Walden

Introduction

A Lasting Impact

One hundred and fifty years after it was first published, Henry David Thoreau’s book Walden has become a powerful symbol. It stands for going back to nature, protecting the environment, opposing big business, and peacefully disobeying unfair laws. Thoreau himself is remembered as a strong protester, a unique individual, and a kind of wilderness saint. Because of this, Walden is like the Bible: a book that many respect but few actually read.

Walden appeared in the mid-1800s, a time when many great American books were written. These include:

• The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850)
• Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851)
• Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman (1855)
• Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1854), which was a hugely popular book that stirred the nation.
• Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays, which helped prepare people for these new ideas.

Of all these important works, Walden has had the biggest influence on how America sees itself today.

Why Walden Still Matters

We live in a time of too much information. We are surrounded by loud, silly, and constant electronic entertainment. Our jobs are often stressful, with global pressures and increasing demands. In this kind Dof world, the idea of building a small cabin in the woods to change and simplify one’s life is very appealing. Thoreau described this as wanting “to front only the essential facts of life”—to face only what truly matters.

This desire is still strong today. We see it in:

• The booming vacation industry.
• The sales of campers and RVs.
• People escaping on weekends to second homes in forests or mountains, where there’s less pollution from industry and business.

Walden advises us to “Simplify, simplify.” Many of us try to do this. However, even trying to live a simple, rustic life in the 21st century involves a lot of planning, money, and travel.

Thoreau’s Goal: A Call to Change

Thoreau probably wouldn’t look down on people today trying to follow his ideas. Walden was written to convince people to change their lives. This strong purpose gives the book an energy that his only other published book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), doesn’t have.

Like A Week, Walden is a collection of personal stories and thoughts. Thoreau was known for constantly revising and adding to his work. Walden went through at least seven different versions. The whole book is a defense of his unusual choice to live alone. He starts with a powerful and funny tone, explaining why he’s sharing his personal life:

He says he wouldn’t talk so much about himself if people in his town hadn’t asked so many questions about his way of life. Some might have thought these questions were nosy. But Thoreau felt they were natural and understandable, given the situation.

Living Deliberately

The “situation” Thoreau referred to was the society around him. He saw it as full of boring work and pointless distractions. His main goal was “to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life.” He wanted to see if he could learn what life had to teach him. He didn’t want to reach the end of his life and realize he hadn’t truly lived.

However, Thoreau also had another, very practical reason for his experiment: he wanted to be a writer. Like many writers, he needed privacy, quiet, and a “broad margin”—a mental space—where his thoughts could explore freely.

Life at Walden Pond

In the spring of 1845, Thoreau built a small, one-room cabin. It was on land owned by his mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, more than a mile south of the village of Concord, Massachusetts. He moved in on July 4th, a symbolic date for declaring his own independence.

Over the next two years, Thoreau was very productive:

• He finished a version of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. This book was based on a canoe trip he and his brother John took in 1839. He later expanded this draft.
• He wrote the first version of Walden.
• He wrote a long essay about Thomas Carlyle. He even gave part of this essay as a lecture in Concord in 1846.

In July 1846, Thoreau refused to pay several years’ worth of a local tax (the poll tax). He did this because he believed the U.S. government supported slavery, which he opposed. He spent one night in jail. This experience became the foundation for his famous essay, “Civil Disobedience.”

Later that same year, he traveled to Maine for the first time. There, he wrote most of his essay “Ktaadn,” about Mount Katahdin.

Thoreau was 27 years old when he began living in the cabin by Walden Pond. Before this:

• He had graduated from Harvard University (19th in his class).
• He had tried teaching.
• He had helped his father in the family’s pencil-making business.
• He did various local jobs for a dollar a day.
• He lived with the Emerson family for two years, working as a handyman and gardener.
• He had spent a short time on Long Island, tutoring and trying to start a literary career.

Despite Emerson’s support and publishing a few poems and essays in a magazine called The Dial, Thoreau hadn’t yet made a significant impact. When he left the cabin in 1847, he had become the Thoreau that we know from literary history.

What Thoreau Looked Like

Thoreau’s appearance was quite noticeable, and several people wrote about it.

• Nathaniel Hawthorne, a fellow writer who lived in Concord for a time, described him in 1842. Hawthorne found him to be “a young man with much of wild original nature still remaining in him.” He also said Thoreau was “as ugly as sin, long-nosed, queer-mouthed.” His manners were “uncouth and somewhat rustic, although courteous.” Hawthorne felt Thoreau “seems inclined to lead a sort of Indian life among civilized men—an Indian life, I mean, as respects the absence of any systematic effort for a livelihood.” This meant Thoreau didn’t seem focused on a regular career.

• James Kendall Hosmer remembered an older Thoreau. He described him “stood in the doorway with hair which looked as if it had been dressed with a pine-cone, inattentive grey eyes, hazy with faraway musings, an emphatic nose and disheveled attire that bore signs of tramps in woods and swamps.” His clothes looked messy, as if he’d been walking through forests and marshes.

• Daniel Ricketson, a follower from New Bedford, remembered (as told by Thoreau’s biographer Walter Harding) “the gentleness, humanity, and intelligence of Thoreau’s blue eyes.” He also noted that “though his arms were long, his legs short, his hands and feet large, and his shoulders markedly sloping, he was strong and vigorous in his walk.”

Thoreau’s Impressive Voice

His voice was remarkable, even near the end of his life when tuberculosis (a lung disease) had weakened it. On his last big trip, he went to Minnesota hoping the drier air might help his health. In Chicago, he visited a Unitarian minister named Robert Collyer. Collyer remembered:

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

In simple terms, Collyer said Thoreau spoke clearly and truthfully. Sometimes he paused to find the exact right word or to catch his breath. But his sentences were always perfectly formed. His words were so connected to who he was that when Collyer read Thoreau’s books later, he heard Thoreau’s actual voice, not his own.

Finding His Unique Writing Style

How did Thoreau develop his literary voice, which still sounds fresh to modern readers—often more so than Emerson’s? Emerson was a more polished and worldly speaker, as you might expect from someone who used to be a clergyman. His style was more like giving a speech.

Emerson’s short, forceful, and encouraging sentences can feel a bit tiring to readers now. It feels like he was always aware of an audience in front of him, trying to impress them with clever sayings and encouragement.

Thoreau’s writing has a more inward feeling. He wasn’t focused on an audience. Instead, he paid close attention to the vast world of sensations around him, describing what he saw and experienced with great precision.

Consider these sentences from near the beginning of his book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers:

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

Deep Observation and Meaning

Everything in that passage is a clear observation. He moves smoothly from describing one type of bird (a bittern) to another. Then, he makes a surprising comment: that the fading color of the flowers increased their “sincerity,” as if the flowers were trying to make a point.

The long paragraph continues by listing the flowers of the Concord meadows, using their Latin names. It ends with a memory of early mornings on the water before sunrise. He watched water lilies suddenly open as the dawn sun touched them. He wrote, “whole fields of white blossoms seemed to flash open before me, as I floated along, like the unfolding of a banner.”

This is not just “nature writing,” though it captures the freshness of a continent still being explored and documented, much like naturalists like Humboldt or Audubon did. Instead, it’s a living, detailed example of Emerson’s hopeful idea: “every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact.” Emerson believed that Nature is, at its core, Spirit, and that “Spirit alters, moulds, makes it.”

Emerson often quoted the mystic Swedenborg, who said, “The visible world and the relation of its parts, is the dial plate of the invisible.” This means the physical world shows us clues about the unseen spiritual world. Emerson also stated, “The axioms of physics translate the laws of ethics.” In other words, the rules of science reflect moral laws.

Thoreau absorbed these ideas about Idealism (the belief that reality is fundamentally mental or spiritual) from Emerson. He immersed himself in Nature, seeing it as a great source of metaphors and meaning. He became a kind of scientist—he later called himself “a mystic, a transcendentalist, and a natural philosopher to boot.” He was also an autobiographer, writing about his own life and experiences.

He carefully collected moments and observations, which became increasingly detailed and subtle. He wrote these down in journals that eventually amounted to two million words. He found these insights wherever he looked.

Emerson, like other respected people in Concord, was doubtful about such personal and unusual pursuits. He wrote in his own journal that “Thoreau wants a little ambition in his mixture… Instead of being the head of American engineers, he is captain of a huckleberry party.” Emerson thought Thoreau should aim for a more conventional, high-status career.

But Thoreau’s “huckleberry-gathering”—his taste for exploring and observing—took him on interesting journeys. He walked the wave-battered coast of Cape Cod and climbed to the rocky top of Maine’s Mount Katahdin. Yet, he always returned to the small wilderness around Concord. For him, this local area was a microcosm, a small place that represented the entire universe. It was a cosmos, or universe, that was big enough for him.

Old Roots for New Ideas

The literary critic F. O. Matthiessen, in his book American Renaissance, points out how much the great American writers of Thoreau’s time were influenced by English writers from the 1600s. These included poets like John Donne and George Herbert, and writers like Andrew Marvell and Thomas Browne.

These 17th-century writers believed in correspondences—connections between the small and the large, between a person’s inner world and the outer world of Nature.

• John Donne wrote, “The heart of man / Is an epitome of God’s great book / Of creatures, and man need no farther look.” Meaning, the human heart reflects all of creation.
• George Herbert put it this way: “Man is one world, and hath / Another to attend him.” This suggests that Nature extends into unseen heavenly realms that care for humanity.

These English writers, often called “metaphysical” because they explored deep philosophical questions, had a powerful impact. Their ideas, by a kind of spiritual kinship, sparked a new way of looking at the world in the American writers of the 1800s, who were themselves spiritual descendants of the 17th-century Puritans. This resulted in writing filled with closely observed details that led to deep inner reflection.

Walden’s Power Is in Its Details

Walden truly comes alive through its specific details. The long first chapter, “Economy,” joyfully explains exactly how to build a house:

• “a tight shingled and plastered house”
• “ten feet wide by fifteen long, and eight-feet posts”
• It had “a garret and a closet, a large window on each side, two trap doors, one door at the end, and a brick fireplace opposite.” He even provides a list of all his expenses, which totaled only $28.12 ½.

Thoreau enthusiastically presents his plan for a simple, self-reliant life. He lists the few foods he paid for and the money he earned from his seven miles of bean rows. He tells us how to make his simple bread from rye and cornmeal, and “a very good molasses either of pumpkin or beets.”

In one experiment, he even ate a woodchuck. He said he enjoyed it “notwithstanding its musky flavor,” but he doubted it would become a popular item at the local butcher shop.

He also shares details about his housekeeping:

“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….”

He then reflects on his furniture temporarily sitting outside. This is a mark of his sensitive and quirky way of seeing things:

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

He found that everyday objects looked much more interesting when seen outside in the natural light and air.

The Value of Seeing

In Thoreau’s free state of mind, many things were “worth the while to see”:

• The way chickadees (small birds) eat.
• The tiny streams of melting snow in the spring along the railroad embankment. He described them as “resembling, as you look down on them, the laciniated lobed and imbricated thalluses of some lichens” (looking like the complex, overlapping patterns of certain plant-like organisms called lichens). At the same time, he felt “cheered by the music of a thousand tinkling rills and rivulets whose veins are filled with the blood of winter which they are bearing off.” This means he heard the sounds of many small streams carrying away the last of winter’s ice and snow.
• At other times, he would listen closely to “the faint wiry peep” of baby woodcocks (birds) being led by their mother through the swamp.

In Walden’s most brilliant and skillful chapter, “Sounds,” Thoreau hears not only the calls and movements of countless creatures but also, surprisingly, the whistle and noise of the Fitchburg Railroad train. The train passed about a hundred an eighty meters away, along the edge of Walden Pond. He wrote with approval:

“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…. 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.”

His admiration for Nature was not picky; it included the “iron steed” (the train) that noisily pushed its way into his woods. He dedicated several pages to praising the train, ending with one of his best-known poems, which starts, “What’s the railroad to me? / I never go to see / Where it ends.”

A Critical Look at Thoreau’s Simplicity

In the 1840s, Thoreau saw the people of Concord as leading “lives of quiet desperation.” He felt they had “no time to be any thing but a machine.” However, from our modern viewpoint, Concord was a peaceful, rural place. The steam engine was the most advanced technology, and most work was farm labor.

According to Thoreau, it’s the farmer whose “poor immortal soul” is “well nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed.” He describes meeting a farmer in the middle of the night, rushing his animals to Boston for an early morning market. Meanwhile, Thoreau, the unburdened hermit, was returning to his cozy cabin to sleep.

It’s important to remember that Thoreau was a Harvard graduate and the son of a small factory owner (John Thoreau, the pencil-manufacturer). In the local social structure, he was somewhat of a gentleman. He felt he had a gentleman’s right to pursue his hobbies, even if they didn’t make money.

We might feel a bit uncomfortable when we read his statements like, “to maintain one’s self on this earth is not hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely,” or that “by working about six weeks in a year, I could meet all the expenses of living.”

• Not everyone is given free land to live on for a personal experiment.
• Not everyone can easily rely on the resources and social connections of a nearby village.

Thoreau tends to downplay how much most people need to work. He also largely ignores the growing wave of industrial labor that was starting to transform New England at the time. In his earlier book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, he paid little attention to the factories that were turning this river system into the first industrial zone in the New World. Herman Melville, in his short story “The Tartarus of Maids,” tried to show the harsh realities of this factory work.

Resisting Consumerism, With Some Limits

Thoreau’s main protest was against the end result of industry: consumerism, the constant pressure to buy more products. His proposed solution was to do without: “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.” In other words, true wealth comes from needing and wanting fewer things.

This idea of “doing without” extended to many areas of life for Thoreau, including sex. He believed that “The generative energy, which, when we are loose, dissipates and makes us unclean, when we are continent invigorates and inspires us.” He thought that restraining sexual energy could lead to greater strength and inspiration.

As Nathaniel Hawthorne sensed, such an extreme approach, if widely adopted, could mean the end of most of the interactions that create civilization. It might lead to a return to a kind of “Indian life” (as Hawthorne imagined it, meaning a more solitary, less structured existence) or even beyond that—to a level of individual independence that no human society, especially a tribal one, could support.

His retreat to the cabin, and the similar back-to-the-land movements his book has helped inspire, were in many ways luxuries. They were often financed by the extra wealth generated by a complex economy that, at the time, even relied on slave labor in other parts of the country.

Even a dedicated follower of Thoreau like E. B. White admitted this. (White himself moved to the coast of Maine, an experience supported by income from a New York magazine.) Writing a tribute for Walden’s 100th anniversary about 50 years ago, White acknowledged that “the plodding economist will … have rough going if he hopes to emerge from the book with a clear system of economic thought.” He also noted that Thoreau sometimes wrote as if “all his readers were male, unmarried, and well-connected.”

But even if Walden can’t be seen as a complete solution for all of life’s problems, it can be enjoyed like a condiment—a flavoring or a spice that clears the head and adds zest. White remembered how much the book encouraged him when he read it as a young man. He saw Walden as “an invitation to life’s dance, assuring the troubled recipient that… the music is played for him, too, if he will but listen and move his feet.”

As Thoreau himself wrote, “Love your life, poor as it is.”

Walden as a Source of Strength

Walden can be seen as an antidote—a remedy—for feelings of indifference (apathy) and worry (anxiety). With its positive energy and its powerful appeals to our senses, the book can strengthen us.

The time when Thoreau wrote Walden was a difficult period for him personally. He was young but felt he should have achieved more. It was also a troubled time for the United States, which was struggling with the issue of slavery and heading towards the Civil War.

While Thoreau didn’t write much about the industrial revolution, he did feel a widespread “crisis in belief.” At the time, even Unitarianism, a very flexible form of Christianity with few strict rules, seemed to demand too much faith from some people. The study of nature was leading some towards naturalism (the idea that only natural laws and forces operate in the world) and philosophical materialism (the idea that only physical matter is real).

Early in Walden, Thoreau mentions “Darwin, the naturalist.” He refers to Darwin’s account of the native people of Tierra del Fuego (at the southern tip of South America). These people “went naked with impunity, while the European shivers in his clothes.” For Thoreau, these people were like model citizens of his ideal world—a utopia of doing without unnecessary things.

According to Walter Harding’s biography, The Days of Henry Thoreau (1965), Thoreau was ill but still managed to read Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1860. He “took six pages of notes on it… and… liked the book very much.” However, the big arguments about religion that Darwin’s book caused didn’t really involve Thoreau or change his own way of thinking.

In Walden, Thoreau admits he once had “a slight insanity in my mood.” For a moment, Nature seemed unfriendly. But this feeling quickly disappeared during a gentle rain. He suddenly felt “an infinite and unaccountable friendliness all at once like an atmosphere sustaining me.” He believed, “There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature and has his senses still.” This means that anyone who lives surrounded by nature and truly uses their senses won’t suffer from deep sadness.

A Man of Many Talents

Thoreau was like Darwin in his careful, patient observations. He was also like Benjamin Franklin in his clever, practical skills. Unlike most other Transcendentalists (thinkers who focused on spiritual ideas), Thoreau could actually do things. He could:

• Tend Emerson’s garden and make home repairs.
• Build a fanciful summerhouse that Bronson Alcott imagined, using real carpentry skills.

“I have as many trades as fingers,” he says in Walden. Between 1849 and 1861, he completed over two hundred land surveys, mostly in and around Concord.

In his book The Pencil (1990), Henry Petroski writes about Thoreau as an inventor. Shortly after graduating from Harvard, Thoreau created a seven-foot-tall grinding machine. This machine could capture only the very finest particles of graphite—the ones light enough to float highest in the air. For a while, Thoreau’s pencils were considered the best in America because they were the least gritty.

We trust the narrator of Walden and his spiritual goals more because he gives many examples of his practical knowledge. His call for us to live a higher, more spiritual life often starts with a simple, practical story. For instance, he describes how to fit an axe head tightly onto its handle:

“One day, when my axe had come off and I had cut a green hickory for a wedge, driving it with a stone, and had placed the whole to soak in a pond hole in order to swell the wood, I saw a striped snake run into the water, and he lay on the bottom, apparently without inconvenience, as long as I staid there, or more than a quarter of an hour; perhaps because he had not yet fairly come out of the torpid state. It appeared to me that for a like reason men remain in their present low and primitive condition; but if they should feel the influence of the spring of springs arousing them, they would of necessity rise to a higher and more ethereal life.”

In simpler terms, after fixing his axe, he saw a snake resting calmly in the water, perhaps still sluggish from winter. This made him think: maybe people stay in a basic, uninspired state for a similar reason—they haven’t been fully awakened. But if people felt a deep, inner awakening (the “spring of springs”), they would naturally move towards a higher, more spiritual way of living.

Learning from Nature’s Processes

By living in the woods, Thoreau became a student of how physical things work. He saw that water makes wood swell. He noticed that dead leaves absorb the sun’s heat. He wrote:

“The elements… abetted me in making a path through the deepest snow in the woods, for when I had once gone through the wind blew the oak leaves into my tracks, where they lodged, and by absorbing the rays of the sun melted the snow, and so not only made a dry bed for my feet, but in the night their dark line was my guide.” The natural elements helped him. After he walked through deep snow, the wind blew oak leaves into his footprints. These leaves soaked up the sun’s heat and melted the snow. This created a dry path for him and, at night, the dark line of leaves showed him the way.

The pond covered with winter ice made him observe things very closely. Just as he had carefully studied the spring thaw, the freezing in winter led him to inspect ice bubbles in minute detail. He described “narrow oblong perpendicular bubbles about half an inch long, sharp cones with the apex upward.”

During warm spells, these bubbles would expand and join together, “often like slivery coins poured from a bag, one overlapping another.” He takes this almost microscopic look at “the infinite number of minute bubbles” and connects it to a larger sound: “These are the little air-guns which contribute to make the ice crack and whoop.” He meant the tiny bubbles help cause the loud cracking sounds ice makes.

He gets close to the idea of microorganisms (tiny living things) when he asks, “Why is it that a bucket of water soon becomes putrid [spoiled], but frozen remains sweet forever?” However, instead of exploring this scientifically, he ends with a witty remark: “It is commonly said that this is the difference between the affections and the intellect.” This clever saying suggests that emotions (affections) can go bad or become complicated, like water, while pure thought (intellect) can remain clear and unchanged, like ice.

Exploring Walden Pond Scientifically

When railroad tracks were built nearby, the dug-up earth revealed new geological formations. Similarly, when people began cutting ice commercially from Walden Pond in the winter of 1846-1847, Thoreau got new chances to study ice. He noted the different shades of color in the ice with the same precision that the landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church showed when painting icebergs.

Early in 1846, Thoreau used the frozen surface of Walden Pond to do his most important technical work there. Using surveying tools like a “compass and chain and sounding line,” he cut holes in the ice in straight lines across the pond. He then measured the depth of the water at these points. He created a map of the pond (with a scale of forty rods to an inch) and a drawing showing the shape of the pond’s bottom.

For a long time, people had rumored that Walden Pond was bottomless. Thoreau commented, “It is remarkable how long men will believe in the bottomlessness of a pond without taking the trouble to sound it.” The surveyor in him was proud to announce, “I can assure my readers that Walden has a reasonably tight bottom at a not unreasonable, though at an unusual, depth.”

He found that ponds are generally shallower than people imagine: “Most ponds, emptied, would leave a meadow no more hollow than we frequently see.” By this, he also suggested that most mysteries can be solved if we patiently examine them scientifically, just as he “emptied” the pond’s mystery by measuring it.

Readers who are new to Walden might be surprised by how much of the book is dedicated to this kind of hands-on, factual exploration and demonstration. The romantic who celebrates Nature also approaches it with the clear-eyed, practical mindset of Benjamin Franklin and the logical thinking of Enlightenment philosophers (the “philosophes”).

Thoreau’s purpose is to help us see Nature as it really is—powerful, relentless, and not always gentle—after centuries of viewing the world mainly from a human-centered perspective (“hazy anthropocentricity”). He believed we need to be called away from the comfortable routines and shared illusions of ordinary village life.

The Need for Wildness

Thoreau wrote powerfully about our need for nature:

“We need the tonic of wildness…. We can never have enough of Nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and Titanic features…. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander. We are cheered when we observe the vulture feeding on the carrion which disgusts and disheartens us and deriving health and strength from the repast.”

Here’s what he means:

• “We need the tonic of wildness”: Wild nature is like a medicine that strengthens and revitalizes us.
• “Inexhaustible vigor, vast and Titanic features”: We need to see Nature’s endless energy and its huge, powerful aspects.
• “Witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander”: We need to see life existing beyond our usual boundaries, thriving in places we don’t go.
• The Vulture: Even seeing a vulture eating dead animals (carrion), which might disgust us, can be cheering. It shows us how nature finds health and strength even from decay.

He tells a story about a dead horse on the path to his cabin. The smell repulsed him, but it also encouraged him. It was “the assurance it gave me of the strong appetite and inviolable health of Nature”—a sign of nature’s powerful, unkillable life force.

The idea of “Nature red in tooth and claw”—meaning a violent, predatory natural world—deeply troubled the poet Tennyson and other Victorian-era Christians. But Thoreau embraced this view.

Embracing Nature’s Harsh Realities

Thoreau openly accepted the sometimes brutal aspects of nature:

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

Let’s break this down:

• He loves that nature is so full of life that countless creatures can be sacrificed or prey on each other.
• He accepts that delicate creatures (“tender organizations”) can be easily destroyed—like tadpoles eaten by herons, or toads run over.
• He even mentions dramatic, though rare, events like rains of “flesh and blood” (likely referring to instances where strong winds pick up and drop small animals or organic matter).
• He suggests that since accidents are so common in nature, we shouldn’t make too big a deal of them.
• A wise person sees a kind of “universal innocence” in nature; it’s not being intentionally cruel, it just is.
• Therefore, trying to apply human ideas of “compassion” to all of nature’s processes doesn’t really hold up (“is a very untenable ground”).

It’s as if Thoreau is looking directly at the harsh realities of life and death in the natural world. Yet, he doesn’t just accept this universe, as another Transcendentalist, Margaret Fuller, famously said she did. Thoreau claims to rejoice in it.

Thoreau’s Death and Thoughts on Immortality

Thoreau died at the young age of forty-four from tuberculosis (which was then called “consumption”). People in Concord admired the calmness with which he faced his death. When some tried to talk to him about the afterlife, he famously said, “One world at a time.”

He didn’t completely give up the idea of personal immortality. Some of his phrases hint at it. For example, near the passages about nature’s harshness, he described a “wild river valley and the woods… bathed in so pure and bright a light as would have waked the dead.” He concluded, “There needs no stronger proof of the immortality. All things must live in such a light.”

But what he truly meant is unclear. Perhaps it was a moment of instinctive optimism. This comes after an entire book that celebrates Nature in a clear-eyed way—as a system of chemicals, molecules, and mathematics. He saw Nature as something understood by science, stripped of human-projected emotions (the “pathetic fallacy”). This was different even from Emerson’s more sophisticated spiritual view of Nature (his “Neoplatonism”).

For Thoreau in these scientific moods, there was no more room for Idealism (the idea that reality is fundamentally spiritual), no more perfect Platonic forms, no shimmering ideal examples (“archetypes”) existing separately from individual things.

As the poet William Carlos Williams would say in the next century, giving a motto to modernism: “No ideas but in things.” The poetry of Williams, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound showed that focusing on concrete things and images—even if presented as puzzling fragments without obvious emotional or logical links—gives language power and creates a direct connection between writer and reader.

It is this “thinginess”—the focus on concrete details—in Thoreau’s writing that still excites us today. We are also thrilled by the energetic way he jumps from detail to detail, image to image, while still carrying some of the philosophical and spiritual weight of Transcendentalism (its “metaphysical burden”).

Without this philosophical weight, which is much less obvious in his writings published after his death (like The Maine Woods and Cape Cod), he might seem like just an observant and well-spoken travel writer. Nevertheless, his descriptions of places like the chaotic, mist-covered top of Mount Katahdin—which he called “the raw materials of a planet dropped from an unseen quarry”—and the shipwrecks and wind-beaten apple trees of Cape Cod still give us a kind of metaphysical shudder. This is a deep, thoughtful feeling that comes from seeing a man confront harsh, unyielding nature and find in it an image of something bleak but purifying within himself.

Thoreau, John Brown, and Social Justice

In Thoreau’s later years, the arguments between abolitionists (who wanted to end slavery) and slaveholders grew increasingly intense, hinting at the bloody Civil War to come. During this time, Thoreau became well-known, even notorious, for his passionate support of John Brown.

Thoreau had met Brown briefly in Concord. He found Brown to be “a man of great common sense, deliberate and practical,” with “tact and prudence.” Brown also had the simple, disciplined habits of a soldier.

Though Thoreau himself was a peaceful man, he praised John Brown—who was seen by many as a grim killer—for a very practical reason: Brown had taken action, even violent action, against the officially approved violence of a government that protected slavery. Thoreau wrote:

“It was his peculiar doctrine that a man has a perfect right to interfere by force with the slaveholder, in order to rescue the slave. I agree with him…. I do not wish to kill nor to be killed, but I can foresee circumstances in which both these things would be by me unavoidable. We preserve the so-called “peace” of our community by deeds of petty violence every day.”

In this quote, Thoreau supports Brown’s idea that it’s right to use force to free enslaved people. He says that while he doesn’t want to kill or be killed, sometimes such actions might be unavoidable. He also points out that even everyday “peace” in society is often maintained by small acts of force or coercion.

The Enduring Search for Reality

Thoreau’s insights made him a hero to the revolutionaries of the 1960s. They, too:

• Saw the hidden violence within the established social order.
• Recognized how private property could sometimes feel like a form of enslavement.
• Noticed how the media often replaced personal, direct experience of reality with “the news”—a trend that is even stronger today than it was decades ago.

Thoreau wrote, “Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous.” By “fabulous,” he meant that reality often seems as unbelievable or distant as a fable, while illusions are accepted as truth.

The word “reality” echoes throughout Walden. He urged: “Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance… till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality…. Be it life or death, we crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business.”

He encouraged people to dig through all the superficial stuff—opinions, prejudices, traditions, illusions—until they reach something solid and true: reality. Whether facing life or death, he believed we should seek only what is real.

Against the vast, dark indifference of material Nature, we can only offer the brief light of our own consciousness, like a lamp shining in a cabin. The energizing gift, or “benison,” of Walden is that it makes us feel that this contest between our awareness and Nature’s indifference is an equal and fair one.

Thoreau and His Contemporaries

In 1850, the United States had about twenty-three million people, a small enough population that a writer could feel like they were addressing a single community.

Although Thoreau is famous as the man who lived alone in the woods (just as Herman Melville was known as “the man who had lived among cannibals”), Thoreau was actually sociable in his own careful and slightly reserved way.

Once, in 1856, while visiting his friends the Loomises in Cambridge, he was awkwardly made to hold their newborn baby, Mabel Loomis. Mabel Loomis later became famous as the first editor of Emily Dickinson’s poetry. In the 20th century, historian Peter Gay would point to her as a leading example of a Victorian woman who lived a sexually fulfilled and unrepressed life.

By 1852, Thoreau knew most of New England’s writers. In that year, he visited Walt Whitman in Brooklyn. Whitman was living in a messy bedroom with his brother, who had intellectual disabilities.

Thoreau and Whitman had different views about the common person. Whitman later said that Thoreau had “a very aggravated case of superciliousness” (meaning he thought Thoreau was snobbish). Thoreau, on the other hand, found some of Whitman’s poems “disagreeable to say the least, simply sensual… as if the beasts spoke.”

Despite these differences, both men left with generally positive impressions of each other. “He is a great fellow,” Thoreau wrote about Whitman in a letter. About Whitman’s book of poems, Leaves of Grass, Thoreau said, “On the whole it sounds to me very brave & American after whatever deductions. I do not believe that all the sermons so called that have been preached in this land put together are equal to it for preaching.” He felt Whitman’s poetry was more powerful than many sermons.

Over time, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden have become known as the two great works celebrating American individualism. At a time when traditional beliefs and assurances were fading, these books affirmed the value, power, and beauty of the free and independent self in the New World.

Economy

When I wrote these pages, or at least most of them, I was living alone in the woods. My house, which I built myself, was a mile from any neighbor. It stood on the shore of Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts. I earned my living only by the work of my own hands. I lived there for two years and two months. Now, I am temporarily living in “civilized” society again.

I wouldn’t bother my readers so much with my personal affairs if my townspeople hadn’t asked so many specific questions about my way of life. Some might call their questions nosy. But to me, they didn’t seem nosy at all. Considering the circumstances, their curiosity was very natural and relevant.

People Asked Questions

Some people asked:

• What did I eat?
• Did I feel lonely?
• Was I afraid? And other similar things.

Others were curious about how much of my income I gave to charity. Some, who had large families, wanted to know how many poor children I supported.

So, I ask my readers who aren’t particularly interested in me to forgive me if I try to answer some of these questions in this book. In most books, the writer avoids using “I.” In this book, “I” will be used. That’s the main difference, if you’re thinking about ego. We usually forget that it’s always a person, a first person “I,” who is speaking in any book.

I wouldn’t talk so much about myself if there were anyone else I knew as well. Unfortunately, my own limited experience is the only subject I truly know. Besides, I believe every writer should, sooner or later, provide a simple and honest account of their own life. They shouldn’t just report what they’ve heard about other people’s lives. It should be the kind of account someone might send to their family from a faraway land. If a person has lived sincerely, then to me, their life has indeed been lived in a “faraway land” – something unique and worth hearing about.

Perhaps these pages are especially for students who don’t have much money. As for my other readers, they can take whatever parts apply to them. I hope no one will try too hard to make this “coat” fit if it doesn’t. It might be very useful to the person it fits naturally.

Looking at Our Lives in New England

I want to say something about you who are reading this, you who are said to live in New England. I’m less concerned with faraway people like the Chinese or Sandwich Islanders (Hawaiians). I want to talk about your condition, especially your external circumstances in this world, in this town. What is your situation? Does it have to be as bad as it is? Can it be improved?

I have traveled a lot in Concord. Everywhere—in shops, offices, and fields—the people have seemed to me to be punishing themselves in a thousand remarkable ways. I’ve heard about Brahmin priests in India who perform extreme acts of self-discipline:

• Sitting exposed to four fires while staring at the sun.
• Hanging upside down over flames.
• Looking at the sky over their shoulders until their necks are permanently twisted, so they can only swallow liquids.
• Living chained to the foot of a tree for life.
• Measuring vast empires with their bodies, like caterpillars inching along.
• Standing on one leg on top of pillars for years.

Even these intentional acts of self-punishment are hardly more unbelievable or astonishing than the scenes I witness every day here. The twelve labors of Hercules were nothing compared to the tasks my neighbors have taken on. Hercules’s labors were only twelve, and they had an end. But I’ve never seen these men defeat any monster or finish any great task. They have no helper like Iolas, who cauterized the Hydra’s heads with a hot iron. As soon as one of their problems is crushed, two more spring up.

The Burden of Inherited Things

I see young men in my town whose misfortune is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools. These things are easier to acquire than to get rid of. It would have been better if they had been born in an open pasture and raised by a wolf. Then they might have seen more clearly what kind of work they were truly meant to do.

Who made them slaves to the land? Why should they struggle to manage sixty acres, when a person is only destined to “eat a peck of dirt” (a small, symbolic amount, referring to our eventual return to the earth)? Why should they start digging their own graves as soon as they are born, by taking on these lifelong burdens? They have to live a man’s life, pushing all these possessions ahead of them, and manage as best they can.

How many poor, immortal souls have I met who were nearly crushed and smothered under their load! They creep down the road of life, pushing before them a barn seventy-five feet long by forty feet wide. Their “Augean stables” (a place of immense, neglected filth, like the stables Hercules had to clean) are never cleansed. They are burdened by one hundred acres of land—fields for tilling, for hay, for pasture, and a woodlot. Those who don’t have such unnecessary inherited burdens—the “portionless”—find it hard enough just to manage and cultivate their own bodies, their “few cubic feet of flesh.”

Working Under a Mistake

Men work hard, but they are mistaken about why. The best part of a man is soon plowed into the soil as fertilizer. A seeming fate, usually called necessity, makes them work, as an old book says, “laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal.” This means they spend their lives accumulating material things that decay or can be stolen. It’s a fool’s life, as they will discover when they reach the end of it, if not sooner.

