Transcriber’s Note:

Inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in the original document have been preserved. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

The following alternate spellings were noted, but retained:

Shakspeare and Shakespeare
Minot and Minott

MANUSCRIPT EDITION
LIMITED TO SIX HUNDRED COPIES
NUMBER ——

Star-flowers (Trientalis) (page 266)

Fair Haven Pond from the Cliffs

THE WRITINGS OF
HENRY DAVID THOREAU

JOURNAL

EDITED BY BRADFORD TORREY

II
1850-September 15, 1851

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
MDCCCCVI

CHAPTER I. 1850 (Æt. 32-33) The Religion of the Hindoos—Narrow Shoes—The Town of Bedford—A Visit to Haverhill and the Dustin House—Taste in Eating—Sawing Buttonwood Logs—The Insanity of Heroes—The Sand Cherry—Life in a Small Meadow—Turtle and Horned Pout—Limestone—The Energy of Our Ancestors—A New Bosphorus—Sippio Brister’s Gravestone—Fences—Driving Cows to Pasture—Setting Fire to the Woods—The Incendiary—The View from Goodman’s Hill in Sudbury—A Burner of Brush—Tending a Burning—The Regularity of the Cars—The Levels of Life—A Proposed Method of Fighting Wood-Fires—The Yezidis—Insects over the River—Cows in a Pasture—Horses Fighting—The Advantages of a Fire in the Woods—Walking by Night—An Indian Squaw—A Button from the Marquis of Ossoli’s Coat—Bones on the Beach—Fresh Water in Sand-Bars—Rags and Meanness—Tobacco Legislation—An Ideal Friend—Conforming—A Drunken Dutchman—Legs as Compasses—Walks about Concord—Meadow-Hay—The Old Marlborough Road—Surface of Water—The Money-Digger—The Railroad—Tall Ambrosia—The Ways of Cows—Flocks of Birds—A Great Blue Heron—The Elm—Uncle Charles Dunbar—Lines on a Flower growing in the Middle of the Road—A Beautiful Heifer—Water the Only Drink—On the River—Music—The Canadian Excursion—Living and Loving one’s Life—Canadian Houses—A Frog in the Milk—Apostrophe to Diana—Aground at Patchogue—The Relics of a Human Body on the Beach—Echoes—Sawmills—Begging Indians—The Indian and his Baskets—Uncle Charles on the Dock at New York—Nature in November—The Approach of Winter—Changes made in Views from the cutting down of Woods—Cats run Wild—The Growth of a Wood—Canadian Greatcoats—A Root Fence—Wild Apples—An Old Bone—A Miser and his Surveyor—The Remains of a Coal-Pit—The Pickerel in the Brooks—Wildness—The Attraction of the West—Frightened Cows—The Passing of the Wild Apple—Begging Governments—Old Maps—The First Cold Day—A New Kind of Cranberry—The Discoveries of the Unscientific Man—The Sportiveness of Cattle—Fair Haven Pond—Friends and Acquaintances—Summer Days in Winter—A Muskrat on the Ice—An Encampment of Indians at Concord—Indian Lore—Indian Inventions—Instinct in Women—The Little Irish Boy—Puffballs—An Ocean of Mist.	[3]
CHAPTER II. December, 1850 (Æt. 33) Moss—Circulation in Plants—The First Snow—Blue-Curls and Indigo-weed—Hands and Feet—Sweet-Gale—Promethea Cocoons—Frozen-thawed Apples—Swamps in Winter—An Old-fashioned Snow-Storm—A Shrike with Prey—The Death of Friends—Notes from Gordon Cumming—Blue Jays.	[120]
CHAPTER III. January-April, 1851 (Æt. 33) A Visit to the Clinton Gingham-Mills—Behavior—The Knowledge of an Unlearned Man—Snow-covered Hills—The Walker Errant—Sauntering—Freedom—F. A. Michaux on Certain Trees—Divine Communications—The Tameness of English Literature—Quotations from Ovid—Panoramas of the Rhine and the Mississippi—The Fertility of America—Midwinter—Sir John Mandeville on the Peoples of the Earth—A Society for the Diffusion of Useful Ignorance—America the She Wolf To-day—The Gregariousness of Man—The Edge of the Meadow—Fleets of Ice-Flakes—Waterfalls within Us—The Ice-Flakes again—Antiquity—The Health of the Farmer—Eating—The Fallibility of Friends—Moral Freedom—Manners and Character—Getting a Living—Actinism—The Floating Crust of the Meadow—Mythology and Geology—Law and Lawlessness—Carrying off Sims—Governor Boutwell—Concord and Slavery—The Fugitive Slave Law—Slavery and the Press—Mahomet—The Sentence of the Judge—The Servility of Newspapers—A False Idea of Liberty—Real and Actual Communications—The Cat—Love and Marriage.	[134]
CHAPTER IV. May, 1851 (Æt. 33) Purity—An Optical Illusion—A Mountain Tarn—Experiments in Living—The Caliph Omar—The Harivansa—The Taming of Beasts and Men—The Study of Nature—False Teeth or a False Conscience—Taking Ether—Moonlight—Notes from Michaux—Vegetation and Human Life—The Development of the Mind—The Mind and its Roots—Man our Contemporary—Names—Wild Apples and their Names—An Inspiring Regret—Medical Botany—The Designs of Providence—True Sites for Houses—The View from the Wayland Hills—An Organ-Grinder—Materia Medica—Tobacco—More Names for Wild Apples.	[186]
CHAPTER V. June, 1851 (Æt. 33) A Visit to Worcester—A Fallen Oak—Angelica and Hemlock—Transcendentalism—The Past and the Future—Who boosts You?—F. A. Michaux on the Ohio—Various Trees—Our Garments and the Trees’—A Moonlight Walk—Crossing Bridges at Night—Air-Strata at Night—A Book of the Seasons—South American Notes from Darwin’s “Voyage of a Naturalist”—Moonlight—Breathing—The Shimmering of the Moon’s Reflections on the Rippled Surface of a Pond—The Bittern’s Pumping—Twilight—Music Out-of-Doors—The Whip-poor-will’s Moon—Fireflies—Darwin again—The Rapid Growth of Grass—The Birch the Surveyor’s Tree—Criticism—Calmness—The Wood Thrush’s Song—The Ox’s Badges of Servitude—A Visit to a Menagerie—Old Country Methods of Farming—The Hypæthral Character of the “Week”—Dog and Wagon—Haying begun—The Fragrance of the Fir.	[224]
CHAPTER VI. July, 1851 (Æt. 33-34) Travellers heard talking at Night—Potato-Fields—Hubbard’s Bridge—Moonlight—Sam, the Jailer—Intimations of the Night—Shadows of Trees—Perez Blood’s Telescope—The Chastity of the Mind—A Rye-Field—A Visit to the Cambridge Observatory—Charles River—A Gorgeous Sunset—The Forms of Clouds—A Moonlight Walk—The Light of the Moon—Waterfalls within Us—Another Moonlight Walk—Eating a Raw Turnip—The Experience of Ecstasy—The Song Sparrow—Berry-Picking—Signs of the Season—The First of the Dog-Days—Pitch Pine Woods—The Ideal Self—The Life of the Spirit—A Proposed Occupation—The River’s Crop—An Old Untravelled Road—A Black Veil—A Human Footprint—The Gentleman—An Immortal Melody—Wild Pigeons—Mirabeau as a Highwayman—Ambrosial Fog—Maimed Geniuses—The Charm of the French Names in Canada—Walking and Writing—Swallows—The Moods of the Mind—Drought—A South Shore Excursion—On the Hingham Boat—Hull—The Cohasset Shore—Daniel Webster’s Farm—A Mackerel Schooner—Clark’s Island—A Boat Swamped—Digging Clams—The Rut of the Sea—Seals in Plymouth Harbor—Shells and Seaweeds—The Sailboat—Webster’s Nearest Neighbor—A Hard Man—Plymouth.	[280]
CHAPTER VII. August, 1851 (Æt. 34) Return to Concord—An Ill-managed Menagerie—A Summer Evening—A Musical Performer—The Moon and the Clouds—The Nearness of the Wild—Travelling—Profitable Interest—The Spread of Inventions—The Inspiring Melodies—An Unheeded Warning—Sounds of a Summer Night—The Moon’s War with the Clouds—First Signs of Morning—The Dawn—Thistle and Bee—Cool Weather—Delight in Nature—The Snake in the Stomach—The Haying—Dogs and Cows—British Soldiers in Canada—Liberty in Canada—Canadian Fortifications—Prehensile Intellects—The Poet and his Moods—Knowing one’s Subject—The Revolution of the Seasons—Rattlesnake-Plantain—The Creak of the Crickets—Botanical Terms—The Cardinal-Flower—The Canadian Feudal System—Government—The Flowering of the Vervain—The Conspicuous Flowers of the Season—The Visit to Canada—De Quincey’s Style—Charity and Almshouses—Men observed as Animals—The Price Farm Road—Snake and Toad—An August Wind—Cutting Turf—Burning Brush—The Telegraph—The Fortress of Quebec—A Faithful Flower—Potato Balls—The Seal of Evening—Solitude in Concord—The Names of Plants.	[367]
CHAPTER VIII. September, 1851 (Æt. 34) Disease the Rule of Existence—Finding one’s Faculties—Telegraphs—Moose-lipped Words—Cato’s De Re Rustica—The Horse and Man—Health and Disease—The Telegraph Harp—Walking in England—A Walk to Boon’s Pond in Stow—The Farmer and His Oxen—Tempe and Arcadia—Footpaths for Poets—Writing on Many Subjects—Dammed Streams—The Dog of the Woods—J. J. G. Wilkinson—Fastidiousness—A Lake by Moonlight—A Formalist—The Fullness of Life—Creatures of Institutions— Moments of Inspiration—Gladness—A September Evening—Singing heard at Night—Moonlight on the River—Fair Haven by Moonlight—Northern Lights—Soaring Hawks—The Grass and the Year—The Sky at Night—A Factory-Bell—Sunrise—The Color of the Poke—The Stone-mason’s Craft—Moral Effort—Benvenuto Cellini—An Endymion Sleep—The Mountains in the Horizon—The Telegraph Harp—Perambulating the Bounds—A Pigeon-Place—An Elusive Scent—The Cross-leaved Polygala.	[440]

