars is
behind the clouds. There are the stars, and they who
can may read them. The astronomers forever com-
ment on and observe them. They are not exhalations
like our daily colloquies and vaporous breath. What
is called eloquence in the forum is commonly found
to be rhetoric in the study. The orator yields to the
inspiration of a transient occasion, and speaks to the
mob before him, to those who can hear him; but the
writer, whose more equable life is his occasion, and
who would be distracted by the event and the crowd
which inspire the orator, speaks to the intellect and
heart of mankind, to all in any age who can under-
stand him.
No wonder that Alexander carried the Iliad with
him on his expeditions in a precious casket. A written
word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once
more intimate with us and more universal than any
other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life
itself. It may be translated into every language, and
not only be read but actually breathed from all hu-
man lips;-not be represented on canvas or in marble
only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself. The
symbol of an ancient man's thought becomes a mod-
ern man's speech. Two thousand summers have im-
parted to the monuments of Grecian literature, as to
her marbles, only a maturer golden and autumnal
tint, for they have carried their own serene and ce-
lestial atmosphere into all lands to protect them
against the corrosion of time. Books are the treasured
wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of genera-
tions and nations. Books, the oldest and the best,
stand naturally and rightfully on the shelves of every
 WALDEN 103

cottage. They have no cause of their own to plead,

but while they enlighten and sustain the reader his
common sense will not refuse them. Their authors
are a natural and irresistible aristocracy in every so-
ciety, and, more than kings or emperors, exert an
influence on mankind. When the illiterate and per-
haps scornful trader has earned by enterprise and
industry his coveted leisure and independence, and
is admitted to the circles of wealth and fashion, he
turns inevitably at last to those still higher but yet
inaccessible circles of intellect and genius, and is
sensible only of the imperfection of his culture and
the vanity and insufficiency of all his riches, and
further proves his good sense by the pains which he
takes to secure for his children that intellectual cul-
ture whose want he so keenly feels; and thus it is
that he becomes the founder of a family.
Those who have not learned to read the ancient
classics in the language in which they were written
must have a very imperfect knowledge of the history
of the human race; for it is remarkable that no tran-
script of them has ever been made into any modern
tongue, unless our civilization itself may be regarded
as such a transcript. Homer has never yet been
printed in English, nor ^schylus, nor Virgil even,—
works as refined, as solidly done, and as beautiful
almost as the morning itself; for later writers, say
what we will of their genius, have rarely, if ever,
equalled the elaborate beauty and finish and the life-
long and heroic literary labors of the ancients. They
only talk of forgetting them who never knew them.
It will be soon enough to forget them when we have
the learning and the genius which will enable us to
attend to and appreciate them. That age will be rich
indeed when those relics which we call Classics, and
the still older and more than classic but even less
104 READING

known Scriptures of the nations, shall have still

further accumulated, when the Vaticans shall be
filled with Vedas and Zendavestas and Bibles, with
Homers and Dantes and Shakspeares, and all the
centuries to come shall have successively deposited
their trophies in the forum of the world. By such a
pile we may hope to scale heaven at last.
The works of the great poets have never yet been
read by mankind, for only great poets can read them.
They have only been read as the multitude read the
stars, at most astrologically, not astronomically.
Most men have learned to read to serve a paltry con-
venience, as they have learned to cipher in order to
keep accounts and not be cheated in trade; but of read-
ing as a noble intellectual exercise they know little or
nothing; yet this only is reading, in a high sense, not
that which lulls us as a luxury and suffers the nobler
faculties to sleep the while, but what we have to stand
on tiptoe to read and devote our most alert and wake-
ful hours to.
I think that having learned our letters we should
read the best that is in literature, and not be forever
repeating our a b abs, and words of one syllable, in
the fourth or fifth classes, sitting on the lowest and
foremost form all our lives. Most men are satisfied if
they read or hear read, and perchance have been con-
victed by the wisdom of one good book, the Bible, and
for the rest of their lives vegetate and dissipate their
faculties in what is called easy reading. There is a
work in several volumes in our Circulating Library
entitled Little Reading, which I thought referred to a
town of that name which I had not been to. There
are those who, like cormorants and ostriches, can di-
gest all sorts of this, even after the fullest dinner of
meats and vegetables, for they suffer nothing to be
wasted. If others are the machines to provide this
 WALDEN 105

provender, they are the machines to read it. They

read the nine thousandth tale about Zebulon and
Sephronia, and how they loved as none had ever
loved before, and neither did the course of their true
love run smooth,-at any rate, how it did run and
stumble, and get up again and go on! how some poor
unfortunate got up onto a steeple, who had better
never have gone up as far as the belfry; and then,
having needlessly got him up there, the happy nov-
elist rings the bell for all the world to come together
and hear, O dear! how he did get down again! For my
part, I think that they had better metamorphose all
such aspiring heroes of universal noveldom into man
weathercocks, as they used to put heroes among the
constellations, and let them swing round there till
they are rusty, and not come down at all to bother
honest men with their pranks. The next time the
novelist rings the bell I will not stir though the meet-
ing-house burn down. "The Skip of the Tip-Toe-Hop,
a Romance of the Middle Ages, by the celebrated au-
thor of Tittle-Tol-Tan,' to appear in monthly parts; a
great rush; don't all come together." All this they read
with saucer eyes, and erect and primitive curiosity,
and with unwearied gizzard, whose corrugations even
yet need no sharpening, just as some little four-year-
old bencher his two-cent gilt-covered edition of Cin-
derella,-without any improvement, that I can see, in
the pronunciation, or accent, or emphasis, or any
more skill in extracting or inserting the moral. The
result is dulness of sight, a stagnation of the vital
circulations, and a general deliquium and sloughing
off of all the intellectual faculties. This sort of ginger-
bread is baked daily and more sedulously than pure
wheat or rye-and-Indian in almost every oven, and
finds a surer market.
106 READING

The best books are not read even by those who are
called good readers. What does our Concord culture
amount to? There is in this town, with a very few
exceptions, no taste for the best or for very good
books even in English literature, whose words all can
read and spell. Even the college-bred and so called
liberally educated men here and elsewhere have
really little or no acquaintance with the English
classics; and as for the recorded wisdom of mankind,
the ancient classics and Bibles, which are accessible
to all who will know of them, there are the feeblest
efforts any where made to become acquainted with
them. I know a woodchopper, of middle age, who
takes a French paper, not for news as he says, for he
is above that, but to "keep himself in practice," he
being a Canadian by birth; and when I ask him what
he considers the best thing he can do in this world,
he says, beside this, to keep up and add to his Eng-
lish. This is about as much as the college bred gen-
erally do or aspire to do, and they take an English
paper for the purpose. One who has just come from
reading perhaps one of the best English books will
find how many with whom he can converse about it?
Or suppose he comes from reading a Greek or Latin
classic in the original, whose praises are familiar even
to the so called illiterate; he will find nobody at all to
speak to, but must keep silence about it. Indeed, there
is hardly the professor in our colleges, who, if he has
mastered the difficulties of the language, has pro-
portionally mastered the difficulties of the wit and
poetry of a Greek poet, and has any sympathy to im-
part to the alert and heroic reader; and as for the
sacred Scriptures, or Bibles of mankind, who in this
town can tell me even their titles? Most men do not
know that any nation but the Hebrews have had a
scripture. A man, any man, will go considerably out
 WALDEN 107

of his way to pick up a silver dollar; but here are

golden words, which the wisest men of antiquity have
uttered, and whose worth the wise of every succeed-
ing age have assured us of;—and yet we learn to read
only as far as Easy Reading, the primers and class-
books, and when we leave school, the "Little Read-
ing," and story books, which are for boys and be-
ginners; and our reading, our conversation and
thinking, are all on a very low level, worthy only of
pygmies and manikins.
I aspire to be acquainted with wiser men than this
our Concord soil has produced, whose names are
hardly known here. Or shall I hear the name of Plato
and never read his book? As if Plato were my towns-
man and I never saw him,-my next neighbor and I
never heard him speak or attended to the wisdom of
his words. But how actually is it? His Dialogues,
which contain what was immortal in him, lie on the
next shelf, and yet I never read them. We are under-
bred and low-lived and illiterate; and in this respect
I confess I do not make any very broad distinction
between the Uliterateness of my townsman who cannot
read at all, and the illiterateness of him who has
learned to read only what is for children and feeble
intellects. We should be as good as the worthies of
antiquity, but partly by first knowing how good they
were. We are a race of tit-men, and soar but little
higher in our intellectual flights than the columns of
the daily paper.
It is not all books that are as dull as their readers.
There are probably words addressed to our condition
exactly, which, if we could really hear and under-
stand, would be more salutary than the morning or
the spring to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect
on the face of things for us. How many a man has
dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.
108 READING

The book exists for us perchance which will explain

our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present
unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered.
These same questions that disturb and puzzle and
confound us have in their turn occurred to all the
wise men; not one has been omitted; and each has
answered them, according to his ability, by his words
and his life. Moreover, with wisdom we shall learn
liberality. The solitary hired man on a farm in the
outskirts of Concord, who has had his second birth
and peculiar religious experience, and is driven as he
believes into silent gravity and exclusiveness by his
faith, may think it is not true; but Zoroaster, thou-
sands of years ago, travelled the same road and had
the same experience; but he, being wise, knew it to
be universal, and treated his neighbors accordingly,
and is even said to have invented and established
worship among men. Let him humbly commune with
Zoroaster then, and, through the liberalizing influ-
ence of all the worthies, with Jesus Christ himself,
and let "our church" go by the board.
We boast that we belong to the nineteenth century
and are making the most rapid strides of any nation.
But consider how little this village does for its own
culture. I do not wish to flatter my townsmen, nor
to be flattered by them, for that will not advance
either of us. We need to be provoked,—goaded like
oxen, as we are, into a trot. We have a comparatively
decent system of common schools, schools for infants
only; but excepting the half-starved Lyceum in the
winter, and latterly the puny beginning of a library
suggested by the state, no school for ourselves. We
spend more on almost any article of bodily aliment
or ailment than on our mental aliment. It is time that
we had uncommon schools, that we did not leave off
our education when we begin to be men and women.
 WALDEN 109

It is time that villages were universities, and their

elder inhabitants the fellows of universities, with lei-
sure—if they are indeed so well off—to pursue liberal
studies the rest of their lives. Shall the world be con-
fined to one Paris or one Oxford forever? Cannot stu-
dents be boarded here and get a liberal education un-
der the skies of Concord? Can we not hire some
Abelard to lecture to us? Alas! what with foddering
the cattle and tending the store, we are kept from
school too long, and our education is sadly neglected.
In this country, the village should in some respects
take the place of the nobleman of Europe. It should
be the patron of the fine arts. It is rich enough. It
wants only the magnanimity and refinement. It can
spend money enough on such things as farmers and
traders value, but it is thought Utopian to propose
spending money for things which more intelligent
men know to be of far more worth. This town has
spent seventeen thousand dollars on a town-house,
thank fortune or politics, but probably it will not
spend so much on living wit, the true meat to put
into that shell, in a hundred years. The one hundred
and twenty-five dollars annually subscribed for a
Lyceum in the winter is better spent than any other
equal sum raised in the town. If we live in the nine-
teenth century, why should we not enjoy the ad-
vantages which the nineteenth century offers? Why
should our life be in any respect provincial? If we
will read newspapers, why not skip the gossip of Bos-
ton and take the best newspaper in the world at once?
-not be sucking the pap of "neutral family" papers,
or browsing "Olive-Branches" here in New England.
Let the reports of all the learned societies come to us,
and we will see if they know any thing. Why should
we leave it to Harper & Brothers and Redding & Co.
to select our reading? As the nobleman of cultivated
110 READING

taste surrounds himself with whatever conduces to

his culture,—genius—learning—wit—books—paintings—
statuary-music-philosophical instruments, and the
like; so let the village do,-not stop short at a peda-
gogue, a parson, a sexton, a parish library, and three
selectmen, because our pilgrim forefathers got
through a cold winter once on a bleak rock with these.
To act collectively is according to the spirit of our in-
stitutions; and I am confident that, as our circum-
stances are more flourishing, our means are greater
than the nobleman's. New England can hire all the
wise men in the world to come and teach her, and
board them round the while, and not be provincial at
all. That is the uncommon school we want. Instead of
noblemen, let us have noble villages of men. If it is
necessary, omit one bridge over the river, go round
a little there, and throw one arch at least over the
darker gulf of ignorance which surrounds us.
Sounds

BUT while we are confined to books, though

the most select and classic, and read only particular
written languages, which are themselves but dialects
and provincial, we are in danger of forgetting the
language which all things and events speak without
metaphor, which alone is copious and standard. Much
is published, but little printed. The rays which stream
through the shutter will be no longer remembered
when the shutter is wholly removed. No method nor
discipline can supersede the necessity of being for-
ever on the alert. What is a course of history, or
philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected,
or the best society, or the most admirable routine of
life, compared with the discipline of looking always
at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student
merely, or a seer? Read your fate, see what is before
you, and walk on into futurity.
I did not read books the first summer; I hoed beans.
Nay, I often did better than this. There were times
when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the
present moment to any work, whether of the head or
hands. I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes,
in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed
bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till
noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories
and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness,
while the birds sang around or flitted noiseless
through the house, until by the sun falling in at my
west window, or the noise of some traveller's wagon
on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse
of time. I grew in those seasons like corn in the night,
and they were far better than any work of the hands
would have been. They were not time subtracted from
112 SOUNDS

my life, but so much over and above my usual allow-

ance. I realized what the Orientals mean by contem-
plation and the forsaking of works. For the most part,
I minded not how the hours went. The day advanced
as if to light some work of mine; it was morning, and
lo, now it is evening, and nothing memorable is ac-
complished. Instead of singing like the birds, I si-
lently smiled at my incessant good fortune. As the
sparrow had its trill, sitting on the hickory before
my door, so had I my chuckle or suppressed warble
which he might hear out of my nest. My days were
not days of the week, bearing the stamp of any heathen
deity, nor were they minced into hours and fretted
by the ticking of a clock; for I lived like the Puri
Indians, of whom it is said that "for yesterday, to-day,
and to-morrow they have only one word, and they
express the variety of meaning by pointing backward
for yesterday, forward for to-morrow, and overhead
for the passing day." This was sheer idleness to my
fellow-townsmen, no doubt; but if the birds and flow-
ers had tried me by their standard, I should not have
been found wanting. A man must find his occasions
in himself, it is true. The natural day is very calm,
and will hardly reprove his indolence.
I had this advantage, at least, in my mode of life,
over those who were obliged to look abroad for
amusement, to society and the theatre, that my life
itself was become my amusement and never ceased
to be novel. It was a drama of many scenes and with-
out an end. If we were always indeed getting our liv-
ing, and regulating our lives according to the last and
best mode we had learned, we should never be
troubled with ennui. Follow your genius closely
enough, and it will not fail to show you a fresh pros-
pect every hour. Housework was a pleasant pastime.
When my floor was dirty, I rose early, and, setting all
 WALDEN 113

my furniture out of doors on the grass, bed and bed-

stead making but one budget, dashed water on the
floor, and sprinkled white sand from the pond on it,
and then with a broom scrubbed it clean and white;
and by the time the villagers had broken their fast
the morning sun had dried my house sufficiently to
allow me to move in again, and my meditations were
almost uninterrupted. It was pleasant to see my whole
household effects out on the grass, making a little
pile like a gypsy's pack, and my three-legged table,
from which I did not remove the books and pen and
ink, standing amid the pines and hickories. They
seemed glad to get out themselves, and as if unwill-
ing to be brought in. I was sometimes tempted to
stretch an awning over them and take my seat there.
It was worth the while to see the sun shine on these
things, and hear the free wind blow on them; so
much more interesting most familiar objects look out
of doors than in the house. A bird sits on the next
bough, life-everlasting grows under the table, and
blackberry vines run round its legs; pine cones, chest-
nut burs, and strawberry leaves are strewn about. It
looked as if this was the way these forms came to be
transferred to our furniture, to tables, chairs, and
bedsteads,-because they once stood in their midst.
My house was on the side of a hill, immediately on
the edge of the larger wood, in the midst of a young
forest of pitch pines and hickories, and half a dozen
rods from the pond, to which a narrow footpath led
down the hill. In my front yard grew the strawberry,
blackberry, and life-everlasting, johnswort and gold-
en-rod, shrub-oaks and sand-cherry, blueberry and
ground-nut. Near the end of May, the sand-cherry,
Cerasus pumila, adorned the sides of the path with
its delicate flowers arranged in umbels cylindrically
about its short stems, which last, in the fall, weighed
114 SOUNDS

down with good sized and handsome cherries, fell

over in wreaths like rays on every side. I tasted them
out of compliment to Nature, though they were
scarcely palatable. The sumach, Rhus glabra, grew
luxuriantly about the house, pushing up through the
embankment which I had made, and growing five or
six feet the first season. Its broad pinnate tropical leaf
was pleasant though strange to look on. The large
buds, suddenly pushing out late in the spring from
dry sticks which had seemed to be dead, developed
themselves as by magic into graceful green and
tender boughs, an inch in diameter; and sometimes,
as I sat at my window, so heedlessly did they grow
and tax their weak joints, I heard a fresh and tender
bough suddenly fall like a fan to the ground, when
there was not a breath of air stirring, broken off by
its own weight. In August, the large masses of berries,
which, when in flower, had attracted many wild bees,
gradually assumed their bright velvety crimson hue,
and by their weight again bent down and broke the
tender limbs.

As I sit at my window this summer afternoon,

hawks are circling about my clearing; the tantivy of
wild pigeons, flying by twos and threes athwart my
view, or perching restless on the white-pine boughs
behind my house, gives a voice to the air; a fishhawk
dimples the glassy surface of the pond and brings up
a fish; a mink steals out of the marsh before my door
and seizes a frog by the shore; the sedge is bending
under the weight of the reed-birds flitting hither and
thither; and for the last half hour I have heard the
rattle of railroad cars, now dying away and then re-
viving like the beat of a partridge, conveying travel-
lers from Boston to the country. For I did not live so
 WALDEN 115

out of the world as that boy, who, as I hear, was put

out to a farmer in the east part of the town, but ere
long ran away and came home again, quite down at
the heel and homesick. He had never seen such a dull
and out-of-the-way place; the folks were all gone off;
why, you couldn't even hear the whistle! I doubt if
there is such a place in Massachusetts now: —

"In truth, our village has become a butt

For one of those fleet railroad shafts, and o'er
Our peaceful plain its soothing sound is—Concord."
The Fitchburg Railroad touches the pond about a
hundred rods south of where I dwell. I usually go to
the village along its causeway, and am, as it were,
related to society by this link. The men on the freight
trains, who go over the whole length of the road, bow
to me as to an old acquaintance, they pass me so
often, and apparently they take me for an employee;
and so I am. I too would fain be a track-repairer
somewhere in the orbit of the earth.
The whistle of the locomotive penetrates my woods
summer and winter, sounding like the scream of a
hawk sailing over some farmer's yard, informing me
that many restless city merchants are arriving within
the circle of the town, or adventurous country trad-
ers from the other side. As they come under one hori-
zon, they shout their warning to get off the track to
the other, heard sometimes through the circles of two
towns. Here come your groceries, country; your ra-
tions, countrymen! Nor is there any man so inde-
pendent on his farm that he can say them nay. And
here's your pay for them! screams the countryman's
whistle; timber like long battering rams going twenty
miles an hour against the city's walls, and chairs
enough to seat all the weary and heavy laden that
dwell within them. With such huge and lumbering
116 SOUNDS

civility the country hands a chair to the city. All the

Indian huckleberry hills are stripped, all the cran-
berry meadows are raked into the city. Up comes the
cotton, down goes the woven cloth; up comes the silk,
down goes the woollen; up come the books, but down
goes the wit that writes them.
When I meet the engine with its train of cars mov-
ing off with planetary motion,-or, rather, like a
comet, for the beholder knows not if with that ve-
locity and with that direction it will ever revisit this
system, since its orbit does not look like a returning
curve,—with its steam cloud like a banner streaming
behind in golden and silver wreaths, like many a
downy cloud which I have seen, high in the heavens,
unfolding its masses to the light,—as if this travelling
demigod, this cloud-compeller, would ere long take
the sunset sky for the livery of his train; when I hear
the iron horse make the hills echo with his snort like
thunder, shaking the earth with his feet, and breath-
ing fire and smoke from his nostrils, (what kind of
winged horse or fiery dragon they will put into the
new Mythology I don't know,) it seems as if the earth
had got a race now worthy to inhabit it. If all were as
it seems, and men made the elements their servants
for noble ends! If the cloud that hangs over the en-
gine were the perspiration of heroic deeds, or as
beneficent to men as that which floats over the farm-
er's fields, then the elements and Nature herself
would cheerfully accompany men on their errands
and be their escort.
I watch the passage of the morning cars with the
same feeling that I do the rising of the sun, which is
hardly more regular. Their train of clouds stretching
far behind and rising higher and higher, going to
heaven while the cars are going to Boston, conceals
the sun for a minute and casts my distant field into
 WALDEN 117

the shade, a celestial train beside which the petty

train of cars which hugs the earth is but the barb of
the spear. The stabler of the iron horse was up early
this winter morning by the light of the stars amid the
mountains, to fodder and harness his steed. Fire, too,
was awakened thus early to put the vital heat in him
and get him off. If the enterprise were as innocent
as it is early! If the snow lies deep, they strap on his
snow-shoes, and with the giant plow, plow a furrow
from the mountains to the seaboard, in which the
cars, like a following drill-barrow, sprinkle all the
restless men and floating merchandise in the country
for seed. All day the fire-steed flies over the country,
stopping only that his master may rest, and I am
awakened by his tramp and defiant snort at midnight,
when in some remote glen in the woods he fronts the
elements incased in ice and snow; and he will reach
his stall only with the morning star, to start once
more on his travels without rest or slumber. Or per-
chance, at evening, I hear him in his stable blowing
off the superfluous energy of the day, that he may
calm his nerves and cool his liver and brain for a few
hours of iron slumber. If the enterprise were as heroic
and commanding as it is protracted and unwearied!
Far through unfrequented woods on the confines
of towns, where once only the hunter penetrated by
day, in the darkest night dart these bright saloons
without the knowledge of their inhabitants; this mo-
ment stopping at some brilliant station-house in town
or city, where a social crowd is gathered, the next in
the Dismal Swamp, scaring the owl and fox. The
starlings and arrivals of the cars are now the epochs
in the village day. They go and come with such regu-
larity and precision, and their whistle can be heard
so far, that the farmers set their clocks by them, and
thus one well conducted institution regulates a whole
118 SOUNDS

country. Have not men improved somewhat in punc-

tuality since the railroad was invented? Do they not
talk and think faster in the depot than they did in the
stage-office? There is something electrifying in the
atmosphere of the former place. I have been aston-
ished at the miracles it has wrought; that some of
my neighbors, who, I should have prophesied, once
for all, would never get to Boston by so prompt a
conveyance, were on hand when the bell rang. To do
things "railroad fashion" is now the by-word; and it
is worth the while to be warned so often and so sin-
cerely by any power to get off its track. There is no
stopping to read the riot act, no firing over the heads
of the mob, in this case. We have constructed a fate,
an Atropos, that never turns aside. (Let that be the
name of your engine.) Men are advertised that at a
certain hour and minute these bolts will be shot to-
ward particular points of the compass; yet it inter-
feres with no man's business, and the children go to
school on the other track. We live the steadier for it.
We are all educated thus to be sons of Tell. The air
is full of invisible bolts. Every path but your own is
the path of fate. Keep on your own track, then.
What recommends commerce to me is its enter-
prise and bravery. It does not clasp its hands and
pray to Jupiter. I see these men every day go about
their business with more or less courage and content,
doing more even than they suspect, and perchance
better employed than they could have consciously de-
vised. I am less affected by their heroism who stood
up for half an hour in the front line at Buena Vista,
than by the steady and cheerful valor of the men
who inhabit the snow-plough for their winter quar-
ters; who have not merely the three-o'-clock in the
morning courage, which Bonaparte thought was the
rarest, but whose courage does not go to rest so early,
 WALDEN 119

who go to sleep only when the storm sleeps or the

sinews of their iron steed are frozen. On this morning
of the Great Snow, perchance, which is still raging
and chilling men's blood, I hear the muffled tone of
their engine bell from out the fog bank of their
chilled breath, which announces that the cars are
coming, without long delay, notwithstanding the veto
of a New England north-east snow storm, and I be-
hold the ploughmen covered with snow and rime,
their heads peering above the mould-board which is
turning down other than daisies and the nests of
field-mice, like bowlders of the Sierra Nevada, that
occupy an outside place in the universe.
Commerce is unexpectedly confident and serene,
alert, adventurous, and unwearied. It is very natural
in its methods withal, far more so than many fantas-
tic enterprises and sentimental experiments, and
hence its singular success. I am refreshed and ex-
panded when the freight train rattles past me, and I
smell the stores which go dispensing their odors all
the way from Long Wharf to Lake Champlain, re-
minding me of foreign parts, of coral reefs, and In-
dian oceans, and tropical climes, and the extent of
the globe. I feel more like a citizen of the world at
the sight of the palm-leaf which will cover so many
flaxen New England heads the next summer, the
Manilla hemp and cocoa-nut husks, the old junk,
gunny bags, scrap iron, and rusty nails. This car-load
of torn sails is more legible and interesting now than
if they should be wrought into paper and printed
books. Who can write so graphically the history of
the storms they have weathered as these rents have
done? They are proof-sheets which need no correc-
tion. Here goes lumber from the Maine woods, which
did not go out to sea in the last freshet, risen four
dollars on the thousand because of what did go out or
120 SOUNDS

was split up; pine, spruce, cedar,—first, second, third

and fourth qualities, so lately all of one quality, to
wave over the bear, and moose, and caribou. Next
rolls Thomaston lime, a prime lot, which will get far
among the hills before it gets slacked. These rags in
bales, of all hues and qualities, the lowest condition
to which cotton and linen descend, the final result of
dress,—of patterns which are now no longer cried up,
unless it be in Milwaukie, as those splendid articles,
English, French, or American prints, ginghams, mus-
lins, &c., gathered from all quarters both of fashion
and poverty, going to become paper of one color or a
few shades only, on which forsooth will be written
tales of real life, high and low, and founded on fact!
This closed car smells of salt fish, the strong New
England and commercial scent, reminding me of the
Grand Banks and the fisheries. Who has not seen a
salt fish, thoroughly cured for this world, so that
nothing can spoil it, and putting the perseverance of
the saints to the blush? with which you may sweep
or pave the streets, and split your kindlings, and the
teamster shelter himself and his lading against sun
wind and rain behind it,-and the trader, as a Con-
cord trader once did, hang it up by his door for a sign
when he commences business, until at last his oldest
customer cannot tell surely whether it be animal,
vegetable, or mineral, and yet it shall be as pure as a
snowflake, and if it be put into a pot and boiled, will
come out an excellent dun fish for a Saturday's din-
ner. Next Spanish hides, with the tails still preserving
their twist and the angle of elevation they had when
the oxen that wore them were careering over the
pampas of the Spanish main,—a type of all obstinacy,
and evincing how almost hopeless and incurable are
all constitutional vices. I confess, that practically
speaking, when I have learned a man's real disposi-
 WALDEN 121

tion, I have no hopes of changing it for the better or

worse in this state of existence. As the Orientals say,
"A cur's tail may be warmed, and pressed, and bound
round with ligatures, and after a twelve years' labor
bestowed upon it, still it will retain its natural form."
The only effectual cure for such inveteracies as these
tails exhibit is to make glue of them, which I believe
is what is usually done with them, and then they will
stay put and stick. Here is a hogshead of molasses or
of brandy directed to John Smith, Cuttingsville, Ver-
mont, some trader among the Green Mountains, who
imports for the farmers near his clearing, and now
perchance stands over his bulk-head and thinks of the
last arrivals on the coast, how they may affect the
price for him, telling his customers this moment, as
he has told them twenty times before this morning,
that he expects some by the next train of prime qual-
ity. It is advertised in the Cuttingsville Times.
While these things go up other things come down.
Warned by the whizzing sound, I look up from my
book and see some tall pine, hewn on far northern
hills, which has winged its way over the Green Moun-
tains and the Connecticut, shot like an arrow through
the township within ten minutes, and scarce another
eye beholds it; going
"to be the mast
Of some great ammiral."

And hark! here comes the cattle-train bearing the

cattle of a thousand hills, sheepcots, stables, and cow-
yards in the air, drovers with their sticks, and shep-
herd boys in the midst of their flocks, all but the
mountain pastures, whirled along like leaves blown
from the mountains by the September gales. The air
is filled with the bleating of calves and sheep, and
the hustling of oxen, as if a pastoral valley were going
122 SOUNDS

by. When the old bell-wether at the head rattles his

bell, the mountains do indeed skip like rams and the
little hills like lambs. A car-load of drovers, too, in
the midst, on a level with their droves now, their vo-
cation gone, but still clinging to their useless sticks
as their badge of office. But their dogs, where are
they? It is a stampede to them; they are quite thrown
out; they have lost the scent. Methinks I hear them
barking behind the Peterboro' Hills, or panting up the
western slope of the Green Mountains. They will not
be in at the death. Their vocation, too, is gone. Their
iidelity and sagacity are below par now. They will
sunk back to their kennels in disgrace, or perchance
run wild and strike a league with the wolf and the
fox. So is your pastoral life whirled past and away.
But the bell rings, and I must get off the track and
let the cars go by;—
What's the railroad to me?
I never go to see
Where it ends.
It fills a few hollows,
And makes banks for the swallows,
It sets the sand a-blowing,
And the blackberries a-growing,
but I cross it like a cart-path in the woods. I will not
have my eyes put out and my ears spoiled by its
smoke and steam and hissing.

Now that the cars are gone by, and all the restless
world with them, and the fishes in the pond no longer
feel their rumbling, I am more alone than ever. For
the rest of the long afternoon, perhaps, my medita-
tions are interrupted only by the faint rattle of a
carriage or team along the distant highway.
 WALDEN 123

Sometimes, on Sundays, I heard the bells, the Lin-

coln, Acton, Bedford, or Concord bell, when the wind
was favorable, a faint, sweet, and, as it were, natural
melody, worth importing into the wilderness. At a suf-
ficient distance over the woods this sound acquires a
certain vibratory hum, as if the pine needles in the
horizon were the strings of a harp which it swept. All
sound heard at the greatest possible distance pro-
duces one and the same effect, a vibration of the uni-
versal lyre, just as the intervening atmosphere makes
a distant ridge of earth interesting to our eyes by the
azure tint it imparts to it. There came to me in this
case a melody which the air had strained, and which
had conversed with every leaf and needle of the wood,
that portion of the sound which the elements had
taken up and modulated and echoed from vale to vale.
The echo is, to some extent, an original sound, and
therein is the magic and charm of it. It is not merely
a repetition of what was worth repeating in the bell,
but partly the voice of the wood; the same trivial
words and notes sung by a wood-nymph.
At evening, the distant lowing of some cow in the
horizon beyond the woods sounded sweet and melodi-
ous, and at first I would mistake it for the voices of
certain minstrels by whom I was sometimes sere-
naded, who might be straying over hill and dale; but
soon I was not unpleasantly disappointed when it was
prolonged into the cheap and natural music of the
cow. I do not mean to be satirical, but to express my
appreciation of those youths' singing, when I state
that I perceived clearly that it was akin to the music
of the cow, and they were at length one articulation
of Nature.
Regularly at half past seven, in one part of the
summer, after the evening train had gone by, the
whippoorwills chanted their vespers for half an hour,
124 SOUNDS

sitting on a stump by my door, or upon the ridge

pole of the house. They would begin to sing almost
with as much precision as a clock, within five min-
utes of a particular time, referred to the setting of
the sun, every evening. I had a rare opportunity to
become acquainted with their habits. Sometimes I
heard four or five at once in different parts of the
wood, by accident one a bar behind another, and so
near me that I distinguished not only the cluck after
each note, but often that singular buzzing sound like
a fly in a spider's web, only proportionally louder.
Sometimes one would circle round and round me in
the woods a few feet distant as if tethered by a string,
when probably I was near its eggs. They sang at in-
tervals throughout the night, and were again as
musical as ever just before and about dawn.
When other birds are still the screech owls take up
the strain, like mourning women their ancient u-lu-lu.
Their 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 sol-
emn graveyard ditty, the mutual consolations of sui-
cide lovers remembering the pangs and the delights
of supernal love in the infernal groves. Yet I love to
hear their wailing, their doleful responses, trilled
along the wood-side, reminding me sometimes of mu-
sic and singing birds; as if it were the dark and tear-
ful side of music, the regrets and sighs that would
fain be sung. They are the spirits, the low spirits and
melancholy forebodings, of fallen souls that once in
human shape night-walked the earth and did the
deeds of darkness, now expiating their sins with their
wailing hymns or threnodies in the scenery of their
transgressions. They give me a new sense of the va-
riety and capacity of that nature which is our com-
mon dwelling. Oh-o-o-o-o that I never had been
 WALDEN 125

bor-r-r-r-n! sighs one on this side of the pond, and

circles with the restlessness of despair to some new
perch on the gray oaks. Then-tfeat I never had been
bor-r-r-r-n! echoes another on the farther side with
tremulous sincerity, and—bor-r-r-r-n! comes faintly
from far in the Lincoln woods.
I was also serenaded by a hooting owl. Near at hand
you could fancy it the most melancholy sound in Na-
ture, as if she meant by this to stereotype and make
permanent in her choir the dying moans of a human
being,—some poor weak relic of mortality who has left
hope behind, and howls like an animal, yet with hu-
man sobs, on entering the dark valley, made more
awful by a certain gurgling melodiousness,—I find
myself beginning with the letters gl when I try to
imitate it,-expressive of a mind which has reached
the gelatinous mildewy stage in the mortification of
all healthy and courageous thought. It reminded me
of ghouls and idiots and insane howlings. But now
one answers from far woods in a strain made really
melodious by distance,—Hoo hoo hoo, hoorer hoo; and
indeed for the most part it suggested only pleasing
associations, whether heard by day or night, summer
or winter.
I rejoice that there are owls. Let them do the idiotic
and maniacal hooting for men. It is a sound admira-
bly suited to swamps and twilight woods which no
day illustrates, suggesting a vast and undeveloped
nature which men have not recognized. They repre-
sent the stark twilight and unsatisfied thoughts which
all have. All day the sun has shone on the surface of
some savage swamp, where the double spruce stands
hung with usnea lichens, and small hawks circulate
above, and the chicadee lisps amid the evergreens,
and the partridge and rabbit skulk beneath; but now a
more dismal and fitting day dawns, and a different
126 SOUNDS

race of creatures awakes to express the meaning of

Nature there.
Late in the evening I heard the distant rumbling of
wagons over bridges,-a sound heard farther than al-
most any other at night,—the baying of dogs, and
sometimes again the lowing of some disconsolate cow
in a distant barn-yard. In the mean while all the shore
rang with the trump of bullfrogs, the sturdy spirits
of ancient wine-bibbers and wassailers, still unre-
pentant, trying to sing a catch in their Stygian lake,—
if the Walden nymphs will pardon the comparison,
for though there are almost no weeds, there are frogs
there,—who would fain keep up the hilarious rules of
their old festal tables, though their voices have waxed
hoarse and solemnly grave, mocking at mirth, and the
wine has lost its flavor, and become only liquor to
distend their paunches, and sweet intoxication never
comes to drown the memory of the past, but mere
saturation and waterloggedness and distention. The
most aldermanic, with his chin upon a heart-leaf,
which serves for a napkin to his drooling chaps, un-
der this northern shore quaffs a deep draught of the
once scorned water, and passes round the cup with
the ejaculation tr-r-r-oonk, tr-r-r-oonk, tr-r-r-oonkl and
straightway comes over the water from some distant
cove the same password repeated, where the next in
seniority and girth has gulped down to his mark;
and when this observance has made the circuit of
the shores, then ejaculates the master of ceremonies,
with satisfaction, tr-r-r-oonkl and each in his turn re-
peats the same down to the least distended, leakiest,
and flabbiest paunched, that there be no mistake; and
then the bowl goes round again and again, until the
sun disperses the morning mist, and only the patri-
arch is not under the pond, but vainly bellowing
troorik from time to time, and pausing for a reply.
 WALDEN 127

I am not sure that I ever heard the sound of cock-

crowing from my clearing, and I thought that it
might be worth the while to keep a cockerel for his
music merely, as a singing bird. The note of this
once wild Indian pheasant is certainly the most re-
markable of any bird's, and if they could be natural-
ized without being domesticated, it would soon be-
come the most famous sound in our woods, surpass-
ing the clangor of the goose and the hooting of the
owl; and then imagine the cackling of the hens to
fill the pauses when their lords' clarions rested! No
wonder that man added this bird to his tame stock,—
to say nothing of the eggs and drumsticks. To walk
in a winter morning in a wood where these birds
abounded, their native woods, and hear the wild
cockerels crow on the trees, clear and shrill for miles
over the resounding earth, drowning the feebler
notes of other birds,-think of it! It would put nations
on the alert. Who would not be early to rise, and rise
earlier and earlier every successive day of his life, till
he became unspeakably healthy, wealthy, and wise?
This foreign bird's note is celebrated by the poets of
all countries along with the notes of their native
songsters. All climates agree with brave Chanticleer.
He is more indigenous even than the natives. His
health is ever good, his lungs are sound, his spirits
never flag. Even the sailor on the Atlantic and Pacific
is awakened by his voice; but its shrill sound never
roused me from my slumbers. I kept neither dog, cat,
cow, pig, nor hens, so that you would have said there
was a deficiency of domestic sounds; neither the
churn, nor the spinning wheel, nor even the singing
of the kettle, nor the hissing of the urn, nor children
crying, to comfort one. An old-fashioned man would
have lost his senses or died of ennui before this. Not
even rats in the wall, for they were starved out, or
128 SOUNDS

rather were never baited in,—only squirrels on the

roof and under the floor, a whippoorwill on the ridge
pole, a blue-jay screaming beneath the window, a
hare or woodchuck under the house, a screech-owl or
a cat-owl behind it, a flock of wild geese or a laughing
loon on the pond, and a fox to bark in the night. Not
even a lark or an oriole, those mild plantation birds,
ever visited my clearing. No cockerels to crow nor
hens to cackle in the yard. No yard! but unfenced
Nature reaching up to your very sills. A young forest
growing up under your windows, and wild sumachs
and blackberry vines breaking through into your
cellar; sturdy pitch-pines rubbing and creaking against
the shingles for want of room, their roots reaching
quite under the house. Instead of a scuttle or a blind
blown off in the gale,—a pine tree snapped off or torn
up by the roots behind your house for fuel. Instead of
no path to the front-yard gate in the Great Snow,—no
gate,—no front-yard,—and no path to the civilized
world!
Solitude

THIS is a delicious evening, when the whole

body is one sense, and imbibes delight through every
pore. I go and come with a strange liberty in Nature,
a part of herself. As I walk along the stony shore of
the pond in my shirt sleeves, though it is cool as well
as cloudy and windy, and I see nothing special to
attract me, all the elements are unusually congenial
to me. The bullfrogs trump to usher in the night, and
the note of the whippoorwill is borne on the rippling
wind from over the water. Sympathy with the flutter-
ing alder and poplar leaves almost takes away my
breath; yet, like the lake, my serenity is rippled but
not ruffled. These small waves raised by the evening
wind are as remote from storm as the smooth reflect-
ing surface. Though it is now dark, the wind still
blows and roars in the wood, the waves still dash,
and some creatures lull the rest with their notes. The
repose is never complete. The wildest animals do not
repose, but seek their prey now; the fox, and skunk,
and rabbit, now roam the fields and woods without
fear. They are Nature's watchmen,—links which con-
nect the days of animated life.
When I return to my house I find that visitors have
been there and left their cards, either a bunch of flow-
ers, or a wreath of evergreen, or a name in pencil on
a yellow walnut leaf or a chip. They who come rarely
to the woods take some little piece of the forest into
their hands to play with by the way, which they leave,
either intentionally or accidentally. One has peeled
a willow wand, woven it into a ring, and dropped
it on my table. I could always tell if visitors had
called in my absence, either by the bended twigs or
grass, or the print of their shoes, and generally of
130 SOLITUDE

what sex or age or quality they were by some slight

trace left, as a flower dropped, or a bunch of grass
plucked and thrown away, even as far off as the
railroad, half a mile distant, or by the lingering odor
of a cigar or pipe. Nay, I was frequently notified of
the passage of a traveller along the highway sixty
rods off by the scent of his pipe.
There is commonly sufficient space about us. Our
horizon is never quite at our elbows. The thick wood
is not just at our door, nor the pond, but somewhat is
always clearing, familiar and worn by us, appropri-
ated and fenced in some way, and reclaimed from
Nature. For what reason have I this vast range and
circuit, some square miles of unfrequented forest, for
my privacy, abandoned to me by men? My nearest
neighbor is a mile distant, and no house is visible
from any place but the hill-tops within half a mile of
my own. I have my horizon bounded by woods all to
myself; a distant view of the railroad where it touches
the pond on the one hand, and of the fence which
skirts the woodland road on the other. But for the
most part it is as solitary where I live as on the
prairies. It is as much Asia or Africa as New Eng-
land. I have, as it were, my own sun and moon and
stars, and a little world all to myself. At night there
was never a traveller passed my house, or knocked
at my door, more than if I were the first or last man;
unless it were in the spring, when at long intervals
some came from the village to fish for pouts,—they
plainly fished much more in the Walden Pond of
their own natures, and baited their hooks with dark-
ness,-but they soon retreated, usually with light bas-
kets, and left "the world to darkness and to me," and
the black kernel of the night was never profaned by
any human neighborhood. I believe that men are gen-
erally still a little afraid of the dark, though the
 WALDEN 131

witches are all hung, and Christianity and candles

have been introduced.
Yet I experienced sometimes that the most sweet
and tender, the most innocent and encouraging so-
ciety may be found in any natural object, even for
the poor misanthrope and most melancholy man.
There can be no very black melancholy to him who
lives in the midst of Nature and has his senses still.
There was never yet such a storm but it was ^olian
music to a healthy and innocent ear. Nothing can
rightly compel a simple and brave man to a vulgar
sadness. While I enjoy the friendship of the seasons
I trust that nothing can make life a burden to me.
The gentle rain which waters my beans and keeps me
in the house to-day is not drear and melancholy, but
good for me too. Though it prevents my hoeing them,
it is of far more worth than my hoeing. If it should
continue so long as to cause the seeds to rot in the
ground and destroy the potatoes in the low lands, it
would still be good for the grass on the uplands, and,
being good for the grass, it would be good for me.
Sometimes, when I compare myself with other men,
it seems as if I were more favored by the gods than
they, beyond any deserts that I am conscious of; as
if I had a warrant and surety at their hands which my
fellows have not, and were especially guided and
guarded. I do not flatter myself, but if it be possible
they flatter me. I have never felt lonesome, or in the
least oppressed by a sense of solitude, but once, and
that was a few weeks after I came to the woods,
when, for an hour, I doubted if the near neighbor-
hood of man was not essential to a serene and healthy
life. To be alone was something unpleasant. But I
was at the same time conscious of a slight insanity in
my mood, and seemed to foresee my recovery. In the
midst of a gentle rain while these thoughts prevailed,
132 SOLITUDE

I was suddenly sensible of such sweet and beneficent

society in Nature, in the very pattering of the drops,
and in every sound and sight around my house, an
infinite and unaccountable friendliness all at once
like an atmosphere sustaining me, as made the
fancied advantages of human neighborhood insig-
nificant, and I have never thought of them since.
Every little pine needle expanded and swelled with
sympathy and befriended me. I was so distinctly
made aware of the presence of something kindred to
me, even in scenes which we are accustomed to call
wild and dreary, and also that the nearest of blood to
me and humanest was not a person nor a villager,
that I thought no place could ever be strange to me
again. -
"Mourning untimely consumes the sad;
Few are their days in the land of the living,
Beautiful daughter of Toscar."