There’s an old Greek myth about Deucalion and Pyrrha, who created humans by throwing stones over their heads behind them. A Latin poet wrote: “Inde genus durum sumus, experiensque laborum, Et documenta damus quâ simus origine nati.”

Sir Walter Raleigh put it into English rhyme this way: “From thence our kind hard-hearted is, enduring pain and care, Approving that our bodies of a stony nature are.”

This describes people blindly following a confused instruction, throwing stones over their heads without seeing where they land. This is like people today who live without thinking, following customs that lead to hard lives.

No Time for True Living

Most men, even in this relatively free country, are so busy with factitious cares (artificial worries) and unnecessarily difficult work that they cannot enjoy life’s finer rewards. Their fingers, from too much toil, are too clumsy and tremble too much for that.

Actually, the working man doesn’t have the free time for true integrity each day. He cannot afford to build the noblest kinds of relationships with other people; focusing on such things would lower the market value of his labor. He has no time to be anything but a machine. How can he remember his own ignorance—which is necessary for personal growth—when he is always forced to use the knowledge he already has?

Sometimes, we should provide for him freely—give him food and clothes and refresh him with kind support—before we judge him. The finest qualities of our nature, like the delicate bloom on fruits, can only be preserved with the most gentle handling. Yet, we do not treat ourselves or each other so tenderly.

Lives of Quiet Struggle

Some of you, as we all know, are poor. You find it hard to live. Sometimes, it feels like you are gasping for breath. I have no doubt that some of you reading this cannot pay for all the dinners you have already eaten, or for the coats and shoes that are quickly wearing out or are already gone. You might have come to this page using borrowed or stolen time, taking an hour that belongs to your creditors.

It is very clear what small, sneaky lives many of you live. My own experiences have sharpened my sight. You are always on the edge, trying to get into business and trying to get out of debt. Debt is an ancient trap, called æs alienum by the Latins, meaning “another’s brass” (because some of their coins were made of brass). People are still living, dying, and being buried because of this “other’s brass”—this debt.

You are always promising to pay, promising to pay tomorrow, but then dying today, unable to pay your debts. You try to win favor or get customers in so many ways (as long as they are not actual crimes):

• Lying
• Flattering
• Voting in certain ways
• Shrinking yourselves into a tiny “nutshell of civility” (being overly polite and agreeable)
• Or puffing yourselves up into an atmosphere of thin, superficial generosity

You do all this so you can persuade your neighbor to let you make his shoes, his hat, his coat, or his carriage, or to import his groceries for him. You make yourselves sick with worry and overwork so you can save a little something for a sick day. You hide this money in an old chest, or in a stocking behind the wall, or, more safely, in the brick bank. It doesn’t matter where, or how much, or how little.

Our Own Worst Masters

Sometimes I wonder why we get so worked up about what is called Negro Slavery. That is a terrible and obvious form of servitude, but it is somewhat distant for some. Meanwhile, there are so many clever and subtle masters that enslave people in both the North and the South. It is hard to have a Southern overseer. It is worse to have a Northern one. But worst of all is when you are your own slave-driver.

People talk about a divine spark in mankind! But look at the man driving a team of horses on the highway, heading to market day or night. Does any divine spark stir within him? His highest duty seems to be feeding and watering his horses! What is his own destiny to him compared to the interests of shipping and commerce? Doesn’t he drive for “Squire Make-a-stir” (some important local person)? How godlike, how immortal, is he?

See how he cringes and sneaks around. All day long, he lives with a vague fear. He is not immortal or divine. Instead, he is the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a reputation built by his own actions. Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared to our own private opinion of ourselves. What a man thinks of himself is what determines, or rather shows, his fate.

How can we achieve self-emancipation—freeing ourselves—even in the far-off lands of our own thoughts and imagination? What great reformer like Wilberforce (who fought against slavery) can bring that about for us internally?

Also, think of the ladies of the land weaving decorative “toilet cushions” as they prepare for Judgment Day. They do this, perhaps, so they don’t appear too overly concerned about their ultimate fate! It’s as if you could kill time without harming eternity. Wasting time has eternal consequences.

Quiet Desperation

Most people lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is just confirmed desperation. You go from the desperate city into the desperate countryside. There, you have to console yourself with the small bravery of animals like minks and muskrats.

A predictable but unconscious despair is hidden even under what we call games and amusements. There is no real play in these activities, because true play comes after work is done. But for these people, the work is never finished. It is a sign of wisdom not to do desperate things.

Questioning Our Choices and Old Advice

When we consider what is “the chief end of man” (a question from old religious teachings), and what are the true necessities and means of life, it seems as if people have deliberately chosen their common way of living because they preferred it to any other. Yet, they honestly believe they have no other choice.

But alert and healthy people remember that the sun rose clear this morning. This means there is always a chance for a fresh start and a new perspective. It is never too late to give up our prejudices. No way of thinking or doing, no matter how ancient, can be trusted without proof. What everyone repeats or silently accepts as true today may turn out to be false tomorrow. It might be just the “smoke of opinion,” which some people mistakenly thought was a cloud that would bring fertilizing rain to their fields.

What old people say you cannot do, you should try, and you may find that you can. Old ways are for old people; new ways are for new people. Perhaps old people once didn’t know enough to gather fresh fuel to keep the fire going. New people put a little dry wood under a pot (a steam engine boiler) and are whisked around the globe with the speed of birds. This kind of progress is so fast it might metaphorically “kill old people” with astonishment.

Age is not necessarily a better teacher than youth. In fact, age has often lost as much as it has gained. One might almost doubt if the wisest person has learned anything of absolute value simply by living a long time. Practically speaking, the old don’t have very important advice to give the young. Their own experience has been so limited, and their lives have often been such miserable failures (for private reasons, they must believe). Or perhaps they have some faith left that contradicts their negative experiences, and they are simply not as young as they once were.

I have lived for some thirty years on this planet. I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my elders. They have told me nothing useful, and they probably cannot tell me anything useful. Here is life, an experiment that I have largely not yet tried. The fact that they have tried it doesn’t help me. If I have any experience that I think is valuable, I am sure to realize that my mentors said nothing about it.

Challenging “Necessities”

One farmer says to me, “You cannot live on vegetable food alone, because it provides nothing to make bones with.” So, he religiously dedicates part of his day to supplying his body with the “raw material of bones” (presumably by eating meat). All the while he is talking, he walks behind his oxen. These oxen, with their bones made entirely from vegetables, pull him and his heavy plow along, overcoming every obstacle. This shows the irony of his statement.

Some things are considered absolute necessities of life in some circles (especially for the most helpless and sick people). In other circles, these same things are merely luxuries. And in still others, they are entirely unknown. The idea of what is “necessary” is relative.

Has Everything Been Tried?

Some people seem to think that every aspect of human life has already been explored by those who came before us—all the heights and all the valleys—and that everything has been taken care of.

• According to the writer Evelyn, “the wise Solomon prescribed ordinances for the very distances of trees.”
• Roman officials (“prætors”) decided how often you could go onto your neighbor’s land to gather acorns that fell there without trespassing, and what share belonged to that neighbor.
• The ancient physician Hippocrates even left directions on how we should cut our nails: even with the ends of the fingers, neither shorter nor longer.

Undoubtedly, the very boredom and weariness (tedium and ennui) that lead people to think they have exhausted all the variety and joys of life are as old as Adam. But humanity’s capacities have never truly been measured. We cannot judge what people can do by looking only at past examples, because so little has actually been tried.

Whatever your failures have been so far, a voice might say, “Do not be sad, my child, for who can tell you what you have still left undone?” This means don’t be defined by past failures; there’s always more potential.

New Ways of Seeing

We could test our lives by a thousand simple experiments. For instance, consider that the same sun that ripens my beans also illuminates, at the same moment, a whole system of other planets like ours. If I had truly remembered this, it would have prevented some mistakes I made. That expansive, cosmic view was not the light in which I hoed my beans.

The stars are the points of what wonderful, vast triangles! What distant and different beings, in the various “mansions” (regions) of the universe, are looking at the same star at the same moment as I am! Nature and human life are as varied as our individual personalities and bodies (“constitutions”). Who can say what prospect life offers to another person?

Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for just an instant? If we could, we would live in all the ages of the world in a single hour; yes, in all the worlds of all the ages. History, Poetry, Mythology! I know of no way to read another’s experience that would be as startling and informative as this direct sharing of perspective.

Rejecting Conventional “Good”

Most of what my neighbors call “good,” I believe in my soul to be “bad.” If I regret anything, it is very likely to be my own “good behavior”—times when I conformed. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well? (This is a sarcastic way of questioning conformity.)

An old man, someone who has lived seventy years, perhaps with some kind of honor, might say the wisest thing he can. But I hear an irresistible voice that invites me away from all that conventional wisdom. One generation abandons the projects and beliefs of the previous one, like ships left stranded on a beach.

Trusting More, Fearing Less

I think we can safely trust ourselves and the world a good deal more than we usually do. We can give up as much anxious care for ourselves as we honestly spend caring for others or other things. Nature is as well suited to our weakness as it is to our strength.

The constant anxiety and strain that some people experience is an almost incurable form of disease. We are made to exaggerate the importance of the work we do. And yet, how much is not done by us at all! Or, what if we had fallen sick?

How vigilant we are! We are determined not to live by faith if we can possibly avoid it. All day long, we are on the alert. At night, we unwillingly say our prayers and commit ourselves to uncertainties. We are so thoroughly and sincerely forced to live this way—revering our current way of life and denying the possibility of change.

“This is the only way,” we say. But there are as many ways to live as there can be lines drawn from the center of a circle to its edge. All change is a miracle to observe, but it is a miracle that is happening every single 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 person successfully turns an idea from their imagination into a fact they understand, I predict that eventually, all people will establish their lives on that new basis.

What Are True Necessities?

Let us consider for a moment what most of the trouble and anxiety I have mentioned is really about. How much of it is truly necessary for us to be troubled, or at least careful?

It would be beneficial to live a primitive and frontier-style life for a while, even in the midst of our outwardly civilized society. This would help us learn what the basic, gross necessaries of life are, and what methods people have used to get them. Or, we could even look over the old account books of merchants to see what things people most commonly bought at the stores—what they stored. In other words, what are the most basic, essential supplies (“grossest groceries”)?

For all the improvements made over the ages have had very little influence on the essential laws of human existence. Our skeletons, for example, are probably indistinguishable from those of our ancient ancestors. Our basic needs remain much the same.

Defining “Necessary of Life”

By the words “necessary of life,” I mean whatever, of all that a person obtains by their own efforts, has been from the very first—or from long use has become—so important to human life that few people, if any, ever try to do without it. This applies whether they are “savages” (living in a pre-civilized state), poor, or philosophers.

For many creatures, there is in this sense only one necessary of life: Food.

• To the bison on the prairie, it is a few inches of tasty grass, with water to drink. Perhaps he also seeks the Shelter of the forest or the mountain’s shadow.
• None of the wild animals require more than Food and Shelter.

The necessaries of life for humans in this climate can be accurately grouped under several headings:

• Food
• Shelter
• Clothing
• Fuel

Only after we have secured these basic things are we truly prepared to address the deeper problems of life with freedom and a chance of success.

Humans have invented not only houses, but also clothes and cooked food. It’s possible that the accidental discovery of the warmth of fire—which was at first a luxury—and the subsequent use of it, led to our present need to sit by it. We observe that cats and dogs also acquire this same “second nature”—this learned need for warmth from a fire.

With the right Shelter and Clothing, we naturally keep our bodies warm. But if we have too much of these, or too much Fuel—that is, if we use more external heat than our own bodies produce—doesn’t “cookery” (being uncomfortably overheated) begin?

Charles Darwin, the naturalist, wrote about the native people of Tierra del Fuego (at the southern tip of South America). He said that his own group, who were well-clothed and sitting close to a fire, were still not overly warm. However, he was very surprised to see these naked native people, who were farther from the fire, “streaming with perspiration at undergoing such a roasting.”

Similarly, we are told that the New Hollander (an old term for an Australian Aborigine) goes naked without any problem, while a European shivers in his clothes. Is it impossible to combine the physical toughness of these peoples with the intellectual development of a “civilized” person? (Thoreau uses terms like “savages” here, which were common in his time to describe people living in non-industrialized societies, but today we understand these terms are outdated and can be offensive. His point was about their physical resilience.)

According to the chemist Justus von Liebig, a man’s body is like a stove. Food is the fuel that keeps up the internal “combustion” (burning process) in the lungs. In cold weather, we eat more; in warm weather, we eat less. Our body heat is the result of a slow burning process. Disease and death happen when this process is too rapid, or when there isn’t enough fuel (food), or if there’s a problem with the “draught” (like a fireplace not drawing air properly), causing the fire to go out. Of course, our vital heat is not exactly the same as fire; this is just an analogy.

So, it seems from the list of necessities (Food, Shelter, Clothing, Fuel) that “animal life” is nearly the same as “animal heat.”

• Food can be seen as the Fuel that keeps up the fire within us.
• External Fuel (like firewood) is used only to prepare that Food or to add extra warmth to our bodies from the outside.
• Shelter and Clothing also serve only to hold in the heat that our bodies have generated and absorbed.

The Main Need: Staying Warm

The most important physical need for our bodies, then, is to keep warm—to keep our vital heat inside us. Think about the efforts we make for this! Not just with our Food, Clothing, and Shelter, but also with our beds. Our beds are like our night-clothes. We even rob the nests and take feathers from the breasts of birds to prepare this shelter within a shelter (our bedding), just as a mole has its cozy bed of grass and leaves at the end of its burrow.

A poor man often complains that “this is a cold world.” And indeed, many of our problems, both physical and social, are directly related to cold.

In some climates, summer makes a kind of Elysian life (a life of perfect happiness and ease) possible for humans.

• Fuel, except to cook food, is unnecessary then. The sun is our fire.
• Many fruits are sufficiently “cooked” by the sun’s rays.
• Food, in general, is more varied and easier to get.
• Clothing and Shelter become completely or almost unnecessary.

In our current time and in this country (America in the 1840s), I find from my own experience that a few tools are the next most important things after basic necessities. These include:

• A knife
• An axe
• A spade
• A wheelbarrow, and so on. For those who study, lamplight, stationery (paper, pens), and access to a few books are also important. All of these can be obtained at a very small cost.

Yet, some unwise people travel to the other side of the globe. They go to “barbarous” (uncivilized, in their view) and unhealthy regions. They devote themselves to trade for ten or twenty years, all so that they can live—that is, keep comfortably warm—and finally die back in New England. The irony is that they go through so much hardship just to achieve a basic level of comfort they could have had more simply.

The very rich are not just kept comfortably warm; they are often unnaturally hot. As I suggested before, they are “cooked,” of course, fashionably so (à la mode).

Luxuries: Hindrances, Not Helps

Most luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only unnecessary but are actual hindrances to the progress and improvement of humankind. When it comes to luxuries and comforts, the wisest people throughout history have always lived a simpler and more basic life than even the poor.

The ancient philosophers—Chinese, Hindu, Persian, and Greek—were a group of people who had very few outward riches but were incredibly wealthy in inner qualities. We don’t know a lot about them, but it’s remarkable that we know as much as we do. The same is true of more modern reformers and those who have tried to benefit humanity.

No one can be an impartial or wise observer of human life unless they look at it from the perspective of what we might call voluntary poverty—choosing to live simply. The fruit of a life of luxury is just more luxury, whether in farming, business, literature, or art.

These days, there are many professors of philosophy, but not many true philosophers. Yet, it is admirable to teach philosophy (to “profess”) because it was once admirable to live philosophically. To be a philosopher means more than just having deep thoughts or even starting a school of thought. It means loving wisdom so much that you live according to its principles—a life of simplicity, independence, generosity of spirit (magnanimity), and trust. It means solving some of life’s problems not just in theory, but in practice.

The success of many great scholars and thinkers is often like that of a courtier—someone who gains favor by pleasing others. Their success is not kingly or truly independent and strong. They manage to live by conforming to society, practically doing what their fathers did. They are not in any sense the creators of a nobler kind of human being.

But why do people so often degenerate, or become worse? What makes families decline? What is the nature of the luxury that weakens (enervates) and destroys nations? Are we sure that there is none of this destructive luxury in our own lives?

A true philosopher is ahead of his time, even in the outward way he lives. He is not fed, sheltered, clothed, and warmed in the same way as his contemporaries. How can a man be a philosopher and not keep himself warm using better, simpler, and more efficient methods than other men?

After Necessities: Adventure on Life

When a man has obtained the things that are necessary for life by the methods I’ve described, what does he want next? Surely not more of the same kind of warmth—like more and richer food, larger and more splendid houses, finer and more abundant clothing, or more numerous, constantly burning, hotter fires.

When he has the necessities, there is another option besides getting more and more unnecessary things (superfluities). That option is to adventure on life now. His vacation from harder, more basic work has begun.

It’s like a seed in the soil. The soil seems right for the seed because the seed has sent its first root (radicle) downward. Now it can confidently send its shoot upward as well. Why has mankind rooted himself so firmly in the earth, if not so that he may rise just as high into the heavens above?

The nobler plants are valued for the fruit they eventually bear high up in the air and light, far from the ground. They are not treated like humble vegetables (esculents). Even though some vegetables might live for two years (biennials), they are usually cultivated only until their root is perfected. Their tops are often cut off for this purpose, so most people would not even recognize them if they saw them in their flowering season. (The point is that if people focus only on basic material needs—the “root”—they may miss the higher “flowering” or spiritual development in life.)

Who I Am Addressing

I don’t mean to set rules for strong and brave individuals. They will manage their own affairs whether they are in heaven or hell. Perhaps they will build more magnificently and spend more lavishly than the richest people, without ever making themselves poor. They might not even know how they live so well—if, indeed, such people exist, as some have dreamed.

Nor am I talking to those who find their encouragement and inspiration in the current state of things and cherish it with the fondness and enthusiasm of lovers. (To some extent, I count myself in this group.) I am not speaking to those who are well employed, whatever their circumstances, because they know whether they are well employed or not.

Instead, I am mainly speaking to the mass of men who are discontented. They idly complain about how hard their lives are, or about the times they live in, when they actually have the power to improve their situations. There are some who complain most energetically and sadly of all, often because they say they are “doing their duty.” (Perhaps implying their sense of duty makes them miserable, or they use it as an excuse not to change.)

I also have in mind that group of people who seem wealthy but are actually the most terribly impoverished of all. They have accumulated a lot of “dross” (worthless material possessions, or wealth they don’t know how to use). They don’t know how to use these things or get rid of them. In this way, they have forged their own golden or silver chains (fetters).

My Own Aspirations

If I were to try to tell you how I have wished to spend my life in past years, it would probably surprise those of my readers who know a little about its actual history. It would certainly astonish those who know nothing about it. I will only hint at some of the projects and endeavors I have cherished.

Living in the Present

In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been eager to improve the nick of time—to make the most of the present moment—and to “notch it on my stick,” to make it count. I’ve wanted to stand on the meeting point of two eternities, the past and the future, which is precisely the present moment, and to “toe that line,” to live fully within it.

You will have to forgive some unclear parts in my writing. There are more secrets in my “trade” (my way of life and thinking) than in most people’s. These secrets are not kept on purpose; they are just an inseparable part of its nature. I would gladly tell you everything I know about it and would never put a “No Admittance” sign on my gate.

A Symbolic Search

Long ago, I lost a hound, a bay-colored horse, and a turtle-dove, and I am still searching for them. (These are likely symbols of things he valued and felt were lost—perhaps ideals, wildness, innocence, or companionship.) I have spoken to many travelers about them, describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two people who had heard the hound, and the sound of the horse’s hooves, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud. They seemed as anxious to find them again as if they had lost these things themselves.

Experiencing Nature Directly

My goal has been to anticipate, not just the sunrise and the dawn, but, if possible, Nature herself! How many mornings, in summer and winter, before any neighbor was awake and about his business, have I been about mine! No doubt, many of my townspeople have met me returning from this “enterprise”—farmers starting for Boston in the twilight, or woodchoppers going to their work. It is true, I never physically helped the sun to rise, but, believe me, it was of the utmost importance just to be present at its rising.

Listening to the Wind and Sky

So many autumn and winter days I spent outside the town, trying to hear what was “in the wind”—to catch some message or inspiration from nature and share it immediately! I nearly invested all my energy (“sunk all my capital”) in this effort and lost my own breath in the bargain, running to meet it. If this news from the wind had concerned politics, you can be sure it would have appeared in the newspaper (“Gazette”) with the latest updates.

At other times, I’d be watching from the “observatory” of some cliff or tree, ready to “telegraph” (observe and report) any new arrival in nature. Or I’d wait at evening on the hilltops for the sky to fall, hoping I might catch something wonderful. Though I never caught much, and what I did catch would often dissolve in the sun, like the manna that fed the Israelites in the desert (meaning, the insights were precious but fleeting).

My Unconventional “Career”

For a long time, I was a reporter for a journal that didn’t have many readers. Its editor has never seen fit to print most of what I wrote. And, as is too common with writers, I only got my labor for my pains (meaning, I wasn’t paid much, if at all). However, in this case, my efforts (“pains”) were their own reward.

For many years, I was a self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and rainstorms, and I did my duty faithfully. I was a surveyor, not of official highways, but of forest paths and all routes across open lots. I tried to keep them open, and to see that ravines were bridged and passable at all seasons, especially where public use showed they were needed.

I have looked after the wild animals (“wild stock”) of the town. These animals often give a faithful herdsman a good deal of trouble by leaping over fences. I have also kept an eye on the unfrequented nooks and corners of the local farms, though I did not always know whether Jonas or Solomon (common farmer names) worked in a particular field on any given day; that was none of my business. I have watered the red huckleberry, the sand cherry, and the nettle tree, the red pine and the black ash, the white grape and the yellow violet, which might have withered in dry seasons if I hadn’t.

In short, I went on like this for a long time. I can say it without boasting that I faithfully minded my own kind of business. Eventually, it became more and more clear that my townspeople would not, after all, appoint me to any official town office, nor would they give me an easy job with a moderate salary (a “sinecure”). My accounts—which I can swear I have kept faithfully—have indeed never been officially checked (audited), much less accepted, and certainly not paid and settled. However, I have not set my heart on that kind of recognition.

The Indian and the Baskets: A Lesson in Value

Not long ago, a traveling Native American man went to sell baskets at the house of a well-known lawyer in my neighborhood. “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 neighbors doing so well—for example, the lawyer only had to “weave arguments,” and by some magic, wealth and social standing followed—the Indian had said to himself: “I will go into business; I will weave baskets; it is a thing which I can do.” He thought that once he had made the baskets, he would have done his part, and then it would be the white man’s role to buy them. He had not discovered that it was necessary for him to make it worth the other person’s while to buy them, or at least to make the buyer think it was worthwhile, or to make something else that it would be worth their while to buy.

I, too, had woven a kind of basket with a delicate texture—my writings and my way of life. But I had not made it worth anyone’s while (in a commercial sense) to buy them. Yet, in my case, I still thought it was worth my while to weave them. Instead of studying how to make it worth other people’s while to buy my baskets, I studied instead how to avoid the necessity of selling them at all.

The life which people praise and regard as successful is only one kind of life. Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of all the others?

Turning to Walden

Finding that my fellow citizens were not likely to offer me a position in the courthouse, or any job in a church (“curacy or living”), or any other employment, I realized I must manage for myself. So, I turned my attention more exclusively than ever to the woods, where I felt better known and more at home.

I decided to “go into business” at once—to start my Walden experiment—and not wait to acquire the usual amount of money (capital). I would use whatever slender means I already had. My purpose in going to Walden Pond was not to live cheaply, nor to live expensively. It was to conduct some private business (my experiment in simple, deliberate living) with the fewest possible obstacles. It seemed not so much sad as foolish to be prevented from accomplishing this important personal goal simply for want of a little common sense, a bit of initiative, or some business talent.

The True Nature of “Business”

I have always tried to develop strict business habits; they are essential for every person. Imagine your trade is with the “Celestial Empire” (an old term for China). A small office (“counting house”) on the coast, perhaps in a New England harbor like Salem, would be enough. You would export local products—ice, pine timber, a little granite—always using ships from your own country. These would be good ventures.

Consider what such a business involves:

• Overseeing all the details yourself, in person.
• Being pilot, captain, owner, and insurer (underwriter) all at once.
• Buying, selling, and keeping the accounts.
• Reading every letter received, and writing or reading every letter sent.
• Supervising the unloading of imports, day and night.
• Being in many parts of the coast almost at the same time—often the most valuable cargo will be unloaded on an unexpected shore (like a “Jersey shore”).
• Being your own telegraph, tirelessly scanning the horizon, communicating with all passing coastal ships.
• Keeping up a steady dispatch of goods to supply a distant and demanding market.
• Keeping yourself informed of market conditions, prospects of war and peace everywhere.
• Anticipating trends in trade and civilization.
• Taking advantage of the results of all exploring expeditions, using new sea passages and all improvements in navigation.
• Studying charts, learning the position of reefs and new lighthouses and buoys.
• Constantly correcting logarithmic tables (used for navigation), because an error by a calculator can cause a ship to hit a rock when it should have reached a friendly dock (like the unexplained fate of the explorer La Pérouse).
• Keeping up with universal science, studying the lives of all great discoverers, navigators, adventurers, and merchants, from ancient explorers like Hanno and the Phoenicians down to our own day.
• Finally, taking inventory (“account of stock”) from time to time, to know where you stand.

This kind of business is a labor that would challenge all of a person’s abilities. It involves complex problems of profit and loss, interest, various charges (tare and tret), and all kinds of measurements, demanding almost universal knowledge. (Thoreau uses this elaborate analogy to show that his “business” of living deliberately and understanding life requires similar dedication, thoroughness, and comprehensive attention.)

Walden Pond: A Good Business Location

I have thought that Walden Pond would be a good place for my kind of “business”—not just because of the nearby railroad and the ice trade. It offers advantages which it might not be wise to reveal publicly. It is a good “port” and a good “foundation.”

There are no “Neva marshes” to be filled in (unlike St. Petersburg, Russia, which was built on marshland). However, you must everywhere build on “piles of your own driving” (meaning, you must rely entirely on your own efforts and foundations). It is said that a flood-tide on the Neva River, combined with a westerly wind and ice, could sweep the city of St. Petersburg from the face of the earth. (This implies that Walden, or the life he built there, is on a more solid, natural, and self-reliant foundation.)

Practicalities: Clothing

Since this “business” of mine at Walden was to be started without the usual amount of money, it may not be easy to guess where the necessary resources were to come from.

Let’s talk about Clothing, to get to the practical part of the question. Perhaps we are more often guided by a love of novelty and a concern for the opinions of other people when we buy clothes, rather than by true usefulness.

Let anyone who has real work to do remember that the main purposes of clothing are:

1. To retain vital body heat.
2. In our current state of society, to cover nakedness.

With these points in mind, he can judge how much necessary or important work can be done without constantly adding to his wardrobe. Kings and queens who wear an outfit only once, even if it’s made by a royal tailor or dressmaker, cannot know the true comfort of wearing clothes that really fit well from use. They are no better than wooden horses used simply to hang clean clothes on.

Every day, our garments become more like ourselves. They receive the imprint of the wearer’s character. Eventually, we hesitate to lay them aside without the same kind of delay, medical attention, and solemnity that we might give to our own bodies when they are failing.

No man ever stood lower in my estimation for having a patch on his clothes. Yet, I am sure that there is generally greater anxiety to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes, than to have a sound conscience. But even if a tear (rent) in one’s clothing is not mended, perhaps the worst fault (vice) it reveals is simply carelessness or lack of foresight (improvidence).

I sometimes test my acquaintances with questions like this: Who among them could wear a patch, or just two extra seams, over the knee of their pants? Most behave as if they believe their entire future prospects would be ruined if they did such a thing. It would be easier for them to hobble to town with a broken leg than with torn trousers (“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 trousers, there is no help for it in his eyes. This is because he considers not what is truly respectable, but what is respected by society. We know but few men; what we mostly see are a great many coats and breeches. We see the clothes, not the real person inside them.

If you dress a scarecrow in your best remaining clothes and stand beside it in rags (“shiftless”), who would people greet first? Most likely, the scarecrow. The other day, passing a cornfield, I saw a hat and coat on a stake. I recognized the owner of the farm nearby; he was only a little more worn by the weather than the clothes on the stake.

I’ve heard of a dog that barked at every stranger who approached his master’s property wearing clothes. However, a thief who was naked could easily quiet the dog. It’s an interesting question: how much of their social standing would people keep if they were all stripped of their clothes? In such a situation, could you confidently tell which people in a group of “civilized” men belonged to the most respected class?

Madam Pfeiffer, an adventurous world traveler, wrote that when she got as near home as Asiatic Russia, she felt she had to wear something other than her traveling dress when meeting officials. She said this was because she “was now in a civilized country, where people are judged by their clothes.” Even in our democratic New England towns, simply having wealth, and showing it off through fancy dress and expensive carriages, gets the owner almost universal respect. But those who give such respect, as numerous as they are, are like “heathens” in this regard (meaning, uncivilized in their judgment). They need a missionary to teach them better values.

Besides, clothes introduced sewing, a type of work that you could say is endless. A woman’s dress, at least, is never truly finished.

New Clothes or a New Person?

A man who has finally found something meaningful to do will not need to get a new suit of clothes to do it in. For him, the old suit that has been lying dusty in the attic for who knows how long will do just fine. Old shoes will serve a hero longer than they have served his assistant (his “valet”)—if a hero even has a valet. Bare feet are older than shoes, and a hero can make them work.

Only those who go to fancy evening parties (“soirées”) and legislative halls feel they must have new coats, and change them as often as the man himself changes his opinions or roles. But if my jacket and trousers, my hat and shoes, are fit to worship God in, they will do for any occasion, won’t they?

Who has ever seen his old clothes—his old coat, for example—actually worn out, broken down into its original fibers? Isn’t it usually considered an act of charity to give it to some poor boy, who might then give it to someone poorer still—or should we say richer, someone who can make do with even less?

I say, beware of all projects that require new clothes, instead of rather requiring a new wearer of clothes. If there is not a new man—a changed and improved person—how can new clothes be made to fit properly? If you have any project before you, try it in your old clothes. All people want, not something to do with (more possessions), but something to do (a purpose), or rather, something to be (a better version of themselves).

Perhaps we should never get a new suit of clothes, no matter how ragged or dirty the old one is, until we have behaved, or ventured, or journeyed in some way that makes us feel like new people in our old clothes. To keep the old clothes then would be like keeping new wine in old bottles—the container is no longer suitable for the new contents within. Our “moulting season,” like that of birds when they shed their old feathers, must be a critical turning point in our lives. The loon (a type of bird) goes to solitary ponds to get through its moulting. Similarly, the snake sheds its old skin, and the caterpillar its wormy coat, through an internal effort and expansion. Clothes are, after all, just our outermost layer of skin (“cuticle”) and our connection to this mortal world (“mortal coil”).

Otherwise, if we don’t change inwardly but only change our outward appearance, we will be found “sailing under false colors” (pretending to be something we are not). We will inevitably be disgraced (“cashiered”) in the end, by our own opinion of ourselves as well as by the opinion of others.

Layers of Clothing, Layers of Self

We put on garment after garment, as if we grew like certain plants (“exogenous plants”) that grow by adding layers on the outside.

• Our outside clothes, often thin and fanciful, are like our epidermis or false skin. They are not really part of our life and can be stripped off here and there without serious harm.
• Our thicker garments, worn constantly, are like our cellular integument or cortex (a deeper layer of skin or bark).
• But our shirts are like our liber or true bark of a tree. They cannot be removed without “girdling” the tree (cutting through the vital layer all around it) and so destroying the man.

I believe that all cultures, at some times of the year, wear something equivalent to this essential shirt.

It is desirable that a man be dressed so simply that he can easily lay his hands on himself in the dark. He should live in all respects so compactly and preparedly that, if an enemy were to capture the town, he could, like the old philosopher Bias of Priene, walk out the gate empty-handed without any anxiety.

For most purposes, one thick garment is as good as three thin ones. Cheap clothing can be bought at prices that truly suit customers.

• A thick coat, which will last for many years, can be bought for five dollars.
• Thick trousers can be bought for two dollars.
• Cowhide boots cost a dollar and a half a pair.
• A summer hat costs a quarter of a dollar.
• A winter cap costs sixty-two and a half cents, or a better one can be made at home for almost no cost.

Where is the man so poor that, dressed in such a suit of clothes earned by his own labor, there will not be wise men who will respect him?

Fashion’s Tyranny

When I ask for a garment of a particular style, my tailoress tells me gravely, “They do not make them so now.” She doesn’t emphasize the word “They” at all, as if she were quoting an authority as impersonal as the Fates. I find it difficult to get what I want made, simply because she cannot believe that I mean what I say, or that I am so bold (“rash”) as to want something different.

When I hear this pronouncement, like an oracle speaking, I am momentarily lost in thought. I emphasize each word to myself separately so I can understand its meaning. I try to find out by what degree of relationship “They” are connected to me, and what authority “They” might have in an affair that affects me so directly. Finally, I am inclined to answer her with equal mystery, and without any more emphasis on the “they” than she used: “It is true, they did not make them so recently, but they do now.” (Implying that he himself is the new authority, the new “They” who decides what is current for him.)

Of what use is this measuring of me if she does not measure my character, but only the breadth of my shoulders, as if I were merely a peg to hang a coat on? We do not worship the Graces (goddesses of charm and beauty) or the Parcæ (the Fates who controlled destiny), but Fashion. She spins and weaves and cuts with full authority. The head monkey in Paris puts on a traveler’s cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same. (This is a harsh critique of people blindly following fashion trends set elsewhere.)

Sometimes I despair of getting anything quite simple and honest done in this world with the help of other people. They would have to be passed through a powerful press first, to squeeze their old notions out of them, so that they would not soon get back on their feet with the same old ideas. And even then, there would be someone in the company with a “maggot in his head” (a stubborn, irrational idea) that was hatched from an egg deposited there nobody knows when—for not even fire can kill these persistent, wrong ideas—and all your effort would be lost.

Nevertheless, we should not forget that some Egyptian wheat (symbolizing ancient wisdom or value) is said to have been handed down to us by a mummy (meaning, true value can survive through time).

Dressing: Not Yet an Art

On the whole, I think it cannot be argued that dressing, in this or any other country, has risen to the dignity of an art. At present, people just manage to wear whatever they can get. Like shipwrecked sailors, they put on whatever clothes they can find on the beach. And from a little distance, whether of space or time, they laugh at each other’s outfits (“masquerade”).