ILLUSTRATIONS

STAR-FLOWERS (TRIENTALIS) Carbon photograph (page 266)	[Frontispiece]
FAIR HAVEN POND FROM THE CLIFFS	[Colored plate]
FAIR HAVEN POND FROM THE CLIFFS	[10]
NOVEMBER WOODS	[86]
FIRST SNOW	[122]
MIDWINTER	[150]
TOWN BROOK, PLYMOUTH	[364]

JOURNAL

VOLUME II

THE JOURNAL OF
HENRY DAVID THOREAU

VOLUME II

I
1850 (ÆT. 32-33)[1]

The Hindoos are more serenely and thoughtfully religious than the Hebrews. They have perhaps a purer, more independent and impersonal knowledge of God. Their religious books describe the first inquisitive and contemplative access to God; the Hebrew bible a conscientious return, a grosser and more personal repentance. Repentance is not a free and fair highway to God. A wise man will dispense with repentance. It is shocking and passionate. God prefers that you approach him thoughtful, not penitent, though you are the chief of sinners. It is only by forgetting yourself that you draw near to him.

The calmness and gentleness with which the Hindoo philosophers approach and discourse on forbidden themes is admirable.

What extracts from the Vedas I have read fall on me like the light of a higher and purer luminary, which describes a loftier course through a purer stratum,—free from particulars, simple, universal. It rises on me like the full moon after the stars have come out, wading through some far summer stratum of the sky.

The Vedant teaches how, “by forsaking religious rites,” the votary may “obtain purification of mind.”

One wise sentence is worth the state of Massachusetts many times over.

The Vedas contain a sensible account of God.

The religion and philosophy of the Hebrews are those of a wilder and ruder tribe, wanting the civility and intellectual refinements and subtlety of the Hindoos.

Man flows at once to God as soon as the channel of purity, physical, intellectual, and moral, is open.

With the Hindoos virtue is an intellectual exercise, not a social and practical one. It is a knowing, not a doing.

I do not prefer one religion or philosophy to another. I have no sympathy with the bigotry and ignorance which make transient and partial and puerile distinctions between one man’s faith or form of faith and another’s,—as Christian and heathen. I pray to be delivered from narrowness, partiality, exaggeration, bigotry. To the philosopher all sects, all nations, are alike. I like Brahma, Hari, Buddha, the Great Spirit, as well as God.

[Part of leaf missing here.]

A page with as true and inevitable and deep a meaning as a hillside, a book which Nature shall own as her own flower, her own leaves; with whose leaves her own shall rustle in sympathy imperishable and russet; which shall push out with the skunk-cabbage in the spring. I am not offended by the odor of the skunk in passing by sacred places.[2] I am invigorated rather. It is a reminiscence of immortality borne on the gale. O thou partial world, when wilt thou know God? I would as soon transplant this vegetable to Polynesia or to heaven with me as the violet.

Shoes are commonly too narrow. If you should take off a gentleman’s shoes, you would find that his foot was wider than his shoe. Think of his wearing such an engine! walking in it many miles year after year! A shoe which presses against the sides of the foot is to be condemned. To compress the foot like the Chinese is as bad as to compress the head like the Flatheads, for the head and the foot are one body. The narrow feet,—they greet each other on the two sides of the Pacific. A sensible man will not follow fashion in this respect, but reason. Better moccasins, or sandals, or even bare feet, than a tight shoe. A wise man will wear a shoe wide and large enough, shaped somewhat like the foot, and tied with a leather string, and so go his way in peace, letting his foot fall at every step.

When your shoe chafes your feet, put in a mullein leaf.

When I ask for a garment of a particular form, my tailoress tells me gravely, “They do not make them so now,” and I find it difficult to get made what I want, simply because she cannot believe that I mean what I say; it surpasses her credulity. Properly speaking, my style is as fashionable as theirs. “They do not make them so now,” as if she quoted the Fates! I am for a moment absorbed in thought, thinking, wondering who they are, where they live. It is some Oak Hall, O call, O. K., all correct establishment which she knows but I do not. Oliver Cromwell. I emphasize and in imagination italicize each word separately of that sentence to come at the meaning of it.[3]

Or you may walk into the foreign land of Bedford, where not even yet, after four or five, or even seven or eight, miles, does the sky shut down, but the airy and crystal dome of heaven arches high over all, when you did not suspect that there was so much daylight under its crystal dome, and from the hill eastward perchance see the small town of Bedford standing stately on the crest of a hill like some city of Belgrade with one hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants. I wonder if Mr. Fitch lives there among them.

How many noble men and women must have their abode there! So it seems,—I trust that so it is,—but I did not go into Bedford that time. But alas! I have been into a village before now, and there was not a man of a large soul in it. In what respect was it better than a village of prairie-dogs.[4] I mean to hint no reproach even by implica-[part of leaf torn off].

Sunday, May 12, 1850, visited the site of the Dustin house in the northwest part of Haverhill, now but a slight indentation in a corn-field, three or four feet deep, with an occasional brick and cellar-stone turned up in plowing. The owner, Dick Kimball, made much of the corn grown in this hole, some ears of which were sent to Philadelphia. The apple tree which is said to have stood north from the house at a considerable distance is gone. A brick house occupied by a descendant is visible from the spot, and there are old cellar-holes in the neighborhood, probably the sites of some of the other eight houses which were burned on that day. It is a question with some which is the site of the true Dustin house.

Also visited the same day an ancient garrison-house now occupied by Fred. Ayer, who said it was built one hundred and fifty or one hundred and sixty years ago by one Emerson, and that several oxen were killed by lightning while it was building. There was also a pear tree nearly as old as the house. It was built of larger and thicker and harder brick than are used nowadays, and on the whole looked more durable and still likely to stand a hundred years. The hard burnt blue-black ends of some of the bricks were so arranged as to checker the outside. He said it was considered the handsomest house in Haverhill when it was built, and people used to come up from town some two miles to see it. He thought that they were the original doors which we saw. There were but few windows, and most of them were about two feet and a half long and a foot or more wide, only to fire out of. The oven originally projected outside. There were two large fireplaces. I walked into one, by stooping slightly, and looked up at the sky. Ayer said jokingly that some said they were so made to shoot wild geese as they flew over. The chains and hooks were suspended from a wooden bar high in the chimney. The timbers were of immense size.

Fourteen vessels in or to be in the port of Haverhill, laden with coal, lumber, lime, wood, and so forth. Boys go [to] the wharf with their fourpences to buy a bundle of laths to make a hen-house; none elsewhere to be had.

Saw two or three other garrison-houses. Mrs. Dustin was an Emerson, one of the family for whom I surveyed.

Measured a buttonwood tree in Haverhill, one of twenty and more set out about 1739 on the banks of the Merrimack. It was thirteen and eight twelfths feet in circumference at three and a half feet from the ground.

Jewett’s steam mill is profitable, because the planing machine alone, while that is running, makes shavings and waste enough to feed the engine, to say nothing of the sawdust from the sawmill; and the engine had not required the least repair for several years. Perhaps, as there is not so much sawing and planing to be done in England, they therefore may not find steam so cheap as water.

A single gentle rain in the spring makes the grass look many shades greener.

It is wisest to live without any definite and recognized object from day to day,—any particular object,—for the world is round, and we are not to live on a tangent or a radius to the sphere. As an old poet says, “though man proposeth, God disposeth all.”

Our thoughts are wont to run in muddy or dusty ruts.

I too revive as does the grass after rain. We are never so flourishing, our day is never so fair, but that the sun may come out a little brighter through mists and we yearn to live a better life. What have we to boast of? We are made the very sewers, the cloacæ, of nature.

If the hunter has a taste for mud turtles and muskrats and skunks and other such savage titbits, the fine lady indulges a taste for some form of potted cheese, or jelly made of a calf’s foot, or anchovies from over the water, and they are even. He goes to the mill-pond, she to her preserve pot. I wonder how he, I wonder how I, can live this slimy, beastly kind of life, eating and drinking.[5]

The fresh foliage of the woods in May, when the leaves are about as big as a mouse’s ear, putting out like taller grasses and herbs.

