,t>,.;^^;5*r:^;5I^V fN i' THOREAU s cP- •"oo^ ^Cc nO°<. ^^- * '. s o ^ ^' % •/». '^ "^^^ v^ c- "-^^^^^'.^ ., 0^ ^^""^ C>, >^% . * A , ^ ^ ' ^ « ■- "^ A*^ , . « 'C' -^ , X ^ , \V *>. * ^ •X^ /% ^- ^-. c xOq,. "-.."*.. '^ v^^\ \ " '°.l. * 8 1 ^ LONGMANS' ENGLISH CLASSICS EDITED BY ASHLEY H. THORNDIKE, Ph.D., L.H.D. PEOFESSOR OF ENGLISH IN COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY HENRY DAVID THOREAU WALDEN longmans' (Sngligb Claggtcs THOREAU'S WALDEN EDITED WITH NOTES AND AN INTRODUCTION BY RAYMOND MACDONALD ALDEN, Ph.D. ASSOCIATE PKOFESSOR OF ENGLISH, LELAND STANFORD JUNIOB UNIVERSITY NEW YORK LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. LONDON, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA 1910 \ Copyright, 1910 BY LOxNTGMANS, GREEN AND CO. THE SCIENTIFIC PRESS ROBERT DRDMMOND AND COMPANY NEW YORK (^CI.A^65887 o CONTENTS. PAGE Introduction ix BiBUOGRAPHY xviii Chronological Table. xix WALDEN: CHAPTER I. Economy 3 II. Where I Lived, and What I Lived For 68 III. Reading 83 IV. Sounds 93 V. Solitude 108 \i. Visitors 116 VII. The Beanfield 129 VIII. The Village 139 IX. The Ponds 144 X. Baker Farm 166 XI. Higher Laws 173 XII. Brute Neighbors 183 XIII. House-warming 195 XIV. Former Inhabitants; and Winter Visitors 20S XV. Winter Animals 220 XVI. The Pond in Winter 229 XVII. Spring 242 XVIII. Conclusion 258 Notes 271 V INTRODUCTION. Henry Thoreau was a man of whom there is little that is significant to know which cannot be found in his chief book, Walden. From the worldly- standpoint his life was wholh^ uneventful, even the publication of his writings causing little comment at the time. He was born, lived, and died in Concord, Massachusetts, the friend and associate of the great men of his time who lived there, notably Emerson. He went to Harvard College, being graduated in 1837; taught school for a time; assisted his father in the manufacture of plumbago and pencils (a few of the pencils still survive in Massachu- setts, stamped ''Thoreau and Son"); worked as surveyor when he was in need of money; gave occasional lectures in the popular "lyceums" of the day; and read and wrote abundantly, but not at all in the manner or for the pur- poses of a professional literary man. For the most part he sought only to live, in a spiritually rich sense, and it has been truly said that His " was a life in which the pick- ing up of an arrow-head or the discovery of a richer blueberry patch were events, and the election of a new President but an incident." When statistics concerning his college class were being gathered, ten years after graduation, Thoreau replied to the questions asked : "Am not married. I don't know whether mine is a profession, or a trade, or what not. It is not yet learned ... I am a Schoolmaster, a private Tutor, a Surveyor, a Gardener, a Farmer, a Painter (I mean a House Painter), a Carpenter, a Mason, a Day-laborer, a Pencilmaker, a Glass-paper-maker, a Writer, and sometimes a Poet- aster. ... I have found out a way to live without what is commonly called employment or industry, attractive or otherwise. Indeed, my steadiest employment, if such it can be called, is to keep myself at the top of my condition, and ready for whatever may turn up in heaven or on earth.'' ¥iii INTRODUCTION. Thoreau's literary work is composed of the two books published in his lifetime, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1S49), and Walden, or Life in the Woods (1S54), and of various papers which he contributed to periocUcals; these last, together with portions of his journals and correspondence, were made into books after his death. The whole fills some dozen volumes, but the method and spirit of all that Thoreau said were so stead- fast and simple that to know one of the volumes, one might say, is to know the rest. They contain many thoughts drawn from Thoreau's reading, which covered as wide a range as that of any American of his time; they also echo some of the teachings of the " Concord philos- ophers," Emerson and Bronson Alcott, of whom Thoreau was a friend and — to some extent — a disciple; but chiefly they contain his own thoughts " on man, on nature, and on human life," and from that standpoint are among the most original writings of their age. There are two chiefly significant aspects of these writ- ings, and the first is their connection with nature. •» Tho- reau's love of the out-door world and all its creatures perhaps impressed his friends more than any other char- acteristic. Bronson Alcott wrote of him: " I had never thought of knowing a man so thoroughly of the country, and so purely a son of nature. I think he had the profoundest passion for it of any one of his time. . . . He seemed one with things, of nature's essence and core, knit of strong timbers, — like a wood and its mhabitants. There was in him sod and shade, wilds and waters manifold, — the mold and mist of earth and sky. . . . He, of all men, seemed to be the native New Englander, as much so as the oak, the granite ledge; our best sample of an indigenous American, untouched by the old country, unless he came down rather from Thor the Northman, whose name he bore." So it was his occupation, not his recreation, to roam the open country, never using the railroad or other artificial means of locomotion if he could help it, and to find in almost every foot of ground something worth seeing and remembering. "He knew the country like a fox or a bird," wrote INTRODUCTION. is Emerson, ''and passed through it as freely by paths of his own. He knew every track in the snow or on the ground, and what creature had taken this path before him. . . . On the day I speak of he looked for the Men- yanthes, detected it across the wide pool, and, on examina- tion of the florets, decided that it had been in flower five days. He drew out of his breast-pocket his diary, and read the names of all the plants that should bloom on this day, whereof he kept account as a banker when his notes fall due. The Cypripedium not due till to-morrow. He thought that, if waked up from a trance in this swanip, he could tell by the plants what time of the year it was within two days. . . . His power of observation seemed to indicate additional senses. He saw as with microscope, heard as with ear-trumpet, and his memory was a photo- graphic register of all he saw and heard. And yet none knew better than he that it is not the fact that imports, but the impression or effect of the fact on your mind. Every fact lay in glory in his mind, a tj'pe of the order and beauty of the whole." From this standpoint, then, Walden is one of the few great books which are especially valued for their power of communicating the richness of the flavor of the world of nature. But by "nature," when Thoreau is concerned, we must understand not merely the landscape and its creatures, but natural living, as contrasted with the complex and artificial life of society. Many of us like to free ourselves from the bustle and trappings of civilization for a few days' outing, but Thoreau honestly and consistently wished to do so all the time. He not only enjoyed "the simple life," but he believed in it, and proclaimed: "A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone." So to him " life in the woods " was typical of freedom from the drudgery, the blind money- getting and moncj'-spending, of the great part of mankind. And after thinking a good while about the things that one "can afford to let alone," he put his theories to the test by building a little hut on the shore of Walden Pond, and living in it for some two years. (See the text itself for an account' of what the cxrjerinient cost him, and the X INTRODUCTION. proportionate time which he saved for more important things than earning money.) "I went to the woods because I wished to hve deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. ... I wanted to live deep, and suck out all the marrow of life." The book W olden is not only the record of his experiment, but the evidence of what he found ^' the marrow of life " to be. This brings us to the second of the significant aspects of Thoreau's work. Besides being a great naturalist, he was a great idealist. Far more than most men, he valued and loved both the world of things and the world of ideas. He found in himself, he said, "an instinct toward a higher, or as it is named, spiritual life, and another toward a primitive, rank and savage one: and I reverence them both." So his thoughts roamed from the fishes and the pebbles in Walden Pond to the deepest recesses of the mind, and in both directions he found happiness. "While I enjoy the friendship of the seasons, I trust that nothing can make life a burden to me." Ancl he bade others test their happiness by their relation to nature: "If the day and the night arc 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." But in such sayings he was of course not referring chiefly to the physical side of life; that was only a means to the life of the spirit. As truly as any man who ever lived, Thoreau believed that "the life is more than meat, and the body than raiment." And he persistently looked at human activ- ities from this ideal standpoint. If his doctrines appeared only in what he wrote for pul^lication, it might be thought that he was posing — as some did think, in his lifetime. But his letters show the same ideas everywhere. In 1857, after a general financial panic, he wrote to a friend : "The merchants and company have long laughed at transcendentalism [on the meaning of this word, see page xiv], higher laws, etc., crying ' None of your moonshine,' as if they were anchored to something not only definite. INTRODUCTION. xi but sure and permanent. If there was any institution which was presumed to rest on a solid and secure basis, and more than any other represented this boasted com- mon sense, prudence, and practical talent, it was the bank; and now those very banks are found to be mere reeds shaken by the wind. Scarcely one in the land has kept its promise. . . . But there is the moonshine still, serene, beneficent, unchanged." This passage may well be compared with the defence of ideals in the closing pages of W olden: ^' 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. ... 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." No better word than this has been spoken to youth by any American writer. But it must be said that, despite the nobility and purity of Thoreau's thinking, it can hardly be taken as a safe guide. In his concern for individual freedom, he never sufficiently regarded man's place and duties in organized society, and a portion of his teaching reads like the expression of a kind of exalted selfishness; — com- pare, for example, his rather scornful references to "Doing-good" and ''philanthropy," in the closing pages of the first chapter. From such sayings one must sub- tract something, because of his love of paradox and exaggeration; the same sjDirit that led him to say, "I could easily do without the post-office. I think that there are very few important communications made through it," or, when he wished to urge the younger generation to act on its own best impulses, to utter this absurdity: " I have lived some thirty years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable advice from my seniors." Such utterances he himself explained, in the Conclusion to Walden, saying: "I fear chiefly lest my expression may not be extra-vagant enough. ... I desire to speak somewhere without bounds, for I am convinced that I cannot exaggerate enough even to lay the founda- tion of a true expression." But no allowance for exaggera- tion will enable one to feel that Thoreau could ever have xii INTRODUCTION. worked much with other men for the good of the community. As an individual, however, he was deeply interested in certain public questions. On account of his disap- proval of the Mexican War he refused to pay his poll- tax, and in 1845 was arrested and imprisoned for this refusal. (See page 142, and the note on it.) Later he proposed similar action for those who wished to protest against slavery, saying, ''Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison." From the same standpoin the admired and befriended the revolutionary abolitionist, John Brown, when he came to Concord; and when, in 1859, Brown was about to be executed for his daring raid at Harper's Ferr}'-, it was Thoreau who gathered his fellow-citizens together at Concord, and read them a ringing address in honor of the man who had so conspicuously represented his own principle of ''civil disobedience." But with ordinary, orderly matters of social good he had little concern; and in the thrilling days of 18G1 we find him writing to a friend: " I do not so much regret the present condition of things in this country as I do that 1 ever heard of it. I know one or two who have this year, for the first time, read a President's Message; but they do not see that this implies a fall in themselves rather than a rise in the President. Blessed were the days before you read a President's Message. Blessed are they who never read a newspaper." Thoreau's criticism of life, then, is valuable chiefl}^ in a negative way. For those who feel that they are social beings, and must live in cooperation with othei-s, he has little positive advice. But he strikes splendid blows at the stupidity and wastefulness of many men's lives, and such scorn is ennobling. "I have seen more men than usual, lately," he writes (in a letter of Aug. 8, 1854), "and well as I was acquainted with one, I am surprised to find what vulgar fellows they are. They do a little business commonly each day, in order to pay their board, and then they congregate in sitting-rooms and feebly fabulate and paddle in the social slush; and when I think that they have sufficiently relaxed, and am prepared ta INTRODUCTION. xiii see them steal away to their shrines, they go unashamed to their beds, and take on a new layer of sloth." The salty vigor of this is more like Carlyle's than it is like any American writer, and often Thoreau's virile satire sug- gests the temper of Carlyle rather than that of Emerson, with whom he is more commonly associated. The strictly literary value of his work is very uneven. He wrote freely and unsystematically, as he thought and lived, not seeking to order his material carefully, or to build up the structure of his thought in the manner of one who really tries to prove something. Sometimes he will linger and amble when we would wish to go more speedily.* But aside from these things, Thoreau's style is singularly rich aijd rewarding. He studs his writing with gems from every quarter of literature, so that to understand all his allusions might be said to be a liberal education. His moral earnestness at times has a dignity quite the equal of Emerson's, and flashes out in the same sort of noble, compact utterances. ''The morning wind forever blows, the poem of creation is uninterrupted." "God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine." "There is more day to dawn; the sun is but a morning star." On the other hand, his humor is far more ready and abundant than his friend's. " I retained the landscape, and I have annually carried off what it yielded without a wheel- barrow." " We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate." Or, compare the account of Circulating Library novels in Chapter III, or the delicious contrast, in Chapter V, between Thoreau going comfortal)ly to bed in his hut and the prosperous farmer driving cattle to market through the darkness and the mud, in order to enjoy "the comforts of life." Sometimes he will revel in a bit of pure verbal melody, like the old seventeenth-century * Walden is certainly longer than it need be. Those who prefer to read less than the whole may be advised to include the first five chapters, and perhaps the eighth, eleventh, sixteenth, and eighteenth, for the rest — by no means omitting the last. xiv INTRODUCTION. writers whom he knew and loved; such is the beautiful close of the sixteenth chapter, where the Walden water is followed "past the site of the fabulous islands of Atlantis and the Hesperides," till it "makes the periplus of Hanno, and, floating by Ternate and Tidore and the mouth of the Persian gull, melts in the tropic gales of the Indian seas." And sometimes, again, there is a masterly bit of narrative or description, which may be taken out and made to stand by itself as a work of art in miniature. Such is the Battle of the Ants, in Chapter XII, for narra- tion; and, for description, the splendid picture of the old fisherman in the Week on the Concord and Merrimack, too good not to be quoted here: "I often discovered him unexpectedly amid the pads and the gray willows when he moved, fishing in some old country method — for youth and age then went a fishing together — full of incommunicable thoughts, perchance about his own Tyne and Northuml^erland. He was always to be seen in serene afternoons haunting the river, and almost rustling with the sedge; so many sunny hours in an old man's life, entrapping silly fish; almost grown to be the sun's familiar; what need had he of hat or raiment any, having served out his time, and seen through such thin disguises? I have seen how his coeval fates rewarded him with the yellow perch, and yet I thought his luck was not in proportion to his years; and I have seen when, with slow steps and weighed down with aged thoughts, he disappeared with his fish under his low-roofed house on the skirts of the village. I think nobody else saw him; nobody else remembers him now, for he soon after died, and migrated to new Tyne streams. His fishing was not a sport, nor solely a means of sub- sistence, but a sort of solemn sacrament and withdrawal from the world, just as the aged read their Bibles." Certain aspects of Thoreau's work cannot be under- stood without remembering his connection with the group of New England " Transcendcntalists " who exerted an important influence on American thought and literature in the 40's of the nineteenth century. Transcendentalism may be ]:)riefly defined as the belief that there are sources of knowledge which transcend — INTRODUCTION. xv that is, are of higher origin than — the five senses and the common reason; that the spirit of man may l a -0 b «5 u x o 3 "c "o >, « c 2 1 o c c 1 a a .2 Sj3 o cE-' c o o -3 O tn H ^ H c ■^.2 H (5 s :o ^ t-^ .1 -TO OC 71 n Ml co-^ -t -r a: X 2 i^ a, a"? S ,• "^ b "^ £ •• § S S rt ?< ^ H ^ _o a ^ ►s^l o J c z W 5S c a ci O 1 5 5 w 1=^ .s ^-i Vj' 5 .-3 ^ o CO S to e ^ cjK t^ o r~ >ii^ ^ ■^ S C-l CO CO Zco"-i -f C' -•r > rf C-i< *< T a. « X OC 00 00 OC' oCi OTj cc GT' Vj ^^ ^^ ^H ^- ^^ . e 8 g ^ o <: n. 1 1 o tS a a u K M c o £ c u CJ as i <; cj a c *^ W M >1 o Q 'H S la o o H o w S* Ph hJ r- _^ CO to t-^ X irf t- C-J CO CO CO -t< -f '^l 2 « 00 00 00 cc X OC »— ' — ' ^^ -^ ^H ^H -7: .= £ S 'J ii ^ S " 2 a o bO •S 2 H 1 ^ ^ ^■^ "o O eg o S o g 03 o — •73 g-l . • -ja coco 0) H K K 5 IS H < eg. "go 8 1 l| t^ CO a in.f-i-o °r-,'^ t CJ Tt<0-*CHTt>W eo •<)<•* 2 1 s ■ si >i CO OrH O Oi T. eo Tj'TfjS t — "a 00 00 00 00 00 GO OC CC |-» »— 1 .— ( r-t 1— t T— 1 .— 1 »— ' XX CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE. e: d i = .2 "-o d J •5 J" > c3 a "tl— -B 3 ^ c S ■S Da tj i o p to c3 1^ H -3 cj o m M u CO V 3 i -^^ ■< tS fa Q H-lw s o o u u ja e J3 H p Pl is H o t- drt :5 ^H S o oj: o CO CO oc CO ^H r^ -^ s " g ^ "2 ■2 « -2 c S c^ ■^ i =5 1 _a < ^ 6 t? K ^i ^ (d f^ ^ o u a X GO ■^ >> 3 i i 1 >. ^ o |S >. ^ k-. 13 C ^-3 «■ 2sii 8 o o . 1 a o W . . 5 . -^fe O ?M -~ CO lO O *! lO CO e ce 00 CO CCi CO CO .