Every generation laughs at the old fashions but religiously follows the new ones. We are amused looking at the costumes of King Henry VIII or Queen Elizabeth, as much as if they were the outfits of the King and Queen of the Cannibal Islands (meaning, they look utterly strange and exotic to us).

All costume, when considered apart from the person wearing it, is pitiful or grotesque. It is only the serious eye looking out from within the costume, and the sincere life lived by the person inside it, that stops our laughter and makes the costume of any people seem respectable or even sacred. If Harlequin (a traditional comic character in pantomime, known for his colorful, patterned costume) gets a stomach ache, his fancy outfit will have to suit that miserable mood too. When a soldier is hit by a cannonball, rags are as fitting as royal purple robes.

The Fickle Taste for Novelty

The childish and unrefined (“savage”) taste of men and women for new patterns keeps so many people anxiously “shaking and squinting through kaleidoscopes.” They are trying to discover the particular new design or figure that this generation demands today. The manufacturers have learned that this taste is merely whimsical and unpredictable. Of two patterns that differ only by a few threads more or less of a particular color, one will sell readily, while the other will sit on the shelf. Though it frequently happens that after a season has passed, the unsold one becomes the most fashionable.

Comparatively speaking, tattooing is not the hideous custom it is often called. It is not barbarous merely because the design is printed skin-deep and cannot be changed. (Perhaps Thoreau implies that tattooing, being permanent, is more honest than the constantly changing, superficial whims of fashion.)

The Factory System and Clothing

I cannot believe that our factory system is the best way for people to get clothing. The condition of the factory workers (“operatives”) is becoming more like that of workers in England every day (who were known for their poor working conditions). This is not surprising because, as far as I have heard or observed, the main goal of the factory system is not that humankind may be well and honestly clothed, but, unquestionably, that the corporations may become rich.

In the long run, people usually achieve only what they aim for. Therefore, even if they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high (like the well-being of workers and society, not just profit).

Shelter: A Modern Necessity

As for Shelter, I will not deny that this is now a necessary of life. However, there are instances of men having done without it for long periods, even in colder countries than this one. Samuel Laing, a writer, says that “The Laplander (a person from Lapland in northern Scandinavia) 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.” Laing had seen them asleep like this. Yet he adds, “They are not hardier than other people.” (This suggests their survival was due to adaptation and technique, not just innate toughness.)

But, probably, humans did not live long on the earth without discovering the convenience of a house. The phrase “domestic comforts” may have originally meant the satisfactions provided by the house itself, more than those provided by the family within it. However, these comforts must be very limited and occasional in those climates where a house is mainly associated in our thoughts with winter or the rainy season. In such places, for two-thirds of the year, a house (except perhaps for a parasol for shade) is unnecessary. In our climate, in the summer, a house was formerly used almost solely as a covering at night.

In old “Indian gazettes” (perhaps symbolic records or maps), a wigwam was the symbol of a day’s march. A row of wigwam symbols cut or painted on the bark of a tree signified how many times a group had camped.

Humans were not made so large-limbed and robust that they didn’t need to seek to narrow their world and wall in a space that fitted them. At first, humans were bare and lived out of doors. Though this was pleasant enough in calm and warm weather during the day, the rainy season and the winter—not to mention the scorching sun—would perhaps have destroyed the human race (“nipped his race in the bud”) if people had not quickly clothed themselves with the shelter of a house. Adam and Eve, according to the fable, wore a natural shelter of branches (a “bower”) before they wore any other clothes. Humans wanted a home: first, a place of physical warmth, and then, a place for the warmth of affections (love and emotional comfort).

The Instinct for Shelter

We can imagine a time, in the early days of the human race, when some enterprising person crept into a hollow in a rock for shelter. Every child begins the world anew, to some extent. Children love to stay outdoors, even in wet and cold weather. A child plays “house,” just as it plays “horse,” having an instinct for it. Who does not remember the interest with which, when young, he or she looked at overhanging rocks, or any formation that resembled a cave? It was the natural yearning of that part of our most primitive ancestor which still survived in us.

From the cave, we have advanced to roofs made of palm leaves, of bark and boughs, of linen woven and stretched, of grass and straw, of boards and shingles, and of stones and tiles. At last, we hardly know what it is to live in the open air. Our lives have become “domestic” (tame and house-bound) in more senses than we usually think. From the hearth (the fireplace, symbol of home) to the field (symbol of nature) is a great distance, figuratively speaking.

It would perhaps be well if we were to spend more of our days and nights without any obstruction between us and the stars and sky (“celestial bodies”). It might be better if the poet did not speak so much from under a roof, or if the saint did not live indoors for so long. Birds do not sing in caves, nor do doves cherish their innocence in man-made birdhouses (“dovecots”). Nature thrives best in natural settings.

Building a Dwelling Wisely

However, if one plans to build a house, it is important to exercise a little “Yankee shrewdness” (practical New England cleverness). Otherwise, one might end up with a “workhouse” (a place for forced labor), a confusing labyrinth with no way out (“clew” means clue), a museum, a poorhouse (“almshouse”), a prison, or even a splendid tomb (“mausoleum”) instead of a home.

First, consider how little shelter is absolutely necessary. I have seen Penobscot Indians in this town living in tents made of thin cotton cloth while the snow was nearly a foot deep around them. I thought that they would probably be glad to have the snow even deeper to help keep out the wind.

Formerly, when the question of how to get my living honestly, while still having freedom for my own important pursuits, troubled me even more than it does now (for unfortunately, I have become somewhat hardened or “callous” to it), I used to see a large wooden box by the railroad. It was about six feet long by three feet wide. The laborers locked up their tools in it at night. It suggested to me that any man who was in a very difficult situation might get such a box for a dollar. After boring a few holes in it with an auger (a tool for drilling holes) to let in some air, he could get into it when it rained and at night. He could hook down the lid and so have freedom in his love life, and be free in his soul. This did not seem like the worst option, nor by any means a despicable one. You could sit up as late as you pleased. Whenever you got up, you could go out without any landlord or building owner chasing you for rent. Many a man is harassed to death to pay the rent for a larger and more luxurious box (a fancier house) who would not have frozen to death in a simple box like this.

I am far from joking. Economy is a subject that people sometimes treat lightly, but it cannot be dismissed so easily.

A comfortable house for a tough and hardy race of people, who lived mostly outdoors, was once made in this area almost entirely from materials that Nature provided ready to their hands. Gookin, who was the superintendent of the Native Americans subject to the Massachusetts Colony, wrote in 1674:

• “The best of their houses are covered very neatly, tight and warm, with barks of trees, stripped 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 (poorer houses) are covered with mats which they make of a kind of bulrush, and are also indifferently (fairly) tight and warm, but not so good as the former…”
• “Some I have seen, sixty or a hundred feet long and thirty feet broad…”
• “I have often lodged in their wigwams, and found them as warm as the best English houses.” He added that their wigwams were commonly carpeted and lined inside with well-made embroidered mats, and were furnished with various utensils. The Native Americans had even advanced so far as to regulate the effect of the wind by hanging a mat over the smoke hole in the roof, which could be moved by a string. Such a lodge was originally built in a day or two at most, and could be taken down and put up again in a few hours. Every family owned one, or had their own apartment within one.

Owning Shelter: “Savage” vs. Civilized

In the “savage state” (as Thoreau termed pre-industrial societies), every family owns a shelter as good as the best available, and it is sufficient for their simpler, more basic wants. But I think I am speaking within reasonable limits when I say that, though the birds of the air have their nests, and the foxes their holes, and these native peoples their wigwams, in modern civilized society, not more than half the families own their own 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 population. The rest pay an annual tax (rent) for this outermost garment of all (their housing). This housing has become indispensable in both summer and winter. The annual rent paid would be enough to buy a whole village of Native American wigwams, but instead, it helps to keep these renters poor as long as they live.

I do not mean to insist here on the disadvantage of hiring compared with owning. But it is clear that the “savage” owns his shelter because it costs so little, while the civilized man commonly hires his because he cannot afford to own it. Nor, in the long run, can he any better afford to hire.

But, someone might answer, by merely paying this rent, the poor civilized man gets a home that is a palace compared with the “savage’s” dwelling. An annual rent of from twenty-five to a hundred dollars (which were country rates at the time) entitles him to the benefit of centuries of improvements: spacious apartments, clean paint and wallpaper, a Rumford fireplace (an efficient design), back plastering (for insulation), Venetian blinds, a copper pump, a spring lock, a convenient cellar, and many other things.

But how does it happen that the person who is said to enjoy these things is so commonly a poor civilized man, while the “savage,” who does not have them, is rich as a savage (meaning, self-sufficient and content within his own system)?

If it is asserted that civilization is a real advance in the condition of humankind—and I think that it is, though only the wise truly improve their advantages—it must be shown that it has produced better dwellings without making them more costly. And the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

An average house in this neighborhood costs perhaps eight hundred dollars. To save up this sum will take from ten to fifteen years of a laborer’s life, even if he is not burdened with a family. This estimate assumes the monetary value of every man’s labor is one dollar a day (for if some receive more, others receive less). So, he must have spent more than half his working life before his “wigwam” (his house) will be earned. If we suppose he pays rent instead, this is merely a doubtful choice between two bad options. Would the “savage” have been wise to exchange his wigwam for a palace on these terms?

The “Benefit” of Civilization’s Burdens

It may be guessed that I reduce almost the whole advantage of holding this unnecessary (“superfluous”) property, as a fund saved for the future, mainly to the cost of paying for one’s own funeral expenses, as far as the individual is concerned. But perhaps a man is not actually required to bury himself.

Nevertheless, this points to an important distinction between the civilized man and the “savage.” No doubt, “they” (the institutions of civilized society) have designs on us for our supposed benefit. They make 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 the life of the race as a whole.

But I wish to show at what a great sacrifice this advantage (of civilization) is currently obtained. And I want to suggest that we may possibly live in such a way as to secure all the advantages of civilization without suffering any of the disadvantages.

Challenging Old Excuses

What do you mean by saying, “The poor you will always have with you,” or that “The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge” (an old proverb suggesting children suffer for their parents’ sins)?

The Lord God says (in the book of Ezekiel): “As I live… you shall not have occasion any more to use this proverb in Israel.” And also: “Behold, all souls are mine; as the soul of the father, so also the soul of the son is mine: the soul that sins, it shall die.” (Thoreau uses these quotes to argue that people are responsible for their own situations, and poverty or suffering are not unchangeable destinies or inherited curses.)

When I consider my neighbors, the farmers of Concord, who are at least as well off as people in other professions, I find that most of them have been toiling for twenty, thirty, or forty years. They work this long so they can become the real owners of their farms. Often, they have inherited these farms with debts attached, or they bought them with borrowed money. We can estimate that about one-third of all that work went just to pay for their houses—but commonly, they still haven’t paid them off completely.

It’s true that sometimes the debts on a farm are greater than the farm’s actual value. In such cases, the farm itself becomes one huge burden. And still, a man is found to inherit it, saying he is well acquainted with it.

When I ask the town assessors (officials who value property for taxes), I am surprised to learn that they cannot immediately name even a dozen people in the town who own their farms free and clear of debt. If you want to know the history of these homesteads, ask at the bank where they are mortgaged.

The man who has actually paid for his farm with his own labor on it is so rare that every neighbor can point him out. I doubt if there are even three such men in Concord.

What has been said of merchants—that a very large majority, even ninety-seven out of a hundred, are sure to fail in business—is equally true of farmers. Regarding merchants, however, one of them made a relevant point. He said that a great part of their failures are not genuine financial failures, but simply failures to meet their commitments because it is inconvenient. In other words, it is their moral character that breaks down.

But this view makes the matter seem infinitely worse. It also suggests that probably not even the other three who supposedly “succeed” manage to save their souls. Perhaps they are bankrupt in a worse sense (morally) than those who fail honestly in business.

Bankruptcy and refusing to pay debts (repudiation) are like the springboards from which much of our civilization leaps and does its acrobatic tricks. But the “savage” (a term Thoreau used for people in non-industrialized societies, meaning someone facing basic survival directly) stands on the unbending plank of potential starvation; he has no such financial tricks.

Yet, the Middlesex Cattle Show (an agricultural fair) happens here every year with great success and celebration (“éclat”), as if every part of the agricultural system were running perfectly smoothly (“suent”).

The Farmer’s Complex Life

The farmer tries to solve the problem of making a living by using a formula that is more complicated than the problem itself. To get something as simple as shoestrings, he speculates in herds of cattle (making risky investments). With great skill, he has set a very sensitive trap (like one with a “hair spring”) to catch comfort and independence. And then, just as he turned away, he got his own leg caught in it.

This is the reason he is poor. For a similar reason, we are all poor in respect to a thousand simple, natural (“savage”) comforts, even though we are surrounded by luxuries. As the poet George Chapman wrote: “The false society of men— —for earthly greatness All heavenly comforts rarefies to air.” (This means that society’s focus on worldly success and possessions causes spiritual comforts to vanish.)

And when the farmer finally gets his house, he may not be richer but poorer for it. It may be the house that has “got him,” trapping him. As I understand it, this was a valid objection that Momus (the Greek god of criticism) made against the house that Minerva (goddess of wisdom) built. He said that she “had not made it movable, by which means a bad neighborhood might be avoided.” This criticism can still be made today, because our houses are such unwieldy, difficult-to-manage property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed in them. And the “bad neighborhood” we need to avoid is often our own unhappy, unhealthy selves (“our own scurvy selves”).

I know at least one or two families in this town who, for nearly a whole generation, have been wishing to sell their houses on the outskirts of town and move into the village. But they have not been able to do it, and it seems only death will set them free from their property.

Improved Houses, Unimproved People

Let’s grant that the majority of people are eventually able either to own or to rent a modern house with all its improvements. While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the people who are to live in them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings to inhabit them.

And if the civilized man’s goals and activities are no worthier than those of the “savage”—if he spends the greater part of his life simply trying to obtain basic necessities and comforts—why should he have a better dwelling than the “savage”?

The Price of Luxury: Poverty for Others

But how do the poor minority fare in this system? Perhaps it will be found that, just in proportion as some people have been placed in outward circumstances far above the “savage,” others have been degraded far below him. The luxury of one class is balanced by the extreme poverty (indigence) of another. On one side is the palace; on the other are the poorhouse (“almshouse”) and the “silent poor” (those who suffer poverty without complaint).

The countless people who built the pyramids to be the tombs of the Pharaohs were fed on garlic, and it may be that they were not even decently buried themselves. The mason who finishes the fancy cornice (decorative molding) of a palace perhaps returns at night to a hut not as good as a Native American wigwam.

It is a mistake to suppose that, in a country where the usual signs of civilization exist, the condition of a very large number of the inhabitants may not be as degraded as that of “savages.” I am referring to the degraded poor, not, for the moment, to the degraded rich (who have their own kind of degradation).

To know this, I wouldn’t need to look farther than the shantytown dwellings that line our railroads everywhere—the railroad itself being the latest “improvement” in civilization. In my daily walks, I see human beings living in conditions like pigsties (“sties”). They live all winter with an open door for the sake of light, without any visible woodpile for fuel (and often without even an imaginable one). The bodies of both old and young people are permanently hunched and stunted (“contracted”) from the long habit of shrinking from cold and misery. The development of all their limbs and abilities is stopped.

It is certainly fair to look at the condition of the class of people by whose labor the great works that distinguish this generation are accomplished. This, to a greater or lesser extent, is also the condition of factory workers (“operatives”) of every type in England, which is the great “workhouse” (a place of hard labor, often for the poor) of the world. Or I could refer you to Ireland, which is marked on maps as one of the “white” or enlightened spots of the world (this is likely sarcastic, given the widespread poverty in Ireland at the time). Contrast the physical condition of the Irish people with that of the North American Indian, or the South Sea Islander, or any other so-called “savage race” before it was degraded by contact with civilized man. Yet, I have no doubt that the rulers of Ireland are as wise as the average civilized rulers. The condition of the Irish people only proves what terrible poverty (“squalidness”) can exist alongside civilization.

I hardly need to refer now to the enslaved laborers in our Southern States who produce the staple exports of this country, and who are themselves considered a staple product of the South. But for now, I will limit my discussion to those who are said to be in moderate circumstances.

What is a House, Really?

Most people appear never to have actually considered what a house is. They are actually, though needlessly, poor all their lives because they think they must have a house just like their neighbors have. It’s as if someone were to feel obligated to wear any sort of coat that a tailor might cut out for him. Or, as if someone, gradually giving up a simple palm-leaf hat or a cap made of woodchuck skin, were to complain of hard times because he could not afford to buy himself a crown!

It is possible to invent a house even more convenient and luxurious than any we currently have, yet one that everyone would admit a person could not afford to pay for. Shall we always study to obtain more of these things, and not sometimes try to be content with less? Should the respectable citizen gravely teach, by word and example, that it’s necessary for a young man to provide a certain number of unneeded items like “glow-shoes” (perhaps a humorous or obscure reference), umbrellas, and empty guest chambers for empty guests, before he dies?

Why should not our furniture be as simple as an Arab’s or a Native American’s? When I think of the great benefactors of the human race, whom we have honored almost as gods (“apotheosized”), as messengers from heaven bringing divine gifts to mankind, I do not see in my mind any crowd of servants (“retinue”) following them, nor any cart-load of fashionable furniture.

Or what if I were to allow—wouldn’t it be a strange allowance?—that our furniture should be more complex than the Arab’s, in proportion as we are morally and intellectually his superiors! (This is sarcastic; Thoreau questions whether “civilized” people are truly superior in ways that justify more complex material lives.) At present, our houses are cluttered and spoiled (“defiled”) with it. A good housewife would sweep the greater part of it into the dustbin and not leave her morning’s work undone.

Morning work! By the blushes of Aurora (the dawn) and the music of Memnon (a statue in Egypt that was said to sing at sunrise), what should be a person’s morning work in this world? (He evokes a sense of awe and suggests morning should be for higher purposes than dusting.) I once had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required daily dusting, when the furniture of my mind was still all undusted. 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 the ground.

Fashion and False Luxuries

It is the luxurious and self-indulgent (“dissipated”) people who set the fashions, which the crowd (“herd”) so diligently follows. The traveler who stops at the best hotels (so-called “best houses”) soon discovers this. The innkeepers (“publicans”) assume him to be a Sardanapalus (an ancient Assyrian king, a symbol of extreme, decadent luxury). If the traveler were to give in to their “tender mercies” (their attempts to sell him luxuries), he would soon be completely weakened and made unmanly (“emasculated”).

I think that in the railroad car, we are inclined to spend more on luxury than on safety and convenience. It threatens to become no better than a modern drawing-room, without actually achieving true safety or convenience. It’s filled with its divans, ottomans, sunshades, and a hundred other “oriental” things. We are taking these things west with us, things that were invented for the ladies of the harem and the “effeminate natives of the Celestial Empire” (an old term for China, used here with some prejudice common in his era). “Jonathan” (a term for the typical plain American) should be ashamed to even know the names of these luxuries.

I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself than be crowded onto a velvet cushion. I would rather ride on the earth in an ox cart with free air circulation than go to heaven in the fancy car of an excursion train and breathe polluted air (“malaria,” both literally and figuratively) all the way.

Losing Our Way: From Sojourners to Settlers

The very simplicity and nakedness of human life in primitive ages had this advantage at least: it meant that people were still just temporary visitors (“sojourners”) in nature. When a person was refreshed with food and sleep, he thought about his journey again. He lived, so to speak, in a tent in this world. He was either threading through valleys, or crossing plains, or climbing mountaintops.

But look! People have become the tools of their tools. The man who independently plucked fruits when he was hungry has become a farmer (dependent on a complex system). And he who stood under a tree for shelter has become a housekeeper (tied to a house and its upkeep). We no longer camp as if for just a night. We have settled down on earth and forgotten heaven (our spiritual life and higher aspirations). We have adopted Christianity merely as an improved method of agriculture (reducing it to a practical, worldly system focused on earthly productivity). We have built for this world a family mansion, and for the next world, a family tomb. (Our focus is on earthly possessions and eventual death, rather than a vibrant spiritual life.)

The best works of art are the expression of humanity’s struggle to free itself from this condition of being too settled and materialistic. But the effect of much of our art is merely to make this low state comfortable and to cause that higher state to be forgotten. There is actually no place in this village for a true work of fine art, even if one had come down to us from the past. Our lives, our houses, and our streets provide 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 how their internal economy is managed and sustained, I wonder that the floor does not give way under the visitor while he is admiring the trinkets (“gewgaws”) on the mantelpiece. I wonder it doesn’t let him fall through into the cellar, to some solid and honest, though earthy, foundation.

I cannot help but see that this so-called rich and refined life is something people jump at superficially. I do not get much enjoyment from the fine arts that adorn it because my attention is wholly occupied with the “jump” itself—the precarious effort to maintain such a lifestyle. I remember that the greatest genuine leap ever recorded, due to human muscles alone, is that of certain wandering Arabs, who are said to have cleared twenty-five feet on level ground. Without artificial support (“factitious support”), a person is sure to come back down to earth again beyond that distance.

The first question I am tempted to ask the owner of such “great impropriety” (an overly luxurious and unstable way of life) is: Who supports you? Are you one of the ninety-seven who fail in business, or one of the three who succeed? Answer me these questions, and then perhaps I may look at your trinkets (“bawbles”) and find them ornamental.

The cart before the horse is neither beautiful nor useful. Before we can adorn our houses with beautiful objects, the walls must be stripped bare, and our lives must be stripped bare. Beautiful housekeeping and beautiful living must be laid as the foundation. Currently, a taste for the beautiful is best cultivated outdoors, where there is no house and no housekeeper to distract us.

Lessons from Early Settlers

Old Johnson, in his book “Wonder-Working Providence,” speaks of the first settlers of this town, with whom he was a contemporary. He tells us that “they burrow themselves 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.” He says they did not “provide them houses… 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 (later New York), writing in Dutch in 1650 for people who wished to settle there, states more particularly that: “Those in New Netherland, and especially in New England, who have no means to build farmhouses 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. They case the earth inside with wood all round the wall, and line the wood with the bark of trees or something else to prevent the caving in of the earth. They floor this cellar with plank, and wainscot it overhead for a ceiling, raise a roof of spars (poles) clear up, and cover the spars with bark or green sods. In these houses, they can live dry and warm with their entire families for two, three, and four years. It is understood that partitions are run through those cellars which are adapted to the size of the family.”

He continues: “The wealthy and principal men in New England, in the beginning of the colonies, commenced their first dwelling houses in this fashion for two reasons; firstly, in order not to waste time in building, and not to lack food the next season; secondly, in order not to discourage poor laboring people whom they brought over in numbers from their Fatherland. In the course of three or four years, when the country became adapted to agriculture, they built themselves handsome houses, spending several thousands on them.”

Our Spiritual Poverty

In this course that our ancestors took, there was at least a show of prudence, 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 truly adapted to human culture (a truly refined and spiritual way of living). We are still forced to cut our spiritual bread far thinner than our forefathers cut their wheaten bread.

This is not to say that all architectural ornament should be neglected, even in the simplest periods. But let our houses first be lined with beauty where they come in contact with our lives—internally, spiritually—like the shell of a shellfish, which is beautiful and perfectly fitted to its inhabitant. Our houses should not just be overlaid with superficial beauty. But, alas! I have been inside one or two of these modern houses, and I know what they are truly lined with.

Using Civilization Wisely

Though we are not so far gone (“degenerate”) that we might not possibly live in a cave or a wigwam or wear animal skins today, it certainly is better to accept the advantages—though they are so dearly bought—which the invention and industry of mankind offer.

In a neighborhood like 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 for building. I speak with understanding on this subject, for I have made myself acquainted with it both in theory and in practice.

With a little more wisdom (“wit”), we might use these modern materials so as to become richer than the richest people are now, and make our civilization a true blessing. The ideal civilized man is a more experienced and wiser “savage”—someone who combines modern knowledge with fundamental soundness and connection to essentials.

But now, let me hasten to describe my own experiment.

Starting the Walden Experiment

Near the end of March, 1845, I borrowed an axe and went down to the woods by Walden Pond. I went to the spot nearest to where I intended to build my house and began to cut down some tall, straight white pine trees, which were still in their youth, to use for timber.

It is difficult to begin any project without borrowing something. But perhaps it is the most generous course to take, as it allows your fellow human beings to have an interest in your enterprise. The owner of the axe, as he handed it to me, said that it was “the apple of his eye” (something very precious to him); but I returned it sharper than I received it.

It was a pleasant hillside where I worked. It was covered with pine woods, through which I could look out at the pond. There was also a small open field in the woods where young pines and hickories were springing up. The ice on the pond had not yet dissolved, though there were some open spaces. The ice 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 onto the railroad on my way home, its yellow sand heap stretched away gleaming in the hazy atmosphere. The rails shone in the spring sun, and I heard the lark and the pewee and other birds. They had already come to begin another year with us.

They were pleasant spring days. The “winter of man’s discontent” (a reference to Shakespeare, meaning a period of unhappiness) was thawing, just as the earth was thawing. The life that had lain dormant (“torpid”) began to stretch itself.

One day, when the head of my axe had come off its handle, I had cut a green hickory sapling to make a wedge. I drove the wedge into the handle with a stone and had placed the whole axe head and handle to soak in a pond hole to make the wood swell and tighten. While I was there, I saw a striped snake run into the water. He lay on the bottom, apparently without any inconvenience, for as long as I stayed there, which was more than a quarter of an hour. Perhaps this was because he had not yet fully come out of his winter’s dormant state.

It seemed to me that people remain in their current low and undeveloped (“primitive”) condition for a similar reason that the snake was sluggish. But if they should feel the influence of a true awakening, a “spring of springs,” arousing them, they would automatically rise to a higher and more spiritual (“ethereal”) life. I had previously seen snakes on frosty mornings in my path with parts of their bodies still numb and stiff, waiting for the sun to thaw them.

On the 1st of April, it rained and melted the ice. In the early part of the day, which was very foggy, I heard a stray goose honking and splashing (“groping about”) over the pond. It sounded as if it were lost, or perhaps like the spirit of the fog itself.

Building and Singing

So I continued for some days, cutting and shaping timber, and also making studs (vertical posts in walls) and rafters (roof beams). I did all this with my narrow axe. During this time, I didn’t have many deep or scholarly thoughts that I could easily share. I mostly sang to myself:

“Men say they know many things; But lo! they have taken wings,— The arts and sciences, And a thousand appliances; The wind that blows Is all that anybody knows.”

(This little song suggests that despite all human knowledge and inventions, true understanding might be as simple and elusive as the wind.)

I shaped the main timbers to be six inches square. Most of the studs were shaped on two sides only, and the rafters and floor timbers on one side. I left the bark on the other sides. This made them just as straight as, and much stronger than, timbers that are completely sawed at a mill. I carefully cut joints (mortises or tenons) into each piece of wood, using the stump of the tree as a kind of workbench. I had borrowed other tools by this time.

My days in the woods were not very long. Yet, I usually carried my dinner of bread and butter with me. At noon, I would read the newspaper in which my food was wrapped, sitting among the green pine boughs I had cut off. My bread even picked up some of their fragrance, because my hands were covered with a thick coat of sticky pine pitch.

Before I was done with my logging, I had become more of a friend than an enemy to the pine trees, even though I had cut some of them down. This was because I had become better acquainted with them. Sometimes, a person walking (“a rambler”) in the woods was attracted by the sound of my axe. We would chat pleasantly over the wood chips I had made.

Getting the Shanty

By the middle of April, my house was framed and ready for the “raising” (the event where the frame is erected). I made no haste in my work, but rather tried to make the most of the experience.

I had already bought the old shanty of James Collins for its boards. Collins was an Irishman who worked on the Fitchburg Railroad. His shanty was considered an uncommonly fine one for its type. When I first called to see it, he was not at home. I walked around the outside. At first, no one inside noticed me because the window was set so deep and high in the wall.

It was a small building with a peaked cottage-style roof. There wasn’t much else to see from the outside, as dirt was piled up five feet high all around it, like a compost heap. The roof was the soundest part, though it was a good deal warped and made brittle by the sun. There was no doorsill (the wood or stone at the bottom of a doorway). Instead, there was a permanent passage for the hens under the bottom door board.

Mrs. Collins came to the door and asked me to view it from the inside. My approach had driven the hens inside. It was dark and had a dirt floor for the most part. The air was damp, clammy, and made one think of fever (“aguish”). There were only a few loose boards on the floor here and there, which would not support much weight.

She lit a lamp to show me the inside of the roof and the walls. She also showed me that the board floor extended under the bed. She warned me not to step into the cellar, which was a sort of dust-filled hole about two feet deep. In her own words, they were “good boards overhead, good boards all around, and a good window.” The window originally had two whole panes of glass, but the cat had recently escaped through it.

Inside, there was a stove, a bed, and a place to sit. There was an infant in the house, born there. There was also a silk parasol, a mirror with a gilded (gold-painted) frame, and a new patented coffee mill nailed to a young oak tree (an oak sapling) that was part of the structure. That was all their furniture.

The bargain was soon made, for James had returned in the meantime. The terms were:

• I was to pay four dollars and twenty-five cents that night.
• He was to vacate the shanty by five o’clock the next morning.
• He promised not to sell it to anyone else in the meantime.
• I was to take possession at six o’clock.

He said it would be wise for me to be there early. This was to prevent (“anticipate”) certain unclear but wholly unjust claims that might be made regarding ground rent or fuel owed. This, he assured me, was the only outstanding claim (“encumbrance”) on the property.

At six the next morning, I passed him and his family on the road. One large bundle held all their possessions: bed, coffee mill, mirror, hens—everything but the cat. The cat had taken to the woods and become a wild cat. I learned afterward that it stepped into a trap set for woodchucks and so became a dead cat at last.

Moving the Boards

I took down the shanty that same morning, carefully pulling out the nails. I moved it in small cartloads to the side of Walden Pond. There, I spread the boards on the grass to let the sun bleach them and warp them back into a flatter shape. As I drove my cart along the woodland path, an early thrush sang a note or two for me.

I was “treacherously” informed by a young Irish lad named Patrick that my neighbor Seeley, another Irishman, was pocketing the still usable, straight nails, staples, and spikes during the times I was away carting the boards. Then, when I came back, Seeley would stand around to pass the time of day. He would look up with an innocent, unconcerned expression, as if his mind were full of spring thoughts, at the “devastation” (the dismantled shanty). He mentioned that there was a lack of work, perhaps as an excuse for being there or for his theft. He was there, it seemed, to represent all spectators, and to help make this seemingly insignificant event feel as grand as the mythical removal of the gods of Troy from their fallen city.

Digging the Cellar

I dug my cellar in the side of a hill that sloped to the south. A woodchuck had formerly dug its burrow there. I dug down through sumac and blackberry roots, and below the lowest level where vegetation stained the soil. The cellar was six feet square and seven feet deep. I dug until I reached a fine sand where potatoes would not freeze in any winter. The sides of the cellar were left sloping and were not lined with stones. But since the sun has never shone on them, the sand still keeps its place. It was only about two hours’ work.

I took particular pleasure in this act of breaking ground. In almost all parts of the world, people dig into the earth to find a stable and moderate (“equable”) temperature. Under the most splendid house in the city, you will still find the cellar where people store their root vegetables, just as they did in ancient times. Long after the main structure of a house has disappeared, future generations will notice its dent in the earth. The house, in a way, is still just a sort of porch at the entrance of a burrow.

Raising the Frame and Moving In

At length, in the beginning of May, I set up the frame of my house. I had the help of some of my acquaintances. This was more to take advantage of a good opportunity for neighborliness than from any real necessity for their help. No man was ever more honored by the character of the people who helped him raise his house than I was. I trust that they are destined to assist one day at the raising of even loftier structures, both literally and figuratively.

I began to occupy my house on the 4th of July, as soon as it was boarded up and roofed. The boards were carefully cut with a feather edge and overlapped, so that the walls were perfectly waterproof. But before putting up the boards, I laid the foundation for a chimney at one end of the house. I carried two cartloads of stones up the hill from the pond in my arms for this purpose.

I built the chimney after my hoeing work was done in the fall, before a fire became necessary for warmth. In the meantime, I did my cooking outdoors on the ground, early in the morning. I still think this method of cooking is in some respects more convenient and agreeable than the usual one. When it stormed before my bread was baked, I fixed a few boards over the fire and sat under them to watch my loaf. I passed some pleasant hours in that way.

In those days, when my hands were much employed with physical labor, I read very little. But the smallest scraps of paper that lay on the ground—perhaps a piece of newspaper used as a “holder” for something, or as a makeshift tablecloth—gave me as much entertainment as the epic poem, the Iliad. In fact, they answered the same purpose.

Building with Deeper Purpose

It would be worthwhile to build a house even more deliberately and thoughtfully than I did. One might consider, for instance, what foundation a door, a window, a cellar, or an attic truly has in the nature of human beings. Perhaps we should never build any main structure (“superstructure”) until we have found a better reason for it than even our immediate practical needs (“temporal necessities”).

There is a certain natural fitness in a man building his own house, just as there is in a bird building its own nest. Who knows, if people constructed their own dwellings with their own hands, and provided food for themselves and their families simply and honestly enough, perhaps the poetic faculty (the ability to create and appreciate beauty and meaning) would be universally developed in them, just as birds universally sing when they are so engaged in their life’s work?

But alas! We often behave like cowbirds and cuckoos, which lay their eggs in nests that other birds have built. Such birds do not cheer any traveler with their chattering and unmusical notes. Shall we forever give up the pleasure of construction to the carpenter? What does architecture really amount to in the experience of most people? In all my walks, I have never come across a man engaged in so simple and natural an occupation as building his own house.

We belong to the community, and our lives are interconnected through a division of labor. It is not the tailor alone who is said to be only “the ninth part of a man” (an old saying implying that extreme specialization makes a person incomplete). The preacher, the merchant, and the farmer are also, in this sense, only parts of a whole. Where is this division of labor to end? And what purpose does it finally serve? No doubt, another person may also think for me; but it is not therefore desirable that he should do so to the exclusion of my thinking for myself.