In all my rambles I have seen no landscape which can make me forget Fair Haven. I still sit on its Cliff in a new spring day, and look over the awakening woods and the river, and hear the new birds sing, with the same delight as ever. It is as sweet a mystery to me as ever, what this world is. Fair Haven Lake in the south, with its pine-covered island and its meadows, the hickories putting out fresh young yellowish leaves, and the oaks light-grayish ones, while the oven-bird thrums his sawyer-like strain, and the chewink rustles through the dry leaves or repeats his jingle on a tree-top, and the wood thrush, the genius of the wood, whistles for the first time his clear and thrilling strain,—it sounds as it did the first time I heard it. The sight of these budding woods intoxicates me,—this diet drink.

The strong-colored pine, the grass of trees, in the midst of which other trees are but as weeds or flowers,—a little exotic.

In the row of buttonwood trees on the banks of the Merrimack in Haverhill, I saw that several had been cut down, probably because of their unsightly appearance, they all suffering from the prevalent disease which has attacked the buttonwood of late years, and one large one still resting on its stump where it had fallen. It seemed like a waste of timber or of fuel, but when I inquired about it, they answered that the millers did not like to saw it. Like other ornamental trees which have stood by the roadside for a hundred years, the inhabitants have been accustomed to fasten their horses to them, and have driven many spikes into them for this purpose. One man, having carried some buttonwood logs to mill, the miller agreed to saw them if he would make good the injury which might be done to his saw. The other agreed to it, but almost at the first clip they ran on to a spike and broke the saw, and the owner of the logs cried, “Stop!” he would have no more sawed. They are difficult to split, beside, and make poor timber at best, being very liable to warp.

The “itinerary distance” between two points, a convenient expression.

Fair Haven Pond from the Cliffs

Humboldt says, “It is still undetermined where life is most abundant: whether on the earth or in the fathomless depths of the ocean.”

It was a mirage, what in Sanscrit, according to Humboldt, is called “the thirst of the gazelle.”

Nothing memorable was ever accomplished in a prosaic mood of mind. The heroes and discoverers have found true more than was previously believed, only when they were expecting and dreaming of something more than their contemporaries dreamed of,—when they were in a frame of mind prepared in some measure for the truth.

Referred to the world’s standard, the hero, the discoverer, is insane, its greatest men are all insane. At first the world does not respect its great men. Some rude and simple nations go to the other extreme and reverence all kinds of insanity. Humboldt says, speaking of Columbus approaching the New World: “The grateful coolness of the evening air, the ethereal purity of the starry firmament, the balmy fragrance of flowers, wafted to him by the land breeze, all led him to suppose (as we are told by Herrera, in the Decades (5)), that he was approaching the garden of Eden, the sacred abode of our first parents. The Orinoco seemed to him one of the four rivers which, according to the venerable tradition of the ancient world, flowed from Paradise, to water and divide the surface of the earth, newly adorned with plants.”

Expeditions for the discovery of El Dorado, and also of the Fountain of Youth, led to real, though perhaps not compensatory, discoveries.[6]

I have heard my brother playing on his flute at evening half a mile off through the houses of the village, every note with perfect distinctness. It seemed a more beautiful communication with me than the sending up of a rocket would have been. So, if I mistake not, the sound of blasting rocks has been heard from down the river as far as Lowell,—some twenty miles by its course,—where they were making a deep cut for the railroad.

The sand cherry (Prunus depressa Pursh., Cerasus pumila Mx.) grew about my door, and near the end of May enlivened my yard with its umbels arranged cylindrically about its short branches. In the fall, weighed down with the weight of its large and handsome cherries, it fell over in wreath-like rays on every side. I tasted them out of compliment to nature, but I never learned to love them.[7]

If the long-continued rains cause the seeds to rot in the ground and destroy the potatoes in the low lands, they are good for the grass on the uplands, though the farmers say it is not so sweet.[8]

As I walked, I was intoxicated with the slight spicy odor of the hickory buds and the bruised bark of the black birch, and, in the fall, the pennyroyal.

Many a time I have expected to find a woodchuck, or rabbit, or a gray squirrel, when it was the ground-robin rustling the leaves.

I have been surprised to discover the amount and the various kinds of life which a single shallow swamp will sustain. On the south side of the pond, not more than a quarter of a mile from it, is a small meadow of ten or a dozen acres in the woods, considerably lower than Walden, and which by some is thought to be fed by the former by a subterranean outlet,—which is very likely, for its shores are quite springy and its supply of water is abundant and unfailing,—indeed tradition says that a sawmill once stood over its outlet, though its whole extent, including its sources, is not more than I have mentioned,—a meadow through which the Fitchburg Railroad passes by a very high causeway, which required many a carload of sand, where the laborers for a long time seemed to make no progress, for the sand settled so much in the night that by morning they were where they were the day before, and finally the weight of the sand forced upward the adjacent crust of the meadow with the trees on it many feet, and cracked it for some rods around. It is a wet and springy place throughout the summer, with a ditch-like channel, and in one part water stands the year round, with cat-o’-nine-tails and tussocks and muskrats’ cabins rising above it, where good cranberries may be raked if you are careful to anticipate the frost which visits this cool hollow unexpectedly early. Well, as I was saying, I heard a splashing in the shallow and muddy water and stood awhile to observe the cause of it. Again and again I heard and saw the commotion, but could not guess the cause of it,—what kind of life had its residence in that insignificant pool. We sat down on the hillside. Ere long a muskrat came swimming by as if attracted by the same disturbance, and then another and another, till three had passed, and I began to suspect that they were at the bottom of it. Still ever and anon I observed the same commotion in the waters over the same spot, and at length I observed the snout of some creature slyly raised above the surface after each commotion, as if to see if it were observed by foes, and then but a few rods distant I saw another snout above the water and began to divine the cause of the disturbance. Putting off my shoes and stockings, I crept stealthily down the hill and waded out slowly and noiselessly about a rod from the firm land, keeping behind the tussocks, till I stood behind the tussock near which I had observed the splashing. Then, suddenly stooping over it, I saw through the shallow but muddy water that there was a mud turtle there, and thrusting in my hand at once caught him by the claw, and, quicker than I can tell it, heaved him high and dry ashore; and there came out with him a large pout just dead and partly devoured, which he held in his jaws. It was the pout in his flurry and the turtle in his struggles to hold him fast which had created the commotion. There he had lain, probably buried in the mud at the bottom up to his eyes, till the pout came sailing over, and then this musky lagune had put forth in the direction of his ventral fins, expanding suddenly under the influence of a more than vernal heat,—there are sermons in stones, aye and mud turtles at the bottoms of the pools,—in the direction of his ventral fins, his tender white belly, where he kept no eye; and the minister squeaked his last.[9] Oh, what an eye was there, my countrymen! buried in mud up to the lids, meditating on what? sleepless at the bottom of the pool, at the top of the bottom, directed heavenward, in no danger from motes. Pouts expect their foes not from below. Suddenly a mud volcano swallowed him up, seized his midriff; he fell into those relentless jaws from which there is no escape, which relax not their hold even in death.[10] There the pout might calculate on remaining until nine days after the head was cut off. Sculled through Heywood’s shallow meadow, not thinking of foes, looking through the water up into the sky. I saw his [the turtle’s] brother sunning and airing his broad back like a ship bottom up which had been scuttled,—foundered at sea. I had no idea that there was so much going on in Heywood’s meadow.

The pickerel commonly lie perfectly still at night, like sticks, in very shallow water near the shore near a brook’s mouth. I have seen a large one with a deep white wound from a spear, cutting him half in two, unhealed and unhealable, fast asleep, and forked him into my boat. I have struck a pickerel sound asleep and knew that I cut him almost in two, and the next moment heard him go ashore several rods off; for being thus awakened in their dreams they shoot off with one impulse, intending only to abandon those parts, without considering exactly to what places they shall go. One night a small pickerel, which the boat had probably struck in his sleep, leaped into the boat and so was secured without a wound.

The chub is a soft fish and tastes like boiled brown paper salted.

I was as interested in the discovery of limestone as if it had been gold, and wondered that I had never thought of it before. Now all things seemed to radiate round limestone, and I saw how the farmers lived near to, or far from, a locality of limestone. I detected it sometimes in walls, and surmised from what parts it was probably carted; or when I looked down into an old deserted well, I detected it in the wall, and found where the first settlers had quarried it extensively. I read a new page in the history of these parts in the old limestone quarries and kilns where the old settlers found the materials of their houses; and I considered that, since it was found so profitable even at Thomaston to burn lime with coal dust, perchance these quarries might be worked again.[11]

When the rocks were covered with snow, I even uncovered them with my hands, that I might observe their composition and strata, and thought myself lucky when the sun had laid one bare for me; but [now] that they are all uncovered I pass by without noticing them. There is a time for everything.