— »— ' -^ s; sS fa .CO o -5 s ft: K ►J s 1 c o o o o O o 5 M ^ ra C c3 -- 1 en 5 < o^! CO Ok- o o3 5^ o-)oO CC' CO CO 00 00 CO ^i »-H '^ "^ 14 .S c S m ^ a j= •a « f^ ^ O =»a 1 lis CD C3 3^ o <| 1 °s a o S c _c o O -; CO -; .. -3" S s^i^ o K ? o«S S >i ■ J^ o oc -■ S® H 3 .2-3 5^ tg 2 :s:| •-5 in lo;:^ CO i-O^O CO oo oo C<0 00 00 00 Sti tM , l-H l-( '-' WALDEN HENRY DAVID THOREAU WALDEN. ECONOMY. Whex 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 myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, 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 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 do not appear to me at all impertinent, but, considering 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 there- fore 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 /, 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 speaking. I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, 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 4 WALDEN. he has heard of other men's Kves; some such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a dis- tant land to me. Perhaps these pages are more particu- larl}' 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 concerning the Chinese and Sandwich Islanders, as you who read these pages, who are said to live in New England ; some- thing about your condition, especially j'our 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 everywhere, in shops, and offices, and fields, the inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand re- markable 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 down- Avard, over flames; or looking at the heavens over their shoulders ''until it becomes impossible for them to re- sume 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 standing 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 comparison with those which my neigh- bors have undertaken; 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 lolaus to burn with a hot iron the root of the hydra's 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 ECONOMY. 5 got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clear 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? AVhy 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 "l3efore them, and get on as well as they can. How many a poor im- mortal soul have I met 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, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and wood-lot! The portionless, who struggle with no such unnecessary inherited encum- brances, 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 treasures 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, experien'sque laborum, Et documenta damus qua simus origine nati. Or, as Raleigh rhymes it in his sonorous way, — "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, 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 6 WALDEX. 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 relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the market. He has no time to be anything but a machine. How can he remember well his ignorance — which his ' growth re- quires — who. has so often to use his knowledge? We should feed and clothe him gratuitously someljimes, and recruit him with our cordials, before we judge of him. The finest c|ualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate hand- ling. 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 actu- ally eaten, or for the coats and shoes which are fast w'earing 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 wdiat 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 ces alienum, another's brass, for some of their coins were made of brass; still liv- ing, and dying, and buried by this other's brass; always promising to pay, promising 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, flattering, voting, contracting yourselves into a nutshell of civilit}^, or dilating into an atmosphere of thin and vaporous generosity, that you may persuade your neighbor to let j^ou 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 something against a sick day, something to be tucked away in an old chest, or in a stocking behind the plastering, or, more safely, in a brick bank; no matter where, no matter how much or how little. I sometimes wonder that we can be so frivolous, I ECONOMY. 7 may almost say, as to attend to the gross but somewhat foreign form of servitude called Negro Slavery, there are so many keen and subtle masters that enslave both north and south. It is hard to have a southern overseer; it is worse to have a northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself. 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 com- pared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate. Self-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 desj^erate coun- try, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious 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 cate- chism, 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 syn rose clear. It is ne\"er too late to give up our prejudices. No way of think- 8 WALDEN. ing or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. What everybody 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, per- chance, to fetch fresh fuel to keep the fire a-going; new people put a little dry wood under 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 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 anything of absolute value by living. Practically, the old have no very im- portant 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 valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors. They have told me nothing, and probably cannot tell me anything, 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 Men- tors said nothing about. One farmer says to me, " You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with;" and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his S3^stem 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 circles, 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 ECONOMY. 9 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 Koman prsetors have decided how often you may go into your neighbor's land to gather the acorns which fall on it without trespass, and what share be- longs to that neighbor." Hippocrates has even left directions 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. What- ever 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 wonderful triangles! \Miat distant and different beings in the various man- sions of the universe are contemplating the same one at the same moment! Nature and human 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 startling 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 anything, 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 yearsj not without honor of a kind, — I hear an 10 WALDEX. irresistible voice which invites me away from all that. One generation abandons the enterprises of another like stranded vessels. I think that we may safel}^ 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 in- curable 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; l3ut there are as many ways as there can be drawn radii from one centre. All change is a miracle to contem- plate; 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 knowledge." When one man has reduced a fact of the imagination 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 neces- saries of life and what methods have been taken to ob- tain them; or even to look over the old day-books of the merchants, to see what it was that men most com- monly bought at the stores, what they stored, that is, what are the grossest groceries. For the improvements of ages have had but little influence on the essential laws of man's existence; as our skeletons, probably, are not to be distinguished from those of our ancestors. ECONOMY. 11 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 attempt 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 moun- tain's shadow. None of the brute creation requires more than Food and Shelter. The necessaries of life for man in this climate may, accurately 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 life with freedom and a prospect of success. Man has in- vented, not only houses, but clothes and cooked food; and possibly from the accidental discovery of the warmth of fire, and the consequent use of it, at first a luxury, arose the present necessity to sit by it. We observe cat? and clogs acquiring 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 Terra del Fuego that, while his own party, who were well clothed and sitting close to a fire, were far from too 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 impunity, while the European shivers in his clothes. Is it im- possible to combine the hardiness of these savages 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 12 WALDEN. out. Of course the vital heat is not to be confounded with fire; but so much for analogy. It appears, there- fore, 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 retain 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 Clothing, and Shelter, but with our beds, which are our night- clothes, rob])ing the nests and breasts of birds to pre- pare this shelter within a shelter, as the mole has its bed of grass and leaves at the end of its burrow! 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 summer, in some cUmates, 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 fruits are sufficiently cooked by its rays; while Food generally is more various, and more easily olDtained, and Clothing and Shelter are wholly or half unnecessary. At the present day, and in this country, as I find my own experience, a few imple- ments, a knife, an axe, a spade, a wheelbarrow, &c., and for the studious, lamplight, stationer}', 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 com- fortably warm, — and die in New England at last. The luxuriously 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 com- forts, of life are not only not indispensable, bvit positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind. With respect ECONOMY. 13 to luxuries and comforts, the wisest have ever lived a more simple and meagre life than the poor. The an- cient philosophers, Chinese, Hindoo, Persian, and Greek, were a class than which none has been poorer in outward riches, none so rich in inward. We know not much about them. It is remarkable that loe know- so much of them as we do. The same is true of the more modern reformers and benefactors of their race. None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call volun+ar}- poverty. Of a life of luxury the fruit is luxury, whether in agriculture, or commerce, or literature, or art. There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because.it wa; once admirable to live. To be a philos- opher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live, ac- cording to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically. The success 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 nature of the luxury which enervates and destroys nations? 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, sheltered, 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 superfluities; and that is, to adventure on life 14 WALDEN. 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 conficlence. 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 the}' may be biennials, are cultivated only till they 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 magnifi- cently and spend more lavishly than the richest, with- out ever impoverishing themselves, not knowing how they live, — if, indeed, there are any such, as has been dreamed; nor to those who find their encouragement and inspiration in precisely the present condition 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 emplo3'ed 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 inconsolably of any, because they are, as they say, doing their duty. I also have in my mind that seemingly wealthy but most terribly im- poverished class of all, who have accumulated dross, bvit 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 surprise those of my readers who are somewhat acciuainted 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 cherished. ECONOMY. 15 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 hne. 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 Admit- tance" on my gate. 1 long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle- dove, and am still on their trail. Many are the trav- ellers 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 behind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if the}'- had lost them themselves. To anticipate, not the sunrise and the dawn merely, but, if possible, Nature herself! How many mornings, summer and winter, before yet an}' neighbor was stir- ring about his business, have I been al)Out mine! No doubt, many of my townsmen have met me returning from this enterprise, farmers starting for Boston in the iTwilight, 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 importance only to be present at it. So many autumn, ay, and winter days, spent outside 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 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 some- thing, 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 16 WALDEN. veiy 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 leap- ing fences, and I have had an eye to the unfrequented 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 ancl 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 boast'ng, 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 moderate 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. 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!" exclaimed the Indian, as he went out the gate, "do you mean to starve us?" Having seen his industrious white neighl^ors so well off, — that the law- yer 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 baskets he would have done his part, and then it ECONOMY. 17 would bo tho white man's to buy them. He had not discovered 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 m}^ 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 anywhere else, ])ut 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 already got. My purpose in going to Walden Pond was not to live cheaply nor to live deai-ly there, but to transact some private business with the fewest obstacles; to be hindered from accomplish- ■ ing 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 accjuire strict business habits; they are indispensable to everj^ 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 native 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 lauy and sell and keep the accounts; to read every letter received, and write or read every letter sent; to superintend the discharge of imports night and day; to be upon many parts of the coast almost at the same time; — often the 18 WALDEN. lichcst freight will be discharged upon a Jersey shore; — to be your own telegraph, unweariedly 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 w^here, and anticipate the tendencies of trade and civilization, — taking advan- tage of the results of all exploring expeditions, using new passages and all improvements in navigation; — charts to be studied, the position of reefs and new lights and buoys to be ascertained, and ever, and ever, the loga- rithmic 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 un- told fate of La Perouse; — universal science to be kept pace with, studying the lives of all great discoverers and navigators, great adventurers and merchants, from Hanno and the Pha3nicians down to our day; in fine, account 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 demand a universal knowledge. I have thought that Walden Pond would be a good • place for business, not solely on account of the railroad and the ice trade; it offers advantages which it may not be good policy to divulge; it is a good post and a good foundation. No Neva marshes to be filled; though you must everywhere build on piles of your own driving, it is said that a flood-tide, with a westerly wind, and ice in the Neva, would sweep St. Petersburg 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 question, perhaps we are led oftener by the love of novelty, and a regard for the opinions of men, in procuring it, than ECONOMY. 19 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 add- ing to his wardrobe. Kings and queens who wear a suit but once, though made by some tailor or dressmaker 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 da our garments become more assimilated to ourselves, receiving the im- press of the wearer's character, 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 holsble to town with a broken leg than with a broken pantaloon. Often if an accident 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 considers, not what is truly respectable, but what is respected. We know but few men, a great many coats and breeches. Dress a scare- crow in your last shift, you standing shiftless by, who would not soonest salute the scarecrow? Passing a corn- field 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 20 WALDEN. such a case, tell surely of any compan}' of civilized men, wliich 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 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 acci- dental 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. Besides, clothes in- troduced 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 indeter- minate 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 re- quire 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 some- thing to do with, but something to do, or rather some- thing to he. Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted, so enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel like new men in the old, and that to retain it would ECONOMY. 21 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 caterpillar its wormy coat, by an internal industry and expansion; for clothes are but our outmost cuticle and mortal coil. Otherwise we shall be found sailing under 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 cellular 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 preparedly 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 clothing 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 earn- ing, 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. 22 WALDEN. 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 7ne, 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 net the Graces, nor the Parcse, but Fashion. She spins and weaves and cuts with full authorit}-. The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveller's cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same. I sometimes despair of getting anything quite simple and honest done in this v/orld by the help of men. They would have to be passed through a powerful press first, to squeeze their old no- tions 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 wdien, for not even fire kills these things, and you would have lost your labor. Nevertheless we will not forget that some Egyptian wheat was handed down to us Id}^ a inummy. On the whole, I think that it cannot be maintained 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 dis- tance, whether of space or time, laugh at each other's masquerade. Every generation laughs at the old fashions, ])ut follows religiously the new. We are amused at be- holding 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 costume of any people. Let Harlequin be taken with a fit of colic and his trappings will have t ECONOMY. 23 serve that mood too. When the soldier is hit Idv 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 sc[uinting through kaleidoscopes that they may discover the partic- ular figure which this generation re^iuires 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 fre- quently happens that after the lapse of a season the latter becomes the most fashionable. 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 object 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. There- fore, though they should fail immecliately, they had better aim at something high. As for a Shelter, I will not deny that this is now a neces- sary 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 has seen them asleep thus. Yet he adds, "They are not hardier than other people." But, probabl}^ man did not live long on the earth without discovering the con- venience which there is in a house, the domestic com- forts, which phrase may have originally signified the satisfactions of the house more than of the family; though these must be extremely partial and occasional 24 WALDEN. 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 unneces- sary. 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 limited 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, 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 before 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 hol- low 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, hav- ing an instinct for it. Who does not remember 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 primitive 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 daj-s and nights without an}' 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. ECONOMY. 