True Architectural Beauty

True, there are so-called architects in this country. I have heard of at least one who was possessed with the idea of making architectural ornaments have a core of truth, a real necessity, and therefore a genuine beauty, as if this were a revelation to him. This might be all very well from his point of view, but it is only a little better than the common superficial interest in art (“dilettantism”). He was a sentimental reformer in architecture; he began at the cornice (the ornamental top), not at the foundation. His focus was only on how to put a core of truth within the ornaments—so that every fancy sugar candy (“sugar plum”) might actually have an almond or a caraway seed inside it. (Though I believe that almonds are most wholesome without the sugar—simple truth is best.) His focus was not on how the inhabitant, the person living in the house, might build truly, both inside and out, and let the ornaments take care of themselves.

What reasonable person ever supposed that ornaments were something merely outward and on the surface—that the tortoise got its spotted shell, or the shellfish its mother-of-pearl colors, by a contract similar to the way the inhabitants of Broadway got their Trinity Church (a grand, ornate building)? But a person should have no more to do with choosing the architectural style of his house than a tortoise has with choosing the style of its shell. The style should grow naturally from the life lived within. Nor does a soldier need to be so idle as to try to paint the precise color of his virtue on his flag. The enemy will find out his true character. He may turn pale when the real test comes.

This architect I mentioned seemed to me to lean over the fancy cornice of a building and timidly whisper his half-truth to the rough-and-ready occupants inside, who really knew the truth better than he did.

What architectural beauty I now see, I know has gradually grown from within outward. It has grown out of the necessities and character of the person living there, who is the only true builder. It has grown out of some unconscious truthfulness and nobility, without ever a thought for mere appearance. And whatever additional beauty of this kind is destined to be produced in the future will be preceded by a similar unconscious beauty in the way people live.

The most interesting dwellings in this country, as any painter knows, are commonly the most unpretentious, humble log huts and cottages of the poor. It is the life of the inhabitants—these houses are their “shells”—and not any particular feature on their surfaces merely, which makes them picturesque. And the suburban box-house of a citizen will be equally interesting when his life becomes as simple and as agreeable to the imagination, and when there is as little straining after effect in the style of his dwelling.

A great proportion of architectural ornaments are literally hollow. A strong September wind would strip them off like borrowed feathers (“borrowed plumes,” meaning false, easily lost finery), without any real injury to the substantial structure underneath. People who have no olives or wines stored in their cellar (meaning, those who live simply and don’t need to show off wealth) can do without elaborate architecture.

What if an equal fuss were made about the ornaments of style in literature? What if the architects of our Bibles spent as much time on their “cornices” (fancy stylistic flourishes) as the architects of our churches do on theirs? That is how “belles-lettres” (literature valued for its beauty rather than content) and “beaux-arts” (fine arts focused on aesthetics) and their professors are often made—with too much focus on superficials.

For goodness sake, how much does it really concern a man how a few sticks are slanted over him or under him, and what colors are daubed upon his box (his house)? It would mean something if, in any earnest sense, he slanted them and he daubed it. But when the spirit has departed from the occupant, then the house’s architecture is no different from constructing his own coffin. It is the architecture of the grave, and “carpenter” is then 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 (his grave)? You might as well toss a copper coin to decide the color. What an abundance of leisure he must have to think of such things! Why do you take up a handful of dirt? Better to paint your house the color of your own complexion; let it turn pale or blush for you, reflecting your true character.

An “enterprise to improve the style of cottage architecture!” When you have my kind of ornaments ready—those that grow from a true and simple life—I will wear them.

Finishing My House

Before winter, I built a chimney. I also shingled the sides of my house, which were already rainproof. I used imperfect and sappy shingles made from the first slice of the log. I had to straighten their edges with a plane.

I thus have a tight, shingled, and plastered house. It is ten feet wide by fifteen feet long, with eight-foot posts. It has an attic (“garret”) and a closet, a large window on each side, two trap doors, one door at the end, and a brick fireplace opposite. The exact cost of my house, paying the usual price for the materials I used, but not counting my own labor (all of which I did myself), was as follows. I give the details because very few people are able to tell exactly what their houses cost, and fewer still, if any, know the separate cost of the various materials that make them up:—

The Awakening from a Sluggish State

It seemed to me that people remain in their current low and undeveloped (“primitive”) condition for a similar reason that the snake was sluggish from the cold. But if they should feel the influence of a true awakening—a deep, inner “spring of springs”—it would stir them. Then, they would automatically rise to a higher and more spiritual (“ethereal”) life. I had previously seen snakes on frosty mornings lying in my path. Parts of their bodies were still numb and stiff, waiting for the sun to thaw them.

On the 1st of April, it rained, and the rain melted the ice on the pond. In the early part of the day, which was very foggy, I heard a stray goose over the pond. It was honking and seemed to be splashing around (“groping about”) as if it were lost. It sounded like the spirit of the fog itself.

Working in the Woods

So I continued for some days, cutting and shaping (“hewing”) timber for my house. I also made studs (vertical posts for walls) and rafters (beams for the roof). I did all this with my narrow axe. During this time, I didn’t have many deep or scholarly thoughts that I could easily share with others. I mostly sang to myself this little song:

“Men say they know many things; But lo! they have taken wings,— The arts and sciences, And a thousand appliances; The wind that blows Is all that any body knows.”

(This song suggests that despite all human knowledge and inventions, true understanding might be as simple and as fundamental as the wind.)

I shaped the main timbers to be six inches square. Most of the studs were shaped on two sides only. The rafters and floor timbers were shaped on only one side. I left the bark on the other sides. This method made the timbers just as straight as, and much stronger than, those completely sawed at a mill. I carefully cut joints (mortises or tenons, which are ways of fitting wood together) into each piece of wood. I had borrowed other tools by this time to do this finer work.

My workdays in the woods were not very long. Yet, I usually carried my dinner of bread and butter with me. At noon, I would sit among the green pine boughs I had cut off and read the newspaper in which my food was wrapped. My bread even picked up some of the pine fragrance because my hands were covered with a thick, sticky coat of pine pitch.

Before I was done with my logging, I had become more of a friend than an enemy to the pine trees, even though I had cut some of them down. This happened because I had become better acquainted with them. Sometimes, a person walking for pleasure in the woods (“a rambler”) was attracted by the sound of my axe. We would then chat pleasantly over the wood chips I had made.

Acquiring Boards for the House

By the middle of April, my house was framed and ready for the “raising” (the event where the wooden frame is stood up). I didn’t rush my work; instead, I tried to make the most of the experience.

I had already bought the old shanty (a small, roughly built cabin) of James Collins to use its boards for my house. Collins was an Irishman who worked on the Fitchburg Railroad. His shanty was considered an uncommonly fine one for its type. When I first went to see it, he was not at home. I walked around the outside. At first, no one inside noticed me because the window was set very deep and high in the wall.

The shanty was small, with a peaked cottage-style roof. There wasn’t much else to see from the outside, as dirt was piled up five feet high all around it, like a compost heap. The roof was the most solid part, though it was quite warped and made brittle by the sun. There was no proper doorsill (the wood or stone at the bottom of a doorway). Instead, there was a permanent passage for the hens under the bottom door board.

Mrs. Collins came to the door and asked me to look at it from the inside. My approach had driven their hens into the shanty. Inside, it was dark and mostly had a dirt floor. The air was damp, clammy, and felt like it could give you a fever (“aguish”). There were only a few loose boards on the floor here and there, which would not support much weight.

She lit a lamp to show me the inside of the roof and the walls. She also showed me that the board floor extended under the bed. She warned me not to step into the cellar, which was a sort of dust-filled hole about two feet deep. In her own words, the shanty had “good boards overhead, good boards all around, and a good window.” The window originally had two whole panes of glass, but the cat had recently squeezed out that way.

The shanty contained:

• A stove
• A bed
• A place to sit
• An infant, who had been born there
• A silk parasol
• A mirror with a gilded (gold-painted) frame
• A new patented coffee mill nailed to a young oak tree (an oak sapling) that was part of the shanty’s structure. That was everything.

The bargain was soon made, because James had returned in the meantime. The terms were:

• I was to pay four dollars and twenty-five cents that night.
• He was to move out of the shanty by five o’clock the next morning.
• He promised not to sell it to anyone else before then.
• I was to take possession at six o’clock.

James advised me to be there early. This was to prevent any unclear but completely unjust claims that might be made about money owed for ground rent or fuel. This, he assured me, was the only outstanding claim or debt (“encumbrance”) on the property.

At six o’clock the next morning, I passed him and his family on the road. One large bundle held all their possessions: their bed, coffee mill, mirror, and hens—everything but the cat. The cat had run off into the woods and become a wild cat. I learned later that it stepped into a trap set for woodchucks and so, eventually, became a dead cat.

Dismantling and Moving the Shanty

I took down the shanty that same morning, carefully pulling out all the nails. I moved the dismantled structure in small cartloads to the side of Walden Pond. There, I spread the boards on the grass to let the sun bleach them and help them warp back into a flatter, more usable shape. As I drove my cart along the woodland path, an early thrush sang a note or two for me.

I was “treacherously” informed by a young Irish lad named Patrick that my neighbor Seeley, another Irishman, was secretly pocketing the still usable, straight nails, staples, and spikes. He did this during the times I was away carting the boards. Then, when I came back, Mr. Seeley would stand around to pass the time of day. He would look up with an innocent, unconcerned expression, as if his mind were full of spring thoughts, at the “devastation” (the completely dismantled shanty). He mentioned that there was a lack of work in the area, perhaps as an excuse for being there or for his theft.

It seemed Mr. Seeley was there to represent all spectators. And, in a grandly humorous way, his presence helped make this seemingly insignificant event—dismantling an old shanty—feel as momentous as the mythical removal of the gods of Troy from their fallen city.

Digging the Cellar

I dug my cellar in the side of a hill that sloped to the south. A woodchuck had formerly dug its burrow in that same spot. I dug down through sumac and blackberry roots, and below the lowest level where vegetation stained the soil. The cellar was six feet square and seven feet deep. I dug until I reached a fine sand, a depth where potatoes would not freeze in any winter. The sides of the cellar were left sloping and were not lined with stones. But since the sun has never shone directly on them, the sand still keeps its place. Digging the cellar was only about two hours’ work.

I took particular pleasure in this act of breaking ground. In almost all parts of the world, people dig into the earth to find a stable and moderate (“equable”) temperature. Under the most splendid house in any city, you will still find the cellar where people store their root vegetables, just as they did in ancient times. Long after the main structure of a house has disappeared, future generations will notice its dent in the earth. In this way, a house is still just a sort of porch at the entrance of a burrow.

Raising the Frame and Living in the House

Finally, at the beginning of May, I set up the frame of my house. I had the help of some of my acquaintances. This was more to take advantage of a good opportunity for neighborliness than from any real necessity for their help. No man was ever more honored by the character of the people who helped him raise his house than I was. I trust that they are destined to assist one day at the raising of even loftier structures, both literally and in their own lives.

I began to live in my house on the 4th of July, a symbolic date. I moved in as soon as it was boarded up and roofed. The boards for the walls were carefully cut with a feather edge (tapered) and overlapped, so that the walls were perfectly waterproof. But before putting up the wallboards, I laid the foundation for a chimney at one end of the house. I carried two cartloads of stones up the hill from the pond in my arms for this purpose.

I built the chimney itself after my hoeing work was done in the fall, before a fire became necessary for warmth. In the meantime, I did my cooking outdoors on the ground, early in the morning. I still think this method of cooking is in some respects more convenient and agreeable than the usual one. When it stormed before my bread was baked, I simply fixed a few boards over the fire and sat under them to watch my loaf bake. I passed some pleasant hours in that way.

In those days, when my hands were much occupied with physical labor, I read very little. But the smallest scraps of paper that lay on the ground—perhaps a piece of newspaper used as a “holder” for something, or as a makeshift tablecloth—gave me as much entertainment as the great epic poem, the Iliad. In fact, for me at that time, they served the same purpose.

Building with Deeper Meaning

It would be worthwhile to build a house even more deliberately and thoughtfully than I did. One might consider, for instance, what kind of foundation a door, a window, a cellar, or an attic truly has in the very nature of human beings. Perhaps we should never build any main structure (“superstructure”) until we have found a better reason for it than even our immediate practical needs (“temporal necessities”).

There is a certain natural rightness (“fitness”) in a man building his own house, just as there is in a bird building its own nest. Who knows, if people constructed their own dwellings with their own hands, and provided food for themselves and their families simply and honestly enough, perhaps the poetic faculty—the ability to create and appreciate beauty and meaning—would be universally developed in them? Perhaps they would all sing, just as birds universally sing when they are so engaged in their life’s work.

But alas! We often behave like cowbirds and cuckoos, which lay their eggs in nests that other birds have built. Such birds do not cheer any traveler with their chattering and unmusical notes. Shall we forever give up the pleasure of construction to the carpenter? What does architecture really amount to in the experience of most people? In all my walks, I have never come across a man engaged in so simple and natural an occupation as building his own house.

We are all part of the community, and our lives are interconnected through a division of labor. It is not the tailor alone who is said to be only “the ninth part of a man” (an old saying implying that extreme specialization makes a person incomplete). The preacher, the merchant, and the farmer are also, in this sense, only parts of a whole, not complete individuals in all aspects of practical living. Where is this division of labor to end? And what purpose does it finally serve? No doubt, another person may also think for me; but it is not therefore desirable that he should do so to the point where I stop thinking for myself.

Superficial vs. True Architectural Beauty

True, there are so-called architects in this country. I have heard of at least one who was very focused on the idea of making architectural ornaments have a “core of truth,” a real necessity, and therefore a genuine beauty, as if this insight were a divine revelation to him. This might be all very well from his point of view, but it is only a little better than the common superficial interest in art (“dilettantism”). He was a sentimental reformer in architecture; he started with the cornice (the ornamental top of a building), not with the foundation.

His main concern was only how to put a core of truth within the ornaments—as if to ensure that every fancy sugar candy (“sugar plum”) might actually have an almond or a caraway seed inside it. (Though I personally believe that almonds are most wholesome without the sugar—simple, unadorned truth is best.) His focus was not on how the inhabitant, the person living in the house, might build truly, both inside and out, and then let the ornaments take care of themselves, growing naturally from a life well-lived.

What reasonable person ever supposed that ornaments were something merely outward and on the surface? Did the tortoise get its beautifully spotted shell, or the shellfish its mother-of-pearl colors, by some kind of external contract, like the way the people of Broadway got their grand Trinity Church built? Of course not. Nature’s beauty is integral, growing from within.

A person should have no more to do with choosing the architectural style of his house than a tortoise has with choosing the style of its shell. The style should grow naturally from the life lived within that house. Nor does a soldier need to be so idle as to try to paint the precise color of his virtue on his flag. The enemy will find out his true character soon enough. He may turn pale with fear when the real test of battle comes, regardless of what’s on his flag.

This architect I mentioned seemed to me to lean over the fancy cornice of a building and timidly whisper his half-truth to the ordinary (“rude”) occupants inside, who, in their practical lives, often understood true living better than he did.

What architectural beauty I now see, I know has gradually grown from within outward. It has grown out of the necessities and character of the person living there, who is the only true builder. It has grown out of some unconscious truthfulness and nobility of spirit, without ever a thought for mere outward appearance. And whatever additional beauty of this kind is destined to be produced in the future will be preceded by a similar unconscious beauty in the way people live their lives.

The most interesting dwellings in this country, as any painter knows, are commonly the most unpretentious, humble log huts and cottages of the poor. It is the life of the inhabitants—these houses are their “shells”—and not any particular feature on their surfaces merely, which makes them picturesque and appealing. And the suburban box-house of an ordinary citizen will be equally interesting when his life becomes as simple and as agreeable to the imagination, and when there is as little straining after effect in the style of his dwelling.

A great proportion of architectural ornaments are literally hollow. A strong September wind would strip them off like borrowed feathers (“borrowed plumes,” meaning false, easily lost finery), without any real injury to the substantial structure underneath. People who have no olives or wines stored in their cellar (meaning, those who live simply and don’t need to show off wealth with fancy provisions) can do without elaborate architecture.

What if an equal fuss were made about the ornaments of style in literature? What if the “architects” of our Bibles spent as much time on their literary “cornices” (fancy stylistic flourishes) as the architects of our churches do on their physical ones? That is how “belles-lettres” (literature valued for its beauty of style rather than its content) and “beaux-arts” (fine arts focused on aesthetics) and their professors are often created—with too much focus on superficial elements.

For goodness sake, how much does it really concern a person how a few sticks of wood are slanted over him or under him in his house, and what colors are daubed upon his “box”? It would mean something if, in any earnest and genuine sense, he himself slanted them and he himself daubed it. But when the true spirit has departed from the occupant, then the house’s architecture is no different from constructing his own coffin. It becomes the architecture of the grave, and in that context, “carpenter” is just 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 final resting place, his “last and narrow house” (his grave)? You might as well toss a copper coin to decide the color. What an abundance of leisure he must have to think of such things! Why do you take up a handful of dirt? It would be better to paint your house the color of your own complexion; let it turn pale or blush for you, reflecting your true character and feelings.

An “enterprise to improve the style of cottage architecture!” When you have my kind of ornaments ready—those that grow naturally from a true and simple life—I will wear them.

Finishing Touches on My House

Before winter set in, I built a chimney. I also shingled the sides of my house, which were already rainproof. For shingles, I used imperfect and sappy (full of sap) pieces of wood made from the first slice of the log. I had to straighten their edges with a plane.

So, I now have a tight, shingled, and plastered house.

• It is ten feet wide by fifteen feet long.
• It has eight-foot posts.
• It includes an attic (“garret”) and a closet.
• There is a large window on each side.
• There are two trap doors.
• There is one door at the end.
• There is a brick fireplace opposite the door.

The exact cost of my house, paying the usual price for the materials I used (but not counting my own labor, as I did all the work myself), was as follows. I provide these details because very few people are able to tell exactly what their houses cost. Even fewer, if any, know the separate cost of the various materials that make up their homes:—

The Cost of My House

Here is what the materials for my house cost. I paid the usual prices for these items, but this list does not include the cost of my own labor, as I did all the work myself:

• Boards: $8.03 ½ (mostly from the shanty)
• 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 (This was more than I needed.)
• Hair: $0.31 (This was more than I needed.)
• Mantle-tree iron (for the fireplace): $0.15
• Nails: $3.90
• Hinges and screws: $0.14
• Latch: $0.10
• Chalk: $0.01
• Transportation: $1.40 (I carried a good part of this myself.)
• In all: $28.12 ½

These are all the materials I paid for. The timber for the frame, the stones for the foundation, and the sand for the plaster I got by “squatter’s right” (meaning, I took them from the land as someone living there without formal ownership, a common practice in unsettled areas at the time). I also have a small woodshed next to my house, made mostly from leftover materials.

Future Plans and the True Cost of Shelter

I intend to build myself a house that will surpass any on the main street in Concord in grandeur and luxury—as soon as such a house pleases me as much and will cost me no more than my current simple one does. (This is likely a slightly humorous or ironic statement, emphasizing his satisfaction with simplicity.)

From this experience, I found that a student who wishes for a place to live can obtain one for a lifetime at an expense not greater than the rent he now pays annually for a room. If I seem to boast more than is proper, my excuse is that I am “bragging” for humanity rather than for myself. My own shortcomings and inconsistencies do not change the truth of my statement.

Despite much insincere talk and hypocrisy in the world—like chaff (the worthless husk of grain) which I find difficult to separate from my wheat (the truth), and 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 to live simply. I am resolved that I will not, through false humility, become the “devil’s attorney” (arguing against what I know to be good and true). I will try to speak a good word for the truth.

Critique of College Education and “Modern Improvements”

Which boy would be more likely to cut his fingers: the one who made his own jack-knife from scratch, or the one who only attended lectures and was given a knife? (This rhetorical question implies that practical experience is more valuable, and perhaps safer, than purely theoretical knowledge.)

To my astonishment, when I was leaving college, I was informed that I had studied navigation! Why, if I had taken just one trip down the harbor, I would have known more about it than all my classroom studies taught me. Even the poor student studies and is taught only political economy (the study of how governments and countries manage their wealth). But that economy of living—which is the same as philosophy, the art of living wisely and well—is not even sincerely taught (“professed”) in our colleges. The result is that while a student is reading Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Say (famous classical economists), he runs his father into debt that can never be repaid.

As it is with our colleges, so it is with a hundred “modern improvements.” There is an illusion about them; they do not always represent a positive step forward. The devil, it seems, goes on demanding compound interest to the very end for his early investment and numerous later investments in these “improvements.” (This means that many modern conveniences have hidden and accumulating costs or downsides.)

Our inventions are often just pretty toys that distract our attention from serious things. They are merely improved means to an unimproved end—a goal that was already too easy to reach. For example, railroads lead to Boston or New York, but is merely getting to a place quickly the most important goal?

We are in a great hurry to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas. But Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate to each other. It’s like the situation of a man who was very eager to be introduced to a distinguished deaf woman. But when he was finally presented to her, and one end of her ear trumpet (a device to help the deaf hear) was put into his hand, he had nothing to say. It’s as if the main object of these technologies were to talk fast, not to talk sensibly.

We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic Ocean and bring the Old World (Europe) some weeks nearer to the New World (America). But perhaps the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be something trivial, like the fact that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.

After all, the man whose horse can trot a mile in a minute does not necessarily carry the most important messages. He is not an evangelist spreading vital news, nor does he come like John the Baptist, living on locusts and wild honey and preaching repentance. I doubt if the famous racehorse Flying Childers ever carried even a peck of corn to the mill (meaning, such speed often serves no practical, life-sustaining purpose).

The True Way to Travel

Someone says to me, “I wonder that you do not save up money. You love to travel. You could take the train (“cars”) and go to Fitchburg today and see the country.”

But I am wiser than that. I have learned that the swiftest traveler is the one who goes on foot. I say to my friend, “Suppose we try to see who will get there first.” The distance to Fitchburg is thirty miles. The train fare is ninety cents. That is almost a whole day’s wages. I remember when wages were only sixty cents a day for laborers working on this very railroad.

Well, I start now on foot, and I will get there before night. I have traveled at that rate for a week at a time. You, in the meantime, will have to work to earn your ninety-cent fare. You will arrive there sometime tomorrow, or possibly this evening, if you are lucky enough to get a job quickly. Instead of going to Fitchburg today, you will be working here in Concord for the greater part of the day.

And so, if the railroad reached all the way around the world, I think I should still keep ahead of you by traveling on foot. As for seeing the country and getting that kind of experience, I would have to part ways with you altogether if you relied on the train.

The Hidden Costs of “Progress”

Such is the universal law, which no one can ever outwit. With regard to the railroad, we may even say it is “as broad as it is long” (meaning, its benefits come with equal or greater limitations or costs). To make a railroad around the world available to all mankind would be equivalent to leveling and grading the entire surface of the planet—an immense and perhaps destructive effort.

People have a vague idea that if they keep up this activity of investing in joint-stock companies and digging with spades long enough, everyone will eventually ride somewhere, in almost no time, and for nothing. But though a crowd rushes to the station (“depot”), and the conductor shouts “All aboard!” when the smoke has blown away and the steam has condensed, it will be seen that only a few are actually riding. The rest are run over. And it will be called, and will be, “A melancholy accident.”

No doubt, those who have earned their fare can ride at last—that is, if they survive that long. But by that time, they will probably have lost their energy (“elasticity”) and desire to travel.

This spending of the best part of one’s life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it reminds me of the Englishman who went to India to make a fortune first. His plan was to return to England and then live the life of a poet. He should have gone up to his attic (“garret”) and begun living as a poet at once.

“What!” exclaim a million Irishmen, starting up from all the shantytown dwellings in the land. “Is not this railroad which we have built a good thing?” Yes, I answer, it is comparatively good. That is, you might have done worse. But I wish, as you are brothers of mine, that you could have spent your time better than digging in this dirt.

A Study in Bread-Making

I made a study of the ancient and essential art of bread-making. I consulted such authorities as were available, going back to the primitive days and the first invention of unleavened bread. This was when humans first moved from a diet of wild nuts and meats to the mildness and refinement of bread. I gradually continued my studies down through the ages, learning about the accidental souring of dough which, it is supposed, taught people the leavening process (using yeast or sourdough). I studied the various fermentations that followed, until I came to what is called “good, sweet, wholesome bread,” the staff of life.

Leaven (like yeast), which some consider the soul of bread—the spiritus or life-force that fills its cellular tissue—has been religiously preserved like the sacred vestal fire in ancient Rome. I suppose some precious bottle-full of this leaven was first brought over on the Mayflower. It “did the business” for America, and its influence is still rising, swelling, and spreading in bread-like (“cerealian”) billows over the land.

This “seed” of leaven I regularly and faithfully got from the village. But at length, one morning I forgot the rules and accidentally scalded my yeast. By this accident, I discovered that even yeast was not essential. (My discoveries were generally made by taking things apart—analysis—rather than by putting them together—synthesis.) I have gladly omitted yeast from my bread since then. This is despite the fact that most housewives earnestly assured me that safe and wholesome bread without yeast could not be made. Elderly people even predicted a speedy decay of my vital forces if I went without it.

Yet, I find that yeast is not an essential ingredient. After going without it for a year, I am still alive and well (“in the land of the living”). I am glad to escape the trivial bother of carrying a bottle-full of yeast in my pocket, which would sometimes pop and spill its contents, much to my embarrassment. It is simpler and more respectable to leave it out. Humans are animals who, more than any other, can adapt themselves to all climates and circumstances.

Neither did I put any baking soda (“sal soda”), or other acid or alkali, into my bread. It would seem that I made my bread according to the recipe which Marcus Porcius Cato (a Roman statesman) gave about two centuries before Christ: “Panem depsticium sic facito. Manus mortariumque bene lavato. Farinam in mortarium indito, aquæ paulatim addito, subigitoque pulchre. Ubi bene subegeris, defingito, coquitoque sub testu.”

I take this to mean: “Make kneaded bread this way. Wash your hands and mixing bowl (trough) well. Put the meal into the bowl, add water gradually, and knead it thoroughly. When you have kneaded it well, shape it, and bake it under a cover” (that is, in a baking kettle or Dutch oven). There is not a word about leaven in Cato’s recipe.

However, I did not always use this “staff of life.” At one time, because my purse was empty, I went without bread for more than a month.

Self-Sufficiency in Food

Every New Englander could easily raise all his own grains for bread (“breadstuffs”) in this land of rye and Indian corn (cornmeal). They would not need to depend on distant and fluctuating markets for them. Yet, we are so far from simplicity and independence that, in Concord, fresh and sweet cornmeal is rarely sold in the shops. Hominy and corn in a still coarser form are hardly used by anyone. For the most part, the farmer gives the grain he produces to his cattle and hogs. Then he buys flour at the store, which is at least no more wholesome than his own grain, and at a greater cost.

I saw that I could easily raise my bushel or two of rye and Indian corn. Rye will grow on the poorest land, and corn does not require the best. I could grind them in a hand-mill and so do without rice and pork. And if I must have some concentrated sweet, I found by experiment that I could make a very good molasses either from pumpkins or beets. I knew that I only needed to plant a few maple trees to obtain maple syrup even more easily. While these trees were growing, I could use various other substitutes besides those I have named. “For,” as our Forefathers sang:

“we can make liquor to sweeten our lips Of pumpkins and parsnips and walnut-tree chips.”

Finally, as for salt, that most basic (“grossest”) of groceries: to obtain this might be a good reason for a visit to the seashore. Or, if I did without salt altogether, I should probably drink less water. I do not learn that the Native Americans ever troubled themselves to go after it.

Avoiding Trade; Simple Needs

In this way, I could avoid all trade and barter as far as my food was concerned. Since I already had a shelter, it would only remain to get clothing and fuel. The trousers (“pantaloons”) which I now wear were woven in a farmer’s family—thank Heaven there is still so much virtue left in mankind! (For I think the fall from being an independent farmer to being a factory worker—an “operative”—is as great and memorable an economic decline as the earlier fall from being a self-sufficient human (“man”) to being a farmer tied to the land.) And in a new country like this, fuel is an “encumbrance”—meaning it’s so plentiful it’s almost a burden to clear away or manage.

As for a place to live (“habitat”), if I were not permitted still to squat on the land, 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 actually enhanced the value of the land by squatting on it and improving it.

On Diet and Faith

There is a certain class of unbelievers who sometimes ask me questions such as, if I think that I can live on vegetable food alone. To strike at the root of the matter at once—for the root of such a question is really about faith—I am accustomed to answer such people that I can live on board nails if necessary. If they cannot understand that (my level of conviction and adaptability), they cannot understand much of what I have to say.

For my part, I am glad to hear of experiments of this kind being tried. For example, I heard of a young man who tried for two weeks (“a fortnight”) to live on hard, raw corn on the ear, using only his teeth to grind it (“for all mortar”). The squirrel tribe has tried the same diet and succeeded. The human race is interested in these experiments, though a few old women who are no longer capable of such things (“incapacitated for them”), or who own shares in flour mills (“own their thirds in mills”), may be alarmed by such ideas.

My Simple Furniture

My furniture, part of which I made myself, and the rest costing me nothing for which I have not already given an account, consisted of:

• A bed
• A table
• A desk
• Three chairs
• A looking-glass (mirror) three inches in diameter
• A pair of tongs and andirons (for the fireplace)
• A kettle
• A skillet (a small frying pan)
• A frying-pan
• A dipper (for water)
• A wash-bowl
• Two knives and forks
• Three plates
• One cup
• One spoon
• A jug for oil (for the lamp)
• A jug for molasses
• A japanned lamp (a lamp with a glossy black lacquer)

No one is so poor that he needs to sit on a pumpkin. That is just inefficiency (“shiftlessness”). There are plenty of chairs like the ones I like best stored in village attics (“garrets”), to be had simply for taking them away.

Furniture! Thank God, I can sit and I can stand without the aid of a furniture warehouse. What person, except a philosopher, would not be ashamed to see all his furniture packed in a cart and going up the country road, exposed to the light of heaven and the eyes of men—a pitiful (“beggarly”) collection of empty boxes? That is “Spaulding’s furniture.” (This might be a local reference to someone known for frequent moves or a large amount of unimpressive furniture.)

I could never tell from inspecting such a load of furniture whether it belonged to a so-called rich man or a poor one; the owner always seemed poverty-stricken by the burden of it. Indeed, the more you have of such things, the poorer you really are. Each load looks as if it contained the contents of a dozen shanties; and if one shanty is poor, this is like being a dozen times as poor.

Pray, why do we ever move, if not eventually to get rid of our furniture, our cast-off skins (“exuviæ”)? We move at last to go from this world to another that is newly furnished, and leave this old world’s stuff to be burned. It is as if all these possessions (“traps”) were buckled to a man’s belt, and he could not move over the rough country where our lives are lived (“where our lines are cast”) without dragging them along—dragging his trap.

He was a lucky fox that left his tail in the trap to escape. The muskrat will gnaw its own third leg off to be free. No wonder mankind has lost its resilience and freedom (“elasticity”). How often a person is at a “dead set”—completely stuck and unable to move forward!

“Sir, if I may be so bold, what do you mean by a ‘dead set’?” If you are a perceptive person (“a seer”), whenever you meet a man, you will see all that he owns—yes, and much that he pretends to disown—trailing behind him. You’ll see even his kitchen furniture and all the junk (“trumpery”) which he saves and will not burn. He will appear to be harnessed to it all, making what little headway he can. I think that the man is at a “dead set” who has managed to get himself through a small opening like a knothole or a narrow gateway, but his huge sled-load of furniture cannot follow him.

I cannot help but feel compassion when I hear some neat, compact-looking man, who seems free and ready for anything, start talking about his “furniture”—whether it is insured or not. “But what shall I do with my furniture?” he worries. My gay butterfly, it seems, is then entangled in a spider’s web. Even those who seem for a long while not to have any furniture, if you inquire more closely, you will find have some stored away in somebody’s barn.

I look upon England today as an old gentleman who is traveling with a great deal of baggage—junk (“trumpery”) that has accumulated from long housekeeping, which he has not the courage to burn. He has a great trunk, a little trunk, a hatbox (“bandbox”), and a bundle. He should throw away the first three at least.

It would surpass the powers of a healthy man nowadays to “take up his bed and walk” (a Biblical reference to being healed and becoming mobile). And I should certainly advise a sick man to lay down his burdensome bed and run for his life. When I have met an immigrant tottering under a huge bundle which contained all his worldly possessions—looking like an enormous cyst (“wen”) that had grown out of the nape of his neck—I have pitied him. I pitied him not because that was all he had, but because he had all that to carry. If I have to drag my own trap (my necessary possessions), I will take care that it is a light one and does not catch me (“nip me”) in a vital part. But perhaps it would be wisest never to put one’s paw into the trap of accumulating possessions at all.

Simple Living, Simple Needs

I would observe, by the way, that it costs me nothing for curtains. I have no curious onlookers (“gazers”) to shut out except the sun and moon, and I am willing that they should look in. The moon will not sour my milk nor taint my meat. The sun will not injure my furniture or fade my carpet. And if the sun is sometimes too warm a friend, I find it still better economy to retreat behind some curtain which nature has provided (like the shade of trees or foliage), than to add a single item to the details of housekeeping.

A lady once offered me a mat for my doorway. But as I had no room to spare within the house, nor time to spare either indoors or outdoors to shake it, I declined it. I preferred to wipe my feet on the grass (“sod”) before my door. It is best to avoid the beginnings of evil (meaning, even small, seemingly harmless possessions can lead to more and become a burden).

The Deacon’s Auction: The Legacy of Junk

Not long ago, I was present at the auction of a deacon’s belongings (“effects”), for his life had not been “ineffectual” (meaning, he had certainly accumulated things, though perhaps Thoreau is being ironic about the “effect” of such a life). As Shakespeare wrote:

“The evil that men do lives after them.” (Here, “evil” might refer to the burden of possessions left behind.)

As usual at such auctions, a great proportion of the items was junk (“trumpery”) which had begun to accumulate in his father’s day. Among the rest of the items was a dried tapeworm. And now, after lying for half a century in his attic and other dusty holes, these things were not burned. Instead of a bonfire, or a purifying destruction of them, there was an auction—a way of increasing their hold on people. The neighbors eagerly gathered to view them, bought them all, and carefully transported them to their own attics and dust holes. There, these items will lie until their new owners’ estates are settled, when they will start the cycle again. When a man dies, he “kicks the dust”—both literally and figuratively, leaving behind his dusty, burdensome possessions.

Learning from Other Cultures: The “Busk”

The customs of some so-called “savage nations” might, perhaps, be profitably imitated by us. For they at least go through the appearance (“semblance”) of shedding their old ways (“casting their slough”) annually. They have the idea of renewal, whether they achieve the full reality of it or not.