We are never prepared to believe that our ancestors lifted large stones or built thick walls. I find that I must have supposed that they built their bank walls of such as a single man could handle. For since we have put their lives behind us we can think of no sufficient motive for such exertion. How can their works be so visible and permanent and themselves so transient? When I see a stone which it must have taken many yoke of oxen to move, lying in a bank wall which was built two hundred years ago, I am curiously surprised, because it suggests an energy and force of which we have no memorials. Where are the traces of the corresponding moral and intellectual energy? I am not prepared to believe that a man lived here so long ago who could elevate into a wall and properly aline a rock of great size and fix it securely,—such an Archimedes. I walk over the old corn-fields, it is true, where the grassy corn-hills still appear in the woods, but there are no such traces of them there. Again, we are wont to think that our ancestors were all stalwart men, because only their most enduring works have come down to us. I think that the man who lifted so large a rock in the course of his ordinary work should have had a still larger for his monument.

I noticed a singular instance of ventriloquism to-day in a male chewink singing on the top of a young oak. It was difficult to believe that the last part of his strain, the concluding jingle, did not proceed from a different quarter, a woodside many rods off. Hip-you, he-he-he-he. It was long before I was satisfied that the last part was not the answer of his mate given in exact time. I endeavored to get between the two; indeed, I seemed to be almost between them already.

I have not seen Walden so high for many years; it is within four feet of the pond-hole in Hubbard’s woods.

The river is higher than it has been at this season for many years.

When the far mountains are invisible, the near ones look the higher.

The oldest nature is elastic. I just felt myself raised upon the swell of the eternal ocean, which came rolling this way to land.

When my eye ranges over some thirty miles of this globe’s surface,—an eminence green and waving, with sky and mountains to bound it,—I am richer than Crœsus.

The variously colored blossoms of the shrub oaks now, in May, hanging gracefully like ear-drops, or the similar blossoms of the large oaks.

I have noticed the effect of a flag set up on a hill in the country. It tames the landscape, subdues it to itself. The hill looks as if it were a military post. Our green, wild country landscape is gathered under the folds of a flag.

A lively appearance is imparted to the landscape as seen from Nawshawtuct, by the flood on the meadows,—by the alternation of land and water, of green and of light colors. The frequent causeways, and the hedgerows (?) jutting into the meadows, and the islands, have an appearance full of light and life.

To-day, May 31st, a red and white cow, being uneasy, broke out of the steam-mill pasture and crossed the bridge and broke into Elijah Wood’s grounds. When he endeavored to drive her out by the bars, she boldly took to the water, wading first through the meadows full of ditches, and swam across the river, about forty rods wide at this time, and landed in her own pasture again. She was a buffalo crossing her Mississippi. This exploit conferred some dignity on the herd in my eyes, already dignified, and reflectedly on the river, which I looked on as a kind of Bosphorus.

I love to see the domestic animals reassert their native rights,—any evidence that they have not lost their original wild habits and vigor.[12]

There is a sweet wild world which lies along the strain of the wood thrush—the rich intervales which border the stream of its song—more thoroughly genial to my nature than any other.[13]

The blossoms of the tough and vivacious shrub oak are very handsome.

I visited a retired, now almost unused, graveyard in Lincoln to-day, where five British soldiers lie buried who fell on the 19th April, ’75. Edmund Wheeler, grandfather of William, who lived in the old house now pulled down near the present, went over the next day and carted them to this ground. A few years ago one Felch, a phrenologist, by leave of the selectmen dug up and took away two skulls. The skeletons were very large, probably those of grenadiers. William Wheeler, who was present, told me this. He said that he had heard old Mr. Child, who lived opposite, say that when one soldier was shot he leaped right up his full length out of the ranks and fell dead; and he, William Wheeler, saw a bullet-hole through and through one of the skulls.

Close by stood a stone with this inscription:—

In memory of
Sippio Brister
a man of Colour
who died
Nov 1. 1820
Æt. 64.

But that is not telling us that he lived.[14]

There was one Newell, a tailor, his neighbor, who became a Universalist minister. Breed put on his sign:—

Tailoring and barbering done with speed

By John C Newell & John C Breed.[15]

The water was over the turnpike below Master Cheney’s when I returned (May 31st, 1850).

[A third of a page torn out here.]

that these fences, to a considerable extent, will be found to mark natural divisions, especially if the land is not very minutely divided,—mowing (upland and meadow) pasture, woodland, and the different kinds of tillage. There will be found in the farmer’s motive for setting a fence here or there some conformity to natural limits. These artificial divisions no doubt have the effect of increasing the area and variety to the traveller. These various fields taken together appear more extensive than a single prairie of the same size would. If the divisions corresponded [A third of a page torn out here.]

The year has many seasons more than are recognized in the almanac. There is that time about the first of June, the beginning of summer, when the buttercups blossom in the now luxuriant grass and I am first reminded of mowing and of the dairy. Every one will have observed different epochs. There is the time when they begin to drive cows to pasture,—about the 20th of May,—observed by the farmer, but a little arbitrary year by year. Cows spend their winters in barns and cow-yards, their summers in pastures. In summer, therefore, they may low with emphasis, “To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new.” I sometimes see a neighbor or two united with their boys and hired men to drive their cattle to some far-off country pasture, fifty or sixty miles distant in New Hampshire, early in the morning, with their sticks and dogs. It is a memorable time with the farmers’ boys, and frequently their first journey from home. The herdsman in some mountain pasture is expecting them. And then in the fall, when they go up to drive them back, they speculate as to whether Janet or Brindle will know them. I heard such a boy exclaim on such an occasion, when the calf of the spring returned a heifer, as he stroked her side, “She knows me, father; she knows me.” Driven up to be the cattle on a thousand hills.

I once set fire to the woods. Having set out, one April day, to go to the sources of Concord River in a boat with a single companion, meaning to camp on the bank at night or seek a lodging in some neighboring country inn or farmhouse, we took fishing tackle with us that we might fitly procure our food from the stream, Indian-like. At the shoemaker’s near the river, we obtained a match, which we had forgotten. Though it was thus early in the spring, the river was low, for there had not been much rain, and we succeeded in catching a mess of fish sufficient for our dinner before we had left the town, and by the shores of Fair Haven Pond we proceeded to cook them. The earth was uncommonly dry, and our fire, kindled far from the woods in a sunny recess in the hillside on the east of the pond, suddenly caught the dry grass of the previous year which grew about the stump on which it was kindled. We sprang to extinguish it at first with our hands and feet, and then we fought it with a board obtained from the boat, but in a few minutes it was beyond our reach; being on the side of a hill, it spread rapidly upward, through the long, dry, wiry grass interspersed with bushes.

“Well, where will this end?” asked my companion. I saw that it might be bounded by Well Meadow Brook on one side, but would, perchance, go to the village side of the brook. “It will go to town,” I answered. While my companion took the boat back down the river, I set out through the woods to inform the owners and to raise the town. The fire had already spread a dozen rods on every side and went leaping and crackling wildly and irreclaimably toward the wood. That way went the flames with wild delight, and we felt that we had no control over the demonic creature to which we had given birth. We had kindled many fires in the woods before, burning a clear space in the grass, without ever kindling such a fire as this.

As I ran toward the town through the woods, I could see the smoke over the woods behind me marking the spot and the progress of the flames. The first farmer whom I met driving a team, after leaving the woods, inquired the cause of the smoke. I told him. “Well,” said he, “it is none of my stuff,” and drove along. The next I met was the owner in his field, with whom I returned at once to the woods, running all the way. I had already run two miles. When at length we got into the neighborhood of the flames, we met a carpenter who had been hewing timber, an infirm man who had been driven off by the fire, fleeing with his axe. The farmer returned to hasten more assistance. I, who was spent with running, remained. What could I do alone against a front of flame half a mile wide?

I walked slowly through the wood to Fair Haven Cliff, climbed to the highest rock, and sat down upon it to observe the progress of the flames, which were rapidly approaching me, now about a mile distant from the spot where the fire was kindled. Presently I heard the sound of the distant bell giving the alarm, and I knew that the town was on its way to the scene. Hitherto I had felt like a guilty person,—nothing but shame and regret. But now I settled the matter with myself shortly. I said to myself: “Who are these men who are said to be the owners of these woods, and how am I related to them? I have set fire to the forest, but I have done no wrong therein, and now it is as if the lightning had done it. These flames are but consuming their natural food.” (It has never troubled me from that day to this more than if the lightning had done it. The trivial fishing was all that disturbed me and disturbs me still.) So shortly I settled it with myself and stood to watch the approaching flames.[16] It was a glorious spectacle, and I was the only one there to enjoy it. The fire now reached the base of the cliff and then rushed up its sides. The squirrels ran before it in blind haste, and three pigeons dashed into the midst of the smoke. The flames flashed up the pines to their tops, as if they were powder.

When I found I was about to be surrounded by the fire, I retreated and joined the forces now arriving from the town. It took us several hours to surround the flames with our hoes and shovels and by back fires subdue them. In the midst of all I saw the farmer whom I first met, who had turned indifferently away saying it was none of his stuff, striving earnestly to save his corded wood, his stuff, which the fire had already seized and which it after all consumed.