25 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 workhouse, a labyrinth without a clew, a museum, an almshouse, a prison, or a splendid mausoleum instead. Consider first how slight a shelter is absolutely necessary. I have seen Penobscot Indians, in this 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 living honestly, with freedom left for my proper pur- suits, was a question which vexed 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 suggested 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 Nature furnished ready to their hands. Gookin, who was superintendent of the Indians subject to the Massachu- setts 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 indifferently tight and 26 WALDEN. 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 commonly carpeted and lined within with well-wrought embroidered mats, and were furnished with various utensils. The Indians had ad- vanced so far as to regulate 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 con structed in a clay 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 fainily owns a shelter aa good as the best, and sufficient for its coarser and sim- pler 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 prevails, 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 indispensable summer and win ter,' which would buy a village 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 because 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 tliis tax the poor civilized man secures an abode which is a palace compared with the savage's. An annual rent of from twenty-five to a hundred dollars, these are tha country rates, entitles him to the benefit of the improve-} ments of centuries, spacious apartments, clean painU and paper, Rumford fireplace, back plastering, Venetian blinds, copper pump, spring lock, a commodious cellar, and many other things. But how happens it that he who is said to enjoy these things is so commonly a poor ECONOMY. 27 civilized man, while the savage, who has them not, is rich as a savage? If it is asserted that civilization 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 re- quired to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run. An average house in this neighborhood costs per- haps eight hundred dollars, and to lay up this sum will take ten to fifteen years of the laborer's life, even if he is not encuml^ered with a family; — estii^ating the pecu- niar}' 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 be- fore 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 wig- wam 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 individual is concerned, mainly to the defraying of funeral 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 benefit, in making the life of a civilized people an institution, 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 occa- sion 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 sinneth it shall die." 28 WALDEN. When I consider my neighbors, the farmers of Concord, 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 in- herited 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 encumbrances some- times outweigh the value of the farm, so that the farm itself becomes one great encumbrance, and still a man is found to inherif it, being well acquainted with it, as he says. On applying to the assessors, I am surprised to learn 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 mer- chants, that a very large majority, even ninety-seven in a hundred, are sure to fail, is equally true of the farm- ers. With regard to the merchants, however, 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, besides, that probably 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 repudiation 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 machine 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 ECONOMY, 29 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 sim- ilar reason we are all poor in respect to a thousand savage comforts, though surrounded by luxuries. As Chapman sings : — " The false society of men — — for earthly greatness All 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 movable, by which means a bad neighborhood might be avoided;" and it may still be urged, for our houses are such un- wieldy property that we are often imprisoned 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 genera- tion, have been wishing to sell their houses in the out- skirts and move into the village, but have not been able to accomplish it, and only death wall set them free. Granted that the majority are able at last either to own or hire the modern house with all its improvements. 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 we 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 another. On the one side is the palace, on the other are the almshouse and "silent poor." The myriads who 30 WALDEN. built the pyramids to be the tombs of the Pharaohs were fed on garhc, and it may be were not decently buried themselves. The mason who finishes the cornice 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 civilization 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 degraded rich. To know this I should not need to look farther than to the •shanties which everywhere 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 shrinking 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 accom- plished. 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. Con- trast 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 con- tact with the civilized man. Yet I have no doubt that that people's rulers are as wise as the average of civilized Tulers. Their condition only proves what squalidness may consist with civilization. I hardly need refer. now to the laborers of our Southern States who produce the staple exports of this country, and are themselves a staple production of the South. But to confine myself to those who are said to be in moderate circumstances. 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, ECOXOMY. 31 or, gradually leaving off palmlcaf hat. or cap of wood- chuck skin, complain of hard times because he could not afford to buy him a crown! It is possible to invent a house still more convenient and luxurious than Wc 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 provid- ing a certain number of superfluous glowshoes, 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 fashional^le furniture. Or what if I were to allow — would it not be a singular allowance? — that our furniture 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 terrified 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 fashions which the herd so diligently follow. The traveller who stops at the best houses, so called, soon discovers this, for the republicans presume him to be a Sardanapalus, and if he resigned himself to their tender mercies he w^ould soon be completely emasculated. I think that in the railroad car we are inclined to spend more on luxury than on safety and convenience, and it threatens with- 32 , WALDEN. out attaining these to become no better than a modern drawing-room, with its divans, and ottomans, and sun- shades, and a hundred other Oriental things, which we are taking west with us, invented for the kxdies 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 free circulation, than go to heaven in the fancy car of an excursion 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 lo! 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 Christianity merely as an improved method of agr?-i-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 village for a work of fine art, if any had come down to us, to stand, for our lives, our houses and streets, furnish 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 mantle-piece, and let him through into the cellar, to some solid and honest though earthy foundation. I cannot but per- ECONOMY. 33 ceive 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 ai-ts which adorn it, my attention being wholly occupied 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. Without 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 impro- priety is, Who bolsters you? Are you one of the ninety- seven who fail, or the three who succeed? Answer me these questions, and then perhaps I may look at your baubles and find them ornamental. The cart before the horse is neither beautiful nor useful. Before we can adorn om' houses with Ijeautiful objects the walls must be stripped, and our lives must be stripped, and beautiful housekeeping and beautiful 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 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 in- formation 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 pre- 34 WALDEN. vent the caving in of the earth; floor this cellar with plank, and wainscot it overhead for a ceiling, rais« 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 cellars, which are adapted to the size of the family. The wealthy and principal men in New England, in the Ijeginning 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 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 forefathers did their wheaten. Not that all architectural ornament is to be neglected even in the rudest period; 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 over- laid with it. But, alas! 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 industry 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 undcrstandingly on this sub- ject, for I have made myself acquainted with it both ECONOM Y. 35 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. Xear the end of March, 1S45, I borrowed an axe and went down to the woods by Walden Pond, nearest 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 borrowing, but perhaps it is the most generous course thus to per- mit your fellow-men to have an interest in your enter- prise. 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 hickories 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 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 already 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 itself. 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 stayed there, or more than a quarter of an hour; perhaps because he had not yet fairly come out of the torpicl 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 36 WALDEN. 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, waiting for the sun to thaw them. On the 1st 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 frog. So I went on for some days cutting and hewing tim- ber, and also studs and rafters, all wnth 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 thoasand apphances; The wind tliat blows Is all that anybody 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 imparted 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 dow^n some of them, having become better acquainted with it. Some- times 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 bought the shanty of James Collins, an Irishman who worked ECONOMY. 37 on the Fitchburg Railroad, for boards. James Col- lins' 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 dimen- sions, 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 in- side. 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 boarcl which would not 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 si k 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, selling to nobody else meanwhile: I to take possession at six. It were well, he said, to be there early, and anticipate 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 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, drawing the nails, and removed it to the pond side by small cart- 38 WALDEN. loads, 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 tolerable, 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 l^eing a dearth of work, as he said. He was there to represent spectatordom, and help make this seemingly insignificant 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 burrow, clown 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 win- ter. 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 partic- ular pleasure in this breaking of ground, for in almost all latitudes men dig into the earth for an equable tem- perature. 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 disap- peared posterity 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 an}- 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 feathor-edged and lapped, so that it was perfectly impervious to rain; but l)efore l^oarding I laid the foundation of a chimney at one end, bringing two cartloads of stones up the hill from the pond in ECONOMY. 39 my arms. I built the chimney after my hoeing in the fall, before a fire became necessary for warmth, doing my cooking in the meanwhile out of doors on the ground, early in the morning: which mode I still think is in some respects more convenient and agree- able 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 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 universally sing when they are so en- gaged? 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 construc- tion 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 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? Xo 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. 40 WALDEX. 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 beaut}', as if it were a revelation to him. All very well perhaps from his point of view, but only a little better than the common dilettantism. A sentimental reformer in architecture, he began at the cornice, not at the foundation. 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 in- dweller, might build trul}^ within and without, and let the ornaments take care of themselves. What reasonable man ever supposed that ornaments were something out- ward and in the skin merety, — that the tortoise got his spotted shell, or the shellfish its mo the r-o' -pearl tints, by such a contract as the inhabitants of Broadway their Trinity Church? But a man has no more to do with 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 truthfulness, and nobleness, without ever a thought for the appearance; and what- ever additional beauty of this kind is destined to be pro- duced will be preceded by a like unconscious beauty of life. The most interesting dwellings in this countr}', as the painter knows, are the most unpretending, humble log huts and cottages of the poor commonly; it is the life of the inhabitants whose shells they are, and not any peculiarity in their surfaces merely, which makes them picturesque; 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 strain- ECONOMY. 41 ing after effect in the stj-le of his dwelling. A great proportion of architectural ornaments are literally hollow, and a September gale would strip them off, like bor- rowed plumes, without injury to the substantials. They can do without architecture who have no olives nor wines in the cellar. What if an equal ado 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, forsooth, 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 departed out of the tenant, it is of a piece with constructing his own coffin, — the architec- ture 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 the 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 ornaments 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 fire-place 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, and fewer still, if any, 4'2 WALDEX. the separate cost of the various materials which compose them : — Boards $8 03J / 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 .> 31 (Morethanl \ needed. Mantle-tree iron 15 Nails 3 90 Hinges and screws 14 Latch 10 Chalk 01 Transportation ^ { ^ ^'^L^^^S' In all $28 12^ These are all the materials excepting the timber, stones, and sand, which I claimed by scjuatter'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 w411 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 slielter 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 short- comings and inconsistencies do not affect the truth of my statement. Notwithstanding much cant and hypoc- risy, — chaff which I find it difficult to separate from my wheat, but for which I am as sorry as any man, — I will breathe freely and stretch myself in this respect, it is such a relief to both the -moral and physical system; and I am resolved that I will not through humility be- come the devil's attorney. I will endeavor to speak a good word for the truth. At Cambridge College the mere rent of a student's room, which is only a little larger ECONOMY. 43 than my own, is thirty dollars each year, though the corporation had the advantage of building thirty-two side by side and under one roof, and the occupant suffers the inconvenience of many and noisy neighbors, and per- haps a residence 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 pecuniary 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 subscription of dollars and cents, and then following blindly the principles of a division of labor to its extreme, a principle which should never be fol- lowed 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 founda- tions, 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 desire to be benefited by it, even to lay the foundation them- selves. The student who secures his coveted leisure and retirement by sj'stematically shirking any labor neces- sary to man obtains but an ignoble and unprofitable leisure, defrauding himself of the experience 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 44 WALDEN. beginning to end. How could j'ouths 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 neighl^orhood of some professor, where any- thing is professed 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 and not learn how it is earned; to discover new satellites to Neptune, and not detect the motes in his eyes, or to what vaga])ond he is a satellite himself; or to be devoured by the monsters that swarm all around him, while con- templating the monsters in a drop of vinegar. Which would have advanced the most at the end of a month, — the boy who had made his own jackknife from the ore which he had dug and smelted, reading as much as would be necessary for this, — or the boy who had at- tended the lectures on metallurgy at the Institute in the meanwhile, and had received a Rogers' penknife from his father? Which would be most likely to cut his fingers? ... To my astonishment 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 dis- tract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was alreadv l)ut too easy to arrive at; as railroads^ ECONOMY. 45 lead to Boston or Now York. Wc are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; l3ut ]Mainc and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. Either is in such a predicament as the man who was earnest to be introduced to a distin- guished deaf woman, but when he was presented, and one end of her ear trumpet was put into his hand, had noth- ing 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 w^orld some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance 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 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 sometime to-morrow, or possil)ly this evening, if you are lucky enough to get a job in season. Instead of going to Fitch- burg, you will be working here the greater part of the daly. And so, if the railroad reached round the world, I think that I should keep ahead of you; and as for see- ing the country and getting experience of that kind, I should have to cut your acquaintance altogether. Such is the universal law, which no man can ever out- wit, 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 equivalent to grading 46 WALDEN. 