Would it not be well if we were to celebrate a “busk,” or “feast of first fruits,” similar to the custom of the Mucclasse Native Americans, as described by the naturalist William Bartram? He says: “When a town celebrates the busk, 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. All this, along with all the remaining grain and other old provisions, they cast together into one common heap, and consume it with fire. After having taken medicine, and fasted for three days, all the fire in the town is extinguished. During this fast, they abstain from the gratification of every appetite and passion whatever. A general amnesty is proclaimed; all wrongdoers (‘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 this new fire, every home (‘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 receive visits and rejoice with their friends from neighboring towns who have in like manner purified and prepared themselves.”

The Mexicans also practiced a similar purification at the end of every fifty-two years. They did this in the belief that it was time for the world to come to an end, requiring a fresh start.

I have scarcely heard of a truer sacrament—that is, as the dictionary defines it, an “outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace”—than this custom. I have no doubt that these peoples were originally inspired directly from Heaven to do this, though they have no biblical record of such a revelation.

Self-Reliance and True Livelihood

For more than five years, I supported myself in this way, solely by the labor of my own hands. I found that by working about six weeks in a year, I could meet all the expenses of living. The whole of my winters, as well as most of my summers, I had free and clear for study.

I have thoroughly tried school-keeping (teaching). I found that my expenses were in proportion, or rather out of proportion, to my income. This was because I was obliged to dress and behave (“train”)—not to mention think and believe—according to societal expectations for a teacher. And I lost my valuable time in the bargain. Since I did not teach for the good of my fellow human beings, but simply to make a living, this was a failure in my eyes.

I have tried trade (business). But I found that it would take ten years just to get started in that field. And by that time, I should probably be on my way to the devil (morally compromised). I was actually afraid that I might by then be doing what is called “a good business” (meaning, conventionally successful but perhaps not ethically sound).

Formerly, when I was looking about to see what I could do for a living—with some sad experience of conforming to the wishes of friends still fresh in my mind to challenge my ingenuity—I often and seriously thought of picking huckleberries. That, surely, I could do. Its small profits might be enough for me, for my greatest skill has always been to want but little. It required so little capital, and so little distraction from my usual moods—or so I foolishly thought at the time. While my acquaintances went unhesitatingly into trade or the professions, I contemplated this occupation of huckleberry picking as most like theirs in its potential for independence. I imagined ranging the hills all summer to pick the berries that came in my way, and thereafter carelessly disposing of them. It was like the story of Apollo, who, to fulfill a penance, had “to keep the flocks of Admetus”—a simple, humble, yet noble task. I also dreamed that I might gather wild herbs, or carry evergreens to those villagers who loved to be reminded of the woods, perhaps even taking them to the city by hay-cart loads.

But I have since learned that trade curses everything it handles. Even if you trade in messages from heaven, the whole curse of trade attaches to the business.

Choosing Freedom

Because I preferred some things to others, and especially valued my freedom, and because I found I could live a hard life (“fare hard”) and yet succeed well (in my own terms), I did not wish to spend my time earning rich carpets or other fine furniture, or delicate cookery, or a house in the Grecian or the Gothic style just yet. If there are any people for whom acquiring these things is no interruption to their true lives, and who know how to use them when they have acquired them, I gladly leave the pursuit of such things to them.

Some people are “industrious” and appear to love labor for its own sake, or perhaps because it keeps them out of worse mischief. To such people, I have nothing to say at present. 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 currently do—work until they “pay for themselves” and get their “free papers” (achieve true self-ownership and freedom from unnecessary toil or debt).

For myself, I found that the occupation of a day-laborer was the most independent of any. This was especially true because it required only thirty or forty days of work in a year to support one person. The laborer’s day ends with the going down of the sun. He is then free to devote himself to his chosen pursuit, independent of his labor. But his employer, who speculates and plans from month to month, has no rest from one end of the year to the other.

Simple Living as a Pastime

In short, I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one’s self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely. In the same way, the necessary pursuits of simpler nations are still the enjoyable sports of more “artificial” (complex and developed) ones. It is not necessary that a man should earn his living by the sweat of his brow, unless he sweats more easily than I do.

Finding Your Own Way

One young man of my acquaintance, who has inherited some acres of land, told me that he thought he should live as I did, if only he had the means to do so. (This is ironic, as Thoreau’s way of life required very few “means.”) I would not want anyone to adopt my mode of living on any account. Besides the fact that before he has fairly learned it, I may have found out another way of living for myself, I desire that there may be as many different persons in the world as possible.

But I would have each one be very careful to find out and pursue his own way, and not his father’s or his mother’s or his neighbor’s way instead. The youth may build, or plant, or sail—only let him not be hindered from doing that which he tells me he would truly like to do. It is by a “mathematical point” only—a single, precise focus like the North Star—that we are wise. The sailor or the fugitive slave keeps the polestar in his eye for guidance. That single point of reference is sufficient guidance for all our life. We may not arrive at our intended port or destination within a predictable period, but by keeping to our guiding principle, we will preserve the true course.

Cooperation and Solitude

Undoubtedly, in some cases, what is true for one person is truer still for a thousand. For example, a large house is not necessarily more expensive than a small one in proportion to its size, since one roof may cover, one cellar may underlie, and one wall may separate several apartments. But for my part, I preferred the solitary dwelling.

Moreover, it will commonly be cheaper to build the whole house yourself than to convince another person of the advantage of sharing a common wall. And when you have done this, the common partition wall, to be much cheaper, must be a thin one. That other person sharing the wall may then prove to be a bad neighbor, and may also not keep his side of the wall in good repair.

The only kind of cooperation that is commonly possible is exceedingly partial and superficial. And what little true cooperation there is, is as if it did not exist, being a kind of harmony that is inaudible to most people. If a man has faith, he will cooperate with equal faith everywhere. If he has no 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, with shared purpose and understanding.

On Traveling Together and Alone

I heard it proposed lately that two young men should travel together over the world. One would travel without money, earning his way as he went—perhaps working as a sailor (“before the mast”) or as a farmhand (“behind the plough”). The other young man would carry a “bill of exchange” (a document like a traveler’s check, guaranteeing payment).

It was easy to see that these two could not remain companions or cooperate for long. One would be actively working and engaging with the world in a basic way, while the other would not need to “operate” in that manner at all. They would surely part ways at the first interesting challenge or crisis in their adventures.

Above all, as I have implied before, the person who goes alone can start today. But the person who travels with another must wait until that other person is ready. It may be a long time before they actually get off on their journey.

Accusations of Selfishness and the Nature of “Doing Good”

Some of my townspeople have said that my way of life is very selfish. I confess that I have, so far, indulged very little in organized charitable activities (“philanthropic enterprises”). I have made some sacrifices because of my sense of duty, and among those sacrifices has been the pleasure of engaging in such charity work.

There are those who have used all their persuasive arts to try to get me to take on the support of some poor family in the town. And if I had nothing else to do—for the devil always finds employment for idle hands—I might try my hand at some such pastime as that. However, on the occasions when I have thought to indulge myself in this way, and put Heaven under an obligation by offering to support certain poor persons in all respects as comfortably as I support myself, and have even gone so far as to make them the offer, they have, every one of them, unhesitatingly preferred to remain poor. (Thoreau’s point here is complex and perhaps provocative, suggesting that people’s situations are not always straightforwardly “fixable” by material aid alone, or that they may have their own reasons for their way of life.)

While my townsmen and women are devoted in so many ways to the good of their fellows, I trust that at least one person (myself) may be spared for other, perhaps less conventionally “humane,” pursuits—my own individual studies and way of life. You must have a special talent or “genius” for charity, just as for anything else. As for “Doing-good,” that is one of the professions which are already full of practitioners. Moreover, I have tried it fairly, and, strange as it may seem, I am satisfied that it does not suit my nature (“constitution”).

I probably would not consciously and deliberately abandon my own particular calling or life’s work to do the “good” which society demands of me, even if it were to save the universe from annihilation. I believe that a similar, but infinitely greater, steadfastness to one’s own true nature and purpose, found elsewhere in the universe (perhaps in natural laws, or in the integrity of other individuals), is what truly preserves it.

But I would not stand between any person and their own genius or calling. And to the person who wholeheartedly dedicates their life to this work of charity, which I decline to do, I would say: Persevere, even if the world calls what you are doing “evil,” as it most likely will at times.

Being Good vs. Doing Good

I am far from supposing that my case is a peculiar one; no doubt many of my readers would offer a similar defense for their own choices. When it comes to doing something—and I will not guarantee that my neighbors will pronounce it “good”—I do not hesitate to say that I would be an excellent (“capital”) fellow to hire. But what that “something” 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 in life, and for the most part, it is wholly unintended. People often say, practically speaking: Begin where you are and be who you are, without mainly aiming to become of more worth to society, and then, with kindness planned in advance (“aforethought”), go about doing good deeds.

If I were to preach at all in this manner, I should say instead: Set about being good.

It’s as if the sun, after it had kindled its fires up to the brightness of a moon or a sixth-magnitude star, should then stop its main work and go about like Robin Goodfellow (a mischievous sprite in English folklore). Imagine the sun peeping in at every cottage window, inspiring lunatics, tainting meats, and making darkness visible. This would be instead of steadily increasing its warm, life-giving heat and general beneficence until it is so bright that no mortal can look it directly in the face—and then, and in the meantime too, going about the world in its own orbit, simply doing good by its very nature. Or rather, as a truer philosophy has discovered, it is the world that goes about the sun, getting good from it. The sun simply is, and its being benefits the world.

There’s the myth of Phaeton, who wished to prove his heavenly birth by his great deeds of beneficence. He was allowed to drive the sun’s chariot for just one day. He drove out of the beaten track and, as a result, burned several blocks of houses in the lower streets of heaven, scorched the surface of the earth, dried up every spring, and made the great desert of Sahara. Finally, Jupiter hurled him headlong to the earth with a thunderbolt. The sun, through grief at Phaeton’s death, did not shine for a year. (This myth illustrates the dangers of well-intentioned but misguided and grandiose attempts at “doing good.”)

The Perils of Imposed “Goodness”

There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness that has been tainted or corrupted. It is like human, or even divine, carrion (dead and decaying flesh). 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. I would flee as from that dry and parching wind of the African deserts called the simoom, which fills the mouth, nose, ears, and eyes with dust until you are suffocated. I would run for fear that I should get some of his “good” done to me—some of its “virus” (poison) mingled with my blood.

No—in this case, I would rather suffer evil in the natural way. A man is not a good man to me simply because he will feed me if I should be starving, or warm me if I should be freezing, or pull me out of a ditch if I should ever fall into one. I can find you a Newfoundland dog that will do as much.

Philanthropy, as it is commonly practiced, is not love for one’s fellow human beings in the broadest sense. John Howard (a famous prison reformer) was no doubt an exceedingly kind and worthy man in his way, and he has received his reward and recognition. But, comparatively speaking, what are a hundred Howards to us if their philanthropy does not help us when we are in our “best estate”—when we are striving for our highest potential and are most worthy of being helped in that endeavor? I have never heard of a philanthropic meeting in which it was sincerely proposed to do any real good to me, or to people like me.

Beyond Conventional Consolation

The Jesuit missionaries were quite perplexed (“balked”) by those Native Americans who, while being burned at the stake, actually suggested new methods of torture to their tormentors. Being superior to physical suffering, it sometimes happened that these individuals were also superior to any consolation which the missionaries could offer. The golden rule, “to do as you would be done by,” fell with less persuasiveness on the ears of those who, for their part, did not much care how they were treated by others. They loved their enemies in a new and different fashion, and came very near to freely forgiving them for all they did. (This example highlights the limitations of conventional morality and religious consolation when faced with radically different cultural perspectives or extreme spiritual fortitude.)

True Charity and Its Challenges

Be sure that you give the poor the aid they most need. Sometimes, that aid might be your own example of a self-reliant life, even if that example “leaves them far behind” by showing them a standard they feel they cannot reach. If you give money, spend yourself with it—give your time, your wisdom, your presence—and do not merely abandon the money to them.

We make curious mistakes sometimes. Often the poor man is not so cold and hungry as he is dirty, ragged, and crude in his manners (“gross”). This is partly his taste and his habits, not merely his misfortune. If you give him money, he will perhaps buy more rags with it.

I used to pity the clumsy Irish laborers who cut ice on Walden Pond. They wore such mean and ragged clothes, while I shivered in my more tidy and somewhat more fashionable garments. This continued until, one bitter cold day, one of these laborers who had slipped into the water came to my house to warm himself. I saw him strip off three pairs of pants and two pairs of stockings before he got down to his skin. Though his clothes were dirty and ragged enough, it is true, he had so many inner layers (“intra ones”) that he could afford to refuse the extra garments I offered him. This accidental ducking in the cold water was perhaps the very thing he needed—an invigorating shock. Then I began to pity myself. I saw that it would be a greater charity to give me a flannel shirt than to give a whole cheap clothing store (“slop-shop”) to him.

Striking at the Root of Evil

There are a thousand people “hacking at the branches of evil” for every one person who is “striking at the root.” And it may be that the person who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is, by his own mode of life (perhaps one that supports an unjust system), doing the most to produce the very misery which he strives in vain to relieve. It is like the pious slave-breeder who devotes the proceeds from selling every tenth enslaved person to buy a Sunday’s liberty for the rest. (This is a stark example of hypocritical charity that does not address the fundamental injustice.)

Some people show their kindness to the poor by employing them in their kitchens. Would they not be kinder if they employed themselves there? (Meaning, perhaps, if they did their own basic work and lived more simply, there would be less need for such hierarchical employment, or they would understand true labor better.) You boast of spending a tenth part of your income on charity. Maybe you should spend the nine-tenths in a way that reflects charitable living (e.g., by consuming less, living simply), and then you’d be truly done with the matter. As it is, society (through charity) recovers only a tenth part of the property that is often accumulated through questionable means. Is this apparent generosity really due to the kindness of the one in whose possession the wealth is found, or to the negligence (“remissness”) of the officers of justice in addressing how wealth is distributed in the first place?

The Overestimation of Philanthropy

Philanthropy is almost the only virtue which is sufficiently appreciated by mankind. No, it is actually greatly overrated; and it is our own selfishness which overrates it. (We praise it perhaps to make ourselves feel good, or to delegate the responsibility of caring for others.)

A robust poor man, one sunny day here in Concord, praised a fellow townsman to me because, as he said, this man was “kind to the poor”—meaning, kind to himself. The kind “uncles and aunts” of the human race (those who provide simple comforts and aid) are often more esteemed than its true spiritual fathers and mothers (those who offer deeper, more challenging guidance).

I once heard a respected clergyman (“reverend lecturer”) speak about England. He was a man of learning and intelligence. After listing England’s great scientific, literary, and political figures—Shakespeare, Bacon, Cromwell, Milton, Newton, and others—he next spoke of her Christian heroes. As if his profession required it of him, he elevated these heroes to a place far above all the rest, as the greatest of the great. These Christian heroes were William Penn, John Howard, and Mrs. Elizabeth Fry (all known for their philanthropic work). Everyone listening must have felt the falsehood and insincere rhetoric (“cant”) of this. These last three were not England’s best men and women overall; they were, perhaps, only her best philanthropists.

True Goodness: The Flower and Fruit of a Man

I would not subtract anything from the praise that is due to philanthropy. I merely demand justice for all who by their lives and works are a blessing to mankind, in whatever field. I do not chiefly value a man’s uprightness and benevolence (his good deeds and moral correctness) when these are, as it were, merely his “stem and leaves” (the basic, structural parts of his character). Those plants whose greenness, when withered, we use to make herb tea for the sick, serve but a humble purpose. Such remedies are most often employed by quacks.

I want the flower and fruit of a man—the highest expression of his being. I want some fragrance to be wafted over from him to me, and some ripeness to flavor our interactions. His goodness must not be a partial and temporary act, but a constant, overflowing abundance (“superfluity”). This true goodness should cost him nothing (because it is his nature) and he should be unconscious of it. This is a charity that “hides a multitude of sins” (meaning, a genuinely good nature makes many small faults irrelevant).

The philanthropist too often surrounds mankind with the remembrance of his own cast-off griefs, like an atmosphere, and calls this sympathy. We should instead share our courage, not our despair; our health and ease, not our disease. We must take care that these negative things do not spread by contagion.

From what southern plains does that voice of wailing come? (He questions the abstract and distant objects of some philanthropy.) Under what latitudes do the “heathen” reside, to whom we would send our “light”? Who is that intemperate and brutal man whom we feel we must redeem?

If anything ails a man, so that he does not perform his own functions properly—if he has a pain in his bowels, even (for that is considered the seat of sympathy in some old philosophies)—he immediately sets about reforming the world. Being a microcosm (a small representation of the universe) himself, he discovers—and it is a true discovery for him, and he feels 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. He fears, with a dread awful to think of, that the children of men will nibble it before it is ripe. And straightway, his drastic and urgent philanthropy seeks out the Eskimos and the Patagonians, and embraces the populous Indian and Chinese villages. And thus, by a few years of philanthropic activity (while the powers that be are meanwhile using him for their own ends, no doubt), he cures himself of his indigestion (“dyspepsia”). The globe acquires a faint blush on one or both of its cheeks, as if it were beginning to be ripe. Life loses its crudity and is once more sweet and wholesome to live. (This is a satirical depiction of a certain kind of reformer who projects his own problems onto the world and then “solves” them through frenetic activity that ultimately serves to make himself feel better.)

I never dreamed of any enormity (great wickedness or error) greater than those I myself have committed. I never knew, and never shall know, a worse man than myself. (This emphasizes the importance of self-awareness and addressing one’s own faults first.)

The Reformer’s Private Ailment

I believe that what so saddens the reformer is not primarily his sympathy with his fellows in distress. It is, though he may be the holiest son of God, his own private ailment or trouble. Let this be set right within him—let the spring come to his own soul, let the morning rise over his own couch—and he will forsake his “generous companions” in reform without apology. (Once his personal issue is resolved, his philanthropic zeal may vanish.)

My excuse for not lecturing against the use of tobacco is that I never chewed it. That is a penalty which reformed tobacco-chewers often have to pay (they feel compelled to preach against their former habit). Though, there are certainly things enough that I have “chewed” (metaphorically speaking, bad habits I’ve had) which I could lecture against.

If you should ever be drawn (“betrayed”) into any of these philanthropies, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing (a Biblical allusion to giving secretly). For, in Thoreau’s view, such conspicuous acts of charity are often not worth knowing about or making a fuss over. Instead: Rescue the drowning man, and then simply tie your own shoestrings. Attend to immediate, practical needs—both for others and for yourself—without making a grand display. Take your time, and set about some free labor (work done willingly, for its own sake or for true benefit, not out of a sense of misguided duty or for show).

True Well-being

Our manners have been corrupted by too much communication with “the saints” (perhaps meaning, by overly pious, rigid, or sanctimonious influences that create unnatural standards of behavior). Our hymn-books often resound with a kind of melodious cursing of God, or with an emphasis on enduring Him forever, rather than joyous praise. One might say that even the prophets and redeemers of history have often done more to console humanity’s fears than to confirm its hopes. There is nowhere recorded a simple and irrepressible satisfaction with the mere gift of life, any memorable and unreserved praise of God.

All health and success does me good, however far off and withdrawn it may appear in others. All disease and failure helps to make me sad and does me evil, however much sympathy it may seem to have with me or I with it. (Our own state of being colors our perception of the world.)

If, then, we would indeed restore mankind by truly “Indian” (Native American, often associated with natural remedies), botanic, magnetic (referring to then-popular theories of animal magnetism or healing), or other natural means, let us first be as simple and as well as Nature herself. Let us dispel the clouds which hang over our own brows, and take up a little life into our own pores.

Do not stay to be an “overseer of the poor.” Instead, endeavor to become one of the “worthies of the world”—a person of true value and excellence in your own right.

The Wisdom of the Cypress Tree

I read in the Gulistan, or Flower Garden, by Sheik Sadi of Shiraz, a Persian poet, that: “They asked a wise man, saying: Of the many celebrated trees which the Most High God has created lofty and shady (‘umbrageous’), they call none azad, or ‘free,’ excepting the cypress, which bears no fruit. What mystery is there in this? He replied: Each tree has its appropriate produce and its appointed season. During that season, it is fresh and blooming, and during the absence of that season, it is dry and withered. The cypress is exposed to neither of these states; it is always flourishing. And of this nature are the azads, or religious independents—those who are spiritually free.

Fix not your heart on that which is transitory (temporary); for the Dijlah, or Tigris River, will continue to flow through Bagdad long after the race of caliphs (rulers) is extinct. If your hand has plenty, be liberal and giving like the date tree. But if it affords nothing to give away, be an azad, or free person, like the cypress—steadfast, always flourishing in your own nature, and not dependent on external seasons of ‘fruitfulness’ or reward.”

COMPLEMENTAL VERSES

THE PRETENSIONS OF POVERTY (By Thomas Carew, a 17th-century English poet. Thoreau includes this poem, likely as a counterpoint or to stimulate further thought on the nature of poverty and virtue.)

The poem essentially criticizes a certain kind of poverty that makes a show of being virtuous. The speaker of the poem tells the “poor needy wretch” that he presumes too much to claim a high moral station just because his humble cottage or tub allows him to cultivate a “lazy or pedantic (showy and dull) virtue.” This virtue is seen as being cheaply obtained, through simple living with roots and herbs, while rejecting normal human passions. The poem argues that this rejection of passions actually “degradeth nature,” numbs the senses, and, like the mythical Gorgon, “turns active men to stone” (makes them lifeless).

The speaker says that “we” (representing a more worldly and active view of virtue) do not need the “dull society” of this forced and joyless temperance, or the “unnatural stupidity” that knows neither joy nor sorrow. Nor do “we” value a forced, “falsely exalted passive fortitude” over active engagement with life. This “low abject brood” that embraces such a mean and mediocre existence may have “servile minds.”

Instead, the poem promotes “such virtues only as admit excess”—meaning virtues that can be expressed grandly and generously. These include:

• Brave, bounteous (generous) acts
• Regal magnificence
• All-seeing prudence
• Magnanimity (greatness of spirit) that knows no bounds
• That heroic virtue for which antiquity has left no specific name, but only patterns or examples, such as Hercules, Achilles, and Theseus.

The poem concludes by telling the “wretch” to go back to his “loath’d cell.” And when he sees the “new enlightened sphere” (the world of active, grand virtue), he should study to understand what those true “worthies” were really like.

Where I Lived, and What I Lived For

Choosing a Place in Imagination

At a certain time in our lives, we often look at every spot as a possible place to build a house. I have explored the countryside in every direction within a dozen miles of where I live. In my imagination, I have “bought” all the farms one after another. They were all for sale, and I knew their prices.

I walked over each farmer’s property. I tasted his wild apples and talked with him about farming. In my mind, I “took” his farm at his price—any price—and imagined mortgaging it back to him. I even put a higher price on it. I took everything but the actual deed (the legal paper of ownership). I took his word for his deed because I dearly love to talk. I “cultivated” the farm, and the farmer too, to some extent, I hope. Then, when I had enjoyed it long enough in my mind, I “withdrew,” leaving him to actually carry on the work.

Because of this imaginative experience, my friends started to see me as a kind of real-estate broker.

Wherever I sat, there I could imagine living. The landscape then seemed to radiate out from me as the center. What is a house but a sedes, a seat? It’s even better if it’s a country seat, a place in the countryside.

I discovered many possible sites for a house that were not likely to be developed (“improved”) anytime soon. Some people might have thought these places were too far from the village. But from my perspective, the village was too far from them.

“Well, there I might live,” I said to myself. And in my imagination, there I did live. I lived there for an hour, experiencing a whole summer and a winter life. I saw how I could let the years pass, how I could endure the winter storms (“buffet the winter through”), and see the spring come in.

The future inhabitants of this region, wherever they may eventually place their houses, can be sure that I have already anticipated their spots. An afternoon was enough for me to mentally lay out the land into an orchard, a woodlot, and a pasture. I decided which fine oak or pine trees should be left standing before the door, and from where each lightning-struck (“blasted”) tree could be seen to its best advantage. And then I let the land lie, perhaps unused (“fallow”). For a person is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.

Almost Owning a Farm

My imagination carried me so far that I even had the “refusal” (the first option to buy) of several farms. The refusal was all I really wanted; I never got my fingers burned by actually owning property.

The nearest I came to actual possession was when I “bought” the Hollowell Place. I had even begun to sort my seeds for planting. I had collected materials to make a wheelbarrow to carry things on or off the property. But before the owner gave me the deed, his wife—every man seems to have such a wife—changed her mind and wished to keep the farm. The owner then offered me ten dollars to release him from our agreement.

Now, to tell the truth, I had only ten cents in the world at that moment. It was beyond my ability to calculate whether I was the man who had ten cents, or the man who had a farm, or the man who had ten dollars, or all of them together! However, I let him keep the ten dollars and the farm too, for I had “carried it far enough” in my mind; I had enjoyed the idea of it sufficiently. Or rather, to be generous, I “sold” him back the farm for exactly what I “gave” for it (which was nothing in real money). And since he was not a rich man, I made him a present of the ten dollars he offered me. I still had my ten cents, my seeds, and my materials for a wheelbarrow left.

I found that, in this way, I had been a rich man without any damage to my actual poverty. But I kept the landscape in my memory. And every year since then, I have “carried off” what it yielded—its beauty and inspiration—without needing a wheelbarrow.

With respect to landscapes, I feel like the poet William Cowper, who wrote: “I am monarch of all I survey, My right there is none to dispute.” (This means he felt he owned the landscape through his appreciation of it, a right no one could deny.)

The Poet’s “Harvest”

I have frequently seen a poet leave a farm after having enjoyed its most valuable part—its beauty and inspiration. Meanwhile, the crusty old farmer supposed that the poet had only gotten a few wild apples. Why, the owner of a farm often doesn’t realize for many years when a poet has “put his farm in rhyme.” The poet, through his words, has created the most admirable kind of invisible fence around it. He has fairly “impounded” it (taken possession of its essence), milked it, skimmed it, and gotten all the cream. He has left the farmer only the skimmed milk (the purely material aspect).

The True Appeal of the Hollowell Place

The real attractions of the Hollowell farm, for me, were:

• Its complete seclusion: it was about two miles from the village, half a mile from the nearest neighbor, and separated from the highway by a broad field.
• Its border on the river: the owner said the river’s fogs protected the farm from frosts in the spring, though that particular detail meant nothing to me.
• The gray color and rundown (“ruinous”) state of the house and barn, and the broken-down (“dilapidated”) fences: these things put a welcome distance between me and the last person who lived there.
• The hollow and lichen-covered apple trees, gnawed by rabbits: these showed me what kind of natural neighbors I would have.
• But above all, it was the memory I had of it from my earliest boat trips (“voyages”) up the river. Back then, the house was concealed behind a dense grove of red maples, through which I could hear the house-dog bark.

I was in a hurry to “buy” it before the current owner finished “improving” it. I didn’t want him getting out more rocks, cutting down the hollow apple trees, or digging up (“grubbing up”) some young birches that had sprung up in the pasture. In short, I wanted it before he made any more of his so-called improvements.

To enjoy these advantages—its wildness and seclusion—I was ready to “carry it on.” I was willing to take on the responsibility, like Atlas in Greek mythology, who carried the world on his shoulders. (I never heard what payment Atlas received for that job!) I was ready to do all those things that had no other motive or excuse but that I might pay for the farm and be left alone (“unmolested”) in my possession of it. For I knew all the while that it would yield the most abundant crop of the kind I wanted—inspiration, solitude, connection with nature—if I could only afford to let it alone and not be bothered with conventional farming. But, as I said, the purchase didn’t happen.

Living Free and Uncommitted

All that I could say, then, with respect to farming on a large scale (I have always cultivated a small garden), was that I had my seeds ready. Many people think that seeds improve with age. I have no doubt that time does distinguish between good and bad seeds (and perhaps good and bad ideas). When at last I do plant, I shall be less likely to be disappointed.

But I would say to my fellow human beings, once and for all: As long as possible, live free and uncommitted. It makes very little difference whether you are committed to a farm or to the county jail. (Both, in his view, can be forms of confinement that limit true freedom.)

Cato’s Advice on Buying a Farm

Old Cato, whose book “De Re Rusticâ” (On Agriculture) is my “Cultivator” (my farming guide), says something important. The only translation I have seen makes sheer nonsense of the passage, but here is what Cato means: “When you think of getting a farm, consider it carefully in your mind. Do not buy greedily. Do not spare your efforts to look at it thoroughly, and do not think it is enough to go around it just once. The oftener you go there, the more it will please you, if it is a good farm.”

I think I shall follow Cato’s advice. I shall not buy greedily. Instead, I will go round and round any place I might consider living, as long as I live. I would rather be buried in it first, so that it may please me the more at the very end. (This implies a deep, lifelong, non-possessive connection to a place, rather than a hasty purchase.)

My Walden Experiment: Waking the Neighbors

The Walden experiment was my next undertaking of this kind, and I plan to describe it in more detail. For convenience, I am putting the experience of two years into one continuous story. As I have said before, I do not intend to write an “ode to dejection” (a poem full of sadness and despair). Instead, I intend to “brag” as loudly and cheerfully as Chanticleer the rooster crows in the morning from his roost—if only to wake my neighbors up!

First Days in the Woods

When I first took up my home (“abode”) in the woods—that is, when I began to spend my nights as well as my days there—it happened by accident to be on Independence Day, July 4th, 1845. My house was not finished for winter at that time. It was merely a defense against the rain, without any plastering on the walls or a chimney. The walls were made of rough, weather-stained boards with wide cracks (“chinks”) between them, which made the house cool at night.

The upright white, hand-shaped (“hewn”) studs (wall posts) and the freshly planed door and window frames gave the house a clean and airy look. This was especially true in the morning, when its timbers were saturated with dew. I imagined that by noon some sweet-smelling resin (“gum”) would seep out from them. To my imagination, the house kept this fresh, dawn-like (“auroral”) character throughout the day. It reminded me of a certain house on a mountain which I had visited the year before. That house was an airy and unplastered cabin, fit to entertain a traveling god, and a place where a goddess might let her garments trail.

The winds that passed over my dwelling were like those that sweep over the ridges of mountains. They seemed to bear only the broken melodies (“strains”), or the heavenly (“celestial”) parts, of earthly music. The morning wind blows forever; the poem of creation is uninterrupted. But few are the ears that truly hear it. Olympus (the home of the Greek gods) is simply the outside of the earth, everywhere around us.

A Simple Shelter, A Close Neighbor to Birds

The only “house” I had owned before, if I don’t count a boat, was a tent. I used this tent occasionally when making trips (“excursions”) in the summer, and it is still rolled up in my attic (“garret”). But the boat, after passing from one owner to another, has “gone down the stream of time” (it’s long gone).

With this more substantial shelter around me—my partly-built cabin—I had made some progress toward settling in the world. This wooden frame, so lightly covered (“clad”), was a sort of crystallization around me, and it had an effect on me, its builder. It was suggestive, somewhat like a picture drawn only in outlines. I did not need to go outdoors to get fresh air, because the atmosphere inside my unfinished house had lost none of its freshness. I often felt I was not so much inside a house as merely behind a door, even during the rainiest weather.

The Harivansa (an ancient Sanskrit text) says, “An abode without birds is like meat without seasoning.” My home was not like that, for I suddenly found myself a neighbor to the birds. This was not because I had imprisoned one in a cage, but because I had “caged” myself near them by building my cabin in their habitat. I was not only nearer to some of those birds which commonly visit gardens and orchards, but also to those wilder and more thrilling songsters of the forest which never, or rarely, serenade a villager. These included:

• The wood thrush
• The veery
• The scarlet tanager
• The field sparrow
• The whippoorwill
• And many others.

The Pond and Its Mists

I was living by the shore of a small pond, about a mile and a half south of the village of Concord. The pond was somewhat higher in elevation than the village. It was in the midst of an extensive wood between Concord and the town of Lincoln, and about two miles south of Concord Battle Ground, our only local field known to fame. My cabin was set so low in the woods that the opposite shore of the pond, about half a mile away and covered with trees, was my most distant horizon.

For the first week, whenever I looked out at the pond, it impressed me like a tarn (a small mountain lake) situated high up on the side of a mountain. Its bottom seemed far above the surface of other lakes. As the sun rose, I saw the pond throwing off its nightly clothing of mist. Here and there, by degrees, its soft ripples or its smooth, reflecting surface was revealed. Meanwhile, the mists, like ghosts, were stealthily withdrawing in every direction into the woods, as if a secret nighttime meeting (“nocturnal conventicle”) were breaking up. The very dew seemed to hang upon the trees later into the day than usual, just as it does on the sides of mountains.

A Lower Heaven

This small lake was most valuable as a neighbor during the quiet intervals of a gentle rainstorm in August. At such times, both the air and the water would be perfectly still. Though the sky was overcast, the mid-afternoon had all the serenity of evening. The wood thrush sang all around, and its song could be heard from one shore to the other. A lake like this is never smoother than at such a time. The clear portion of the air above it, being shallow and darkened by clouds, makes the water below, full of light and reflections, become a “lower heaven” itself, all the more significant and beautiful.

From a hilltop nearby, where the woods had been recently cut, there was a pleasing view (“vista”) southward across the pond. This view went through a wide gap (“indentation”) in the hills that form the shore there. The opposite sides of these hills sloped toward each other, suggesting a stream flowing out in that direction through a wooded valley. But there was no stream.

That way, I looked between and over the near green hills to some distant and higher ones on 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.” I could also see a small portion of the village. But in other directions, even from this high point, I could not see over or beyond the woods which surrounded me.

It is good to have some water in your neighborhood. It gives a sense of buoyancy and seems to make the earth float. One value even of the smallest well is that when you look into it, you see that the earth is not a solid continent but rather “insular”—like an island surrounded by water. This is as important a realization as the fact that a well keeps butter cool.

When I looked across the pond from this peak toward the Sudbury meadows, which during flood times I could see elevated (perhaps by a mirage) in their steamy (“seething”) valley like a coin in a basin, all the earth beyond the pond appeared like a thin crust. It seemed insulated and floated even by this small sheet of water in between. I was reminded that this land on which I lived was, after all, just dry land surrounded by the unknown.