Some of my pleasantest hours were during the long

rain storms in the spring or fall, which confined me
to the house for the afternoon as well as the fore-
noon, soothed by their ceaseless roar and pelting;
when an early twilight ushered in a long evening in
which many thoughts had time to take root and un-
fold themselves. In those driving north-east rains
which tried the village houses so, when the maids
stood ready with mop and pail in front entries to keep
the deluge out, I sat behind my door in my little
house, which was all entry, and thoroughly enjoyed
its protection. In one heavy thunder shower the
lightning struck a large pitch-pine across the pond,
making a very conspicuous and perfectly regular
spiral groove from top to bottom, an inch or more
deep, and four or five inches wide, as you would
groove a walking-stick. I passed it again the other
 WALDEN 133

day, and was struck with awe on looking up and

beholding that mark, now more distinct than ever,
where a terrific and resistless bolt came down out of
the harmless sky eight years ago. Men frequently say
to me, "I should think you would feel lonesome
down there, and want to be nearer to folks, rainy and
snowy days and nights especially." I am tempted to
reply to such,—This whole earth which we inhabit
is but a point in space. How far apart, think you,
dwell the two most distant inhabitants of yonder
star, the breadth of whose disk cannot be appreciated
by our instruments? Why should I feel lonely? is not
our planet in the Milky Way? This which you put
seems to me not to be the most important question.
What sort of space is that which separates a man
from his fellows and makes him solitary? I have
found that no exertion of the legs can bring two
minds much nearer to one another. What do we want
most to dwell near to? Not to many men surely, the
depot, the post-office, the bar-room, the meeting-
house, the school-house, the grocery, Beacon Hill, or
the Five Points, where men most congregate, but
to the perennial source of our life, whence in all our
experience we have found that to issue; as the willow
stands near the water and sends out its roots in that
direction. This will vary with different natures, but
this is the place where a wise man will dig his cel-
lar. . . . I one evening overtook one of my townsmen,
who has accumulated what is called "a handsome
property",—though I never got a fair view of it.-on
the Walden road, driving a pair of cattle to market,
who inquired of me how I could bring my mind to
give up so many of the comforts of life. I answered
that I was very sure I liked it passably well; I was
not joking. And so I went home to my bed, and left
him to pick his way through the darkness and the
134 SOLITUDE

mud to Brighton,—or Bright-town,—which place he

would reach some time in the morning.
Any prospect of awakening or coming to life to a
dead man makes indifferent all times and places. The
place where that may occur is always the same, and
indescribably pleasant to all our senses. For the most
part we allow only outlying and transient circum-
stances to make our occasions. They are, in fact, the
cause of our distraction. Nearest to all things is that
power which fashions their being. Next to us the
grandest laws are continually being executed. Next
to us is not the workman whom we have hired, with
whom we love so well to talk, but the workman whose
work we are.
"How vast and profound is the influence of the sub-
tile powers of Heaven and of Earth!"
"We seek to perceive them, and we do not see them;
we seek to hear them, and we do not hear them; iden-
tified with the substance of things, they cannot be
separated from them."
"They cause that in all the universe men purify and
sanctify their hearts, and clothe themselves in their
holiday garments to offer sacrifices and oblations to
their ancestors. It is an ocean of subtile intelligences.
They are every where, above us, on our left, on our
right; they environ us on all sides."
We are the subjects of an experiment which is not
a little interesting to me. Can we not do without the
society of our gossips a little while under these cir-
cumstances,—have our own thoughts to cheer us?
Confucius says truly, "Virtue does not remain as an
abandoned orphan; it must of necessity have neigh-
bors."
With thinking we may be beside ourselves in a sane
sense. By a conscious effort of the mind we can stand
aloof from actions and their consequences; and all
 WALDEN 135

things, good and bad, go by us like a torrent. We are

not wholly involved in Nature. I may be either the
drift-wood in the stream, or Indra in the sky looking
down on it. I may be affected by a theatrical exhibi-
tion; on the other hand, I may not be affected by an
actual event which appears to concern me much
more. I only know myself as a human entity; the
scene, so to speak, of thoughts and affections; and am
sensible of a certain doubleness by which I can stand
as remote from myself as from another. However in-
tense my experience, I am conscious of the presence
and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not
a part of me, but spectator, sharing no experience,
but taking note of it; and that is no more I than it is
you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is
over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fic-
tion, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was
concerned. This doubleness may easily make us poor
neighbors and friends sometimes.
I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of
the time. To be in company, even with the best, is
soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I
never found the companion that was so companion-
able as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely
when we go abroad among men than when we stay in
our chambers. A man thinking or working is always
alone, let him be where he will. Solitude is not meas-
ured by the miles of space that intervene between a
man and his fellows. The really diligent student in
one of the crowded hives of Cambridge College is as
solitary as a dervish in the desert. The farmer can
work alone in the field or the woods all day, hoeing
or chopping, and not feel lonesome, because he is em-
ployed; but when he comes home at night he cannot
sit down in a room alone, at the mercy of his thoughts,
but must be where he can "see the folks," and rec-
136 SOLITUDE

reate, and as he thinks remunerate himself for his

day's solitude; and hence he wonders how the stu-
dent can sit alone in the house all night and most of
the day without ennui and "the blues;" but he does
not realize that the student, though in the house, is
still at work in his field, and chopping in his woods,
as the farmer in his, and in turn seeks the same recrea-
tion and society that the latter does, though it may
be a more condensed form of it.
Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very
short intervals, not having had time to acquire any
new value for each other. We meet at meals three
times a day, and give each other a new taste of that
old musty cheese that we are. We have had to agree
on a certain set of rules, called etiquette and polite-
ness, to make this frequent meeting tolerable, and
that we need not come to open war. We meet at the
post-office, and at the sociable, and about the fireside
every night; we live thick and are in each other's way,
and stumble over one another, and I think that we
thus lose some respect for one another. Certainly less
frequency would suffice for all important and hearty
communications. Consider the girls in a factory,—
never alone, hardly in their dreams. It would be better
if there were but one inhabitant to a square mile, as
where I live. The value of a man is not in his skin,
that we should touch him.
I have heard of a man lost in the woods and dying
of famine and exhaustion at the foot of a tree, whose
loneliness was relieved by the grotesque visions with
which, owing to bodily weakness, his diseased imagi-
nation surrounded him, and which he believed to be
real. So also, owing to bodily and mental health and
strength, we may be continually cheered by a like
but more normal and natural society, and come to
know that we are never alone.
 WALDEN 137

I have a great deal of company in my house; es-

pecially in the morning, when nobody calls. Let me
suggest a few comparisons, that some one may con-
vey an idea of my situation. I am no more lonely than
the loon in the pond that laughs so loud, or than
Walden Pond itself. What company has that lonely
lake, I pray? And yet it has not the blue devils, but
the blue angels in it, in the azure tint of its waters.
The sun is alone, except in thick weather, when there
sometimes appear to be two, but one is a mock sun.
God is alone,—but the devil, he is far from being
alone; he sees a great deal of company; he is legion.
I am no more lonely than a single mullein or dande-
lion in a pasture, or a bean leaf, or sorrel, or a horse-
fly, or a humble-bee. I am no more lonely than the
Mill Brook, or a weathercock, or the northstar, or the
south wind, or an April shower, or a January thaw,
or the first spider in a new house.
I have occasional visits in the long winter eve-
nings, when the snow falls fast and the wind howls
in the wood, from an old settler and original pro-
prietor, who is reported to have dug Walden Pond,
and stoned it, and fringed it with pine woods; who
tells me stories of old time and of new eternity; and
between us we manage to pass a cheerful evening
with social mirth and pleasant views of things, even
without apples or cider,—a most wise and humorous
friend, whom I love much, who keeps himself more
secret than ever did Goffe or Whalley; and though
he is thought to be dead, none can show where he is
buried. An elderly dame, too, dwells in my neighbor-
hood, invisible to most persons, in whose odorous herb
garden I love to stroll sometimes, gathering simples
and listening to her fables; for she has a genius of
unequalled fertility, and her memory runs back
farther than mythology, and she can tell me the
138 SOLITUDE

original of every fable, and on what fact every one

is founded, for the incidents occurred when she was
young. A ruddy and lusty old dame, who delights in
all weathers and seasons, and is likely to outlive all
her children yet.
The indescribable innocence and beneficence of
Nature,—of sun and wind and rain, of summer and
winter,—such health, such cheer, they afford forever!
and such sympathy have they ever with our race,
that all Nature would be affected, and the sun's
brightness fade, and the winds would sigh humanely,
and the clouds rain tears, and the woods shed their
leaves and put on mourning in midsummer, if any
man should ever for a just cause grieve. Shall I not
have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves
and vegetable mould myself?
What is the pill which will keep us well, serene,
contented? Not my or thy great-grandfather's, but our
great-grandmother Nature's universal, vegetable, bo-
tanic medicines, by which she has kept herself young
always, outlived so many old Parrs in her day, and
fed her health with their decaying fatness. For my
panacea, instead of one of those quack vials of a mix-
ture dipped from Acheron and the Dead Sea, which
come out of those long shallow black-schooner look-
ing wagons which we sometimes see made to carry
bottles, let me have a draught of undiluted morning
air. Morning air! If men will not drink of this at the
fountain-head of the day, why, then, we must even
bottle up some and sell it in the shops, for the benefit
of those who have lost their subscription ticket to
morning time in this world. But remember, it will not
keep quite till noon-day even in the coolest cellar, but
drive out the stopples long ere that and follow west-
ward the steps of Aurora. I am no worshipper of
Hygeia, who was the daughter of that old herb-
 WALDEN 139

doctor ^Esculapius, and who is represented on monu-

ments holding a serpent in one hand, and in the
other a cup out of which the serpent sometimes
drinks; but rather of Hebe, cupbearer to Jupiter, who
was the daughter of Juno and wild lettuce, and who
had the power of restoring gods and men to the vigor
of youth. She was probably the only thoroughly sound-
conditioned, healthy, and robust young lady that ever
walked the globe, and wherever she came it was
spring.
Visitors

I THINK that I love society as much as most,

and am ready enough to fasten myself like a blood-
sucker for the time to any full-blooded man that
comes in my way. I am naturally no hermit, but
might possibly sit out the sturdiest frequenter of the
bar-room, if my business called me thither.
I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude,
two for friendship, three for society. When visitors
came in larger and unexpected numbers there was
but the third chair for them all, but they generally
economized the room by standing up. It is surprising
how many great men and women a small house will
contain. I have had twenty-five or thirty souls, with
their bodies, at once under my roof, and yet we often
parted without being aware that we had come very
near to one another. Many of our houses, both public
and private, with their almost innumerable apart-
ments, their huge halls and their cellars for the stor-
age of wines and other munitions of peace, appear to
me extravagantly large for their inhabitants. They
are so vast and magnificent that the latter seem to be
only vermin which infest them. I am surprised when
the herald blows his summons before some Tremont
or Astor or Middlesex House, to see come creeping
out over the piazza, for all inhabitants a ridiculous
mouse, which soon again slinks into some hole in
the pavement.
One inconvenience I sometimes experienced in so
small a house, the difficulty of getting to a sufficient
distance from my guest when we began to utter the
big thoughts in big words. You want room for your
thoughts to get into sailing trim and run a course or
two before they make their port. The bullet of your
 WALDKN 141

thought must have overcome its lateral and ricochet

motion and fallen into its last and steady course be-
fore it reaches the ear of the hearer, else it may
plough out again through the side of his head. Also,
our sentences wanted room to unfold and form their
columns in the interval. Individuals, like nations,
must have suitable broad and natural boundaries,
even a considerable neutral ground, between them. I
have found it a singular luxury to talk across the
pond to a companion on the opposite side. In my
house we were so near that we could not begin to
hear,—we could not speak low enough to be heard;
as when you throw two stones into calm water so
near that they break each other's undulations. If we
are merely loquacious and loud talkers, then we can
afford to stand very near together, cheek by jowl,
and feel each other's breath; but if we speak reservedly
and thoughtfully, we want to be farther apart, that
all animal heat and moisture may have a chance to
evaporate. If we would enjoy the most intimate so-
ciety with that in each of us which is without, or
above, being spoken to, we must not only be silent,
but commonly so far apart bodily that we cannot
possibly hear each other's voice in any case. Referred
to this standard, speech is for the convenience of
those who are hard of hearing; but there are many
fine things which we cannot say if we have to shout.
As the conversation began to assume a loftier and
grander tone, we gradually shoved our chairs farther
apart till they touched the wall in opposite corners,
and then commonly there was not room enough.
My "best" room, however, my withdrawing room,
always ready for company, on whose carpet the sun
rarely fell, was the pine wood behind my house.
Thither in summer days, when distinguished guests
came, I took them, and a priceless domestic swept the
142 VISITORS

floor and dusted the furniture and kept the things

in order.
If one guest came he sometimes partook of my
frugal meal, and it was no interruption to conversa-
tion to be stirring a hasty-pudding, or watching the
rising and maturing of a loaf of bread in the ashes,
in the mean while. But if twenty came and sat in my
house there was nothing said about dinner, though
there might be bread enough for two, more than if
eating were a forsaken habit; but we naturally prac-
tised abstinence; and this was never felt to be an
offence against hospitality, but the most proper and
considerate course. The waste and decay of physical
life, which so often needs repair, seemed miracu-
lously retarded in such a case, and the vital vigor
stood its ground. I could entertain thus a thousand
as well as twenty; and if any ever went away disap-
pointed or hungry from my house when they found
me at home, they may depend upon it that I sympa-
thized with them at least. So easy is it, though many
housekeepers doubt it, to establish new and better cus-
toms in the place of the old. You need not rest your
reputation on the dinners you give. For my own part,
I was never so effectually deterred from frequenting a
man's house, by any kind of Cerberus whatever, as by
the parade one made about dining me, which I took to
be a very polite and roundabout hint never to trouble
him so again. I think I shall never revisit those scenes.
I should be proud to have for the motto of my cabin
those lines of Spenser which one of my visitors in-
scribed on a yellow walnut leaf for a card: —

"Arrived there, the little house they fill,

Ne looke for entertainment where none was;
Rest is their feast, and all things at their will:
The noblest mind the best contentment has."
 WALDEN 143

When Winslow, afterward governor of the Plym-

outh Colony, went with a companion on a visit of
ceremony to Massassoit on foot through the woods,
and arrived tired and hungry at his lodge, they were
well received by the king, but nothing was said about
eating that day. When the night arrived, to quote
their own words,—"He laid us on the bed with him-
self and his wife, they at the one end and we at the
other, it being only plank, laid a foot from the ground,
and a thin mat upon them. Two more of his chief
men, for want of room, pressed by and upon us; so
that we were worse weary of our lodging than of our
journey." At one o'clock the next day Massassoit
"brought two fishes that he had shot," about thrice
as big as a bream; "these being boiled, there were at
least forty looked for a share in them. The most ate
of them. This meal only we had in two nights and a
day; and had not one of us bought a partridge, we
had taken our journey fasting." Fearing that they
would be light-headed for want of food and also sleep,
owing to "the savages' barbarous singing, (for they
used to sing themselves asleep,)" and that they might
get home while they had strength to travel, they de-
parted. As for lodging, it is true they were but poorly
entertained, though what they found an inconveni-
ence was no doubt intended for an honor; but as far
as eating was concerned, I do not see how the Indians
could have done better. They had nothing to eat them-
selves, and they were wiser than to think that apolo-
gies could supply the place of food to their guests; so
they drew their belts tighter and said nothing about
it. Another time when Winslow visited them, it be-
ing a season of plenty with them, there was no de-
ficiency in this respect.
As for men, they will hardly fail one any where. I
had more visitors while I lived in the woods than at
144 VISITORS

any other period of my life; I mean that I had some.

I met several there under more favorable circum-
stances than I could any where else. But fewer came
to see me upon trivial business. In this respect, my
company was winnowed by my mere distance from
town. I had withdrawn so far within the great ocean
of solitude, into which the rivers of society empty,
that for the most part, so far as my needs were con-
cerned, only the finest sediment was deposited around
me. Beside, there were wafted to me evidences of un-
explored and uncultivated continents on the other
side.
Who should come to my lodge this morning but a
true Homeric or Paphlagonian man,—he had so suit-
able and poetic a name that I am sorry I cannot print
it here,—a Canadian, a wood-chopper and post-maker,
who can hole fifty posts in a day, who made his last
supper on a woodchuck which his dog caught. He, too,
has heard of Homer, and, "if it were not for books,"
would "not know what to do rainy days," though per-
haps he has not read one wholly through for many
rainy seasons. Some priest who could pronounce the
Greek itself taught him to read his verse in the testa-
ment in his native parish far away; and now I must
translate to him, while he holds the book, Achilles'
reproof to Patroclus for his sad countenance.—"Why
are you in tears, Patroclus, like a young girl?"—

"Or have you alone heard some news from Phthia?

They say that Menoetius lives yet, son of Actor,
And Peleus lives, son of ^Eacus, among the Myrmidons,
Either of whom having died, we should greatly grieve."

He says, "That's good." He has a great 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," says he. To him Homer
 WALDEN 145

was a great writer, though what his writing was about

he did not know. A more simple and natural man it
would be hard to find. Vice and disease, which cast
such a sombre moral hue over the world, seemed to
have hardly any existence for him. He was about
twenty-eight years old, and had left Canada and his
father's house a dozen years before to work in the
States, and earn money to buy a farm with at last,
perhaps in his native country. He was cast in the
coarsest mould; a stout but sluggish body, yet grace-
fully carried, with a thick sunburnt neck, dark bushy
hair, and dull sleepy blue eyes, which were occasion-
ally lit up with expression. He wore a flat gray cloth
cap, a dingy wool-colored greatcoat, and cowhide
boots. He was a great consumer of meat, usually
carrying his dinner to his work a couple of miles
past my house,—for he chopped all summer,—in a tin
pail; cold meats, often cold woodchucks, and coffee
in a stone bottle which dangled by a string from his
belt; and sometimes he offered me a drink. He came
along early, crossing my bean-field, though without
anxiety or haste to get to his work, such as Yankees
exhibit. He wasn't a-going to hurt himself. He didn't
care if he only earned his board. Frequently he would
leave his dinner in the bushes, when his dog had
caught a woodchuck by the way, and go back a mile
and a half to dress it and leave it in the cellar of the
house where he boarded, after deliberating first for
half an hour whether he could not sink it in the pond
safely till nightfall,—loving to dwell long upon these
themes. He would say, as he went by in the morning,
"How thick the pigeons are! If working every day
were not my trade, I could get all the meat I should
want by hunting,—pigeons, woodchucks, rabbits,
partridges,-by gosh! I could get all I should want
for a week in one day."
146 VISITORS

He was a skilful chopper, and indulged in some

flourishes and ornaments in his art. He cut his trees
level and close to the ground, that the sprouts which
came up afterward might be more vigorous and a
sled might slide over the stumps; and instead of leav-
ing a whole tree to support his corded wood, he would
pare it away to a slender stake or splinter which you
could break off with your hand at last.
He interested me because he was so quiet and soli-
tary and so happy withal; a well of good humor and
contentment which overflowed at his eyes. His mirth
was without alloy. Sometimes I saw him at his work
in the woods, felling trees, and he would greet me
with a laugh of inexpressible satisfaction, and a salu-
tation in Canadian French, though he spoke English
as well. When I approached him he would suspend
his work, and with half-suppressed mirth lie along the
trunk of a pine which he had felled, and, peeling off
the inner bark, roll it up into a ball and chew it while
he laughed and talked. Such an exuberance of animal
spirits had he that he sometimes tumbled down and
rolled on the ground with laughter at any thing which
made him think and tickled him. Looking round upon
the trees he would exclaim,—"By George! I can enjoy
myself well enough here chopping; I want no better
sport." Sometimes, when at leisure, he amused him-
self all day in the woods with a pocket pistol, firing
salutes to himself at regular intervals as he walked.
In the winter he had a fire by which at noon he
warmed his coffee in a kettle; and as he sat on a log
to eat his dinner the chicadees would sometimes
come round and alight on his arm and peck at the
potato in his fingers; and he said that he "liked to
have the little fellers about him."
In him the animal man chiefly was developed. In
physical endurance and contentment he was cousin
 WALDEN 147

to the pine and the rock. I asked him once if he was

not sometimes tired at night, after working all day;
and he answered, with a sincere and serious look,
"Gorrappit, I never was tired in my life." But the in-
tellectual and what is called spiritual man in him
were slumbering as in an infant. He had been in-
structed only in that innocent and ineffectual way in
which the Catholic priests teach the aborigines, by
which the pupil is never educated to the degree of
consciousness, but only to the degree of trust and
reverence, and a child is not made a man, but kept a
child. When Nature made him, she gave him a strong
body and contentment for his portion, and propped
him on every side with reverence and reliance, that
he might live out his threescore years and ten a child.
He was so genuine and unsophisticated that no in-
troduction would serve to introduce him, more than
if you introduced a woodchuck to your neighbor. He
had got to find him out as you did. He would not play
any part. Men paid him wages for work, and so helped
to feed and clothe him; but he never exchanged opin-
ions with them. He was so simply and naturally
humble—if he can be called humble who never as-
pires—that humility was no distinct quality in him,
nor could he conceive of it. Wiser men were demi-
gods to him. If you told him that such a one was com-
ing, he did as if he thought that any thing so grand
would expect nothing of himself, but take all the re-
sponsibility on itself, and let him be forgotten still. He
never heard the sound of praise. He particularly rev-
erenced the writer and the preacher. Their perform-
ances were miracles. When I told him that I wrote
considerably, he thought for a long time that it was
merely the handwriting which I meant, for he could
write a remarkably good hand himself. I sometimes
found the name of his native parish handsomely writ-
148 VISITORS

ten in the snow by the highway, with the proper

French accent, and knew that he had passed. I asked
him if he ever wished to write his thoughts. He said
that he had read and written letters for those who
could not, but he never tried to write thoughts,—no, he
could not, he could not tell what to put first, it would
kill him, and then there was spelling to be attended to
at the same time!
I heard that a distinguished wise man and reformer
asked him if he did not want the world to be changed;
but he answered with a chuckle of surprise in his
Canadian accent, not knowing that the question had
ever been entertained before, "No, I like it well
enough." It would have suggested many things to a
philosopher to have dealings with him. To a stranger
he appeared to know nothing of things in general;
yet I sometimes saw in him a man whom I had not
seen before, and I did not know whether he was as
wise as Shakspeare or as simply ignorant as a child,
whether to suspect him of a fine poetic consciousness
or of stupidity. A townsman told me that when he
met him sauntering through the village in his small
close-fitting cap, and whistling to himself, he re-
minded him of a prince in disguise.
His only books were an almanac and an arithmetic,
in which last he was considerably expert. The former
was a sort of cyclopasdia to him, which he supposed
to contain an abstract of human knowledge, as in-
deed it does to a considerable extent. I loved to sound
him on the various reforms of the day, and he never
failed to look at them in the most simple and prac-
tical light. He had never heard of such things before.
Could he do without factories? I asked. He had worn
the home-made Vermont gray, he said, and that was
good. Could he dispense with tea and coffee? Did this
country afford any beverage beside water? He had
 WALDEN 149

soaked hemlock leaves in water and drank it, and

thought that was better than water in warm weather.
When I asked him if he could do without money, he
showed the convenience of money in such a way as to
suggest and coincide with the most philosophical ac-
counts of the origin of this institution, and the very
derivation of the word pecunia. If an ox were his
property, and he wished to get needles and thread at
the store, he thought it would be inconvenient and
impossible soon to go on mortgaging some portion of
the creature each time to that amount. He could de-
fend many institutions better than any philosopher,
because, in describing them as they concerned him,
he gave the true reason for their prevalence, and spec-
ulation had not suggested to him any other. At an-
other time, hearing Plato's definition of a man,—a
biped without feathers,—and that one exhibited a cock
plucked and called it Plato's man, he thought it an
important difference that the knees bent the wrong
way. He would sometimes exclaim, "How I love to
talk! By George, I could talk all day!" I asked him
once, when I had not seen him for many months, if
he had got a new idea this summer. "Good Lord,"
said he, "a man that has to work as I do, if he does
not forget the ideas he has had, he will do well. May
be the man you hoe with is inclined to race; then, by
gorry, your mind must be there; you think of weeds."
He would sometimes ask me first on such occasions,
if I had made any improvement. One winter day I
asked him if he was always satisfied with himself,
wishing to suggest a substitute within him for the
priest without, and some higher motive for living.
"Satisfied!" said he; "some men are satisfied with one
thing, and some with another. One man, perhaps, if
he has got enough, will be satisfied to sit all day with
his back to the fire and his belly to the table, by
150 VISITORS

George!" Yet I never, by any manoeuvring, could get

him to take the spiritual view of things; the highest
that he appeared to conceive of was a simple ex-
pediency, such as you might expect an animal to ap-
preciate; and this, practically, is true of most men.
If I suggested any improvement in his mode of life,
he merely answered, without expressing any regret,
that it was too late. Yet he thoroughly believed in
honesty and the like virtues.
There was a certain positive originality, however
slight, to be detected in him, and I occasionally ob-
served that he was thinking for himself and express-
ing his own opinion, a phenomenon so rare that I
would any day walk ten miles to observe it, and it
amounted to the re-origination of many of the insti-
tutions of society. Though he hesitated, and perhaps
failed to express himself distinctly, he always had a
presentable thought behind. Yet his thinking was so
primitive and immersed in his animal life, that,
though more promising than a merely learned man's,
it rarely ripened to any thing which can be reported.
He suggested that there might be men of genius in
the lowest grades of life, however permanently hum-
ble and illiterate, who take their own view always, or
do not pretend to see at all; who are as bottomless
even as Walden Pond was thought to be, though they
may be dark and muddy.

Many a traveller came out of his way to see me

and the inside of my house, and, as an excuse for
calling, asked for a glass of water. I told them that I
drank at the pond, and pointed thither, offering to
lend them a dipper. Far off as I lived, I was not ex-
empted from that annual visitation which occurs,
methinks, about the first of April, when every body
 WALDEN 151

is on the move; and I had my share of good luck,

though there were some curious specimens among
my visitors. Half-witted men from the almshouse and
elsewhere came to see me; but I endeavored to make
them exercise all the wit they had, and make their
confessions to me; in such cases making wit the
theme of our conversation; and so was compensated.
Indeed, I found some of them to be wiser than the
so called overseers of the poor and selectmen of the
town, and thought it was time that the tables were
turned. With respect to wit, I learned that there was
not much difference between the half and the whole.
One day, in particular, an inoffensive, simple-minded
pauper, whom with others I had often seen used as
fencing stuff, standing or sitting on a bushel in the
fields to keep cattle and himself from straying, visited
me, and expressed a wish to live as I did. He told
me, with the utmost simplicity and truth, quite su-
perior, or rather inferior, to any thing that is called
humility, that he was "deficient in intellect." These
were his words. The Lord had made him so, yet he
supposed the Lord cared as much for him as for
another. "I have always been so," said he, "from my
childhood; I never had much mind; I was not like
other children; I am weak in the head. It was the
Lord's will, I suppose." And there he was to prove the
truth of his words. He was a metaphysical puzzle to
me. I have rarely met a fellow-man on such promis-
ing ground,—it was so simple and sincere and so true
all that he said. And, true enough, in proportion as he
appeared to humble himself was he exalted. I did not
know at first but it was the result of a wise policy. It
seemed that from such a basis of truth and frankness
as the poor weak-headed pauper had laid, our inter-
course might go forward to something better than the
intercourse of sages.
152 VISITORS

I had some guests from those not reckoned com-

monly among the town's poor, but who should be;
who are among the world's poor, at any rate; guests
who appeal, not to your hospitality, but to your hos-
pitalality; who earnestly wish to be helped, and pref-
ace their appeal with the information that they are
resolved, for one thing, never to help themselves. I
require of a visitor that he be not actually starving,
though he may have the very best appetite in the
world, however he got it. Objects of charity are not
guests. Men who did not know when their visit had
terminated, though I went about my business again,
answering them from greater and greater remote-
ness. Men of almost every degree of wit called on me
in the migrating season. Some who had more wits
than they knew what to do with; runaway slaves with
plantation manners, who listened from time to time,
like the fox in the fable, as if they heard the hounds
a-baying on their track, and looked at me beseeching-
ly, as much as to say,—
"O Christian, will you send me back?"
One real runaway slave, among the rest, whom I
helped to forward toward the northstar. Men of one
idea, like a hen with one chicken, and that a duck-
ling; men of a thousand ideas, and unkempt heads,
like those hens which are made to take charge of a
hundred chickens, all in pursuit of one bug, a score
of them lost in every morning's dew,-and become
frizzled and mangy in consequence; men of ideas in-
stead of legs, a sort of intellectual centipede that
made you crawl all over. One man proposed a book in
which visitors should write their names, as at the
White Mountains; but, alas! I have too good a mem-
ory to make that necessary.
 WALDEN 153

I could not but notice some of the peculiarities of

my visitors. Girls and boys and young women gen-
erally seemed glad to be in the woods. They looked
in the pond and at the flowers, and improved their
time. Men of business, even farmers, thought only of
solitude and employment, and of the great distance
at which I dwelt from something or other; and
though they said that they loved a ramble in the
woods occasionally, it was obvious that they did not.
Restless committed men, whose time was all taken
up in getting a living or keeping it; ministers who
spoke of God as if they enjoyed a monopoly of the
subject, who could not bear all kinds of opinions;
doctors, lawyers, uneasy housekeepers who pried into
my cupboard and bed when I was out,—how came Mrs.
to know that my sheets were not as clean as hers?
—young men who had ceased to be young, and had
concluded that it was safest to follow the beaten
track of the professions,—all these generally said
that it was not possible to do so much good in my
position. Ay! there was the rub. The old and infirm
and the timid, of whatever age or sex, thought most
of sickness, and sudden accident and death; to them
life seemed full of danger,—what danger is there if you
don't think of any?—and they thought that a prudent
man would carefully select the safest position, where
Dr. B. might be on hand at a moment's warning.
To them the village was literally a com-munity, a
league for mutual defence, and you would suppose
that they would not go a-huckleberrying without a
medicine chest. The amount of it is, if a man is alive,
there is always danger that he may die, though the
danger must be allowed to be less in proportion as
he is dead-and-alive to begin with. A man sits as
many risks as he runs. Finally, there were the self-
154 VISITORS

styled reformers, the greatest bores of all, who thought

that I was forever singing,—
This is the house that I built;
This is the man that lives in the house that I built;
but they did not know that the third line was,—
These are the folks that worry the man
That lives in the house that I built.
I did not fear the hen-harriers, for I kept no chickens;
but I feared the men-harriers rather.
I had more cheering visitors than the last. Chil-
dren come a-berrying, railroad men taking a Sunday
morning walk in clean shirts, fishermen and hunters,
poets and philosophers, in short, all honest pilgrims,
who came out to the woods for freedom's sake, and
really left the village behind, I was ready to greet
with,—"Welcome, Englishmen! welcome, English-
men!" for I had had communication with that race.
The Bean-Field

MEANWHILE my beans, the length of whose

rows, added together, was seven miles already plant-
ed, were impatient to be hoed, for the earliest had
grown considerably before the latest were in the
ground; indeed they were not easily to be put off.
What was the meaning of this so steady and self-
respecting, this small Herculean labor, I knew not. I
came to love my rows, my beans, though so many
more than I wanted. They attached me to the earth,
and so I got strength like Antaeus. But why should
I raise them? Only Heaven knows. This was my
curious labor all summer,-to make this portion of
the earth's surface, which had yielded only cinque-
foil, blackberries, johnswort, and the like, before,
sweet wild fruits and pleasant flowers, produce in-
stead this pulse. What shall I learn of beans or beans
of me? I cherish them, I hoe them, early and late
I have an eye to them; and this is my day's work.
It is a fine broad leaf to look on. My auxiliaries are
the dews and rains which water this dry soil, and
what fertility is in the soil itself, which for the most
part is lean and effete. My enemies are worms, cool
days, and most of all woodchucks. The last have
nibbled for me a quarter of an acre clean. But what
right had I to oust johnswort and the rest, and break
up their ancient herb garden? Soon, however, the
remaining beans will be too tough for them, and go
forward to meet new foes.
When I was four years old, as I well remember,
I was brought from Boston to this my native town,
through these very woods and this field, to the pond.
It is one of the oldest scenes stamped on my memory.
And now to-night my flute has waked the echoes over
156 THE B E A N - F I E L D

that very water. The pines still stand here older than
I; or, if some have fallen, I have cooked my supper
with their stumps, and a new growth is rising all
around, preparing another aspect for new infant eyes.
Almost the same johnswort springs from the same
perennial root in this pasture, and even I have at
length helped to clothe that fabulous landscape of
my infant dreams, and one of the results of my
presence and influence is seen in these bean leaves,
corn blades, and potato vines.
I planted about two acres and a half of upland;
and as it was only about fifteen years since the land
was cleared, and I myself had got out two or three
cords of stumps, I did not give it any manure; but
in the course of the summer it appeared by the arrow-
heads which I turned up in hoeing, that an extinct
nation had anciently dwelt here and planted corn and
beans ere white men came to clear the land, and so,
to some extent, had exhausted the soil for this very
crop.
Before yet any woodchuck or squirrel had run
across the road, or the sun had got above the shrub-
oaks, while all the dew was on, though the farmers
warned me against it,—I would advise you to do all
your work if possible while the dew is on,—I began
to level the ranks of haughty weeds in my bean-field
and throw dust upon their heads. Early in the morn-
ing I worked barefooted, dabbling like a plastic artist
in the dewy and crumbling sand, but later in the day
the sun blistered my feet. There the sun lighted me to
hoe beans, pacing slowly backward and forward over
that yellow gravelly upland, between the long green
rows, fifteen rods, the one end terminating in a shrub
oak copse where I could rest in the shade, the other
in a blackberry field where the green berries deepened
their tints by the time I had made another bout. Re-
 WALDEN 157

moving the weeds, putting fresh soil about the bean

stems, and encouraging this weed which I had sown,
making the yellow soil express its summer thought
in bean leaves and blossoms rather than in worm-
wood and piper and millet grass, making the earth
say beans instead of grass,—this was my daily work.
As I had little aid from horses or cattle, or hired men
or boys, or improved implements of husbandry, I was
much slower, and became much more intimate with
my beans than usual. But labor of the hands, even
when pursued to the verge of drudgery, is perhaps
never the worst form of idleness. It has a constant
and imperishable moral, and to the scholar it yields
a classic result. A very agricola laboriosus was I to
travellers bound westward through Lincoln and Way-
land to nobody knows where; they sitting at their
ease in gigs, with elbows on knees, and reins loosely
hanging in festoons; I the home-staying, laborious
native of the soil. But soon my homestead was out of
their sight and thought. It was the only open and
cultivated field for a great distance on either side of
the road; so they made the most of it; and some-
times the man in the field heard more of travellers'
gossip and comment than was meant for his ear:
"Beans so late! peas so late!"—for I continued to plant
when others had begun to hoe,—the ministerial hus-
bandman had not suspected it. "Corn, my boy, for
fodder; corn for fodder." "Does he live there?" asks
the black bonnet of the gray coat; and the hard-
featured farmer reins up his grateful dobbin to in-
quire what you are doing where he sees no manure
in the furrow, and recommends a little chip dirt, or
any little waste stuff, or it may be ashes or plaster.
But here were two acres and a half of furrows, and
only a hoe for cart and two hands to draw it,—there
being an aversion to other carts and horses,—and
158 THE BEAN-FIELD

chip dirt far away. Fellow-travellers as they rattled

by compared it aloud with the fields which they had
passed, so that I came to know how I stood in the
agricultural world. This was one field not in Mr.
Colman's report. And, by the way, who estimates the
value of the crop which Nature yields in the still
wilder fields unimproved by man? The crop of Eng-
lish hay is carefully weighed, the moisture calculated,
the silicates and the potash; but in all dells and pond
holes in the woods and pastures and swamps grows a
rich and various crop only unreaped by man. Mine was,
as it were, the connecting link between wild and
cultivated fields; as some states are civilized, and
others half-civilized, and others savage or barbarous,
so my field was, though not in a bad sense, a half-
cultivated field. They were beans cheerfully return-
ing to their wild and primitive state that I cultivated,
and my hoe played the Ranz des Vaches for them.
Near at hand, upon the topmost spray of a birch,
sings the brown-thrasher—or red mavis, as some love
to call him—all the morning, glad of your society, that
would find out another farmer's field if yours were
not here. While you are planting the seed, he cries,-
"Drop it, drop it,—cover it up, cover it up,-pull it up,
pull it up, pull it up." But this was not corn, and so
it was safe from such enemies as he. You may wonder
what his rigmarole, his amateur Paganini perform-
ances on one string or on twenty, have to do with
your planting, and yet prefer it to leached ashes or
plaster. It was a cheap sort of top dressing in which I
had entire faith.
As I drew a still fresher soil about the rows with
my hoe, I disturbed the ashes of unchronicled nations
who in primeval years lived under these heavens, and
their small implements of war and hunting were
brought to the light of this modern day. They lay
 WALDEN 159

mingled with other natural stones, some of which

bore the marks of having been burned by Indian fires,
and some by the sun, and also bits of pottery and
glass brought hither by the recent cultivators of the
soil. When my hoe tinkled against the stones, that
music echoed to the woods and the sky, and was an
accompaniment to my labor which yielded an instant
and immeasurable crop. It was no longer beans that
I hoed, nor I that hoed beans; and I remembered
with as much pity as pride, if I remembered at all,
my acquaintances who had gone to the city to at-
tend the oratorios. The night-hawk circled overhead
in the sunny afternoons—for I sometimes made a day
of it-like a mote in the eye, or in heaven's eye, fall-
ing from time to time with a swoop and a sound as if
the heavens were rent, torn at last to very rags and
tatters, and yet a seamless cope remained; small
imps that fill the air and lay their eggs on the ground
on bare sand or rocks on the tops of hills, where few
have found them; graceful and slender like ripples
caught up from the pond, as leaves are raised by the
wind to float in the heavens; such kindredship is in
Nature. The hawk is aerial brother of the wave which
he sails over and surveys, those his perfect air-in-
flated wings answering to the elemental unfledged
pinions of the sea. Or sometimes I watched a pair
of hen-hawks circling high in the sky, alternately
soaring and descending, approaching and leaving
one another, as if they were the imbodiment of my
own thoughts. Or I was attracted by the passage of
wild pigeons from this wood to that, with a slight
quivering winnowing sound and carrier haste; or
from under a rotten stump my hoe turned up a slug-
gish portentous and outlandish spotted salamander,
a trace of Egypt and the Nile, yet our contemporary.
When I paused to lean on my hoe, these sounds and
160 THE B E A N - F I E L D

sights I heard and saw any where in the row, a part

of the inexhaustible entertainment which the country
offers.
On gala days the town fires its great guns, which
echo like popguns to these woods, and some waifs of
martial music occasionally penetrate thus far. To me,
away there in my bean-field at the other end of the
town, the big guns sounded as if a puff ball had burst;
and when there was a military turnout of which I was
ignorant, I have sometimes had a vague sense all the
day of some sort of itching and disease in the horizon,
as if some eruption would break out there soon, either
scarlatina or canker-rash, until at length some more
favorable puff of wind, making haste over the fields
and up the Wayland road, brought me information of
the "trainers." It seemed by the distant hum as if
somebody's bees had swarmed, and that the neigh-
bors, according to Virgil's advice, by a faint tintin-
nabulum upon the most sonorous of their domestic
utensils, were endeavoring to call them down into the
hive again. And when the sound died quite away, and
the hum had ceased, and the most favorable breezes
told no tale, I knew that they had got the last drone of
them all safely into the Middlesex hive, and that now
their minds were bent on the honey with which it was
smeared.
I felt proud to know that the liberties of Massachu-
setts and of our fatherland were in such safe keep-
ing; and as I turned to my hoeing again I was filled
with an inexpressible confidence, and pursued my
labor cheerfully with a calm trust in the future.
When there were several bands of musicians, it
sounded as if all the village was a vast bellows, and
all the buildings expanded and collapsed alternately
with a din. But sometimes it was a really noble and
inspiring strain that reached these woods, and the
 WALDEN 161

trumpet that sings of fame, and I felt as if I could

spit a Mexican with a good relish,-for why should
we always stand for trifles?—and looked round for a
woodchuck or a skunk to exercise my chivalry upon.
These martial strains seemed as far away as Pales-
tine, and reminded me of a march of crusaders in
the horizon, with a slight tantivy and tremulous mo-
tion of the elm-tree tops which overhang the village.
This was one of the great days; though the sky had
from my clearing only the same everlastingly great
look that it wears daily, and I saw no difference in it.
It was a singular experience that long acquaint-
ance which I cultivated with beans, what with plant-
ing, and hoeing, and harvesting, and threshing, and
picking over, and selling them,—the last was the
hardest of all,—I might add eating, for I did taste. I
was determined to know beans. When they were
growing, I used to hoe from five o'clock in the morn-
ing till noon, and commonly spent the rest of the
day about other affairs. Consider the intimate and
curious acquaintance one makes with various kinds
of weeds,—it will bear some iteration in the account,
for there was no little iteration in the labor,-dis-
turbing their delicate organizations so ruthlessly, and
making such invidious distinctions with his hoe,
levelling whole ranks of one species, and sedulously
cultivating another. That's Roman wormwood,—that's
pigweed,-that's sorrel,—that's piper-grass,—have at
him, chop him up, turn his roots upward to the sun,
don't let him have a fibre in the shade, if you do hell
turn himself t'other side up and be as green as a leek
in two days. A long war, not with cranes, but with
weeds, those Trojans who had sun and rain and dews
on their side. Daily the beans saw me come to their
rescue armed with a hoe, and thin the ranks of their
enemies, filling up the trenches with weedy dead.
162 THE B E A N - F I E L D

Many a lusty crest-waving Hector, that towered a

whole foot above his crowding comrades, fell before
my weapon and rolled in the dust.
Those summer days which some of my contempo-
raries devoted to the fine arts in Boston or Rome, and
others to contemplation in India, and others to trade
in London or New York, I thus, with the other farm-
ers of New England, devoted to husbandry. Not that
I wanted beans to eat, for I am by nature a Pythag-
orean, so far as beans are concerned, whether they
mean porridge or voting, and exchanged them for
rice; but, perchance, as some must work in fields if
only for the sake of tropes and expression, to serve a
parable-maker one day. It was on the whole a rare
amusement, which, continued too long, might have
become a dissipation. Though I gave them no manure,
and did not hoe them all once, I hoed them unusually
well as far as I went, and was paid for it in the end,
"there being in truth," as Evelyn says, "no compost
or laetation whatsoever comparable to this continual
motion, repastination, and turning of the mould with
the spade." "The earth," he adds elsewhere, "especial-
ly if fresh, has a certain magnetism in it, by which
it attracts the salt, power, or virtue (call it either)
which gives it life, and is the logic of all the labor
and stir we keep about it, to sustain us; all dungings
and other sordid temperings being but the vicars
succedaneous to this improvement." Moreover, this
being one of those "worn-out and exhausted lay fields
which enjoy their sabbath," had perchance, as Sir
Kenelm Digby thinks likely, attracted "vital spirits"
from the air. I harvested twelve bushels of beans.
But to be more particular; for it is complained that
Mr. Colman has reported chiefly the expensive ex-
periments of gentlemen farmers; my outgoes were,—
 WALDEN 163

For a hoe, $0 54
Ploughing, harrowing, and furrowing, 7 50, Too much.
Beans for seed, 3 12V2
Potatoes " 1 33
Peas " 0 40
Turnip seed, 0 06
White line for crow fence, 0 02
Horse cultivator and boy three hours, 1 00
Horse and cart to get crop, 0 75

In all, $14 721/z

My income was, (pattern familias vendacem, non

emacem esse oportet,) from

Nine bushels and twelve quarts of beans sold, $16 94

Five " large potatoes, 2 50
Nine " small " 2 25
Grass, 1 00
Stalks, 0 75

In all, $23 44
Leaving a pecuniary profit, as I have elsewhere said, of $8 71 Vz.

This is the result of my experience in raising beans.

Plant the common small white bush bean about the
first of June, in rows three feet by eighteen inches
apart, being careful to select fresh round and un-
mixed seed. First look out for worms, and supply
vacancies by planting anew. Then look out for wood-
chucks, if it is an exposed place, for they will nibble
off the earliest tender leaves almost clean as they
go; and again, when the young tendrils make their
appearance, they have notice of it, and will shear
them off with both buds and young pods, sitting erect
like a squirrel. But above all harvest as early as pos-
sible, if you would escape frosts and have a fair and
saleable crop; you may save much loss by this means.
This further experience also I gained. I said to
myself, I will not plant beans and corn with so much
164 THE B E A N - F I E L D

industry another summer, but such seeds, if the seed

is not lost, as sincerity, truth, simplicity, faith, in-
nocence, and the like, and see if they will not grow in
this soil, even with less toil and manurance, and sus-
tain me, for surely it has not been exhausted for these
crops. Alas! I said this to myself; but now another
summer is gone, and another, and another, and I
am obliged to say to you, Reader, that the seeds
which I planted, if indeed they were the seeds of
those virtues, were wormeaten or had lost their vital-
ity, and so did not come up. Commonly men will only
be brave as their fathers were brave, or timid. This
generation is very sure to plant corn and beans each
new year precisely as the Indians did centuries ago
and taught the first settlers to do, as if there were a
fate in it. I saw an old man the other day, to my
astonishment, making the holes with a hoe for the
seventieth time at least, and not for himself to lie
down in! But why should not the New Englander try
new adventures, and not lay so much stress on his
grain, his potato and grass crop, and his orchards?—
raise other crops than these? Why concern ourselves
so much about our beans for seed, and not be con-
cerned at all about a new generation of men? We
should really be fed and cheered if when we met a
man we were sure to see that some of the qualities
which I have named, which we all prize more than
those other productions, but which are for the most
part broadcast and floating in the air, had taken root
and grown in him. Here comes such a subtile and
ineffable quality, for instance, as truth or justice,
though the slightest amount or new variety of it,
along the road. Our ambassadors should be instructed
to send home such seeds as these, and Congress help
to distribute them over all the land. We should never
stand upon ceremony with sincerity. We should never
 WALDEN 165

cheat and insult and banish one another by our

meanness, if there were present the kernel of worth
and friendliness. We should not meet thus in haste.
Most men I do not meet at all, for they seem not to
have time; they are busy about their beans. We
would not deal with a man thus plodding ever, lean-
ing on a hoe or a spade as a staff between his work,
not as a mushroom, but partially risen out of the
earth, something more than erect, like swallows
alighted and walking on the ground.—
"And as he spake, his wings would now and then
Spread, as he meant to fly, then close again,"
so that we should suspect that we might be con-
versing with an angel. Bread may not always nourish
us; but it always does us good, it even takes stiffness
out of our joints, and makes us supple and buoyant,
when we knew not what ailed us, to recognize any
generosity in man or Nature, to share any unmixed
and heroic joy.
Ancient poetry and mythology suggest, at least,
that husbandry was once a sacred art; but it is pur-
sued with irreverent haste and heedlessness by us,
our object being to have large farms and large crops
merely. We have no festival, nor procession, nor
ceremony, not excepting our Cattle-shows and so
called Thanksgivings, by which the farmer expresses
a sense of the sacredness of his calling, or is re-
minded of its sacred origin. It is the premium and the
feast which tempt him. He sacrifices not to Ceres and
the Terrestrial Jove, but to the infernal Plutus rather.
By avarice and selfishness, and a grovelling habit,
from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as
property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly,
the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded
with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives.
166 THE B E A N - F I E L D

He knows Nature but as a robber. Cato says that the

profits of agriculture are particularly pious or just,
(maximeque plus qusestus,') and according to Varro
the old Romans "called the same earth Mother and
Ceres, and thought that they who cultivated it led a
pious and useful life, and that they alone were left
of the race of King Saturn."
We are wont to forget that the sun looks on our
cultivated fields and on the prairies and forests with-
out distinction. They all reflect and absorb his rays
alike, and the former make but a small part of the
glorious picture which he beholds in his daily course.
In his view the earth is all equally cultivated like a
garden. Therefore we should receive the benefit of his
light and heat with a corresponding trust and mag-
nanimity. What though I value the seed of these
beans, and harvest that in the fall of the year? This
broad field which I have looked at so long looks not
to me as the principal cultivator, but away from me
to influences more genial to it, which water and
make it green. These beans have results which are
not harvested by me. Do they not grow for wood-
chucks partly? The ear of wheat, (in Latin spica,
obsoletely speca, from spe, hope,) should not be the
only hope of the husbandman; its kernel or grain
(granum, from gerendo, bearing,) is not all that it
bears. How, then, can our harvest fail? Shall I not
rejoice also at the abundance of the weeds whose
seeds are the granary of the birds? It matters little
comparatively whether the fields fill the farmer's
barns. The true husbandman will cease from anxiety,
as the squirrels manifest no concern whether the
woods will bear chestnuts this year or not, and finish
his labor with every day, relinquishing all claim to
the produce of his fields, and sacrificing in his mind
not only his first but his last fruits also.
The Village

AFTER hoeing, or perhaps reading and writing,

in the forenoon, I usually bathed again in the pond,
swimming across one of its coves for a stint, and
washed the dust of labor from my person, or
smoothed out the last wrinkle which study had made,
and for the afternoon was absolutely free. Every day
or two I strolled to the village to hear some of the
gossip which is incessantly going on there, circulating
either from mouth to mouth, or from newspaper to
newspaper, and which, taken in homoeopathic doses,
was really as refreshing in its way as the rustle of
leaves and the peeping of frogs. As I walked in the
woods to see the birds and squirrels, so I walked in
the village to see the men and boys; instead of the
wind among the pines I heard the carts rattle. In one
direction from my house there was a colony of
muskrats in the river meadows; under the grove of
elms and buttonwoods in the other horizon was a
village of busy men, as curious to me as if they had
been prairie dogs, each sitting at the mouth of its
burrow, or running over to a neighbor's to gossip. I
went there frequently to observe their habits. The
village appeared to me a great news room; and on
one side, to support it, as once at Redding & Com-
pany's on State Street, they kept nuts and raisins, or
salt and meal and other groceries. Some have such a
vast appetite for the former commodity, that is, the
news, and such sound digestive organs, that they can
sit forever in public avenues without stirring, and let
it simmer and whisper through them like the Etesian
winds, or as if inhaling ether, it only producing
numbness and insensibility to pain,—otherwise it
would often be painful to hear,—without affecting the
168 THE V I L L A G E

consciousness. I hardly ever failed, when I rambled

through the village, to see a row of such worthies,
either sitting on a ladder sunning themselves, with
their bodies inclined forward and their eyes glancing
along the line this way and that, from time to time,
with a voluptuous expression, or else leaning against
a barn with their hands in their pockets, like caryat-
ides, as if to prop it up. They, being commonly out
of doors, heard whatever was in the wind. These are
the coarsest mills, in which all gossip is first rudely
digested or cracked up before it is emptied into finer
and more delicate hoppers within doors. I observed
that the vitals of the village were the grocery, the bar-
room, the post-office, and the bank; and, as a neces-
sary part of the machinery, they kept a bell, a big
gun, and a fire-engine, at convenient places; and the
houses were so arranged as to make the most of
mankind, in lanes and fronting one another, so that
every traveller had to run the gantlet, and every man,
woman, and child might get a lick at him. Of course,
those who were stationed nearest to the head of the
line, where they could most see and be seen, and
have the first blow at him, paid the highest prices for
their places; and the few straggling inhabitants in
the outskirts, where long gaps in the line began to
occur, and the traveller could get over walls or turn
aside into cow paths, and so escape, paid a very slight
ground or window tax. Signs were hung out on all
sides to allure him; some to catch him by the appe-
tite, as the tavern and victualling cellar; some by the
fancy, as the dry goods store and the jeweller's; and
others by the hair or the feet or the skirts, as the bar-
ber, the shoemaker, or the tailor. Besides, there was
a still more terrible standing invitation to call at every
one of these houses, and company expected about
these times. For the most part I escaped wonderfully
 WALDEN 169

from these dangers, either by proceeding at once

boldly and without deliberation to the goal, as is rec-
ommended to those who run the gantlet, or by keep-
ing my thoughts on high things, like Orpheus, who,
"loudly singing the praises of the gods to his lyre,
drowned the voices of the Sirens, and kept out of
danger." Sometimes I bolted suddenly, and nobody
could tell my whereabouts, for I did not stand much
about gracefulness, and never hesitated at a gap in a
fence. I was even accustomed to make an irruption
into some houses, where I was well entertained, and
after learning the kernels and very last sieve-ful of
news, what had subsided, the prospects of war and
peace, and whether the world was likely to hold to-
gether much longer, I was let out through the rear
avenues, and so escaped to the woods again.
It was very pleasant, when I staid late in town, to
launch myself into the night, especially if it was dark
and tempestuous, and set sail from some bright vil-
lage parlor or lecture room, with a bag of rye or
Indian meal upon my shoulder, for my snug harbor
in the woods, having made all tight without and with-
drawn under hatches with a merry crew of thoughts,
leaving only my outer man at the helm, or even tying
up the helm wh?n it was plain sailing. I had many
a genial thought by the cabin fire "as I sailed." I was
never cast away nor distressed in any weather, though
I encountered some severe storms. It is darker in the
woods, even in common nights, than most suppose. I
frequently had to look up at the opening between the
trees above the path in order to learn my route, and,
where there was no cart-path, to feel with my feet the
faint track which I had worn, or steer by the known
relation of particular trees which I felt with my hands,
passing between two pines for instance, not more
than eighteen inches apart, in the midst of the woods,
170 THE V I L L A G E

invariably, in the darkest night. Sometimes, after

coming home thus late in a dark and muggy night,
when my feet felt the path which my eyes could not
see, dreaming and absent-minded all the way, until
I was aroused by having to raise my hand to lift the
latch, I have not been able to recall a single step of
my walk, and I have thought that perhaps my body
would find its way home if its master should forsake
it, as the hand finds its way to the mouth without as-
sistance. Several times, when a visitor chanced to
stay into evening, and it proved a dark night, I was
obliged to conduct him to the cart-path in the rear of
the house, and then point out to him the direction he
was to pursue, and in keeping which he was to be
guided rather by his feet than his eyes. One very
dark night I directed thus on their way two young
men who had been fishing in the pond. They lived
about a mile off through the woods, and were quite
used to the route. A day or two after one of them told
me that they wandered about the greater part of the
night, close by their own premises, and did not get
home till toward morning, by which time, as there
had been several heavy showers in the mean while,
and the leaves were very wet, they were drenched to
their skins. I have heard of many going astray even
in the village streets, when the darkness was so thick
that you could cut it with a knife, as the saying is.
Some who live in the outskirts, having come to town
a-shopping in their wagons, have been obliged to put
up for the night; and gentlemen and ladies making a
call have gone half a mile out of their way, feeling
the sidewalk only with their feet, and not knowing
when they turned. It is a surprising and memorable,
as well as valuable experience, to be lost in the woods
any time. Often in a snow storm, even by day, one
will come out upon a well-known road, and yet find
 WALDEN 171

it impossible to tell which way leads to the village.