It burned over a hundred acres or more and destroyed much young wood. When I returned home late in the day, with others of my townsmen, I could not help noticing that the crowd who were so ready to condemn the individual who had kindled the fire did not sympathize with the owners of the wood, but were in fact highly elate and as it were thankful for the opportunity which had afforded them so much sport; and it was only half a dozen owners, so called, though not all of them, who looked sour or grieved, and I felt that I had a deeper interest in the woods, knew them better and should feel their loss more, than any or all of them. The farmer whom I had first conducted to the woods was obliged to ask me the shortest way back, through his own lot. Why, then, should the half-dozen owners [and] the individuals who set the fire alone feel sorrow for the loss of the wood, while the rest of the town have their spirits raised? Some of the owners, however, bore their loss like men, but other some declared behind my back that I was a “damned rascal;” and a flibbertigibbet or two, who crowed like the old cock, shouted some reminiscences of “burnt woods” from safe recesses for some years after. I have had nothing to say to any of them. The locomotive engine has since burned over nearly all the same ground and more, and in some measure blotted out the memory of the previous fire. For a long time after I had learned this lesson I marvelled that while matches and tinder were contemporaries the world was not consumed; why the houses that have hearths were not burned before another day; if the flames were not as hungry now as when I waked them. I at once ceased to regard the owners and my own fault,—if fault there was any in the matter,—and attended to the phenomenon before me, determined to make the most of it. To be sure, I felt a little ashamed when I reflected on what a trivial occasion this had happened, that at the time I was no better employed than my townsmen.

That night I watched the fire, where some stumps still flamed at midnight in the midst of the blackened waste, wandering through the woods by myself; and far in the night I threaded my way to the spot where the fire had taken, and discovered the now broiled fish,—which had been dressed,—scattered over the burnt grass.

This has been a cool day, though the first of summer. The prospect of the meadows from Lee’s Hill was very fine. I observe that the shadows of the trees are very distinct and heavy in such a day, falling on the fresh grass. They are as obvious as the trees themselves by mid-afternoon. Commonly we do not make much account of the distinct shadows of objects in the landscape.

What is bare and unsightly is covered by the water now. The verdure seems to spring directly from its bosom; there are no stems nor roots. The meadows are so many mirrors reflecting the light,—toward sunset dazzlingly bright.

I visited this afternoon (June 3d) Goodman’s Hill in Sudbury, going through Lincoln over Sherman’s Bridge and Round Hill, and returning through the Corner. It probably affords the best view of Concord River meadows of any hill. The horizon is very extensive as it is, and if the top were cleared so that you could get the western view, it would be one of the most extensive seen from any hill in the county. The most imposing horizons are those which are seen from tops of hills rising out of a river valley. The prospect even from a low hill has something majestic in it in such a case. The landscape is a vast amphitheatre rising to its rim in the horizon. There is a good view of Lincoln lying high up in among the hills. You see that it is the highest town hereabouts, and hence its fruit. The river at this time looks as large as the Hudson. I think that a river-valley town is much the handsomest and largest-featured,—like Concord and Lancaster, for instance, natural centres. Upon the hills of Bolton, again, the height of land between the Concord and Nashua, I have seen how the peach flourishes. Nobscot, too, is quite imposing as seen from the west side of Goodman’s Hill. On the western side of a continuation of this hill is Wadsworth’s battle-field.[17]

Returning, I saw in Sudbury twenty-five nests of the new (cliff?) swallow under the eaves of a barn. They seemed particularly social and loquacious neighbors, though their voices are rather squeaking. Their nests, built side by side, looked somewhat like large hornets’ nests, enough so to prove a sort of connection. Their activity, sociability, and chattiness make them fit pensioners and neighbors of man—summer companions—for the barn-yard.

The last of May and the first of June the farmers are everywhere planting their corn and beans and potatoes.

To-day, June 4th, I have been tending a burning in the woods. Ray was there. It is a pleasant fact that you will know no man long, however low in the social scale, however poor, miserable, intemperate, and worthless he may appear to be, a mere burden to society, but you will find at last that there is something which he understands and can do better than any other. I was pleased to hear that one man had sent Ray as the one who had had the most experience in setting fires of any man in Lincoln. He had experience and skill as a burner of brush.

You must burn against the wind always, and burn slowly. When the fire breaks over the hoed line, a little system and perseverance will accomplish more toward quelling it than any man would believe. It fortunately happens that the experience acquired is oftentimes worth more than the wages. When a fire breaks out in the woods, and a man fights it too near and on the side, in the heat of the moment, without the systematic coöperation of others, he is disposed to think it a desperate case, and that this relentless fiend will run through the forest till it is glutted with food; but let the company rest from their labors a moment, and then proceed more deliberately and systematically, giving the fire a wider berth, and the company will be astonished to find how soon and easily they will subdue it. The woods themselves furnish one of the best weapons with which to contend with the fires that destroy them,—a pitch pine bough. It is the best instrument to thrash it with. There are few men who do not love better to give advice than to give assistance.

However large the fire, let a few men go to work deliberately but perseveringly to rake away the leaves and hoe off the surface of the ground at a convenient distance from the fire, while others follow with pine boughs to thrash it with when it reaches the line, and they will finally get round it and subdue it, and will be astonished at their own success.

A man who is about to burn his field in the midst of woods should rake off the leaves and twigs for the breadth of a rod at least, making no large heaps near the outside, and then plow around it several furrows and break them up with hoes, and set his fire early in the morning, before the wind rises.

As I was fighting the fire to-day, in the midst of the roaring and crackling,—for the fire seems to snort like a wild horse,—I heard from time to time the dying strain, the last sigh, the fine, clear, shrill scream of agony, as it were, of the trees breathing their last, probably the heated air or the steam escaping from some chink. At first I thought it was some bird, or a dying squirrel’s note of anguish, or steam escaping from the tree. You sometimes hear it on a small scale in the log on the hearth. When a field is burned over, the squirrels probably go into the ground. How foreign is the yellow pine to the green woods—and what business has it here?

The fire stopped within a few inches of a partridge’s nest to-day, June 4th, whom we took off in our hands and found thirteen creamy-colored eggs. I started up a woodcock when I went to a rill to drink, at the westernmost angle of R. W. E.’s wood-lot.

To-night, June 5th, after a hot day, I hear the first peculiar summer breathing of the frogs.

When all is calm, a small whirlwind will suddenly lift up the blazing leaves and let them fall beyond the line, and set all the woods in a blaze in a moment. Or some slight almost invisible cinder, seed of fire, will be wafted from the burnt district on to the dry turf which covers the surface and fills the crevices of many rocks, and there it will catch as in tinder, and smoke and smoulder, perchance, for half an hour, heating several square yards of ground where yet no fire is visible, until it spreads to the leaves and the wind fans it into a blaze.

Men go to a fire for entertainment. When I see how eagerly men will run to a fire, whether in warm or in cold weather, by day or by night, dragging an engine at their heels, I am astonished to perceive how good a purpose the love of excitement is made to serve. What other force, pray, what offered pay, what disinterested neighborliness could ever effect so much? No, these are boys who are to be dealt with, and these are the motives that prevail. There is no old man or woman dropping into the grave but covets excitement.

Yesterday, when I walked to Goodman’s Hill, it seemed to me that the atmosphere was never so full of fragrance and spicy odors. There is a great variety in the fragrance of the apple blossoms as well as their tints. Some are quite spicy. The air seemed filled with the odor of ripe strawberries, though it is quite too early for them. The earth was not only fragrant but sweet and spicy to the smell, reminding us of Arabian gales and what mariners tell of the spice islands. The first of June, when the lady’s-slipper and the wild pink have come out in sunny places on the hillsides, then the summer is begun according to the clock of the seasons.

Here it is the 8th of June, and the grass is growing apace. In the front yards of the village they are already beginning to cut it. The fields look luxuriant and verdurous, but, as the weather is warmer, the atmosphere is not so clear. In distant woods the partridge sits on her eggs, and at evening the frogs begin to dream and boys begin to bathe in the river and ponds.

Cultivate the habit of early rising. It is unwise to keep the head long on a level with the feet.

The cars come and go with such regularity and precision, and the whistle and rumble are heard so far, that town clocks and family clocks are already half dispensed with, and it is easy to foresee that one extensive well-conducted and orderly institution like a railroad will keep time and order for a whole country. The startings and arrivals of the cars are the epochs in a village day.[18]

Not till June can the grass be said to be waving in the fields. When the frogs dream, and the grass waves, and the buttercups toss their heads, and the heat disposes to bathe in the ponds and streams, then is summer begun.

June 9th, 1850, Walden is still rising, though the rains have ceased and the river has fallen very much. I see the pollen of the pitch pine now beginning to cover the surface of the pond. Most of the pines at the north-northwest end have none, and on some there is only one pollen-bearing flower.

I saw a striped snake which the fire in the woods had killed, stiffened and partially blackened by the flames, with its body partly coiled up and raised from the ground, and its head still erect as if ready to dart out its tongue and strike its foe. No creature can exhibit more venom than a snake, even when it is not venomous, strictly speaking.

The fire ascended the oak trees very swiftly by the moss which fringed them.

It has a singular effect on us when we hear the geologist apply his terms to Judea,—speak of “limestone” and “blocks of trap and conglomerate, boulders of sandstone and quartz” there. Or think of a chemical analysis of the water of the Dead Sea!

The pitch and white pines are two years or more maturing their seed.

Certain rites are practiced by the Smrities (among the Hindoos) at the digging of wells.

In early times the Brahmans, though they were the legislators of India, possessed no executive power and lived in poverty; yet they were for the most part independent and respected.