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 who shall have earned their fare, that is, if they survive so long, but they will probably have lost their elasticity and desire to travel by that time. This spend- ing 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 Englishn;an 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 mil- lion Irishmen starting up from all the shanties in the land, "is not this railroad which we have built a good thing?" Yes, I answer, com'paratively good, that is, you might have clone 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 aljout 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, t mostly growing up to pines and hickories, and was solcl | the preceding season for eight dollars and eight cents I an acre. One farmer said that it was "good for nothing but to raise cheeping squirrels on." I put no manure whatever 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 supplied me with fuel for a long time, and left small circles of virgin mould, easily distinguishable through the summer by the greater ECOXOMY. 47 luxuriance of the boans there. The dead and for the most part unmerchantable wood ijehind my house, and the driftwood from the pond, have supplied the remainder of my fuel. I was obliged to hire a team and a man for the ploughing, though I held the plough myself. My farm outgoes for the first season were, for implements, seed, work, &c., $14 72^. The seed corn was given me. This never costs anything to speak of, unless you plant more than enough. I got twelve bushels of beans, and eighteen bushels of potatoes, besides some peas and sweet corn. The yellow corn and turnips were too late to come to anything. INIy whole income from the farm was There are left $8 7U besides 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, consider- ing the importance of a man's soul and of to-day, not- withstanding the short time occupied 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 the least awed by many celebrated works on hus- bandry, 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 exchange it for an insuf- ficient quanity of more luxurious 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 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 48 WALDEN. to speak impartially on this point, and as one not in- terested in the success or failure of the present economical and social arrangements. I was more independent 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. Besides being better off than the}^ 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 exchange 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 haying, and it is no boy's play. Certainly no nation that lived simply in all respects, that is, no nation of philosophers, 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. However, / 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 horseman or a herdsman 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 ec^ual 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 not have accomplished works yet more worthy of himself in that case? When men begin to do. not merely un- necessary 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, be- come the slaves of the strongest. Man thus not only woi'ks for the animal within him, but, for a symlsol of this, he works for the animal without him. Though we have many substantial houses of brick or stone, the pros- perity of the farmer is still measured by the degree to ECONOMY. 49 which the barn overshadows the house. This town is said to have the hirgest houses for oxen, cows, and horses hereabouts, and it is not behindhand in its pubHc build- ings; but there are very few halls for free worship or free speech in this count}'. 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 admirable 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 per- petuate the memory of themselves by the amount of hammered 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 monu- ment as high as the moon. I love better to see stones in place. The grandeur of Thebes was a vulgar grandeur. More sensible is a rod of stone wall that bounds an honest man's field than a hundred-gated Thebes that has wan- dered farther from the true end of life. 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 tomlj onl}'. 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 de- graded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have clrowned 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 build- ing be an Egyptian 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 50 WALDEX butter. Mr. Balcom, a promising young architect, de- signs it on the back of his Vitruvius, with hard pencil and ruler, and the job is let out to Dobson & Sons, stone- cutters. When the thirty centuries begin to look down •on it, mankind begin to look up at it. As for your high towers 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 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 meanwhile, for I have as many trades as fingers, I had earned S13 34. The expense of food for eight months, namely, from July 4th to March 1st, 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 73^ Molasses 1 7.3 Rye meal 1 04-J Indian meal 99f Pork 22 Flour 88 Sugar 80 Lard 65 Apples 25 Dried apples 22 Sweet potatoes 10 One pumpkin 06 One watermelon .... 02 Salt 03 Cheapest form of the saccharine. Cheaper than rye. / Costs more than Indian meal, \ both money and trouble. > ^'4 Yes, I did eat $S 74, all told; but I should not thus unblushingly pubhsh my guilt, if I did not know that most of my readers were equally guilty with myself, and ECONOMY. 51 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 wood- chuck which ravaged my beanfield, — effect his trans- migration, as a Tartar would say, — and devour him, partly for experiment's sake; but though it affordecl 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 same dates, though little can be inferred from this item, amounted to $8 40i 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+ Farm one year 14 72+ Food eight months 8 74 Clothing, &c., eight months 8 40f Oil, &c., eight months 2 00 In all $61 99f I address myself now to those of my readers who have a living to get. And t^ meet this I have for farm pro- duce sold $23 44 Earned by day-labor 13 34 t In all $36 78 which subtracted from the sum of the outgoes leaves a balance of S2o 21f 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, besides the leisure and independence and health thus secured, 52 WALDEN. a comfortable house for me as long as I choose to oc- cupy 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 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 philos- ophy of India. To meet the objections of some inveterate cavillers, I may as well state that if I dined out occa- sionally, as I always had done, and I trust shall have opportunities to do again, it was frequently to the detri- ment of my domestic arrangements. 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 dinner, satisfactor}^ on sev- eral accounts, simply off a dish of purslane (Portulaca oleracea) which I gathered 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 al^stemious- ness to the test unless he has a well-stocked larder. ECONOMY. 53 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 turning 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, consulting such authorities as offered, going back to the primitive days and first invention of the un- leavened 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 sup- posed, 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 religiously preserved like the vestal fire, — some precious bottle-full, I sup- pose, first brought over in the Mayflower, did the business for America, and its influence is still rising, swelling, spreading, in cerealian billows over the land, — this seed I regularly and faithfully procured from the village, till at length one m.orning 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 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 54 WALDEX. in m}' 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 mortariumque bene lavato. Farinam in mortarium indito, ac|ute 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 no.t always use this staff of life. At one time, owing to the emptiness of m}" purse, I saw none of it for more than a month. Every New Englander might easily raise all his own breadstuff s 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 independence 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 produc- ing, and buys flour, which is 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 concentrated sweet, I found b}' 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 grow- ing I could use various substitutes besides those which I have named. " For," as the Forefitthers sang, — "we can make liquor to sweeten our lips Of pumpkins and parsni_)s and walnut-tree chips." ECOXOMY. 55 Finally, as for salt, that grossest of groceries, to obtain this might be a fit occasion for a visit to the seashore, 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 panta- loons which I now wear were woven in a farmer'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 far- mer; — and in a new country fuel is an encumbrance. As for a habitat, if I were not permitted 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 en- hanced the value of the land b}' squatting on it. There is a certain class of unbelievers who sometimes ask me such questions as, if I think that I can live on vegetable food alone; and to strike at the root of the matter at once, — for the root is faith, — I am accustomed 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 succeeded. The human race is interested in these experiments, though a few old women who are incapacitated 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 56 . WALDEN, pumpkin. That is shiftlessness. There is a plenty of such chairs as I hke best in the village garrets to be had for taking them away. Furniture! Thank God, I can sit and I can stand without the aid of a furniture ware- house. What man but a philosopher would not be ashamed to see his furniture packed in a cart and going up country exposed to the light of heaven and the eyes of men, a beggarly account of empty boxes? That is Spaulding's furniture. I could never tell from inspect- ing 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 j^ou are. Each load looks as if it contained the contents 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 exuvioe; 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 3^ou meet a man you will s.ce 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 an}^, if you inquire more narrowly you will find have some stored in some- body's barn. I look upon England to-day as an old ECONOMY. ^ : 57 gentleman who is travelling with a great deal of baggage, trumpery which has accumulated from long housekeep- ing, 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 and walk, and I should certainly advise a sick one to lay down his bed and run. When I have met an immigrant 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 he could 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 w^ould 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 l^ehind 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 m}^ 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 clay. 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 purifying destruc- tion of them, there was an auction, or increasing of them. The neighbors eagerly collected to view them, bought them all, and carefully transported them to their garrets 58 • ^ WALDEX. 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, perchance, be profitably imitated by us, for they at least go through the semblance of casting their slough annually; 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 themselves 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 ever}' appetite and pas- sion whatever. A general amnesty is proclaimed; all malefactors may return to their town. . . . "On the fourth morning, the high priest, by rubbing dry wood together, produces new fire in the public 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 following days they I receive visits and rejoice with their friends from neigh- boring towns who have in like manner purified and pre- pared 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. 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 directly from heaven to do thus, though the}- have no Biblical record of the revelation. ECONOMY. 59 y- For more than five 3'ears 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 schoolkeeping, and found that my expenses were in proportion, or rather out of pro- portion, to my income, for I was obliged to dress and train, not to say think and believe, accordingly, 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 w'ay to the devil. I was actually afraid that I might l)y that time be doing what is called a good business. When formerly I w^as looking about to see what I could do for a living, some sad expe- rience 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 greatest 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 un- hesitatingly into trade or the professions, I contemplated this occupation as most like theirs; ranging the hills all summer to pick the berries which 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 everything 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 succeed well, I did not wish to spend my time in earning rich ■carpets or other fine furniture, or delicate cookery, or a house in the Grecian or the Gothic stjde just yet. If there are any to whom it is no interruption to acquire 60 WALDEN. these things, and who know how to use them when acquired, I rehnquish 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, espe- cially 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 lal^or; but his employer, 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 experience, that to maintain one's self on this earth is not a hardship I but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely; as the* pursuits of the simpler nations are still 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, be- sides 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 v/orlcl as possible ; but i j I would have each one be very careful to find out and |j pursue his own way, and not his father's or his mother's or his neighbor's instead. The vouth 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 ECONOMY. 61 still for a thousand, as a large house is not proportionally more expensive than a small one, 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 commonly 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 partition, 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 exceed- ingly partial and superficial; and what little true coopera- tion there is, is as if it were not, being a harmony inaudible to men. If a man has faith he will cooperate with equal faith everywhere; 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 be- hind the plough, the other carrying a bill of exchange 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 anotlier 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 myself in this respect, and lay their Heaven under an 62 WALDEN. 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 remain poor. While my townsmen and women are devoted in so many ways to the good of their fellows, 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 anything 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 deliberatel}'' forsake my particular calling to do the good which society demands of me, to save the universe from annihilation; and I believe that a like but infinitely greater steadfastness elsewhere is all that now preserves it. But I would not stand be- tween 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 similar 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 has kindled his fires up to the splendor of a moon or a star of the sixth magnitude, and go al:)out like a Robin Goodfellow, peeping in at every cottage window, inspiring lunatics, and tainting meats, and making darkness visible, instead of steadily increas- ing his genial heat and l^eneficcnce till he is of such Ijright- ness that no mortal can look him in the face, and then, ECONOMY. 63 and in the meanwhile 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 lieaten 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 good- ness 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 dr}^ and parching wind of the African deserts called the simoom, whicli 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 3'ou a Newfound- land dog that will do as much. Philanthropy 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 lis in our best estate, when we are most worthy to be helped? I never heard of a philanthropic meeting in which it 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 physical 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 64 WALDEN. 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 misfortune. 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 bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to pro- duce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve. It is the pious slave-breeder devoting the i^roceeds 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 em- ployed themselves there? You boast of spending a tenth part of your income in charity; maybe 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- ECONOMY. 65 ficiently appreciated by mankind. Nay, it is greatly overrated; and it is our selfishness which overrates it. A roljust 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 Christian 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 anything from the praise that is due to philanthropy, but merely demand justice for all who by their lives and works are a blessing to man- kind. I do not value chiefly a man's uprightness 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 emploj-ed 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 which hides a multitude of sins. The philanthropist too often sur- rounds mankind with the remembrance of his own cast- off griefs as an atmosphere, and calls it sympathy. We shoidd 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 lat- itudes reside the heathen to whom we send light? Who is that intemperate and brutal man whom we would redeem? If anything ail a man, so that he does not per- form his functions, if he have a pain in his bowels even, — G6 WALDEN. 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 discovery, 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 Esquimau and the Patagonian, and embraces the populous Indian and Chinese villages; and thus, b}^ a few years of phil- anthropic activity, the powers in the meanwhile 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 ripe, and life loses its crudity and is once more sweet ancl 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 myself. 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 morning rise over his couch, and he will forsake his generous companions without apology. My excuse for not lectur- ing 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 philanthropies, do not let your left hand know what 3'our 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 irre- pressible satisfaction with the gift of life, any memo- rable praise of God. All health and success does me ECONOMY. 67 good, however far off and withdrawn it may appear; 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 man- kind by truh' Indian, botanic, magnetic, or natural means, let us first be as simple and well as Nature our- selves, dispel the clouds which hang over our own brows, and take up a little life into our 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, being 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 liberal as the date tree; but if it aff"ords nothing to give away, be an azad, or free man, like the cypress.'' COMPLEMENTAL 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, 68 WALDEN. 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. Cakew. II. WHERE I LIVED, AND WHAT I LIVED FOR. At a certain season of our life we are accustomed 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 imagination 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 Avith him, took his farm at his price, at any price, mortgaging it to him in my mintl; even put a higher price on it, — took everything 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 with- drew 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 WHERE I LIVED, AND WHAT I LIVED FUR. 69 run off, buffet the winter through, and see the spring come in. The future inhabitants of this region, where- cver they may place their houses, may be sure that they have been anticipated. An afternoon sufficed 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 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 num- ber 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 possession 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 w^ished to keep it, and he offered me ten dollars to release him. Now, to speak the truth, I had but ten cents in the world, and it sur- passed my arithmetic to tell, if I was that man who had ten cents, or who had a farm, or ten dollars, or all to- gether. 