Though he knows that he has travelled it a thousand
times, he cannot recognize a feature in it, but it is as
strange to him as if it were a road in Siberia. By
night, of course, the perplexity is infinitely greater. In
our most trivial walks, we are constantly, though un-
consciously, steering like pilots by certain well-known
beacons and headlands, and if we go beyond our
usual course we still carry in our minds the bearing
of some neighboring cape; and not till we are com-
pletely lost, or turned round,—for a man needs only
to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this
world to be lost,—do we appreciate the vastness and
strangeness of Nature. Every man has to learn the
points of compass again as often as he awakes,
whether from sleep or any abstraction. Not till we
are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the
world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize
where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.
One afternoon, near the end of the first summer,
when I went to the village to get a shoe from the cob-
bler's, I was seized and put into jail, because, as I
have elsewhere related, I did not pay a tax to, or
recognize the authority of, the state which buys and
sells men, women, and children, like cattle at the
door of its senate-house. I had gone down to the
woods for other purposes. But, wherever a man goes,
men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institu-
tions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their
desperate odd-fellow society. It is true, I might have
resisted forcibly with more or less effect, might have
run "amok" against society; but I preferred that society
should run "amok" against me, it being the desperate
party. However, I was released the next day, obtained
my mended shoe, and returned to the woods in season
to get my dinner of huckleberries on Fair-Haven Hill.
172 THE V I L L A G E

I was never molested by any person but those who

represented the state. I had no lock nor bolt but for
the desk which held my papers, not even a nail to put
over my latch or windows. I never fastened my door
night or day, though I was to be absent several days;
not even when the next fall I spent a fortnight in the
woods of Maine. And yet my house was more re-
spected than if it had been surrounded by a file of
soldiers. The tired rambler could rest and warm him-
self by my fire, the literary amuse himself with the
few books on my table, or the curious, by opening my
closet door, see what was left of my dinner, and what
prospect I had of a supper. Yet, though many people
of every class came this way to the pond, I suffered
no serious inconvenience from these sources, and I
never missed any thing but one small book, a volume
of Homer, which perhaps was improperly gilded, and
this I trust a soldier of our camp has found by this
time. I am convinced, that if all men were to live as
simply as I then did, thieving and robbery would be
unknown. These take place only in communities
where some have got more than is sufficient while
others have not enough. The Pope's Homers would
soon get properly distributed.—
"Nee bella fuerunt,
Faginus astabat dum scyphus ante dapes."
"Nor wars did men molest,
When only beechen bowls were in request."
"You who govern public affairs, what need have you
to employ punishments? Love virtue, and the people
will be virtuous. The virtues of a superior man are
like the wind; the virtues of a common man are like
the grass; the grass, when the wind passes over it,
bends."
The Ponds

SOMETIMES, having had a surfeit of human

society and gossip, and worn out all my village friends,
I rambled still farther westward than I habitually
dwell, into yet more unfrequented parts of the town,
"to fresh woods and pastures new," or, while the sun
was setting, made my supper of huckleberries and
blueberries on Fair Haven Hill, and laid up a store
for several days. The fruits do not yield their true
flavor to the purchaser of them, nor to him who
raises them for the market. There is but one way to
obtain it, yet few take that way. If you would know
the flavor of huckleberries, ask the cow-boy or the
partridge. It is a vulgar error to suppose that you have
tasted huckleberries who never plucked them. A huck-
leberry never reaches Boston; they have not been
known there since they grew on her three hills. The
ambrosial and essential part of the fruit is lost with
the bloom which is rubbed off in the market cart,
and they become mere provender. As long as Eternal
Justice reigns, not one innocent huckleberry can be
transported thither from the country's hills.
Occasionally, after my hoeing was done for the day,
I joined some impatient companion who had been
fishing on the pond since morning, as silent and mo-
tionless as a duck or a floating leaf, and, after prac-
tising various kinds of philosophy, had concluded
commonly, by the time I arrived, that he belonged to
the ancient sect of Coenobites. There was one older
man, an excellent fisher and skilled in all kinds of
woodcraft, who was pleased to look upon my house as
a building erected for the convenience of fishermen;
and I was equally pleased when he sat in my doorway
to arrange his lines. Once in a while we sat together
174 THE P O N D S

on the pond, he at one end of the boat, and I at the

other; but not many words passed between us, for he
had grown deaf in his later years, but he occasionally
hummed a psalm, which harmonized well enough
with my philosophy. Our intercourse was thus alto-
gether one of unbroken harmony, far more pleasing
to remember than if it had been carried on by speech.
When, as was commonly the case, I had none to
commune with, I used to raise the echoes by striking
with a paddle on the side of my boat, filling the sur-
rounding woods with circling and dilating sound,
stirring them up as the keeper of a menagerie his
wild beasts, until I elicited a growl from every wooded
vale and hill-side.
In warm evenings I frequently sat in the boat play-
ing the flute, and saw the perch, which I seemed to
have charmed, hovering around me, and the moon
travelling over the ribbed bottom, which was strewed
with the wrecks of the forest. Formerly I had come to
this pond adventurously, from time to time, in dark
summer nights, with a companion, and making a fire
close to the water's edge, which we thought attracted
the fishes, we caught pouts with a bunch of worms
strung on a thread; and when we had done, far in the
night, threw the burning brands high into the air like
skyrockets, which, coming down into the pond, were
quenched with a loud hissing, and we were suddenly
groping in total darkness. Through this, whistling a
tune, we took our way to the haunts of men again.
But now I had made my home by the shore.
Sometimes, after staying in a village parlor till the
family had all retired, I have returned to the woods,
and, partly with a view to the next day's dinner, spent
the hours of midnight fishing from a boat by moon-
light, serenaded by owls and foxes, and hearing, from
time to time, the creaking note of some unknown
 WALDEN 175

bird close at hand. These experiences were very

memorable and valuable to me,—anchored in forty
feet of water, and twenty or thirty rods from the shore,
surrounded sometimes by thousands of small perch
and shiners, dimpling the surface with their tails in
the moonlight, and communicating by a long flaxen
line with mysterious nocturnal fishes which had their
dwelling forty feet below, or sometimes dragging sixty
feet of line about the pond as I drifted in the gentle
night breeze, now and then feeling a slight vibration
along it, indicative of some life prowling about its
extremity, of dull uncertain blundering purpose there,
and slow to make up its mind. At length you slowly
raise, pulling hand over hand, some horned pout
squeaking and squirming to the upper air. It was very
queer, especially in dark nights, when your thoughts
had wandered to vast and cosmogonal themes in
other spheres, to feel this faint jerk, which came to
interrupt your dreams and link you to Nature again.
It seemed as if I might next cast my line upward into
the air, as well as downward into this element which
was scarcely more dense. Thus I caught two fishes as
it were with one hook.

The scenery of Walden is on a humble scale, and,

though very beautiful, does not approach to grandeur,
nor can it much concern one who has not long fre-
quented it or lived by its shore; yet this pond is so
remarkable for its depth and purity as to merit a par-
ticular description. It is a clear and deep green well,
half a mile long and a mile and three quarters in cir-
cumference, and contains about sixty-one and a half
acres; a perennial spring in the midst of pine and oak
woods, without any visible inlet or outlet except by
the clouds and evaporation. The surrounding hills rise
176 THE P O N D S

abruptly from the water to the height of forty to eighty

feet, though on the south-east and east they attain to
about one hundred and one hundred and fifty feet re-
spectively, within a quarter and a third of a mile.
They are exclusively woodland. All our Concord wa-
ters have two colors at least, one when viewed at a
distance, and another, more proper, close at hand.
The first depends more on the light, and follows the
sky. In clear weather, in summer, they appear blue
at a little distance, especially if agitated, and at a
great distance all appear alike. In stormy weather they
are sometimes of a dark slate color. The sea, however,
is said to be blue one day and green another without
any perceptible change in the atmosphere. I have
seen our river, when, the landscape being covered
with snow, both water and ice were almost as green
as grass. Some consider blue "to be the color of pure
water, whether liquid or solid." But, looking directly
down into our waters from a boat, they are seen to be
of very different colors. Walden is blue at one time
and green at another, even from the same point of
view. Lying between the earth and the heavens, it
partakes of the color of both. Viewed from a hill-top
it reflects the color of the sky, but near at hand it is
of a yellowish tint next the shore where you can see
the sand, then a light green, which gradually deepens
to a uniform dark green in the body of the pond. In
some lights, viewed even from a hill-top, it is of a
vivid green next the shore. Some have referred this
to the reflection of the verdure; but it is equally green
there against the railroad sand-bank, and in the
spring, before the leaves are expanded, and it may be
simply the result of the prevailing blue mixed with
the yellow of the sand. Such is the color of its iris.
This is that portion, also, where in the spring, the ice
being warmed by the heat of the sun reflected from
 WALDEN 177

the bottom, and also transmitted through the earth,

melts first and forms a narrow canal about the still
frozen middle. Like the rest of our waters, when
much agitated, in clear weather, so that the surface
of the waves may reflect the sky at the right angle,
or because there is more light mixed with it, it ap-
pears at a little distance of a darker blue than the sky
itself; and at such a time, being on its surface, and
looking with divided vision, so as to see the reflection,
I have discerned a matchless and indescribable light
blue, such as watered or changeable silks and sword
blades suggest, more cerulean than the sky itself,
alternating with the original dark green on the op-
posite sides of the waves, which last appeared but
muddy in comparison. It is a vitreous greenish blue,
as I remember it, like those patches of the winter sky
seen through cloud vistas in the west before sun-
down. Yet a single glass of its water held up to the
light is as colorless as an equal quantity of air. It is
well known that a large plate of glass will have a
green tint, owing, as the makers say, to its "body,"
but a small piece of the same will be colorless. How
large a body of Walden water would be required to
reflect a green tint I have never proved. The water
of our river is black or a very dark brown to one look-
ing directly down on it, and, like that of most ponds,
imparts to the body of one bathing in it a yellowish
tinge; but this water is of such crystalline purity that
the body of the bather appears of an alabaster white-
ness, still more unnatural, which, as the limbs are
magnified and distorted withal, produces a monstrous
effect, making fit studies for a Michael Angelo.
The water is so transparent that the bottom can
easily be discerned at the depth of twenty-five or thir-
ty feet. Paddling over it, you may see many feet be-
neath the surface the schools of perch and shiners,
178 THE P O N D S

perhaps only an inch long, yet the former easily dis-

tinguished by their transverse bars, and you think
that they must be ascetic fish that find a subsistence
there. Once, in the winter, many years ago, when I
had been cutting holes through the ice in order to
catch pickerel, as I stepped ashore I tossed my axe
back on to the ice, but, as if some evil genius had
directed it, it slid four or five rods directly into one of
the holes, where the water was twenty-five feet deep.
Out of curiosity, I lay down on the ice and looked
through the hole, until I saw the axe a little on one
side, standing on its head, with its helve erect and
gently swaying to and fro with the pulse of the pond;
and there it might have stood erect and swaying till in
the course of time the handle rotted off, if I had not
disturbed it. Making another hole directly over it with
an ice chisel which I had, and cutting down the long-
est birch which I could find in the neighborhood with
my knife, I made a slip-noose, which I attached to its
end, and, letting it down carefully, passed it over the
knob of the handle, and drew it by a line along the
birch, and so pulled the axe out again.
The shore is composed of a belt of smooth rounded
white stones like paving stones, excepting one or two
short sand beaches, and is so steep that in many
places a single leap will carry you into water over
your head; and were it not for its remarkable trans-
parency, that would be the last to be seen of its bot-
tom till it rose on the opposite side. Some think it is
bottomless. It is nowhere muddy, and a casual ob-
server would say that there were no weeds at all in it;
and of noticeable plants, except in the little meadows
recently overflowed, which do not properly belong to
it, a closer scrutiny does not detect a flag nor a bul-
rush, nor even a lily, yellow or white, but only a few
small heart-leaves and potamogetons, and perhaps a
 WALDEN 179

water-target or two; all which however a bather might

not perceive; and these plants are clean and bright
like the element they grow in. The stones extend a
rod or two into the water, and then the bottom is pure
sand, except in the deepest parts, where there is usual-
ly a little sediment, probably from the decay of the
leaves which have been wafted on to it so many suc-
cessive falls, and a bright green weed is brought up
on anchors even in midwinter.
We have one other pond just like this, White Pond
in Nine Acre Corner, about two and a half miles west-
erly; but, though I am acquainted with most of the
ponds within a dozen miles of this centre, I do not
know a third of this pure and well-like character. Suc-
cessive nations perchance have drank at, admired,
and fathomed it, and passed away, and still its water
is green and pellucid as ever. Not an intermitting
spring! Perhaps on that spring morning when Adam
and Eve were driven out of Eden Walden Pond was
already in existence, and even then breaking up in a
gentle spring rain accompanied with mist and a south-
erly wind, and covered with myriads of ducks and
geese, which had not heard of the fall, when still such
pure lakes sufficed them. Even then it had com-
menced to rise and fall, and had clarified its waters
and colored them of the hue they now wear, and
obtained a patent of heaven to be the only Walden
Pond in the world and distiller of celestial dews. Who
knows in how many unremembered nations' litera-
tures this has been the Castalian Fountain? or what
nymphs presided over it in the Golden Age? It is a
gem of the first water which Concord wears in her
coronet.
Yet perchance the first who came to this well have
left some trace of their footsteps. I have been sur-
prised to detect encircling the pond, even where a
180 THE P O N D S

thick wood has just been cut down on the shore, a

narrow shelf-like path in the steep hill-side, alternate-
ly rising and falling, approaching and receding from
the water's edge, as old probably as the race of man
here, worn by the feet of aboriginal hunters, and still
from time to time unwittingly trodden by the present
occupants of the land. This is particularly distinct to
one standing on the middle of the pond in winter,
just after a light snow has fallen, appearing as a clear
undulating white line, unobscured by weeds and
twigs, and very obvious a quarter of a mile off in
many places where in summer it is hardly distin-
guishable close at hand. The snow reprints it, as it
were, in clear white type alto-relievo. The orna-
mented grounds of villas which will one day be built
here may still preserve some trace of this.
The pond rises and falls, but whether regularly or
not, and within what period, nobody knows, though,
as usual, many pretend to know. It is commonly
higher in the winter and lower in the summer, though
not corresponding to the general wet and dryness. I
can remember when it was a foot or two lower, and
also when it was at least five feet higher, than when
I lived by it. There is a narrow sand-bar running into
it, with very deep water on one side, on which I
helped boil a kettle of chowder, some six rods from
the main shore, about the year 1824, which it has not
been possible to do for twenty-five years; and on the
other hand, my friends used to listen with incredulity
when I told them, that a few years later I was ac-
customed to fish from a boat in a secluded cove in the
woods, fifteen rods from the only shore they knew,
which place was long since converted into a meadow.
But the pond has risen steadily for two years, and
now, in the summer of '52, is just five feet higher
than when I lived there, or as high as it was thirty
 WALDEN 181

years ago, and fishing goes on again in the meadow.

This makes a difference of level, at the outside, of
six or seven feet; and yet the water shed by the sur-
rounding hills is insignificant in amount, and this
overflow must be referred to causes which affect the
deep springs. This same summer the pond has begun
to fall again. It is remarkable that this fluctuation,
whether periodical or not, appears thus to require
many years for its accomplishment. I have observed
one rise and a part of two falls, and I expect that a
dozen or fifteen years hence the water will again be
as low as I have ever known it. Flint's Pond, a mile
eastward, allowing for the disturbance occasioned by
its inlets and outlets, and the smaller intermediate
ponds also, sympathize with Walden, and recently at-
tained their greatest height at the same time with the
latter. The same is true, as far as my observation goes,
of White Pond.
This rise and fall of Walden at long intervals serves
this use at least; the water standing at this great
height for a year or more, though it makes it difficult
to walk round it, kills the shrubs and trees which have
sprung up about its edge since the last rise, pitch-
pines, birches, alders, aspens, and others, and, falling
again, leaves an unobstructed shore; for, unlike many
ponds and all waters which are subject to a daily tide,
its shore is cleanest when the water is lowest. On the
side of the pond next my house, a row of pitch pines
fifteen feet high has been killed and tipped over as if
by a lever, and thus a stop put to their encroach-
ments; and their size indicates how many years have
elapsed since the last rise to this height. By this fluc-
tuation the pond asserts its title to a shore, and thus
the shore is shorn, and the trees cannot hold it by
right of possession. These are the lips of the lake on
which no beard grows. It licks its chaps from time to
182 THE P O N D S

time. When the water is at its height, the alders,

willows, and maples send forth a mass of fibrous red
roots several feet long from all sides of their stems in
the water, and to the height of three or four feet from
the ground, in the effort to maintain themselves; and
I have known the high-blueberry bushes about the
shore, which commonly produce no fruit, bear an
abundant crop under these circumstances.
Some have been puzzled to tell how the shore be-
came so regularly paved. My townsmen have all heard
the tradition, the oldest people tell me that they heard
it in their youth, that anciently the Indians were hold-
ing a pow-wow upon a hill here, which rose as high
into the heavens as the pond now sinks deep into the
earth, and they used much profanity, as the story
goes, though this vice is one of which the Indians
were never guilty, and while they were thus engaged
the hill shook and suddenly sank, and only one old
squaw, named Walden, escaped, and from her the
pond was named. It has been conjectured that when
the hill shook these stones rolled down its side and
became the present shore. It is very certain, at any
rate, that once there was no pond here, and now there
is one; and this Indian fable does not in any respect
conflict with the account of that ancient settler whom
I have mentioned, who remembers so well when he
first came here with his divining rod, saw a thin
vapor rising from the sward, and the hazel pointed
steadily downward, and he concluded to dig a well
here. As for the stones, many still think that they are
hardly to be accounted for by the action of the waves
on these hills; but I observe that the surrounding hills
are remarkably full of the same kind of stones, so that
they have been obliged to pile them up in walls on
both sides of the railroad cut nearest the pond; and,
moreover, there are most stones where the shore is
 WALDEN 183

most abrupt; so that, unfortunately, it is no longer a

mystery to me. I detect the paver. If the name was not
derived from that of some English locality,—Saffron
Walden, for instance,—one might suppose that it was
called, originally, Walled-in Pond.
The pond was my well ready dug. For four months
in the year its water is as cold as it is pure at all times;
and I think that it is then as good as any, if not the
best, in the town. In the winter, all water which is
exposed to the air is colder than springs and wells
which are protected from it. The temperature of the
pond water which had stood in the room where I sat
from five o'clock in the afternoon till noon the next
day, the sixth of March, 1846, the thermometer hav-
ing been up to 65° or 70° some of the time, owing
partly to the sun on the roof, was 42°, or one degree
colder than the water of one of the coldest wells in
the village just drawn. The temperature of the Boiling
Spring the same day was 45°, or the warmest of any
water tried, though it is the coldest that I know of in
summer, when, beside, shallow and stagnant surface
water is not mingled with it. Moreover, in summer,
Walden never becomes so warm as most water which
is exposed to the sun, on account of its depth. In the
warmest weather I usually placed a pailful in my
cellar, where it became cool in the night, and re-
mained so during the day; though I also resorted to
a spring in the neighborhood. It was as good when a
week old as the day it was dipped, and had no taste
of the pump. Whoever camps for a week in summer
by the shore of a pond, needs only bury a pail of
water a few feet deep in the shade of his camp to be
independent on the luxury of ice.
There have been caught in Walden, pickerel, one
weighing seven pounds, to say nothing of another
which carried off a reel with great velocity, which the
184 THE P O N D S

fisherman safely set down at eight pounds because

he did not see him, perch and pouts, some of each
weighing over two pounds, shiners, chivins or roach,
(Leuciscus pulchellus,") a very few breams, (Pomotis
obesus,) and a couple of eels, one weighing four
pounds,—I am thus particular because the weight of a
fish is commonly its only title to fame, and these are
the only eels I have heard of here;-also, I have a faint
recollection of a little fish some five inches long, with
silvery sides and a greenish back, somewhat dace-like
in its character, which I mention here chiefly to link
my facts to fable. Nevertheless, this pond is not very
fertile in fish. Its pickerel, though not abundant, are
its chief boast. I have seen at one time lying on the
ice pickerel of at least three different kinds; a long
and shallow one, steel-colored, most like those caught
in the river; a bright golden kind, with greenish re-
flections and remarkably deep, which is the most com-
mon here; and another, golden-colored, and shaped
like the last, but peppered on the sides with small
dark brown or black spots, intermixed with a few
faint blood-red ones, very much like a trout. The
specific name reticulatus would not apply to this; it
should be guttatus rather. These are all very firm fish,
and weigh more than their size promises. The shiners,
pouts, and perch also, and indeed all the fishes which
inhabit this pond, are much cleaner, handsomer, and
firmer fleshed than those in the river and most other
ponds, as the water is purer, and they can easily be
distinguished from them. Probably many ichthyol-
ogists would make new varieties of some of them.
There are also a clean race of frogs and tortoises, and
a few muscles in it; muskrats and minks leave their
traces about it, and occasionally a travelling mud-
turtle visits it. Sometimes, when I pushed off my boat
in the morning, I disturbed a great mud-turtle which
 WALDEN 185

had secreted himself under the boat in the night.

Ducks and geese frequent it in the spring and fall,
the white-bellied swallows (Hirundo bicolor} skim
over it, kingfishers dart away from its coves, and the
peetweets (Totanus macularius) "teter" along its
stony shores all summer. I have sometimes disturbed
a fishhawk sitting on a white-pine over the water; but
I doubt if it is ever profaned by the wing of a gull,
like Fair Haven. At most, it tolerates one annual
loon. These are all the animals of consequence which
frequent it now.
You may see from a boat, in calm weather, near
the sandy eastern shore, where the water is eight or
ten feet deep, and also in some other parts of the
pond, some circular heaps half a dozen feet in di-
ameter by a foot in height, consisting of small stones
less than a hen's egg in size, where all around is bare
sand. At first you wonder if the Indians could have
formed them on the ice for any purpose, and so, when
the ice melted, they sank to the bottom; but they are
too regular and some of them plainly too fresh for
that. They are similar to those found in rivers; but
as there are no suckers nor lampreys here, I know
not by what fish they could be made. Perhaps they
are the nests of the chivin. These lend a pleasing
mystery to the bottom.
The shore is irregular enough not to be monotonous.
I have in my mind's eye the western indented with
deep bays, the bolder northern, and the beautifully
scolloped southern shore, where successive capes over-
lap each other and suggest unexplored coves between.
The forest has never so good a setting, nor is so dis-
tinctly beautiful, as when seen from the middle of a
small lake amid hills which rise from the water's
edge; for the water in which it is reflected not only
makes the best foreground in such a case, but, with
186 THE P O N D S

its winding shore, the most natural and agreeable

boundary to it. There is no rawness nor imperfection
in its edge there, as where the axe has cleared a part,
or a cultivated field abuts on it. The trees have ample
room to expand on the water side, and each sends
forth its most vigorous branch in that direction. There
Nature has woven a natural selvage, and the eye
rises by just gradations from the low shrubs of the
shore to the highest trees. There are few traces of
man's hand to be seen. The water laves the shore as
it did a thousand years ago.
A lake is the landscape's most beautiful and expres-
sive feature. It is earth's eye; looking into which the
beholder measures the depth of his own nature. The
fluviatile trees next the shore are the slender eye-
lashes which fringe it, and the wooded hills and cliffs
around are its overhanging brows.
Standing on the smooth sandy beach at the east end
of the pond, in a calm September afternoon, when a
slight haze makes the opposite shore line indistinct, I
have seen whence came the expression, "the glassy
surface of a lake." When you invert your head, it
looks like a thread of finest gossamer stretched across
the valley, and gleaming against the distant pine
woods, separating one stratum of the atmosphere
from another. You would think that you could walk
dry under it to the opposite hills, and that the swal-
lows which skim over might perch on it. Indeed, they
sometimes dive below the line, as it were by mistake,
and are undeceived. As you look over the pond west-
ward you are obliged to employ both your hands to
defend your eyes against the reflected as well as the
true sun, for they are equally bright; and if, between
the two, you survey its surface critically, it is literally
as smooth as glass, except where the skater insects, at
equal intervals scattered over its whole extent, by
 WALDEN 187

their motions in the sun produce the finest imag-

inable sparkle on it, or, perchance, a duck plumes
itself, or, as I have said, a swallow skims so low as
to touch it. It may be that in the distance a fish de-
scribes an arc of three or four feet in the air, and
there is one bright flash where it emerges, and an-
other where it strikes the water; sometimes the whole
silvery arc is revealed; or here and there, perhaps, is
a thistle-down floating on its surface, which the fishes
dart at and so dimple it again. It is like molten glass
cooled but not congealed, and the few motes in it are
pure and beautiful like the imperfections in glass.
You may often detect a yet smoother and darker
water, separated from the rest as if by an invisible
cobweb, boom of the water nymphs, resting on it.
From a hill-top you can see a fish leap in almost any
part; for not a pickerel or shiner picks an insect from
this smooth surface but it manifestly disturbs the
equilibrium of the whole lake. It is wonderful with
what elaborateness this simple fact is advertised,—
this piscine murder will out,—and from my distant
perch I distinguish the circling undulations when
they are half a dozen rods in diameter. You can even
detect a water-bug (Gyrinus') ceaselessly progressing
over the smooth surface a quarter of a mile off; for
they furrow the water slightly, making a conspicuous
ripple bounded by two diverging lines, but the skaters
glide over it without rippling it perceptibly. When the
surface is considerably agitated there are no skaters
nor water-bugs on it, but apparently, in calm days,
they leave their havens and adventurously glide forth
from the shore by short impulses till they completely
cover it. It is a soothing employment, on one of those
fine days in the fall when all the warmth of the sun
is fully appreciated, to sit on a stump on such a
height as this, overlooking the pond, and study the
188 THE P O N D S

dimpling circles which are incessantly inscribed on its

otherwise invisible surface amid the reflected skies
and trees. Over this great expanse there is no disturb-
ance but it is thus at once gently smoothed away and
assuaged, as, when a vase of water is jarred, the
trembling circles seek the shore and all is smooth
again. Not a fish can leap or an insect fall on the pond
but it is thus reported in circling dimples, in lines of
beauty, as it were the constant welling up of its foun-
tain, the gentle pulsing of its life, the heaving of its
breast. The thrills of joy and thrills of pain are un-
distinguishable. How peaceful the phenomena of the
lake! Again the works of man shine as in the spring.
Ay, every leaf and twig and stone and cobweb sparkles
now at mid-afternoon as when covered with dew in
a spring morning. Every motion of an oar or an in-
sect produces a flash of light; and if an oar falls, how
sweet the echo!
In such a day, in September or October, Walden is
a perfect forest mirror, set round with stones as
precious to my eye as if fewer or rarer. Nothing so
fair, so pure, and at the same time so large, as a lake,
perchance, lies on the surface of the earth. Sky
water. It needs no fence. Nations come and go with-
out defiling it. It is a mirror which no stone can
crack, whose quicksilver will never wear off, whose
gilding Nature continually repairs; no storms, no
dust, can dim its surface ever fresh;—a mirror in
which all impurity presented to it sinks, swept and
dusted by the sun's hazy brush,—this the light dust-
cloth.-which retains no breath that is breathed on it,
but sends its own to float as clouds high above its
surface, and be reflected in its bosom still.
A field of water betrays the spirit that is in the air.
It is continually receiving new life and motion from
above. It is intermediate in its nature between land
 WALDEN 189

and sky. On land only the grass and trees wave, but
the water itself is rippled by the wind. I see where
the breeze dashes across it by the streaks or flakes of
light. It is remarkable that we can look down on its
surface. We shall, perhaps, look down thus on the
surface of air at length, and mark where a still sub-
tler spirit sweeps over it.
The skaters and water-bugs finally disappear in the
latter part of October, when the severe frosts have
come; and then and in November, usually, in a calm
day, there is absolutely nothing to ripple the surface.
One November afternoon, in the calm at the end of a
rain storm of several days' duration, when the sky
was still completely overcast and the air was full of
mist, I observed that the pond was remarkably
smooth, so that it was difficult to distinguish its sur-
face; though it no longer reflected the bright tints of
October, but the sombre November colors of the sur-
rounding hills. Though I passed over it as gently as
possible, the slight undulations produced by my boat
extended almost as far as I could see, and gave a
ribbed appearance to the reflections. But, as I was
looking over the surface, I saw here and there at a
distance a faint glimmer, as if some skater insects
which had escaped the frosts might be collected
there, or, perchance, the surface, being so smooth,
betrayed where a spring welled up from the bottom.
Paddling gently to one of these places, I was surprised
to find myself surrounded by myriads of small perch,
about five inches long, of a rich bronze color in the
green water, sporting there and constantly rising to
the surface and dimpling it, sometimes leaving bubbles
on it. In such transparent and seemingly bottomless
water, reflecting the clouds, I seemed to be floating
through the air as in a balloon, and their swimming
impressed me as a kind of flight or hovering, as if they
190 THE P O N D S

were a compact flock of birds passing just beneath my

level on the right or left, their fins, like sails, set all
around them. There were many such schools in the
pond, apparently improving the short season before
winter would draw an icy shutter over their broad sky-
light, sometimes giving to the surface an appearance
as if a slight breeze struck it, or a few rain-drops fell
there. When I approached carelessly and alarmed
them, they made a sudden plash and rippling with
their tails, as if one had struck the water with a brushy
bough, and instantly took refuge in the depths. At
length the wind rose, the mist increased, and the waves
began to run, and the perch leaped much higher than
before, half out of water, a hundred black points, three
inches long, at once above the surface. Even as late as
the fifth of December, one year, I saw some dimples on
the surface, and thinking it was going to rain hard im-
mediately, the air being full of mist, I made haste to
take my place at the oars and row homeward; already
the rain seemed rapidly increasing, though I felt none
on my cheek, and I anticipated a thorough soaking.
But suddenly the dimples ceased, for they were pro-
duced by the perch, which the noise of my oars had
scared into the depths, and I saw their schools dimly
disappearing; so I spent a dry afternoon after all.
An old man who used to frequent this pond nearly
sixty years ago, when it was dark with surrounding for-
ests, tells me that in those days he sometimes saw it all
alive with ducks and other water fowl, and that
there were many eagles about it. He came here a-
fishing, and used an old log canoe which he found
on the shore. It was made of two white-pine logs dug
out and pinned together, and was cut off square at
the ends. It was very clumsy, but lasted a great many
years before it became water-logged and perhaps
sank to the bottom. He did not know whose it was;
 WALDEN 191

it belonged to the pond. He used to make a cable for

his anchor of strips of hickory bark tied together. An
old man, a potter, who lived by the pond before the
Revolution, told him once that there was an iron
chest at the bottom, and that he had seen it. Some-
times it would come floating up to the shore; but
when you went toward it, it would go back into deep
water and disappear. I was pleased to hear of the old
log canoe, which took the place of an Indian one of
the same material but more graceful construction,
which perchance had first been a tree on the bank,
and then, as it were, fell into the water, to float there
for a generation, the most proper vessel for the lake.
I remember that when I first looked into these depths
there were many large trunks to be seen indistinctly
lying on the bottom, which had either been blown
over formerly, or left on the ice at the last cutting,
when wood was cheaper; but now they have mostly
disappeared.
When I first paddled a boat on Walden, it was
completely surrounded by thick and lofty pine and
oak woods, and in some of its coves grape vines had
run over the trees next the water and formed bow-
ers under which a boat could pass. The hills which
form its shores are so steep, and the woods on them
were then so high, that, as you looked down from the
west end, it had the appearance of an amphitheatre
for some kind of sylvan spectacle. I have spent many
an hour, when I was younger, floating over its sur-
face as the zephyr willed, having paddled my boat
to the middle, and lying on my back across the seats,
in a summer forenoon, dreaming awake, until I was
aroused by the boat touching the sand, and I arose to
see what shore my fates had impelled me to; days
when idleness was the most attractive and produc-
tive industry. Many a forenoon have I stolen away,
192 THE P O N D S

preferring to spend thus the most valued part of the

day; for I was rich, if not in money, in sunny hours
and summer days, and spent them lavishly; nor do
I regret that I did not waste more of them in the
workshop or the teacher's desk. But since I left those
shores the woodchoppers have still further laid them
waste, and now for many a year there will be no
more rambling through the aisles of the wood, with
occasional vistas through which you see the water.
My Muse may be excused if she is silent henceforth.
How can you expect the birds to sing when their
groves are cut down?
Now the trunks of trees on the bottom, and the
old log canoe, and the dark surrounding woods, are
gone, and the villagers, who scarcely know where it
lies, instead of going to the pond to bathe or drink,
are thinking to bring its water, which should be as
sacred as the Ganges at least, to the village in a pipe,
to wash their dishes with!—to earn their Walden by
the turning of a cock or drawing of a plug! That
devilish Iron Horse, whose ear-rending neigh is heard
throughout the town, has muddied the Boiling Spring
with his foot, and he it is that has browsed off all
the woods on Walden shore; that Trojan horse, with
a thousand men in his belly, introduced by mercenary
Greeks! Where is the country's champion, the Moore
of Moore Hall, to meet him at the Deep Cut and
thrust an avenging lance between the ribs of the
bloated pest?
Nevertheless, of all the characters I have known,
perhaps Walden wears best, and best preserves its
purity. Many men have been likened to it, but few
deserve that honor. Though the woodchoppers have
laid bare first this shore and then that, and the Irish
have built their sties by it, and the railroad has in-
fringed on its border, and the ice-men have skimmed
 WALDEN 193

it once, it is itself unchanged, the same water which

my youthful eyes fell on; all the change is in me.
It has not acquired one permanent wrinkle after all
its ripples. It is perennially young, and I may stand
and see a swallow dip apparently to pick an insect
from its surface as of yore. It struck me again to-
night, as if I had not seen it almost daily for more
than twenty years,-Why, here is Walden, the same
woodland lake that I discovered so many years ago;
where a forest was cut down last winter another is
springing up by its shore as lustily as ever; the same
thought is welling up to its surface that was then; it
is the same liquid joy and happiness to itself and its
Maker, ay, and it may be to me. It is the work of a
brave man surely, in whom there was no guile! He
rounded this water with his hand, deepened and clari-
fied it in his thought, and in his will bequeathed it
to Concord. I see by its face that it is visited by the
same reflection; and I can almost say, Walden, is it
you?
It is no dream of mine,
To ornament a line;
I cannot come nearer to God and Heaven
Than I live to Walden even.
I am its stony shore,
And the breeze that passes o'er;
In the hollow of my hand
Are its water and its sand,
And its deepest resort
Lies high in my thought.
The cars never pause to look at it; yet I fancy that
the engineers and firemen and brakemen, and those
passengers who have a season ticket and see it often,
are better men for the sight. The engineer does not
forget at night, or his nature does not, that he has
beheld this vision of serenity and purity once at least
during the day. Though seen but once, it helps to
194 THE P O N D S

wash out State-street and the engine's soot. One

proposes that it be called "God's Drop."
I have said that Walden has no visible inlet nor
outlet, but it is on the one hand distantly and indi-
rectly related to Flint's Pond, which is more elevated,
by a chain of small ponds coming from that quarter,
and on the other directly and manifestly to Concord
River, which is lower, by a similar chain of ponds
through which in some other geological period it may
have flowed, and by a little digging, which God for-
bid, it can be made to flow thither again. If by living
thus reserved and austere, like a hermit in the woods,
so long, it has acquired such wonderful purity, who
would not regret that the comparatively impure wa-
ters of Flint's Pond should be mingled with it, or it-
self should ever go to waste its sweetness in the
ocean wave?

Flint's, or Sandy Pond, in Lincoln, our greatest lake

and inland sea, lies about a mile east of Walden. It
is much larger, being said to contain one hundred
and ninety-seven acres, and is more fertile in fish;
but it is comparatively shallow, and not remarkably
pure. A walk through the woods thither was often my
recreation. It was worth the while, if only to feel the
wind blow on your cheek freely, and see the waves
run, and remember the life of mariners. I went a-
chestnutting there in the fall, on windy days, when
the nuts were dropping into the water and were
washed to my feet; and one day, as I crept along its
sedgy shore, the fresh spray blowing in my face, I
came upon the mouldering wreck of a boat, the sides
gone, and hardly more than the impression of its flat
bottom left amid the rushes; yet its model was sharp-
 WALDEN 195

ly defined, as if it were a large decayed pad, with its

veins. It was as impressive a wreck as one could im-
agine on the sea-shore, and had as good a moral. It
is by this time mere vegetable mould and undistin-
guishable pond shore, through which rushes and flags
have pushed up. I used to admire the ripple marks on
the sandy bottom, at the north end of this pond, made
firm and hard to the feet of the wader by the pressure
of the water, and the rushes which grew in Indian
file, in waving lines, corresponding to these marks,
rank behind rank, as if the waves had planted them.
There also I have found, in considerable quantities,
curious balls, composed apparently of fine grass or
roots, of pipewort perhaps, from half an inch to four
inches in diameter, and perfectly spherical. These
wash back and forth in shallow water on a sandy
bottom, and are sometimes cast on the shore. They
are either solid grass, or have a little sand in the
middle. At first you would say that they were formed
by the action of the waves, like a pebble; yet the
smallest are made of equally coarse materials, half
an inch long, and they are produced only at one sea-
son of the year. Moreover, the waves, I suspect, do
not so much construct as wear down a material
which has already acquired consistency. They pre-
serve their form when dry for an indefinite period.
Flint's Pond! Such is the poverty of our nomencla-
ture. What right had the unclean and stupid farmer,
whose farm abutted on this sky water, whose shores
he has ruthlessly laid bare, to give his name to it?
Some skin-flint, who loved better the reflecting sur-
face of a dollar, or a bright cent, in which he could
see his own brazen face; who regarded even the wild
ducks which settled in it as trespassers; his fingers
grown into crooked and horny talons from the long
habit of grasping harpy-like;—so it is not named for
196 THE P O N D S

me. I go not there to see him nor to hear of him;

who never saw it, who never bathed in it, who never
loved it, who never protected it, who never spoke a
good word for it, nor thanked God that he had made
it. Rather let it be named from the fishes that swim in
it, the wild fowl or quadrupeds which frequent it, the
wild flowers which grow by its shores, or some wild
man or child the thread of whose history is inter-
woven with its own; not from him who could show
no title to it but the deed which a like-minded neigh-
bor or legislature gave him,—him who thought only
of its money value; whose presence perchance cursed
all the shore; who exhausted the land around it, and
would fain have exhausted the waters within it; who
regretted only that it was not English hay or cran-
berry meadow,—there was nothing to redeem it, for-
sooth, in his eyes,—and would have drained and sold
it for the mud at its bottom. It did not turn his mill,
and it was no privilege to him to behold it. I respect
not his labors, his farm where every thing has its
price; who would carry the landscape, who would
carry his God, to market, if he could get any thing
for him; who goes to market for his god as it is; on
whose farm nothing grows free, whose fields bear no
crops, whose meadows no flowers, whose trees no
fruits, but dollars; who loves not the beauty of his
fruits, whose fruits are not ripe for him till they are
turned to dollars. Give me the poverty that enjoys
true wealth. Farmers are respectable and interesting
to me in proportion as they are poor,—poor farmers.
A model farm! where the house stands like a fungus
in a muck-heap, chambers for men, horses, oxen,
and swine, cleansed and uncleansed, all contiguous
to one another! Stocked with men! A great grease-
spot, redolent of manures and buttermilk! Under a
high state of cultivation, being manured with the
 WALDEN 197

hearts and brains of men! As if you were to raise your

potatoes in the church-yard! Such is a model farm.
No, no; if the fairest features of the landscape are
to be named after men, let them be the noblest and
worthiest men alone. Let our lakes receive as true
names at least as the Icarian Sea, where "still the
shore" a "brave attempt resounds."