Galbraith’s Math. Tables, Edinburgh, 1834. For descriptions of instruments he refers to Jones’s edition of Adam’s Geom. and Graphical Essays, Biot’s Traité d’Astronomie Physique, Base du Système Métrique, Woodhouse’s, Vince’s, and Pearson’s Treatises of Astronomy. For problems connected with trigonometrical surveying, to the third volume of Hutton’s Course of Math. by Dr. O. Gregory, Baron Zach’s work on the Attraction of Mountains, the Base du Système de Métrique Décimal, and Puissant’s Géodesie.

Olive or red seems the fittest color for a man, a denizen of the woods. The pale white man! I do not wonder that the African pitied him.[19]

The white pine cones are now two inches long, curved sickle-like from the topmost branches, reminding you of the tropical trees which bear their fruit at their heads.[20]

The life in us is like the water in the river; it may rise this year higher than ever it was known to before and flood the uplands—even this may be the eventful year—and drown out all our muskrats.[21]

There [are] as many strata at different levels of life as there are leaves in a book. Most men probably have lived in two or three. When on the higher levels we can remember the lower levels, but when on the lower we cannot remember the higher.

My imagination, my love and reverence and admiration, my sense of the miraculous, is not so excited by any event as by the remembrance of my youth. Men talk about Bible miracles because there is no miracle in their lives. Cease to gnaw that crust. There is ripe fruit over your head.

Woe to him who wants a companion, for he is unfit to be the companion even of himself.

We inspire friendship in men when we have contracted friendship with the gods.

When we cease to sympathize with and to be personally related to men, and begin to be universally related, then we are capable of inspiring others with the sentiment of love for us.

We hug the earth. How rarely we mount! How rarely we climb a tree! We might get a little higher, methinks. That pine would make us dizzy. You can see the mountains from it as you never did before.[22]

Shall not a man have his spring as well as the plants?

The halo around the shadow is visible both morning and evening.[23]

After this and some other fires in the woods which I helped to put out, a more effectual system by which to quell them occurred to me. When the bell rings, hundreds will run to a fire in the woods without carrying any implement, and then waste much time after they get there either in doing nothing or what is worse than nothing, having come mainly out of curiosity, it being as interesting to see it burn as to put it out. I thought that it would be well if forty or fifty men in every country town should enroll themselves into a company for this purpose and elect suitable officers. The town should provide a sufficient number of rakes, hoes, and shovels, which it should be the duty of certain of the company to convey to [the] woods in a wagon, together with the drum, on the first alarm, people being unwilling to carry their own tools for fear they will be lost. When the captain or one of the numerous vice-captains arrives, having inspected the fire and taken his measures, let him cause the roll to be called, however the men may be engaged, and just take a turn or two with his men to form them into sections and see where they are. Then he can appoint and equip his rake-men and his hoe-men and his bough-men, and drop them at the proper places, always retaining the drummer and a scout; and when he has learned through his scout that the fire has broken out in a new place, he, by beat of drum, can take up one or two men of each class—as many as can be spared—and repair to the scene of danger.

One of my friends suggests instead of the drum some delicious music, adding that then he would come. It might be well, to refresh the men when wearied with work, and cheer them on their return. Music is the proper regulator.

So, far in the East, among the Yezidis, or Worshippers of the Devil, so called, and the Chaldæans, and so forth, you may hear these remarkable disputations on doctrinal points.[24]

Any reverence, even for a material thing, proceeds from an elevation of character. Layard, speaking of the reverence for the sun exhibited by the Yezidis, or Worshippers of the Devil, says: “They are accustomed to kiss the object on which its first beams fall; and I have frequently, when travelling in their company at sunrise, observed them perform this ceremony. For fire, as symbolic, they have nearly the same reverence; they never spit into it, but frequently pass their hands through the flame, kiss them, and rub them over their right eyebrow, or sometimes over the whole face.”

Who taught the oven-bird to conceal her nest? It is on the ground, yet out of sight. What cunning there is in nature! No man could have arranged it more artfully for the purpose of concealment. Only the escape of the bird betrays it.

I observe to-night, June 15th, the air over the river by the Leaning Hemlocks filled with myriads of newly fledged insects drifting and falling as it were like snowflakes from the maples, only not so white. Now they drift up the stream, now down, while the river below is dimpled with the fishes rising to swallow the innumerable insects which have fallen [into] it and are struggling with it. I saw how He fed his fish. They, swimming in the dark nether atmosphere of the river, rose lazily to its surface to swallow such swimmers of the light upper atmosphere as sank to its bottom.[25]

I picked up to-day the lower jaw of a hog, with white and sound teeth and tusks, which reminded me that there was an animal health and vigor distinct from the spiritual health. This animal succeeded by other means than temperance and purity.[26]

There are thirty-eight lighthouses in Massachusetts. The light on the Highlands of Neversink is visible the greatest distance, viz. thirty miles. There are two there, one revolving, one not.

The fantastic open light crosses which the limbs of the larch make, seen against the sky, of the sky-blue color its foliage.

In a swamp where the trees stand up to their knees, two or three feet deep, in the fine bushes as in a moss bed.

The arbor-vitæ fans, rich, heavy, elaborate, like bead-work.

June 20. I can see from my window three or four cows in a pasture on the side of Fair Haven Hill, a mile and a half distant. There is but one tree in the pasture, and they are all collected and now reposing in its shade, which, as it is early though sultry, is extended a good way along the ground. It makes a pretty landscape. That must have been an epoch in the history of the cow when they discovered to stand in the shadow of a tree. I wonder if they are wise enough to recline on the north side of it, that they may not be disturbed so soon. It shows the importance of leaving trees for shade in the pastures as well as for beauty. There is a long black streak, and in it the cows are collected. How much more they will need this shelter at noon! It is a pleasant life they lead in the summer,—roaming in well-watered pastures, grazing, and chewing the cud in the shade,—quite a philosophic life and favorable for contemplation, not like their pent-up winter life in close and foul barns. If only they could say as on the prairies, “To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new.”

Cattle and horses, however, retain many of their wild habits or instincts wonderfully. The seeds of instinct are preserved under their thick hides, like seeds in the bowels of the earth, an indefinite period.[27] I have heard of a horse which his master could not catch in his pasture when the first snowflakes were falling, who persisted in wintering out. As he persisted in keeping out of his reach, his master finally left him. When the snow had covered the ground three or four inches deep, the horse pawed it away to come at the grass,—just as the wild horses of Michigan do, who are turned loose by their Indian masters,—and so he picked up a scanty subsistence. By the next day he had had enough of free life and pined for his stable, and so suffered himself to be caught.

A blacksmith, my neighbor, heard a great clattering noise the other day behind his shop, and on going out found that his mare and his neighbor the pumpmaker’s were fighting. They would run at one another, then turn round suddenly and let their heels fly. The rattling of their hoofs one against the other was the noise he heard. They repeated this several times with intervals of grazing, until one prevailed. The next day they bore the marks of some bruises, some places where the skin was rucked up, and some swellings.

And then for my afternoon walks I have a garden, larger than any artificial garden that I have read of and far more attractive to me,—mile after mile of embowered walks, such as no nobleman’s grounds can boast, with animals running free and wild therein as from the first,—varied with land and water prospect, and, above all, so retired that it is extremely rare that I meet a single wanderer in its mazes. No gardener is seen therein, no gates nor [sic]. You may wander away to solitary bowers and brooks and hills.

The ripple marks on the sandy bottom of Flint’s Pond, where the rushes grow, feel hard to the feet of the wader, though the sand is really soft,—made firm perchance by the weight of the water.[28]

The rushes over the water are white with the exuviæ, the skeletons, of insects,—like blossoms,—which have deposited their eggs on their tops. The skeletons looked like those of shad-flies, though some living insects were not.

I have seen crimson-colored eggs painting the leaves of the black birch quite beautifully.

And now the ascending sun has contracted the shadow of the solitary tree, and they are compelled to seek the neighboring wood for shelter.

June 21. The flowers of the white pine are now in their prime, but I see none of their pollen on the pond.

This piece of rural pantomime, this bucolic, is enacted before me every day. Far over the hills on that fair hillside, I look into the pastoral age.

But these are only the disadvantages of a fire. It is without doubt an advantage on the whole. It sweeps and ventilates the forest floor, and makes it clear and clean. It is nature’s besom. By destroying the punier underwood it gives prominence to the larger and sturdier trees, and makes a wood in which you can go and come. I have often remarked with how much more comfort and pleasure I could walk in woods through which a fire had run the previous year. It will clean the forest floor like a broom perfectly smooth and clear,—no twigs left to crackle underfoot, the dead and rotten wood removed,—and thus in the course of two or three years new huckleberry fields are created for the town,—for birds and men.

When the lightning burns the forest its Director makes no apology to man, and I was but His agent. Perhaps we owe to this accident partly some of the noblest natural parks. It is inspiriting to walk amid the fresh green sprouts of grass and shrubbery pushing upward through the charred surface with more vigorous growth.