Imagination’s Pasture

Though the view from my cabin door was even more limited (“contracted”), I did not feel crowded or confined in the least. There was enough pasture for my imagination. The low shrub-oak plateau to which the opposite shore of the pond arose stretched away in my mind toward the prairies of the West and the steppes of Tartary (vast plains in Asia). This afforded ample room for all the roving families of mankind. As Damodara (a figure in Hindu stories) said, when his herds required new and larger pastures: “There are none happy in the world but beings who enjoy freely a vast horizon.”

A Place Apart

Both my place and my sense of time were changed by living at Walden. I felt I lived nearer to those parts of the universe and to those eras in history which had most attracted me. Where I lived was, in a sense, as far off as many a region viewed nightly by astronomers.

We are accustomed to imagine rare and delightful places in some remote and more heavenly (“celestial”) corner of the solar system, perhaps behind the constellation of Cassiopeia’s Chair, far from noise and disturbance. I discovered that my house actually had its site in just such a withdrawn, yet forever new and unspoiled (“unprofaned”), part of the universe. If it were worthwhile to settle in those parts of the sky near the star clusters of the Pleiades or the Hyades, or near the stars Aldebaran or Altair, then I felt I was really there at Walden. Or, at least, I was at an equal remoteness from the life I had left behind. That old life now seemed dwindled and twinkling with as fine and distant a ray as my nearest neighbor’s light appeared to me, visible only on moonless nights. Such was that part of creation where I had “squatted” (settled without formal ownership).

As an old poem says: “There was a shepherd that did live, And held his thoughts as high As were the mounts whereon his flocks Did hourly feed him by.”

What should we think of a shepherd’s life if his flocks always wandered to higher pastures than his own thoughts reached? (Our thoughts and aspirations should always be as high as, or higher than, our physical surroundings or daily pursuits.)

The Sacred Morning

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 (the Roman goddess of the dawn) as the ancient Greeks were. I got up early and bathed in the pond. That was a religious exercise for me, and one of the best things which I did.

They say that characters were engraved on the bathing tub of the ancient Chinese king Tching-thang to this effect: “Renew thyself completely each day; do it again, and again, and forever again.” I can understand that. Morning brings back the heroic ages.

I was as much affected by the faint hum of a mosquito making its invisible and unimaginable tour through my room at the earliest dawn, when I was sitting with my door and windows open, as I could be by any trumpet that ever sang of fame. The mosquito’s hum was like Homer’s requiem (a song for the dead, but here perhaps a song of ancient, enduring life). It was itself an Iliad and an Odyssey in the air, singing its own story of wrath and wanderings. There was something cosmic (“cosmical”) about it; a constant advertisement, until forbidden by winter, of the everlasting vigor and fertility of the world.

The morning, which is the most memorable season of the day, is the awakening hour. Then there is the least sleepiness (“somnolence”) in us. 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 by our own Genius (our inner spirit, our guiding inspiration). We should not be awakened by the mechanical nudgings of some servant (“servitor”). We should be awakened by our own newly-acquired inner force and aspirations. This awakening should be accompanied by the gentle waves (“undulations”) of celestial music, instead of factory bells, and a fragrance filling the air—an awakening to a higher life than the one we fell asleep from. And thus the darkness of night can bear its fruit and prove itself to be good, no less than the light of day. (Night’s rest prepares for an inspired awakening.)

That person who does not believe that each day contains an earlier, more sacred, and dawn-like (“auroral”) hour than he has yet spoiled (“profaned”) by mundane activities, has despaired of life. He is pursuing a descending and darkening way. After a partial stopping (“cessation”) of his sensory life during sleep, the soul of a person, or its organs rather, are reinvigorated each day. His Genius tries again what noble life it can create.

All memorable events, I should say, happen (“transpire”) in morning time and in a morning atmosphere. The Vedas (ancient Hindu scriptures) say, “All intelligences awake with the morning.” Poetry and art, and the fairest and most memorable of the actions of human beings, date from such an hour. All poets and heroes, like Memnon (the mythical statue that sang at sunrise), are the children of Aurora, the dawn. They emit their music at sunrise.

To the person whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning. It does not matter what the clocks say or what the attitudes and labors of other people are. Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me. Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep. Why is it that people give such a poor account of their day if they have not been slumbering? They are not such poor calculators of their time. If they had not been overcome with drowsiness, they would have performed something worthwhile.

The millions are awake enough for physical labor. But only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion. Only one in a hundred million is awake enough for 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 if I had?

The Highest Art: Affecting the Quality of the Day

We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake. This is not done by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us even in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of human beings to elevate their lives by a conscious effort.

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 at the world. This, morally, we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.

Every person is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour—worthy of being looked back upon from his wisest and best moments. If we refused, or rather used up and moved beyond, such petty (“paltry”) information as we usually get, the oracles (sources of deep wisdom) would distinctly inform us how this higher life might be achieved. (If we clear our minds of trivialities, deeper wisdom will emerge.)

Where I Lived, and What I Lived For

Choosing a Place in My Mind

At a certain time in our lives, we often look at every spot as a possible place to build a house. In this way, I have explored the countryside in every direction within a dozen miles of where I actually live. In my imagination, I have “bought” all the farms one after another. They were all for sale, and I knew their prices.

I walked over each farmer’s property. I tasted his wild apples and talked with him about farming. In my mind, I “took” his farm at his price—any price—and imagined I was mortgaging it back to him. I even put a higher imaginary price on it. I took everything about the farm except the actual legal paper (the “deed”) that proves ownership. I took the farmer’s word for his deed because I dearly love to talk. I “cultivated” the farm in my mind, and the farmer too, to some extent, I hope. Then, when I had enjoyed the idea of it long enough, I “withdrew,” leaving him to actually carry on the work.

Because of this imaginative experience, my friends started to see me as a kind of real-estate broker.

Wherever I sat, I felt I could live there. The landscape then seemed to spread out from me as its center. What is a house but a sedes, a seat? It’s even better if it’s a “country seat,” a place to settle in the countryside.

I discovered many possible sites for a house that were not likely to be developed (“improved” with buildings) anytime soon. Some people might have thought these places were too far from the village. But from my perspective, the village was too far from them.

“Well, there I might live,” I said to myself about these spots. And in my imagination, there I did live. I lived there for an hour, experiencing a whole summer and a winter life in my mind. I saw how I could let the years pass, how I could endure the winter storms (“buffet the winter through”), and see the spring come in again.

The future inhabitants of this region, wherever they may eventually build their houses, can be sure that I have already thought about their spots. An afternoon was enough for me to mentally lay out a piece of land into an orchard, a woodlot, and a pasture. I decided which fine oak or pine trees should be left standing before the door, and from which viewpoint each lightning-struck (“blasted”) tree could be seen to its best advantage. And then I let the land lie, perhaps unused (“fallow”) in reality. For a person is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.

Almost Owning the Hollowell Place

My imagination carried me so far that I even had the “refusal” (the first option to buy) of several farms. This first option was all I really wanted; I never got my fingers burned by actually owning property.

The nearest I came to actual possession was when I agreed to buy the Hollowell Place. I had even begun to sort my seeds for planting there. I had collected materials to make a wheelbarrow to carry things on or off the property. But before the owner gave me the deed, his wife—every man seems to have such a wife who influences decisions—changed her mind and wished to keep the farm. The owner then offered me ten dollars to release him from our agreement.

Now, to tell the truth, I had only ten cents in the world at that moment. It was beyond my ability to calculate whether I was the man who had ten cents, or the man who was about to own a farm, or the man who was offered ten dollars, or somehow all of these at once! However, I let him keep the ten dollars and the farm too. I felt I had “carried it far enough” in my mind; I had enjoyed the idea of owning it sufficiently.

Or rather, to be generous, I “sold” him back the farm for exactly what I “gave” for it (which was nothing in real money). And since he was not a rich man, I made him a present of the ten dollars he had offered me. I still had my original ten cents, my seeds, and my materials for a wheelbarrow left.

I found that, in this way, I had been a rich man (in experience and imagination) without any damage to my actual poverty. But I kept the landscape in my memory. And every year since then, I have “carried off” what that landscape yielded—its beauty, its inspiration—without ever needing a wheelbarrow.

With respect to landscapes, I feel like the poet William Cowper, who wrote: “I am monarch of all I survey, My right there is none to dispute.” (This means he felt he owned the landscape through his deep appreciation of it, a right no one could deny or take away.)

The Poet’s True Harvest

I have frequently seen a poet walk away from a farm after having enjoyed its most valuable part—its beauty and inspiration. Meanwhile, the crusty old farmer supposed that the poet had only gotten a few wild apples for his trouble. Why, the owner of a farm often doesn’t realize for many years when a poet has “put his farm in rhyme” (written a poem about it). Through his words, the poet has created the most admirable kind of invisible fence around the farm. He has, in a sense, “impounded” it (taken possession of its essence), milked it, skimmed it, and gotten all the cream (the best part, the spiritual nourishment). He has left the farmer only the skimmed milk (the purely material aspect).

What Drew Me to the Hollowell Farm

The real attractions of the Hollowell farm, for me, were these:

• Its complete seclusion: It was about two miles from the village, half a mile from the nearest neighbor, and separated from the highway by a broad field.
• Its border on the river: The owner said the river’s fogs protected the farm from frosts in the spring. (This particular detail meant nothing to me, but I noted his reasoning.)
• Its rustic appearance: The gray color and rundown (“ruinous”) state of the house and barn, and the broken-down (“dilapidated”) fences, created a sense of history and put a welcome distance between me and the last person who lived there.
• Its wild nature: The hollow and lichen-covered apple trees, gnawed by rabbits, showed me what kind of natural neighbors I would have.
• An old memory: Above all, it was the memory I had of the place from my earliest boat trips (“voyages”) up the river. Back then, the house was concealed behind a dense grove of red maples, and I could hear the house-dog bark through the trees.

I was in a hurry to “buy” it before the current owner finished making what he considered “improvements.” I didn’t want him getting out more rocks, cutting down the old hollow apple trees, or digging up (“grubbing up”) some young birches that had sprung up in the pasture. In short, I wanted the farm before he changed its wild character.

To enjoy these advantages—its wildness and seclusion—I was ready to “carry it on.” I was willing to take on the responsibility, like Atlas in Greek mythology, who carried the world on his shoulders. (I never heard what payment Atlas received for that enormous job!) I was ready to do all those things that had no other motive or excuse but that I might pay for the farm and be left alone (“unmolested”) in my possession of it. For I knew all the while that it would yield the most abundant crop of the kind I wanted—inspiration, solitude, connection with nature—if I could only afford to let it alone and not be bothered with conventional farming. But, as I mentioned, the purchase didn’t actually happen.

Live Free and Uncommitted

All that I could say, then, with respect to farming on a large scale (though I have always cultivated a small garden), was that I had my “seeds” ready—my ideas and plans. Many people think that seeds improve with age. I have no doubt that time does help to distinguish between good and bad seeds (and perhaps good and bad ideas). When at last I do plant my seeds, I shall be less likely to be disappointed.

But I would say to my fellow human beings, once and for all: As long as possible, live free and uncommitted. It makes very little difference in the end whether you are committed to a farm or to the county jail. (Both, in his view, can be forms of confinement that limit true freedom and self-discovery.)

Cato’s Wisdom on Choosing a Farm

Old Cato, a Roman statesman and writer, whose book “De Re Rusticâ” (On Agriculture) is like my “Cultivator” (my personal farming guide), says something important. The only English translation I have seen makes sheer nonsense of the passage, but here is what Cato essentially means: “When you think of getting a farm, consider it carefully in your mind. Do not buy greedily. Do not spare your efforts to look at it thoroughly, and do not think it is enough to go around it just once. The oftener you go there, the more it will please you, if it is a good farm.”

I think I shall follow Cato’s advice. I shall not buy greedily. Instead, I will go round and round any place I might consider living, as long as I live. I would rather be buried in it first, so that it may please me all the more at the very end. (This implies a deep, lifelong, non-possessive connection to a place, rather than a hasty purchase based on fleeting desire.)

My Experiment at Walden

The Walden experiment was my next undertaking of this kind, and I plan to describe it in more detail now. For convenience, I am putting the experience of two years into one continuous story. As I have said before, I do not intend to write an “ode to dejection” (a poem full of sadness and despair). Instead, I intend to “brag” as loudly and cheerfully as Chanticleer the rooster crows in the morning from his roost—if only to wake my neighbors up to new possibilities!

Moving In and an Unfinished House

When I first took up my home (“abode”) in the woods—that is, when I began to spend my nights as well as my days there—it happened by accident to be on Independence Day, July 4th, 1845. My house was not finished for winter at that time. It was merely a defense against the rain, without any plastering on the walls or a chimney. The walls were made of rough, weather-stained boards with wide cracks (“chinks”) between them, which made the house cool at night.

The upright white, hand-shaped (“hewn”) studs (the vertical posts in the walls) and the freshly planed door and window frames gave the house a clean and airy look. This was especially true in the morning, when its timbers were saturated with dew. I imagined that by noon some sweet-smelling resin (“gum”) would seep out from them.

To my imagination, the house kept this fresh, dawn-like (“auroral”) character throughout the day. It reminded me of a certain house on a mountain which I had visited the year before. That house was an airy and unplastered cabin, fit to entertain a traveling god, and a place where a goddess might let her garments trail gracefully.

The winds that passed over my dwelling were like those that sweep over the ridges of mountains. They seemed to bear only the broken melodies (“strains”), or the heavenly (“celestial”) parts, of earthly music. The morning wind blows forever; the poem of creation is uninterrupted. But few are the ears that truly hear it. Olympus (the mythical home of the Greek gods) is simply the outside of the earth, present everywhere around us, if we have eyes to see and ears to hear.

A Simple Shelter, Close to the Birds

The only “house” I had owned before this, if I don’t count a boat, was a tent. I used this tent occasionally when making trips (“excursions”) in the summer, and it is still rolled up in my attic (“garret”). But the boat, after passing from one owner to another, has “gone down the stream of time”—it’s long gone.

With this more substantial shelter around me—my partly-built cabin—I felt I had made some progress toward settling in the world. This wooden frame, so lightly covered (“clad”) with boards, was a sort of crystallization around me. It also had an effect on me, its builder; the house shaped me just as I shaped it. It was suggestive, somewhat like a picture drawn only in outlines. I did not need to go outdoors to get fresh air, because the atmosphere inside my unfinished house had lost none of its natural freshness. I often felt I was not so much inside a house as merely behind a door, even during the rainiest weather.

The Harivansa (an ancient Sanskrit text) says, “An abode without birds is like meat without seasoning.” My home was not like that, for I suddenly found myself a neighbor to the birds. This was not because I had imprisoned one in a cage, but because I had “caged” myself near them by building my cabin in their habitat. I was not only nearer to some of those birds which commonly visit gardens and orchards, but also to those wilder and more thrilling songsters of the forest which never, or rarely, serenade a villager. These included:

• The wood thrush
• The veery
• The scarlet tanager
• The field sparrow
• The whippoorwill
• And many others.

The Pond: A Mountain Lake in the Woods

I was living by the shore of a small pond, about a mile and a half south of the village of Concord. The pond was somewhat higher in elevation than the village. It was situated in the midst of an extensive wood between Concord and the town of Lincoln, and about two miles south of Concord Battle Ground, our only local field known to fame. My cabin was set so low in the woods that the opposite shore of the pond, about half a mile away and also covered with trees, was my most distant horizon.

For the first week, whenever I looked out at the pond, it impressed me as being like a tarn (a small mountain lake) situated high up on the side of a mountain. Its bottom seemed far above the surface of other, lower lakes. As the sun rose each morning, I saw the pond throwing off its nightly covering of mist. Here and there, by degrees, its soft ripples or its smooth, reflecting surface would be revealed. Meanwhile, the mists, like ghosts, were stealthily withdrawing in every direction into the woods, as if a secret nighttime meeting (“nocturnal conventicle”) were breaking up. The very dew seemed to hang upon the trees later into the day than usual, just as it does on the sides of mountains.

The Pond as a “Lower Heaven”

This small lake was most valuable as a neighbor during the quiet intervals of a gentle rainstorm in August. At such times, both the air and the water would be perfectly still. Though the sky was overcast, the mid-afternoon had all the serenity of an evening. The wood thrush sang all around, and its beautiful song could be heard from one shore of the pond to the other. A lake like this is never smoother or more reflective than at such a time. And because the clear portion of the air above it was shallow and darkened by the clouds, the water below, full of light and reflections, became a “lower heaven” itself—all the more significant and beautiful for its mirroring quality.

From a hilltop nearby, where the woods had been recently cut, there was a pleasing view (“vista”) southward across the pond. This view went through a wide gap (“indentation”) in the hills that form the shore there. The opposite sides of these hills sloped toward each other, suggesting a stream flowing out in that direction through a wooded valley. But there was no actual stream.

Looking that way, I could see between and over the near green hills to some distant and higher ones on the horizon, which were 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.” I could also see a small portion of the village from that spot. But in other directions, even from this high point, I could not see over or beyond the woods which surrounded me.

It is good to have some water in your neighborhood. Water gives a sense of buoyancy and seems to make the earth float. One value even of the smallest well is that when you look into it, you see that the earth is not a solid continent but rather “insular”—like an island surrounded by water, meaning it’s not as solid or permanent as we might think. This realization is as important as the practical fact that a well keeps butter cool.

When I looked across Walden Pond from this peak toward the Sudbury meadows, which during flood times I could sometimes see elevated (perhaps by a mirage) in their steamy (“seething”) valley like a coin in a basin, all the earth beyond the pond appeared like a thin crust. It seemed insulated and floated even by this small sheet of intervening water. I was reminded that this land on which I lived was, after all, just dry land, a small island in a vast unknown.

A Vast Horizon for the Mind

Though the view from my cabin door was even more limited (“contracted”) than from the hilltop, I did not feel crowded or confined in the least. There was enough pasture for my imagination. The low shrub-oak plateau to which the opposite shore of the pond rose stretched away in my mind toward the prairies of the American West and the steppes of Tartary (the vast plains of Central Asia). This inner landscape afforded ample room for all the roving families of humankind. As Damodara (a figure in Hindu stories) said, when his herds required new and larger pastures: “There are none happy in the world but beings who enjoy freely a vast horizon.” My mind had that vast horizon.

A Place Beyond Ordinary Time and Space

By living at Walden, both my sense of place and my sense of time were changed. I felt I lived nearer to those parts of the universe and to those eras in history which had most attracted me. Where I lived was, in a spiritual sense, as far off as many a distant region viewed nightly by astronomers.

We often imagine rare and delightful places existing in some remote and more heavenly (“celestial”) corner of the solar system, perhaps hidden behind the constellation of Cassiopeia’s Chair, far from earthly noise and disturbance. I discovered that my house at Walden Pond actually had its site in just such a withdrawn, yet forever new and unspoiled (“unprofaned”), part of the universe. If it were truly worthwhile to settle in those distant parts of the sky near the star clusters of the Pleiades or the Hyades, or near the bright stars Aldebaran or Altair, then I felt I was effectively “really there” at Walden. Or, at least, I was at an equal remoteness from the conventional life I had left behind. That old life now seemed dwindled and twinkling with as fine and distant a ray as my nearest physical neighbor’s lamplight appeared to me, visible only on moonless nights. Such was that part of creation where I had “squatted” (settled simply, without formal ownership).

As an old poem says about a shepherd: “There was a shepherd that did live, And held his thoughts as high As were the mounts whereon his flocks Did hourly feed him by.”

What should we think of a shepherd’s life if his flocks always wandered to higher pastures than his own thoughts managed to reach? (Our thoughts and aspirations should always be as high as, or even higher than, our physical surroundings or daily pursuits.)

The Sacredness of Morning

Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life as simple, and I may say as innocent, as Nature herself. I have been as sincere a worshipper of Aurora (the Roman goddess of the dawn) as the ancient Greeks were. I got up early and bathed in the pond. That was a religious exercise for me, and one of the best things which I did each day.

They say that an inscription was engraved on the bathing tub of the ancient Chinese king Tching-thang with this message: “Renew thyself completely each day; do it again, and again, and forever again.” I can understand that. Morning brings back the feeling of heroic ages, a time of fresh beginnings and noble possibilities.

I was as much affected by the faint hum of a mosquito making its invisible and unimaginable tour through my room at the earliest dawn—when I was sitting with my door and windows open—as I could be by any grand trumpet that ever sang of fame. The mosquito’s tiny hum was like Homer’s requiem (a song that is ancient, profound, and speaks of life and death). It was itself an Iliad and an Odyssey (epic poems of struggle and journey) in the air, singing its own story of “wrath and wanderings.” There was something cosmic (“cosmical”) about it; it was a constant advertisement (until winter silenced it) of the everlasting vigor and fertility of the world.

The morning, which is the most memorable part (“season”) of the day, is the awakening hour. Then there is the least sleepiness (“somnolence”) in us. 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 truly be called a day—to which we are not awakened by our own Genius (our inner spirit, our guiding inspiration). We should not be awakened merely by the mechanical nudgings of some servant (“servitor”). We should be awakened by our own newly-acquired inner force and aspirations. This ideal awakening should be accompanied by the gentle waves (“undulations”) of celestial music (the sounds of nature, or an inner harmony), instead of by the harsh sound of factory bells. It should be an awakening to a higher life than the one we fell asleep from, with a fragrance filling the air. And in this way, the darkness of night can bear its fruit (rest and renewal) and prove itself to be good, no less than the light of day.

That person who does not believe that each day contains an earlier, more sacred, and dawn-like (“auroral”) hour than he has yet spoiled (“profaned”) by mundane activities, has despaired of life. He is pursuing a descending and darkening way. After a partial stopping (“cessation”) of his sensory life during sleep, the soul of a person—or its perceptive organs, rather—are reinvigorated each day. His Genius tries again what noble life it can create.

All memorable events, I should say, happen (“transpire”) in morning time and in a morning atmosphere. The Vedas (ancient Hindu scriptures) say, “All intelligences awake with the morning.” Poetry and art, and the fairest and most memorable of the actions of human beings, all date from such an hour. All poets and heroes, like Memnon (the mythical statue in Egypt that was said to sing at sunrise), are the children of Aurora, the dawn. They emit their music and perform their greatest deeds at sunrise.

To the person whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the entire day is a perpetual morning. It does not matter what the clocks say or what the attitudes and labors of other people are. Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me. Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep, to awaken fully. Why is it that people give such a poor account of their day if they have not been metaphorically slumbering? They are not usually such poor calculators of their time. If they had not been overcome with drowsiness (spiritual and mental, as well as physical), they would have performed something worthwhile.

The millions are awake enough for physical labor. But only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion. Only one in a hundred million is awake enough for 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 if I had? (Such a person would be dazzlingly alive.)

The Highest of Arts

We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake. This is not done by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn—a dawn of understanding and renewal which does not forsake us even in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of human beings to elevate their lives by a conscious effort.

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 at the world. This, morally and spiritually, we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.

Every person is tasked to make his life, even in its smallest details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour—worthy of being looked back upon from his wisest and best moments. If we refused, or rather used up and moved beyond, such petty (“paltry”) information and distractions as we usually fill our minds with, then the oracles (sources of deep wisdom, both internal and external) would distinctly inform us how this higher life might be achieved.

Living Deliberately: The Core Purpose

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately. I wanted to face only the essential facts of life. I wanted to see if I could not learn what life had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not truly lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, because living is so precious. Nor did I wish to practice resignation (giving up on a full life), unless it was absolutely necessary.

I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life. I wanted to live so sturdily and simply (like a Spartan) as to drive away (“put to rout”) all that was not truly life. I wanted to cut a broad path (“swath”) and shave close to the bone—to get to the very core of things. I wanted to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its simplest terms.

And if life proved to be “mean” (base, petty, or harsh), why then I wanted to experience the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world. Or if it were sublime (grand and inspiring), I wanted to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next “excursion” (my next phase of life or writing).

For most people, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about life. They are unsure whether it is of the devil or of God. They have, somewhat hastily, concluded that the chief purpose (“chief end”) of mankind here on earth is to “glorify God and enjoy him forever” (a phrase from the Westminster Catechism), often without deeply questioning what that truly means for their own lives.

Our Ant-Like Existence and the Call for Simplicity

Still, we live “meanly”—our lives are small and petty—like ants. This is true even though the fable tells us that we were long ago changed from ants into men. Like pygmies fighting with cranes (an ancient story of absurd and futile conflict), we engage in struggles that are often pointless. It is error upon error, and one makeshift solution (“clout upon clout”) after another. Our best virtue often arises only because of some unnecessary and avoidable (“superfluous and evitable”) wretchedness that we ourselves have created. Our life is frittered away by unnecessary detail.

An honest man hardly needs to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases, he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest of the details together. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand. Instead of a million, count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumbnail.

In the midst of this choppy (“chopping”) sea of civilized life, there are so many clouds and storms and quicksands and a thousand-and-one items to be allowed for. A person, if he does not want to sink (“founder”) and go to the bottom and never reach his destination (“port”) at all, has to navigate by “dead reckoning” (estimating his position without precise instruments). He must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds in such a complex world.

Simplify, simplify. Instead of three meals a day, if it is necessary, eat but one. Instead of a hundred dishes, have five. And reduce other things in your life in proportion.

Our life is often like the German Confederacy of that time (a loose and shifting collection of many small states). Its boundaries were forever fluctuating, so that even a German citizen could not tell you exactly how it was bounded at any given moment. The nation itself, with all its so-called internal improvements (which, by the way, are often all external and superficial), is just such an unwieldy and overgrown establishment. It is cluttered with “furniture” (unnecessary complications) and tripped up by its own traps. It is ruined by luxury and heedless expense, by a lack of careful calculation and a worthy aim. This is true of the nation just as it is true of the million households in the land. And the only cure for the nation, as for individual households, is in a rigid economy (careful management of resources), a stern and more than Spartan simplicity of life, and an elevation of purpose.

Society lives too fast. People think that it is essential that the Nation have commerce, and export ice, and talk through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles an hour. They believe these things are essential, without a doubt, whether they personally participate in them or not. But whether we should live like baboons or like men is a little uncertain to them.

If we do not get out railroad ties (“sleepers”), and forge rails, and devote days and nights to the work of building railroads, but instead go to work on (“tinkering upon”) our own lives to improve them, who will build railroads? And if railroads are not built, how shall we get to heaven “in season” (efficiently, or on time)? (This is a sarcastic question, mocking the idea that railroads are a path to salvation or true progress.)

But if we stay at home and mind our own business, who will want railroads? We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us. (Meaning, we become servants to the very technologies and systems we create, rather than them serving our true needs.)

Did you ever think what those “sleepers” (the wooden ties) are that lie beneath the railroad tracks? Each one represents a man—an Irishman, or a Yankee man. The rails are laid on them, and they are covered with sand, and the train cars run smoothly over them. They are “sound sleepers,” I assure you. (This is a pun: the ties are solid and lie still, but they also represent the men who are “sleeping” through life, or whose lives are crushed by the system.) And every few years, a new lot of sleepers is laid down and run over by the trains. So that, if some people have the pleasure of riding on a rail, others have the misfortune to be ridden upon.

And when the train runs over a man who is walking in his sleep—a “supernumerary sleeper” (an extra one) in the wrong position—and wakes him up with a fatal shock, they suddenly stop the cars and make a great outcry (“hue and cry”) about it, as if this were an exceptional event. I am glad to know that it takes a gang of men for every five miles of track just to keep the sleepers down and level in their beds as it is. For this is a sign that they (the oppressed workers, the “sleepers”) may sometime get up again.

Our Hurried, Wasted Lives

Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We seem determined to be starved before we are even hungry. (We are so anxious about the future that we over-prepare and miss the present.) People say that “a stitch in time saves nine,” and so they take a thousand stitches today to save nine tomorrow. (This is an example of excessive, anxious busyness.)

As for real work, we often don’t do any of any real consequence. We have the “Saint Vitus’ dance” (a neurological disorder causing involuntary jerky movements; Thoreau uses it as a metaphor for society’s restless, purposeless activity). We cannot possibly keep our heads still.

If I should only give a few pulls at the parish bell-rope, as if for a fire—that is, without actually setting the bell to ring continuously—there is hardly a man on his farm in the outskirts of Concord (notwithstanding that “press of engagements” which was his excuse for being too busy so many times this morning), nor a boy, nor a woman, I might almost say, who would not forsake everything and follow that sound. They would come, 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 they would come to see it put out, and to have a hand in it, if that is done as impressively. Yes, they would come even if it were the parish church itself that was burning.

Hardly a man takes a half-hour’s nap after dinner without, upon waking, holding up his head and asking, “What’s the news?” It’s as if the rest of mankind had stood as his sentinels, guarding the world for him while he slept. Some people even give directions to be waked every half hour, doubtless for no other purpose than to hear the latest news. And then, to pay for the trouble of being woken, they tell what they have dreamed. After a night’s sleep, the news is considered as indispensable as breakfast. “Pray tell me anything new that has happened to a man anywhere on this globe,” one says. And he reads it over his coffee and rolls—perhaps about a man who had his eyes gouged out this morning on the Wachito River. All the while, he never dreams that he himself lives in the dark, unfathomed, mammoth cave of this world, and has only the mere beginning (“rudiment”) of an eye himself, being blind to his own true condition and the realities around him.

The Irrelevance of Most “News”

For my part, I could easily do without the post office. I think that there are very few important communications 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 actually worth the postage. The penny-post (the cheap postal service) is commonly an institution through which you seriously offer a man that penny for his thoughts which is so often safely offered only in jest.

And I am sure that I never read any truly memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man being robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one ship (“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 appearing in the winter—we never need to read of another such instance. One is enough to understand the principle. If you are acquainted with the underlying principle or pattern, what do you care for a myriad of examples and applications?

To a philosopher, all “news,” as it is called, is gossip. And those who edit it and read it are like old women chattering over their tea. Yet, quite a few people are greedy for this gossip. There was such a rush, as I hear, the other day at one of the newspaper offices to learn the foreign news from the latest ship arrival, that several large squares of plate glass belonging to the establishment were broken by the pressure of the crowd. This was news which I seriously think a clever person (“a ready wit”) might write a year or even twelve years beforehand with sufficient accuracy.

As for Spain, for instance, if you know how to throw in references to Don Carlos and the Infanta, and Don Pedro, and the cities of Seville and Granada, from time to time in the right proportions—they may have changed the names a little since I last saw the papers—and serve up a bullfight when other entertainments fail, your account will be true to the letter. It will give us as good an idea of the exact state or ruin of things in Spain as the most brief (“succinct”) and clear (“lucid”) reports under this heading in the newspapers. And as for England, almost the last significant scrap of news from that quarter was the revolution of 1649. And if you have learned the history of her crops for an average year, you never need attend to that subject again, unless your interests (“speculations”) are of a purely financial nature. If one may judge who rarely looks into the newspapers, nothing truly new ever happens in foreign parts, a French revolution not excepted. (This is an exaggeration to emphasize his point about the repetitive nature of human events and the superficiality of much that is reported as “news.”)

The Only True News

What news! How much more important it is to know that which was never old—the timeless truths! Kieou-pe-yu (a great dignitary of the state of Wei in ancient China) sent a man to Khoung-tseu (Confucius) to know his news. Khoung-tseu had the messenger 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 accomplish it.” The messenger being gone, the philosopher Confucius remarked: “What a worthy messenger! What a worthy messenger!” (The true “news” was the report of his master’s ongoing effort at self-improvement.)

The preacher, instead of bothering (“vexing”) the ears of drowsy farmers on their day of rest at the end of the week—for Sunday is often merely the fit conclusion of an ill-spent week, and not the fresh and brave beginning of a new one—with yet another long, rambling, and uninspired (“draggle-tail”) sermon, should shout with a thundering voice: “Pause! Stop! Why do you seem to move so fast, yet are progressing so deadly slow?” (A call to stop frenetic, meaningless activity and reflect on true progress.)

Reality is Fabulous; Shams are Valued

Shams and delusions are often valued (“esteemed”) as the soundest truths, while reality itself is fabulous (as amazing and wonderful as a fairy tale). If people 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’ Entertainments. If we respected only what is inevitable and has a natural 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. Petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality. This understanding is always exhilarating and sublime. By closing their eyes and metaphorically slumbering, and by consenting to be deceived by mere outward shows, people everywhere establish and confirm their daily life of routine and habit. Yet, this routine is still built on purely illusory foundations.

Children, who “play life” with imagination and openness, often discern its true laws and relationships more clearly than adults. Adults often fail to live life worthily, yet they think that they are wiser because of their experience—that is, often, because of their failures.

I have read in a Hindu book that “there was a king’s son, who, being expelled in infancy from his native city, was brought up by a forester. Growing up to maturity in that state, he imagined himself to belong to the ‘barbarous’ race with which he lived. One of his father’s ministers, having discovered him, revealed to him who he truly was. The misconception of his character was removed, and he knew himself to be a prince. So the soul,” continues the Hindu 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 (part of the divine Absolute, the ultimate reality).”

I perceive that we inhabitants of New England live the mean (small, unfulfilling) 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 person should walk through this town and see only the reality, where, do you think, would the “Mill-dam” (a local landmark, likely representing commerce and industry) go? If he should give us an account of the realities he beheld there, we should not recognize the place in his description.

Look at a meeting-house, or a court-house, or a jail, or a shop, or a dwelling-house, and say what that thing really is before a true, penetrating gaze. They would all go to pieces in your account of them; their conventional meanings would dissolve.

People esteem truth as something remote, existing 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 supposedly distant times and places and profound occasions are actually now and here. God himself culminates (reaches the highest point) in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the whole course of all the ages. And we are able to apprehend (grasp, understand) at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality which surrounds us.

The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions. Whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us by our thoughts and perceptions. Let us spend our lives in conceiving then—in thinking, imagining, and understanding deeply. The poet or the artist never yet had so fair and noble a design that some of his descendants (“posterity”), at least, could not eventually accomplish it. The power of ideas is immense.

Living Deliberately: A Call to Action

Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature herself does. Let us not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito’s wing that falls on the rails of our attention. Let us rise early and either fast, or “break fast” (eat breakfast) gently and without agitation (“perturbation”). Let company come and let company go, let the bells ring and the children cry—let us be determined to make a day of it, to live it fully and intentionally. Why should we give in (“knock under”) and simply go with the stream of conventional life?