Goose Pond, of small extent, is on my way to

Flint's; Fair-Haven, an expansion of Concord River,
said to contain some seventy acres, is a mile south-
west; and White Pond, of about forty acres, is a mile
and a half beyond Fair-Haven. This is my lake coun-
try. These, with Concord River, are my water privi-
leges; and night and day, year in year out, they grind
such grist as I carry to them.
Since the woodcutters, and the railroad, and I my-
self have profaned Walden, perhaps the most attrac-
tive, if not the most beautiful, of all our lakes, the
gem of the woods, is White Pond;-a poor name from
its commonness, whether derived from the remark-
able purity of its waters or the color of its sands. In
these as in other respects, however, it is a lesser twin
of Walden. They are so much alike that you would
say they must be connected under ground. It has the
same stony shore, and its waters are of the same hue.
As at Walden, in sultry dog-day weather, looking
down through the woods on some of its bays which
are not so deep but that the reflection from the bot-
tom tinges them, its waters are of a misty bluish-
green or glaucous color. Many years since I used to
go there to collect the sand by cart-loads, to make
sand-paper with, and I have continued to visit it ever
since. One who frequents it proposes to call it Virid
Lake. Perhaps it might be called Yellow-Pine Lake,
198 THE P O N D S

from the following circumstance. About fifteen years

ago you could see the top of a pitch-pine, of the kind
called yellow-pine hereabouts, though it is not a dis-
tinct species, projecting above the surface in deep
water, many rods from the shore. It was even sup-
posed by some that the pond had sunk, and this was
one of the primitive forest that formerly stood there.
I find that even so long ago as 1792, in a "Topograph-
ical Description of the Town of Concord," by one of
its citizens, in the Collections of the Massachusetts
Historical Society, the author, after speaking of Wai-
den and White Ponds, adds: "In the middle of the
latter may be seen, when the water is very low, a
tree which appears as if it grew in the place where it
now stands, although the roots are fifty feet below the
surface of the water; the top of this tree is broken off,
and at that place measures fourteen inches in diam-
eter." In the spring of '49 I talked with the man who
lives nearest the pond in Sudbury, who told me that
it was he who got out this tree ten or fifteen years be-
fore. As near as he could remember, it stood twelve
or fifteen rods from tiie shore, where the water was
thirty or forty feet deep. It was in the winter, and he
had been getting out ice in the forenoon, and had
resolved that in the afternoon, with the aid of his
neighbors, he would take out the old yellow-pine. He
sawed a channel in the ice toward the shore, and
hauled it over and along and out on to the ice with
oxen; but, before he had gone far in his work, he was
surprised to find that it was wrong end upward, with
the stumps of the branches pointing down, and the
small end firmly fastened in the sandy bottom. It was
about a foot in diameter at the big end, and he had
expected to get a good saw-log, but it was so rotten
as to be fit only for fuel, if for that. He had some of
 WALDEN 199

it in his shed then. There were marks of an axe and

of woodpeckers on the but. He thought that it might
have been a dead tree on the shore, but was finally
blown over into the pond, and after the top had be-
come waterlogged, while the but-end was still dry
and light, had drifted out and sunk wrong end up.
His father, eighty years old, could not remember
when it was not there. Several pretty large logs may
still be seen lying on the bottom, where, owing to the
undulation of the surface, they look like huge water
snakes in motion.
This pond has rarely been profaned by a boat, for
there is little in it to tempt a fisherman. Instead of
the white lily, which requires mud, or the common
sweet flag, the blue flag (Iris versicolor) grows thinly
in the pure water, rising from the stony bottom all
around the shore, where it is visited by humming
birds in June, and the color both of its bluish blades
and its flowers, and especially their reflections, are in
singular harmony with the glaucous water.
White Pond and Walden are great crystals on the
surface of the earth, Lakes of Light. If they were per-
manently congealed, and small enough to be clutched,
they would, perchance, be carried off by slaves, like
precious stones, to adorn the heads of emperors; but
being liquid, and ample, and secured to us and our
successors forever, we disregard them, and run after
the diamond of Kohinoor. They are too pure to have a
market value; they contain no muck. How much
more beautiful than our lives, how much more trans-
parent than our characters, are they! We never
learned meanness of them. How much fairer than the
pool before the farmer's door, in which his ducks swim!
Hither the clean wild ducks come. Nature has no hu-
man inhabitant who appreciates her. The birds with
200 THE P O N D S

their plumage and their notes are in harmony with

the flowers, but what youth or maiden conspires
with the wild luxuriant beauty of Nature? She flour-
ishes most alone, far from the towns where they re-
side. Talk of heaven! ye disgrace earth.
Baker Farm

SOMETIMES I rambled to pine groves, standing

like temples, or like fleets at sea, full-rigged, with
wavy boughs, and rippling with light, so soft and
green and shady that the Druids would have forsaken
their oaks to worship in them; or to the cedar wood
beyond Flint's Pond, where the trees, covered with
hoary blue berries, spiring higher and higher, are fit
to stand before Valhalla, and the creeping juniper
covers the ground with wreaths full of fruit; or to
swamps where the usnea lichen hangs in festoons
from the black-spruce trees, and toad-stools, round
tables of the swamp gods, cover the ground, and
more beautiful fungi adorn the stumps, like butter-
flies or shells, vegetable winkles; where the swamp-
pink and dogwood grow, the red alder-berry glows
like eyes of imps, the waxwork grooves and crushes
the hardest woods in its folds, and the wild-holly
berries make the beholder forget his home with their
beauty, and he is dazzled and tempted by nameless
other wild forbidden fruits, too fair for mortal taste.
Instead of calling on some scholar, I paid many a
visit to particular trees, of kinds which are rare in
this neighborhood, standing far away in the middle
of some pasture, or in the depths of a wood or
swamp, or on a hill-top; such as the black-birch, of
which we have some handsome specimens two feet
in diameter; its cousin the yellow-birch, with its loose
golden vest, perfumed like the first; the beech, which
has so neat a bole and beautifully lichen-painted,
perfect in all its details, of which, excepting scat-
tered specimens, I know but one small grove of
sizeable trees left in the township, supposed by some
to have been planted by the pigeons that were once
202 BAKER FARM

baited with beech nuts near by; it is worth the while

to see the silver grain sparkle when you split this
wood; the bass; the hornbeam; the Celtis occidentals,
or false elm, of which we have but one well-grown;
some taller mast of a pine, a shingle tree, or a more
perfect hemlock than usual, standing like a pagoda
in the midst of the woods; and many others I could
mention. These were the shrines I visited both sum-
mer and winter.
Once it chanced that I stood in the very abutment
of a rainbow's arch, which filled the lower stratum
of the atmosphere, tinging the grass and leaves
around, and dazzling me as if I looked through col-
ored crystal. It was a lake of rainbow light, in which,
for a short while, I lived like a dolphin. If it had
lasted longer it might have tinged my employments
and life. As I walked on the railroad causeway, I
used to wonder at the halo of light around my shad-
ow, and would fain fancy myself one of the elect.
One who visited me declared that the shadows of
some Irishmen before him had no halo about them,
that it was only natives that were so distinguished.
Benvenuto Cellini tells us in his memoirs, that, after
a certain terrible dream or vision which he had dur-
ing his confinement in the castle of St. Angelo, a
resplendent light appeared over the shadow of his
head at morning and evening, whether he was in
Italy or France, and it was particularly conspicuous
when the grass was moist with dew. This was proba-
bly the same phenomenon to which I have referred,
which is especially observed in the morning, but also
at other times, and even by moonlight. Though a con-
stant one, it is not commonly noticed, and, in the
case of an excitable imagination like Cellini's, it
would be basis enough for superstition. Beside, he
tells us that he showed it to very few. But are they
 WALDEN 203

not indeed distinguished who are conscious that they

are regarded at all?

I set out one afternoon to go a-fishing to Fair-

Haven, through the woods, to eke out my scanty fare
of vegetables. My way led through Pleasant Meadow,
an adjunct of the Baker Farm, that retreat of which
a poet has since sung, beginning,—

"Thy entry is a pleasant field,

Which some mossy fruit trees yield
Partly to a ruddy brook,
By gliding musquash undertook,
And mercurial trout,
Darting about."

I thought of living there before I went to Walden. I

"hooked" the apples, leaped the brook, and scared the
musquash and the trout. It was one of those after-
noons which seem indefinitely long before one, in
which many events may happen, a large portion of
our natural life, though it was already half spent when
I started. By the way there came up a shower, which
compelled me to stand half an hour under a pine,
piling boughs over my head, and wearing my hand-
kerchief for a shed; and when at length I had made
one cast over the pickerel-weed, standing up to my
middle in water, I found myself suddenly in the
shadow of a cloud, and the thunder began to rumble
with such emphasis that I could do no more than
listen to it. The gods must be proud, thought I, with
such forked flashes to rout a poor unarmed fisher-
man. So I made haste for shelter to the nearest hut,
which stood half a mile from any road, but so much
the nearer to the pond, and had long been unin-
habited : —
204 BAKER FARM

"And here a poet builded,

In the completed years,
For behold a trivial cabin
That to destruction steers."
So the Muse fables. But therein, as I found, dwelt
now John Field, an Irishman, and his wife, and sev-
eral children, from the broad-faced boy who assisted
his father at his work, and now came running by his
side from the bog to escape the rain, to the wrinkled,
sibyl-like, cone-headed infant that sat upon its fa-
ther's knee as in the palaces of nobles, and looked out
from its home in the midst of wet and hunger in-
quisitively upon the stranger, with the privilege of
infancy, not knowing but it was the last of a noble
line, and the hope and cynosure of the world, instead
of John Field's poor starveling brat. There we sat to-
gether under that part of the roof which leaked the
least, while it showered and thundered without. I
had sat there many times of old before the ship was
built that floated this family to America. An honest,
hard-working, but shiftless man plainly was John
Field; and his wife, she too was brave to cook so
many successive 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 one hand, and yet no effects of
it visible any where. The chickens, which had also
taken shelter here from the rain, stalked about the
room like members of the family, too humanized
methought to roast well. They stood and looked in my
eye or pecked at my shoe significantly. Meanwhile
my host told me his story, how hard he worked
"bogging" for a neighboring farmer, turning up a
meadow with a spade or bog hoe at the rate of ten
dollars an acre and the use of the land with manure
for one year, and his little broad-faced son worked
 WALDEN 205

cheerfully at his father's side the while, not knowing

how poor a bargain the latter had made. I tried to
help him with my experience, telling him that he was
one of my nearest neighbors, and that I too, who
came a-fishing here, and looked like a loafer, was
getting my living like himself; that I lived in a tight
light and clean house, which hardly cost more than
the annual rent of such a ruin as his commonly
amounts to; and how, if he chose, he might in a
month or two build himself a palace of his own; that
I did not use tea, nor coffee, nor butter, nor milk,
nor fresh meat, and so did not have to work to get
them; again, as I did not work hard, I did not have
to eat hard, and it cost me but a trifle for my food;
but as he began with tea, and coffee, and butter, and
milk, and beef, he had to work hard to pay for them,
and when he had worked hard he had to eat hard
again to repair the waste of his system,—and so it
was as broad as it was long, indeed it was broader
than it was long, for he was discontented and wasted
his life into the bargain; and yet he had rated it as
a gain in coming to America, that here you could get
tea, and coffee, and meat every day. But the only
true America is that country where you are at lib-
erty to pursue such a mode of life as may enable you
to do without these, and where the state does not
endeavor to compel you to sustain the slavery and
war and other superfluous expenses which directly or
indirectly result from the use of such things. For I
purposely talked to him as if he were a philosopher,
or desired to be one. I should be glad if all the mead-
ows on the earth were left in a wild state, if that were
the consequence of men's beginning to redeem them-
selves. A man will not need to study history to find
out what is best for his own culture. But alas! the
culture of an Irishman is an enterprise to be under-
206 BAKER FARM

taken with a sort of moral bog hoe. I told him, that

as he worked so hard at bogging, he required thick
boots and stout clothing, which yet were soon soiled
and worn out, but I wore light shoes and thin cloth-
ing, which cost not half so much, though he might
think that I was dressed like a gentleman, (which,
however, was not the case,) and in an hour or two,
without labor, but as a recreation, I could, if I
wished, catch as many fish as I should want for two
days, or earn enough money to support me a week.
If he and his family would live simply, they might
all go a-huckleberrying in the summer for their
amusement. John heaved a sigh at this, and his wife
stared with arms a-kimbo, and both appeared to be
wondering if they had capital enough to begin such
a course with, or arithmetic enough to carry it
through. It was sailing by dead reckoning to them,
and they saw not clearly how to make their port so;
therefore I suppose they still take life bravely, after
their fashion, face to face, giving it tooth and nail,
not having skill to split its massive columns with any
fine entering wedge, and rout it in detail;—thinking
to deal with it roughly, as one should handle a thistle.
But they fight at an overwhelming disadvantage,—
living, John Field, alas! without arithmetic, and fail-
ing so.
"Do you ever fish?" I asked. "Oh yes, I catch a
mess now and then when I am lying by; good perch I
catch." "What's your bait?" "I catch shiners with
fish-worms, and bait the perch with them." "You'd
better go now, John," said his wife with glistening
and hopeful face; but John demurred.
The shower was now over, and a rainbow above the
eastern woods promised a fair evening; so I took my
departure. When I had got without I asked for a
drink, hoping to get a sight of the well bottom, to
 WALDEN 207

complete my survey of the premises; but there, alas!

are shallows and quicksands, and rope broken withal,
and bucket irrecoverable. Meanwhile the right culi-
nary vessel was selected, water was seemingly dis-
tilled, and after consultation and long delay passed
out to the thirsty one,-not yet suffered to cool, not
yet to settle. Such gruel sustains life here, I thought;
so, shutting my eyes, and excluding the motes by a
skilfully directed under-current, I drank to genuine
hospitality the heartiest draught I could. I am not
squeamish in such cases when manners are con-
cerned.
As I was leaving the Irishman's roof after the rain,
bending my steps again to the pond, my haste to
catch pickerel, wading in retired meadows, in sloughs
and bog-holes, in forlorn and savage places, appeared
for an instant trivial to me who had been sent to
school and college; but as I ran down the hill toward
the reddening west, with the rainbow over my shoul-
der, and some faint tinkling sounds borne to my ear
through the cleansed air, from I know not what quar-
ter, my Good Genius seemed to say,—Go fish and hunt
far and wide day by day,-farther and wider,—and rest
thee by many brooks and hearth-sides without mis-
giving. Remember thy Creator in the days of thy
youth. Rise free from care before the dawn, and seek
adventures. Let the noon find thee by other lakes, and
the night overtake thee every where at home. There
are no larger fields than these, no worthier games
than may here be played. Grow wild according to thy
nature, like these sedges and brakes, which will never
become English hay. Let the thunder rumble; what if
it threaten ruin to farmers' crops? that is not its er-
rand to thee. Take shelter under the cloud, while they
flee to carts and sheds. Let not to get a living be thy
trade, but thy sport. Enjoy the land, but own it not.
208 BAKER FARM

Through want of enterprise and faith men are where

they are, buying and selling, and spending their lives
like serfs.
O Baker Farm!

"Landscape where the richest element

Is a little sunshine innocent." * *
"No one runs to revel
On thy rail-fenced lea." * *
"Debate with no man hast thou,
With questions art never perplexed,
As tame at the first sight as now,
In thy plain russet gabardine dressed." * *
"Come ye who love,
And ye who hate,
Children of the Holy Dove,
And Guy Faux of the state,
And hang conspiracies
From the tough rafters of the trees!"

Men come tamely home at night only from the next

field or street, where their household echoes haunt,
and their life pines because it breathes its own breath
over again; their shadows morning and evening reach
farther than their daily steps. We should come home
from far, from adventures, and perils, and discover-
ies every day, with new experience and character.
Before I had reached the pond some fresh impulse
had brought out John Field, with altered mind, letting
go "bogging" ere this sunset. But he, poor man, dis-
turbed only a couple of fins while I was catching a
fair string, and he said it was his luck; but when we
changed seats in the boat luck changed seats too.
Poor John Field!—I trust he does not read this, unless
he will improve by it,-thinking to live by some deriva-
tive old country mode in this primitive new country,—
to catch perch with shiners. It is good bait some-
 WALDEN 209

times, I allow. With his horizon all his own, yet he a

poor man, born to be poor, with his inherited Irish
poverty or poor life, his Adam's grandmother and
boggy ways, not to rise in this world, he nor his
posterity, till their wading webbed bog-trotting feet
get talaria to their heels.
Higher Laws

As I came home through the woods with my

string of fish, trailing my pole, it being now quite
dark, I caught a glimpse of a woodchuck stealing
across my path, and felt a strange thrill of savage
delight, and was strongly tempted to seize and devour
him raw; not that I was hungry then, except for that
wildness which he represented. Once or twice, how-
ever, while I lived at the pond, I found myself rang-
ing the woods, like a half-starved hound, with a
strange abandonment, seeking some kind of venison
which I might devour, and no morsel could have been
too savage for me. The wildest scenes had become
unaccountably familiar. I found in myself, and still
find, an instinct toward a higher, or, as it is named,
spiritual life, as do most men, and another toward a
primitive rank and savage one, and I reverence them
both. I love the wild not less than the good. The wild-
ness and adventure that are in fishing still recom-
mended it to me. I like sometimes to take rank hold
on life and spend my day more as the animals do.
Perhaps I have owed to this employment and to
hunting, when quite young, my closest acquaintance
with Nature. They early introduce us to and detain us
in scenery with which otherwise, at that age, we
should have little acquaintance. Fishermen, hunters,
woodchoppers, and others, spending their lives in the
fields and woods, in a peculiar sense a part of Nature
themselves, are often in a more favorable mood for
observing her, in the intervals of their pursuits, than
philosophers or poets even, who approach her with
expectation. She is not afraid to exhibit herself to
them. The traveller on the prairie is naturally a
hunter, on the head waters of the Missouri and Co-
 WAL0EN 211

lumbia a trapper, and at the Falls of St. Mary a fish-

erman. He who is only a traveller learns things at
second-hand and by the halves, and is poor authority.
We are most interested when science reports what
those men already know practically or instinctively,
for that alone is a true humanity, or account of hu-
man experience.
They mistake who assert that the Yankee has few
amusements, because he has not so many public holi-
days, and men and boys do not play so many games
as they do in England, for here the more primitive
but solitary amusements of hunting fishing and the
like have not yet given place to the former. Almost
every New England boy among my contemporaries
shouldered a fowling piece between the ages of ten
and fourteen; and his hunting and fishing grounds
were not limited like the preserves of an English
nobleman, but were more boundless even than those
of a savage. No wonder, then, that he did not oftener
stay to play on the common. But already a change is
taking place, owing, not to an increased humanity,
but to an increased scarcity of game, for perhaps the
hunter is the greatest friend of the animals hunted,
not excepting the Humane Society.
Moreover, when at the pond, I wished sometimes to
add fish to my fare for variety. I have actually fished
from the same kind of necessity that the first fishers
did. Whatever humanity I might conjure up against
it was all factitious, and concerned my philosophy
more than my feelings. I speak of fishing only now,
for I had long felt differently about fowling, and sold
my gun before I went to the woods. Not that I am less
humane than others, but I did not perceive that my
feelings were much affected. I did not pity the fishes
nor the worms. This was habit. As for fowling, during
the last years that I carried a gun my excuse was that
212 HIGHER LAWS

I was studying ornithology, and sought only new or

rare birds. But I confess that I am now inclined to
think that there is a finer way of studying ornithology
than this. It requires so much closer attention to the
habits of the birds, that, if for that reason only, I
have been willing to omit the gun. Yet notwithstand-
ing the objection on the score of humanity, I am com-
pelled to doubt if equally valuable sports are ever
substituted for these; and when some of my friends
have asked me anxiously about their boys, whether
they should let them hunt, I have answered, yes,—
remembering that it was one of the best parts of my
education,-mafee them hunters, though sportsmen
only at first, if possible, mighty hunters at last, so
that they shall not find game large enough for them
in this or any vegetable wilderness,-hunters as well
as fishers of men. Thus far I am of the opinion of
Chaucer's nun, who
"yave not of the text a pulled hen
That saith that hunters ben not holy men."
There is a period in the history of the individual, as
of the race, when the hunters are the "best men," as
the Algonquins called them. We cannot but pity the
boy who has never fired a gun; he is no more hu-
mane, while his education has been sadly neglected.
This was my answer with respect to those youths who
were bent on this pursuit, trusting that they would
soon outgrow it. No humane being, past the thought-
less age of boyhood, will wantonly murder any crea-
ture, which holds its life by the same tenure that he
does. The hare in its extremity cries like a child. I
warn you, mothers, that my sympathies do not always
make the usual phil-anthropic distinctions.
Such is oftenest the young man's introduction to
the forest, and the most original part of himself. He
 WALDEN 213

goes thither at first as a hunter and fisher, until at

last, if he has the seeds of a better life in him, he
distinguishes his proper objects, as a poet or natural-
ist it may be, and leaves the gun and fish-pole behind.
The mass of men are still and always young in this
respect. In some countries a hunting parson is no
uncommon sight. Such a one might make a good
shepherd's dog, but is far from being the Good Shep-
herd. I have been surprised to consider that the only
obvious employment, except wood-chopping, ice-cut-
ting, or the like business, which ever to my knowledge
detained at Walden Pond for a whole half day any of
my fellow-citizens, whether fathers or children of the
town, with just one exception, was fishing. Com-
monly they did not think that they were lucky, or well
paid for their time, unless they got a long string of
fish, though they had the opportunity of seeing the
pond all the while. They might go there a thousand
times before the sediment of fishing would sink to
the bottom and leave their purpose pure; but no doubt
such a clarifying process would be going on all the
while. The governor and his council faintly remem-
ber the pond, for they went a-fishing there when they
were boys; but now they are too old and dignified to
go a-fishing, and so they know it no more forever. Yet
even they expect to go to heaven at last. If the legis-
lature regards it, it is chiefly to regulate the number
of hooks to be used there; but they know nothing
about the hook of hooks with which to angle for the
pond itself, impaling the legislature for a bait. Thus,
even in civilized communities, the embryo man passes
through the hunter stage of development.
I have found repeatedly, of late years, that I can-
not fish without falling a little in self-respect. I have
tried it again and again. I have skill at it, and, like
many of my fellows, a certain instinct for it, which
214 HIGHER LAWS

revives from time to time, but always when I have

done I feel that it would have been better if I had not
fished. I think that I do not mistake. It is a faint in-
timation, yet so are the first streaks of morning. There
is unquestionably this instinct in me which belongs
to the lower orders of creation; yet with every year I
am less a fisherman, though without more humanity
or even wisdom; at present I am no fisherman at all.
But I see that if I were to live in a wilderness I should
again be tempted to become a fisher and hunter in
earnest. Beside, there is something essentially un-
clean about this diet and all flesh, and I began to see
where housework commences, and whence the en-
deavor, which costs so much, to wear a tidy and re-
spectable appearance each day, to keep the house
sweet and free from all ill odors and sights. Having
been my own butcher and scullion and cook, as well
as the gentleman for whom the dishes were served up,
I can speak from an unusually complete experience.
The practical objection to animal food in my case
was its uncleanness; and, besides, when I had caught
and cleaned and cooked and eaten my fish, they
seemed not to have fed me essentially. It was in-
significant and unnecessary, and cost more than it
came to. A little bread or a few potatoes would have
done as well, with less trouble and filth. Like many
of my contemporaries, I had rarely for many years
used animal food, or tea, or coffee, &c.; not so much
because of any ill effects which I had traced to them,
as because they were not agreeable to my imagina-
tion. The repugnance to animal food is not the effect
of experience, but is an instinct. It appeared more
beautiful to live low and fare hard in many respects;
and though I never did so, I went far enough to
please my imagination. I believe that every man who
has ever been earnest to preserve his higher or poetic
 WALDEN 215

faculties in the best condition has been particularly

inclined to abstain from animal food, and from much
food of any kind. It is a significant fact, stated by
entomologists, I find it in Kirby and Spence, that
"some insects in their perfect state, though furnished
with organs of feeding, make no use of them;" and
they lay it down as "a general rule, that almost all
insects in this state eat much less than in that of
larvae. The voracious caterpillar when transformed
into a butterfly," . . "and the gluttonous maggot when
become a fly," content themselves with a drop or
two of honey or some other sweet liquid. The ab-
domen under the wings of the butterfly still represents
the larva. This is the tid-bit which tempts his in-
sectivorous fate. The gross feeder is a man in the
larva state; and there are whole nations in that con-
dition, nations without fancy or imagination, whose
vast abdomens betray them.
It is hard to provide and cook so simple and clean
a diet as will not offend the imagination; but this, I
think, is to be fed when we feed the body; they should
both sit down at the same table. Yet perhaps this may
be done. The fruits eaten temperately need not make
us ashamed of our appetites, nor interrupt the worthi-
est pursuits. But put an extra condiment into your
dish, and it will poison you. It is not worth the while
to live by rich cookery. Most men would feel shame
if caught preparing with their own hands precisely
such a dinner, whether of animal or vegetable food,
as is every day prepared for them by others. Yet till
this is otherwise we are not civilized, and, if gentle-
men and ladies, are not true men and women. This
certainly suggests what change is to be made. It may
be vain to ask why the imagination will not be rec-
onciled to flesh and fat. I am satisfied that it is not.
Is it not a reproach that man is a carnivorous animal?
216 HIGHER LAWS

True, he can and does live, in a great measure, by

preying on other animals; but this is a miserable
way,—as any one who will go to snaring rabbits, or
slaughtering lambs, may learn,-and he will be re-
garded as a benefactor of his race who shall teach
man to confine himself to a more innocent and whole-
some diet. Whatever my own practice may be, I have
no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human
race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating
animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off
eating each other when they came in contact with the
more civilized.
If one listens to the faintest but constant sugges-
tions of his genius, which are certainly true, he sees
not to what extremes, or even insanity, it may lead
him; and yet that way, as he grows more resolute and
faithful, his road lies. The faintest assured objection
which one healthy man feels will at length prevail
over the arguments and customs of mankind. No man
ever followed his genius till it misled him. Though
the result were bodily weakness, yet perhaps no one
can say that the consequences were to be regretted,
for these were a life in conformity to higher prin-
ciples. If the day and the night are such that you
greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like
flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more
starry, more immortal,-that is your success. All na-
ture is your congratulation, and you have cause mo-
mentarily to bless yourself. The greatest gains and
values are farthest from being appreciated. We easily
come to doubt if they exist. We soon forget them.
They are the highest reality. Perhaps the facts most
astounding and most real are never communicated
by man to man. The true harvest of my daily life is
somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints
 WALDEN 217

of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught,

a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched.
Yet, for my part, I was never unusually squeamish;
I could sometimes eat a fried rat with a good relish,
if it were necessary. I am glad to have drunk water
so long, for the same reason that I prefer the natural
sky to an opium-eater's heaven. I would fain keep
sober always; and there are infinite degrees of drunk-
enness. I believe that water is the only drink for a
wise man; wine is not so noble a liquor; and think
of dashing the hopes of a morning with a cup of warm
coffee, or of an evening with a dish of tea! Ah, how
low I fall when I am tempted by them! Even music
may be intoxicating. Such apparently slight causes
destroyed Greece and Rome, and will destroy England
and America. Of all ebriosity, who does not prefer to
be intoxicated by the air he breathes? I have found it
to be the most serious objection to coarse labors long
continued, that they compelled me to eat and drink
coarsely also. But to tell the truth, I find myself at
present somewhat less particular in these respects. I
carry less religion to the table, ask no blessing; not
because I am wiser than I was, but, I am obliged to
confess, because, however much it is to be regretted,
with years I have grown more coarse and indifferent.
Perhaps these questions are entertained only in youth,
as most believe of poetry. My practice is "nowhere,"
my opinion is here. Nevertheless I am far from re-
garding myself as one of those privileged ones to
whom the Ved refers when it says, that "he who has
true faith in the Omnipresent Supreme Being may eat
all that exists," that is, is not bound to inquire what
is his food, or who prepares it; and even in their case
it is to be observed, as a Hindoo commentator has
remarked, that the Vedant limits this privilege to "the
time of distress."
218 H I G H E R LAWS

Who has not sometimes derived an inexpressible

satisfaction from his food in which appetite had no
share? I have been thrilled to think that I owed a
mental perception to the commonly gross sense of
taste, that I have been inspired through the palate,
that some berries which I had eaten on a hill-side had
fed my genius. "The soul not being mistress of her-
self," says Thseng-tseu, "one looks, and one does not
see; one listens, and one does not hear; one eats, and
one does not know the savor of food." He who dis-
tinguishes the true savor of his food can never be a
glutton; he who does not cannot be otherwise. A puri-
tan may go to his brown-bread crust with as gross an
appetite as ever an alderman to his turtle. Not that
food which entereth into the mouth defileth a man,
but the appetite with which it is eaten. It is neither
the quality nor the quantity, but the devotion to sen-
sual savors; when that which is eaten is not a viand
to sustain our animal, or inspire our spiritual life,
but food for the worms that possess us. If the hunter
has a taste for mud-turtles, muskrats, and other such
savage tid-bits, the fine lady indulges a taste for jelly
made of a calf's foot, or for sardines from over the
sea, and they are even. He goes to the mill-pond, she
to her preserve-pot. The wonder is how they, how you
and I, can live this slimy beastly life, eating and
drinking.
Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never
an instant's truce between virtue and vice. Goodness
is the only investment that never fails. In the music
of the harp which trembles round the world it is the
insisting on this which thrills us. The harp is the
travelling patterer for the Universe's Insurance Com-
pany, recommending its laws, and our little good-
ness is all the assessment that we pay. Though the
youth at last grows indifferent, the laws of the uni-
 WALDEN 219

verse are not indifferent, but are forever on the side

of the most sensitive. Listen to every zephyr for some
reproof, for it is surely there, and he is unfortunate
who does not hear it. We cannot touch a string or
move a stop but the charming moral transfixes us.
Many an irksome noise, go a long way off, is heard as
music, a proud sweet satire on the meanness of our
lives.
We are conscious of an animal in us, which awak-
ens in proportion as our higher nature slumbers. It is
reptile and sensual, and perhaps cannot be wholly
expelled; like the worms which, even in life and
health, occupy our bodies. Possibly we may withdraw
from it, but never change its nature. I fear that it
may enjoy a certain health of its own; that we may
be well, yet not pure. The other day I picked up the
lower jaw of a hog, with white and sound teeth and
tusks, which suggested that there was an animal
health and vigor distinct from the spiritual. This
creature succeeded by other means than temperance
and purity. "That in which men differ from brute
beasts," says Mencius, "is a thing very inconsiderable;
the common herd lose it very soon; superior men pre-
serve it carefully." Who knows what sort of life would
result if we had attained to purity? If I knew so wise
a man as could teach me purity I would go to seek
htm forthwith. "A command over our passions, and
over the external senses of the body, and good acts,
are declared by the Ved to be indispensable in the
mind's approximation to God." Yet the spirit can for
the time pervade and control every member and
function of the body, and transmute what in form is
the grossest sensuality into purity and devotion. The
generative energy, which, when we are loose, dis-
sipates and makes us unclean, when we are con-
tinent invigorates and inspires us. Chastity is the
220 HIGHER LAWS

flowering of man; and what are called Genius, Hero-

ism, Holiness, and the like, are but various fruits
which succeed it. Man flows at once to God when the
channel of purity is open. By turns our purity in-
spires and our impurity casts us down. He is blessed
who is assured that the animal is dying out in him
day by day, and the divine being established. Perhaps
there is none but has cause for shame on account of
the inferior and brutish nature to which he is allied.
I fear that we are such gods or demigods only as
fauns and satyrs, the divine allied to beasts, the
creatures of appetite, and that, to some extent, our
very life is our disgrace.—
"How happy's he who hath due place assigned
To his beasts and disaforested his mind!

Can use his horse, goat, wolf, and ev'ry beast,

And is not ass himself to all the rest!
Else man not only is the herd of swine,
But he's those devils too which did incline
Them to a headlong rage, and made them worse."
All sensuality is one, though it takes many forms;
all purity is one. It is the same whether a man eat,
or drink, or cohabit, or sleep sensually. They are but
one appetite, and we only need to see a person do any
one of these things to know how great a sensualist
he is. The impure can neither stand nor sit with pu-
rity. When the reptile is attacked at one mouth of his
burrow, he shows himself at another. If you would be
chaste, you must be temperate. What is chastity? How
shall a man know if he is chaste? He shall not know
it. We have heard of this virtue, but we know not
what it is. We speak conformably to the rumor which
we have heard. From exertion come wisdom and
purity; from sloth ignorance and sensuality. In the
student sensuality is a sluggish habit of mind. An
 WALDEN 221

unclean person is universally a slothful one, one who

sits by a stove, whom the sun shines on prostrate,
who reposes without being fatigued. If you would
avoid uncleanness, and all the sins, work earnestly,
though it be at cleaning a stable. Nature is hard to
be overcome, but she must be overcome. What avails
it that you are Christian, if you are not purer than
the heathen, if you deny yourself no more, if you
are not more religious? I know of many systems of
religion esteemed heathenish whose precepts fill the
reader with shame, and provoke him to new endeav-
ors, though it be to the performance of rites merely.
I hesitate to say these things, but it is not because
of the subject,—I care not how obscene my words are,
—but because I cannot speak of them without betray-
ing my impurity. We discourse freely without shame
of one form of sensuality, and are silent about an-
other. We are so degraded that we cannot speak sim-
ply of the necessary functions of human nature. In
earlier ages, in some countries, every function was
reverently spoken of and regulated by law. Nothing
was too trivial for the Hindoo lawgiver, however of-
fensive it may be to modern taste. He teaches how to
eat, drink, cohabit, void excrement and urine, and the
like, elevating what is mean, and does not falsely
excuse himself by calling these things trifles.
Every man is the builder of a temple, called his
body, to the god he worships, after a style purely his
own, nor can he get off by hammering marble in-
stead. We are all sculptors and painters, and our ma-
terial is our own flesh and blood and bones. Any
nobleness begins at once to refine a man's features,
any meanness or sensuality to imbrute them.
John Farmer sat at his door one September eve-
ning, after a hard day's work, his mind still running
on his labor more or less. Having bathed he sat down
222 HIGHER LAWS

to recreate his intellectual man. It was a rather cool

evening, and some of his neighbors were apprehend-
ing a frost. He had not attended to the train of his
thoughts long when he heard some one playing on a
flute, and that sound harmonized with his mood. Still
he thought of his work; but the burden of his thought
was, that though this kept running in his head, and
he found himself planning and contriving it against
his will, yet it concerned him very little. It was no
more than the scurf of his skin, which was con-
stantly shuffled off. But the notes of the flute came
home to his ears out of a different sphere from that
he worked in, and suggested work for certain faculties
which slumbered in him. They gently did away with
the street, and the village, and the state in which he
lived. A voice said to him,—Why do you stay here and
live this mean moiling life, when a glorious existence
is possible for you? Those same stars twinkle over
other fields than these.—But how to come out of this
condition and actually migrate thither? All that he
could think of was to practise some new austerity, to
let his mind descend into his body and redeem it,
and treat himself with ever increasing respect.
Brute Neighbors

SOMETIMES I had a companion in my fishing,

who came through the village to my house from the
other side of the town, and the catching of the dinner
was as much a social exercise as the eating of it.
Hermit. I wonder what the world is doing now. I
have not heard so much as a locust over the sweet-
fern these three hours. The pigeons are all asleep
upon their roosts,-no flutter from them. Was that a
farmer's noon horn which sounded from beyond the
woods just now? The hands are coming in to boiled
salt beef and cider and Indian bread. Why will men
worry themselves so? He that does not eat need not
work. I wonder how much they have reaped. Who
would live there where a body can never think for the
barking of Bose? And O, the housekeeping! to keep
bright the devil's door-knobs, and scour his tubs this
bright day! Better not keep a house. Say, some hollow
tree; and then for morning calls and dinner-parties I
Only a woodpecker tapping. O, they swarm; the sun
is too warm there; they are born too far into life for
me. I have water from the spring, and a loaf of brown
bread on the shelf.—Hark! I hear a rustling of the
leaves. Is it some ill-fed village hound yielding to the
instinct of the chase? or the lost pig which is said to
be in these woods, whose tracks I saw after the rain?
It comes on apace; my sumachs and sweet-briars
tremble.-Eh, Mr. Poet, is it you? How do you like
the world to-day?
Poet. See those clouds; how they hang! That's the
greatest thing I have seen to-day. There's nothing like
it in old paintings, nothing like it in foreign lands,—
unless when we were off the coast of Spain. That's a
true Mediterranean sky. I thought, as I have my liv-
224 BRUTE NEIGHBORS

ing to get, and have not eaten to-day, that I might go

a-fishing. That's the true industry for poets. It is the
only trade I have learned. Come, let's along.
Hermit. I cannot resist. My brown bread will soon
be gone. I will go with you gladly soon, but I am
just concluding a serious meditation. I think that I
am near the end of it. Leave me alone, then, for a
while. But that we may not be delayed, you shall be
digging the bait meanwhile. Angle-worms are rarely
to be met with in these parts, where the soil was
never fattened with manure; the race is nearly ex-
tinct. The sport of digging the bait is nearly equal to
that of catching the fish, when one's appetite is not
too keen; and this you may have all to yourself to-
day. I would advise you to set in the spade down
yonder among the ground-nuts, where you see the
johnswort waving. I think that I may warrant you
one worm to every three sods you turn up, if you look
well in among the roots of the grass, as if you were
weeding. Or, if you choose to go farther, it will not
be unwise, for I have found the increase of fair bait
to be very nearly as the squares of the distances.
Hermit alone. Let me see; where was I? Methinks
I was nearly in this frame of mind; the world lay
about at this angle. Shall I go to heaven or a-fishing?
If I should soon bring this meditation to an end,
would another so sweet occasion be likely to offer?
I was as near being resolved into the essence of
things as ever I was in my life. I fear my thoughts
will not come back to me. If it would do any good,
I would whistle for them. When they make us an
offer, is it wise to say, We will think of it? My
thoughts have left no track, and I cannot find the
path again. What was it that I was thinking of? It
was a very hazy day. I will just try these three sen-
tences of Con-fut-see; they may fetch that state about
 WALDEN 225

again. I know not whether it was the dumps or a

budding ecstasy. Mem. There never is but one oppor-
tunity of a kind.
Poet. How now, Hermit, is it too soon? I have got
just thirteen whole ones, beside several which are
imperfect or undersized; but they will do for the
smaller fry; they do not cover up the hook so much.
Those village worms are quite too large; a shiner may
make a meal off one without finding the skewer.
Hermit. Well, then, let's be off. Shall we to the
Concord? There's good sport there if the water be
not too high.

Why do precisely these objects which we behold

make a world? Why has man just these species of
animals for his neighbors; as if nothing but a mouse
could have filled this crevice? I suspect that Pilpay
& Co. have put animals to their best use, for they are
all beasts of burden, in a sense, made to carry some
portion of our thoughts.
The mice which haunted my house were not the
common ones, which are said to have been intro-
duced into the country, but a wild native kind (Mus
leucopus) not found in the village. I sent one to a
distinguished naturalist, and it interested him much.
When I was building, one of these had its nest under-
neath the house, and before I had laid the second
floor, and swept out the shavings, would come out
regularly at lunch time and pick up the crumbs at my
feet. It probably had never seen a man before; and
it soon became quite familiar, and would run over
my shoes and up my clothes. It could readily ascend
the sides of the room by short impulses, like a squir-
rel, which it resembled in its motions. At length, as
I leaned with my elbow on the bench one day, it
226 BRUTE NEIGHBORS

ran up my clothes, and along my sleeve, and round

and round the paper which held my dinner, while I
kept the latter close, and dodged and played at bo-
peep with it; and when at last I held still a piece of
cheese between my thumb and finger, it came and
nibbled it, sitting in my hand, and afterward cleaned
its face and paws, like a fly, and walked away.
A phcebe soon built in my shed, and a robin for
protection in a pine which grew against the house.
In June the partridge, (Tetrao umbellus,} which is
so shy a bird, led her brood past my windows, from
the woods in the rear to the front of my house, cluck-
ing and calling to them like a hen, and in all her
behavior proving herself the hen of the woods. The
young suddenly disperse on your approach, at a sig-
nal from the mother, as if a whirlwind had swept
them away, and they so exactly resemble the dried
leaves and twigs that many a traveller has placed
his foot in the midst of a brood, and heard the whir
of the old bird as she flew off, and her anxious calls
and mewing, or seen her trail her wings to attract his
attention, without suspecting their neighborhood. The
parent will sometimes roll and spin round before you
in such a dishabille, that you cannot, for a few mo-
ments, detect what kind of creature it is. The young
squat still and flat, often running their heads under
a leaf, and mind only their mother's directions given
from a distance, nor will your approach make them
run again and betray themselves. You may even tread
on them, or have your eyes on them for a minute,
without discovering them. I have held them in my
open hand at such a time, and still their only care,
obedient to their mother and their instinct, was to
squat there without fear or trembling. So perfect is
this instinct, that once, when I had laid them on the
leaves again, and one accidentally fell on its side, it
 WALDEN 227

was found with the rest in exactly the same position

ten minutes afterward. They are not callow like the
young of most birds, but more perfectly developed
and precocious even than chickens. The remarkably
adult yet innocent expression of their open and serene
eyes is very memorable. All intelligence seems re-
flected in them. They suggest not merely the purity
of infancy, but a wisdom clarified by experience.
Such an eye was not born when the bird was, but
is coeval with the sky it reflects. The woods do not
yield another such a gem. The traveller does not
often look into such a limpid well. The ignorant or
reckless sportsman often shoots the parent at such a
time, and leaves these innocents to fall a prey to
some prowling beast or bird, or gradually mingle
with the decaying leaves which they so much re-
semble. It is said that when hatched by a hen they
will directly disperse on some alarm, and so are lost,
for they never hear the mother's call which gathers
them again. These were my hens and chickens.
It is remarkable how many creatures live wild and
free though secret in the woods, and still sustain
themselves in the neighborhood of towns, suspected
by hunters only. How retired the otter manages to
live here! He grows to be four feet long, as big as a
small boy, perhaps without any human being getting
a glimpse of him. I formerly saw the raccoon in the
woods behind where my house is built, and probably
still heard their whinnering at night. Commonly I
rested an hour or two in the shade at noon, after
planting, and ate my lunch, and read a little by a
spring which was the source of a swamp and of a
brook, oozing from under Brister's Hill, half a mile
from my field. The approach to this was through a
succession of descending grassy hollows, full of
young pitch-pines, into a larger wood about the
228 BRUTE NEIGHBORS

swamp. There, in a very secluded and shaded spot,

under a spreading white-pine, there was yet a clean
firm sward to sit on. I had dug out the spring and
made a well of clear gray water, where I could dip
up a pailful without roiling it, and thither I went for
this purpose almost every day in midsummer, when
the pond was warmest. Thither too the wood-cock led
her brood, to probe the mud for worms, flying but a
foot above them down the bank, while they ran in a
troop beneath; but at last, spying me, she would
leave her young and circle round and round me,
nearer and nearer, till within four or five feet, pre-
tending broken wings and legs, to attract my atten-
tion and get off her young, who would already have
taken up their march, with faint wiry peep, single file
through the swamp, as she directed. Or I heard the
peep of the young when I could not see the parent
bird. There too the turtle-doves sat over the spring, or
fluttered from bough to bough of the soft white-pines
over my head; or the red squirrel, coursing down the
nearest bough, was particularly familiar and in-
quisitive. You only need sit still long enough in some
attractive spot in the woods that all its inhabitants
may exhibit themselves to you by turns.
I was witness to events of a less peaceful char-
acter. One day when I went out to my wood-pile, or
rather my pile of stumps, I observed two large ants,
the one red, the other much larger, nearly half an
inch long, and black, fiercely contending with one
another. Having once got hold they never let go, but
struggled and wrestled and rolled on the chips inces-
santly. Looking farther, I was surprised to find that
the chips were covered with such combatants, that it
was not a duellum, but a bellum, a war between two
races of ants, the red always pitted against the black,
and frequently two red ones to one black. The le-
 WALDEN 229

gions of these Myrmidons covered all the hills and

vales in my wood-yard, and the ground was already
strewn with the dead and dying, both red and black.
It was the only battle which I have ever witnessed,
the only battle-field I ever trod while the battle was
raging; internecine war; the red republicans on the
one hand, and the black imperialists on the other. On
every side they were engaged in deadly combat, yet
without any noise that I could hear, and human
soldiers never fought so resolutely. I watched a couple
that were fast locked in each other's embraces, in a
little sunny valley amid the chips, now at noon-day
prepared to fight till the sun went down, or life went
out. The smaller red champion had fastened him-
self like a vice to his adversary's front, and through
all the tumblings on that field never for an instant
ceased to gnaw at one of his feelers near the root,
having already caused the other to go by the board;
while the stronger black one dashed him from side to
side, and, as I saw on looking nearer, had already
divested him of several of his members. They fought
with more pertinacity than bull-dogs. Neither mani-
fested the least disposition to retreat. It was evident
that their battle-cry was Conquer or die. In the mean
while there came along a single red ant on the hill-
side of this valley, evidently full of excitement, who
either had despatched his foe, or had not yet taken
part in the battle; probably the latter, for he had lost
none of his limbs; whose mother had charged him to
return with his shield or upon it. Or perchance he
was some Achilles, who had nourished his wrath
apart, and had now come to avenge or rescue his
Patroclus. He saw this unequal combat from afar,—
for the blacks were nearly twice the size of the red,—
he drew near with rapid pace till he stood on his
guard within half an inch of the combatants; then,
230 BRUTE NEIGHBORS

watching his opportunity, he sprang upon the black

warrior, and commenced his operations near the root
of his right fore-leg, leaving the foe to select among
his own members; and so there were three united
for life, as if a new kind of attraction had been in-
vented which put all other locks and cements to
shame. I should not have wondered by this time to
find that they had their respective musical bands sta-
tioned on some eminent chip, and playing their na-
tional airs the while, to excite the slow and cheer the
dying combatants. I was myself excited somewhat
even as if they had been men. The more you think
of it, the less the difference. And certainly there is
not the fight recorded in Concord history, at least, if
in the history of America, that will bear a moment's
comparison with this, whether for the numbers en-
gaged in it, or for the patriotism and heroism dis-
played. For numbers and for carnage it was an
Austerlitz or Dresden. Concord Fight! Two killed on
the patriots' side, and Luther Blanchard wounded!
Why here every ant was a Buttrick,—"Fire! for God's
sake fire!"—and thousands shared the fate of Davis
and Hosmer. There was not one hireling there. I have
no doubt that it was a principle they fought for, as
much as our ancestors, and not to avoid a three-
penny tax on their tea; and the results of this battle
will be as important and memorable to those whom it
concerns as those of the battle of Bunker Hill, at
least.
I took up the chip on which the three I have par-
ticularly described were struggling, carried it into
my house, and placed it under a tumbler on my
window-sill, in order to see the issue. Holding a micro-
scope to the first-mentioned red ant, I saw that,
though he was assiduously gnawing at the near fore-
leg of his enemy, having severed his remaining
 WALDEN 231

feeler, his own breast was all torn away, exposing

what vitals he had there to the jaws of the black
warrior, whose breast-plate was apparently too thick
for him to pierce; and the dark carbuncles of the
sufferer's eyes shone with ferocity such as war only
could excite. They struggled half an hour longer under
the tumbler, and when I looked again the black
soldier had severed the heads of his foes from their
bodies, and the still living heads were hanging on
either side of him like ghastly trophies at his saddle-
bow, still apparently as firmly fastened as ever, and
he was endeavoring with feeble struggles, being with-
out feelers and with only the remnant of a leg, and
I know not how many other wounds, to divest him-
self of them; which at length, after half an hour
more, he accomplished. I raised the glass, and he
went off over the window-sill in that crippled state.
Whether he finally survived that combat, and spent
the remainder of his days in some Hotel des In-
valides, I do not know; but I thought that his industry
would not be worth much thereafter. I never learned
which party was victorious, nor the cause of the war;
but I felt for the rest of that day as if I had had my
feelings excited and harrowed by witnessing the
struggle, the ferocity and carnage, of a human battle
before my door.
Kirby and Spence tell us that the battles of ants
have long been celebrated and the date of them re-
corded, though they say that Huber is the only mod-
ern author who appears to have witnessed them.
".<Eneas Sylvius," say they, "after giving a very cir-
cumstantial account of one contested with great
obstinacy by a great and small species on the trunk
of a pear tree," adds that " 'This action was fought
in the pontificate of Eugenius the Fourth, in the
presence of Nicholas Pistoriensis, an eminent lawyer,
232 BRUTE NEIGHBORS