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 dollars, and still had my ten cents, and seeds, and materials for a wheelbarrow left. I found thus that I had been a rich man without any damage to my property. But I retained the landscape, and I have since annually carried off what it yielded without a wheelbarrow. With respect to landscapes, — "I am monarch of all I survey, My right there is none to dispute. I have freciuently 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, the most admirable 70 WALDEN. 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 Hollo well farm, to me, were: its complete retirement, being about two miles from the village, half a mile from the nearest neighbor, and separated from the highway by a broad field; its bounding on the river, which the owner said protected 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 rab- bits, showing what kind of neighbors I should have; but above all, the recollection 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, — I never heard what compensation he received for that, — and do all those things which had no other motive or excuse but that I might pay for it and l^e unmolested in my posses- sion 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 dis- criminates 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 uncommitted. It makes but little difference whether you are committed to a farm or the county jail. WHERE I LIVED, AXD WHAT I LIVED FOR. 71 Old Cato, whose "De Re Rustica" is mj' '^ 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 de- jection, 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 daj's there, which, by accident, was on Independence Da}', or the fourth of July, 1S45, my house was not finished for winter, ]jut 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, especiall}' in the morning, when its timbers were saturated with dew, so 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 character, reminding me of a certain house on a mountain which I had visited the year before. This was an airy and unplastered cabin, fit to entertain a travelling god, and where a goddess might trail her garments. 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; ]jut few are the ears that hear it. Olympus is but the outside of the earth evervwhere. 72 WALDEN. 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 sul^stantial shelter about me, I had made some progress toward settling in the world. This frame, so slightly clad, was a sort of crystallization around me, and reacted on the builder. It was suggestive somewhat as a picture in outlines. I did not need to go out of doors to take the air, for the atmosphere 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 myself 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 commonly frequent the garden and the orchard, but to those wilder and more thrilling songsters of the forest which never, or rarely, serenade a villager, — the 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 some- what 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 mighty clothing of mist, and here and there, by degrees, its soft ripples or its smooth reflecting surface were revealed, while the mists, like ghosts, were stealthily withdrawing in every direction into the woods, as at the breaking upof some nocturnal conventi- cle. The very dew seemed to hang upon the trees later into the day than usual, as on the sides of mountains. WHERE I LIVED, AND WHAT I LIVED FOR. 73 This smull 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 even- ing, 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, becomes a lower heaven itself so much the more important. From a hill top near by, where the wood had recently been cut off, there was a pleasing vista southward across the pond, through a wide indentation in the hills which form the shore there, where their opposite sides sloping toward each other suggested 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 northwest, those true- blue coins from heaven's own mint, .and also of some portion of the village. But in other directions, even from this point, I could not see over or beyond the woods which surrounded me. It is well to have some water in your neighborhood, to give buoyancy to and float the earth. One value even of the smallest well is that when you look into it you see that the earth is not con- tinent 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 elevated 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, 74 WALDEX. stretched away toward the prairies of the "West and the steppes of Tartary, affording ample room for all the rov- ing families of men. " There are none happy in the world but beings who enjoy freely a vast horizon," — 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 ears in his- tory which had most attracted me. Where I live was as far off as many a region viewed nightly by astronomers. We are wont to imagine rare and delectable 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 Aldebaran or Altair, then I was really there, or at an equal remoteness from the life which I had left behind, dwindled and twinkling with as fine a ray to my nearest neighbor, and to be seen only in moonless nights by him. .Such was that part of creation where I had squatted : — "There was a shepherd that did Hve, 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 worshipper 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 completely each day; do it again, and again, ancl forever again." I can under- stand that. Morning brings back the heroic ages. I was as much affected by the faint hum of a mosquito WHERE I LIVED, AND WHAT I LIVED FOR. 75 making its invisible and unimaoinable tour through my apartment at earhcst dawn, 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 Od}'ssey in the air, singing its own W'rath and wanderings. There was something cosmical about it; a standing advertisement, till forbidden, of the ever- lasting 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 slumbers 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 ]jy our Genius, but by the mechanical nudgings of some servitor, are not awak- ened by our own newly acquired force and aspirations from within, accompanied by the undulations 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 contains 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 Vedas 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 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 re- form 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. 76 WALDEN. If they had not been overcome with drowsiness they would have performed something. The milHons are awake enough for phj-sical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred 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 expectation 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 effect 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 delibr erately, 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 ditl not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite neces- sary. I 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 corner, 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 excursion. 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 con- WHERE I LIVED, AND WHAT I LIVED FOR. 77 eluded 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 evitablc 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. Sim- plicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; in- stead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail. In the midst of this chop- ping 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 reckoning, 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 proportion. Our life is like a German Confederacy, made up of petty states, with its boundary forever fluctuating, 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 eleva- tion of purpose. It lives too fast. Men think that it is essential that the Nation have commerce, 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 78 WALDEN. ■ 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 railroad? Each one is a man, an Irishman, 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 mis- fortune 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 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 sometime 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 ivork, 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 J WHERE I LIVED, AND WHAT I LIVED FOR. 79 his sentinels. 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 anything new that has happened to a man anywhere 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 unfathomed 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 thought 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 Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter, — we never need read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications? To a philosopher all 7iews,^ 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 80 WALDEN. bull-fight when other entertainments fail, it will be true to the letter, and give us as good an idea of the exact state 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 16-19; and if 3'ou 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 pecuniary 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-he-yu (great dig- nitary of the state of Wei) sent a man to Khoung-tseu to know his news. Khoung-tseu caused the messenger to be seated near him, and questioned him in these terms: What is your master doing? The messenger answered with respect: My master desires to diminish the number of his faults, but he cannot come to the end of them. The messenger being gone, the philosopher remarked: What a worthy messenger! What a worthy messenger!" The preacher, instead of vexing the ears of drowsy farm- ers 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 beginning of a new one, — with this one other draggletail 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 steadily 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' Entertain- ments. If we respected only what is inevitable and has a right to be, music and poetry would resound along the streets. When we are unhurried 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 aways exhilarating and sublime. By closing the eyes ' ' WHERE I LIVED, AND WHAT I LIVED FOR. 81 and slumbering, and consenting to be deceived by shows, men establish and confirm their dail_y life of I'outine and habit everywhere, which still is built on purely illusory 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, being expelled in infancy from his native city, was brought up by a forester, and, growing up to maturity in that state, imagined himself to belong to the iDarbarous 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 courthouse, 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 j^our account of them. Men esteem truth remote, in 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 ail what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that 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 82 WALDEN. 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 clay 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 perturbation; 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 merid- ian shallows. Weather this danger and you are safe, for the rest of the way is down hill. With unrelaxecl 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, v/hy 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 appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard l^ottom and rocks in place, which we can call realitij, and say, This is, and no mistake; and then begin, having a point cVappui, 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 happily 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 READING. 83 it; but while I drink I sec the sandy bottom and detect 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 ni}^ 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 bur- row 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. III. READING. With a little more deliberation in the choice of their pursuits, all men would perhaps become essentially students and observers, for certainly their nature and destiny are interesting to all alike. In accumulating 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 immortal, and need fear no change nor accident. The oldest Egyptian or Hindoo philosopher raised a corner of the veil from the statue of the divinity; and still the trem- bling 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 improvable, is neither past, present, nor future. My residence was more favorable, not only to thought, but to serious reading, than a university; and though 84 WALDEN. I was be^'ond the range of the ordinary circulating hbrary, I had more than ever come withm 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 spiritual world; I have had this advantage in books. To be intoxicated by a single glass of wine; I have experienced this pleasure wdien 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 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 employ- ment made me ashamed of myself, and I asked where it was then that / lived. The student may read Homer or ^schylus 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 modern 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 learn only some words of an ancient language, which are raised out of the trivialncss of the street, to be perpetual suggestions and provocations. 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 practical studies; but the adventurous student will READING. 85 always stud}- classics, in whatever language they may be written and however ancient they ma}' 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 w^ell omit to study Nature because she is old. To read 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 underAvent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly 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 unconsciously, 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 sjDeak. 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 written in those languages; for these were not written in that Greek or Latin which the}' knew, but in the select language of literature. They had not learned the nobler dialects of Greece and Rome, but the very materials on which they were written were waste paper to them, and they prized instead a cheap con- temporary literature. But when the several nations of Europe had acquired distinct though rude written languages of their own, sufficient for the purposes of their rising literatures, then first learning revived, and scholars were enabled to discern from that remoteness 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. 86 WALDEN. However much we may admire the orator's occasional bursts of eloquence, the noblest written words are com- monly 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 comment 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 in- tellect and heart of mankind, to all in any age who can understand 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 human 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 modern man's speech. Two thousand summers have imparted 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 celestial 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 generations and nations. Books, the oldest and the best, stand naturally and rightfully on the shelves of every 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 society, and, more than kings or emperors, exert an influence on mankind. When the illiterate and perhaps scornful trader has earned by enterprise and industry READING. 87 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 j'ct inaccessible circles of intellect and genius, and is sensible only of the imperfec- tion 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 in- tellectual culture 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 transcript of them has ever been made into any modern tongue, unless our civ- ilization itself may be regarded as such a transcript. Homer has never yet been printed in English, nor ^schy- lus, 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, ecjualled the elaborate beauty and finish and the lifelong 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 known Scrip- tures of the nations, shall have still further accumulated, when the Vaticans shall l^e filled with ^'edas and Zend- avestas and Bibles, with Homers and Dantes and Shak- speares, and all the centuries to come shall have succes- sively 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 astrologicalh', not astronomically. Most men have learned to read to serve a paltry convenience, as they have learned to cipher in order to keep accounts and not be cheated in trade; but of reading as a noble intellectual exercise they know little or nothing; yet this 88 WALDEN. 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 wakeful 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 convicted 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 digest 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 provender, they are the machines to read it. They read the nine thousandth tale about Zebulon and Se- phronia, 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 on to a steeple, who had l^etter never have gone up as far as the belfry; and then, having needlessly got him up there, the happy novelist 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 weather-cocks, 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 meeting-house burn down. "The Skip of the Tip-Toe- Hop, a Romance of the Middle Ages, by the celebrated author 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, READING. 89 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 Cinderella, — without any improvement, that I can see, in the pro- nunciation, 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 deliciuium and sloughing off of all the in- tellectual faculties. This sort of gingerbread is baked daily and more sedulously than pure wheat or rye-and- Indian in almost every oven, and finds a surer market. The best books are not read even by those who are called good readers. What does our Concord culture amount to? Tliere is in this town, with a very few ex- ceptions, 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 anywhere made to Ijecome acc[uainted 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 b}^ birth; and when I ask him what he considers the best thing he can do in this world, he says, besides this, to keep up and add to his English. This is about as much as the college-bred generally 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 proportionally mastered the difficulties of the wit and poetry of a Cireek poet, and has any sympathy to impart to the alert and heroic 90 WALDEN. 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 con- siderably out 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 suc- ceeding 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 Reading," and story books, which are for boys and beginners; 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 townsman 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 underbred and low-lived and illiterate; and in this respect I confess I do not riake any very broad distinction between the illiteratencss of my townsman who cannot read at all, and the illitcrateness 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 understand, 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. The book exists for us perchance which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at ]:)resent unutterable things READING. 91 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 exclusive- ness by his faith, may think it is not true; but Zoroaster, thousands 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 influence of all the worthies, with Jesus Christ Himself, and let "our church" go l)y 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 cul- ture. 