Let us not be upset and overwhelmed in that terrible rapid current and whirlpool called dinner, often situated in the “meridian shallows” (the less profound, busy middle part of the day). Weather this danger successfully, and you are safe, for the rest of the way is downhill. With unrelaxed nerves, with morning vigor, sail by it, looking another way, metaphorically tied to the mast like Ulysses resisting the Sirens’ call. If the (metaphorical) engine whistles, let it whistle until it is hoarse for its pains. If the bell rings, why should we run? Let us instead consider what kind of music these sounds are like—what message they truly carry.

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 mere appearance—that layer of sediment (“alluvion”) which covers the globe. Let us dig through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, until we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality. And then we can say, “This is, and no mistake.”

And then, having a firm foundation (point d’appui)—a place below the reach of floods (“freshet”) and frost and fire—we can begin to build. This is a place where you might found a wall or a state, or set a lamp-post safely. Or perhaps you might set up a “Realometer” (a gauge for measuring reality), not a Nilometer (which measures the floods of the Nile River), so that future ages might know how deep a flood of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time.

If you stand right in front of a fact, face to face with it, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a curved sword (“cimeter”). You will feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow. And so, by this intense, direct encounter with reality, you will happily conclude your mortal career, having truly lived.

Be it life or death, we crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel the cold in our extremities. If we are alive, let us go about our business with full awareness.

Time, Eternity, and the Intellect

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink, I see the sandy bottom and realize how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper. I would fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. (He means he wants to explore deeper, more eternal truths, not just the shallow flow of everyday time.)

I cannot count even one star, or perhaps, one fundamental truth. I feel as if I do not know the first letter of the alphabet. I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born (when perception was perhaps purer and unclouded by societal conditioning).

The intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and cuts (“rifts”) its way into the secret of things. I do not wish to be any more busy with my hands than is necessary. My head is my 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 forepaws. And with it, I would mine and burrow my way through these hills of experience and knowledge. I think that the richest vein of truth is somewhere hereabouts; so I judge by my intuition (“divining rod and thin rising vapors”). And here, at Walden, I will begin to mine.

Reading

The Immortal Pursuit of Truth

If people thought a little more carefully when choosing their activities, perhaps everyone would essentially become students and observers. After all, our own nature and destiny are certainly interesting to all of us.

When we are accumulating property for ourselves or for our children, founding a family or a state, or even acquiring fame, we are dealing with things that are mortal and will pass away. But when we are dealing with truth, we are engaging with something immortal. In that pursuit, we need not fear change or accident.

The oldest Egyptian or Hindu philosopher lifted a corner of the veil from the statue of divinity, revealing a glimpse of eternal truth. And that veil, once lifted, remains raised. Today, I can gaze upon as fresh and glorious a vision as those ancient philosophers did. This is because, in a sense, it was the same human spirit—the “I” in them—that was so bold back then. And it is the “he” (that ancient spirit of inquiry) in me that now reviews that timeless vision. No dust has settled on that symbolic robe; no time has truly passed since that divinity was first revealed. The time that we really improve, or that truly holds potential for improvement, is not tied to the past, present, or future—it is eternal.

A Place for Serious Reading

My home at Walden Pond was more favorable not only to thought but also to serious reading than a university could be. Although I was beyond the reach of the ordinary circulating library, I had more than ever come under the influence of those truly great books which circulate around the world. The sentences in these books were perhaps first written on bark and are now merely copied from time to time onto linen paper.

The poet Mîr Camar Uddîn Mast said: “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 when I have drunk the liquor of the esoteric doctrines.” (He means that books can provide a powerful, intoxicating journey into the spiritual realm.)

I kept Homer’s Iliad on my table throughout the summer, though I only looked at its pages now and then. At first, the constant labor with my hands—for I had my house to finish and my beans to hoe at the same time—made more extensive study impossible. Yet, I sustained myself with the prospect of such reading in the future. In the intervals of my work, I read one or two shallow books of travel. Eventually, that kind of trivial employment (reading shallow books) made me ashamed of myself. It made me ask where, in a deeper sense, I was then truly living.

The Value of Classics and True Reading

A student can read Homer or Æschylus (ancient Greek writers) in the original Greek without danger of wasting time (“dissipation”) or indulging in mere luxury. This is because such study implies that he, in some measure, tries to emulate (imitate and equal) their heroes and dedicates his morning hours to their pages.

The heroic books, even if printed in the letters of our own modern language, will always be in a language that seems “dead” to superficial or “degenerate” times. We must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line. We must guess at (“conjecture”) a larger sense than common everyday use permits, using whatever wisdom, valor, and generosity we ourselves possess.

The modern cheap and productive printing press, with all its translations, has done little to bring us nearer to the heroic writers of antiquity. They seem as solitary and unique, and the very letters 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. These words are raised out of the triviality of everyday street talk and become perpetual sources of suggestion and intellectual challenge (“provocations”). It is not in vain that the farmer remembers and repeats the few Latin words which he has heard.

People sometimes speak as if the study of the classics will eventually give way to more modern and practical studies. But the adventurous student will always study the classics, in whatever language they may be written and however ancient they may be. For what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of mankind? They are the only oracles (sources of profound wisdom) which have not decayed. They contain answers to the most modern inquiries that the ancient oracles of Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might as well stop studying Nature because she is old!

To read well—that is, to read true books in a true spirit—is a noble exercise. It is one that will challenge (“task”) the reader more than any exercise that the customs of the day consider valuable. It requires a training such as athletes underwent—the steady dedication, almost of one’s whole life, to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and thoughtfully (“reservedly”) as they were written.

It is not enough even to be able to speak the language of the nation by which these books were written. There is a memorable difference between the spoken language and the written language—the language we hear and the language we read.

• The spoken language is commonly transitory—a sound, a tongue, a dialect merely. It is almost unrefined (“brutish”), and we learn it unconsciously, like animals do, from our mothers.
• The written language is the maturity and experience of that spoken tongue. If the spoken language is our mother tongue, this written language is our “father tongue.” It is a reserved and select form of expression, too significant to be merely heard by the ear. We must be “born again” intellectually to truly speak and understand it.

The crowds of people who merely spoke the Greek and Latin tongues in the Middle Ages were not automatically entitled by the accident of their birth to read the works of genius written in those languages. For these great works were not written in the everyday Greek or Latin which those people knew, but in the select, refined language of literature. They had not learned the nobler dialects of Greece and Rome. The very materials on which these classics were written were like waste paper to them, and they instead prized a cheap, contemporary literature.

But when the several nations of Europe had acquired distinct, though still developing (“rude”), written languages of their own—languages sufficient for the purposes of their rising literatures—then, for the first time, learning revived. Scholars were then able to discern from that historical distance the treasures of antiquity. What the Roman and Grecian multitudes could not hear or appreciate in their own time, after the lapse of ages, a few scholars could read. And only a few scholars are still truly reading it today.

The Enduring Power of Written Words

However much we may admire an orator’s occasional bursts of eloquence, the noblest written words are commonly as far behind or above the fleeting spoken language as the firmament (the sky) with its stars is behind the clouds. The stars are there, and those who can may read them. Astronomers forever comment on and observe them. These written words are not temporary “exhalations” (like breath) like our daily conversations (“colloquies”) and vaporous breath.

What is called eloquence in the public forum is commonly found to be mere rhetoric (skillful but perhaps superficial speaking) when examined in the quiet of one’s study. The orator yields to the inspiration of a passing (“transient”) occasion and speaks to the crowd (“mob”) before him—to those who can hear him at that moment. But the writer, whose more stable and consistent (“equable”) life is his occasion, and who would be distracted by the very event and crowd which inspire the orator, speaks to the intellect and heart of mankind—to all people in any age who can understand him.

Books: The Wealth of the World

No wonder that Alexander the Great carried Homer’s 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 that is nearest to life itself. It may be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually “breathed from all human lips.” It is not to be represented on canvas or in marble only, but to be carved out of the very breath of life itself. The symbol of an ancient person’s thought becomes a modern person’s speech.

Two thousand summers have given to the monuments of Grecian literature, just as to her marble statues, only a maturer golden and autumnal tint. For these literary works have carried their own serene and heavenly (“celestial”) atmosphere into all lands, which has protected 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 selfish 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. More than kings or emperors, they exert an influence on mankind.

When the uneducated (“illiterate”) and perhaps scornful trader has earned, through his enterprise and industry, his desired leisure and independence, and is admitted to the circles of wealth and fashion, he inevitably turns at last to those still higher but often inaccessible circles of intellect and genius. He then becomes sensible only of the imperfection of his own culture and the vanity and insufficiency of all his riches. He further proves his good sense by the pains which he takes to secure for his children that intellectual culture whose lack he so keenly feels. And thus it is that he becomes the founder of a truly developed family.

The Necessity of Reading Originals

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 true and complete transcript (translation that captures the full essence) of them has ever been made into any modern tongue—unless our civilization itself may be regarded as such a transcript (and if so, often a poor one).

Homer has never yet been truly “printed in English,” nor has Æschylus, nor even Virgil—works as refined, as solidly crafted, and as beautiful almost as the morning itself. For later writers, say what we will of their genius, have rarely, if ever, equaled the elaborate beauty and finish, and the lifelong and heroic literary labors of the ancients.

Only those who never truly knew the classics talk of forgetting them. It will be soon enough to forget them when we have acquired the learning and the genius which will enable us to truly attend to and appreciate them. That age will be rich indeed when those precious relics which we call Classics, and the still older and more than classic (but even less known) Scriptures of the various nations, shall have still further accumulated in our understanding. It will be a rich age when the Vaticans (great libraries) of the world are filled with Vedas and Zendavestas (sacred texts of Hinduism and Zoroastrianism) and Bibles, with the works of Homer and Dante and Shakespeare. And it will be a rich age when all the centuries to come shall have successively deposited their intellectual trophies in the great forum of the world. By building such a pile of wisdom, we may hope to “scale heaven” (reach the highest understanding) at last.

True Reading: A Noble Exercise

The works of the great poets have never yet been truly read by mankind, for only great poets can fully read and understand them. Ordinary people have generally read them only as the multitude reads the stars: at most astrologically (for superficial predictions or fortunes), not astronomically (with deep, scientific understanding).

Most people have learned to read merely to serve some trivial (“paltry”) convenience, just as they have learned to do arithmetic (“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 alone is reading, in a high sense: not that which lulls us as a luxury and allows our nobler faculties to sleep. True reading is that which we have to stand on tiptoe to reach and to which we must devote our most alert and wakeful hours.

Beyond Easy Reading

I think that once we have learned our letters, we should read the best that is in literature. We should not be forever repeating our “a, b, abs” (basic alphabet lessons) and words of one syllable, as if stuck in the fourth or fifth grade, sitting on the lowest and foremost bench all our lives.

Most people are satisfied if they read, or hear read, and perhaps have been convinced by the wisdom of one good book, like the Bible. For the rest of their lives, they then “vegetate” (live a dull, inactive life) and waste (“dissipate”) their mental faculties on what is called “easy reading.” There is a work in several volumes in our Circulating Library titled Little Reading, which I initially thought referred to a town of that name which I had not visited.

There are those who, like cormorants and ostriches (birds known for being able to digest almost anything), can digest all sorts of this easy reading, even after the fullest dinner of meats and vegetables, for they let nothing be wasted. If other people are the machines that provide this reading matter (“provender”), these readers are the machines that consume it. They read the nine-thousandth tale about “Zebulon and Sephronia” (generic names for characters in sentimental romances), and how they loved as none had ever loved before, and how the course of their true love did not run smooth—or at any rate, how it did run and stumble, and get up again and go on! They read how some poor unfortunate got up onto a steeple, who had better never have gone up as far as the belfry. And then, having needlessly gotten 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 transform (“metamorphose”) all such aspiring heroes of this universal world of novels (“noveldom”) into “man weathercocks.” Just as ancient people used to place heroes among the constellations, let these fictional heroes swing round on top of buildings until they are rusty, and not come down at all to bother honest men with their silly pranks. The next time the popular novelist rings the bell for attention, I will not stir, even if the meeting-house itself were to burn down.

Consider announcements like: “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 for copies; please don’t all come at once!” People read all this with wide, unblinking (“saucer”) eyes, and with an erect and primitive curiosity. They read with an unwearied “gizzard” (a bird’s strong stomach, here meaning an undiscriminating mental digestion), whose inner folds (“corrugations”) even yet need no sharpening. They read it just as some little four-year-old child on a low bench (“bencher”) reads his two-cent, gilt-covered edition of Cinderella—without any improvement that I can see, in pronunciation, or accent, or emphasis, or any more skill in extracting or inserting the moral of the story.

The result of such reading is dullness of sight, a stagnation of the vital circulations of thought, and a general collapse (“deliquium”) and shedding (“sloughing off”) of all the intellectual faculties. This sort of literary “ginger-bread” (fluffy, unsubstantial, and overly sweet) is baked daily and more diligently (“sedulously”) than pure wheat bread or wholesome rye-and-Indian bread in almost every oven, and it finds a surer market.

The Neglect of Great Literature

The best books are not read even by those who are called good readers. What does our Concord culture amount to? There is in this town, with very few exceptions, no real taste for the best, or even for very good books in English literature—books whose words everyone here can read and spell. Even the college-educated 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 of various cultures, which are accessible to all who will make the effort to know them—there are only the feeblest efforts made anywhere to become acquainted with them.

I know a woodchopper, of middle age, who subscribes to a French newspaper. He says he doesn’t read it for the news, as he is above that, but to “keep himself in practice” with the French language, as he is a Canadian by birth. And when I ask him what he considers the best thing he can do in this world, he says, besides his work, it is to keep up and add to his knowledge of English. This is about as much as the college-educated generally do or aspire to do with language; they, too, often take an English paper for a similar superficial purpose.

Consider someone who has just come from reading perhaps one of the best English books. How many people will he find with whom he can truly converse about it? Or suppose he comes from reading a Greek or Latin classic in the original language—works whose praises are familiar even to those considered “illiterate.” He will find nobody at all to speak to about it; he must keep his thoughts and impressions to himself.

Indeed, there is hardly a professor in our colleges who, even if he has mastered the technical difficulties of the language, has proportionally mastered the difficulties of the wit and poetry of a Greek poet. Few have any real sympathy or deep understanding to share (“impart”) with the alert and heroic reader who seeks it. And as for the sacred Scriptures, or Bibles of mankind from various cultures, who in this town can even tell me their titles? Most people do not even know that any nation other than the Hebrews has ever had a scripture.

A man, any man, will go considerably out of his way to pick up a silver dollar. But here are golden words, words which the wisest men of antiquity have uttered, and whose worth the wise of every succeeding age have assured us of. And yet, we learn to read only as far as “Easy Reading” books, the primers and class-books for children. When we leave school, we move on to “Little Reading” and storybooks, which are for boys and beginners. Our reading, our conversation, and our thinking are all on a very low level, worthy only of pygmies and manikins (small, insignificant beings).

Aspiring to True Wisdom

I aspire to be acquainted with wiser men than this Concord soil has yet produced—great thinkers whose names are hardly even known here. Or shall I hear the name of Plato and never read his books? It’s as if Plato were my townsman and I never saw him—my next-door neighbor, and I never heard him speak or paid attention to the wisdom of his words. But how is it actually in our lives? His Dialogues, which contain what was immortal in him, lie on the next shelf in the library, and yet I (and most people) never read them.

We are intellectually “underbred,” live “low-lived” (superficial lives), and are essentially “illiterate” in terms of deep understanding. In this respect, I confess I do not make any very broad distinction between the illiteracy of my townsman who cannot read at all, and the illiteracy of him who has learned to read only what is fit for children and people with feeble intellects.

We should strive to be as good as the great “worthies of antiquity,” but partly by first truly knowing how good they were. We are currently a “race of tit-men” (like small birds, perhaps implying small minds and limited vision). We soar but little higher in our intellectual flights than the columns of the daily newspaper.

The Power of Transformative Books

It is not all books that are as dull as their readers. There are probably words written that are addressed exactly to our condition. If we could really hear and understand them, these words would be more beneficial (“salutary”) than the morning or the spring to our lives. They might possibly put a new perspective (“aspect”) on the face of things for us.

How many a person has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book! The book may exist for us, perhaps, which will explain our own miracles and reveal new ones. The things that are at present unutterable, that we cannot express, we may find somewhere already uttered in a great book. These same questions that disturb and puzzle and confound us have, in their turn, occurred to all the wise men of history. Not one question has been omitted. And each wise person has answered them, according to his ability, by his words and by his life.

Moreover, with wisdom, we shall learn liberality (open-mindedness and generosity of spirit). The solitary hired man on a farm in the outskirts of Concord, who has had his “second birth” and a peculiar religious experience, and is driven (as he believes) into silent seriousness (“gravity”) and exclusiveness by his faith, may think his experience is unique and not true for others. But Zoroaster, the ancient Persian prophet, thousands of years ago, traveled the same spiritual road and had the same kind of experience. But Zoroaster, being wise, knew his experience to be universal. He treated his neighbors accordingly and is even said to have invented and established forms of worship among men. Let that solitary hired man, then, humbly commune with Zoroaster. And, through the liberalizing influence of all the great spiritual figures (“worthies”) of history, let him connect with Jesus Christ himself. And let “our church”—our narrow, sectarian views—“go by the board” (be discarded or set aside).

Our Village Culture

We boast that we belong to the nineteenth century and that our nation is making the most rapid strides of progress. But consider how little this village of Concord does for its own culture. I do not wish to flatter my townsmen, nor to be flattered by them, for that will not advance or improve either of us.

A Call for Deeper Learning

We need to be provoked—pushed, like oxen are goaded, into a trot—to keep learning and thinking. We have a relatively decent system of common schools, but these are mostly schools for young children. Except for the poorly supported (“half-starved”) Lyceum lecture series in the winter, and recently the small (“puny”) beginning of a library suggested by the state, there is no real school for ourselves as adults. We spend more money on almost any item for our physical nourishment (“aliment”) or to treat physical illness (“ailment”) than we do on our mental nourishment.

It is time that we had uncommon schools—schools that go beyond the basics. It is time that we did not stop our education when we simply begin to be men and women. It is time that our villages became universities, and their older inhabitants became the “fellows” (like resident scholars) of these universities. They should have the leisure—if they are indeed as well-off as they seem—to pursue broad, liberal studies for the rest of their lives.

Shall the world be confined to having only one Paris or one Oxford as great centers of learning forever? Cannot students live and board here in Concord and get a true liberal education under our own skies? Can we not hire some great teacher, like an Abelard (a famous medieval philosopher), to lecture to us?

Alas! What with feeding the cattle and tending the store, most of us are kept away from school and serious study for too long. Our education is sadly neglected. In this country, the village should, in some respects, take the place of the nobleman in Europe. The village itself should be the patron of the fine arts. It is certainly rich enough. It lacks only the generosity of spirit (“magnanimity”) and the cultural refinement.

Our towns can spend plenty of money on such things as farmers and traders value. But it is often thought to be idealistic and impractical (“Utopian”) to propose spending money for things which more intelligent people know to be of far more worth. This town, for example, has spent seventeen thousand dollars on a town-house (a public meeting building), thanks either to good fortune or to politics. But it probably will not spend that much on cultivating “living wit”—the true intellectual and cultural substance that should fill such a shell—in a hundred years. The one hundred and twenty-five dollars subscribed annually for a Lyceum in the winter is better spent than any other equal sum raised in the town.

Embracing a Wider World of Thought

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 (limited to a narrow, local outlook)? If we are going to read newspapers, why not skip the gossip of Boston and get the best newspaper in the world at once? We should not be content with “sucking the pap” (like babies drinking milk) of bland, “neutral family” papers, or Browse only local publications like “Olive-Branches” here in New England. Let the reports of all the learned societies in the world come to us, and we will see if they truly know anything.

Why should we leave it to publishing houses like Harper & Brothers and Redding & Co. to select our reading material for us? Just as a nobleman of cultivated taste surrounds himself with whatever contributes to his culture—genius, learning, wit, books, paintings, statuary, music, philosophical instruments, and the like—so let the village do. Our communities should not stop short at providing only a schoolteacher (“pedagogue”), a clergyman (“parson”), a church caretaker (“sexton”), a small parish library, and three town officials (“selectmen”), just because our pilgrim forefathers managed to get through a cold winter once on a bleak rock with only these basic supports.

To act collectively is in keeping with the spirit of our American institutions. I am confident that, as our material circumstances are more flourishing, our means (our resources) are now greater than those of any nobleman of the past. New England can hire all the wise men in the world to come and teach her. She can provide for them (“board them round”) while they are here, and thus not be provincial at all. That is the uncommon school we want.

Instead of individual noblemen, let us have noble villages of men. If it is necessary, let us omit building one physical bridge over the river, and go around a little there by another route. Instead, let us use those resources to throw at least one arch of knowledge and understanding over the darker gulf of ignorance which surrounds us.

Sounds

Beyond Books to the Language of Reality

But while we are confined to books, even the most select and classic ones, and read only particular written languages—which are themselves just local dialects and somewhat limited (“provincial”)—we are in danger of forgetting something important. We risk forgetting the language which all things and events speak directly, without metaphor. This direct language of reality is the only one that is truly rich (“copious”) and universal (“standard”).

Much is published, but little is truly “printed” in the sense of having lasting value. The rays of light that stream through a partly open shutter will no longer be remembered when the shutter is completely removed. (Similarly, partial understandings gained from books might be forgotten if we could access the full, direct truth of experience, or if we stop seeking it.)

No method or discipline can replace the necessity of being forever on the alert—awake and observant to the world around us. What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected? What is even the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of always looking at what is truly there to be seen? Will you be merely a reader, a student, or will you be a seer—one who perceives deeply? Read your own fate, see what is before you, and walk on into the future with open eyes.

A Broad Margin for Life

I did not read books during my first summer at Walden Pond; I hoed beans. No, I often did even better than this. There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the beauty and aliveness (“bloom”) of the present moment to any work, whether it was work of the head or work of the hands. I love to have a broad margin to my life—a sense of spaciousness, freedom, and uncommitted time.

Sometimes, on a summer morning, after I had taken my usual bath, I would sit in my sunny doorway from sunrise until noon. I would be lost in a deep state of thought or daydream (“rapt in a revery”). I sat there amidst the pines, hickories, and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness. The birds sang around me or flitted noiselessly through my open house. This would continue until the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveler’s wagon on the distant highway, reminded me that time had passed.

I grew in those quiet seasons like corn grows in the night. Those times of quiet reflection were far better for me than any work of my hands would have been. They were not time subtracted from my life, but so much extra time, over and above my usual allowance. I realized what people from Eastern cultures mean by contemplation and the “forsaking of works” (setting aside busy activity to find inner peace and understanding).

For the most part, I did not pay attention to how the hours went. The day advanced as if to light some work of mine. It would be morning, and then, behold, it would be evening, and nothing “memorable” (in the conventional sense of accomplishments) had been done. Instead of singing like the birds, I silently smiled at my constant good fortune to live so freely. As the sparrow had its trill, sitting on the hickory tree before my door, so I had my own quiet chuckle or suppressed song (“warble”) which he might hear from my “nest” (my house).

My days were not days of the week, bearing the stamp of some ancient pagan (“heathen”) deity like Tuesday (Tiu’s day) or Wednesday (Woden’s day). Nor were my days chopped (“minced”) into hours and made anxious (“fretted”) by the ticking of a clock. For I lived like the Puri Indians of South America, of whom it is said that “for yesterday, today, and tomorrow they have only one word.” They express the difference in meaning by pointing backward for yesterday, forward for tomorrow, and overhead for the passing day.

This way of life was no doubt sheer idleness to my fellow townspeople. But if the birds and flowers had judged me by their standards, I would not have been found wanting. A person must find his own occasions for meaningful experience within himself, it is true. The natural day is very calm and will hardly scold (“reprove”) a person for such quiet “indolence” (which was really a state of reflective stillness).

Life Itself as Entertainment

I had this advantage, at least, in my way of life, over those who were obliged to look outside themselves for amusement—to society and the theater. My life itself had become my amusement, and it never ceased to be new and interesting (“novel”). It was a drama with many scenes and without an end.

If we were always indeed focused on earning our living in a meaningful way, and managing (“regulating”) our lives according to the last and best way we had learned, we should never be troubled with boredom (“ennui”). Follow your own genius (your unique inner calling) closely enough, and it will not fail to show you a fresh prospect and new interest every hour.

Even housework was a pleasant pastime for me. When my floor was dirty, I rose early. I set all my furniture out of doors on the grass (my bed and bedstead making just one bundle or item). Then I dashed water on the floor, sprinkled white sand from the pond on it, and with a broom, scrubbed it clean and white. By the time the villagers had finished their breakfast, the morning sun had dried my house sufficiently to allow me to move my furniture in again. My meditations were almost uninterrupted by this simple chore.

It was pleasant to see all my household effects out on the grass, making a little pile like a gypsy’s pack. My three-legged table, from which I did not remove my books, pen, and ink, stood there amidst the pines and hickories. The furniture itself seemed glad to get outside and as if unwilling to be brought back in. I was sometimes tempted to stretch an awning over them and take my seat there among them.

It was worthwhile to see the sun shine on these things and to hear the free wind blow on them. Most familiar objects look so much more interesting out of doors than they do inside the house. A bird sits on the next bough; the life-everlasting plant grows under the table, and blackberry vines run around its legs. Pine cones, chestnut burs, and strawberry leaves are strewn about. It looked as if this was how these natural forms and shapes first came to be transferred to our furniture—to our tables, chairs, and bedsteads—because the furniture once stood in their midst.

The Natural Surroundings of My Home

My house was on the side of a hill, immediately on the edge of the larger wood. It was in the midst of a young forest of pitch pines and hickories. It was about half a dozen rods (roughly 33 yards or 30 meters) from the pond, to which a narrow footpath led down the hill.

In my front yard grew many wild plants:

• Strawberry
• Blackberry
• Life-everlasting
• Johnswort
• Goldenrod
• Shrub oaks
• Sand cherry
• Blueberry
• Groundnut

Near the end of May, the sand cherry (Cerasus pumila) adorned the sides of the path. Its delicate flowers were arranged in cylindrical clusters (“umbels”) around its short stems. Later, in the fall, these stems, weighed down with good-sized and handsome cherries, fell over in wreaths, like rays of light, on every side. I tasted them out of compliment to Nature, though they were scarcely palatable (tasty).

The sumach (Rhus glabra) grew abundantly (“luxuriantly”) around the house. It pushed up through the earthen bank I had made around my foundation and grew five or six feet in the first season. Its broad, feather-like (“pinnate”), tropical-looking leaf was pleasant, though somewhat strange, to look at. The large buds, suddenly pushing out late in the spring from dry sticks that had seemed to be dead, developed themselves as if by magic into graceful, green, and tender boughs, an inch in diameter. Sometimes, as I sat at my window, these boughs grew so heedlessly and put so much stress on their weak joints, that I heard a fresh and tender bough suddenly fall like a fan to the ground, even when there was not a breath of air stirring. It had broken off simply by its own weight. In August, the large masses of sumach berries—which, when in flower, had attracted many wild bees—gradually turned a bright, velvety crimson color. By their weight, they again bent down and sometimes broke the tender limbs of the plant.

The Symphony of Sounds: Nature and the Railroad

As I sit at my window this summer afternoon, hawks are circling about my clearing. The “tantivy” (a sound like a hunting horn, or the sound of rapid flight) of wild pigeons, flying by twos and threes across my view, or perching restlessly on the white-pine boughs behind my house, gives a voice to the air. A fish hawk dives and dimples the glassy surface of the pond, then brings up a fish. A mink steals out of the marsh before my door and seizes a frog by the shore. The sedge (a grass-like plant) is bending under the weight of the reed-birds flitting here and there.

And for the last half hour, I have heard the rattle of railroad cars. The sound is now dying away and then reviving, like the beat of a partridge’s wings. The train is conveying travelers from Boston to the country.

For I did not live so far out of the world as that boy I heard about. He was sent to work for a farmer in the east part of the town, but before long, he ran away and came home again, quite worn out (“down at the heel”) and homesick. He said he had never seen such a dull and out-of-the-way place; the folks were all gone off to work; why, you couldn’t even hear the train whistle! I doubt if there is such a place in Massachusetts now—a place so remote you can’t hear a train.

As a little verse I wrote says: “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.” (Meaning, the railroad has reached even our peaceful town of Concord.)

The Fitchburg Railroad touches the pond about a hundred rods (a little over a quarter of a mile) south of where I live. I usually go to the village along its causeway (a raised road built for the tracks), and so I am, in a way, related to society by this link. The men on the freight trains, who travel the whole length of the road, often bow to me as to an old acquaintance, they pass me so frequently. Apparently, they take me for an employee of the railroad; and so I am, in a larger sense. I too would gladly be a track-repairer somewhere in the orbit of the earth—doing some fundamental, earth-connected work.

The Intrusive Whistle and the Flow of Commerce

The whistle of the locomotive penetrates my woods summer and winter. It sounds like the scream of a hawk sailing over some farmer’s yard. It informs me that many restless city merchants are arriving within the circle of the town, or that adventurous country traders are coming from the other side. As trains approach from one direction (“horizon”), they shout their warning by whistle to get off the track to those in another direction. This sound is sometimes heard through the area of two towns.

“Here come your groceries, country folk; your supplies (‘rations’), countrymen!” the train seems to announce. Nor is there any man so independent on his farm that he can refuse these goods from the wider world (“say them nay”). And then, “Here’s your pay for them!” screams the countryman’s whistle, as his products are shipped out. Timber, like long battering rams, goes speeding at twenty miles an hour against the city’s walls. Enough chairs are sent to seat all the weary and heavy-laden people who live within those city walls. With such huge and lumbering politeness (“civility”), the country hands a chair to the city.

All the Native American huckleberry hills are stripped bare. All the cranberry meadows are raked, and their produce sent into the city. Up from the South comes the cotton; down to the South goes the woven cloth. Up from distant lands comes the silk; down from New England goes the woollen fabric. Up come the books, but down goes the original wit and wisdom that writes them, as they become mere commodities.

The Iron Horse: A Modern Myth

When I meet the engine with its train of cars moving off with planetary motion—or, rather, like a comet, because the beholder does not know if, with that speed and in that direction, it will ever revisit this system, since its orbit does not look like a returning curve—I am impressed. Its steam cloud streams behind it like a banner in golden and silver wreaths, like many a soft (“downy”) cloud I have seen high in the heavens, unfolding its masses to the light. It is as if this traveling demigod, this “cloud-compeller” (an epithet for Zeus, king of the gods), would before long take the sunset sky for the official uniform (“livery”) of his train.

When I hear the “iron horse” (the locomotive) 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 to represent this, I don’t know), it seems as if the earth had finally gotten a race of beings worthy to inhabit it. If only all were as it seems, and people made the elements their servants for noble ends! If the cloud of steam that hangs over the engine were the perspiration of heroic deeds, or as beneficial to mankind as the natural cloud that floats over the farmer’s fields, then the elements and Nature herself would cheerfully accompany people on their errands and be their escort.

The Relentless Journey of the Fire-Steed

I watch the passage of the morning train cars with the same feeling that I watch the rising of the sun, which is hardly more regular. Their train of steam clouds stretches far behind and rises higher and higher, seeming to go to heaven while the cars themselves are going to Boston. This steam conceals the sun for a minute and casts my distant field into shade. It is like a celestial train, beside which the petty train of cars that hugs the earth is but the sharp point (“barb”) of a spear.

The caretaker (“stabler”) of the iron horse was up early this winter morning, by the light of the stars amid the mountains, to feed (“fodder”) and harness his steed. Fire, too, was awakened thus early to put the vital heat into the engine and get it started. If only the whole enterprise were as innocent as its early start!

If the snow lies deep, they strap on the engine’s “snow-shoes” (perhaps special attachments or simply the powerful plow itself). With a giant plow, they carve a furrow from the mountains to the seaboard. In this furrow, the train cars, like a following seed-planter (“drill-barrow”), sprinkle all the restless people and floating merchandise across the country as if they were seed.

All day the “fire-steed” (the locomotive) flies over the country, stopping only so that its master (the engineer?) may rest. I am awakened by its heavy tread (“tramp”) and defiant snort at midnight, when, in some remote valley (“glen”) in the woods, it confronts the elements, encased in ice and snow. It will reach its “stall” (the engine house) only with the appearance of the morning star, ready to start once more on its travels without rest or slumber. Or perhaps, at evening, I hear it in its stable, blowing off the excess (“superfluous”) energy of the day, so that it may calm its “nerves” and cool its “liver and brain” for a few hours of “iron slumber.”

If only this whole enterprise were as heroic and commanding in its purpose as it is long-lasting (“protracted”) and unwearied in its operation!

Railroad Time and a New Fate

Far through unfrequented woods, on the borders (“confines”) of towns, where once only the hunter ventured by day, now, in the darkest night, these bright “saloons” (passenger cars) dart through, often without the knowledge of their inhabitants (perhaps meaning the wild creatures of the woods, or even that the passengers inside are unaware of the true nature of their journey or surroundings). One moment the train is stopping at some brilliant station-house in a town or city, where a social crowd is gathered. The next moment, it is deep in the Dismal Swamp, scaring the owl and the fox.

The startings and arrivals of the train cars are now the main events (“epochs”) in the village day. They go and come with such regularity and precision, and their whistle can be heard so far, that the farmers set their clocks by them. Thus, one well-conducted institution regulates a whole country. Haven’t people improved somewhat in punctuality since the railroad was invented? Do they not talk and think faster in the train station (“depot”) than they did in the old stagecoach office? There is something electrifying in the atmosphere of the train station. I have been astonished at the miracles it has brought about (“wrought”). Some of my neighbors, who I would have predicted, once and for all, would never get to Boston by such a prompt means of travel, were actually on hand when the train bell rang.

To do things “railroad fashion” (efficiently, precisely, and on time) is now the common saying (“by-word”). And it is worthwhile to be warned so often and so sincerely by any powerful force, like the train, to get off its track. There is no stopping to read the riot act, no firing warning shots over the heads of the mob, in this case. The train is an unstoppable force. We have constructed a new kind of fate, an Atropos (one of the Greek Fates, who cuts the thread of life), that never turns aside. (Let that be the name of your engine, he suggests.)

People are notified (“advertised”) that at a certain hour and minute these “bolts” (the trains) will be shot toward particular points of the compass. Yet, it interferes with no one’s private business; children still go to school on the other track. We live more steadily because of it. We are all educated by it to be “sons of Tell” (like William Tell, the Swiss hero known for his precision and steadiness under pressure). The air is full of invisible bolts—of schedules, dangers, and unseen connections. Every path but your own carefully chosen one is the path of this new fate. Keep on your own track, then.