who related the whole history of the battle with the

greatest fidelity.' A similar engagement between
great and small ants is recorded by Olaus Magnus,
in which the small ones, being victorious, are said
to have buried the bodies of their own soldiers, but
left those of their giant enemies a prey to the birds.
This event happened previous to the expulsion of the
tyrant Christiern the Second from Sweden." The bat-
tle which I witnessed took place in the Presidency
of Polk, five years before the passage of Webster's
Fugitive-Slave Bill.
Many a village Bose, fit only to course a mud-turtle
in a victualling cellar, sported his heavy quarters in
the woods, without the knowledge of his master, and
ineffectually smelled at old fox burrows and wood-
chucks' holes; led perchance by some slight cur which
nimbly threaded the wood, and might still inspire a
natural terror in its denizens;—now far behind his
guide, barking like a canine bull toward some small
squirrel which had treed itself for scrutiny, then,
cantering off, bending the bushes with his weight,
imagining that he is on the track of some stray mem-
ber of the gerbille family. Once I was surprised to see
a cat walking along the stony shore of the pond, for
they rarely wander so far from home. The surprise
was mutual. Nevertheless the most domestic cat,
which has lain on a rug all her days, appears quite
at home in the woods, and, by her sly and stealthy
behavior, proves herself more native there than the
regular inhabitants. Once, when berrying, I met with
a cat with young kittens in the woods, quite wild, and
they all, like their mother, had their backs up and
were fiercely spitting at me. A few years before I
Lived in the woods there was what was called a
"winged cat" in one of the farm-houses in Lincoln
nearest the pond, Mr. Gilian Baker's. When I called
 WALDEN 233

to see her in June, 1842, she was gone a-hunting in

the woods, as was her wont, (I am not sure whether
it was a male or female, and so use the more com-
mon pronoun,) but her mistress told me that she
came into the neighborhood a little more than a year
before, in April, and was finally taken into their
house; that she was of a dark brownish-gray color,
with a white spot on her throat, and white feet, and
had a large bushy tail like a fox; that in the winter
the fur grew thick and flatted out along her sides,
forming strips ten or twelve inches long by two and a
half wide, and under her chin like a muff, the upper
side loose, the under matted like felt, and in the
spring these appendages dropped off. They gave me
a pair of her "wings," which I keep still. There is no
appearance of a membrane about them. Some thought
it was part flying-squirrel or some other wild animal,
which is not impossible, for, according to naturalists,
prolific hybrids have been produced by the union of
the marten and domestic cat. This would have been
the right kind of cat for me to keep, if I had kept
any; for why should not a poet's cat be winged as
well as his horse?
In the fall the loon (Colymbus glacialis} came, as
usual, to moult and bathe in the pond, making the
woods ring with his wild laughter before I had risen.
At rumor of his arrival all the Mill-dam sportsmen
are on the alert, in gigs and on foot, two by two and
three by three, with patent rifles and conical balls
and spy-glasses. They come rustling through the
woods like autumn leaves, at least ten men to one
loon. Some station themselves on this side of the
pond, some on that, for the poor bird cannot be
omnipresent; if he dive here he must come up there.
But now the kind October wind rises, rustling the
leaves and rippling the surface of the water, so that
234 BRUTE NEIGHBORS

no loon can be heard or seen, though his foes sweep

the pond with spy-glasses, and make the woods re-
sound with their discharges. The waves generously
rise and dash angrily, taking sides with all water-
fowl, and our sportsmen must beat a retreat to town
and shop and unfinished jobs. But they were too
often successful. When I went to get a pail of water
early in the morning I frequently saw this stately
bird sailing out of my cove within a few rods. If I
endeavored to overtake him in a boat, in order to see
how he would manoeuvre, he would dive and be
completely lost, so that I did not discover him again,
sometimes, till the latter part of the day. But I was
more than a match for him on the surface. He com-
monly went off in a rain.
As I was paddling along the north shore one very
calm October afternoon, for such days especially
they settle on to the lakes, like the milkweed down,
having looked in vain over the pond for a loon, sud-
denly one, sailing out from the shore toward the
middle a few rods in front of me, set up his wild
laugh and betrayed himself. I pursued with a paddle
and he dived, but when he came up I was nearer
than before. He dived again, but I miscalculated the
direction he would take, and we were fifty rods
apart when he came to the surface this time, for I
had helped to widen the interval; and again he
laughed long and loud, and with more reason than
before. He manoeuvred so cunningly that I could not
get within half a dozen rods of him. Each time, when
he came to the surface, turning his head this way
and that, he coolly surveyed the water and the land,
and apparently chose his course so that he might
come up where there was the widest expanse of wa-
ter and at the greatest distance from the boat. It was
surprising how quickly he made up his mind and put
 WALDEN 235

his resolve into execution. He led me at once to the

widest part of the pond, and could not be driven
from it. While he was thinking one thing in his
brain, I was endeavoring to divine his thought in
mine. It was a pretty game, played on the smooth
surface of the pond, a man against a loon. Suddenly
your adversary's checker disappears beneath the
board, and the problem is to place yours nearest to
where his will appear again. Sometimes he would
come up unexpectedly on the opposite side of me,
having apparently passed directly under the boat.
So long-winded was he and so unweariable, that
when he had swum farthest he would immediately
plunge again, nevertheless; and then no wit could
divine where in the deep pond, beneath the smooth
surface, he might be speeding his way like a fish,
for he had time and ability to visit the bottom of the
pond in its deepest part. It is said that loons have
been caught in the New York lakes eighty feet be-
neath the surface, with hooks set for trout,—though
Walden is deeper than that. How surprised must the
fishes be to see this ungainly visitor from another
sphere speeding his way amid their schools! Yet he
appeared to knov/ his course as surely under water
as on the surface, and swam much faster there. Once
or twice I saw a ripple where he approached the sur-
face, just put his head out to reconnoitre, and in-
stantly dived again. I found that it was as well for me
to rest on my oars and wait his reappearing as to
endeavor to calculate where he would rise; for again
and again, when I was straining my eyes over the
surface one way, I would suddenly be startled by his
unearthly laugh behind me. But why, after display-
ing so much cunning, did he invariably betray him-
self the moment he came up by that loud laugh? Did
not his white breast enough betray him? He was in-
236 BRUTE NEIGHBORS

deed a silly loon, I thought. I could commonly hear

the plash of the water when he came up, and so also
detected him. But after an hour he seemed as fresh
as ever, dived as willingly and swam yet farther than
at first. It was surprising to see how serenely he
sailed off with unruffled breast when he came to the
surface, doing all the work with his webbed feet
beneath. His usual note was this demoniac laughter,
yet somewhat like that of a water-fowl; but occasion-
ally, when he had balked me most successfully and
come up a long way off, he uttered a long-drawn un-
earthly howl, probably more like that of a wolf than
any bird; as when a beast puts his muzzle to the
ground and deliberately howls. This was his looning,
—perhaps the wildest sound that is ever heard here,
making the woods ring far and wide. I concluded
that he laughed in derision of my efforts, confident
of his own resources. Though the sky was by this
time overcast, the pond was so smooth that I could
see where he broke the surface when I did not hear
him. His white breast, the stillness of the air, and
the smoothness of the water were all against him. At
length, having come up fifty rods off, he uttered one
of those prolonged howls, as if calling on the god of
loons to aid him, and immediately there came a wind
from the east and rippled the surface, and filled the
whole air with misty rain, and I was impressed as if
it were the prayer of the loon answered, and his god
was angry with me; and so I left him disappearing
far away on the tumultuous surface.
For hours, in fall days, I watched the ducks cun-
ningly tack and veer and hold the middle of the
pond, far from the sportsman; tricks which they
will have less need to practise in Louisiana bayous.
When compelled to rise they would sometimes circle
round and round and over the pond at a consider-
 WALDEN 237

able height, from which they could easily see to

other ponds and the river, like black motes in the
sky; and, when I thought they had gone off thither
long since, they would settle down by a slanting
flight of a quarter of a mile on to a distant part
which was left free; but what beside safety they
got by sailing in the middle of Walden I do not
know, unless they love its water for the same reason
that I do.
House-Warming

IN October I went a-graping to the river

meadows, and loaded myself with clusters more
precious for their beauty and fragrance than for
food. There too I admired, though I did not gather,
the cranberries, small waxen gems, pendants of the
meadow grass, pearly and red, which the farmer
plucks with an ugly rake, leaving the smooth mead-
ow in a snarl, heedlessly measuring them by the
bushel and the dollar only, and sells the spoils of the
meads to Boston and New York; destined to be
jammed, to satisfy the tastes of lovers of Nature
there. So butchers rake the tongues of bison out of
the prairie grass, regardless of the torn and droop-
ing plant. The barberry's brilliant fruit was likewise
food for my eyes merely; but I collected a small store
of wild apples for coddling, which the proprietor and
travellers had overlooked. When chestnuts were ripe
I laid up half a bushel for winter. It was very excit-
ing at that season to roam the then boundless chest-
nut woods of Lincoln,—they now sleep their long
sleep under the railroad,—with a bag on my shoulder,
and a stick to open burrs with in my hand, for I did
not always wait for the frost, amid the rustling of
leaves and the loud reproofs of the red-squirrels and
the jays, whose half-consumed nuts I sometimes
stole, for the burrs which they had selected were sure
to contain sound ones. Occasionally I climbed and
shook the trees. They grew also behind my house,
and one large tree which almost overshadowed it,
was, when in flower, a bouquet which scented the
whole neighborhood, but the squirrels and the jays
got most of its fruit; the last coming in flocks early
in the morning and picking the nuts out of the burrs
 WALDEN 239

before they fell. I relinquished these trees to them

and visited the more distant woods composed wholly
of chestnut. These nuts, as far as they went, were a
good substitute for bread. Many other substitutes
might, perhaps, be found. Digging one day for fish-
worms I discovered the ground-nut (Apios tuberosa")
on its string, the potato of the aborigines, a sort of
fabulous fruit, which I had begun to doubt if I had
ever dug and eaten in childhood, as I had told, and
had not dreamed it. I had often since seen its crimpled
red velvety blossom supported by the stems of other
plants without knowing it to be the same. Cultiva-
tion has well nigh exterminated it. It has a sweetish
taste, much like that of a frostbitten potato, and I
found it better boiled than roasted. This tuber seemed
like a faint promise of Nature to rear her own chil-
dren and feed them simply here at some future pe-
riod. In these days of fatted cattle and waving grain-
fields, this humble root, which was once the totem
of an Indian tribe, is quite forgotten, or known only
by its flowering vine; but let wild Nature reign here
once more, and the tender and luxurious English
grains will probably disappear before a myriad of
foes, and without the care of man the crow may carry
back even the last seed of corn to the great corn-
field of the Indian's God in the south-west, whence
he is said to have brought it; but the now almost
exterminated ground-nut will perhaps revive and
flourish in spite of frosts and wildness, prove itself
indigenous, and resume its ancient importance and
dignity as the diet of the hunter tribe. Some Indian
Ceres or Minerva must have been the inventor and
bestower of it; and when the reign of poetry com-
mences here, its leaves and string of nuts may be
represented on our works of art.
Already, by the first of September, I had seen two
240 HOUSE-WARMING

or three small maples turned scarlet across the pond,

beneath where the white stems of three aspens di-
verged, at the point of a promontory, next the water.
Ah, many a tale their color told! And gradually from
week to week the character of each tree came out,
and it admired itself reflected in the smooth mirror
of the lake. Each morning the manager of this gallery
substituted some new picture, distinguished by more
brilliant or harmonious coloring, for the old upon
the walls.
The wasps came by thousands to my lodge in Octo-
ber, as to winter quarters, and settled on my win-
dows within and on the walls over-head, sometimes
deterring visitors from entering. Each morning, when
they were numbed with cold, I swept some of them
out, but I did not trouble myself much to get rid of
them; I even felt complimented by their regarding
my house as a desirable shelter. They never molested
me seriously, though they bedded with me; and they
gradually disappeared, into what crevices I do not
know, avoiding winter and unspeakable cold.
Like the wasps, before I finally went into winter
quarters in November, I used to resort to the north-
east side of Walden, which the sun, reflected from
the pitch-pine woods and the stony shore, made the
fire-side of the pond; it is so much pleasanter and
wholesomer to be warmed by the sun while you can
be, than by an artificial fire. I thus warmed myself
by the still glowing embers which the summer, like
a departed hunter, had left.

When I came to build my chimney I studied

masonry. My bricks being second-hand ones required
to be cleaned with a trowel, so that I learned more
 WALDEN 241

than usual of the qualities of bricks and trowels. The

mortar on them was fifty years old, and was said to
be still growing harder; but this is one of those say-
ings which men love to repeat whether they are true
or not. Such sayings themselves grow harder and
adhere more firmly with age, and it would take many
blows with a trowel to clean an old wiseacre of them.
Many of the villages of Mesopotamia are built of
second-hand bricks of a very good quality, obtained
from the ruins of Babylon, and the cement on them
is older and probably harder still. However that may
be, I was struck by the peculiar toughness of the
steel which bore so many violent blows without being
worn out. As my bricks had been in a chimney be-
fore, though I did not read the name of Nebuchad-
nezzar on them, I picked out as many fire-place
bricks as I could find, to save work and waste, and
I filled the spaces between the bricks about the
fire-place with stones from the pond shore, and also
made my mortar with the white sand from the same
place. I lingered most about the fireplace, as the
most vital part of the house. Indeed, I worked so
deliberately, that though I commenced at the ground
in the morning, a course of bricks raised a few
inches above the floor served for my pillow at night;
yet I did not get a stiff neck for it that I remember;
my stiff neck is of older date. I took a poet to board
for a fortnight about those times, which caused me
to be put to it for room. He brought his own knife,
though I had two, and we used to scour them by
thrusting them into the earth. He shared with me the
labors of cooking. I was pleased to see my work ris-
ing so square and solid by degrees, and reflected,
that, if it proceeded slowly, it was calculated to en-
dure a long time. The chimney is to some extent an
independent structure, standing on the ground and
242 HOUSE-WARMING

rising through the house to the heavens; even after

the house is burned it still stands sometimes, and
its importance and independence are apparent. This
was toward the end of summer. It was now Novem-
ber.

The north wind had already begun to cool the

pond, though it took many weeks of steady blowing
to accomplish it, it is so deep. When I began to have
a fire at evening, before I plastered my house, the
chimney carried smoke particularly well, because of
the numerous chinks between the boards. Yet I
passed some cheerful evenings in that cool and airy
apartment, surrounded by the rough brown boards
full of knots, and rafters with the bark on high over-
head. My house never pleased my eye so much after
it was plastered, though I was obliged to confess that
it was more comfortable. Should not every apart-
ment in which man dwells be lofty enough to create
some obscurity over-head, where flickering shadows
may play at evening about the rafters? These forms
are more agreeable to the fancy and imagination
than fresco paintings or other the most expensive
furniture. I now first began to inhabit my house, I
may say, when I began to use it for warmth as well
as shelter. I had got a couple of old fire-dogs to keep
the wood from the hearth, and it did me good to see
the soot form on the back of the chimney which I
had built, and I poked the fire with more right and
more satisfaction than usual. My dwelling was small,
and I could hardly entertain an echo in it; but it
seemed larger for being a single apartment and re-
mote from neighbors. All the attractions of a house
were concentrated in one room; it was kitchen,
chamber, parlor, and keeping-room; and whatever
 WALDEN 243

satisfaction parent or child, master or servant, derive

from living in a house, I enjoyed it all. Cato says, the
master of a family (patremfamilias*) must have in
his rustic villa "cellam oleariam, vinariam, dolia
multa, uti lubeat caritatem expectare, et rei, et
virtuti, et glorias erit," that is, "an oil and wine
cellar, many casks, so that it may be pleasant to
expect hard times; it will be for his advantage, and
virtue, and glory." I had in my cellar a firkin of
potatoes, about two quarts of peas with the weevil
in them, and on my shelf a little rice, a jug of mo-
lasses, and of rye and Indian meal a peck each.
I sometimes dream of a larger and more populous
house, standing in a golden age, of enduring mate-
rials, and without ginger-bread work, which shall
still consist of only one room, a vast, rude, sub-
stantial, primitive hall, without ceiling or plastering,
with bare rafters and purlins supporting a sort of
lower heaven over one's head,—useful to keep off
rain and snow; where the king and queen posts
stand out to receive your homage, when you have
done reverence to the prostrate Saturn of an older
dynasty on stepping over the sill; a cavernous house,
wherein you must reach up a torch upon a pole to
see the roof; where some may live in the fire-place,
some in the recess of a window, and some on settles,
some at one end of the hall, some at another, and
some aloft on rafters with the spiders, if they choose;
a house which you have got into when you have
opened the outside door, and the ceremony is over;
where the weary traveller may wash, and eat, and
converse, and sleep, without further journey; such a
shelter as you would be glad to reach in a tempestu-
ous night, containing all the essentials of a house,
and nothing for house-keeping; where you can see
all the treasures of the house at one view, and every
244 HOUSE-WARMING

thing hangs upon its peg that a man should use; at

once kitchen, pantry, parlor, chamber, store-house,
and garret; where you can see so necessary a thing as
a barrel or a ladder, so convenient a thing as a cup-
board, and hear the pot boil, and pay your respects
to the fire that cooks your dinner and the oven that
bakes your bread, and the necessary furniture and
utensils are the chief ornaments; where the washing
is not put out, nor the fire, nor the mistress, and per-
haps you are sometimes requested to move from off
the trap-door, when the cook would descend into the
cellar, and so learn whether the ground is solid or
hollow beneath you without stamping. A house whose
inside is as open and manifest as a bird's nest, and
you cannot go in at the front door and out at the back
without seeing some of its inhabitants; where to be a
guest is to be presented with the freedom of the
house, and not to be carefully excluded from seven
eighths of it, shut up in a particular cell, and told to
make yourself at home there,—in solitary confine-
ment. Nowadays the host does not admit you to his
hearth, but has got the mason to build one for your-
self somewhere in his alley, and hospitality is the art
of keeping you at the greatest distance. There is as
much secrecy about the cooking as if he had a design
to poison you. I am aware that I have been on many
a man's premises, and might have been legally or-
dered off, but I am not aware that I have been in
many men's houses. I might visit in my old clothes a
king and queen who lived simply in such a house as
I have described, if I were going their way; but back-
ing out of a modern palace will be all that I shall
desire to learn, if ever I am caught in one.
It would seem as if the very language of our par-
lors would lose all its nerve and degenerate into pa-
laver wholly, our lives pass at such remoteness from
 WALDEN 245

its symbols, and its metaphors and tropes are neces-

sarily so far fetched, through slides and dumb-wait-
ers, as it were; in other words, the parlor is so far
from the kitchen and workshop. The dinner even is
only the parable of a dinner, commonly. As if only
the savage dwelt near enough to Nature and Truth to
borrow a trope from them. How can the scholar, who
dwells away in the North West Territory or the Isle
of Man, tell what is parliamentary in the kitchen?
However, only one or two of my guests were ever
bold enough to stay and eat a hasty-pudding with me;
but when they saw that crisis approaching they beat
a hasty retreat rather, as if it would shake the house
to its foundations. Nevertheless, it stood through a
great many hasty-puddings.
I did not plaster till it was freezing weather. I
brought over some whiter and cleaner sand for this
purpose from the opposite shore of the pond in a
boat, a sort of conveyance which would have tempted
me to go much farther if necessary. My house had in
the mean while been shingled down to the ground on
every side. In lathing I was pleased to be able to send
home each nail with a single blow of the hammer,
and it was my ambition to transfer the plaster from
the board to the wall neatly and rapidly. I remem-
bered the story of a conceited fellow, who, in fine
clothes, was wont to lounge about the village once,
giving advice to workmen. Venturing one day to sub-
stitute deeds for words, he turned up his cuffs, seized
a plasterer's board, and having loaded his trowel
without mishap, with a complacent look toward the
lathing overhead, made a bold gesture thitherward;
and straightway, to his complete discomfiture, re-
ceived the whole contents in his ruffled bosom. I ad-
mired anew the economy and convenience of plaster-
ing, which so effectually shuts out the cold and takes
246 HOUSE-WARMING

a handsome finish, and I learned the various casual-

ties to which the plasterer is liable. I was surprised
to see how thirsty the bricks were which drank up all
the moisture in my plaster before I had smoothed it,
and how many pailfuls of water it takes to christen
a new hearth. I had the previous winter made a small
quantity of lime by burning the shells of the Unio
ftuviatilis, which our river affords, for the sake of the
experiment; so that I knew where my materials came
from. I might have got good limestone within a mile
or two and burned it myself, if I had cared to do so.

The pond had in the mean while skimmed over in

the shadiest and shallowest coves, some days or even
weeks before the general freezing. The first ice is
especially interesting and perfect, being hard, dark,
and transparent, and affords the best opportunity that
ever offers for examining the bottom where it is
shallow; for you can lie at your length on ice only an
inch thick, like a skater insect on the surface of the
water, and study the bottom at your leisure, only two
or three inches distant, like a picture behind a glass,
and the water is necessarily always smooth then.
There are many furrows in the sand where some
creature has travelled about and doubled on its tracks;
and, for wrecks, it is strewn with the cases of cadis
worms made of minute grains of white quartz. Per-
haps these have creased it, for you find some of their
cases in the furrows, though they are deep and broad
for them to make. But the ice itself is the object of
most interest, though you must improve the earliest
opportunity to study it. If you examine it closely the
morning after it freezes, you find that the greater part
of the bubbles, which at first appeared to be within
it, are against its under surface, and that more are
 WALDEN 247

continually rising from the bottom; while the ice is

as yet comparatively solid and dark, that is, you see
the water through it. These bubbles are from an
eightieth to an eighth of an inch in diameter, very
clear and beautiful, and you see your face reflected
in them through the ice. There may be thirty or forty
of them to a square inch. There are also already
within the ice narrow oblong perpendicular bubbles
about half an inch long, sharp cones with the apex
upward; or oftener, if the ice is quite fresh, minute
spherical bubbles one directly above another, like a
string of beads. But these within the ice are not so
numerous nor obvious as those beneath. I sometimes
used to cast on stones to try the strength of the ice,
and those which broke through carried in air with
them, which formed very large and conspicuous
white bubbles beneath. One day when I came to the
same place forty-eight hours afterward, I found that
those large bubbles were still perfect, though an inch
more of ice had formed, as I could see distinctly by
the seam in the edge of a cake. But as the last two
days had been very warm, like an Indian summer,
the ice was not now transparent, showing the dark
green color of the water, and the bottom, but opaque
and whitish or gray, and though twice as thick was
hardly stronger than before, for the air bubbles had
greatly expanded under this heat and run together,
and lost their regularity; they were no longer one
directly over another, but often like silvery coins
poured from a bag, one overlapping another, or in
thin flakes, as if occupying slight cleavages. The
beauty of the ice was gone, and it was too late to
study the bottom. Being curious to know what po-
sition my great bubbles occupied with regard to the
new ice, I broke out a cake containing a middling
sized one, and turned it bottom upward. The new ice
248 HOUSE-WARMING

had formed around and under the bubble, so that it

was included between the two ices. It was wholly
in the lower ice, but close against the upper, and was
flattish, or perhaps slightly lenticular, with a rounded
edge, a quarter of an inch deep by four inches in
diameter; and I was surprised to find that directly
under the bubble the ice was melted with great regu-
larity in the form of a saucer reversed, to the height
of five eighths of an inch in the middle, leaving a thin
partition there between the water and the bubble,
hardly an eighth of an inch thick; and in many
places the small bubbles in this partition had burst
out downward, and probably there was no ice at all
under the largest bubbles, which were a foot in di-
ameter. I inferred that the infinite number of minute
bubbles which I had first seen against the under sur-
face of the ice were now frozen in likewise, and that
each, in its degree, had operated like a burning glass
on the ice beneath to melt and rot it. These are the
little air-guns which contribute to make the ice crack
and whoop.

At length the winter set in in good earnest, just as

I had finished plastering, and the wind began to howl
around the house as if it had not had permission to
do so till then. Night after night the geese came
lumbering in in the dark with a clangor and a whis-
tling of wings, even after the ground was covered
with snow, some to alight in Walden, and some fly-
ing low over the woods toward Fair Haven, bound
for Mexico. Several times, when returning from the
village at ten or eleven o'clock at night, I heard the
tread of a flock of geese, or else ducks, on the dry
leaves in the woods by a pond-hole behind my dwell-
ing, where they had come up to feed, and the faint
 WALDEN 249

honk or quack of their leader as they hurried off. In

1845 Walden froze entirely over for the first time
on the night of the 22d of December, Flint's and
other shallower ponds and the river having been
frozen ten days or more; in '46, the i6th; in '49,
about the 3ist; and in '50, about the 27th of Decem-
ber; in '52, the 5th of January; in '53, the 3ist of
December. The snow had already covered the ground
since the 25th of November, and surrounded me sud-
denly with the scenery of winter. I withdrew yet
farther into my shell, and endeavored to keep a bright
fire both within my house and within my breast. My
employment out of doors now was to collect the dead
wood in the forest, bringing it in my hands or on my
shoulders, or sometimes trailing a dead pine tree
under each arm to my shed. An old forest fence
which had seen its best days was a great haul for me.
I sacrificed it to Vulcan, for it was past serving the
god Terminus. How much more interesting an event
is that man's supper who has just been forth in the
snow to hunt, nay, you might say, steal, the fuel to
cook it with! His bread and meat are sweet. There are
enough fagots and waste wood of all kinds in the
forests of most of our towns to support many fires,
but which at present warm none, and, some think,
hinder the growth of the young wood. There was also
the drift-wood of the pond. In the course of the sum-
mer I had discovered a raft of pitch-pine logs with the
bark on, pinned together by the Irish when the rail-
road was built. This I hauled up partly on the shore.
After soaking two years and then lying high six
months it was perfectly sound, though waterlogged
past drying. I amused myself one winter day with
sliding this piecemeal across the pond, nearly half a
mile, skating behind with one end of a log fifteen
feet long on my shoulder, and the other on the ice;
250 HOUSE-WARMING

or I tied several logs together with a birch withe, and

then, with a longer birch or alder which had a hook
at the end, dragged them across. Though completely
waterlogged and almost as heavy as lead, they not
only burned long, but made a very hot fire; nay, I
thought that they burned better for the soaking, as
if the pitch, being confined by the water, burned
longer as in a lamp.
Gilpin, in his account of the forest borderers of
England, says that "the encroachments of trespassers,
and the houses and fences thus raised on the borders
of the forest," were "considered as great nuisances
by the old forest law, and were severely punished un-
der the name of purprestures, as tending ad terrorem
ferarum-ad nocumentum forestse, &c.," to the fright-
ening of the game and the detriment of the forest.
But I was interested in the preservation of the veni-
son and the vert more than the hunters or wood-
choppers, and as much as though I had been the Lord
Warden himself; and if any part was burned, though
I burned it myself by accident, I grieved with a grief
that lasted longer and was more inconsolable than
that of the proprietors; nay, I grieved when it was
cut down by the proprietors themselves. I would that
our farmers when they cut down a forest felt some
of that awe which the old Romans did when they
came to thin, or let in the light to, a consecrated
grove, (lucum conlucare,} that is, would believe that
it is sacred to some god. The Roman made an expia-
tory offering, and prayed, Whatever god or goddess
thou art to whom this grove is sacred, be propitious
to me, my family, and children, &c.
It is remarkable what a value is still put upon
wood even in this age and in this new country, a
value more permanent and universal than that of
gold. After all our discoveries and inventions no man
 WALDEN 251

will go by a pile of wood. It is as precious to us as it

was to our Saxon and Norman ancestors. If they
made their bows of it, we make our gun-stocks of it.
Michaux, more than thirty years ago, says that the
price of wood for fuel in New York and Philadelphia
"nearly equals, and sometimes exceeds, that of the
best wood in Paris, though this immense capital
annually requires more than three hundred thousand
cords, and is surrounded to the distance of three
hundred miles by cultivated plains." In this town the
price of wood rises almost steadily, and the only
question is, how much higher it is to be this year
than it was the last. Mechanics and tradesmen who
come in person to the forest on no other errand, are
sure to attend the wood auction, and even pay a high
price for the privilege of gleaning after the wood-
chopper. It is now many years that men have re-
sorted to the forest for fuel and the materials of the
arts; the New Englander and the New Hollander, the
Parisian and the Celt, the farmer and Robinhood,
Goody Blake and Harry Gill, in most parts of the
world the prince and the peasant, the scholar and
the savage, equally require still a few sticks from
the forest to warm them and cook their food. Neither
could I do without them.
Every man looks at his wood-pile with a. kind of
affection. I loved to have mine before my window,
and the more chips the better to remind me of my
pleasing work. I had an old axe which nobody
claimed, with which by spells in winter days, on the
sunny side of the house, I played about the stumps
which I had got out of my bean-field. As my driver
prophesied when I was ploughing, they warmed me
twice, once while I was splitting them, and again
when they were on the fire, so that no fuel could
give out more heat. As for the axe, I was advised to
252 HOUSE-WARMING

get the village blacksmith to "jump" it; but I jumped

him, and, putting a hickory helve from the woods
into it, made it do. If it was dull, it was at least
hung true.
A few pieces of fat pine were a great treasure. It
is interesting to remember how much of this food for
fire is still concealed in the bowels of the earth. In
previous years I had often gone "prospecting" over
some bare hill-side, where a pitch-pine wood had
formerly stood, and got out the fat pine roots. They
are almost indestructible. Stumps thirty or forty years
old, at least, will still be sound at the core, though
the sapwood has all become vegetable mould, as
appears by the scales of the thick bark forming a
ring level with the earth four or five inches distant
from the heart. With axe and shovel you explore this
mine, and follow the marrowy store, yellow as beef
tallow, or as if you had struck on a vein of gold,
deep into the earth. But commonly I kindled my fire
with the dry leaves of the forest, which I had stored
up in my shed before the snow came. Green hickory
finely split makes the woodchopper's kindlings, when
he has a camp in the woods. Once in a while I got a
little of this. When the villagers were lighting their
fires beyond the horizon, I too gave notice to the
various wild inhabitants of Walden vale, by a smoky
streamer from my chimney, that I was awake.—
Light-winged Smoke, Icarian bird,
Melting thy pinions in thy upward flight,
Lark without song, and messenger of dawn,
Circling above the hamlets as thy nest;
Or else, departing dream, and shadowy form
Of midnight vision, gathering up thy skirts;
By night star-veiling, and by day
Darkening the light and blotting out the sun;
Go thou my incense upward from this hearth,
And ask the gods to pardon this clear flame.
 WALDEN 253

Hard green wood just cut, though I used but little

of that, answered my purpose better than any other.
I sometimes left a good fire when I went to take a
walk in a winter afternoon; and when I returned,
three or four hours afterward, it would be still alive
and glowing. My house was not empty though I was
gone. It was as if I had left a cheerful housekeeper
behind. It was I and Fire that lived there; and com-
monly my housekeeper proved trustworthy. One day,
however, as I was splitting wood, I thought that I
would just look in at the window and see if the house
was not on fire; it was the only time I remember to
have been particularly anxious on this score; so I
looked and saw that a spark had caught my bed, and
I went in and extinguished it when it had burned a
place as big as my hand. But my house occupied so
sunny and sheltered a position, and its roof was so
low, that I could afford to let the fire go out in the
middle of almost any winter day.
The moles nested in my cellar, nibbling every third
potato, and making a snug bed even there of some hair
left after plastering and of brown paper; for even the
wildest animals love comfort and warmth as well as
man, and they survive the winter only because they
are so careful to secure them. Some of my friends
spoke as if I was coming to the woods on purpose to
freeze myself. The animal merely makes a bed,
which he warms with his body in a sheltered place;
but man, having discovered fire, boxes up some air
in a spacious apartment, and warms that, instead of
robbing himself, makes that his bed, in which he can
move about divested of more cumbrous clothing,
maintain a kind of summer in the midst of winter,
and by means of windows even admit the light, and
with a lamp lengthen out the day. Thus he goes a
step or two beyond instinct, and saves a little time
254 HOUSE-WARMING

for the fine arts. Though, when I had been exposed to

the rudest blasts a long time, my whole body began
to grow torpid, when I reached the genial atmosphere
of my house I soon recovered my faculties and pro-
longed my life. But the most luxuriously housed has
little to boast of in this respect, nor need we trouble
ourselves to speculate how the human race may be at
last destroyed. It would be easy to cut their threads
any time with a little sharper blast from the north.
We go on dating from Cold Fridays and Great Snows;
but a little colder Friday, or greater snow, would put
a period to man's existence on the globe.
The next winter I used a small cooking-stove for
economy, since I did not own the forest; but it did
not keep fire so well as the open fire-place. Cooking
was then, for the most part, no longer a poetic, but
merely a chemic process. It will soon be forgotten,
in these days of stoves, that we used to roast potatoes
in the ashes, after the Indian fashion. The stove not
only took up room and scented the house, but it
concealed the fire, and I felt as if I had lost a com-
panion. You can always see a face in the fire. The la-
borer, looking into it at evening, purifies his thoughts
of the dross and earthiness which they have accumu-
lated during the day. But I could no longer sit and
look into the fire, and the pertinent words of a poet
recurred to me with new force.—

"Never, bright flame, may be denied to me

Thy dear, life imaging, close sympathy.
What but my hopes shot upward e'er so bright?
What but my fortunes sunk so low in night?
Why art thou banished from our hearth and hall,
Thou who art welcomed and beloved by all?
Was thy existence then too fanciful
For our life's common light, who are so dull?
 WALDEN 255

Did thy bright gleam mysterious converse hold

With our congenial souls? secrets too bold?
Well, we are safe and strong, for now we sit
Beside a hearth where no dim shadows flit,
Where nothing cheers nor saddens, but a fire
Warms feet and hands—nor does to more aspire;
By whose compact utilitarian heap
The present may sit down and go to sleep,
Nor fear the ghosts who from the dim past walked,
And with us by the unequal light of the old wood
fire talked."
MRS. HOOPER
Former Inhabitants; and
Winter Visitors

I WEATHERED some merry snow storms, and

spent some cheerful winter evenings by my fire-side,
while the snow whirled wildly without, and even the
hooting of the owl was hushed. For many weeks I
met no one in my walks but those who came oc-
casionally to cut wood and sled it to the village. The
elements, however, abetted me in making a path
through the deepest snow in the woods, for when I
had once gone through the wind blew the oak leaves
into my tracks, where they lodged, and by absorbing
the rays of the sun melted the snow, and so not only
made a dry bed for my feet, but in the night their
dark line was my guide. For human society I was
obliged to conjure up the former occupants of these
woods. Within the memory of many of my townsmen
the road near which my house stands resounded with
the laugh and gossip of inhabitants, and the woods
which border it were notched and dotted here and
there with their little gardens and dwellings, though
it was then much more shut in by the forest than
now. In some places, within my own remembrance,
the pines would scrape both sides of a chaise at once,
and women and children who were compelled to go
this way to Lincoln alone and on foot did it with fear,
and often ran a good part of the distance. Though
mainly but a humble route to neighboring villages,
or for the woodman's team, it once amused the travel-
ler more than now by its variety, and lingered longer
in his memory. Where now firm open fields stretch
from the village to the woods, it then ran through a
maple swamp on a foundation of logs, the remnants
 WALDEN 257

of which, doubtless, still underlie the present dusty

highway, from the Stratton, now the Alms House,
Farm, to Brister's Hill.
East of my bean-field, across the road, lived Cato
Ingraham, slave of Duncan Ingraham, Esquire, gentle-
man of Concord village; who built his slave a house,
and gave him permission to live in Walden Woods;—
Cato, not Uticensis, but Concordiensis. Some say that
he was a Guinea Negro. There are a few who remem-
ber his little patch among the walnuts, which he let
grow up till he should be old and need them; but a
younger and whiter speculator got them at last. He too,
however, occupies an equally narrow house at present.
Cato's half-obliterated cellar hole still remains, though
known to few, being concealed from the traveller by
a fringe of pines. It is now filled with the smooth
sumach, (Rhus glabra,) and one of the earliest
species of golden-rod (Solidago stricta} grows there
luxuriantly.
Here, by the very corner of my field, still nearer to
town, Zilpha, a colored woman, had her little house,
where she spun linen for the townsfolk, making the
Walden Woods ring with her shrill singing, for she
had a loud and notable voice. At length, in the war of
1812, her dwelling was set on fire by English soldiers,
prisoners on parole, when she was away, and her cat
and dog and hens were all burned up together. She
led a hard life, and somewhat inhumane. One old
frequenter of these woods remembers, that as he
passed her house one noon he heard her muttering
to herself over her gurgling pot,—"Ye are all bones,
bones!" I have seen bricks amid the oak copse there.
Down the road, on the right hand, on Brister's Hill,
lived Brister Freeman, "a handy Negro," slave of
Squire Cummings once,-there where grow still the
apple-trees which Brister planted and tended; large
258 FORMER INHABITANTS

old trees now, but their fruit still wild and ciderish to
my taste. Not long since I read his epitaph in the old
Lincoln burying-ground, a little on one side, near the
unmarked graves of some British grenadiers who fell
in the retreat from Concord,—where he is styled
"Sippio Brister,"—Scipio Africanus he had some title
to be called,—"a man of color," as if he were dis-
colored. It also told me, with staring emphasis, when
he died; which was but an indirect way of informing
me that he ever lived. With him dwelt Fenda, his
hospitable wife, who told fortunes, yet pleasantly,—
large, round, and black, blacker than any of the
children of night, such a dusky orb as never rose on
Concord before or since.
Farther down the hill, on the left, on the old road
in the woods, are marks of some homestead of the
Stratton family; whose orchard once covered all the
slope of Brister's Hill, but was long since killed out
by pitch-pines, excepting a few stumps, whose old
roots furnish still the wild stocks of many a thrifty
village tree.
Nearer yet to town, you come to Breed's location,
on the other side of the way, just on the edge of the
wood; ground famous for the pranks of a demon not
distinctly named in old mythology, who has acted a
prominent and astounding part in our New England
life, and deserves, as much as any mythological char-
acter, to have his biography written one day; who
first comes in the guise of a friend or hired man, and
then robs and murders the whole family,-New-Eng-
land Rum. But history must not yet tell the tragedies
enacted here; let time intervene in some measure to
assuage and lend an azure tint to them. Here the
most indistinct and dubious tradition says that once
a tavern stood; the well the same, which tempered
the traveller's beverage and refreshed his steed. Here
 WALDEN 259

then men saluted one another, and heard and told the
news, and went their ways again.
Breed's hut was standing only a dozen years ago,
though it had long been unoccupied. It was about
the size of mine. It was set on fire by mischievous
boys, one Election night, if I do not mistake. I lived
on the edge of the village then, and had just lost my-
self over Davenant's Gondibert, that winter that I
labored with a lethargy,—which, by the way, I never
knew whether to regard as a family complaint, hav-
ing an uncle who goes to sleep shaving himself, and
is obliged to sprout potatoes in a cellar Sundays, in
order to keep awake and keep the Sabbath, or as the
consequence of my attempt to read Chalmers' col-
lection of English poetry without skipping. It fairly
overcame my Nervii. I had just sunk my head on
this when the bells rung fire, and in hot haste the
engines rolled that way, led by a straggling troop of
men and boys, and I among the foremost, for I had
leaped the brook. We thought it was far south over
the woods,—we who had run to fires before,—barn,
shop, or dwelling-house, or all together. "It's Baker's
barn," cried one. "It is the Codman Place," affirmed
another. And then fresh sparks went up above the
wood, as if the roof fell in, and we all shouted "Con-
cord to the rescue!" Wagons shot past with furious
speed and crushing loads, bearing, perchance, among
the rest, the agent of the Insurance Company, who
was bound to go however far; and ever and anon
the engine bell tinkled behind, more slow and sure,
and rearmost of all, as it was afterward whispered,
came they who set the fire and gave the alarm. Thus
we kept on like true idealists, rejecting the evidence
of our senses, until at a turn in the road we heard
the crackling and actually felt the heat of the fire
from over the wall, and realized, alas! that we were
260 FORMER INHABITANTS

there. The very nearness of the fire but cooled our

ardor. At first we thought to throw a frog-pond on to
it; but concluded to let it burn, it was so far gone and
so worthless. So we stood round our engine, jostled
one another, expressed our sentiments through speak-
ing trumpets, or in lower tone referred to the great
conflagrations which the world has witnessed, in-
cluding Bascom's shop, and, between ourselves, we
thought that, were we there in season with our "tub",
and a full frog-pond by, we could turn that threat-
ened last and universal one into another flood. We
finally retreated without doing any mischief,—re-
turned to sleep and Gondibert. But as for Gondibert,
I would except that passage in the preface about wit
being the soul's powder,—"but most of mankind are
strangers to wit, as Indians are to powder."
It chanced that I walked that way across the fields
the following night, about the same hour, and hear-
ing a low moaning at this spot, I drew near in the
dark, and discovered the only survivor of the family
that I know, the heir of both its virtues and its vices,
who alone was interested in this burning, lying on
his stomach and looking over the cellar wall at the
still smouldering cinders beneath, muttering to him-
self, as is his wont. He had been working far off in
the river meadows all day, and had improved the first
moments that he could call his own to visit the home
of his fathers and his youth. He gazed into the cellar
from all sides and points of view by turns, always
lying down to it, as if there was some treasure, which
he remembered, concealed between the stones, where
there was absolutely nothing but a heap of bricks
and ashes. The house being gone, he looked at what
there was left. He was soothed by the sympathy
which my mere presence implied, and showed me,
as well as the darkness permitted, where the well
 WALDEN 261

was covered up; which, thank Heaven, could never

be burned; and he groped long about the wall to
find the well-sweep which his father had cut and
mounted, feeling for the iron hook or staple by which
a burden had been fastened to the heavy end,—all
that he could now cling to,-to convince me that it
was no common "rider." I felt it, and still remark it
almost daily in my walks, for by it hangs the his-
tory of a family.
Once more, on the left, where are seen the well and
lilac bushes by the wall, in the now open field, lived
Nutting and Le Grosse. But to return toward Lincoln.
Farther in the woods than any of these, where the
road approaches nearest to the pond, Wyman the
potter squatted, and furnished his townsmen with
earthen ware, and left descendants to succeed him.
Neither were they rich in worldly goods, holding the
land by sufferance while they lived; and there often
the sheriff came in vain to collect the taxes, and "at-
tached a chip," for form's sake, as I have read in his
accounts, there being nothing else that he could lay
his hands on. One day in midsummer, when I was
hoeing, a man who was carrying a load of pottery to
market stopped his horse against my field and in-
quired concerning Wyman the younger. He had long
ago bought a potter's wheel of him, and wished to
know what had become of him. I had read of the
potter's clay and wheel in Scripture, but it had never
occurred to me that the pots we use were not such as
had come down unbroken from those days, or grown
on trees like gourds somewhere, and I was pleased to
hear that so fictile an art was ever practised in my
neighborhood.
The last inhabitant of these woods before me was
an Irishman, Hugh Quoil, (if I have spelt his name
with coil enough,) who occupied Wyman's tene-
262 FORMER INHABITANTS

merit,—Col. Quoil, he was called. Rumor said that he

had been a soldier at Waterloo. If he had lived I
should have made him fight his battles over again.
His trade here was that of a ditcher. Napoleon went
to St. Helena; Quoil came to Walden Woods. All I
know of him is tragic. He was a man of manners,
like one who had seen the world, and was capable of
more civil speech than you could well attend to. He
wore a great coat in mid-summer, being affected with
the trembling delirium, and his face was the color
of carmine. He died in the road at the foot of Brister's
Hill shortly after I came to the woods, so that I have
not remembered him as a neighbor. Before his house
was pulled down, when his comrades avoided it as
"an unlucky castle," I visited it. There lay his old
clothes curled up by use, as if they were himself,
upon his raised plank bed. His pipe lay broken on
the hearth, instead of a bowl broken at the fountain.
The last could never have been the symbol of his
death, for he confessed to me that, though he had
heard of Brister's Spring, he had never seen it; and
soiled cards, kings of diamonds spades and hearts,
were scattered over the floor. One black chicken
which the administrator could not catch, black as
night and as silent, not even croaking, awaiting
Reynard, still went to roost in the next apartment.
In the rear there was the dim outline of a garden,
which had been planted but had never received its
first hoeing, owing to those terrible shaking fits,
though it was now harvest time. It was over-run with
Roman wormwood and beggar-ticks, which last stuck
to my clothes for all fruit. The skin of a woodchuck
was freshly stretched upon the back of the house, a
trophy of his last Waterloo; but no warm cap or
mittens would he want more.
 WALDEN 263

Now only a dent in the earth marks the site of

these dwellings, with buried cellar stones, and straw-
berries, raspberries, thimble-berries, hazel-bushes,
and sumachs growing in the sunny sward there;
some pitch-pine or gnarled oak occupies what was
the chimney nook, and a sweet-scented black-birch,
perhaps, waves where the door-stone was. Sometimes
the well dent is visible, where once a spring oozed;
now dry and tearless grass; or it was covered deep,-
not to be discovered till some late day,—with a flat
stone under the sod, when the last of the race de-
parted. What a sorrowful act must that be,-the cov-
ering up of wells! coincident with the opening of
wells of tears. These cellar dents, like deserted fox
burrows, old holes, are all that is left where once
were the stir and bustle of human life, and "fate, free-
will, foreknowledge absolute," in some form and di-
alect or other were by turns discussed. But all I can
learn of their conclusions amounts to just this, that
"Cato and Brister pulled wool;" which is about as
edifying as the history of more famous schools of
philosophy.
Still grows the vivacious lilac a generation after
the door and lintel and the sill are gone, unfolding its
sweet-scented flowers each spring, to be plucked by
the musing traveller; planted and tended once by
children's hands, in front-yard plots,—now standing
by wall-sides in retired pastures, and giving place to
new-rising forests;-the last of that stirp, sole survivor
of that family. Little did the dusky children think
that the puny slip with its two eyes only, which they
stuck in the ground in the shadow of the house and
daily watered, would root itself so, and outlive them
and house itself in the rear that shaded it, and
grown man's garden and orchard, and tell their
264 WINTER VISITORS

story faintly to the lone wanderer a half century

after they had grown up and died,-blossoming as fair,
and smelling as sweet, as in that first spring. I mark
its still tender, civil, cheerful, lilac colors.
But this small village, germ of something more,
why did it fail while Concord keeps its ground? Were
there no natural advantages,—no water privileges,
forsooth? Ay, the deep Walden Pond and cool Brister's
Spring.-privilege to drink long and healthy draughts
at these, all unimproved by these men but to dilute
their glass. They were universally a thirsty race.
Might not the basket, stable-broom, mat-making,
corn-parching, linen-spinning, and pottery business
have thrived here, making the wilderness to blossom
like the rose, and a numerous posterity have inher-
ited the land of their fathers? The sterile soil would
at least have been proof against a low-land degen-
eracy. Alas! how little does the memory of these
human inhabitants enhance the beauty of the land-
scape! Again, perhaps Nature will try, with me for a
first settler, and my house raised last spring to be the
oldest in the hamlet.
I am not aware that any man has ever built on the
spot which I occupy. Deliver me from a city built on
the site of a more ancient city, whose materials are
ruins, whose gardens cemeteries. The soil is blanched
and accursed there, and before that becomes neces-
sary the earth itself will be destroyed. With such
reminiscences I repeopled the woods and lulled my-
self asleep.