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 sys- tem 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. It is time that villages were universities, and their elder inhabitants the fellows of universities, with leisure — if they are indeed so well off — to pursue liberal studies the rest of their lives. Shall the world be confined to one Paris or one Oxford forever? Cannot students be boarded here and get a liberal education under 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 92 WALDEX. 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 proljably 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 an- nually subscril^ed for a Lyceum in the winter is better spent than any other equal sum raised in the town. If we live in the nineteenth century, why should we not enjoy the advantages 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 Boston 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 anything. Why should we leave it to Harper & Brothers and Redding & Co. to select our reading? As the nobleman of culti- vated taste surrounds himself with whatever conduces to his culture, — genius — learning — wit — books — paint- ings — 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 institutions ; and I am confident that, as our circumstances 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 SOUXDS. 93 ever the river, go round a little there, and throw one arch at least over the darker gulf of ignorance which surrounds us. IV. 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 pro- vincial, we are in danger of forgetting the language which all things and events speak without metaphor, which alone is coj)ious and standard. Much is pub- lished, but little printed. The raj's 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 forever 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 dis- cipline 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 re very, 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 high- "w^ay, 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 my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance. I realized 94 WALDEN. what the Orientals mean by contemplation 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 accomplished. In- stead of singing like the birds, I silently 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 point- ing 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 flowers 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 amuse- ment, 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 without an end. If we were always indeed getting our living, and regulat- ing our lives according to the last and best mode we had learned, we should never be troubled with ennui. Fol- low your genius closely enough, and it will not fail to show you a fresh prospect every hour. 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, 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 SOUNDS. 95 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 unwilling to be brought in. I was sometimes tempted to stretch aii 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 doors than in the house. A bird sits on the next bough, life-everlasting grows under the table, and blackb'erry vines run round its legs; pine cones, chestnut burs, and strawberry leaves are strewn about. It looked as if this was the way these v forms came to be transferred to our furniture, to tables, chairs, and bedstead, — because they once stood in their midst. My house was on the side of a hill, immediate^ 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, black- berry, and life-everlasting, johnswort and goldenrod, shrub-oaks and sand-cherry, blueberry and ground-nut. Near the end of May, the sand-cherry {cerasus putnila) adorned the sides of the path with its delicate flowers arranged in umbels cylindrically about its short stems, which last, in the fall, weighed 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 some- times, as I sat at my window, so heedlessly did they grow and tax their weak joints, I heard a fresh and tender 96 WALDEN. bough suddenl}^ fall like a fan to the ground, when there was not a breath of air stirring, broken otf by its own weight. In August, the large masses of berries, which, when in flower, had attracted many wild bees, gradually fissumed 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 bi''in"gs 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-bircls flitting hither and thither; and for the last half hour I have heard the rattle of railroad cars, now dying away and then reviving like the beat of a partridge, conveying travellers from Boston to the country. For I did not live so 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 erelong ran away and came home again, ciuite 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 causewa}'', and am, as it were, re- lated 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 SOUXDS. 97 restless city merchants are arriving within the circle of the town, or adventurous country traders from the other side. As they come under one horizon, 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 rations, countrymen I Nor is there any man so independent on his farm that he can say them nay. And here's your pay for them I screams the countryman's whistle; timber like long bat- tering 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 civility the country hands a chair to the city. All the Indian huckleberry hills are stripped, all the cranberry meadows are raked into the city. Up comes the cotton, down goes the woven cloth; up comes the silk, down goes the woolen; 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 velocity 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 erelong 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 breathing 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 engine were the perspiration of heroic deeds, or as beneficent as that which floats over the farmer'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 98 WALDEN-. 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 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 plough plough a furrow from the mountains to the seaboard, in which the cars, like a following drill- barrow, sprinkle all the restless men and floating mer- chandise 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 slum- ber. Or perchance, 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 un- wearied ! 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 moment 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 startings and arrivals of the cars are now the epochs in the village day. They go and come with such regularity and precision, and their ;vhistle can be heard so far, that the farmers set their clocks by them, and thus one well-cOnducted institution regulates a whole country. Have not men improved SOUNDS. 99 somev;hat in punctuality 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 astonished 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 con- veyance, are on hand when the bell rings. To do things "railroad fashion" is now the by-word; and it is worth the while to be warned so often and so sincerely 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 toward particular points of the compass.; yet it interferes 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. Wliat recommends commerce to me is its enterprise 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 devised. 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 quarters; who have not merel}^ the three o'clock in the morning courage, which Bonaparte thought was the rarest, but whose courage does not go to rest so early, 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 100 WALDEN. England northeast snow storm, and I behold the plough- men 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 boulders 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 fantastic enterprises and sentimental experiments, and hence its singular success. I am refreshed and expanded 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, reminding me of foreign parts, of coral reefs, and Indian 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 carload 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 correction. 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 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 Mil- waukee, as those splendid articles, English, French, or American prints, ginghams, muslins, &c., gathered from all quarters both of fashion and poverty, going to be- come paper of one color or a few shades only, on which forsooth will be written tales of real life, high and low, SOUNDS. 101 and founded on fact! This closed car smells of salt fish, the strong New England and commercial scent, remind- ing 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 j^our kindlings, and the teamster shelter himself and his lading against sun, wind, and rain behind it, — and the trader, as a Concord trader once did, hang it up by his door for a sign when he com- mences 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 dinner. 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 obstinac}', and evincing how almost hopeless and incurable are all constitutional vices. I confess that, practically speaking, when I have learned a man's real disposition, 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, Vermont, 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 lief ore this morning, that he expects some by the next train of prime ciuality. It is advertised in the Cut- tingsville Times. AVhile these things go up other things come down. Warned by the whizzing sound, I look up from my book 102 WALDEN. and see some tall pine, hewn on far northern hills, which has winged its way over the Green Mountains 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 wdth their sticks, and shepherd 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 by. When the old bell- wether at the head rattles his bell, the mountains do indeed skip like rams and the little hills hke lambs. A car-load of drovers, too, in the midst, on a level with their droves now, their vocation 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. Me- thinks 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 fidelity and sagacity are below par now. They will slink back to their kennels in disgrace, or per- chance run wild and strike a league with the wolf and the fox. So is your pastoral life whirled past and away. iBut 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. SOUNDS. 103 Xow 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 meditations are interrupted only by the faint rattle of a carriage or team along the distant highway. Sometimes, on Sundays, I heard the bells, the Lin- coln, Acton, Bedford, or Concord bell, Avhen the wind was favorable, a faint, sweet, and, as it were, natural melody, worth importing into the wilderness. At a sufficient 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 produces one and the same effect, a vibration of the universal 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 modu- lated 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 W'Orth 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 melodious, and at first I would mistake it for the voices of certain minstrels by whom I was sometimes serenaded, 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 sum- mer, after the evening train had gone by, the whippoor- wills chanted their vespers for half an hour, sitting on a 104 WALDEX. 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 minutes of a particular time, referred to the setting of the sun, ever}- evening. I had a rare opportunity to become accpiainted with their habits. Sometimes I heard four or five at once in dif- ferent parts of the wood, by accident one a bar behind another, and so near me that I distinguished not onh' 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 intervals 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 solemn grave- yard ditty, the mutual consolations of suicide lovers remembering the pangs and delights of supernal love in the infernal groves. Yet I love to hear their wailing, their doleful responses, trilled along the woodside; re- minding me sometimes of music and singing birds; as if it were the dark and tearful side of music, the regrets and sighs that would fain be sung. 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 variety and capacity of that nature which is our common dwelling. Oh-o-o-o-o that I never had been hor-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 — that I never had been bor-r-r-r-n! echoes another on the farther side with tremulous sincerity, and — bor-7'-r-r-n! comes faintly from far in the Lincoln woods. I was also serenaded by a hooting owl. Near at hand SOUNDS. 105 you could fancy it the most melancholy sound in Nature, as if she meant by this to stereot^^pe and make permanent in her choir the dying moans of a human being,— some ])oor weak relic of mortality who has left hope behind, and howls like an animal, yet with human 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 mortifica- tion 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 admirably suited to swamps and twilight woods which no day illustrates,' suggesting a vast and undeveloped nature which men have not recognized. They represent the stark twilight and unsatisfied thoughts which all have. All day the sun has shone on the surface of some savage swamp, where the single spruce stands hung with usnea lichens, and small hawks circulate above, and the chick- adee lisps amid the evergreens, and the partridge and rabbit skulk beneath; but now a more dismal and fitting day dawns, and a different 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 almost any other at night, — the baying of dogs, and some- times again the lowing of some disconsolate cow in a distant barn-yard. In the meanwhile all the shore rang with the trump of bullfrogs, the sturdy spirits of ancient wine-bibbers and wassailers, still unrepentant, 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 106 WALDEN. 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, under 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-oonk! 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 satisfac- tion, tr-r-r-oonk! and each in his turn repeats 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 patriarch is not under the pond, but vainly bellowing troonk from time to time, and pausing for a reply. 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 remarkable of any bird's, and if they could be naturalized without being domesticated, it would soon become the most famous sound in our woods, surpassing 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? SOUNDS. 107 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 sound; 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 ^vere starved out, or 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 win- dow, a hare or woodchuck under the house, a screech- owl or a cat-owl behind it, a flock of wild geese or a laugh- ing 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 black- berry 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 civiHzed world! 108 WALDEN. V. 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 bull- frogs trump to usher in the night, and the note of the whippoorwill is borne on the rippling wind from over the water. S3anpathy with the fluttering 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 reflecting 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 connect 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 flowers, 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 in- tentionally 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 what sex or age or quality they were by some shght 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 SOLITUDE. 109 odor of a cigar or pipe. Nay, I was frequently notified of the passage of a traveller along the highway sixt}' 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, appropriated 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 wathin 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 England. 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 darkness, — but they soon retreated, usually with light baskets, and left *Hhe world to darkness and to me," and the black kernel of the night was never profaned by any human neigh- borhood. I believe that men are generally still a little afraid of the dark, though the 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 society 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 iEolian music to a healthy and innocent ear. Nothing can rightly compel a simple and brave man to a vulgar sadness. While I enjoy the 110 WALDEN. friendship of the seasons I trust that nothing can make hfe 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. Some- times, 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 especialh' guided and guarded. I do not flatter mj'self, 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 neighborhood of man was not essential to a serene and healthy life. To bd 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, 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 friend- liness all at once like an atmosphere sustaining me, as made the fancied advantages of human neighborhood insignificant, 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." SOLITUDE. Ill Some of my plcasantcst 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 forenoon, 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 unfold themselves. In those driving northeast 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 thun- der 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 day, and was struck with awe on looking up and be- holding that mark, now more distinct than ever, where a terrific and resistless bolt came down out of the harmless sky eight years ago. ' Men frec^uently say to me, " I should think \o\x would feel lonesome down there, and want to be nearer to folks, rain}' 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 3'ou 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 surety, 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 112 WALDEN. will dig his cellar. ... 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 mud to Brighton, — or Bright-town, — which place he would reach sometime 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 in- describably pleasant to all our senses. For the most part we allow only outlying and transient circumstances to make our occasions. They are, in fact, the cause of our distraction. Nearest to all things is that power which fashions their being. A^ext to us the grandest laws are continually being executed. Next to us is not the workman wdiom 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 subtile 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; identified with the substance of things, they cannot be separated from them." "The}^ 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 everywhere, 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 circum- stances, — have our own thoughts to cheer us? Con- fucius says truly, " Virtue does not remain as an aban- doned orphan; it must of necessity have neighbors." With thinking we may be beside ourselves in a sane SOLITUDE. 113 sense. By a conscious effort of the mind we can stand aloof from actions and their consequences; and all things, good and bad, go by us like a torrent. We are not wholly involved in Nature. I may be either the driftwood 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 intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence of and criti- cism 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 specta- tor goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, 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 companionable 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 measured 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 employed; 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 recreate, and as he thinks remunerate, himself for his day's solitude; and hence he wonders how the student can sit alone in the house all night and most of the day without ennui and "the blues;" but he 114 WALDEN. 