Wherever a man goes men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions.[29]

Sometimes an arrowhead is found with the mouldering shaft still attached. (Vide Charles Hubbard.) A little boy from Compton, R. I., told me that his father found an arrowhead sticking in a dead tree and nearly buried in it. Where is the hand that drew that bow? The arrow shot by the Indian is still found occasionally, sticking in the trees of our forest.

It is astonishing how much information is to be got out of very unpromising witnesses. A wise man will avail himself of the observation of all. Every boy and simpleton has been an observer in some field,—so many more senses they are, differently located. Will inquire of eyes what they have seen, of ears what they have heard, of hands what they have done, of feet where they have been.

July 16. I have not yet been able to collect half a thimbleful of the pollen of the pine on Walden, abundant as it was last summer.

There is in our yard a little pitch pine four or five years old and not much more than a foot high, with small cones on it but no male flowers; and yet I do not know of another pitch pine tree within half a mile.

Many men walk by day; few walk by night. It is a very different season. Instead of the sun, there are the moon and stars; instead of the wood thrush, there is the whip-poor-will; instead of butterflies, fireflies, winged sparks of fire! who would have believed it? What kind of life and cool deliberation dwells in a spark of fire in dewy abodes? Every man carries fire in his eye, or in his blood, or in his brain. Instead of singing birds, the croaking of frogs and the intenser dream of crickets. The potatoes stand up straight, the corn grows, the bushes loom, and, in a moonlight night, the shadows of rocks and trees and bushes and hills are more conspicuous than the objects themselves. The slightest inequalities in the ground are revealed by the shadows; what the feet find comparatively smooth appears rough and diversified to the eye. The smallest recesses in the rocks are dim and cavernous; the ferns in the wood appear to be of tropical size; the pools seen through the leaves become as full of light as the sky. “The light of day takes refuge in their bosom,” as the Purana says of the ocean. The woods are heavy and dark. Nature slumbers. The rocks retain the warmth of the sun which they have absorbed all night.[30]

The names of those who bought these fields of the red men, the wild men of the woods, are Buttrick, Davis, Barrett, Bulkley, etc., etc. (Vide History.) Here and there still you will find a man with Indian blood in his veins, an eccentric farmer descended from an Indian chief; or you will see a solitary pure-blooded Indian, looking as wild as ever among the pines, one of the last of the Massachusetts tribes, stepping into a railroad car with his gun.

Still here and there an Indian squaw with her dog, her only companion, lives in some lone house, insulted by school-children, making baskets and picking berries her employment. You will meet her on the highway, with few children or none, with melancholy face, history, destiny; stepping after her race; who had stayed to tuck them up in their long sleep. For whom berries condescend to grow. I have not seen one on the Musketaquid for many a year, and some who came up in their canoes and camped on its banks a dozen years ago had to ask me where it came from. A lone Indian woman without children, accompanied by her dog, wearing the shroud of her race, performing the last offices for her departed race. Not yet absorbed into the elements again; a daughter of the soil; one of the nobility of the land. The white man an imported weed,—burdock and mullein, which displace the ground-nut.

As a proof that oysters do not move, I have been told by a Long Island oysterman that they are found in large clusters surrounding the parent oyster in the position in which they must have grown, the young being several years old.

I find the actual to be far less real to me than the imagined. Why this singular prominence and importance is given to the former, I do not know. In proportion as that which possesses my thoughts is removed from the actual, it impresses me. I have never met with anything so truly visionary and accidental as some actual events. They have affected me less than my dreams. Whatever actually happens to a man is wonderfully trivial and insignificant,—even to death itself, I imagine. He complains of the fates who drown him, that they do not touch him. They do not deal directly with him. I have in my pocket a button which I ripped off the coat of the Marquis of Ossoli[31] on the seashore the other day. Held up, it intercepts the light and casts a shadow,—an actual button so called,—and yet all the life it is connected with is less substantial to me than my faintest dreams. This stream of events which we consent to call actual, and that other mightier stream which alone carries us with it,—what makes the difference? On the one our bodies float, and we have sympathy with it through them; on the other, our spirits. We are ever dying to one world and being born into another, and possibly no man knows whether he is at any time dead in the sense in which he affirms that phenomenon of another, or not. Our thoughts are the epochs of our life: all else is but as a journal of the winds that blew while we were here.[32]

I do not think much of the actual. It is something which we have long since done with. It is a sort of vomit in which the unclean love to wallow.

There was nothing at all remarkable about them. They were simply some bones lying on the beach. They would not detain a walker there more than so much seaweed. I should think that the fates would not take the trouble to show me any bones again, I so slightly appreciate the favor.[33]

Do a little more of that work which you have sometime confessed to be good, which you feel that society and your justest judge rightly demands of you. Do what you reprove yourself for not doing. Know that you are neither satisfied nor dissatisfied with yourself without reason. Let me say to you and to myself in one breath, Cultivate the tree which you have found to bear fruit in your soil. Regard not your past failures nor successes. All the past is equally a failure and a success; it is a success in as much as it offers you the present opportunity. Have you not a pretty good thinking faculty, worth more than the rarest gold watch? Can you not pass a judgment on something? Does not the stream still rise to its fountain-head in you? Go to the devil and come back again. Dispose of evil. Get punished once for all. Die, if you can. Depart. Exchange your salvation for a glass of water. If you know of any risk to run, run it. If you don’t know of any, enjoy confidence. Do not trouble yourself to be religious; you will never get a thank-you for it. If you can drive a nail and have any nails to drive, drive them. If you have any experiments you would like to try, try them; now’s your chance. Do not entertain doubts, if they are not agreeable to you. Send them to the tavern. Do not eat unless you are hungry; there’s no need of it. Do not read the newspapers. Improve every opportunity to be melancholy. Be as melancholy as you can be, and note the result. Rejoice with fate. As for health, consider yourself well, and mind your business. Who knows but you are dead already? Do not stop to be scared yet; there are more terrible things to come, and ever to come. Men die of fright and live of confidence. Be not simply obedient like the vegetables; set up your own Ebenezer. Of man’s “disobedience and the fruit,” etc. Do not engage to find things as you think they are. Do what nobody can do for you. Omit to do everything else.[34]

According to Lieutenant Davis, the forms, extent, and distribution of sand-bars and banks are principally determined by tides, not by winds and waves.[35] On sand-bars recently elevated above the level of the ocean, fresh water is obtained by digging a foot or two. It is very common for wells near the shore to rise and fall with the tide. It is an interesting fact that the low sand-bars in the midst of the ocean, even those which are laid bare only at low tide, are reservoirs of fresh water at which the thirsty mariner can supply himself. Perchance, like huge sponges, they hold the rain and dew which falls on them, and which, by capillary attraction, is prevented from mingling with the surrounding brine.[36]

It is not easy to make our lives respectable to ourselves by any course of activity. We have repeatedly to withdraw ourselves into our shells of thought like the tortoise, somewhat helplessly; and yet there is even more than philosophy in that. I do not love to entertain doubts and questions.

I am sure that my acquaintances mistake me. I am not the man they take me for. On a little nearer view they would find me out. They ask my advice on high matters, but they do not even know how poorly on’t I am for hats and shoes. I have hardly a shift. Just as shabby as I am in my outward apparel,—aye, and more lamentably shabby, for nakedness is not so bad a condition after all,—am I in my inward apparel. If I should turn myself inside out, my rags and meanness would appear. I am something to him that made me, undoubtedly, but not much to any other that he has made.[37] All I can say is that I live and breathe and have my thoughts.

What is peculiar in the life of a man consists not in his obedience, but his opposition, to his instincts. In one direction or another he strives to live a supernatural life.

Would it not be worth the while to discover nature in Milton?[38] Be native to the universe. I, too, love Concord best, but I am glad when I discover, in oceans and wildernesses far away, the materials out of which a million Concords can be made,—indeed, unless I discover them, I am lost myself,—that there too I am at home. Nature is as far from me as God, and sometimes I have thought to go West after her. Though the city is no more attractive to me than ever, yet I see less difference between a city and some dismallest swamp than formerly. It is a swamp too dismal and dreary, however, for me. I would as lief find a few owls and frogs and mosquitoes less. I prefer even a more cultivated place, free from miasma and crocodiles, and I will take my choice.[39]

From time to time I overlook the promised land, but I do not feel that I am travelling toward it. The moment I begin to look there, men and institutions get out of the way that I may see. I see nothing permanent in the society around me, and am not quite committed to any of its ways.

The heaven-born Numa, or Lycurgus, or Solon, gravely makes laws to regulate the exportation of tobacco. Will a divine legislator legislate for slaves, or to regulate the exportation of tobacco? What shall a State say for itself at the last day, in which this is a principal production?

What have grave, not to say divine, legislators—Numas, Lycurguses, Solons—to do with the exportation or the importation of tobacco. There was a man appealed to me the other day, “Can you give me a chaw of tobacco?” I legislated for him. Suppose you were to submit the question to any son of God, in what State would you get it again?[40]

Do not waste any reverence on my attitude. I manage to sit up where I have dropped. Except as you reverence the evil one,—or rather the evil myriad. As for missing friends,—fortunate perhaps is he who has any to miss, whose place a thought will not supply. I have an ideal friend in whose place actual persons sometimes stand for a season. The last I may often miss, but the first I recover when I am myself again. What if we do miss one another? have we not agreed upon a rendezvous? While each travels his own way through the wood with serene and inexpressible joy, though it be on his hands and knees over the rocks and fallen trees, he cannot but be on the right way; there is no wrong way to him. I have found myself as well off when I have fallen into a quagmire, as in an armchair in the most hospitable house. The prospect was pretty much the same. Without anxiety let us wander on, admiring whatever beauty the woods exhibit.[41]

Do you know on what bushes a little peace, faith, and contentment grow? Go a-berrying early and late after them.[42] Miss our friends! It is not easy to get rid of them. We shall miss our bodies directly.