At this season I seldom had a visitor. When the

snow lay deepest no wanderer ventured near my
house for a week or fortnight at a time, but there I
lived as snug as a meadow mouse, or as cattle and
 WALDEN 265

poultry which are said to have survived for a long

time buried in drifts, even without food; or like that
early settler's family in the town of Sutton, in this
state, whose cottage was completely covered by the
great snow of 1717 when he was absent, and an In-
dian found it only by the hole which the chimney's
breath made in the drift, and so relieved the family.
But no friendly Indian concerned himself about me;
nor needed he, for the master of the house was at
home. The Great Snow! How cheerful it is to hear of!
When the farmers could not get to the woods and
swamps with their teams, and were obliged to cut
down the shade trees before their houses, and when
the crust was harder cut off the trees in the swamps
ten feet from the ground, as it appeared the next
spring.
In the deepest snows, the path which I used from
the highway to my house, about half a mile long,
might have been represented by a meandering dotted
line, with wide intervals between the dots. For a week
of even weather I took exactly the same number of
steps, and of the same length, coming and going,
stepping deliberately and with the precision of a pair
of dividers in my own deep tracks,—to such routine
the winter reduces us,—yet often they were filled with
heaven's own blue. But no weather interfered fatally
with my walks, or rather my going abroad, for I
frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the
deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech-
tree, or a yellow-birch, or an old acquaintance among
the pines; when the ice and snow causing their limbs
to droop, and so sharpening their tops, had changed
the pines into fir-trees; wading to the tops of the
highest hills when the snow was nearly two feet deep
on a level, and shaking down another snow-storm on
my head at every step; or sometimes creeping and
266 WINTER V I S I T O R S

floundering thither on my hands and knees, when the

hunters had gone into winter quarters. One after-
noon I amused myself by watching a barred owl
(Strix nebulosa) sitting on one of the lower dead
limbs of a white-pine, close to the trunk, in broad
daylight, I standing within a rod of him. He could
hear me when I moved and cronched the snow with
my feet, but could not plainly see me. When I made
most noise he would stretch out his neck, and erect
his neck feathers, and open his eyes wide; but their
lids soon fell again, and he began to nod. I too felt
a slumberous influence after watching him half an
hour, as he sat thus with his eyes half open, like a
cat, winged brother of the cat. There was only a nar-
row slit left between their lids, by which he pre-
served a peninsular relation to me; thus, with half-
shut eyes, looking out from the land of dreams, and
endeavoring to realize me, vague object or mote that
interrupted his visions. At length, on some louder
noise or my nearer approach, he would grow uneasy
and sluggishly turn about on his perch, as if im-
patient at having his dreams disturbed; and when
he launched himself off and flapped through the
pines, spreading his wings to unexpected breadth, I
could not hear the slightest sound from them. Thus,
guided amid the pine boughs rather by a delicate sense
of their neighborhood than by sight, feeling his twi-
light way as it were with his sensitive pinions, he
found a new perch, where he might in peace await
the dawning of his day.
As I walked over the long causeway made for the
railroad through the meadows, I encountered many a
blustering and nipping wind, for nowhere has it
freer play; and when the frost had smitten me on
one cheek, heathen as I was, I turned to it the other
also. Nor was it much better by the carriage road
 WALDEN 267

from Blister's Hill. For I came to town still, like a

friendly Indian, when the contents of the broad open
fields were all piled up between the walls of the
Walden road, and half an hour sufficed to obliterate
the tracks of the last traveller. And when I returned
new drifts would have formed, through which I
floundered, where the busy north-west wind had been
depositing the powdery snow round a sharp angle in
the road, and not a rabbit's track, nor even the fine
print, the small type, of a deer mouse was to be seen.
Yet I rarely failed to find, even in mid-winter, some
warm and springy swamp where the grass and the
skunk-cabbage still put forth with perennial verdure,
and some hardier bird occasionally awaited the re-
turn of spring.
Sometimes, notwithstanding the snow, when I re-
turned from my walk at evening I crossed the deep
tracks of a woodchopper leading from my door, and
found his pile of whittlings on the hearth, and my
house filled with the odor of his pipe. Or on a Sun-
day afternoon, if I chanced to be at home, I heard the
cronching of the snow made by the step of a long-
headed farmer, who from far through the woods
sought my house, to have a social "crack;" one of the
few of his vocation who are "men on their farms;"
who donned a frock instead of a professor's gown,
and is as ready to extract the moral out of church or
state as to haul a load of manure from his barn-yard.
We talked of rude and simple times, when men sat
about large fires in cold bracing weather, with clear
heads; and when other dessert failed, we tried our
teeth on many a nut which wise squirrels have long
since abandoned, for those which have the thickest
shells are commonly empty.
The one who came from farthest to my lodge,
through deepest snows and most dismal tempests,
268 WINTER VISITORS

was a poet. A farmer, a hunter, a soldier, a reporter,

even a philosopher, may be daunted; but nothing can
deter a poet, for he is actuated by pure love. Who
can predict his comings and goings? His business
calls him out at all hours, even when doctors sleep.
We made that small house ring with boisterous mirth
and resound with the murmur of much sober talk,
making amends then to Walden vale for the long
silences. Broadway was still and deserted in compari-
son. At suitable intervals there were regular salutes
of laughter, which might have been referred indiffer-
ently to the last uttered or the forth-coming jest. We
made many a "bran new" theory of life over a thin
dish of gruel, which combined the advantages of
conviviality with the clear-headedness which philoso-
phy requires.
I should not forget that during my last winter at
the pond there was another welcome visitor, who at
one time came through the village, through snow and
rain and darkness, till he saw my lamp through the
trees, and shared with me some long winter evenings.
One of the last of the philosophers,—Connecticut
gave him to the world,-he peddled first her wares,
afterwards, as he declares, his brains. These he
peddles still, prompting God and disgracing man,
bearing for fruit his brain only, like the nut its
kernel. I think that he must be the man of the most
faith of any alive. His words and attitude always
suppose a better state of things than other men are
acquainted with, and he will be the last man to be
disappointed as the ages revolve. He has no venture
in the present. But though comparatively disregarded
now, when his day comes, laws unsuspected by most
will take effect, and masters of families and rulers
will come to him for advice.—
"How blind that cannot see serenity!"
 WALDEN 269

A true friend of man; almost the only friend of hu-

man progress. An Old Mortality, say rather an Im-
mortality, with unwearied patience and faith making
plain the image engraven in men's bodies, the God
of whom they are but defaced and leaning monu-
ments. With his hospitable intellect he embraces
children, beggars, insane, and scholars, and enter-
tains the thought of all, adding to it commonly some
breadth and elegance. I think that he should keep a
caravansary on the world's highway, where philoso-
phers of all nations might put up, and on his sign
should be printed, "Entertainment for man, but not
for his beast. Enter ye that have leisure and a quiet
mind, who earnestly seek the right road." He is per-
haps the sanest man and has the fewest crotchets of
any I chance to know; the same yesterday and to-
morrow. Of yore we had sauntered and talked, and
effectually put the world behind us; for he was
pledged to no institution in it, freeborn, ingenuus.
Whichever way we turned, it seemed that the heav-
ens and the earth had met together, since he en-
hanced the beauty of the landscape. A blue-robed
man, whose fittest roof is the overarching sky which
reflects his serenity. I do not see how he can ever
die; Nature cannot spare him.
Having each some shingles of thought well dried,
we sat and whittled them, trying our knives, and ad-
miring the clear yellowish grain of the pumpkin pine.
We waded so gently and reverently, or we pulled to-
gether so smoothly, that the fishes of thought were
not scared from the stream, nor feared any angler
on the bank, but came and went grandly, like the
clouds which float through the western sky, and the
mother-o'-pearl flocks which sometimes form and
dissolve there. There we worked, revising mythology,
rounding a fable here and there, and building castles
270 WINTER VISITORS

in the air for which earth offered no worthy founda-

tion. Great Looker! Great Expecter! to converse with
whom was a New England Night's Entertainment.
Ah! such discourse we had, hermit and philosopher,
and the old settler I have spoken of,—we three,—it
expanded and racked my little house; I should not
dare to say how many pounds' weight there was above
the atmospheric pressure on every circular inch; it
opened its seams so that they had to be calked with
much dulness thereafter to stop the consequent leak;
-but I had enough of that kind of oakum already
picked.
There was one other with whom I had "solid sea-
sons," long to be remembered, at his house in the vil-
lage, and who looked in upon me from time to time;
but I had no more for society there.
There too, as every where, I sometimes expected
the Visitor who never comes. The Vishnu Purana
says, "The house-holder is to remain at eventide in
his court-yard as long as it takes to milk a cow, or
longer if he pleases, to await the arrival of a guest."
I often performed this duty of hospitality, waited long
enough to milk a whole herd of cows, but did not see
the man approaching from the town.
Winter Animals

WHEN the ponds were firmly frozen, they af-

forded not only new and shorter routes to many
points, but new views from their surfaces of the fa-
miliar landscape around them. When I crossed Flint's
Pond, after it was covered with snow, though I had
often paddled about and skated over it, it was so
unexpectedly wide and so strange that I could think
of nothing but Baffin's Bay. The Lincoln hills rose up
around me at the extremity of a snowy plain, in
which I did not remember to have stood before; and
the fishermen, at an indeterminable distance over the
ice, moving slowly about with their wolfish dogs,
passed for sealers or Esquimaux, or in misty weather
loomed like fabulous creatures, and I did not know
whether they were giants or pygmies. I took this
course when I went to lecture in Lincoln in the
evening, travelling in no road and passing no house
between my own hut and the lecture room. In Goose
Pond, which lay in my way, a colony of muskrats
dwelt, and raised their cabins high above the ice,
though none could be seen abroad when I crossed it.
Walden, being like the rest usually bare of snow, or
with only shallow and interrupted drifts on it, was
my yard, where I could walk freely when the snow
was nearly two feet deep on a level elsewhere and the
villagers were confined to their streets. There, far
from the village street, and except at very long in-
tervals, from the jingle of sleigh-bells, I slid and
skated, as in a vast moose-yard well trodden, over-
hung by oak woods and solemn pines bent down with
snow or bristling with icicles.
For sounds in winter nights, and often in winter
days, I heard the forlorn but melodious note of a
272 WINTER ANIMALS

hooting owl indefinitely far; such a sound as the

frozen earth would yield if struck with a suitable
plectrum, the very lingua vernacula of Walden Wood,
and quite familiar to me at last, though I never
saw the bird while it was making it. I seldom opened
my door in a winter evening without hearing it;
Hoo hoo hoo, hoorer hoo, sounded sonorously, and
the first three syllables accented somewhat like how
der do; or sometimes hoo hoo only. One night in the
beginning of winter, before the pond froze over,
about nine o'clock, I was startled by the loud honking
of a goose, and, stepping to the door, heard the sound
of their wings like a tempest in the woods as they
flew low over my house. They passed over the pond
toward Fair Haven, seemingly deterred from settling
by my light, their commodore honking all the while
with a regular beat. Suddenly an unmistakable cat-
owl from very near me, with the most harsh and
tremendous voice I ever heard from any inhabitant
of the woods, responded at regular intervals to the
goose, as if determined to expose and disgrace this
intruder from Hudson's Bay by exhibiting a greater
compass and volume of voice in a native, and boo-
hoo him out of Concord horizon. What do you mean
by alarming the citadel at this time of night con-
secrated to me? Do you think I am ever caught nap-
ping at such an hour, and that I have not got lungs
and a larynx as well as yourself? Boo-hoo, boo-hoo,
boo-hoo! It was one of the most thrilling discords I
ever heard. And yet, if you had a discriminating ear
there were in it the elements of a concord such as
these plains never saw nor heard.
I also heard the whooping of the ice in the pond,
my great bed-fellow in that part of Concord, as if it
were restless in its bed and would fain turn over,
were troubled with flatulency and bad dreams; or I
 WALDEN 273

was waked by the cracking of the ground by the

frost, as if some one had driven a team against my
door, and in the morning would find a crack in the
earth a quarter of a mile long and a third of an inch
wide.
Sometimes I heard the foxes as they ranged over
the snow crust, in moonlight nights, in search of a
partridge or other game, barking raggedly and demo-
niacally like forest dogs, as if laboring with some
anxiety, or seeking expression, struggling for light
and to be dogs outright and run freely in the streets;
for if we take the ages into our account, may there
not be a civilization going on among brutes as well
as men? They seemed to me to be rudimental, bur-
rowing men, still standing on their defence, awaiting
their transformation. Sometimes one came near to
my window, attracted by my light, barked a vulpine
curse at me, and then retreated.
Usually the red squirrel (Sciurus Hudsonius) waked
me in the dawn, coursing over the roof and up and
down the sides of the house, as if sent out of the
woods for this purpose. In the course of the winter I
threw out half a bushel of ears of sweet-corn, which
had not got ripe, on to the snow crust by my door,
and was amused by watching the motions of the
various animals which were baited by it. In the twi-
light and the night the rabbits came regularly and
made a hearty meal. All day long the red squirrels
came and went, and afforded me much entertainment
by their manoeuvres. One would approach at first
warily through the shrub-oaks, running over the
snow crust by fits and starts like a leaf blown by the
wind, now a few paces this way, with wonderful
speed and waste of energy, making inconceivable
haste with his "trotters," as if it were for a wager,
and now as many paces that way, but never getting
274 WINTER ANIMALS

on more than half a rod at a time; and then suddenly

pausing with a ludicrous expression and a gratui-
tous somerset, as if all the eyes in the universe were
fixed on him,-for all the motions of a squirrel, even
in the most solitary recesses of the forest, imply
spectators as much as those of a dancing girl,-wast-
ing more time in delay and circumspection than
would have sufficed to walk the whole distance,—I
never saw one walk,—and then suddenly, before you
could say Jack Robinson, he would be in the top of a
young pitch-pine, winding up his clock and chiding
all imaginary spectators, soliloquizing and talking to
all the universe at the same time,-for no reason that
I could ever detect, or he himself was aware of, I
suspect. At length he would reach the corn, and se-
lecting a suitable ear, frisk about in the same uncer-
tain trigonometrical way to the top-most stick of my
wood-pile, before my window, where he looked me in
the face, and there sit for hours, supplying himself
with a new ear from time to time, nibbling at first
voraciously and throwing the half-naked cobs about;
till at length he grew more dainty still and played
with his food, tasting only the inside of the kernel,
and the ear, which was held balanced over the stick
by one paw, slipped from his careless grasp and fell
to the ground, when he would look over at it with a
ludicrous expression of uncertainty, as if suspecting
that it had life, with a mind not made up whether to
get it again, or a new one, or be off; now thinking
of corn, then listening to hear what was in the wind.
So the little impudent fellow would waste many an
ear in a forenoon; till at last, seizing some longer and
plumper one, considerably bigger than himself, and
skilfully balancing it, he would set out with it to the
woods, like a tiger with a buffalo, by the same zig-zag
course and frequent pauses, scratching along with it
 WALDEN 275

as if it were too heavy for him and falling all the

while, making its fall a diagonal between a perpen-
dicular and horizontal, being determined to put it
through at any rate;—a singularly frivolous and
whimsical fellow;-and so he would get off with it to
where he lived, perhaps carry it to the top of a pine
tree forty or fifty rods distant, and I would after-
wards find the cobs strewn about the woods in various
directions.
At length the jays arrive, whose discordant screams
were heard long before, as they were warily making
their approach an eighth of a mile off, and in a
stealthy and sneaking manner they flit from tree to
tree, nearer and nearer, and pick up the kernels which
the squirrels have dropped. Then, sitting on a pitch-
pine bough, they attempt to swallow in their haste a
kernel which is too big for their throats and chokes
them; and after great labor they disgorge it, and
spend an hour in the endeavor to crack it by repeat-
ed blows with their bills. They were manifestly
thieves, and I had not much respect for them; but the
squirrels, though at first shy, went to work as if they
were taking what was their own.
Meanwhile also came the chicadees in flocks,
which picking up the crumbs the squirrels had
dropped, flew to the nearest twig, and placing them
under their claws, hammered away at them with
their little bills, as if it were an insect in the bark,
till they were sufficiently reduced for their slender
throats. A little flock of these tit-mice came daily to
pick a dinner out of my wood-pile, or the crumbs at
my door, with faint flitting lisping notes, like the
tinkling of icicles in the grass, or else with sprightly
day day day or more rarely, in spring-like days, a
wiry summery phe-be from the wood-side. They were
so familiar that at length one alighted on an armful
276 WINTER ANIMALS

of wood which I was carrying in, and pecked at the

sticks without fear. I once had a sparrow alight upon
my shoulder for a moment while I was hoeing in a
village garden, and I felt that I was more distin-
guished by that circumstance than I should have been
by any epaulet I could have worn. The squirrels also
grew at last to be quite familiar, and occasionally
stepped upon my shoe, when that was the nearest
way.
When the ground was not yet quite covered, and
again near the end of winter, when the snow was
melted on my south hill-side and about my wood-
pile, the partridges came out of the woods morning
and evening to feed there. Whichever side you walk
in the woods the partridge bursts away on whirring
wings, jarring the snow from the dry leaves and
twigs on high, which comes sifting down in the sun-
beams like golden dust; for this brave bird is not to
be scared by winter. It is frequently covered up by
drifts, and, it is said, "sometimes plunges from on
wing into the soft snow, where it remains concealed
for a day or two." I used to start them in the open
land also, where they had come out of the woods at
sunset to "bud" the wild apple-trees. They will come
regularly every evening to particular trees, where the
cunning sportsman lies in wait for them, and the
distant orchards next the woods suffer thus not a
little. I am glad that the partridge gets fed, at any
rate. It is Nature's own bird which lives on buds and
diet-drink.
In dark winter mornings, or in short winter after-
noons, I sometimes heard a pack of hounds thread-
ing all the woods with hounding cry and yelp, unable
to resist the instinct of the chase, and the note of the
hunting horn at intervals, proving that man was in
the rear. The woods ring again, and yet no fox bursts
 WALDEN 277

forth on to the open level of the pond, nor following

pack pursuing their Actseon. And perhaps at evening
I see the hunters returning with a single brush trail-
ing from their sleigh for a trophy, seeking their inn.
They tell me that if the fox would remain in the
bosom of the frozen earth he would be safe, or if he
would run in a straight line away no fox-hound
could overtake him; but, having left his pursuers far
behind, he stops to rest and listen till they come up,
and when he runs he circles round to his old haunts,
where the hunters await him. Sometimes, however,
he will run upon a wall many rods, and then leap
off far to one side, and he appears to know that wa-
ter will not retain his scent. A hunter told me that
he once saw a fox pursued by hounds burst out on
to Walden when the ice was covered with shallow
puddles, run part way across, and then return to the
same shore. Ere long the hounds arrived, but here
they lost the scent. Sometimes a pack hunting by
themselves would pass my door, and circle round my
house, and yelp and hound without regarding me, as
if afflicted by a species of madness, so that nothing
could divert them from the pursuit. Thus they circle
until they fall upon the recent trail of a fox, for a
wise hound will forsake every thing else for this. One
day a man came to my hut from Lexington to inquire
after his hound that made a large track, and had
been hunting for a week by himself. But I fear that
he was not the wiser for all I told him, for every time
I attempted to answer his questions he interrupted
me by asking, "What do you do here?" He had lost a
dog, but found a man.
One old hunter who has a dry tongue, who used to
come to bathe in Walden once every year when the
water was warmest, and at such times looked in upon
me, told me, that many years ago he took his gun one
278 WINTER ANIMALS

afternoon and went out for a cruise in Walden Wood;

and as he walked the Wayland road he heard the cry
of hounds approaching, and ere long a fox leaped the
wall into the road, and as quick as thought leaped the
other wall out of the road, and his swift bullet had
not touched him. Some way behind came an old
hound and her three pups in full pursuit, hunting on
their own account, and disappeared again in the
woods. Late in the afternoon, as he was resting in
the thick woods south of Walden, he heard the voice
of the hounds far over toward Fair Haven still pur-
suing the fox; and on they came, their hounding cry
which made all the woods ring sounding nearer and
nearer, now from Well-Meadow, now from the Baker
Farm. For a long time he stood still and listened to
their music, so sweet to a hunter's ear, when sud-
denly the fox appeared, threading the solemn aisles
with an easy coursing pace, whose sound was con-
cealed by a sympathetic rustle of the leaves, swift
and still, keeping the ground, leaving his pursuers
far behind; and, leaping upon a rock amid the woods,
he sat erect and listening, with his back to the hunt-
er. For a moment compassion restrained the latter's
arm; but that was a short-lived mood, and as quick
as thought can follow thought his piece was levelled,
and whang /-the fox rolling over the rock lay dead on
the ground. The hunter still kept his place and
listened to the hounds. Still on they came, and now
the near woods resounded through all their aisles
with their demoniac cry. At length the old hound
burst into view with muzzle to the ground, and snap-
ping the air as if possessed, and ran directly to the
rock; but spying the dead fox she suddenly ceased
her hounding, as if struck dumb with amazement,
and walked round and round him in silence; and one
by one her pups arrived, and, like their mother,
 WALDEN 279

were sobered into silence by the mystery. Then the

hunter came forward and stood in their midst, and
the mystery was solved. They waited in silence while
he skinned the fox, then followed the brush a while,
and at length turned off into the woods again. That
evening a Weston Squire came to the Concord hunt-
er's cottage to inquire for his hounds, and told how
for a week they had been hunting on their own ac-
count from Weston woods. The Concord hunter told
him what he knew and offered him the skin; but the
other declined it and departed. He did not find his
hounds that night, but the next day learned that they
had crossed the river and put up at a farm-house for
the night, whence, having been well fed, they took
their departure early in the morning.
The hunter who told me this could remember one
Sam Nutting, who used to hunt bears on Fair Haven
Ledges, and exchange their skins for rum in Concord
village; who told him, even, that he had seen a moose
there. Nutting had a famous fox-hound named Bur-
goyne,—he pronounced it Bugine,—which my inform-
ant used to borrow. In the "Wast Book" of an old
trader of this town, who was also a captain, town-
clerk, and representative, I find the following entry.
Jan. i8th, 1742—3, "John Melven Cr. by i Grey Fox
o—2—3;" they are not now found here; and in his
ledger, Feb. yth, 1743, Hezekiah Stratton has credit
"by Vz a Catt skin o—i—qVz;" of course, a wild-cat,
for Stratton was a sergeant in the old French war,
and would not have got credit for hunting less noble
game. Credit is given for deer skins also, and they
were daily sold. One man still preserves the horns
of the last deer that was killed in this vicinity, and
another has told me the particulars of the hunt in
which his uncle was engaged. The hunters were
formerly a numerous and merry crew here. I remem-
280 WINTER ANIMALS

ber well one gaunt Nimrod who would catch up a

leaf by the road-side and play a strain on it wilder
and more melodious, if my memory serves me, than
any hunting horn.
At midnight, when there was a moon, I sometimes
met with hounds in my path prowling about the
woods, which would skulk out of my way, as if
afraid, and stand silent amid the bushes till I had
passed.
Squirrels and wild mice disputed for my store of
nuts. There were scores of pitch-pines around my
house, from one to four inches in diameter, which
had been gnawed by mice the previous winter,—a
Norwegian winter for them, for the snow lay long
and deep, and they were obliged to mix a large pro-
portion of pine bark with their other diet. These
trees were alive and apparently flourishing at mid-
summer, and many of them had grown a foot, though
completely girdled; but after another winter such
were without exception dead. It is remarkable that
a single mouse should thus be allowed a whole pine
tree for its dinner, gnawing round instead of up and
down it; but perhaps it is necessary in order to thin
these trees, which are wont to grow up densely.
The hares (Lepus Americanus*) were very familiar.
One had her form under my house all winter, sepa-
rated from me only by the flooring, and she startled
me each morning by her hasty departure when I be-
gan to stir,—thump, thump, thump, striking her head
against the floor timbers in her hurry. They used to
come round my door at dusk to nibble the potato par-
ings which I had thrown out, and were so nearly the
color of the ground that they could hardly be dis-
tinguished when still. Sometimes in the twilight I
alternately lost and recovered sight of one sitting
motionless under my window. When I opened my
 WALDEN 281

door in the evening, off they would go with a squeak

and a bounce. Near at hand they only excited my
pity. One evening one sat by my door two 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, but stood on her last toes. Its large
eyes appeared young and unhealthy, almost dropsi-
cal. I took a step, and lo, away it scud with an elastic
spring over the snow crust, straightening its body
and its limbs into graceful length, and soon put the
forest between me and itself,—the wild free venison,
asserting its vigor and the dignity of Nature. Not
without reason was its slenderness. Such then was
its nature. (Lepus, levipes, light-foot, some think.)
What is a country without rabbits and partridges?
They are among the most simple and indigenous ani-
mal products; ancient and venerable families known
to antiquity as to modern times; of the very hue and
substance of Nature, nearest allied to leaves and to
the ground,—and to one another; it is either winged
or it is legged. It is hardly as if you had seen a wild
creature when a rabbit or a partridge bursts away,
only a natural one, as much to be expected as rus-
tling leaves. The partridge and the rabbit are still
sure to thrive, like true natives of the soil, whatever
revolutions occur. If the forest is cut off, the sprouts
and bushes which spring up afford them conceal-
ment, and they become more numerous than ever.
That must be a poor country indeed that does not
support a hare. Our woods teem with them both, and
around every swamp may be seen the partridge or
rabbit walk, beset with twiggy fences and horse-hair
snares, which some cow-boy tends.
The Pond in Winter

AFTER a still winter night I awoke with the

impression that some question had been put to me,
which I had been endeavoring in vain to answer in
my sleep, as what-how-when—where? But there was
dawning Nature, in whom all creatures live, looking
in at my broad windows with serene and satisfied
face, and no question on her lips. I awoke to an an-
swered question, to Nature and daylight. The snow
lying deep on the earth dotted with young pines, and
the very slope of the hill on which my house is
placed, seemed to say, Forward! Nature puts no
question and answers none which we mortals ask.
She has long ago taken her resolution. "O Prince,
our eyes contemplate with admiration and transmit
to the soul the wonderful and varied spectacle of
this universe. The night veils without doubt a part
of this glorious creation; but day comes to reveal to
us this great work, which extends from earth even
into the plains of the ether."
Then to my morning work. First I take an axe and
pail and go in search of water, if that be not a
dream. After a cold and snowy night it needed a
divining rod to find it. Every winter the liquid and
trembling surface of the pond, which was so sensi-
tive to every breath, and reflected every light and
shadow, becomes solid to the depth of a foot or a
foot and a half, so that it will support the heaviest
teams, and perchance the snow covers it to an equal
depth, and it is not to be distinguished from any
level field. Like the marmots in the surrounding hills,
it closes its eye-lids and becomes dormant for three
months or more. Standing on the snow-covered plain,
as if in a pasture amid the hills, I cut my way first
 WALDEN 283

through a foot of snow, and then a foot of ice, and

open a window under my feet, where, kneeling to
drink, I look down into the quiet parlor of the fishes,
pervaded by a softened light as through a window of
ground glass, with its bright sanded floor the same
as in summer; there a perennial waveless serenity
reigns as in the amber twilight sky, corresponding
to the cool and even temperament of the inhabitants.
Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.
Early in the morning, while all things are crisp
with frost, men come with fishing reels and slender
lunch, and let down their fine lines through the
snowy field to take pickerel and perch; wild men,
who instinctively follow other fashions and trust
other authorities than their townsmen, and by their
goings and comings stitch towns together in parts
where else they would be ripped. They sit and eat
their luncheon in stout fear-naughts on the dry oak
leaves on the shore, as wise in natural lore as the
citizen is in artificial. They never consulted with
books, and know and can tell much less than they
have done. The things which they practise are said
not yet to be known. Here is one fishing for pickerel
with grown perch for bait. You look into his pail with
wonder as into a summer pond, as if he kept summer
locked up at home, or knew where she had retreated.
How, pray, did he get these in mid-winter? O, he got
worms out of rotten logs since the ground froze, and
so he caught them. His life itself passes deeper in
Nature than the studies of the naturalist penetrate;
himself a subject for the naturalist. The latter raises
the moss and bark gently with his knife in search
of insects; the former lays open logs to their core
with his axe, and moss and bark fly far and wide. He
gets his living by barking trees. Such a man has some
right to fish, and I love to see Nature carried out in
284 THE P O N D IN W I N T E R

him. The perch swallows the grub-worm, the pickerel

swallows the perch, and the fisherman swallows the
pickerel; and so all the chinks in the scale of being
are filled.
When I strolled around the pond in misty weather
I was sometimes amused by the primitive mode
which some ruder fisherman had adopted. He would
perhaps have placed alder branches over the narrow
holes in the ice, which were four or five rods apart
and an equal distance from the shore, and having
fastened the end of the line to a stick to prevent its
being pulled through, have passed the slack line over
a twig of the alder, a foot or more above the ice, and
tied a dry oak leaf to it, which, being pulled down,
would show when he had a bite. These alders loomed
through the mist at regular intervals as you walked
half way round the pond.
Ah, the pickerel of Walden! when I see them lying
on the ice, or in the well which the fisherman cuts in
the ice, making a little hole to admit the water, I am
always surprised by their rare beauty, as if they were
fabulous fishes, they are so foreign to the streets,
even to the woods, foreign as Arabia to our Concord
life. They possess a quite dazzling and transcendent
beauty which separates them by a wide interval from
the cadaverous cod and haddock whose fame is
trumpeted in our streets. They are not green like the
pines, nor gray like the stones, nor blue like the sky;
but they have, to my eyes, if possible, yet rarer col-
ors, like flowers and precious stones, as if they were
the pearls, the animalized nuclei or crystals of the
Walden water. They, of course, are Walden all over
and all through; are themselves small Waldens in the
animal kingdom, Waldenses. It is surprising that they
are caught here,-that in this deep and capacious
spring, far beneath the rattling teams and chaises
 WALDEN 285

and tinkling sleighs that travel the Walden road,

this great gold and emerald fish swims. I never
chanced to see its kind in any market; it would be
the cynosure of all eyes there. Easily, with a few con-
vulsive quirks, they give up their watery ghosts, like
a mortal translated before his time to the thin air of
heaven.

As I was desirous to recover the long lost bottom of

Walden Pond, I surveyed it carefully, before the ice
broke up, early in '46, with compass and chain and
sounding line. There have been many stories told
about the bottom, or rather no bottom, of this pond,
which certainly had no foundation for themselves. It
is remarkable how long men will believe in the bot-
tomlessness of a pond without taking the trouble to
sound it. I have visited two such Bottomless Ponds
in one walk in this neighborhood. Many have believed
that Walden reached quite through to the other side
of the globe. Some who have lain flat on the ice for
a long time, looking down through the illusive me-
dium, perchance with watery eyes into the bargain,
and driven to hasty conclusions by the fear of catch-
ing cold in their breasts, have seen vast holes "into
which a load of hay might be driven," if there were
any body to drive it, the undoubted source of the
Styx and entrance to the Infernal Regions from these
parts. Others have gone down from the village with a
"fifty-six" and a wagon load of inch rope, but yet have
failed to find any bottom; for while the "fifty-six" was
resting by the way, they were paying out the rope in
the vain attempt to fathom their truly immeasurable
capacity for marvellousness. But I can assure my
readers that Walden has a reasonably tight bottom
at a not unreasonable, though at an unusual, depth.
 WAIBII fill
Aieducecf Plan.
1846
Scale /&<.(/
„£=-> cr^Orodf to aa itvcd,.

^Area & aeresy 703 rods

Circum Jr. rence /. 77fufay
GreatesflenptA/ ffJSz. rods.
Greatest Dejyfo 16>2 feet
 WALDEN 287

I fathomed it easily with a cod-line and a stone weigh-

ing about a pound and a half, and could tell ac-
curately when the stone left the bottom, by having to
pull so much harder before the water got underneath
to help me. The greatest depth was exactly one hun-
dred and two feet; to which may be added the five
feet which it has risen since, making one hundred
and seven. This is a remarkable depth for so small
an area; yet not an inch of it can be spared by the
imagination. What if all ponds were shallow? Would
it not react on the minds of men? I am thankful that
this pond was made deep and pure for a symbol.
While men believe in the infinite some ponds will be
thought to be bottomless.
A factory owner, hearing what depth I had found,
thought that it could not be true, for, judging from
his acquaintance with darns, sand would not lie at so
steep an angle. But the deepest ponds are not so deep
in proportion to their area as most suppose, and, if
drained, would not leave very remarkable valleys.
They are not like cups between the hills; for this one,
which is so unusually deep for its area, appears in a
vertical section through its centre not deeper than a
shallow plate. Most ponds, emptied, would leave a
meadow no more hollow than we frequently see.
William Gilpin, who is so admirable in all that relates
to landscapes, and usually so correct, standing at the
head of Loch Fyne, in Scotland, which he describes
as "a bay of salt water, sixty or seventy fathoms deep,
four miles in breadth," and about fifty miles long,
surrounded by mountains, observes, "If we could have
seen it immediately after the diluvian crash, or what-
ever convulsion of Nature occasioned it, before the
waters gushed in, what a horrid chasm it must have
appeared!
288 THE P O N D IN W I N T E R

So high as heaved the tumid hills, so low

Down sunk a hollow bottom, broad, and deep,
Capacious bed of waters—."
But if, using the shortest diameter of Loch Fyne, we
apply these proportions to Walden, which, as we have
seen, appears already in a vertical section only like a
shallow plate, it will appear four times as shallow. So
much for the increased horrors of the chasm of Loch
Fyne when emptied. No doubt many a smiling val-
ley with its stretching cornfields occupies exactly such
a "horrid chasm," from which the waters have re-
ceded, though it requires the insight and the far sight
of the geologist to convince the unsuspecting inhabi-
tants of this fact. Often an inquisitive eye may detect
the shores of a primitive lake in the low horizon hills,
and no subsequent elevation of the plain has been
necessary to conceal their history. But it is easiest, as
they who work on the highways know, to find the
hollows by the puddles after a shower. The amount
of it is, the imagination, give it the least license, dives
deeper and soars higher than Nature goes. So, prob-
ably, the depth of the ocean will be found to be very
inconsiderable compared with its breadth.
As I sounded through the ice I could determine the
shape of the bottom with greater accuracy than is
possible in surveying harbors which do not freeze
over, and I was surprised at its general regularity. In
the deepest part there are several acres more level
than almost any field which is exposed to the sun
wind and plough. In one instance, on a line arbitrar-
ily chosen, the depth did not vary more than one foot
in thirty rods; and generally, near the middle, I could
calculate the variation for each one hundred feet in
any direction beforehand within three or four inches.
Some are accustomed to speak of deep and dangerous
holes even in quiet sandy ponds like this, but the
 WALDEN 289

effect of water under these circumstances is to level

all inequalities. The regularity of the bottom and its
conformity to the shores and the range of the neigh-
boring hills were so perfect that a distant promon-
tory betrayed itself in the soundings quite across the
pond, and its direction could be determined by ob-
serving the opposite shore. Cape becomes bar, and
plain shoal, and valley and gorge deep water and
channel.
When I had mapped the pond by the scale of ten
rods to an inch, and put down the soundings, more
than a hundred in all, I observed this remarkable
coincidence. Having noticed that the number indi-
cating the greatest depth was apparently in the centre
of the map, I laid a rule on the map lengthwise, and
then breadthwise, and found, to my surprise, that the
line of greatest length intersected the line of greatest
breadth exactly at the point of greatest depth, not-
withstanding that the middle is so nearly level, the
outline of the pond far from regular, and the ex-
treme length and breadth were got by measuring into
the coves; and I said to myself, Who knows but this
hint would conduct to the deepest part of the ocean
as well as of a pond or puddle? Is not this the rule
also for the height of mountains, regarded as the
opposite of valleys? We know that a hill is not high-
est at its narrowest part.
Of five coves, three, or all which had been sounded,
were observed to have a bar quite across their mouths
and deeper water within, so that the bay tended to be
an expansion of water within the land not only hori-
zontally but vertically, and to form a basin or inde-
pendent pond, the direction of the two capes showing
the course of the bar. Every harbor on the sea-coast,
also, has its bar at its entrance. In proportion as the
mouth of the cove was wider compared with its length,
290 THE P O N D IN W I N T E R

the water over the bar was deeper compared with

that in the basin. Given, then, the length and breadth
of the cove, and the character of the surrounding
shore, and you have almost elements enough to make
out a formula for all cases.
In order to see how nearly I could guess, with this
experience, at the deepest point in a pond, by observ-
ing the outlines of its surface and the character of its
shores alone, I made a plan of White Pond, which
contains about forty-one acres, and, like this, has no
island in it, nor any visible inlet or outlet; and as the
line of greatest breadth fell very near the line of least
breadth, where two opposite capes approached each
other and two opposite bays receded, I ventured to
mark a point a short distance from the latter line,
but still on the line of greatest length, as the deepest.
The deepest part was found to be within one hundred
feet of this, still farther in the direction to which I
had inclined, and was only one foot deeper, namely,
sixty feet. Of course, a stream running through, or an
island in the pond, would make the problem much
more complicated.
If we knew all the laws of Nature, we should need
only one fact, or the description of one actual phe-
nomenon, to infer all the particular results at that
point. Now we know only a few laws, and our result
is vitiated, not, of course, by any confusion or irregu-
larity in Nature, but by our ignorance of essential ele-
ments in the calculation. Our notions of law and har-
mony are commonly confined to those instances which
we detect; but the harmony which results from a far
greater number of seemingly conflicting, but really
concurring, laws, which we have not detected, is still
more wonderful. The particular laws are as our points
of view, as, to the traveller, a mountain outline var-
ies with every step, and it has an infinite number of
 WALDEN 291

profiles, though absolutely but one form. Even when

cleft or bored through it is not comprehended in its
entireness.
What I have observed of the pond is no less true in
ethics. It is the law of average. Such a rule of the
two diameters not only guides us toward the sun in
the system and the heart in man, but draw lines
through the length and breadth of the aggregate of a
man's particular daily behaviors and waves of life
into his coves and inlets, and where they intersect
will be the height or depth of his character. Perhaps
we need only to know how his shores trend and his
adjacent country or circumstances, to infer his depth
and concealed bottom. If he is surrounded by moun-
tainous circumstances, an Achillean shore, whose
peaks overshadow and are reflected in his bosom,
they suggest a corresponding depth in him. But a low
and smooth shore proves him shallow on that side. In
our bodies, a bold projecting brow falls off to and in-
dicates a corresponding depth of thought. Also there
is a bar across the entrance of our every cove, or par-
ticular inclination; each is our harbor for a season,
in which we are detained and partially land-locked.
These inclinations are not whimsical usually, but
their form, size, and direction are determined by the
promontories of the shore, the ancient axes of eleva-
tion. When this bar is gradually increased by storms,
tides, or currents, or there is a subsidence of the
waters, so that it reaches to the surface, that which
was at first but an inclination in the shore in which
a thought was harbored becomes an individual lake,
cut off from the ocean, wherein the thought secures
its own conditions, changes, perhaps, from salt to
fresh, becomes a sweet sea, dead sea, or a marsh. At
the advent of each individual into this life, may we
not suppose that such a bar has risen to the surface
292 THE P O N D IN WINTER

somewhere? It is true, we are such poor navigators

that our thoughts, for the most part, stand off and on
upon a harborless coast, are conversant only with the
bights of the bays of poesy, or steer for the public
ports of entry, and go into the dry docks of science,
where they merely refit for this world, and no natural
currents concur to individualize them.
As for the inlet or outlet of Walden, I have not dis-
covered any but rain and snow and evaporation,
though perhaps, with a thermometer and a line, such
places may be found, for where the water flows into
the pond it will probably be coldest in summer and
warmest in winter. When the ice-men were at work
here in '46—7, the cakes sent to the shore were one
day rejected by those who were stacking them up
there, not being thick enough to lie side by side with
the rest; and the cutters thus discovered that the ice
over a small space was two or three inches thinner
than elsewhere, which made them think that there
was an inlet there. They also showed me in another
place what they thought was a "leach hole," through
which the pond leaked out under a hill into a neigh-
boring meadow, pushing me out on a cake of ice to
see it. It was a small cavity under ten feet of water;
but I think that I can warrant the pond not to need
soldering till they find a worse leak than that. One
has suggested, that if such a "leach hole" should be
found, its connection with the meadow, if any ex-
isted, might be proved by conveying some colored
powder or sawdust to the mouth of the hole, and then
putting a strainer over the spring in the meadow,
which would catch some of the particles carried
through by the current.
While I was surveying, the ice, which was sixteen
inches thick, undulated under a slight wind like
water. It is well known that a level cannot be used
 WALDEN 293

on ice. At one rod from the shore its greatest fluctua-

tion, when observed by means of a level on land di-
rected toward a graduated staff on the ice, was three
quarters of an inch, though the ice appeared firmly
attached to the shore. It was probably greater in the
middle. Who knows but if our instruments were deli-
cate enough we might detect an undulation in the
crust of the earth? When two legs of my level were
on the shore and the third on the ice, and the sights
were directed over the latter, a rise or fall of the ice
of an almost infinitesimal amount made a difference
of several feet on a tree across the pond. When I be-
gan to cut holes for sounding, there were three or
four inches of water on the ice under a deep snow
which had sunk it thus far; but the water began
immediately to run into these holes, and continued
to run for two days in deep streams, which wore away
the ice on every side, and contributed essentially, if
not mainly, to dry the surface of the pond; for, as the
water ran in, it raised and floated the ice. This was
somewhat like cutting a hole in the bottom of a ship
to let the water out. When such holes freeze, and a
rain succeeds, and finally a new freezing forms a
fresh smooth ice over all, it is beautifully mottled in-
ternally by dark figures, shaped somewhat like a
spider's web, what you may call ice rosettes, pro-
duced by the channels worn by the water flowing
from all sides to a centre. Sometimes, also, when the
ice was covered with shallow puddles, I saw a double
shadow of myself, one standing on the head of the
other, one on the ice, the other on the trees or hill-
side.

While yet it is cold January, and snow and ice are

thick and solid, the prudent landlord comes from the
294 THE P O N D IN WINTER

village to get ice to cool his summer drink; impres-

sively, even pathetically wise, to foresee the heat and
thirst of July now in January,-wearing a thick coat
and mittens! when so many things are not provided
for. It may be that he lays up no treasures in this
world which will cool his summer drink in the next.
He cuts and saws the solid pond, unroofs the house of
fishes, and carts off their very element and air, held
fast by chains and stakes like corded wood, through
the favoring winter air, to wintry cellars, to underlie
the summer there. It looks like solidified azure, as, far
off, it is drawn through the streets. These ice-cutters
are a merry race, full of jest and sport, and when I
went among them they were wont to invite me to saw
pit-fashion with them, I standing underneath.
In the winter of '46-7 there came a hundred
men of Hyperborean extraction swoop down on to our
pond one morning, with many car-loads of ungainly-
looking farming tools, sleds, ploughs, drill-barrows,
turf-knives, spades, saws, rakes, and each man was
armed with a double-pointed pike-staff, such as is
not described in the New-England Farmer or the Cul-
tivator. I did not know whether they had come to sow
a crop of winter rye, or some other kind of grain
recently introduced from Iceland. As I saw no manure,
I judged that they meant to skim the land, as I had
done, thinking the soil was deep and had lain fallow
long enough. They said that a gentleman farmer, who
was behind the scenes, wanted to double his money,
which, as I understood, amounted to half a million
already; but in order to cover each one of his dollars
with another, he took off the only coat, ay, the skin
itself, of Walden Pond in the midst of a hard winter.
They went to work at once, ploughing, harrowing,
rolling, furrowing, in admirable order, as if they were
bent on making this a model farm; but when I was
 WALDEN 295

looking sharp to see what kind of seed they dropped

into the furrow, a gang of fellows by my side sud-
denly began to hook up the virgin mould itself, with
a peculiar jerk, clean down to the sand, or rather the
water,-for it was a very springy soil,-indeed all the
terra firma there was, and haul it away on sleds, and
then I guessed that they must be cutting peat in a
bog. So they came and went every day, with a pe-
culiar shriek from the locomotive, from and to some
point of the polar regions, as it seemed to me, like a
flock of arctic snow-birds. But sometimes Squaw
Walden had her revenge, and a hired man, walking
behind his team, slipped through a crack in the
ground down toward Tartarus, and he who was so
brave before suddenly became but the ninth part of
a man, almost gave up his animal heat, and was glad
to take refuge in my house, and acknowledged that
there was some virtue in a stove; or sometimes the
frozen soil took a piece of steel out of a ploughshare,
or a plough got set in the furrow and had to be cut
out.
To speak literally, a hundred Irishmen, with Yankee
overseers, came from Cambridge every day to get out
the ice. They divided it into cakes by methods too well
known to require description, and these, being sledded
to the shore, were rapidly hauled off on to an ice
platform, and raised by grappling irons and block and
tackle, worked by horses, on to a stack, as surely as
so many barrels of flour, and there placed evenly side
by side, and row upon row, as if they formed the solid
base of an obelisk designed to pierce the clouds. They
told me that in a good day they could get out a
thousand tons, which was the yield of about one
acre. Deep ruts and "cradle holes" were worn in the
ice, as on terra firma, by the passage of the sleds over
the same track, and the horses invariably ate their
296 THE P O N D IN W I N T E R

oats out of cakes of ice hollowed out like buckets.