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 recreation and society that the latter does, though it may be a more condensed form of it. Society is commonly too cheap. Wq 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 to agree on a certain set of rules, called etiquette and politeness, 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. Con- sider the girls in a factory, — never alone, hardly in their dreams. It would be better if there were but one in- habitant 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 imagina- tion 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. 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 convey 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, — ■ SOLITUDE. 115 but the devil, he is far from Ijeiiig alone; he sees a great deal of company; he is legion. I am no more lonely than a single mullein or dandelion 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 north star, 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 evenings, when the snow falls fast and the wind howls in the wood, from an old settler and original proprietor, who is re- ported to have dug Walden Poncl, 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 seci-et 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 neighborhood, 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 un- equalled fertility, and her memory runs back farther than mythology, and she can tell me the 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 sym- pathy 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 pn mourn- ing 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, con- tented? Not my or thy great-grandfather's, but our 116 WALDEN. great-grandmother Nature's universal, vegetable, botanic 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 mixture dipped from Acheron and the Dead Sea, which come out of those long shallow black-schooner-looking wagons which we sometimes see made to carry bottles, let me have a draught of vmdiluted 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 noonday even in the coolest cellar, but drive out the stopples long ere that and follow westward the steps of Aurora. I am no worshipper of Hygeia, who was the daughter of that old herb-doctor iEsculapius, and who is represented on monuments 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. VI. VISITORS. I THINK that I love society as much as most, and am ready enough to fasten myself like a bloodsucker 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 VISITORS. 117 third chair for thorn 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 apartments, their huge halls and their cellars for the storage of wines and other munitions of peace, appear to me extravagantly large for their in- habitants. 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 thought must have overcome its lateral and ricochet motion and fallen into its last and steady course before 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 forai their columns in the interval. In- dividuals, 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. 118 WALDEX. If wo would enjoy the most intimate societ}^ 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 con- venience 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 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 conversation 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 practised 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 miraculously 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 disappointed or hungry from my house when they found me at home, you may depend upon it that I sympathized with them at least. So easy is it, though many housekeepers doubt it, to establish new and better customs in the place of the old. You need not rest your reputation on the dinners j'ou 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. VISITORS. 119 I think I shall jiever revisit those scenes. I should be proud to have for the motto of my cabin those Hues of Spenser which one of my visitors inscribed 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." When Winslow, afterward governor of the Plymouth Colony, went with a companion on a visit of ceremony to Massasoit 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 Vjed with himself and his wife, they at the one end and we at the other, it being onh' a plank, laid a foot from the grovmd, 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 Massasoit "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 them- selves asleep)," and that they might get home while they had strength to travel, they departed. As for lodging, it is true they were but poorly entertained, though what they found an inconvenience 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 themselves, and they were wiser than to think that apologies 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 being a season of plenty with them, there was no deficiency in this respect. 120 WALDEN. As for men, they will hardly fail on.e anywhere. I had more visitors while I lived in the woods than at any other period of my life; I moan that I had some. I met several there under more favorable circumstances than I could anywhere 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 concerned, only the finest sediment was deposited around me. Besides, there were wafted to me evidences of unexplored and un- cultivated continents on the other side. Who should come to my lodge this morning but a true Homeric or Paphlagonian man, — he had so suitable 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 perhaps 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 testament in his native parish far awav; and now I must translate to him, while he holds the l^ook, 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 hves yet, son of Actor, And Peleus Hves, son of Ji^acus, 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 l)ark 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 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 VISITORS. 121 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, perhajDS in his native countr}-. He was cast in the coarsest mould; a stout but sluggish body, yet gracefully carried, with a thick sunburnt neck, dark bushy hair, and dull sleepy blue eyes, which were occasionally lit up with expres- sion. He wore a fiat 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 wood- chucks, 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 beanfield, though without anxiety or haste to get to his work, such as Yankees exhibit. He wasn't a-going to hurt him- self. He didn't care if he only earned his board. Fre- quently 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 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 leaving "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 122 WALDEN. 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 salutation in Canadian French, though he spoke English as well. When I approached him he would suspend his work, txnd 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 tuml^led down and rolled on the ground with laughter at anything 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." Some- times, when at leisure, he amused himself 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 chickadees 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 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 n^ver was tired in my life." But the intellectual ancl what is called spiritual man in him were slumbering as in an infant. He had been instructed only in that inno- cent 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 tlie 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 ])ody 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 introduction would serve to introduce him, more than VISITORS. 123 if 3'ou 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 opinions with them. He was so simply and naturally humble — if he can be called humble who never aspires — that humility was no distinct quality in him, nor could he coHceive of it. Wiser men were demigods to him. If you told him that such a one was coming, he did as if he thought that anything so grand would expect nothing of himself, but take all responsibility ou itself, and let him be forgotten still. He never heard the sound of praise. He particularly reverenced the writer and the preacher. Their performances 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 him- self. I sometimes found the name of his native parish handsomely written 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 Cana- dian 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 towns- man told me that when he met him sauntering through the village in his small close-fitting cap, and whistling to himself, he reminded him of a prince in disguise. 124 walden: His only books were an almanac and an arithmetic, in which last he was considerably expert. The former was a sort of cyclopaedia to him, which he supposed to contain an abstract of human knowledge, as indeed 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 practical 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 countiy afford any beverage besides water? He had soaked hemlock leaves in water and drunk 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 accounts of the origin of this institu- tion, 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 incon- venient, and impossible soon, to go on mortgaging some portion of the creature each time to that amount. He could defend many institutions better than any philosopher, because, in describing them as they con- cerned him, he gave the true reason for their prevalence, and speculation had not suggested to him any other. At another 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. Maybe the man you hoe with is inclined to race; then, by gorry, 3^our mind must be there; you think of weeds." He would sometimes ask mo 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 VISITORS. 125 a substitute within him for the priest without, and some higher motive for hving. '' 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 l^elly to the table, by George!" Yet I never, by any manoeuvring, could get him to take the spiritvial view of things; the highest that he appeared to conceive of was a simple expediency, such as you might expect an animal to appreciate; and this, practicall}-, 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 observed that he was thinking for himself and expressing his own opinion, a phenomenon so rare that I would any day walk ten miles to observe it, and it amounted to the reorigination of many of the institutions of society. Though he hesitated, and perhaps failed to express him- self distinctly, he always had a presentable thought be- ximd. Yet his thinking was so primitive and immersed in his animal life, that, though more promising than a merety learned man's, it rarely ripened to anything which can be reported. He suggested that there might be men of genius in the lowest grades of life, however permanently humble 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 exempted from that annual visitation which occurs, methinks, about the first of April, when everybody 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 126 WALDEN. 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 com- pensated. 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 superior, or rather inferior, to anything 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 meta- physical puzzle to me. I have rarely met a fellow-man on such promising ground, — it was so simple and sincere and so true, all that he said. And, true enough, in pro- portion 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 mtercourse might go forward to something better than the intercourse of sages. I had some guests from those not reckoned commonly 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 hospitalality; who earnestly wish to be helped, and preface 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. VISITORS. 127 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 remoteness. Men of ahnost 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 Ijc- scechingly, 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 north star. Men of one idea, like a hen with one chicken, and that a duckling; men of a thou- sand ideas, and unkempt heads, like those hens which arc made to take charge of a hundred chickens, all in pur- suit of one bug, a score of them lost in every morning's dew, — and become frizzled and mangy in consequence; men of ideas instead of legs, a sort of intellectual centi- pede 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 memory to make that necessary. 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 saicl 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 covild not bear all kinds of opinions; doctors, lawyers, uneasy house- keepers 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 128 WALDEN. 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 co7n-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 joroportion as he is dead-and-alive to begin with. A man sits as many risks as he runs. Finally, there were the self-stjded 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 hves 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. T 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. Children 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. Englishmen!" for I had had communication with that race. THE BE AX FIELD. 129 VII. THE BEANFIELD. Meanwhile my beans, the length of whose rows, added together, was seven miles already planted, were impatient to be hoed, for the earliest had grown con- siderably 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 por- tion of the earth's surface, which had yielded only cinquefoil, blackberries, johnswort, and the like, before, sweet wild fruits and pleasant flowers, produce instead 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 wood- chucks. 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 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 130 WALDEN. jolinswort 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 shrulj-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 beanfield and throw dust upon their heads. Early in the morning 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 row3, 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. Removing 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 wormwood 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 THE BE AX FIELD. 131 imperishable moral, antl to the scholar it yields a classic result. A very agricula laboriosus was I to travellers bound westward through Lincoln and Wayland to no- body knows where; they sitting at their ease in gigs, with elbows on knees, and reins loosely hanging in festoons; I the homestaying 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 sometimes 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 con- tinued to plant when others had begun to hoe, — the ministerial husbandman 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 clobbin to inquire 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 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. Coleman'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 English hay is carefulty 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 b}^ 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 returning to their wild and primitive state that I culti- vated, and my hoe played the Rfuis des Vaches for them. Near at hand, upon the topmost spray of a birch, 132 WALDEN. sings the brown-thrashcr — 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 performances 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 mingled with other natural stones, some of which bore the marks of having been burned by Indian fires, and some l^y 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 acc^uaintances who had gone to the city to attend the oratorios. The night-hawk circled over- head in the sunny afternoons — for I sometimes made a day of it — like a mote in the eye, or in heaven's eye, falling 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-inflated wings answering to the elemental unfledged pinions of the sea. Or sometimes I watched a pair of hen-hawks circling high in the sky, THE BE AN FIELD. 133 alternately soaring and descending, approaching and leaving one another, as if they were the embodiment 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 sluggish, 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 sights I heard and saw anywhere 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 beanfield 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 clay of some sort of itching and disease in the horizon as if some eruption would break out there soon, either scarla- tina or canker-rash, until at length some more favorable puff of wind, making haste over the fields and up the Waylancl road, brought me information of the "trainers." It seemed by the distant hum as if somebody's bees had swarmed, and that the neighbors, according to Virgil's advice, by a faint tintinnabulum 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 keeping; 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 the village was a vast bellows, and all the buildings expanded and collapsed alternately with a din. But 134 WALDEN. sometimes it was a really noble and inspiring strain that reached these woods, and the 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 Palestine, and reminded me of a march of crusaders in the horizon, with a slight tantivy and tremu- lous motion 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 acquaintance which I cultivated with beans, what with planting, and hoeing, and harvesting, and thrashing, and picking over, and selling them, — the last was the hardest of all, — I might add eating, for I did taste. I was deter- mined to know beans. When they were growing, I used to hoe from five o'clock in the morning 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, — disturbing their delicate organ- izations so ruthlessly, and making such invidious dis- tinctions 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 up- ward to the sun, don't let him have a fibre in the shade, if you do he'll 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. 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 mv contemporaries devoted to the fine arts in Boston and Rome, and others THE BE AN FIELD. 135 to contemplation in India, and others to trade in London or New York, I thus, with the other farmers of New England, devoted to husbandry. Not that I wanted beans to eat. for I am by natiu'e a Pythagorean, 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 else- where, "especially 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 tempering.*? being . but the vicars succeclaneous 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. Coleman has reported chiefly the expensive experi- ments of gentlemen farmers, my outgoes were, — For a hoe $0 54 Ploughing, harrowing, and furrowing 7 50 Too much. Beans for seed 3 12^ Potatoes " 1 33 Peas for seed 40 Turnip seed 06 White hne for crow fence 02 Horse cultivator and boy three hours 1 00 Horse and cart to get crop 75 In all $14 72^ M}^ income was (patrem familias vendacem, non emacem esse oportet) , from 136 WALDEN. Nine bushels and twelve quarts of beans sold $16 94 Five bushels large potatoes 2 50 Nine bushels small potatoes 2 25 Grass 1 00 Stalks 75 In all $23 44 Leaving a pecuniary profit, as I have elsewhere said, of $8 71^. 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 unmixed seed. First look out for worms, and supply vacancies, by plant- ing anew. Then look out for woodchucks, 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 possible, if you would escape frosts and have a fair and salable crop; you may save much loss by this means. This further experience also I gained, I said to my- self, I will not plant beans and corn with so much in- dustry another summer, but such seeds, if the seed is not lost, as sincerity, truth, simplicity, faith, innocence, and the like, and see if they will not grow in this soil, even with less toil and manurance, and sustain 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 vitality 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 cen- turies 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 I THE BE AN FIELD. 