As to conforming outwardly, and living your own life inwardly, I have not a very high opinion of that course. Do not let your right hand know what your left hand does in that line of business. I have no doubt it will prove a failure.[43]

The wind through the blind just now sounded like the baying of a distant hound,—somewhat plaintive and melodious.

The railroad cuts make cliffs for swallows.

Getting into Patchogue late one night in an oyster-boat, there was a drunken Dutchman aboard whose wit reminded me of Shakespeare. When we came to leave the beach, our boat was aground, and we were detained three hours waiting for the tide. In the meanwhile two of the fishermen took an extra dram at the beach house. Then they stretched themselves on the seaweed by the shore in the sun to sleep off the effects of their debauch. One was an inconceivably broad-faced young Dutchman,—but oh! of such a peculiar breadth and heavy look, I should not know whether to call it more ridiculous or sublime. You would say that he had humbled himself so much that he was beginning to be exalted. An indescribable mynheerish stupidity. I was less disgusted by their filthiness and vulgarity, because I was compelled to look on them as animals, as swine in their sty. For the whole voyage they lay flat on their backs on the bottom of the boat, in the bilge-water and wet with each bailing, half insensible and wallowing in their vomit. But ever and anon, when aroused by the rude kicks or curses of the skipper, the Dutchman, who never lost his wit nor equanimity, though snoring and rolling in the vomit produced by his debauch, blurted forth some happy repartee like an illuminated swine. It was the earthiest, slimiest wit I ever heard. The countenance was one of a million. It was unmistakable Dutch. In the midst of a million faces of other races it could not be mistaken. It told of Amsterdam. I kept racking my brains to conceive how he could have been born in America, how lonely he must feel, what he did for fellowship. When we were groping up the narrow creek of Patchogue at ten o’clock at night, keeping our boat off, now from this bank, now from that, with a pole, the two inebriates roused themselves betimes. For in spite of their low estate they seemed to have all their wits as much about them as ever, aye, and all the self-respect they ever had. And the Dutchman gave wise directions to the steerer, which were not heeded. Suddenly rousing himself up where the sharpest-eyed might be bewildered in the darkness, he leaned over the side of the boat and pointed straight down into the creek, averring that that identical hole was a first-rate place for eels. And again he roused himself at the right time and declared what luck he had once had with his pots (not his cups) in another place, which we were floating over in the dark. At last he suddenly stepped on to another boat which was moored to the shore, with a divine ease and sureness, saying, “Well, good-night, take care of yourselves, I can’t be with you any longer.” He was one of the few remarkable men whom I have met. I have been impressed by one or two men in their cups. There was really a divinity stirred within them, so that in their case I have reverenced the drunken, as savages the insane, man. So stupid that he could never be intoxicated. When I said, “You have had a hard time of it to-day,” he answered with indescribable good humor out of the very midst of his debauch, with watery eyes, “Well, it doesn’t happen every day.” It was happening then.[44] He had taken me aboard on his back, the boat lying a rod from the shore, before I knew his condition. In the darkness our skipper steered with a pole on the bottom, for an oysterman knows the bottom of his bay as well as the shores, and can tell where he is by the soundings.[45]

There was a glorious lurid sunset to-night, accompanied with many sombre clouds, and when I looked into the west with my head turned, the grass had the same fresh green, and the distant herbage and foliage in the horizon the same bark blue, and the clouds and sky the same bright colors beautifully mingled and dissolving into one another, that I have seen in pictures of tropical landscapes and skies. Pale saffron skies with faint fishes of rosy clouds dissolving in them. A blood-stained sky. I regretted that I had an impatient companion. What shall we make of the fact that you have only to stand on your head a moment to be enchanted with the beauty of the landscape?

I met with a man on the beach who told me that when he wanted to jump over a brook he held up one leg a certain height, and then, if a line from his eye through his toe touched the opposite bank, he knew that he could jump it. I asked him how he knew when he held his leg at the right angle, and he said he knew the hitch very well. An Irishman told me that he held up one leg and if he could bring his toe in a range with his eye and the opposite bank he knew that he could jump it. Why, I told him, I can blot out a star with my toe, but I would not engage to jump the distance. It then appeared that he knew when he had got his leg at the right height by a certain hitch there was in it. I suggested that he should connect his two ankles with a string.[46]

I knew a clergyman who, when any person died, was wont to speak of that portion of mankind who survived as living monuments of God’s mercy. A negative kind of life to live!

I can easily walk ten, fifteen, twenty, any number of miles, commencing at my own door, without going by any house, without crossing a road except where the fox and the mink do. Concord is the oldest inland town in New England, perhaps in the States, and the walker is peculiarly favored here. There are square miles in my vicinity which have no inhabitant. First along by the river, and then the brook, and then the meadow and the woodside. Such solitude! From a hundred hills I can see civilization and abodes of man afar. These farmers and their works are scarcely more obvious than woodchucks.[47]

As I was going by with a creaking wheelbarrow, one of my neighbors, who heard the music, ran out with his grease-pot and brush and greased the wheels.

That is a peculiar season when about the middle of August the farmers are getting their meadow-hay. If you sail up the river, you will see them in all meadows, raking hay and loading it on to carts, great towering [?] teams, under which the oxen stand like beetles, chewing the cud, waiting for men to put the meadow on. With the heaviest load they dash aside to crop some more savory grass,—the half-broken steers.

There was reason enough for the first settler’s selecting the elm out of all the trees of the forest with which to ornament his villages. It is beautiful alike by sunlight and moonlight, and the most beautiful specimens are not the largest. I have seen some only twenty-five or thirty years old, more graceful and healthy, I think, than any others. It is almost become a villageous tree,—like martins and bluebirds.

The high blueberry has the wildest flavor of any of the huckleberry tribe. It is a little mithridatic. It is like eating a poisonous berry which your nature makes harmless. I derive the same pleasure as if I were eating dog-berries, nightshade, and wild parsnip with impunity.

Man and his affairs,—Church and State and school, trade and commerce and agriculture,—Politics,—for that is the word for them all here to-day,—I am pleased to see how little space it occupies in the landscape. It is but a narrow field. That still narrower highway yonder leads to it. I sometimes direct the traveller[48] [Two pages missing.]

And once again,

When I went a-maying,

And once or twice more

I had seen thee before,

For there grow the mayflower

(Epigæa repens)

And the mountain cranberry

And the screech owl strepens.

O whither dost thou go?

Which way dost thou flow?

Thou art the way.

Thou art a road

Which Dante never trode.

Not many they be

Who enter therein,

Only the guests of the

Irishman Quin.[49]

There was a cross-eyed fellow used to help me survey,—he was my stake-driver,—and all he said was, at every stake he drove, “There, I shouldn’t like to undertake to pull that up with my teeth.”

It sticks in my crop. That’s a good phrase. Many things stick there.

The man of wild habits,

Partridges and rabbits,

Who has no cares

Only to set snares,

Who liv’st all alone,

Close to the bone,

And where life is sweetest

Constantly eatest.

Where they once dug for money,

But never found “ony.”

To market fares

With early apples and pears.

When the spring stirs my blood

With the instinct to travel,

I can get enough gravel

On the Old Marlborough Road.

If you’ll leave your abode

With your fancy unfurled,

You may go round the world

By the Old Marlborough Road.

Nobody repairs it,

For nobody wears it.

It is a living way,

As the Christians say.

What is it, what is it,

But a direction out there

And the bare possibility

Of going somewhere?

Great guide-boards of stone,

But travellers none.

It is worth going there to see

Where you might be.

They’re a great endeavor

To be something for ever.

They are a monument to somebody,

To some selectman

Who thought of the plan.

What king

Did the thing,

I am still wondering.

Cenotaphs of the towns

Named on their crowns;

Huge as Stonehenge;

Set up how or when,

By what selectmen?

Gourgas or Lee,

Clark or Darby?

Blank tablets of stone,

Where a traveller might groan,

And in one sentence

Grave all that is known;

Which another might read,

In his extreme need.

I know two or three

Sentences, i. e.,

That might there be.

Literature that might stand

All over the land.

Which a man might remember

Till after December,

And read again in the spring,

After the thawing.[50]

Old meeting-house bell,

I love thy music well.

It peals through the air,

Sweetly full and fair,

As in the early times,

When I listened to its chimes.

Journal 02, 1850-September 15, 1851 / The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, Volume 08 (of 20)

JOURNAL

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

I
1850 (ÆT. 32-33)[1]

Journal 02, 1850-September 15, 1851 / The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, Volume 08 (of 20)

JOURNAL

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

I1850 (ÆT. 32-33)[1]

I
1850 (ÆT. 32-33)[1]