They stacked up the cakes thus in the open air in a
pile thirty-five feet high on one side and six or seven
rods square, putting hay between the outside layers
to exclude the air; for when the wind, though never
so cold, finds a passage through, it will wear large
cavities, leaving slight supports or studs only here
and there, and finally topple it down. At first it
looked like a vast blue fort or Valhalla; but when
they began to tuck the coarse meadow hay into the
crevices, and this became covered with rime and
icicles, it looked like a venerable moss-grown and
hoary ruin, built of azure-tinted marble, the abode of
Winter, that old man we see in the almanac,—his
shanty, as if he had a design to estivate with us.
They calculated that not twenty-five per cent, of this
would reach its destination, and that two or three per
cent, would be wasted in the cars. However, a still
greater part of this heap had a different destiny from
what was intended; for, either because the ice was
found not to keep so well as was expected, contain-
ing more air than usual, or for some other reason,
it never got to market. This heap, made in the winter
of '46—7 and estimated to contain ten thousand tons,
was finally covered with hay and boards; and though
it was unroofed the following July, and a part of it
carried off, the rest remaining exposed to the sun,
it stood over that summer and the next winter, and
was not quite melted till September 1848. Thus the
pond recovered the greater part.
Like the water, the Walden ice, seen near at hand,
has a green tint, but at a distance is beautifully blue,
and you can easily tell it from the white ice of the
river, or the merely greenish ice of some ponds, a
quarter of a mile off. Sometimes one of those great
cakes slips from the ice-man's sled into the village
 WALDEN 297

street, and lies there for a week like a great emerald,

an object of interest to all passers. I have noticed that
a portion of Walden which in the state of water was
green will often, when frozen, appear from the same
point of view blue. So the hollows about this pond
will, sometimes, in the winter, be filled with a green-
ish water somewhat like its own, but the next day
will have frozen blue. Perhaps the blue color of wa-
ter and ice is due to the light and air they contain,
and the most transparent is the bluest. Ice is an in-
teresting subject for contemplation. They told me
that they had some in the ice-houses at Fresh Pond
five years old which was as good as ever. Why is it
that a bucket of water soon becomes putrid, but
frozen remains sweet forever? It is commonly said
that this is the difference between the affections and
the intellect.
Thus for sixteen days I saw from my window a
hundred men at work like busy husbandmen, with
teams and horses and apparently all the implements
of farming, such a picture as we see on the first page
of the almanac; and as often as I looked out I was
reminded of the fable of the lark and the reapers, or
the parable of the sower, and the like; and now they
are all gone, and in thirty days more, probably, I
shall look from the same window on the pure sea-
green Walden water there, reflecting the clouds and
the trees, and sending up its evaporations in solitude,
and no traces will appear that a man has ever stood
there. Perhaps I shall hear a solitary loon laugh as
he dives and plumes himself, or shall see a lonely
fisher in his boat, like a floating leaf, beholding his
form reflected in the waves, where lately a hundred
men securely labored.
Thus it appears that the sweltering inhabitants of
Charleston and New Orleans, of Madras and Bombay
298 THE P O N D IN WINTER

and Calcutta, drink at my well. In the morning I

bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal
philosophy of the Bhagvat Geeta, since whose com-
position years of the gods have elapsed, and in com-
parison with which our modern world and its litera-
ture seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that
philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of
existence, so remote is its sublimity from our con-
ceptions. I lay down the book and go to my well for
water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Brahmin,
priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits
in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or
dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water
jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his
master, and our buckets as it were grate together in
the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled
with the sacred water of the Ganges. With favoring
winds it is wafted past the site of the fabulous islands
of Atlantis and the Hesperides, makes the periplus
of Hanno, and, floating by Ternate and Tidore and
the mouth of the Persian Gulf, melts in the tropic
gales of the Indian seas, and is landed in ports of
which Alexander only heard the names.
Spring

THE opening of large tracts by the ice-cutters

commonly causes a pond to break up earlier; for the
water, agitated by the wind, even in cold weather,
wears away the surrounding ice. But such was not
the effect on Walden that year, for she had soon got
a thick new garment to take the place of the old.
This pond never breaks up so soon as the others in
this neighborhood, on account both of its greater
depth and its having no stream passing through it to
melt or wear away the ice. I never knew it to open in
the course of a winter, not excepting that of '52-3,
which gave the ponds so severe a trial. It commonly
opens about the first of April, a week or ten days
later than Flint's Pond and Fair-Haven, beginning to
melt on the north side and in the shallower parts
where it began to freeze. It indicates better than any
water hereabouts the absolute progress of the season,
being least affected by transient changes of temper-
ature. A severe cold of a few days' duration in March
may very much retard the opening of the former
ponds, while the temperature of Walden increases
almost uninterruptedly. A thermometer thrust into
the middle of Walden on the 6th of March, 1847,
stood at 32°, or freezing point; near the shore at
33°; in the middle of Flint's Pond, the same day, at
321/2°; at a dozen rods from the shore, in shallow
water, under ice a foot thick, at 36°. This difference
of three and a half degrees between the temperature
of the deep water and the shallow in the latter pond,
and the fact that a great proportion of it is compara-
tively shallow, show why it should break up so much
sooner than Walden. The ice in the shallowest part
was at this time several inches thinner than in the
300 SPRING

middle. In mid-winter the middle had been the warm-

est and the ice thinnest there. So, also, every one
who has waded about the shores of a pond in sum-
mer must have perceived how much warmer the wa-
ter is close to the shore, where only three or four
inches deep, than a little distance out, and on the
surface where it is deep, than near the bottom. In
spring the sun not only exerts an influence through
the increased temperature of the air and earth, but
its heat passes through ice a foot or more thick, and
is reflected from the bottom in shallow water, and so
also warms the water and melts the under side of the
ice, at the same time that it is melting it more direct-
ly above, making it uneven, and causing the air
bubbles which it contains to extend themselves up-
ward and downward until it is completely honey-
combed, and at last disappears suddenly in a single
spring rain. Ice has its grain as well as wood, and
when a cake begins to rot or "comb," that is, as-
sume the appearance of honey-comb, whatever may
be its position, the air cells are at right angles with
what was the water surface. Where there is a rock
or a log rising near to the surface the ice over it is
much thinner, and is frequently quite dissolved by
this reflected heat; and I have been told that in the
experiment at Cambridge to freeze water in a shallow
wooden pond, though the cold air circulated under-
neath, and so had access to both sides, the reflection
of the sun from the bottom more than counterbal-
anced this advantage. When a warm rain in the
middle of the winter melts off the snow-ice from
Walden, and leaves a hard dark or transparent ice
on the middle, there will be a strip of rotten though
thicker white ice, a rod or more wide, about the
shores, created by this reflected heat. Also, as I have
 WALDEN 301

said, the bubbles themselves within the ice operate

as burning glasses to melt the ice beneath.
The phenomena of the year take place every day
in a pond on a small scale. Every morning, generally
speaking, the shallow water is being warmed more
rapidly than the deep, though it may not be made so
warm after all, and every evening it is being cooled
more rapidly until the morning. The day is an epit-
ome of the year. The night is the winter, the morn-
ing and evening are the spring and fall, and the
noon is the summer. The cracking and booming of
the ice indicate a change of temperature. One pleas-
ant morning after a cold night, February 24th, 1850,
having gone to Flint's Pond to spend the day, I
noticed with surprise, that when I struck the ice with
the head of my axe, it resounded like a gong for
many rods around, or as if I had struck on a tight
drum-head. The pond began to boom about an hour
after sunrise, when it felt the influence of the sun's
rays slanted upon it from over the hills; it stretched
itself and yawned like a waking man with a grad-
ually increasing tumult, which was kept up three or
four hours. It took a short siesta at noon, and boomed
once more toward night, as the sun was withdrawing
his influence. In the right stage of the weather a
pond fires its evening gun with great regularity. But
in the middle of the day, being full of cracks, and
the air also being less elastic, it had completely lost
its resonance, and probably fishes and muskrats
could not then have been stunned by a blow on it.
The fishermen say that the "thundering of the pond"
scares the fishes and prevents their biting. The pond
does not thunder every evening, and I cannot tell
surely when to expect its thundering; but though I
may perceive no difference in the weather, it does.
302 SPRING

Who would have suspected so large and cold and

thick-skinned a thing to be so sensitive? Yet it has
its law to which it thunders obedience when it should
as surely as the buds expand in the spring. The earth
is all alive and covered with papilla?. The largest
pond is as sensitive to atmospheric changes as the
globule of mercury in its tube.

One attraction in coming to the woods to live was

that I should have leisure and opportunity to see the
spring come in. The ice in the pond at length begins
to be honey-combed, and I can set my heel in it as I
walk. Fogs and rains and warmer suns are gradually
melting the snow; the days have grown sensibly
longer; and I see how I shall get through the winter
without adding to my wood-pile, for large fires are
no longer necessary. I am on the alert for the first
signs of spring, to hear the chance note of some arriv-
ing bird, or the striped squirrel's chirp, for his stores
must be now nearly exhausted, or see the woodchuck
venture out of his winter quarters. On the I3th of
March, after I had heard the bluebird, song-sparrow,
and red-wing, the ice was still nearly a foot thick.
As the weather grew warmer, it was not sensibly
worn away by the water, nor broken up and floated
off as in rivers, but, though it was completely melted
for half a rod in width about the shore, the middle
was merely honey-combed and saturated with water,
so that you could put your foot through it when six
inches thick; but by the next day evening, perhaps,
after a warm rain followed by fog, it would have
wholly disappeared, all gone off with the fog, spirited
away. One year I went across the middle only five
days before it disappeared entirely. In 1845 Walden
 WALDEN 303

was first completely open on the ist of April; in '46,

the 25th of March; in '47, the 8th of April; in '51, the
28th of March; in '52, the i8th of April; in '53, the
23d of March; in '54, about the yth of April.
Every incident connected with the breaking up of
the rivers and ponds and the settling of the weather
is particularly interesting to us who live in a climate
of so great extremes. When the warmer days come,
they who dwell near the river hear the ice crack at
night with a startling whoop as loud as artillery, as
if its icy fetters were rent from end to end, and with-
in a few days see it rapidly going out. So the alligator
comes out of the mud with quakings of the earth.
One old man, who has been a close observer of Na-
ture, and seems as thoroughly wise in regard to all
her operations as if she had been put upon the stocks
when he was a boy, and he had helped to lay her
keel,—who has come to his growth, and can hardly
acquire more of natural lore if he should live to the
age of Methuselah,-told me, and I was surprised
to hear him express wonder at any of Nature's oper-
ations, for I thought that there were no secrets be-
tween them, that one spring day he took his gun
and boat, and thought that he would have a little
sport with the ducks. There was ice still on the mead-
ows, but it was all gone out of the river, and he
dropped down without obstruction from Sudbury,
where he lived, to Fair-Haven Pond, which he found,
unexpectedly, covered for the most part with a firm
field of ice. It was a warm day, and he was surprised
to see so great a body of ice remaining. Not seeing
any ducks, he hid his boat on the north or back side
of an island in the pond, and then concealed himself
in the bushes on the south side, to await them. The
ice was melted for three or four rods from the shore,
and there was a smooth and warm sheet of water,
304 SPRING

with a muddy bottom, such as the ducks love, within,

and he thought it likely that some would be along
pretty soon. After he had lain still there about an
hour he heard a low and seemingly very distant
sound, but singularly grand and impressive, unlike
any thing he had ever heard, gradually swelling and
increasing as if it would have a universal and mem-
orable ending, a sullen rush and roar, which seemed
to him all at once like the sound of a vast body of
fowl coming in to settle there, and, seizing his gun,
he started up in haste and excited; but he found, to
his surprise, that the whole body of the ice had
started while he lay there, and drifted in to the
shore, and the sound he had heard was made by its
edge grating on the shore,—at first gently nibbled and
crumbled off, but at length heaving up and scattering
its wrecks along the island to a considerable height
before it came to a stand still.
At length the sun's rays have attained the right
angle, and warm winds blow up mist and rain and
melt the snow banks, and the sun dispersing the
mist smiles on a checkered landscape of russet and
white smoking with incense, through which the
traveller picks his way from islet to islet, cheered by
the music of a thousand tinkling rills and rivulets
whose veins are filled with the blood of winter which
they are bearing off.
Few phenomena gave me more delight than to ob-
serve the forms which thawing sand and clay as-
sume in flowing down the sides of a deep cut on the
railroad through which I passed on my way to the
village, a phenomenon not very common on so large
a scale, though the number of freshly exposed banks
of the right material must have been greatly multi-
plied since railroads were invented. The material
was sand of every degree of fineness and of various
 WALDEN 305

rich colors, commonly mixed with a little clay. When

the frost comes out in the spring, and even in a thaw-
ing day in the winter, the sand begins to flow down
the slopes like lava, sometimes bursting out through
the snow and overflowing it where no sand was to
be seen before. Innumerable little streams overlap
and interlace one with another, exhibiting a sort of
hybrid product, which obeys half way the law of cur-
rents, and half way that of vegetation. As it flows it
takes the forms of sappy leaves or vines, making
heaps of pulpy sprays a foot or more in depth, and
resembling, as you look down on them, the laciniated
lobed and imbricated thalluses of some lichens; or
you are reminded of coral, of leopards' paws or birds'
feet, of brains or lungs or bowels, and excrements of
all kinds. It is a truly grotesque vegetation, whose
forms and color we see imitated in bronze, a sort of
architectural foliage more ancient and typical than
acanthus, chiccory, ivy, vine, or any vegetable leaves;
destined perhaps, under some circumstances, to be-
come a puzzle to future geologists. The whole cut
impressed me as if it were a cave with its stalactites
laid open to the light. The various shades of the sand
are singularly rich and agreeable, embracing the dif-
ferent iron colors, brown, gray, yellowish, and red-
dish. When the flowing mass reaches the drain at the
foot of the bank it spreads out flatter into strands,
the separate streams losing their semi-cylindrical
form and gradually becoming more flat and broad,
running together as they are more moist, till they
form an almost flat sand, still variously and beauti-
fully shaded, but in which you can trace the original
forms of vegetation; till at length, in the water itself,
they are converted into banks, like those formed off
the mouths of rivers, and the forms of vegetation are
lost in the ripple marks on the bottom.
306 SPRING

The whole bank, which is from twenty to forty

feet high, is sometimes overlaid with a mass of this
kind of foliage, or sandy rupture, for a quarter of a
mile on one or both sides, the produce of one spring
day. What makes this sand foliage remarkable is its
springing into existence thus suddenly. When I see
on the one side the inert bank,—for the sun acts on
one side firsthand on the other this luxuriant foliage,
the creation of an hour, I am affected as if in a
peculiar sense I stood in the laboratory of the Artist
who made the world and me,—had come to where he
was still at work, sporting on this bank, and with
excess of energy strewing his fresh designs about. I
feel as if I were nearer to the vitals of the globe, for
this sandy overflow is something such a foliaceous
mass as the vitals of the animal body. You find thus
in the very sands an anticipation of the vegetable
leaf. No wonder that the earth expresses itself out-
wardly in leaves, it so labors with the idea inwardly.
The atoms have already learned this law, and are
pregnant by it. The overhanging leaf sees here its
prototype. Internally, whether in the globe or animal
body, it is a moist thick lobe, a word especially ap-
plicable to the liver and lungs and the leaves of fat,
(Xei/^oj, labor, lapsus, to flow or slip downward, a laps-
ing; Ao/3o5, globus, lobe, globe; also lap, flap, and
many other words,) externally a dry thin leaf, even
as the f and v are a pressed and dried b. The radicals
of lobe are Ib, the soft mass of the b (single lobed, or
B, double lobed,) with a liquid I behind it pressing it
forward. In globe, gib, the guttural g adds to the
meaning the capacity of the throat. The feathers and
wings of birds are still drier and thinner leaves. Thus,
also, you pass from the lumpish grub in the earth to
the airy and fluttering butterfly. The very globe con-
tinually transcends and translates itself, and becomes
 WALDEN 307

winged in its orbit. Even ice begins with delicate

crystal leaves, as if it had flowed into moulds which
the fronds of water plants have impressed on the
watery mirror. The whole tree itself is but one leaf,
and rivers are still vaster leaves whose pulp is in-
tervening earth, and towns and cities are the ova of
insects in their axils.
When the sun withdraws the sand ceases to flow,
but in the morning the streams will start once more
and branch and branch again into a myriad of
others. You here see perchance how blood vessels
are formed. If you look closely you observe that first
there pushes forward from the thawing mass a
stream of softened sand with a drop-like point, like
the ball of the finger, feeling its way slowly and
blindly downward, until at last with more heat and
moisture, as the sun gets higher, the most fluid
portion, in its effort to obey the law to which the
most inert also yields, separates from the latter and
forms for itself a meandering channel or artery with-
in that, in which is seen a little silvery stream glanc-
ing like lightning from one stage of pulpy leaves or
branches to another, and ever and anon swallowed
up in the sand. It is wonderful how rapidly yet per-
fectly the sand organizes itself as it flows, using the
best material its mass affords to form the sharp edges
of its channel. Such are the sources of rivers. In the
silicious matter which the water deposits is perhaps
the bony system, and in the still finer soil and organic
matter the fleshy fibre or cellular tissue. What is man
but a mass of thawing clay? The ball of the human
finger is but a drop congealed. The fingers and toes
flow to their extent from the thawing mass of the
body. Who knows what the human body would ex-
pand and flow out to under a more genial heaven? Is
not the hand a spreading palm leaf with its lobes and
308 SPRING

veins? The ear may be regarded, fancifully, as a

lichen, umbilicaria, on the side of the head, with its
lobe or drop. The lip (labium from labor ( ? ) ) laps
or lapses from the sides of the cavernous mouth. The
nose is a manifest congealed drop or stalactite. The
chin is a still larger drop, the confluent dripping of
the face. The cheeks are a slide from the brows into
the valley of the face, opposed and diffused by the
cheek bones. Each rounded lobe of the vegetable
leaf, too, is a thick and now loitering drop, larger or
smaller; the lobes are the fingers of the leaf; and as
many lobes as it has, in so many directions it tends
to flow, and more heat or other genial influences
would have caused it to flow yet farther.
Thus it seemed that this one hillside illustrated the
principle of all the operations of Nature. The Maker
of this earth but patented a leaf. What Champollion
will decipher this hieroglyphic for us, that we may
turn over a new leaf at last? This phenomenon is
more exhilarating to me than the luxuriance and
fertility of vineyards. True, it is somewhat excre-
mentitious in its character, and there is no end to the
heaps of liver lights and bowels, as if the globe were
turned wrong side outward; but this suggests at least
that Nature has some bowels, and there again is
mother of humanity. This is the frost coming out of
the ground; this is Spring. It precedes the green and
flowery spring, as mythology precedes regular poetry.
I know of nothing more purgative of winter fumes
and indigestions. It convinces me that Earth is still
in her swaddling clothes, and stretches forth baby
fingers on every side. Fresh curls spring from the
baldest brow. There is nothing inorganic. These foli-
aceous heaps lie along the bank like the slag of a
furnace, showing that Nature is "in full blast" with-
 WALDEN 309

in. The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history,

stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be
studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but liv-
ing poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede
flowers and fruit,—not a fossil earth, but a living
earth; compared with whose great central life all
animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic. Its
throes will heave our exuviae from their graves. You
may melt your metals and cast them into the most
beautiful moulds you can; they will never excite me
like the forms which this molten earth flows out into.
And not only it, but the institutions upon it, are
plastic like clay in the hands of the potter.

Ere long, not only on these banks, but on every

hill and plain and in every hollow, the frost comes
out of the ground like a dormant quadruped from its
burrow, and seeks the sea with music, or migrates to
other climes in clouds. Thaw with his gentle persua-
sion is more powerful than Thor with his hammer.
The one melts, the other but breaks in pieces.
When the ground was partially bare of snow, and
a few warm days had dried its surface somewhat, it
was pleasant to compare the first tender signs of the
infant year just peeping forth with stately beauty of
the withered vegetation which had withstood the
winter,—Life-everlasting, golden-rods, pinweeds, and
graceful wild grasses, more obvious and interesting
frequently than in summer even, as if their beauty
was not ripe till then; even cotton-grass, cat-tails,
mulleins, johnswort, hard-hack, meadow-sweet, and
other strong stemmed plants, those unexhausted
granaries which entertain the earliest birds,-decent
weeds, at least, which widowed Nature wears. I am
310 SPRING

particularly attracted by the arching and sheaf-like

top of the wool-grass; it brings back the summer to
our winter memories, and is among the forms which
art loves to copy, and which, in the vegetable king-
dom, have the same relation to types already in the
mind of man that astronomy has. It is an antique
style older than Greek or Egyptian. Many of the
phenomena of Winter are suggestive of an inexpres-
sible tenderness and fragile delicacy. We are accus-
tomed to hear this king described as a rude and
boisterous tyrant; but with the gentleness of a lover
he adorns the tresses of Summer.
At the approach of spring the red-squirrels got under
my house, two at a time, directly under my feet as I sat
reading or writing, and kept up the queerest chuckling
and chirruping and vocal pirouetting and gurgling
sounds that ever were heard; and when I stamped they
only chirruped the louder, as if past all fear and respect
in their mad pranks, defying humanity to stop them.
No you don't—chickaree—chickaree. They were wholly
deaf to my arguments, or failed to perceive their force,
and fell into a strain of invective that was irresistible.
The first sparrow of spring! The year beginning
with younger hope than ever! The faint silvery war-
blings heard over the partially bare and moist fields
from the blue-bird, the song-sparrow, and the red-
wing, as if the last flakes of winter tinkled as they
fell! What at such a time are histories, chronologies,
traditions, and all written revelations? The brooks
sing carols and glees to the spring. The marsh-hawk
sailing low over the meadow is already seeking the
first slimy life that awakes. The sinking sound of
melting snow is heard in all dells, and the ice dis-
solves apace in the ponds. The grass flames up on
the hillsides like a spring fire,-"et primitus oritur
 WALDEN 311

herba imbribus primoribus evocata,"— as if the earth

sent forth an inward heat to greet the returning sun;
not yellow but green is the color of its flame;—the
symbol of perpetual youth, the grass-blade, like a
long green ribbon, streams from the sod into the
summer, checked indeed by the frost, but anon push-
ing on again, lifting its spear of last year's hay with
the fresh life below. It grows as steadily as the rill
oozes out of the ground. It is almost identical with
that, for in the growing days of June, when the rills
are dry, the grass blades are their channels, and from
year to year the herds drink at this perennial green
stream, and the mower draws from it betimes their
winter supply. So our human life but dies down to
its root, and still puts forth its green blade to eternity.
Walden is melting apace. There is a canal two rods
wide along the northerly and westerly sides, and wider
still at the east end. A great field of ice has cracked
off from the main body. I hear a song-sparrow sing-
ing from the bushes on the shore,—olit, olit, olit,—
chip, chip, chip, che char,—che wiss, wiss, wiss. He
too is helping to crack it. How handsome the great
sweeping curves in the edge of the ice, answering
somewhat to those of the shore, but more regular! It
is unusually hard, owing to the recent severe but
transient cold, and all watered or waved like a palace
floor. But the wind slides eastward over its opaque
surface in vain, till it reaches the living surface be-
yond. It is glorious to behold this ribbon of water
sparkling in the sun, the bare face of the pond full
of glee and youth, as if it spoke the joy of the fishes
within it, and of the sands on its shore,—a silvery
sheen as from the scales of a leuciscus, as it were
all one active fish. Such is the contrast between win-
ter and spring. Walden was dead and is alive again.
312 SPRING

But this spring it broke up more steadily, as I have said.

The change from storm and winter to serene and
mild weather, from dark and sluggish hours to bright
and elastic ones, is a memorable crisis which all
things proclaim. It is seemingly instantaneous at
last. Suddenly an influx of light filled my house,
though the evening was at hand, and the clouds of
winter still overhung it, and the eaves were dripping
with sleety rain. I looked out the window, and lo!
where yesterday was cold gray ice there lay the
transparent pond already calm and full of hope as
on a summer evening, reflecting a summer evening
sky in its bosom, though none was visible overhead,
as if it had intelligence with some remote horizon. I
heard a robin in the distance, the first I had heard
for many a thousand years, methought, whose note
I shall not forget for many a thousand more,—the
same sweet and powerful song of yore. O the evening
robin, at the end of a New England summer day! If
I could ever find the twig he sits upon! I mean he;
I mean the twig. This at least is not the Turdus
migratorius. The pitch-pines and shrub-oaks about
my house, which had so long drooped, suddenly re-
sumed their several characters, looked brighter,
greener, and more erect and alive, as if effectually
cleansed and restored by the rain. I knew that it
would not rain any more. You may tell by looking
at any twig of the forest, ay, at your very wood-pile,
whether its winter is past or not. As it grew darker,
I was startled by the honking of geese flying low
over the woods, like weary travellers getting in late
from southern lakes, and indulging at last in unre-
strained complaint and mutual consolation. Standing
at my door, I could hear the rush of their wings;
when, driving toward my house, they suddenly spied
 WALDEN 313

my light, and with hushed clamor wheeled and set-

tled in the pond. So I came in, and shut the door,
and passed my first spring night in the woods.
In the morning I watched the geese from the door
through the mist, sailing in the middle of the pond,
fifty rods off, so large and tumultuous that Walden
appeared like an artificial pond for their amusement.
But when I stood on the shore they at once rose up
with a great flapping of wings at the signal of their
commander, and when they had got into rank circled
about over my head, twenty-nine of them, and then
steered straight to Canada, with a regular honk from
the leader at intervals, trusting to break their fast in
muddier pools. A "plump" of ducks rose at the same
time and took the route to the north in the wake of
their noisier cousins.
For a week I heard the circling groping clangor
of some solitary goose in the foggy mornings, seeking
its companion, and still peopling the woods with the
sound of a larger life than they could sustain. In
April the pigeons were seen again flying express in
small flocks, and in due time I heard the martins
twittering over my clearing, though it had not seemed
that the township contained so many that it could
afford me any, and I fancied that they were peculiar-
ly of the ancient race that dwelt in hollow trees ere
white men came. In almost all climes the tortoise
and the frog are among the precursors and heralds
of this season, and birds fly with song and glancing
plumage, and plants spring and bloom, and winds
blow, to correct this slight oscillation of the poles
and preserve the equilibrium of Nature.
As every season seems best to us in its turn, so
the coming in of spring is like the creation of Cosmos
out of Chaos and the realization of the Golden Age.—
314 SPRING

"Eurus ad Auroram, Nabathaeaque regna recessit,

Persidaque, et radiis juga subdita matutinis."
"The East-Wind withdrew to Aurora and the
Nabathaean kingdom,
And the Persian, and the ridges placed under
the morning rays.

Man was born. Whether that Artificer of things,

The origin of a better world, made him from
the divine seed;
Or the earth being recent and lately sundered
from the high
Ether, retained some seeds of cognate heaven."
A single gentle rain makes the grass many shades
greener. So our prospects brighten on the influx of
better thoughts. We should be blessed if we lived in
the present always, and took advantage of every acci-
dent that befell us, like the grass which confesses
the influence of the slightest dew that falls on it;
and did not spend our time in atoning for the neglect
of past opportunities, which we call doing our duty.
We loiter in winter while it is already spring. In a
pleasant spring morning all men's sins are forgiven.
Such a day is a truce to vice. While such a sun holds
out to burn, the vilest sinner may return. Through
our own recovered innocence we discern the inno-
cence of our neighbors. You may have known your
neighbor yesterday for a thief, a drunkard, or a
sensualist, and merely pitied or despised him, and
despaired of the world; but the sun shines bright and
warm this first spring morning, re-creating the world,
and you meet him at some serene work, and see how
his exhausted and debauched veins expand with still
joy and bless the new day, feel the spring influence
with the innocence of infancy, and all his faults are
forgotten. There is not only an atmosphere of good
 WALDEN 315

will about him, but even a savor of holiness groping

for expression, blindly and ineffectually perhaps,
like a new-born instinct, and for a short hour the
south hill-side echoes to no vulgar jest. You see some
innocent fair shoots preparing to burst from his
gnarled rind and try another year's life, tender and
fresh as the youngest plant. Even he has entered into
the joy of his Lord. Why the jailer does not leave
open his prison doors,-why the judge does not dis-
miss his case,-why the preacher does not dismiss
his congregation! It is because they do not obey the
hint which God gives them, nor accept the pardon
which he freely offers to all.
"A return to goodness produced each day in the
tranquil and beneficent breath of the morning, causes
that in respect to the love of virtue and the hatred of
vice, one approaches a little the primitive nature of
man, as the sprouts of the forest which has been
felled. In like manner the evil which one does in the
interval of a day prevents the germs of virtues which
began to spring up again from developing themselves
and destroys them.
"After the germs of virtue have thus been prevent-
ed many times from developing themselves, then
the beneficent breath of evening does not suffice to
preserve them. As soon as the breath of evening
does not suffice longer to preserve them, then the
nature of man does not differ much from that of the
brute. Men seeing the nature of this man like that
of the brute, think that he has never possessed the
innate faculty of reason. Are those the true and
natural sentiments of man?"
"The Golden Age was first created, which without
any avenger
Spontaneously without law cherished fidelity and
rectitude.
316 SPRING

Punishment and fear were not; nor were threaten-

ing words read
On suspended brass; nor did the suppliant crowd
fear
The words of their judge; but were safe without
an avenger.
Not yet the pine felled on its mountains had de-
scended
To the liquid waves that it might see a foreign
world,
And mortals knew no shores but their own.

There was eternal spring, and placid zephyrs with

warm
Blasts soothed the flowers born without seed."

On the 2gth of April, as I was fishing from the

bank of the river near the Nine-Acre-Corner bridge,
standing on the quaking grass and willow roots,
where the muskrats lurk, I heard a singular rattling
sound, somewhat like that of the sticks which boys
play with their fingers, when, looking up, I observed
a very slight and graceful hawk, like a night-hawk,
alternately soaring like a ripple and tumbling a rod
or two over and over, showing the underside of its
wings, which gleamed like a satin ribbon in the sun,
or like the pearly inside of a shell. This sight re-
minded me of falconry and what nobleness and po-
etry are associated with that sport. The Merlin it
seemed to me it might be called: but I care not for
its name. It was the most ethereal flight I had ever
witnessed. It did not simply flutter like a butterfly, nor
soar like the larger hawks, but it sported with proud
reliance in the fields of air; mounting again and
again with its strange chuckle, it repeated its free
and beautiful fall, turning over and over like a
kite, and then recovering from its lofty tumbling, as
 WALDEN 317

if it had never set its foot on terra firma. It appeared

to have no companion in the universe,—sporting
there alone,—and to need none but the morning and
the ether with which it played. It was not lonely, but
made all the earth lonely beneath it. Where was the
parent which hatched it, its kindred, and its father
in the heavens? The tenant of the air, it seemed re-
lated to the earth but by an egg hatched some time
in the crevice of a crag;—or was its native nest made
in the angle of a cloud, woven of the rainbow's trim-
mings and the sunset sky, and lined with some soft
midsummer haze caught up from earth? Its eyry
now some cliffy cloud.
Beside this I got a rare mess of golden and silver
and bright cupreous fishes, which looked like a string
of jewels. Ah! I have penetrated to those meadows
on the morning of many a first spring day, jumping
from hummock to hummock, from willow root to
willow root, when the wild river valley and the woods
were bathed in so pure and bright a light as would
have waked the dead, if they had been slumbering
in their graves, as some suppose. There needs no
stronger proof of immortality. All things must live in
such a light. O Death, where was thy sting? O Grave,
where was thy victory, then?
Our village life would stagnate if it were not for
the unexplored forests and meadows which surround
it. We need the tonic of wildness,-to wade some-
times in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-
hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell
the whispering sedge where only some wilder and
more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink
crawls with its belly close to the ground. At the same
time that we are earnest to explore and learn all
things, we require that all things be mysterious and
unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild,
318 SPRING

unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfath-

omable. We can never have enough of Nature. We
must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor,
vast and Titanic features, the sea-coast with its
wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decay-
ing trees, the thunder cloud, and the rain which lasts
three weeks and produces freshets. We need to wit-
ness our own limits transgressed, and some life
pasturing freely where we never wander. We are
cheered when we observe the vulture feeding on the
carrion which disgusts and disheartens us and deriv-
ing health and strength from the repast. There was a
dead horse in the hollow by the path to my house,
which compelled me sometimes to go out of my way,
especially in the night when the air was heavy, but
the assurance it gave me of the strong appetite and
inviolable health of Nature was my compensation
for this. I love to see that Nature is so rife with life
that myriads can be afforded to be sacrificed and
suffered to prey on one another; that tender organiza-
tions can be so serenely squashed out of existence
like pulp,—tadpoles which herons gobble up, and
tortoises and toads run over in the road; and that
sometimes it has rained flesh and blood! With the
liability to accident, we must see how little account
is to be made of it. The impression made on a wise
man is that of universal innocence. Poison is not
poisonous after all, nor are any wounds fatal. Compas-
sion is a very untenable ground. It must be expedi-
tious. Its pleadings will not bear to be stereotyped.
Early in May, the oaks, hickories, maples, and
other trees, just putting out amidst the pine woods
around the pond, imparted a brightness like sun-
shine to the landscape, especially in cloudy days, as
if the sun were breaking through mists and shining
faintly on the hill-sides here and there. On the third
 WALDEN 319

or fourth of May I saw a loon in the pond, and dur-

ing the first week of the month I heard the whippoor-
will, the brown-thrasher, the veery, the wood-pewee,
the chewink, and other birds. I had heard the wood-
thrush long before. The phcebe had already come
once more and looked in at my door and window, to
see if my house was cavern-like enough for her, sus-
taining herself on humming wings with clinched
talons, as if she held by the air, while she surveyed
the premises. The sulphur-like pollen of the pitch-
pine soon covered the pond and the stones and rotten
wood along the shore, so that you could have col-
lected a barrel-ful. This is the "sulphur showers" we
hear of. Even in Calidas' drama of Sacontala, we
read of "rills dyed yellow with the golden dust of the
lotus." And so the seasons went rolling on into sum-
mer, as one rambles into higher and higher grass.
Thus was my first year's life in the woods com-
pleted; and the second year was similar to it. I
finally left Walden September 6th, 1847.
Conclusion

To THE sick the doctors wisely recommend a

change of air and scenery. Thank Heaven, here is not
all the world. The buck-eye does not grow in New
England, and the mocking-bird is rarely heard here.
The wild-goose is more of a cosmopolite than we; he
breaks his fast in Canada, takes a luncheon in the
Ohio, and plumes himself for the night in a southern
bayou. Even the bison, to some extent, keeps pace
with the seasons, cropping the pastures of the Colo-
rado only till a greener and sweeter grass awaits him
by the Yellowstone. Yet we think that if rail-fences
are pulled down, and stone-walls piled up on our
farms, bounds are henceforth set to our lives and our
fates decided. If you are chosen town-clerk, forsooth,
you cannot go to Tierra del Fuego this summer: but
you may go to the land of infernal fire nevertheless.
The universe is wider than our views of it.
Yet we should oftener look over the tafferel of our
craft, like curious passengers, and not make the voy-
age like stupid sailors picking oakum. The other side
of the globe is but the home of our correspondent.
Our voyaging is only great-circle sailing, and the doc-
tors prescribe for diseases of the skin merely. One
hastens to Southern Africa to chase the giraffe; but
surely that is not the game he would be after. How
long, pray, would a man hunt giraffes if he could?
Snipes and woodcocks also may afford rare sport; but
I trust it would be nobler game to shoot one's self.—
"Direct your eye sight inward, and you'll find
A thousand regions in your mind
Yet undiscovered. Travel them, and be
Expert in home-cosmography."
 WALDEN 321

What does Africa,—what does the West stand for?

Is not our own interior white on the chart? black
though it may prove, like the coast, when discovered.
Is it the source of the Nile, or the Niger, or the Missis-
sippi, or a North-West Passage around this continent,
that we would find? Are these the problems which
most concern mankind? Is Franklin the only man
who is lost, that his wife should be so earnest to find
him? Does Mr. Grinnell know where he himself is?
Be rather the Mungo Park, the Lewis and Clarke and
Frobisher, of your own streams and oceans; explore
your own higher latitudes,—with shiploads of pre-
served meats to support you, if they be necessary;
and pile the empty cans sky-high for a sign. Were pre-
served meats invented to preserve meat merely? Nay,
be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds
within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but
of thought. Every man is the lord of a realm beside
which the earthly empire of the Czar is but a petty
state, a hummock left by the ice. Yet some can be
patriotic who have no se/f-respect, and sacrifice the
greater to the less. They love the soil which makes
their graves, but have no sympathy with the spirit
which may still animate their clay. Patriotism is a
maggot in their heads. What was the meaning of that
South-Sea Exploring Expedition, with all its parade
and expense, but an indirect recognition of the fact,
that there are continents and seas in the moral
world, to which every man is an isthmus or an inlet,
yet unexplored by him, but that it is easier to sail
many thousand miles through cold and storm and
cannibals, in a government ship, with five hundred
men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the
private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one's
being alone.—
322 CONCLUSION

"Erret, et extremes alter scrutetur Iberos.

Plus habet hie vitae, plus habet ille viae."
Let them wander and scrutinize the outlandish
Australians.
I have more of God, they more of the road.
It is not worth the while to go round the world to
count the cats in Zanzibar. Yet do this even till you
can do better, and you may perhaps find some
"Symmes' Hole" by which to get at the inside at last.
England and France, Spain and Portugal, Gold Coast
and Slave Coast, all front on this private sea; but no
bark from them has ventured out of sight of land,
though it is without doubt the direct way to India. If
you would learn to speak all tongues and conform to
the customs of all nations, if you would travel farther
than all travellers, be naturalized in all climes, and
cause the Sphinx to dash her head against a stone,
even obey the precept of the old philosopher, and
Explore thyself. Herein are demanded the eye and
the nerve. Only the defeated and deserters go to the
wars, cowards that run away and enlist. Start now on
that farthest western way, which does not pause at
the Mississippi or the Pacific, nor conduct toward a
worn-out China or Japan, but leads on direct a tan-
gent to this sphere, summer and winter, day and night,
sun down, moon down, and at last earth down too.
It is said that Mirabeau took to highway robbery
"to ascertain what degree of resolution was necessary
in order to place one's self in formal opposition to
the most sacred laws of society." He declared that "a
soldier who fights in the ranks does not require half
so much courage as a foot-pad,"—"that honor and
religion have never stood in the way of a well-con-
sidered and a firm resolve." This was manly, as the
world goes; and yet it was idle, if not desperate. A
saner man would have found himself often enough
 WALDEN 323

"in formal opposition" to what are deemed "the most

sacred laws of society," through obedience to yet
more sacred laws, and so have tested his resolution
without going out of his way. It is not for a man to
put himself in such an attitude to society, but to
maintain himself in whatever attitude he find him-
self through obedience to the laws of his being, which
will never be one of opposition to a just govern-
ment, if he should chance to meet with such.
I left the woods for as good a reason as I went
there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several
more lives to live, and could not spare any
more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily
and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and
make a beaten track for ourselves. I had not lived
there a week before my feet wore a path from my door
to the pond-side; and though it is five or six years
since I trod it, it is still quite distinct. It is true, I fear
that others may have fallen into it, and so helped to
keep it open. The surface of the earth is soft and im-
pressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths
which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then,
must be the highways of the world, how deep the
ruts of tradition and conformity! I did not wish to
take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast
and on the deck of the world, for there I could best
see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish
to go below now.
I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if
one advances confidently in the direction of his
dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has
imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in
common hours. He will put some things behind, will
pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more
liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around
and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and
324 CONCLUSION

interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and

he will live with the license of a higher order of be-
ings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws
of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude
will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weak-
ness weakness. If you have built castles in the air,
your work need not be lost; that is where they should
be. Now put the foundations under them.
It is a ridiculous demand which England and Amer-
ica make, that you shall speak so that they can under-
stand you. Neither men nor toad-stools grow so. As
if that were important, and there were not enough to
understand you without them. As if Nature could
support but one order of understandings, could not
sustain birds as well as quadrupeds, flying as well as
creeping things, and hush and who, which Bright can
understand, were the best English. As if there were
safety in stupidity alone. I fear chiefly lest my ex-
pression may not be extra- vagant enough, may not
wander far enough beyond the narrow limits of my
daily experience, so as to be adequate to the truth of
which I have been convinced. Extra vagance! it de-
pends on how you are yarded. The migrating buffalo,
which seeks new pastures in another latitude, is not
extravagant like the cow which kicks over the pail,
leaps the cow-yard fence, and runs after her calf, in
milking time. I desire to speak somewhere without
bounds; like a man in a waking moment, to men in
their waking moments; for I am convinced that I
cannot exaggerate enough even to lay the foundation
of a true expression. Who that has heard a strain of
music feared then lest he should speak extravagantly
any more forever? In view of the future or possible,
we should live quite laxly and undefined in front,
our outlines dim and misty on that side; as our
shadows reveal an insensible perspiration toward the
 WALDEN 325

sun. The volatile truth of our words should continu-

ally betray the inadequacy of the residual statement.
Their truth is instantly translated; its literal monu-
ment alone remains. The words which express our
faith and piety are not definite; yet they are sig-
nificant and fragrant like frankincense to superior
natures.
Why level downward to our dullest perception al-
ways, and praise that as common sense? The com-
monest sense is the sense of men asleep, which they
express by snoring. Sometimes we are inclined to
class those who are once-and-a-half witted with the
half-witted, because we appreciate only a third part
of their wit. Some would find fault with the morning-
red, if they ever got up early enough. "They pretend,"
as I hear, "that the verses of Kabir have four different
senses; illusion, spirit, intellect, and the exoteric doc-
trine of the Vedas;" but in this part of the world it is
considered a ground for complaint if a man's writings
admit of more than one interpretation. While Eng-
land endeavors to cure the potato-rot, will not any
endeavor to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so
much more widely and fatally?
I do not suppose that I have attained to obscurity,
but I should be proud if no more fatal fault were
found with my pages on this score than was found
with the Walden ice. Southern customers objected to
its blue color, which is the evidence of its purity, as
if it were muddy, and preferred the Cambridge ice,
which is white, but tastes of weeds. The purity men
love is like the mists which envelop the earth, and
not like the azure ether beyond.
Some are dinning in our ears that we Americans,
and moderns generally, are intellectual dwarfs com-
pared with the ancients, or even the Elizabethan men.
But what is that to the purpose? A living dog is
326 CONCLUSION

better than a dead lion. Shall a man go and hang

himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies,
and not be the biggest pygmy that he can? Let every
one mind his own business, and endeavor to be
what he was made.
Why should we be in such desperate haste to suc-
ceed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man
does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it
is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step
to the music which he hears, however measured or
far away. It is not important that he should mature
as soon as an apple-tree or an oak. Shall he turn his
spring into summer? If the condition of things which
we were made for is not yet, what were any reality
which we can substitute? We will not be shipwrecked
on a vain reality. Shall we with pains erect a heaven
of blue glass over ourselves, though when it is done
we shall be sure to gaze still at the true ethereal
heaven far above, as if the former were not?
There was an artist in the city of Kouroo who was
disposed to strive after perfection. One day it came
into his mind to make a staff. Having considered that
in an imperfect work time is an ingredient, but into
a perfect work time does not enter, he said to him-
self, It shall be perfect in all respects, though I
should do nothing else in my life. He proceeded in-
stantly to the forest for wood, being resolved that it
should not be made of unsuitable material; and as
he searched for and rejected stick after stick, his
friends gradually deserted him, for they grew old in
their works and died, but he grew not older by a mo-
ment. His singleness of purpose and resolution, and
his elevated piety, endowed him, without his knowl-
edge, with perennial youth. As he made no compro-
mise with Time, Time kept out of his way, and only
sighed at a distance because he could not overcome
 WALDEN 327

him. Before he had found a stock in all respects

suitable the city of Kouroo was a hoary ruin, and he
sat on one of its mounds to peel the stick. Before he
had given it the proper shape the dynasty of the
Candahars was at an end, and with the point of the
stick he wrote the name of the last of that race in the
sand, and then resumed his work. By the time he had
smoothed and polished the staff Kalpa was no longer
the pole-star; and ere he had put on the ferrule and
the head adorned with precious stones, Brahma had
awoke and slumbered many times. But why do I stay
to mention these things? When the finishing stroke
was put to his work, it suddenly expanded before the
eyes of the astonished artist into the fairest of all the
creations of Brahma. He had made a new system in
making a staff, a world with full and fair proportions;
in which, though the old cities and dynasties had
passed away, fairer and more glorious ones had
taken their places. And now he saw by the heap of
shavings still fresh at his feet, that, for him and his
work, the former lapse of time had been an illusion,
and that no more time had elapsed than is required
for a single scintillation from the brain of Brahma
to fall on and inflame the tinder of a mortal brain.
The material was pure, and his art was pure; how
could the result be other than wonderful?
No face which we can give to a matter will stead
us so well at last as the truth. This alone wears well.
For the most part, we are not where we are, but in a
false position. Through an infirmity of our natures,
we suppose a case, and put ourselves into it, and
hence are in two cases at the same time, and it is
doubly difficult to get out. In sane moments we re-
gard only the facts, the case that is. Say what you
have to say, not what you ought. Any truth is better
than make-believe. Tom Hyde, the tinker, standing on
328 CONCLUSION

the gallows, was asked if he had any thing to say.