137 in! But wh}- 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 concerned 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 cheat and insult and banish one another by our mean- ness, if there were present the kernel of worth and friend- liness. We should not meet thus in haste. i\Iost 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, leaning on a hoe or a spade as a staff between his work, not as a mushroom, l)ut 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 naeant to fly, then close again," so that we should suspect that we might be conversing 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 pursued 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 138 WALDEN. excepting our Cattle-shows and so-called Thanksgivings, by which the farmer expresses a sense of the sacredness of his calling, or is reminded 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 chiefl}^, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robl:)er. Cato saj's that the profits of agriculture are particularly pious or just {maximeque pius quoestus), and according to Varro, the old Romans " callecl 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 cul- tivated fields and on the prairies and forests without distinction. They all reflect and absorb his rays ahke, 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 et^ually cultivated like a garden. Therefore we should receive the benefit of his light and heat with a corresponding trust and magnanimity. 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 woodchucks partly? The ear of wheat (in Latin spica, obsolete^ speca, from spe, hope) should not be the only hope of the husbandman; its kernel or grain igranum, 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 j'ear THE VILLAGE. 139 or not, and finish his labor with every day, rehnquishing all claim to the produce of his fields, and sacrificing in his mind not only his first but his last fruits also. VIII. THE VILLAGE. After hoeing, or perhaps reading and writing, in the forenoon, I usually bathed again in the pond, swim- ming 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, on 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 & Company'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 commodit}^, 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 be often painful to hear, — without affecting the consciousness. I hardly ever failed, when I rambled through the village. 140 WALDEX. 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 caryatides, 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 necessary 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 appetite, as the tavern and victualling cellar; some by the fanc}^, as the dry goods store and the jeweller's; and others by the hair or the feet or the skirts, as the barber, 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 from these dangers , either by proceeding at once boldly and without deliberation to the goal, as is recommended to those who run the gantlet, or by keeping 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 THE VILLAGE. 141 a gap in the 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 together much longer, I was let out through the rear avenues, and so escaped to the woods again. It was very pleasant, when I stayed late in town, to launch myself into the night, especially if it was dark and tempestuous, and set sail from some bright village 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 withdrawn under hatches with a merry crew of thoughts, leaving only my outer man at the helm, or even tying up the helm when 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 com- mon nights, than most suppose. I frequently had to look up at the opening iDetween 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, 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 assistance. Several times, when a visitor chanced to stay into even- ing, 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 142 WALDEN. 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 meanwhile, 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 valual)le ex- perience, 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 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 unconsciously, steering like pilots by certain well-known beacons and head-lands, and if we go beyond our usual covirse we still carry in our minds the bearing of some neighboring cape; and not till we are completely 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 in- finite 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 THE VILLAGE. 143 elsewhere related, I did not pay a tax to, or recognize the authority of, the state, which buys and sells men, women, and chikh'en, like cattle at the door of its senate- house. I had gone down to the woods for other pur- poses. But, wherever a man goes, men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions, 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. I was never molested Ijy 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 respected than if it had been surrounded by a file of soldiers. The tired rambler could rest and warm himself 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 anything 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." 144 WALDEN. " 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." IX. 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 huckleberry 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 fish- ing on the pond since morning, as silent and motionless as a duck or a floating leaf, and, after practising 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 con- venience of fishermen; and I was equally pleased when THE PONDS. 145 he sat in my doorway to arrange his Hnes. Once in a while we sat together 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 altogether 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 surrounding 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 w^as 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 sky-rockets, which, coming down into the pond, were quenched wnth 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 daj-'s dinner, spent the hours of midnight fishing from a boat by moonlight, serenaded by owls and foxes, and hearing, from time to time, the creaking note of some unknown 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 some- times by thousands of small perch and shiners, dimpling the surface with their tails in the moonlight, and com- municating by a long flaxen line with mysterious nocturnal 146 WALDEiY. fishes which had their clweUing forty feet below, or some- times dragging sixty feet of Hue about the pond as I elled amuck. 143-38. " Nee bella fuerunt." From the elegies of Tibullus; I, X, 7. 144-9. " Fresh woods," etc. From the last line of Milton's Lycidm^. 144-27. Coenobites. Not a sect, but a general term for members of monastic orders; here, of course, a pun. 149-36. Castalian Fountain. See Classic Myths, p. 418. 153-34. Reticulatus means net-like in markings; guttatus, spott<>d. 154-13. Fair Haven. See the map. 156-3. Boom is here used in the sense of a pole set in water, or a barrier, to mark a channel or a boundary. NOTES. 279 160-17. Moore of Moore Hall. The hero of the ballad of the Dragon of Wantley, found in Percy's Rcliques. It is interesting to compare Thoreau's protest against the intruding railroad with that of Wordsworth against the Windermere Railway. Addressing the mountauis of the Lake country, he said: "Heard ye that whistle? As her long-linked Train Swept onwards, did the vision cross your view? Yes, ye were startled; — and, in balance true, AVeighing the mischief with the promised gain, Mountains, and Vales, and Floods, I call on you To share the passion of a just disdain." But Thoreau's disdain must not be taken too seriously; and that he could feel the poetic and the humaner sides of the locomotive and of commerce we have already seen evidence (see pp. 96-102; " I am refreshed and expanded when the freight train rattles past me," etc.). 164-1. Icarian Sea. A part of the ^Egean, named from the flight of Icarus. See Classic Myths, p. 2.56. 16-4-7. My lake country. See the map. 166-3. Kohinoor. One of the largest diamonds known, ac- quired by the British Crown in ISoO. 166-32. Valhalla. The hall of Odin; see Classic Myths, p. 367. 167-30. Benvenuto Cellini. .-Vii Italian artist and autobiogra- pher, 1500-1571. 168-9. " Thy entry," etc. This, the quatrain that follows, and the lines on page 172, are from Ellery Channing's poem on Baker Farm (1S4S). F. B. Sanborn, in his note to the poem in his edition of Channing's book on Thoreau, says: "When this poem was written, the retreat here celebrated was a most retired spot, the outlands on Fairhaven Bay of James Baker's large farm in Lincoln, two miles southeast of Concord Village, and a mile or so from Thoreau's Cove and cabin ... It is now the frontage of C. F. Adams's villa" (1902). 171-33. Remember thy Creator. Ecclesiastes 12 : 1. 173-3. Talaria. The winged sandals of Mercury and other fleet divinities. 175-9. " Yave not of the text," etc. That is, did not think the text worth a pulled hen. Chaucer's nun is a mistake for Chaucer's monk (in the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales). 175-22. Philanthropic. That is, loving mankind (as distin- guished from other Hving creatures). 177-16. Kirby and Spence were authors of an Introduction to Entomology, published 1815-1826. 179-2.5. The Ved. One of the Vedas; see note to p. 75. The Vedant (hne 30) is the writer. 179-38. Thseng-tseu was a di.sciple of Confucius, born about 505 B.C., who wrote two works on ethics. 180-3. Not that food which entereth, etc. See Matthew 15 : 11, 180-41. Mencius (otherwise Meng Tsze) was a Chinese philoso- pher who died about 289 B.C. In The Dial for October, 1843, Thoreau printed extracts from his writings foand in "the Chinese 280 NOTES. Classical Work, commonly called the Four Books," translated by Rev. David Collie. 181-23. Fauns and satyrs. Partly human, partly goat-like; see Classic Myths, pp. 77, 89. With the thought of this passage com- pare Tennyson's lines By an Evolutionist: " If my body come from brutes, tho' somewhat finer than their own, I am heir, and this my iiingdom. Shall the royal voice be mute? No, but if the rebel subject seek to drag me from the throne, Hold the sceptre, Human Soul, and rule thy province of the brute." 181-26. " How happy's he," etc. From a poem by John Donne (1573-1631), To Sir Edward Herbert. 181-31. " Those devils." See Mark 5 : 11-13. 183. The Hindoo law-giver. Thoreau probably refers to the "Laws of Menu," reputed to be a son or grandson of Brahma. Extracts from this code were printed in The Dial for January, 1S43. 183-21. A companion. Doubtless William EUery Channing, who lived in Concord, near Emerson, after 1841, and was one of Thoreau's few intimate friends. In his book on Tlioreau. the Poet-Naturalist, he recorded conversations remembered from their walks together, in the manner of tliis chapter of Thoreau's. 185-8. Con-fut-see. One form of the original Chinese name of Confucius (the common form being Latinized, as in the case of Mencius). 185-24. Pilpay & Co. That is, the writers of animal fables with moral significance; the "Fables of Pilpay (or Bidpai) '' came into Europe, through the Arabic, from the Sanskrit language. 188-17. The name of the Greek warriors called Myrmidons was traditionally derived from myrnie.r, ant. See Classic Myths, p. 102. 189-6. Patroclus. See Classic Myths, pp. 294-297.^ 189-26. Austerlitz and Dresden were victories of Napoleon, the first, in 1805, the second in ISlo. Concord Fight occurred on the same day as the Battle of Lexington, April 19, 1775, Buttrick being one of the commanders of the Hevolutionary troops. 190-18. The Hotel des Invalides is the national estabhshment of Fraiice for disabled solidcrs. 190-27. Franv;ois Huber was a Swiss naturalist (1750-1831). 190-28. .^neas Sylvius, otherwise Pius II, was Pope from 1458- 1464. 190-32. Eugenius IV was Pope from 1431-1447. 190-36. Olaus Magnus was a Swedish historian (1490-1558). 190-40. Christiern II was king of Denmark and Norway from 1513-1523. 191-2. The Fugitive Slave Bill was passed in 1850. 191-13. Jerbilla. A diminutive form of the more common jerboa. 192-5. His horse. Pegasus, of course; see Classic Myths, p. 233. 196-22. Ceres or Minerva. See Classic Myths, pp. 52, 56. 197-3!». A poet, l^llcry Channing again. 198-40. Cato. In De Agri Cultura, chapter 3. NOTES. 281 199-17. Prostrate Saturn. See Classic Myths, pp. 52, 56. 201-22. Unio fluviatilis. The river-mussel. 204-5, 6. Vulcan, the god of fire. Terminus of boundaries. 204-29. Gilpin. William Gilpin published a work called Remarks on Forest Scenery in 17i)l. He was the author of many volumes on scenery. See note to p. 233. 205-16. Michaux. Author of a work on the forest trees of the United States, which was translated from the French 1817-1S19. 205-31. Goody Blake and Harry Gill. See Wordsworth's poem so entitled. 206-30. " Light-winged Smoke," etc. This little poem, com- plete in ten lines, is considered to be one of Thoreau's best pieces of verse; it was first printed in The Dial for April, 1843. 208-15. The verses are from a poem, " The Wood-Fire," by Ellen H. Hooper, printed in The Dial, 1840. 209-31. Cato Uticensis. That is, "of Utica;" Marcus Porcius Cato, 95-4(5 b.c. 210-21. Scipio Africanus. Two Roman generals nanied Scipio were called "Africanus" because of military exploits in Africa. 211-16. Gondibert. A long and wearisome epic poem, pub- lished 1651. 211-21. Chalmers' collection. A collection, in many volumes, of the works of the most important, and many unimportant, English poets, published ISIO. 211-23. Nervii. An ancient people of Gaul. Here, of course, a hardly defensil)le pun. 214-31. " Fate, free-will," etc. From Paradise Lost, II, 560. 214-1. Bowl broken at the fountain. Misquoted from Eccle- siastes 12 : 6. 217-23. Turned to it the other. See Matthew 5 : 39. 218-3. A long-headed farmer. Probably Edmund Plosmer; see note to page 38. 218-16. A poet. Doubtless C'hanning again. 218-36. Last of the philosophers. Amos Bronson Alcott, who founded the Concord "School of Philosophy"; born at Wolcott, Conn., (1799-1888). 219-10. Old Mortality. A character in Scott's novel of the same name. 220-13. One other. Doubtless Emerson. 220-18. The Vishnu Purana is the most famous of the eighteen "Puranas" of India. — Poems in which are told the legendary histories of the Hindoo gods. It was englished by H. H. Wilson in 1840. 220-23. Did not see the man approaching from the town. Quoted from the old ballad of the Babes in the Wood. 221-21. Lingua vernacula. The natural language of the place. 225-23. Actaeon. See Classic Myths, p. 145. 229-5. Lepus, levipes. Another fanciful etymology. 231-25. The Styx. See Classic Myths, p. 78. 232-27. A " fifty-six." That is, a weight of that number of pounds. Cf. Hawthorne, in The House of the Seven Gables (chap. 282 NOTES. viii): "The modern Judge Pyneheon, if weighed m tne same' balance with his ancestor, would have required at least an old- fashioned fifty-six to keep the scale in equilibrio." This was half a "hundredweight" (112 pounds). 233-17. William Gilpin. See note to page 204. The quotation is from Gilpin's Obi^ervaiinns on the Highlands of Scotland, ISOO. 333-26. " So high as heaved," etc. Quoted from Paradise Lost, vii, 2S8-290. 239-25. Tartarus. See Classic Myths, pp. 39, 41. 24rl-.3."J. Bhagvat Geeta. See note to p. 49. 241-40. Brahma and Vishnu and Indra form the triad or trinity of the Hindoo mythology. 242-6. Atlantis and the Hesperides. See Classic Myths, pp. 73, 82. 242-7. The periplus of Hanno. On Hanno see note to p. 18. His voyage was called periplus, that is, circumnavigation. Ternate and Tidore are East Indian islands of the Molucca group. 248-20. Labor, lapsus, etc. These etymologies, again, are imaginative rather than historical. So with labium, on the follow- ing page. 249-39. ChampoUion was a French Orientalist, who in 1822 discovered the key to the Egyptian hieroglyphic writing. 250-5. Has some bowels. Thoreau plays on the old use of the word in the sense of compassion. 250-32. Thor. See Classic Myths, p. 369. 251-3. Weeds. A play on the old word weeds, meaning clothing; preserved longest in connection with mourning, as " widow's weeds." 251-37. " Et primus oritur," etc. "And first the grass springs up, called forth by the early rains." From Varro's Rerum Rusti- carum, II, 2. 253-6. I mean he; I mean the twig. That is, the very indi- vidual robin; the particular twig. One is reminded of Words- worth's lines: " But thcre'.s a tree, of many, one, A single field which I have looked upon, Both of them speak of something that is gone." 254-12. " Eurus ad^ Auroram," etc. From Ovid's Metamor- phoses, I, 61, 62; the lines that follow are from the same passage, 78-81. 254-29. While such a sun holds out to burn, etc. Altered from a hymn by Isaac Watts. ' While the lamp holds out to burn, The vilest sinner may return." 255-8. Tb3 joy of his Lord. See Matthew 2.5 : 21. 254-31. "The Golden Age," etc. From the Metamorphoses, I, 89-'. 16, 107-108. 256 lo. Death, etc. See 1 Corinthians 15 : 55. 257-.36. Compassion is a very untenable ground. This whole i NOTES. 283 passage is a fine exampie ot what has often been called Thoreau's stoicism. 258-14. Calidasa was a poet of ancient India; his drama Sakuntala was translated by Sir William Jones in 1789. 258-34. Terra del Fuego. Literally, the land of fire. 259-5. Great-circle sailing. This, properly speaking, is follow- ing the curve of the earth so as to keep to the line of the shortest distance between two points; but Thoreau appears to mean merely sailing on the surface of the globe, as opposed to getting into the interior of things. 259-21. Sir John Franklin was lost on an Arctic expedition in 1847. Thirty-nine relief expeditions were sent out, traces of his tleath being found only in 1859. Grinnell was an American merchant who fitted out one of the relief ships, in 1850. Mungo Park was an African explorer, who died about 1806. Lewis and Clark explored the region from St. Louis to the mouth of the Columbia, 1804-1806. Frobisher was one of the earhest English explorers (died 1594). 260-6. Erret, et extremes, etc., the closing Unes of Claudian's poem De Sene Veronensi. 260-13. " Symmes' Hole." John Cleves Symmes, naval cap- tain in the war of 1812, advocated a theory that the earth and other planets are composed of hollow concentric spheres, open at the poles, and habitable on the inside. He petitioned Congress to fit out an expedition to the North Pole to test his theory, and published many pamphlets and one l)Ook, Theory of Concentric Spheres, 1826. See the Atlantic Monthly, April, 1873. 260-30. Mirabeau was a Frenchman of the Revolution (1749- 1791). 262-8. Bright was formerly a common name for a horse. 262-41. Kabir was a Hindoo religious reformer who lived at Benares between 1488 and 1512. 265-39. " Lo, creation widens," etc. From Blanco White's once famous sonnet To Night, written about 1825. The octave runs: " IMysteriou.s Night! when our first parent knew Thee from report divine, and heard thy name, Did he not tremble for this lively frame. This glorious canopy of light and blue? Yet 'neath a curtain of translucent dew, Bathed in the rays of the great setting flame, Hesperus with the host of heaven came, And lo! creation widened in man's view." 265-41. Croesus was a very rich king of Lydia (560 B.C.). 266-26. The Mameluke bey. The Mamelukes were a military body which long exercised great power in Egypt; its officers were known as beys. In 1811 the Mamelukes were nearly exterminated by Mahomet Ali, who invited the order to court and then am- bushed and massacred them. The bey, referred to in the text, is, perhaps, the one who is said to have escaped by forcing his horse to leap from the parapet. Longmans' English Classics Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems. Edited by Ashley H. Thorndike, Professor of English in Columbia University. $0.25. [For Reading.] Browning's Select Poems. Edited by Percival Chubb, Director of English, Ethical Culture Schools, New York. $0.25. [For Reading.] Banyan's Pilgrim's Progress. 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