"Tell the tailors," said he, "to remember to make a
knot in their thread before they take the first stitch."
His companion's prayer is forgotten.
However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do
not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad
as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest.
The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love
your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some
pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poor-
house. The setting sun is reflected from the windows
of the alms-house as brightly as from the rich man's
abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the
spring. I do not see but a quiet mind may live as
contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as
in a palace. The town's poor seem to me often to live
the most independent lives of any. May be they are
simply great enough to receive without misgiving.
Most think that they are above being supported by
the town; but it oftener happens that they are not
above supporting themselves by dishonest means,
which should be more disreputable. Cultivate poverty
like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble your-
self much to get new things, whether clothes or
friends. Turn the old; return to them. Things do not
change; we change. Sell your clothes and keep your
thoughts. God will see that you do not want society.
If I were confined to a corner of a garret all my days,
like a spider, the world would be just as large to me
while I had my thoughts about me. The philosopher
said: "From an army of three divisions one can take
away its general, and put it in disorder; from the
man the most abject and vulgar one cannot take
away his thought." Do not seek so anxiously to be
developed, to subject yourself to many influences to
be played on; it is all dissipation. Humility like dark-
 WALDEN 329

ness reveals the heavenly lights. The shadows of

poverty and meanness gather around us, "and lo!
creation widens to our view." We are often reminded
that if there were bestowed on us the wealth of
Croesus, our aims must still be the same, and our
means essentially the same. Moreover, if you are re-
stricted in your range by poverty, if you cannot buy
books and newspapers, for instance, you are but con-
fined to the most significant and vital experiences;
you are compelled to deal with the material which
yields the most sugar and the most starch. It is life
near the bone where it is sweetest. You are defended
from being a trifler. No man loses ever on a lower
level by magnanimity on a higher. Superfluous wealth
can buy superfluities only. Money is not required to
buy one necessary of the soul.
I live in the angle of a leaden wall, into whose
composition was poured a little alloy of bell metal.
Often, in the repose of my mid-day, there reaches my
ears a confused tintinnabulum from without. It is the
noise of my contemporaries. My neighbors tell me of
their adventures with famous gentlemen and ladies,
what notabilities they met at the dinner-table; but I
am no more interested in such things than in the
contents of the Daily Times. The interest and the
conversation are about costume and manners chiefly;
but a goose is a goose still, dress it as you will. They
tell me of California and Texas, of England and the
Indies, of the Hon. Mr. of Georgia or of Mas-
sachusetts, all transient and fleeting phenomena, till
I am ready to leap from their court-yard like the
Mameluke bey. I delight to come to my bearings,—
not walk in procession with pomp and parade, in a
conspicuous place, but to walk even with the Builder
of the universe, if I may,-not to live in this restless,
nervous, bustling, trivial Nineteenth Century, but
330 CONCLUSION

stand or sit thoughtfully while it goes by. What are

men celebrating? They are all on a committee of ar-
rangements, and hourly expect a speech from some-
body. God is only the president of the day, and Web-
ster is his orator. I love to weigh, to settle, to gravitate
toward that which most strongly and rightfully at-
tracts me;-not hang by the beam of the scale and
try to weigh less,—not suppose a case, but take the
case that is; to travel the only path I can, and that
on which no power can resist me. It affords me no
satisfaction to commence to spring an arch before I
have got a solid foundation. Let us not play at kittly-
benders. There is a solid bottom every where. We read
that the traveller asked the boy if the swamp before
him had a hard bottom. The boy replied that it had.
But presently the traveller's horse sank in up to the
girths, and he observed to the boy, "I thought you
said that this bog had a hard bottom." "So it has,"
answered the latter, "but you have not got half way
to it yet." So it is with the bogs and quicksands of
society; but he is an old boy that knows it. Only
what is thought said or done at a certain rare coin-
cidence is good. I would not be one of those who will
foolishly drive a nail into mere lath and plastering;
such a deed would keep me awake nights. Give me a
hammer, and let me feel for the furring. Do not
depend on the putty. Drive a nail home and clinch it
so faithfully that you can wake up in the night and
think of your work with satisfaction,-a work at
which you would not be ashamed to invoke the Muse.
So will help you God, and so only. Every nail driven
should be as another rivet in the machine of the
universe, you carrying on the work.
Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me
truth. I sat at a table where were rich food and wine
in abundance, and obsequious attendance, but sin-
 WALDEN 331

cerity and truth were not; and I went away hungry

from the inhospitable board. The hospitality was as
cold as the ices. I thought that there was no need of
ice to freeze them. They talked to me of the age of
the wine and the fame of the vintage; but I thought
of an older, a newer, and purer wine, of a more
glorious vintage, which they had not got, and could
not buy. The style, the house and grounds and "en-
tertainment" pass for nothing with me. I called on
the king, but he made me wait in his hall, and con-
ducted like a man incapacitated for hospitality. There
was a man in my neighborhood who lived in a hollow
tree. His manners were truly regal. I should have
done better had I called on him.
How long shall we sit in our porticoes practising
idle and musty virtues, which any work would make
impertinent? As if one were to begin the day with
long-suffering, and hire a man to hoe his potatoes;
and in the afternoon go forth to practise Christian
meekness and charity with goodness aforethought 1
Consider the China pride and stagnant self-com-
placency of mankind. This generation reclines a little
to congratulate itself on being the last of an illus-
trious line; and in Boston and London and Paris and
Rome, thinking of its long descent, it speaks of its
progress in art and science and literature with satis-
faction. There are the Records of the Philosophical
Societies, and the public Eulogies of Great Men! It is
the good Adam contemplating his own virtue. "Yes,
we have done great deeds, and sung divine songs,
which shall never die,"-that is, as long as we can
remember them. The learned societies and great men
of Assyria,-where are they? What youthful philoso-
phers and experimentalists we are! There is not one
of my readers who has yet lived a whole human Me.
These may be but the spring months in the life of
332 CONCLUSION

the race. If we have had the seven-years' itch, we

have not seen the seventeen-year locust yet in Con-
cord. We are acquainted with a mere pellicle of the
globe on which we live. Most have not delved six
feet beneath the surface, nor leaped as many above
it. We know not where we are. Beside, we are sound
asleep nearly half our time. Yet we esteem ourselves
wise, and have an established order on the surface.
Truly, we are deep thinkers, we are ambitious spirits!
As I stand over the insect crawling amid the pine
needles on the forest floor, and endeavoring to con-
ceal itself from my sight, and ask myself why it will
cherish those humble thoughts, and hide its head
from me who might perhaps be its benefactor, and
impart to its race some cheering information, I am
reminded of the greater Benefactor and Intelligence
that stands over me the human insect.
There is an incessant influx of novelty into the
world, and yet we tolerate incredible dulness. I need
only suggest what kind of sermons are still listened
to in the most enlightened countries. There are such
words as joy and sorrow, but they are only the bur-
den of a psalm, sung with a nasal twang, while we
believe in the ordinary and mean. We think that we
can change our clothes only. It is said that the Brit-
ish Empire is very large and respectable, and that
the United States are a first-rate power. We do not
believe that a tide rises and falls behind every man
which can float the British Empire like a chip, if he
should ever harbor it in his mind. Who knows what
sort of seventeen-year locust will next come out of
the ground? The government of the world I live in
was not framed, like that of Britain, in after-dinner
conversations over the wine.
The life in us is like the water in the river. It may
rise this year higher than man has ever known it,
 WALDEN 333

and flood the parched uplands; even this may be the

eventful year, which will drown out all our muskrats.
It was not always dry land where we dwell. I see far
inland the banks which the stream anciently washed,
before science began to record its freshets. Every one
has heard the story which has gone the rounds of
New England, of a strong and beautiful bug which
came out of the dry leaf of an old table of apple-tree
wood, which had stood in a farmer's kitchen for sixty
years, first in Connecticut, and afterward in Massa-
chusetts,—from an egg deposited in the living tree
many years earlier still, as appeared by counting the
annual layers beyond it; which was heard gnawing
out for several weeks, hatched perchance by the heat
of an urn. Who does not feel his faith in a resurrec-
tion and immortality strengthened by hearing of this?
Who knows what beautiful and winged life, whose
egg has been buried for ages under many concentric
layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society,
deposited at first in the alburnum of the green and
living tree, which has been gradually converted into
the semblance of its well-seasoned tomb,—heard per-
chance gnawing out now for years by the astonished
family of man, as they sat round the festive board,—
may unexpectedly come forth from amidst society's
most trivial and handselled furniture, to enjoy its
perfect summer life at last!
I do not say that John or Jonathan will realize all
this; but such is the character of that morrow which
mere lapse of time can never make to dawn. The
light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only
that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more
day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

T H E E N D
This page intentionally left blank
Index
Achilles, ant as, 229 ANIMALS, WINTER, 271-81
Achilles' reproof, 144 ant war, 228-32
Adam, 179; and Eve, first Antaeus, 155
shelter of, 28; Apios tuberosa, 239
contemplating his virtue, appetite, 218. See also diet
331; ennui old as, 10; apples, wild, gathered, 238
men esteem truth existent apple-trees, wild, 276
before, 97 Arabian Nights'
Adam's grandmother ways, Entertainments, 95
209 Arcadia, 57
Admetus, 70 architects, 46
advice of old to young, 9 architecture, organic, 47-48
/Eolian music, 131 art, moral, 90
.dSschylus, 100, 103 Artist who made the woi'ld,
j9£sculapius, 139 306
Africa, Southern, hunters artist of Kouroo, 326-27
in, 320 Assyria, learned societies
[Agassiz, Louis], of, gone, 331
distinguished naturalist, Astor House, 140
225 auction, 67
[Alcott, Amos Bronson], Augean stables, 5
268-70; as Great Expecter, Aurora, 36, 88, 138;
270; as peddler, 268; children of, 89
blue-robed man, 269; autumn, 240; fruit in, 238;
true friend of man, 269 waterfowl in, 233-37
Aldebaran, 88 awakeness, 17-18, 90, 333
alertness, 17-18. See also awakening, 84, 89-90, 127;
awakeness need for, 325
Alexander, 298; carried Iliad, axe, borrowed, 40-42;
102 lost in pond, 178; new
Algonquins, cited, 212 helve in, 251-52
Alms House Farm, 257
almshouse, visitors from, Babylon, bricks of, 241
151 Baker, Gilian, 232
Altair, 88 BAKER FARM, 201-09
America, 324; history Baker Farm, 203; hounds
compared to ant war, at, 278; poem about
230; imitative in fashions, quoted, 203, 204, 208;
25; Irish coming to, 205 rain at, 203
animal heat, 12-13 Baker's barn, fire
animal in men, 219 misreported at, 259
animal man, Therien as, 146 baking, 62-63
animals, farm, 56-57; Balcom, Mr., 58
in spring, 302 Bank, United States, 58
336 INDEX

barred owl, 266 going to on railroad, 118;

Bartram, William, 68 huckleberry never reaches,
Bascom's shop, fire at, 260 173; skip gossip of, 109;
bay horse, lost, 17 Thoreau brought from, 155
BEAN-FIELD, THE, 155-66 bottom, hard, 98; solid
beans, auxiliaries of, 155; everywhere, 330. See also
enemies of, 155, 163; foundation, foundations
hoeing, 155-57; hoeing Brahma, 298, 327
instead of reading, in; Brahme, 96
how to raise, 163; Bramin, servant of, 298
knowing, 161 Bramins, self-torture of, 4
bears, Sam Nutting bravery, of commerce, 118;
hunting, 279 of minks and muskrats, 8
beech trees, 201-02 bread, 165; compared to
bells, Sunday, 123 reading, 105; spiritual, 40
Bhagvat-Geeta, 57; Thoreau break-making, 62-63
bathes intellect in, 298 Breed's house, 258-61;
Bible, paraphrased, 5, fire at, 259-60; mourner
32, 66-67, 77, 78, 121, for, 260-61
122, 151, 2O7, 221, 262, bricks, 240-41
266, 294, 309, 311, 315, Brighton, 134
317; quoted, 32; referred Brister's Hill, 227, 257-58,
to, 52-53, 71, 104, 261 262, 267
Bibles, ancient classics and, Brister's Spring, 227-28,
106. See also scriptures 262, 264
birds, 226-28; at Walden, British Empire, called large
85-86, 158, 159, 185; in and respectable, 332
spring, 310-13, 319; British grenadiers killed
summer, 114 at Concord, 258
bison, 238, 324; keeps pace brown-thrasher, song of, 158
with seasons, 320 BRUTE NEIGHBORS, 223-37
blindness, human, 93-94, 333 Buena Vista, 118
blue flag, 199 buffalo, see bison
blueberry bushes, high, 182 bug, beautiful, story of, 333
boat, on Walden, 174, 189- building, philosophy of, 45-48
91; Thoreau's, 85 Bull, John, 333
boat wreck in Flint's Pond, bullfrogs, 126
194-95 Bunker Hill, battle of, 230
body, human, 221 business, Thoreau's private,
"bogging," 204, 208 18-21
Boiling Spring, 183, 192 busk, 68
Bonaparte, Napoleon, 118,
262 Calidas' drama of Sacontala,
book, stolen, 172; quoted, 319
revolutionary character Cambridge, ice experiment
of a, 107-08 at, 300; ice-cutters from,
books, value of, 102-03 295
Boston, fruit sold to, 238; Cambridge College, crowded
 INDEX 337
hives of, 135; expenses at, chestnuts, 238-39
50 chestnutting, 194
Canada, home of Therien, chicadees, 146; flocks of,
145 275-76
canoe, log, 190-91 chickens of John Field, 204
capacities, man's, 10 chimney, building of, 240-41;
Carew, Thomas, quoted, 80 standing, 242-43
Cassiopeia's Chair, 88 China, digging to, 58
Castalian Fountain, 179 Christianity as apri-culture,
castles in the air, 269-70, 37
324 Cinderella, trivial reading
cat, 44; gone wild, 232; like, 105
"winged," 232-33 civil disobedience, 171
Cato, Marcus Porcius, quoted, civilization, effects of, 30-31,
63, 84, 166, 243 34-35
Cattle Show, Middlesex, 33 civilized man, 40
Cattle-shows, 165 classical languages, value of,
Celestial Empire, 37; 100-01, 103, 106
trade with, 20 classical literature, 100-04,
cellar holes of former 106
houses, 263 classics denned, 100, 102
cellar of Walden house, 44 Clothing, as necessary to life,
Cellini, Benvenuto, cited, 12; in summer, 14;
202 philosophy of, 21-27;
Celtis occidentalis, 202 purpose of, 13
Cerasus pumila, 113 clothing, new, enterprises
Ceres, 165-66, 239 that require, 23; patched,
chairs, in Walden house, 22; philosopher's, 24;
140 reflects character, 21-22;
Chalmers' collection of simple, 24
English poetry, 259 cock crowing, 127. See also
Champollion, Jean Francois, Chanticleer, chanticleer
308 Codman Place, fire
[Channing, William Ellery, misreported at, 259
the younger], as fishing Coenobites, 173
companion, 223-25; taken Cold Fridays, dating from,
to board, 241; as winter 254
visitor, 267-68 Collins, James, shanty of, 43
Chanticleer, 127 Colman's report, 158, 162
chanticleer, brag lustily Colymbus glacialis, 233-36.
as, 84 See also loon
Chapman, George, quoted, 33 commerce, virtues of, 118-19
charity, 72-73, 77; objects communication, 52
of, 152. See also CONCLUSION, 320-33
philanthropy Concord (Mass.), 3, 49;
chastity, 219-20 diet in, 63; farmers of,
Chaucer, Geoffrey, quoted, 32, 55-56; keeps its ground,
212 264; no seventeen-year
338 INDEX

locusts yet in, 332; dangers in life, 153

relation to Walden, 86; Darwin, Charles, quoted,
sounds from, 160-61; 12-13
Thoreau much-travelled Davenant, William, 259
in, 4; wears Walden, 179 dawn, anticipating, 17
"Concord, Topographical day, compared to year, 301;
Description of the Town living deliberately, 97
of," 198 "De Re Rustica," 84
Concord Battle Ground, 86 deacon's effects, auction of,
Concord culture, 106-09 67
Concord Fight, 230; grave dead set, man at, 66
of grenadiers killed at, debt, 6-7
258 deeds, old, for old people, 8
Concord history, compared deer, last killed in area, 279
at ant war, 230 Delphi, 100
Concord Lyceum, 108-09 desperation of mass of men,
Concord River, 194, 197, 225 8
Concordiensis, 257 detachment from nineteenth
Confucius, quoted, n, 134 century, 329-30
Con-fut-see, 224 Deucalion, 5
Connecticut River, 121 diet, 61, 218; asceticism in,
constellations, 88 217; imagination and,
conversation, distance needed 2r4-i6
for, 140-41; in parlors, 244 Digby, Sir Kenelm, 162
cooking at Walden, 45, 254
cooperation, 71-72 Dismal Swamp, railroad
through, 117
corn, origin of, 239; squirrel
eating, 273-75 Dobson & Sons, stonecutters,
cost of self-maintenance, 69. 58
See also expenses Dodona, 100
coves of Walden, 289-90 dog, living, better than dead
cranberries, admiring, 238 lion, 325-26; village,
cranberry meadows, raked hunting ineffectually, 232.
into city, 116 See also hound, hounds
Croesus, at no real Doing-good, a full profession,
advantage, 329 73
"Cultivator," 84. See also doubleness, awareness of, 135
New-England Cultivator drink, 217; need for healthy,
culture, human, 40; 264; tragedy of alcoholic,
views on village, no 258
Cummings, Squire, 257 drinking, at John Field's
curtains, not used in Walden house, 207; at the pond,
house, 67 150
Cuttingsville (Vt), 121 drummer, different, 326
ducks, in autumn, 236-37;
dame nature, 137-38 migrating in spring, 313
Damodara, quoted, 87 duty, 16
 INDEX 339

earnings, 58; from farming 248, 272; hounds at, 278;

at Walden, 55, 163; while ice breakup on, 299
at Walden, 60 Fair Haven Hill, 171, 173
Earth, dynamism of, 308-09 Fair Haven Ledges, hunting
economists, 52 bears on, 279
ECONOMY, 3-80 Fair Haven Pond, 303
economy, Thoreau farm, commentators on
summarizes his, 205 Thoreau's, 157; extent
Eden, 179 of Thoreau's, 156
education, hunting as, farmer, debts of, 32;
212-13; of Alex Therien, economic entrapment of,
147; practical, 51-52; 33
village, 110 farming, as amusement,
emancipation, self, 7-8 162; at Walden, 54-55,
[Emerson, Ralph Waldo], 163; degraded, 165-66;
270 philosophy of, 55-57
England, 324; greatest farms, ownership of, 32
worthies of, 76; news of fashions, 25-26; old, laughed
revolution of 1649, 95; at, 26; set by luxurious, 36
opinion of, 66; tries to Fenda, 258
cure potato-rot, 325 Field, John, 204-09;
English soldiers burn clothing of, 206; fishing,
Zilpha's home, 257 208; house of, 204;
esculents, 15-16 son of, 204-05; Thoreau's
eternal things, more advice to, 205; well of,
important than news, 95 206-07; work of, 204-05
eternity, 98 fire, as companion, 254;
Etesian winds, 167 as housekeeper, 253;
ethics, compared to Walden, hot, made by raft, 250;
291-92 in Thoreau's bed, 253;
Eve, Adam and, 28, 179 kindling, 252; new, 68
Evelyn, John, quoted, firewood, green, 253; pine,
9-10, 162 252; value of, 251
expenses, for food at Walden, fish, 177-78; rare, caught
59; of farming at Walden, in spring, 317; salt, 120.
55, I63; °f house, 160; See also perch, pickerel,
of living at Walden, 60 pouts, shiners
experiment, fruits of, 323- fisherman, 173-74
24; life as, 9 fishermen, winter, 271,
exploration, inward, 321-22 283-84
explorations, historical, fishing, 59, 173-75; at
cited, 321 night, 174; bait in winter,
explorers cited, 321 283; companion in,
explore thyself, 322 223-25; dropping the
practice of, 213-14;
factory system, 26-27 economy of, 206; in spring,
Fair Haven, 185, 197, 203, 316; out of need, 211;
340 INDEX

wildness of, 210; with Fugitive-Slave Bill, 232

John Field, 208 furniture, of Walden house,
Fitchburg, 53 65; outdoors, 65, 113;
Fitchburg Railroad, 43, philosophy of, 65-68;
115-22. See also railroad simplicity in, 36;
Flint's farm, 195-97 Spaulding's, 65
Flint's Pond, 181, 194-97,
201, 271; ice breakup on, Ganges, 298
299; ice sounds on, 301; garden, see farm
naming of, 195-96; sandy geese, Canada, 248-49;
bottom of, 195 honking, 272; migrating
flute, 155, 222; playing in in spring, 312-13.
boat, 174 See also goose
Flying Childers, 53 Genius, 89, 220; Good,
Food, as fuel, 13; as advice of, 207; not a
necessary to life, 12; retainer, 57
in summer, 14 genius, 73, 112, 150, 216
food, 9, 243; animal, German Confederacy, our
214-16; at Walden house, life like, 92
245; cost of, 61; expense Gilpin, William, quoted,
of at Walden, 59; 250, 287
for guests at Walden, God in present moment, 97
142; rich, 215 Golden Age, 179, 313
FORMER INHABITANTS; golden age, 243
AND WINTER VISITORS, golden-rod, earliest species
256-70 of, 257
former inhabitants, 256-64 Gondibert, 259-60
foundation, 46; none on good behavior, Thoreau
earth worthy of Alcott, repents his, 10
270; solid, 38, 330. good works, see philanthropy
See also bottom, goodness, 218; as constant
foundations superfluity, 77;
foundations, 50-51; put individuality of, 10-11
under air castles, 324. Gookin, Daniel, quoted,
See also bottom, 29-30
foundation Goose Pond, 197; muskrats
fowling, views of, 211-12 in, 271
goose, Canada, 320; in fog,
fox, modes of escape of, 277 42. See also geese
foxes, barking at night, gossip, 167-68
273; hunting of, 277-79 grain, raising at home,
freedom, available, 8 63-64
Freeman, Brister, 257-58, Grand Banks, scent reminds
263 one of, 120
Freeman, Fenda, 258 grapes, wild, 238
frost, leaving ground, 309 grass, of spring, 310-11
Fuel, as necessary to life, Great Snow, 119, 128,
12; food as, 13. See also 265; dating from, 254
wood gathering Green Mountains, 121-22
 INDEX 341

ground-nut, 239 horse, dead, smell of, 318

Gulistan of Sheik Sadi, [Hosmer, Edmund], 267
quoted, 79 hospitality, 152, 207; cold,
Gyrinus, 187 330-31
host, manner of, 244
halo around shadow, 202 Hotel des Invalides for
hares, 280-81 ants, 231
Harivansa, quoted, 85 hound, lost, 17
Harper & Brothers, 109 hounds, hunting, 276-80.
Harvard College, see See also dog
Cambridge College house, Breed's, 259; dream
harvest, true, 216-17; of, 243-44; John Field's,
unfailing, 166 204; site for a, 81-82;
hasty-pudding, 245 Thoreau's preference in a,
hawk, graceful and etherial, 71. See also Shelter,
316-17 shelter
hawks, 159 house at Walden, always
heat, animal, 12-13 unlocked, 172; appearance
heating Walden house, 253 at first, 84-85; boards for,
Hebe, Thoreau worshipper 43-44; building, 40-45;
of, 139 building chimney, 240-41;
Hebrews, not only nation cellar of, 44, 243; cooking-
with scripture, 106 stove in, 254; cost of,
hen-hawks, 159 48-49; features of, 48;
Hercules, labors of, 4 feeding guests at, 142,
herdsman of wild stock, 245; furniture in, 65;
Thoreau as, 18 heating of, 253; location
Hermit, 223-25 of, 86; plants near, 113;
Heroism, 220 plastering, 242, 245-46;
hides, Spanish, 120 raising, 45; shingling, 48;
HIGHER LAWS, 210-22 single room of, 242-43;
Hindoo book, quoted, 96 site of, 44; solitude of,
Hippocrates, 10 130; surroundings of, 85;
Hirundo bicolor, 185 timbers of, 42; visitors to,
hoeing, 155, 161; 129, 140; washing, 113;
entertainments of, 159-60; wildlife around, 128,
in the morning, 156; 280-81
music of, 159 houses, early, in America,
hog, jaw of, 219 39; economy of, 38;
Holiness, 220 improved, 34; unwieldy
Hollowell Place, 82; nature of, 34
attractions of, 83 HOUSE-WARMING, 238-55
Homer, 100, 103, 144-45, housework at Walden house,
172 112-13
Homer's requiem, 89 Howard, John, 74
Hooper, Mrs. Ellen S., Huber, Francois, 231
quoted, 254-55 huckleberries, 173; picking,
hooting owl, 125, 272 69-70, 171, 206
342 INDEX
huckleberry hills, stripped, Independence Day, 84
116 India, philosophy of, 61;
Hudson's Bay, intruder way to, 322
from, 272 Indian, artifacts of, 156,
humility, reveals heavenly 158-59; contrast to Irish,
lights, 328-29 35; ground-nut totem of,
hunter, awaiting ducks at 239; selling baskets, 19;
Fair Haven, 303-04 shelters of, 28-30
hunters, 277-80; at Walden, Indian summer, 247
233-34; parsons as, 213; Indians, entertainment of
searching rare game but Pilgrims, 143; in legend
overlooking themselves, about Walden, 182; in
320 Massachusetts Colony,
hunting, 211; as education, 29-30; Mucclasse, 68;
212-13; outgrowing, 212-13 Puri, ii2; superior to
husbandry, see farming suffering, 75; taught
hut, see house settlers to plant, 164
Hyades, 88 Indra, 135, 298
Hyde, Tom, statement when Ingraham, Cato, 257, 263
hanged, 327-28 Ingraham, Duncan, 257
Hygeia, Thoreau no inhabitants, former, 256-64
worshipper of, 138 innocence, return to in
spring, 314-15
I, use of in Walden, 3 insects, food of, 215
Icarian Sea, 197 inspector, self-appointed, 18
ice, 246-48; booming of, instinct, 98
301; bubbles in, 246-48, instructors, old people as, 9
301; colors of, 296-97; intellect, 98
cracking of, 301; drifting invention, 8
of, 304; great heap of, lolas, 4
296; looking through, 178, Ireland, 35
283; melting, 300; on Iris versicolor, 199
Walden, 292-98; thickness Irish, contrast to savage,
of, 299-300; undulation 35; laborers, 75; railroad
of, 292-93; Walden vs. workers, 249
Cambridge, 325; whooping Irishman, 44; culture of,
of, 272-73 205; Hugh Quoil, 261-62;
ice-cutters, 75, 192-93, James Collins, 43;
292; warming in Thoreau's John Field, 204-09
house, 295 Irishmen, 50; cutting ice,
ice-cutting, 293-98; as 295; on worth of railroad,
farming, 294-95 54; under the rails, 92
Iliad, 45, 89, 99, 102;
quoted, 144 jail, Thoreau put in, 171
imagination, and diet, jays, 275
214-16; goes farther than Jesuits, 75
Nature, 288 Jesus Christ, 108
income, see earnings Johnson, Edward, 38
 INDEX 343
Jonathan, 37, 333 90-91; like German
journal, reporter to a, 18 Confederacy, 92; like
Jove, 165. See also Jupiter water in a river, 332;
Juno, Hebe daughter of, 139 morality of, 218;
Jupiter, 74, 139. See also necessaries of, 11-14; own
Jove mode of, 71; purpose of,
90-91; testing, 10; to be
Kabir, verses of, 325 lived, 328; values in, 11;
Khoung-tseu, messenger variety in, 10; village,
sent to, 95 needs tonic of wildness,
Kieou-pe-yu, 95 317
kingfishers, 185 lightning, effects of, 132-33
Kirby, William, quoted, lilacs, remaining after
215, 231 house, 263-64
Kohinoor, diamond of, 199 lime, making, 246;
Kouroo, artist of, 326-27 Thomaston, on railroad,
120
labor, division of, 46, Lincoln (Mass.), 157, 232;
50; value of, 157 chestnut woods of, 238;
laborer, independence of, 70 hills of, 271; lecturing in,
Laing, Samuel, quoted, 27 271; location of Flint's
lake, beauty of, 186 Pond, 194; relation to
language of things and Walden, 86; travel to in
events, in winter, 256
La Perouse, Jean Francois, literature, classical, 100-04,
20 106
lawgiver, Hindoo, 221 lives, mean and sneaking,
laws, more liberal, 323; of 6; of quiet desperation, 8
the universe, 218-19 lobe, typicality of form of,
leaf, as prototype 306
structure, 307 Loch Fyne, 287-88
leaven, 62-63 loneliness, 133, 135-37;
Le Grosse, John, 261 Thoreau's freedom from,
leisure, neighbors' lack of, 6
Lepus Americanus, 280-81 137
loon, 24, 233-36; chasing,
letters, 94 234-36; deep diving of,
Leusciscus pulchellus, 184
Lexington, dog owner from, 235; in spring, 319;
277 sounds of, 235-36
Liebig, Justus, cited, 13 losing one's way, 170
life, animal, 13; as lost in woods, man, 136
experiment, 9; at Walden, lumber on railroad, 119-20
motive for, 90-91; beautiful luxuries, 9, 14
and winged, 333; broad
margin to, in; civilized, Magnus, Olaus, 232
31-32; dangers in, 153; Maine, trip to, 172
desirable kind of, 16; Mameluke bey, Thoreau
facing essential facts of, ready to escape like, 329
344 INDEX

man, animal, 146; natural, Minerva, 33, 239

145; spiritual, 147 Mirabeau, The Count de,
mapping, Walden Pond, 289- quoted, 322
90; White Pond, 290 molasses making, 64
margin, broad, to life, 111 moles in cellar, 253
marshes, life in, 317 Momus, 33
marsh-hawk, 310 money, Therien on, 149
martins, purple, in spring, Moore of Moore Hall, 192
313 morality of life, 218
mass, discontent of, 8, 16 morning, 156; air of, 138;
Massachusetts, defenders exercises, 113; qualities
of, 160; now much of, 88-90; return to
settled, 115 goodness in, 315; summer,
Massachusetts Colony, in
Indians in, 29-30 morning character, 85
Massachusetts Historical morning star, sun as, 333
Society, 198 morning work, 36, 282-83
Massassoit, 143 Mucclasse Indians, 68
Mast, Mir Camar Uddin, music, jEolian, 131;
quoted, 99 martial, 160-61; of Nature,
mat, refused, for Walden 123, 131
house, 67 muskrats, 271; bravery of, 8
Mayflower, 62 Mus leucopus, 225-26
meal, Indian, 62 Myrmidons, ants as, 229
Melven, John, hunter, 279
Memnon, 89; music of, 36 natural man, 145
Mencius, quoted, 219 Nature, 100, 114, 165, 186,
men-harriers, 154 238; acquaintance with
merchants, failures of, 32-33 from fishing and hunting,
Merlin (hawk), 316-17 210; adaptation to man,
Mesopotamia, bricks of, 241 u; anticipating, 17; as
messenger sent to Khuong- example for life, 97; as
tseu, 95 withdrawing room, 141;
Mexican War, referred to, be as simple as, 78;
161 beauty of, 199-200;
Mexico, geese flying to, 248 beneficence of, 138;
mice, 225-26; eating borrowing trope from, 245;
Thoreau's nut store, 280 cannot spare Alcott, 269;
Michael Angelo, 177 close observer of
Michaux, F. Andrew, quoted, surprised, 303; continually
251 repairs, 188; creatures
Middlesex Cattle Show, 33 express the meaning of,
Middlesex House, 140 126; crop of, 158;
Milky Way, 133 curativeness of, 138; dry
Mill Brook, 137 plants worn by, 309-10;
"Mill-dam," 96 equilibrium of, 313;
Mill-dam sportsmen, 233 furnishes shelter materials,
Milwaukie, fashions in, 120 29; ground-nut a promise
 INDEX 345
from, 239; hard to education in, no; farmers
overcome, 221; imagination of, 162; inhabitants of,
goes farther than, 288; 96; necessaries in, 14;
innocence of, 88, 318; place of rum in, 258;
jerk on line links you to story of bug gone rounds
again, 175; kindredship in, of, 333 • See also Yankee
159; laws of, 290; music New-England Cultivator,
of, 123, 131; not known 294. See also "Cultivator"
by farmer, 166; operations New-England Farmer, 294
of illustrated, 308; power New England Night's
of, 134; puts no question, Entertainment, 270
answers none, 282; New Englander, should try
rabbit asserts vigor of, new adventures, 164
281; refreshing in New Hollander, 13
inexhaustibility, 318; New Netherland, Province
society in, 132; supports of, 39
many orders of New York, fruit sold to,
understanding, 324; 238; price of wood in,
sympathy from, 132; 251
sympathy with, 129; news, 93-95, 167-69; desire
Thoreau part of, 129; f° r > 93; of little interest,
unfenced, reaching to 329; to the philosopher, 94
sills, 128; variety in, 10; newspaper, 167
vastness and strangeness, newspapers, 94
iyr; we are not wholly nick of time, improve the,
involved in, 135; winter 17
fisherman's life unites him night, fishing at, 174-75;
with, 283; would losing way at, 170-71;
accompany men, 116 sounds at, r26; walking
nature, sojourner in, 37 home at, 169-70
Nature's own bird, partridge night-hawk, 159
as, 276 Nile, 58
Nebuchadnezzar, name not
on bricks, 241 Nilometer, 98
necessaries, 9; in living at Nine Acre Corner, 179;
Walden, 21; in New fishing at, 316
England, 14; of life, 11-14 Nineteenth Century,
necessary of life defined, 12 standing apart from,
necessity, animal heat the 329-30
basic, 13 Nutting, Sam, 261; hunting
Negro Slavery, 7 bears, 279
neighbors, 32; brute, 223-37;
labors of Thoreau's, 4-7 Odyssey, 89
Neptune, 51 old deeds, 8
Neva marshes, 21 "Olive-Branches," 109
New England, 4; all the Olympus, outside of earth
world not in, 320; dress everywhere, 85
in, 23; early houses of, 39; orator, limitations of, 102
346 INDEX

ornaments, architectural, Philosophical Societies,

46-47 records of, 331
ornithology, 212 phoebe, 226, 319
Orpheus, 169 pickerel, 183-84, 283-85
otter, 227 pigeons, 159, 201; in
owl, barred, 266; hooting, spring, 313
125, 272 Pilpay & Co., 225
owls, screech, 124-25; pine wood for fire, 252
suited to night, 125-26 pitch-pine, 132, 198, 319
plants, wild, watered by
Paris, as fashion center, 25; Thoreau, 18; withered,
price of wood in, 251 remaining into spring,
parlors, talk in, 244 309-10
Parr, Thomas, 138 plastering, 242, 245-46
parties, political, 17 Plato, 107
partridge, 226-27; as true Plato's definition of man,
native, 281; eye of, 227; 149
Nature's own bird, 276 Pleasant Meadow, 203
partridges, winter feeding Pleiades, 88
of, 276 ploughing, 9, 55
path around Walden, 180 Plutus, 165
Patroclus, 144; ant as, 229 Plymouth Colony, 143
pauper, visit from, 151 Poet, 223-25
peetweets, 185 poet, becoming a, 54; need
penknife, Rodgers', 51 for nature of, 28; taken
to board at Walden, 241;
Penobscot Indian shelters,
use of farm, 82
28-29
poetry, Chalmers' collection
perch, 174, 177, 184; small, of, 259; reign of, 239.
in Walden, 189-90 See also verse
Peterboro' Hills, 122 poet's cat, 233
Pfeiffer, Madam, 22 Polk, James K., 232
Phaeton, death of, 74 Pomotis obesus, 184
Philadelphia, price of wood POND IN WINTER, THE,
in, 251 282-98
philanthropists, England's Pond, see Fair Haven,
best, 76 Flint's, Goose, Walden,
philanthropy, 72-79; and White Ponds
overrated, 76; sources of, PONDS, THE, 173-200
77-78; true, 78-79 poor, the, 72, 75-76;
philosopher, Hindoo, 96; contrast with rich, 34;
superiority of the, 15; to independent lives of, 328
be a, 14-15; wants of Portulaca oleracea, 61
the, 15 potter, near Walden,
philosopher's clothing, 24 191, 261
philosophers, ancient, 14; pouts, 184
nation of, 56; oldest Poverty, The Pretensions
raised curtains still up, 99 of, 80
 INDEX 347
poverty, 6-7, 209; rain storms, inspector of,
independence of, 328-29; 18
of wealthy, 16; voluntary, Raleigh, Sir Walter, quoted,
14 5-6
preacher, Thoreau's advice Ranz des Vaches, 158
to, 95 READING, 99-110
present moment, God in, reading, choice of, 106-09;
97 mode of, 101; need for
Princess Adelaide, 52 greatness in, 104; trivial,
professions tried by 104-07
Thoreau, 69 reality, 98; not appearance,
Puri Indians, 112 95
purity, 220-21; of art, Realometer, 98
escapes mortality, 327; Redding & Co., 109, 167
Walden a symbol of, 287 redemption, 222
purslane, 61 reformer, questions Therien,
Pyramids, 58 148; what saddens the, 78
pyramids, builders of, 34 reformers, 154
Pyrrha, 5 reforms, sounding Therien
Pythagorean, concerning on, 148
beans, 162 revery, 111-12
Rhus glabra, 114, 257
Quoil, Hugh, 261-62 Ricardo, David, 52
rich, contrast with poor, 34
rabbits, see hares riches, inward, 14
raccoon,227 risks, a man sits as many as
raft on Walden, 249-50 he runs, 153
railroad, 41; as Atropos, river, see Concord,
118; compared to comet, Connecticut, Sudbury,
116; deep cut of, 304; and Wachito Rivers
freight on, 119-22; road, Walden, 267;
regularity of, 116-18; Wayland, 278
snowplow on, 118-19; robin, first heard in spring,
sounds of, 114-15; 312; nesting, 226
Thoreau's objections to, room, Nature Thoreau's
53-54, 92, 192; walking best, 141
on, 202; worth of, 54. rules, not for valiant
See also Fitchburg natures, 16
Railroad Rum, New-England, 258
railroad cars, furnishings
of, 37 Sacontala, 319
railroad men, build raft, Sadi, Sheik, 79
249; effect of Walden on, Saffron Walden, 183
193-94; plowing snow, St. Helena, 262
119 St. Petersburg, 21
rain, at Baker Farm, 203; Saint Vitus' dance, our
spring, 314 hurry like, 93
rainbow, 202, 206-07, 217 salamander, 159
348 INDEX

Salem harbor, 20 of railroad workers, 35;

salt, the grossest grocery, Penobscot Indian, 28-29
64 shiners, 177, 184
sand, flowing of, 305; Shiraz, Sheik Sadi of, 79
thawing, type of many shore of Walden, 181-83,
forms, 307-08; vegetative 185-86
appearance of when simplicity, 70, 91; need for,
thawing, 305 38; Spartan, 92
sand bank, thawing, "Skip of the Tip-Toe-Hop,
304-09 The," 105
sand-cherry, 18, 113 slave, Brister Freeman once
Sardanapalus, 37 a, 257; Cato Ingraham
Saturn, King, 166 a, 257
savage, 31, 35, 4O, 245 slave-breeder, 76
Say, Jean Baptiste, 52 Slavery, Negro, 7
scarecrow, 22 slavery, 35; self-imposed, 7
scholar, separate from slaves, runaway, 152
kitchen, 245 sleepers, railroad, 92-93
Sciurus Hudsonius, 273 Smith, Adam, 52
screech owls, 124-25 smoke, poem about, 252
Scriptures, of all nations, snake, striped, 41
104; of the world, 106-07 snakes in spring, 41-42
seeds of virtue, 164-65 snow, 117, 282; at Walden,
Seeley, 44 249; discourages visitors,
self, discovering the, 321 264-65; walking in, 265.
self-doubt, momentary, of See also Great Snow
Thoreau, 207 snow storm, 119; losing way
sensuality, 220-21 in, 170-71
settler, old, of Walden, snow storms, inspector of,
137, 182 18; Thoreau weathers, 256
Shakspeare, William, wise society, Thoreau's enjoyment
as, 148 of, 140; too cheap, 136
shams, accounted true, Solidago stricta, 257
95-96 SOLITUDE, 129-39
Shelter, as necessary to life, solitude, in company, 135;
12; in summer, 14; not oppressive, 131; of
philosophy of, 27-35; Walden house, 130
purpose of, 13 song-sparrow, 311
shelter, changes in, 28; sounding Walden Pond,
cost of, 30-31; 285-90
improvements in, 31; SOUNDS, 111-28
of Laplander, 27; sounds, confused, of
ownership of, 30; contemporaries, 329; from
primitive, 27-28; student, Concord, 160-61; night,
49-5°; tool box as, 29. 126; wildest at Walden
See also house, houses (loon's), 236; winter,
shelters, of Massachusetts 271-73
Colony Indians, 29-30; Spain, news of, 94-95
 INDEX 349
sparrow, first of spring, 310; sun, 10, 67; attaining
lighting on shoulder, 276; higher angle, 304; but a
song, 311 morning star, 333; fire in
Spartan simplicity, 92 summer, 13-14; lighting
Spartan-like, 91 Thoreau while hoeing,
Spence, William, quoted, 156; looks without
215, 231 discrimination, 166;
Spenser, Edmund, quoted, melting influence of, 300;
142 spring, giving innocence,
spiritual man, 147 314; warming in fall, 240
SPRING, 299-319 superfluities, philosopher's
spring, animals in, 302; rejection of, 15
good will in, 314-15; surveying, 58, 81; private, 18
renewal of innocence in, Sutton (Mass.), 265
3I4-I5 swallows, white-bellied, 185
squatter's right, 49 swamps, visiting, 201
squatting, 64 swimming in Walden, 167
Squaw Walden, revenge on Sylvanius, ^Eneas, cited,
ice-cutters, 295 231
squirrel, red, 228, 273-75; "Symmes" Hole," 322
striped, 302 sympathy, from Nature,
squirrels, eating Thoreau's 132; with Nature, 129
nut store, 280; familiarity
of, 276; red, 310 tattooing, 26
staff, of artist of Kouroo, Tching-thang, 88
326-27 teaching school, Thoreau's
stars, 10, 88 try at, 69
State Street, 167 telegraph, from Maine to
statue of divinity, revealed, Texas, 52
99 Tell, William, sons of, 118
stolen book, 172 temples, as memorials, 57-58
storms, music to the tent, Thoreau's, 85
innocent, 131; pleasure tents, Indian, 29
in, 132 Terminus, fence through
stove, at Walden house, 254 serving, 249
Stratton family, 258 Tetrao umbellus, 226-27
Stratton Farm, 257 Thanksgivings, 165
Stratton, Hezekiah, 279 thawing sand bank, 304-09
Strix nebulosa, 266 Thebes, 57
students, housing of, 49-50; [Therien, Alex], 106, 144-
need to work, 51; 50, 267; amusements of,
solitude of, 136 146; appearance of, 145;
success, why haste toward, books of, 148; education
326 of, 147; endurance of,
Sudbury, 198, 303 146-47; expediency of,
Sudbury meadows, 87 150; food of, 145;
Sudbury River, 83 humility of, 147; humor
sumach, smooth, 114, 257 of, 146; naturalness of,
350 INDEX

147; on money, 149; on Varro, Marcus, quoted, 166

reforms, 148; on talk, Ved, cited, 219; quoted, 217
149; on thinking, 149; Vedas, 298; exoteric doctrine
on writing, 147-48; of, 325; quoted, 89
originality of, 150; vegetarianism, 9, 65, 214-16
primitiveness of, 150; Vermont, 121
satisfaction of, 148-49; verse, by Thoreau, 42, 122,
skill of, 146 193, 252; paraphrased,
"They" in fashion, 25 154; quoted, 5-6, 33, 64,
thrasher, brown, 158 80, 82, 88, 115, 132,
Thseng-tseu, 218 144, 152, 165, 172, 203,
Tierra del Fuego, inhabitants 2O4, 2o8, 212, 22O. 254,
of, 12-13 268, 288, 314, 3I5-I6,
timber, 121 320, 322
Time, illusory nature of, Verses, Complemental, 80
326-27 VILLAGE, THE, 167-72
time, spent in revery added village, vitals of, 168
to life, 111-12; the stream village culture, views on,
Thoreau fishes in, 98 no
tit-men, 107 village life, need of wildness,
"Tittle-Tol-Tan," 105 317
tobacco, odor of, 130; Virgil, 103; cited, 160
use of, 78 Vishnu, 298
Totanus macularius, 185 Vishnu Purana, 270
totem, ground-nut as, 239 visiting trees and swamps,
trade, curse of, 7°; with 201-02
Celestial Empire, 20 VISITORS, 140-54
translations, of classics, roo visitors, 129, 140; at night,
trap, man in, 33, 66-67 170; awaiting, 270;
travel on foot, 53 cheering, 154; from
trees, 202; turning color, almshouse, 151;
240; visiting, 201-02 peculiarities of, 152-54;
Tremont House, 140 winter, 267-70
Trinity Church, 47 Vitruvius, 58
Troy, gods of, 44 Vulcan, wood sacrificed to,
truth, dealing with, 99; 249
desirability of, 330-31
Turdus migratorius, 312 Wachito River, 93
turtle-dove, lost, 17 Walden, motive for writing,
turtle-doves, 228 3; readers of, 6; to whom
turtles, 184-85 addressed, 4; use of "I" in,
3
Ulysses, tied to mast like, 97 Walden Pond, 3; ancientness
Unio fluviatilis, 246 of, 179; as mirror, 188;
United States, called first- as neighbor, 86; as symbol
rate power, 332 of purity, 287; beauty of
universe, laws of, 218-19; ice of, 296-97; birds near,
wider than our views, 320 85-86, 158, 159, 185, 310-
 INDEX 351
313; boating on, 173-75, Thoreau's leaving, 319,
189-91, 234-36; bottom of, 323; walking on ice of,
285-90; building house at, 271; water mingled with
40-45; character of, Ganges, 298; woodchoppers
192-93; chasing loon on, near, 192; youth of, 193
234-36; clarity of, 177-78; Walden road, r33; in
colors of, 176-77; winter, 267
compared to ethics, 291-92; Walden Wood, owl in, 272
coves of, 289-90; dates of Walden Woods, Hugh Quoil
first freeze of, 249; depth in, 262; Zilpha in, 257
of, 285-90; effect on walking in snow, 265-66
railroad men, 193-94; wasps, 240
farming at, 54-55; fish in, water, drinking, 150, 207,
177-78, 183-84; fox on, 217, 264
277; geese on, 248-49; water-bug, 187
ice, objections to, 325; watering wild plants, 18
ice breakup on, 299-304; Waterloo, 262
ice on, 246-48; ice-cutting Wayland (Mass.), 157
on, 293-98; in autumn, Wayland road, 278
188; "leach hole" in, 292; wealth, 329
legend about, 182, rgi; weather, harmony with, 131
length of Thoreau's Webster, Daniel, 232, 330
residence at, 3; level of, weeds, 155, 161-62, 166
180-81; logs in, r g i ;
well, 175; Breed's, 260-61;
love of, 237; mapping of, John Field's, 206-07;
289-90; melting of, 311-12; sweltering inhabitants of
motive for living at, 90-91; world drink at Thoreau's,
name of, 183; no inlet or 298; value of the smallest,
outlet, 292; not lonely,
137; of their own natures, 87
130; original proprietor well dents, of former houses,
of, 137; path around, 180; 263
peacefulness of, 188; Well-Meadow, 278
perch in, 189-90; pickerel wells, 183
of, 284-85; place for Weston Squire, hunting his
business, 21; plants in, dogs, 279
178-79; privilege to drink wheat, 166
at, 264; purity of, 199; WHERE I LIVED, AND WHAT
purpose in going to, 19-20, I LIVED FOR, 81-98
90-91; raft on, 249-50; whippoorwills, sound of,
regularity of bottom of, 123-24
288-90; route of ice to White Mountains, 152
India, 298; scenery of, White Pond, 179, 181, 197-
175; shore of, 178, 181-83, 99; depth of, 290; iris in,
185-86; surface in winter, 199; map of, 290; purity
282-83; surface of, 186- of, 199; sand from, 197;
89; surroundings of, 191; yellow-pine in, 198-99
temperature of, 183, 299; Wilberforce, William, 8
352 INDEX

wildness, desired by Thoreau, woodchucks, 155, 163, 166

210; of loon's sound, wood-cock, 228
236; tonic of, 317-18 wood-pile, affection for, 251
wind, listening to, 17; woods, burning of, 250;
morning, 85 cutting of, 250; purpose in
Winslow, Edward, 143 going to, 90-91; reason for
WINTER, THE POND IN, leaving, 323; visiting,
282-98 201-02
WINTER ANIMALS, 271-81 worms, fishing, 224-25
winter, arrival of, 248; worthies, England's greatest,
delicacy in, 310 76
winter visitors, 267-70 writers, Thoreau's
"Wonder-Working requirement in, 3-4
Providence," 38 Wyman, Thomas, 261
wood, green, 253. See also
firewood Yankee, amusements of,
wood gathering, 249-53 211. See also New England
woodchopper, 106, 144-50, Yankee men, under the rails,
267. See also [Therien, 92
Alex] Yankee overseers, 7, 295
woodchoppers, 192 year, day compared to, 301
woodchuck, 44; coming out Young, Arthur, 55
in spring, 302; skin of at youth, abilities of, 8
Quoil's, 262; Thoreau's
eating of, 59; wildness Zilpha, 257
represented by, 210 Zoroaster, 108