The Bravery of Commerce

What recommends commerce to me is its enterprise and bravery. It does not simply clasp its hands and pray to Jupiter for help; it acts. I see these men of commerce every day go about their business with more or less courage and contentment. They often accomplish more than they even suspect, and perhaps they are better employed in these practical activities than they could have consciously devised for themselves.

I am less affected by the heroism of those soldiers who stood up for half an hour in the front line at the Battle of Buena Vista (a battle in the Mexican-American War) than I am by the steady and cheerful valor of the men who inhabit the snowplow for their winter quarters. These men have not merely the “three-o’clock-in-the-morning courage” (a type of sudden, desperate bravery that Napoleon Bonaparte thought was the rarest). Their courage does not go to rest so early. They go to sleep only when the storm itself sleeps, or when the “sinews” (muscles, or in this case, working parts) of their iron steed (the locomotive) are frozen.

On this morning of the Great Snow, which is perhaps still raging and chilling men’s blood, I hear the muffled tone of their engine bell from out of the fog bank of their own chilled breath. It announces that the train cars are coming, without long delay, despite the “veto” of a fierce New England northeast snowstorm. And I behold the plowmen covered with snow and frost (“rime”), their heads peering above the curved blade (“mould-board”) of the plow. This plow is turning down much more than just daisies and the nests of field mice—it is battling the harsh elements. These men are like boulders of the Sierra Nevada mountains, occupying an outside, exposed place in the universe.

The Global Reach of the Freight Train

Commerce is unexpectedly confident and serene, alert, adventurous, and unwearied. It is very natural in its methods, much more so than many fantastic, impractical enterprises or sentimental social experiments. And that is why it has such singular success.

I am refreshed and my mind is expanded when the freight train rattles past me. I smell the goods (“stores”) it carries, dispensing their odors all the way from Long Wharf in Boston to Lake Champlain. These smells remind me of foreign parts of the world—of coral reefs, and Indian oceans, and tropical climates, and the vast extent of the globe. I feel more like a citizen of the world at the sight of items like:

• Palm leaves (which will be made into hats to cover so many fair (“flaxen”) New England heads next summer)
• Manilla hemp and cocoa-nut husks
• Old junk, gunny bags (burlap sacks), scrap iron, and rusty nails.

This carload of torn sails is more readable and interesting to me now, in its raw state, than if the sails were to be processed into paper and printed with books. Who can write the history of the storms these sails have weathered as graphically as these tears (“rents”) in the canvas have already done? They are like “proof-sheets” (pages printed for correction) that need no correction because they tell their own true story.

Here goes lumber from the Maine woods, which did not get washed out to sea in the last flood (“freshet”). Its price has risen four dollars per thousand board feet because of the lumber that did go out or was split up. Here is pine, spruce, cedar—of first, second, third, and fourth qualities—which so recently were all of one quality, waving over the bear, the moose, and the caribou in the forest.

Next rolls by Thomaston lime, a prime lot, which will get far among the hills for building before it gets “slacked” (mixed with water and used). These rags in bales, of all hues and qualities, represent the lowest condition to which cotton and linen descend—the final result of worn-out clothing. They are patterns which are now no longer fashionable (“cried up”), unless perhaps in a newer western city like Milwaukie. These are the remnants of splendid articles—English, French, or American prints, ginghams, muslins, etc.—gathered from all quarters, from both the worlds of fashion and of poverty. They are now going to become paper of one color, or only a few shades. And on this paper, indeed (“forsooth”), will be written tales of real life, both high and low, supposedly founded on fact! (He notes the irony of diverse, colorful past experiences being reduced to uniform paper for often formulaic stories.)

This closed freight car smells of salt fish—that strong New England and commercial scent. It reminds me of the Grand Banks fishing grounds and the whole fishing industry. Who has not seen a salt fish, thoroughly cured for this world, so that nothing can spoil it? Its endurance is so great it seems to put the perseverance of the saints to shame!

Solitude

A Delightful Evening in Nature

This is a delicious evening. My whole body feels like one sense, absorbing delight through every pore. I go and come with a strange liberty in Nature, feeling like a part of herself. As I walk along the stony shore of the pond in my shirt sleeves—though it is cool, cloudy, and windy, and I see nothing special to attract my attention—all the elements feel unusually agreeable (“congenial”) to me.

The bullfrogs make their trumpeting sound to announce the night. The note of the whippoorwill is carried on the rippling wind from over the water. My sympathy with the fluttering leaves of the alder and poplar trees almost takes my breath away. Yet, like the lake, my serenity (calmness) is gently rippled but not deeply disturbed (“ruffled”). These small waves raised by the evening wind are as far from a real storm as the smooth, reflecting surface of the pond is from being turbulent.

Though it is now dark, the wind still blows and roars in the woods. The waves still dash against the shore. Some creatures lull the others to sleep with their notes. The state of rest (“repose”) in nature is never complete. The wildest animals do not rest now; they seek their prey. The fox, the skunk, and the rabbit now roam the fields and woods without fear. They are Nature’s watchmen—living links that connect the days of active, animated life.

Visitors and Their “Cards”

When I return to my house, I sometimes find that visitors have been there in my absence. They have left their “cards”—not formal calling cards, but perhaps:

• A bunch of flowers
• A wreath of evergreen leaves
• A name written in pencil on a yellow walnut leaf or a chip of wood.

People who rarely come to the woods often take some little piece of the forest—a twig, a leaf—into their hands to play with as they walk. They then leave these items behind, either intentionally or accidentally. One visitor peeled a willow wand, wove it into a ring, and dropped it on my table.

I could always tell if visitors had called while I was out, either by the bent twigs or grass, or by the print of their shoes. Generally, I could even tell their sex, age, or social standing (“quality”) by some slight trace they left behind. This might be a dropped flower, or a bunch of grass plucked and thrown away, even as far off as the railroad tracks, half a mile distant. Sometimes it was the lingering odor of a cigar or pipe. In fact, I was frequently made aware of a traveler passing along the highway—about 330 yards (60 rods) away—simply by the scent of his pipe.

My Expansive Solitude

There is usually enough space around us. Our horizon is never quite at our elbows. The thick wood is not right at our doorstep, nor is the pond. There is always some clearing around us, an area that is familiar and worn by our use, claimed (“appropriated”) and perhaps fenced in some way, reclaimed from wild Nature.

For what reason do I have this vast range and circuit of land—some square miles of unfrequented forest—for my privacy, seemingly abandoned to me by other people? My nearest neighbor is a mile away. No house is visible from any place near my cabin except from the hilltops within half a mile of my own dwelling. I have my horizon bounded entirely by woods, all to myself. I have a distant view of the railroad where it touches the pond on 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 it would be on the prairies. It feels as much like being in Asia or Africa as in New England. I have, so to speak, my own sun and moon and stars, and a little world all to myself.

At night, a traveler never passed my house or knocked at my door, any more than if I were the first or the last man on earth. The only exception was sometimes in the spring. At long intervals, a few people would come from the village to fish for pouts (a type of small catfish). But they plainly fished much more in the “Walden Pond of their own natures” (their own inner depths of thought and feeling). They baited their hooks with darkness, seeking something more than just fish. They soon retreated, usually with light baskets, and, as the poet Thomas Gray wrote, left “the world to darkness and to me.” The deep, black core (“kernel”) of the night was never spoiled (“profaned”) by any human neighborhood.

I believe that people, generally, are still a little afraid of the dark. This is true even though the witches are all hung, and Christianity and candles have been introduced to dispel the darkness.

The Companionship of Nature

Yet, I sometimes experienced that the most sweet and tender, the most innocent and encouraging society may be found in any natural object. This is true even for the poor misanthrope (one who dislikes or distrusts humankind) and the most melancholy person. There can be no very deep, dark sadness (“melancholy”) for someone who lives in the midst of Nature and still has his senses alert.

There was never yet a storm that was not like Æolian music (beautiful, harmonious music made by the wind, as if played on an Aeolian harp) to a healthy and innocent ear. Nothing can rightly force a simple and brave person into a state of common, base (“vulgar”) sadness. While I enjoy the friendship of the seasons, I trust that nothing can make life a burden to me.

The gentle rain which waters my beans and keeps me in the house today is not dreary and melancholy; it is good for me too. Though it prevents me from 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-lying lands, it would still be good for the grass on the uplands. And, being good for the grass, it would, in a larger sense, be good for me.

Sometimes, when I compare myself with other men, it seems as if I were more favored by the gods than they are, beyond any good deeds (“deserts”) that I am conscious of having done. It feels as if I had a special warrant and guarantee (“surety”) from their hands which my fellows do not have, and as if I were especially guided and guarded. I do not flatter myself, but if it is possible, it feels as if they (the gods or Nature) flatter me.

I have never felt lonesome, or in the least oppressed by a sense of solitude, but once. That was a few weeks after I first came to the woods. For about an hour, I doubted if the near neighborhood of other people was not essential to a calm (“serene”) and healthy life. To be alone at that moment felt unpleasant. But at the same time, I was conscious of a slight touch of “insanity” (irrationality) in my mood, and I seemed to foresee my own recovery from it.

In the midst of a gentle rain, while these thoughts prevailed, I was suddenly aware of such sweet and beneficial (“beneficent”) society in Nature itself. I found it in the very pattering of the raindrops, and in every sound and sight around my house. An infinite and unexplainable (“unaccountable”) friendliness came all at once, like an atmosphere sustaining me. This feeling made the imagined advantages of human neighborhood seem insignificant, and I have never thought of them in that way 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 (related, like family) to me, even in scenes which we are accustomed to call wild and dreary. I also realized that the nearest of kin to me, and the most truly humane presence, was not a person or a villager, but Nature itself. After that, I thought no place could ever be strange to me again.

As the poet Ossian wrote: “Mourning untimely consumes the sad; Few are their days in the land of the living, Beautiful daughter of Toscar.” (Thoreau implies that his connection with nature prevents such life-consuming sadness.)

The Pleasures of Rainy Days

Some of my pleasantest hours were during the long rainstorms in the spring or fall. These storms confined me to the house for the whole afternoon as well as the forenoon. I was soothed by their ceaseless roar and pelting. An early twilight would then usher in a long evening, in which many thoughts had time to take root and unfold themselves.

In those driving northeast rains which tested the village houses so severely—when the maids stood ready with mop and pail in the front entries to keep the deluge out—I sat behind my door in my little house, which was all entry. I thoroughly enjoyed its protection.

During one heavy thundershower, lightning struck a large pitch pine tree across the pond. It made a very noticeable (“conspicuous”) and perfectly regular spiral groove from the top of the tree to the bottom. The groove was an inch or more deep, and four or five inches wide, as if you had carved a spiral into a walking stick. I passed by that tree again the other day. I was struck with awe on looking up and seeing that mark, now more distinct than ever, where a terrific and irresistible bolt of lightning had come down out of the harmless sky eight years before.

The True Nature of Solitude

People frequently say to me, “I should think you would feel lonesome down there, and would want to be nearer to folks, especially on rainy and snowy days and nights.” I am tempted to reply to such people: This whole earth which we inhabit is but a tiny point in space. How far apart, do you think, live the two most distant inhabitants of that star over there—a star whose actual breadth cannot even be measured (“appreciated”) by our instruments? Why, then, should I feel lonely? Is not our planet itself in the Milky Way galaxy, among countless other stars and worlds?

This question of loneliness, which you put to me, seems not to be the most important one. What sort of space is it that truly separates a person from his fellows and makes him solitary? It is not physical distance. I have found that no amount of walking or travel (“exertion of the legs”) can bring two minds much nearer to one another.

What do we most want to live near to? Surely not to many other people, or to the train station (“depot”), the post office, the barroom, the meeting-house, the schoolhouse, the grocery store, Beacon Hill in Boston, or the Five Points in New York City (all crowded, busy places). Instead, we want to dwell near to the perennial source of our life—that deep, enduring wellspring from which, in all our experience, we have found true life to issue. It is like the willow tree that naturally stands near the water and sends out its roots in that direction. This “source” will vary for different people, but this is the place where a wise person will dig his cellar—found his life.

One evening, on the Walden road, I overtook one of my townsmen who has accumulated what is called “a handsome property”—though I never got a fair view of it. He was driving a pair of cattle to market. He asked 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 my way of life 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 (a market town near Boston), which place he would probably reach sometime in the morning.

Awakening to Life’s Core

Any prospect of awakening, or of coming to life for someone who is spiritually “dead,” makes all particular times and places seem indifferent. The place where such an awakening may occur is always the same in its essence, and it is indescribably pleasant to all our senses.

For the most part, we allow only outlying and temporary (“transient”) circumstances to create our “occasions”—to define our experiences. These external things are, in fact, the cause of our distraction from what truly matters.

Nearest to all things is that power which fashions their very being. Next to us, the grandest laws of the universe are continually being carried out. Next to us is not the workman whom we have hired, with whom we may love to talk so well. Next to us is the true Workman whose work we are. (We are part of a larger, divine creation.)

As an ancient text says about the subtle powers of Heaven and Earth: “How vast and profound is the influence of the subtle 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.” “They cause that in all the universe men purify and sanctify their hearts, and clothe themselves in their holiday garments to offer sacrifices and oblations (offerings) to their ancestors. It is an ocean of subtle intelligences. They are everywhere, above us, on our left, on our right; they surround (‘environ’) us on all sides.”

Inner Companionship and the Observing Self

We are the subjects of an experiment—the experiment of life—which is not a little interesting to me. Can we not do without the society of our gossiping acquaintances for a little while under these circumstances, when we are engaged in such an experiment? Can we not have our own thoughts to cheer us? Confucius says truly, “Virtue does not remain as an abandoned orphan; it must of necessity have neighbors.” (Even in solitude, virtue finds companionship, perhaps in great ideas, in nature, or in a connection to a larger moral order.)

With deep thinking, we may be “beside ourselves” in a sane and healthy sense—we can transcend our ordinary, limited selves. By a conscious effort of the mind, we can stand aloof from our actions and their consequences. All things, good and bad, then go by us like a rushing stream (“torrent”). We are not wholly submerged or involved in Nature; we can observe it with a degree of detachment. I may be either the driftwood carried along in the stream, or I may be like Indra (a Hindu god) in the sky, looking down on it.

I may be deeply affected by a theatrical exhibition. On the other hand, I may not be affected at all by an actual event which appears to concern me much more directly. I only know myself as a human entity—the scene, so to speak, of thoughts and affections. And I am aware (“sensible”) of a certain doubleness in myself, by which I can stand as remote from myself as I can from another person. However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me. This part, it seems, is not truly a part of my experiencing self, but is rather a spectator. It shares no part of the direct experience but merely takes note of it. And that observing self is no more “I” than it is “you”—it is an impartial witness. When the play of life, even if it is a tragedy, is over, this spectator part of me goes its way. For that observing self, the experience was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as its own being was concerned. This doubleness may easily make us poor neighbors and friends sometimes, as our detachment can hinder deep emotional connection.

The Companionship of Solitude

I find it healthy (“wholesome”) to be alone for the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best of people, soon becomes wearisome and dissipating (draining of one’s energy and focus). 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 out among other people than when we stay in our own rooms. A person who is thinking or working is always alone, no matter where he may be. Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a person and his fellows. The truly diligent student in one of the crowded dormitories (“hives”) of Cambridge College is as solitary in his studies as a dervish (a Sufi mystic) 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 actively employed. But when he comes home at night, he cannot sit down in a room alone, at the mercy of his own thoughts. He feels he must be where he can “see the folks,” and relax (“recreate”), and, as he thinks, reward (“remunerate”) himself for his day’s solitude. And for this reason, he wonders how the student can sit alone in his house all night and most of the day without suffering from boredom (“ennui”) and “the blues.” But the farmer does not realize that the student, though he is in the house, is still at work in his field (the field of knowledge), and chopping in his woods (of thought), just as the farmer is in his. And the student, in turn, seeks the same kind of recreation and society that the farmer does, though it may be in a more condensed or different form.

The Cheapness of Society

Society, as it is commonly experienced, is too “cheap”—too superficial and of little real value. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value or insight for each other. We meet at meals three times a day and essentially give each other a new taste of the same old “musty cheese” that we are—our unchanging, perhaps stale, selves. We have had to agree on a certain set of rules, called etiquette and politeness, to make this frequent meeting tolerable and to ensure that we need not come to open conflict.

We meet at the post office, and at social gatherings (“the sociable”), and around the fireside every night. We live “thick” (too closely packed together) and are constantly in each other’s way. We stumble over one another, and I think that because of this, we lose some respect for one another. Certainly, less frequent contact would be sufficient for all important and heartfelt communications.

Consider the girls in a factory—they are never alone, hardly even in their dreams. It would be better if there were but one inhabitant per square mile, as there is where I live. The true value of a person is not in his skin, that we should need to physically touch him or be constantly near him.

True Companionship

I have heard of a man who was lost in the woods and was dying of famine and exhaustion at the foot of a tree. His loneliness was relieved by the grotesque visions with which, owing to his bodily weakness, his diseased imagination surrounded him. He believed these visions to be real. So also, through bodily and mental health and strength, we may be continually cheered by a similar but more normal and natural society—the companionship of Nature. And through this, we may come to know that we are never truly alone.

My Many Companions at Walden

I have a great deal of company in my house, especially in the morning, when nobody (human) calls. Let me suggest a few comparisons, so that someone may get an idea of my situation:

• I am no more lonely than the loon in the pond that laughs so loud.
• I am no more lonely than Walden Pond itself. What company has that lonely lake, I ask? And yet, it does not have the “blue devils” (depression), but rather “blue angels” in it, reflected in the azure (sky-blue) tint of its waters.
• The sun is alone, except in thick weather, when there sometimes appear to be two suns (but one is a “mock sun,” an atmospheric phenomenon).
• God is alone—but the devil, he is far from being alone; he sees a great deal of company; he is “legion” (meaning, many).
• I am no more lonely than a single mullein or dandelion plant in a pasture, or a bean leaf, or a sorrel plant, or a horsefly, or a bumblebee (“humble-bee”).
• I am no more lonely than the Mill Brook (a nearby stream), 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.

Imaginary and Spiritual Visitors

I have occasional visits in the long winter evenings, when the snow falls fast and the wind howls in the wood. These visits are from an old settler and original proprietor of this land. (This is likely a personification of the spirit of the place, or an imagined historical figure.) He is reported to have dug Walden Pond, and stoned its edges, and fringed it with pine woods. He tells me stories of old times and of the new eternity. Between us, we manage to pass a cheerful evening with social mirth and pleasant views of things, even without apples or cider. He is a most wise and humorous friend, whom I love very much. He keeps himself more secret than ever did Goffe or Whalley (English regicides who famously hid in colonial New England). And though he is thought to be dead, no one can show where he is buried.

An elderly dame also dwells in my neighborhood. She is invisible to most people. I love to stroll sometimes in her odorous herb garden, gathering “simples” (medicinal herbs) and listening to her fables. For she has a genius of unequalled fertility (creativity). Her memory runs back farther than mythology, and she can tell me the original story of every fable, and on what fact every one is founded, for the incidents occurred when she was young. She is a ruddy (rosy-cheeked) and lusty (vigorous) old dame, who delights in all weathers and seasons, and is likely to outlive all her children yet. (This “elderly dame” is likely a personification of Mother Nature.)

Nature’s Deep Sympathy

The indescribable innocence and beneficence (goodness and kindness) of Nature—of the sun and wind and rain, of summer and winter—such health, such cheer, they provide forever! And such sympathy have they always had with our human race, that all Nature would be affected if any person should ever grieve for a just cause. The sun’s brightness would fade, the winds would sigh humanely, the clouds would rain tears, and the woods would shed their leaves and put on mourning in midsummer.

Shall I not have “intelligence” (a deep communication and understanding) with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mold myself? (He feels an essential, physical, and spiritual connection to the natural world.)

Nature’s Cure: Morning Air

What is the pill which will keep us well, serene, and contented? It is not a medicine from my or your great-grandfather. It is our great-grandmother Nature’s universal, vegetable, botanic medicines. By these, she has kept herself young always. She has outlived so many “old Parrs” (Thomas Parr, a man famous for supposedly living to an extremely old age) in her day. She has fed her own health with their decaying richness (“fatness”) as they return to the earth. (Nature renews itself from decay and provides constant healing.)

For my own cure-all (“panacea”), instead of one of those quack vials filled with a strange mixture “dipped from Acheron (a river in the Greek underworld) and the Dead Sea”—mixtures that come out of those long, shallow, black-painted wagons that look like schooners, which we sometimes see made to carry bottles of patent medicines—let me have a draught of undiluted morning air.

Morning air! If people will not drink of this at the very fountainhead of the day, why, then, we must even bottle up some of it and sell it in the shops. This would be for the benefit of those who have lost their “subscription ticket” to morning time in this world—those who have lost their connection to the renewing power of morning and nature.

But remember, this morning air will not stay fresh (“keep quite”) until noon, not even in the coolest cellar. Long before noon, its vitality would escape any container (“drive out the stopples,” or stoppers) and follow the dawn (“Aurora”) westward. The freshness of morning is wild and free, not something that can be bottled up.

I am not a worshipper of Hygeia. She was the goddess of health in Greek mythology, the daughter of Æsculapius, that “old herb-doctor” and god of medicine. Hygeia is often shown on monuments holding a serpent in one hand and a cup in the other, from which the serpent sometimes drinks. (These are symbols of medicine and healing sickness.)

Instead, I prefer Hebe. She was the cupbearer to Jupiter, the king of the gods. Hebe was the daughter of Juno (queen of the gods) and, as the old stories creatively put it, “wild lettuce” (suggesting a natural, untamed vitality). Hebe had the power of restoring gods and men to the vigor of youth. She was probably the only thoroughly sound, healthy, and strong (“robust”) young lady that ever walked the globe. Wherever she came, it was spring.

(By preferring Hebe, Thoreau means he values drawing on a fundamental, overflowing source of natural health, youthfulness, and constant renewal, rather than focusing on Hygeia’s domain, which is more about curing illnesses that have already occurred.)

Visitors

My Own Need for Society

I think that I love society as much as most people do. I am ready enough to attach myself (“fasten myself like a bloodsucker,” he says with some humor) for a time to any vibrant, full-blooded person that comes in my way. I am naturally no hermit. In fact, I could probably sit and talk longer than the most dedicated regular (“sturdiest frequenter”) at the barroom, if my business or inclination called me there.

Three Chairs for Different Needs

I had three chairs in my house:

• One for solitude (being alone)
• Two for friendship
• Three for society (larger gatherings)

When visitors came in larger and unexpected numbers, there was only that third chair for all of them. But they generally made the most of the small space (“economized the room”) by standing up. It is surprising how many great men and women a small house can actually hold. I have had twenty-five or thirty people (“souls, with their bodies”) at once under my roof. And yet, we often parted without being aware that we had come very close to one another in understanding or spirit, despite our physical closeness.

Many of our houses, both public and private buildings, with their almost countless (“innumerable”) apartments, their huge halls, and their cellars for storing wines and other “munitions of peace” (supplies for peacetime comfort), appear to me extravagantly large for the people who live in them. These buildings are often so vast and magnificent that the inhabitants seem to be only like vermin (small, insignificant pests) that infest them. I am surprised when a herald (an announcer) blows his trumpet to summon someone before a grand hotel or mansion—like the Tremont House, Astor House, or Middlesex House (famous large buildings of his time). Then, to see come creeping out onto the piazza, as the sole inhabitant, a “ridiculous mouse” of a person, who soon again slinks back into some hole in the pavement. It highlights the contrast between grand structures and the often small lives lived within them.

The Challenge of Deep Conversation in a Small Space

One inconvenience I sometimes experienced in so small a house was the difficulty of getting to a sufficient distance from my guest when we began to discuss “big thoughts in big words.” You want room for your thoughts to get into “sailing trim” (ready to sail, properly organized) and run a course or two before they reach their destination (“make their port”) in the listener’s mind. The “bullet” of your thought must have overcome its initial sideways or ricocheting motion and settled into its final, steady course before it reaches the ear of the hearer. Otherwise, it may fly off wildly and “plough out again through the side of his head” (be completely misunderstood or fail to make an impact).

Also, our sentences needed room to unfold and form their proper structure (“columns”) in the space between us. Individuals, like nations, must have suitable broad and natural boundaries, even a considerable neutral ground, between them to communicate effectively.

I have found it a unique luxury to talk across the pond to a companion on the opposite shore. In my house, we were so near that we often could not truly begin to hear each other—we could not speak low enough to be properly understood without overwhelming the small space. It was like when you throw two stones into calm water so near to each other that their ripples (“undulations”) break and interfere with one another.

If we are merely talkative (“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, so that all the animal heat and moisture from our bodies may have a chance to evaporate, allowing for a clearer, less physically immediate interaction.

If we would enjoy the most intimate society with that part in each of us which is beyond or above mere spoken words—our inner spirit or deeper self—we must not only be silent but commonly be so far apart bodily that we cannot possibly hear each other’s voice in any case. Judged by this standard, everyday speech is mainly for the convenience of those who are hard of hearing. But there are many fine and subtle things which we cannot say if we have to shout.

As a conversation began to take on a loftier and grander tone, my guest and I would gradually shove our chairs farther apart until they touched the wall in opposite corners of my small cabin. And then, commonly, there was still not enough room for the expansive nature of our thoughts.

My True “Best Room”

My “best” room, however—my withdrawing room, always ready for company, on whose carpet the sun rarely fell (because it was always shaded and cool)—was the pine wood behind my house. There, on summer days, when distinguished guests came, I took them. A “priceless domestic servant”—Nature herself—swept the floor (with the wind), dusted the furniture (the logs and rocks), and kept things in beautiful order.

Simple Hospitality

If one guest came, he sometimes shared (“partook of”) my frugal (simple and inexpensive) meal. It was no interruption to our conversation for me to be stirring a hasty-pudding (a simple cornmeal mush) or watching a loaf of bread rising and baking in the ashes of my fire.

But if twenty people came and sat in my house, nothing was said about dinner, even though there might be only enough bread for two (and certainly more than enough if eating were a forgotten habit). We naturally practiced abstinence from food in such large gatherings. This was never felt to be an offense against hospitality, but rather the most proper and considerate course. The usual waste and decay of physical life, which so often needs repair (through food and rest), seemed miraculously slowed down (“retarded”) in such a case. Our vital energy (“vigor”) stood its ground without needing constant replenishment.

I could entertain a thousand people in this way as easily as I could entertain twenty. And if any visitors ever went away disappointed or hungry from my house when they found me at home, they may depend upon it that I sympathized with them at least.

It is so easy—though many housekeepers doubt it—to establish new and better customs in place of the old ones. You need not rest your reputation on the dinners you give. For my own part, I was never so effectively discouraged (“deterred”) from frequently visiting a man’s house by any kind of guardian (“Cerberus,” the mythical three-headed dog guarding the underworld) as I was by the great fuss (“parade”) someone made about inviting me to a formal dinner. I took such elaborate efforts to be a very polite and roundabout hint never to trouble him so again. I think I shall never revisit those scenes of overly formal hospitality.

I should be proud to have for the motto of my cabin these lines from the poet Edmund Spenser, which one of my visitors inscribed on a yellow walnut leaf for a calling card:

“Arrivéd 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.”

(The meaning is: When guests arrived, they filled the little house but did not expect fancy entertainment where there was none. Rest itself was their feast, and they were free to do as they pleased. The noblest mind finds the greatest contentment in simple things.)

Winslow’s Visit to Massassoit: A Lesson in Hospitality

Edward Winslow, who later became governor of the Plymouth Colony, once went with a companion on a formal visit to Massassoit, the sachem (leader) of the Wampanoag people. They traveled on foot through the woods. When they arrived tired and hungry at Massassoit’s lodge, they were well received by the king, but nothing was said about eating that day.

When night arrived, to quote their own words: “He laid us on the bed with himself and his wife, they at the one end and we at the other, it being only planks, laid a foot from the ground, and a thin mat upon them. Two more of his chief men, for want of room, pressed by and upon us; so that we were worse weary of our lodging than of our journey.”

At one o’clock the next day, Massassoit “brought two fishes that he had shot,” about three times as big as a bream. “These being boiled, there were at least forty people who looked for a share in them. Most of them ate of the fish. This was the only meal we had in two nights and a day; and if one of us had not bought a partridge on the way, we would have made our journey fasting (without food).”

Fearing that they would become light-headed for want of food and also sleep (owing to what they called ‘the savages’ barbarous singing,’ for the Wampanoag used to sing themselves to sleep), and hoping they might get home while they still had strength to travel, Winslow and his companion departed.

As for lodging, it is true they were poorly entertained by their standards, though what they found an inconvenience was no doubt intended as an honor by Massassoit. But as far as eating was concerned, I do not see how the Native Americans 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 for the Wampanoag, there was no lack of food in this respect.

The Quality of Visitors in Solitude

As for people, you will hardly fail to find them anywhere. I had more visitors while I lived in the woods than at any other period of my life; I mean that I did have some. (This is a humorous understatement, implying he wasn’t overwhelmed but had meaningful company.) I met several people there under more favorable circumstances—more natural and genuine—than I could anywhere else. But fewer people came to see me about trivial business.

In this respect, my company was “winnowed” (sifted, like grain from chaff) 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, as far as my needs for companionship were concerned, only the “finest sediment” (the most worthwhile people and interactions) was deposited around me. Besides, from the other side of this ocean of solitude, there were evidences of unexplored and uncultivated continents of thought and experience wafted to me.

A Visit from a Canadian Woodchopper: A Homeric Man

Who should come to my lodge one morning but a true “Homeric” or “Paphlagonian” man? (Homeric refers to the simple, heroic characters in Homer’s epics; Paphlagonia was an ancient, rugged country, suggesting a rustic, natural character.) He had so suitable and poetic a name that I am sorry I cannot print it here. He was a Canadian, a woodchopper and a maker of fence posts, who could cut and set (“hole”) fifty posts in a day. He had made his last supper on a woodchuck which his dog had caught.

He, too, had heard of Homer. And, he said, “if it were not for books,” he would “not know what to do on rainy days,” though perhaps he had not read a single book completely through for many rainy seasons. Some priest, who could pronounce the Greek language itself, had taught him to read verses in the New Testament in his native parish far away.

And now, I found myself translating for him, while he held the book, Achilles’ scolding words (“reproof”) to his friend Patroclus for his sad face, from Homer’s Iliad: “Why are you in tears, Patroclus, like a young girl?” “Or have you alone heard some news from Phthia? They say that Menœtius lives yet, son of Actor, And Peleus lives, son of Æacus, among the Myrmidons, Either of whom having died, we should greatly grieve.” (Achilles is essentially asking Patroclus if he’s crying over bad news about their fathers, which would be a valid reason for such sorrow among heroes.)

The woodchopper listened and then said, “That’s good.” He had a great bundle of white-oak bark under his arm, which he had gathered that Sunday morning for a sick man. “I suppose there’s no harm in going after such a thing today,” he remarked, perhaps slightly excusing his Sunday labor. To him, Homer was a great writer, though he did not really know what his writing was about.

A more simple and natural man it would be hard to find. Vice and disease, which cast such a somber moral shadow (“hue”) over the world, seemed to have hardly any existence for him.

Description of the Woodchopper

He was about twenty-eight years old. He had left Canada and his father’s house a dozen years before to work in the United States. He hoped to earn enough money to buy a farm at last, perhaps back in his native country. He was “cast in the coarsest mould”—he was roughly made, a stout but somewhat slow-moving (“sluggish”) body, yet he carried himself gracefully. He had a thick, sunburnt neck, dark bushy hair, and dull, sleepy blue eyes, which were occasionally lit up with expression. He wore a flat gray cloth cap, a dingy wool-colored greatcoat, and cowhide boots.

He was a great consumer of meat. He usually carried his dinner with him to his work—for he chopped wood all summer—a couple of miles past my house. His dinner was in a tin pail and consisted of cold meats, often cold woodchucks, and coffee in a stone bottle which dangled by a string from his belt. Sometimes he offered me a drink of his coffee.

He would come along early in the morning, crossing my bean-field, though without any of the anxiety or haste to get to his work that “Yankees” (New Englanders, often seen as driven and business-like) typically exhibit. He wasn’t going to hurt himself by rushing. He didn’t much care if he only earned enough for his board (food and lodging).

Frequently, if his dog had caught a woodchuck on the way to work, he would leave his dinner pail in the bushes. He would then go back a mile and a half to dress the woodchuck (prepare it for cooking) and leave it in the cellar of the house where he boarded. Before doing this, he would first deliberate for half an hour whether he could not sink it safely in the pond until nightfall—he loved to dwell long upon these practical themes.

As he went by in the morning, he would often say, “How thick the pigeons are! If working every day were not my trade, I could get all the meat I should want by hunting—pigeons, woodchucks, rabbits, partridges—by gosh! I could get all I should want for a week in one day.”

His Skill and Joyful Nature

He was a skillful chopper and sometimes indulged in a few flourishes and ornamental touches in his art. He cut his trees level and close to the ground. This was so that the sprouts which came up afterward might be more vigorous, and so a sled might slide over the stumps more easily. And instead of leaving a whole tree standing to support his corded wood (stacked firewood), he would pare it away to a slender stake or splinter which you could finally break off with your hand.

He interested me because he was so quiet and solitary, and yet so happy with everything. He was a well of good humor and contentment which overflowed in his eyes. His mirth (joyfulness) was pure and unmixed (“without alloy”). Sometimes I saw him at his work in the woods, felling trees. He would greet me with a laugh of inexpressible satisfaction and a salutation in Canadian French, though he spoke English perfectly well. When I approached him, he would stop his work. With half-suppressed mirth, he would lie along the trunk of a pine tree which he had just felled. He would peel off the inner bark, roll it up into a ball, and chew it while he laughed and talked.

He had such an exuberance of animal spirits (natural energy and vitality) that he sometimes tumbled down and rolled on the ground with laughter at anything which made him think and amused (“tickled”) him. Looking around at the trees, he would exclaim, “By George! I can enjoy myself well enough here chopping; I want no better sport.”

Sometimes, when he was 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 would build a fire by which, at noon, he warmed his coffee in a kettle. As he sat on a log to eat his dinner, the chickadees would sometimes come around and land (“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.”

A Man of Nature, Simple in Spirit

In him, the “animal man”—the physical, natural side of human nature—was chiefly developed. In physical endurance and contentment, he was like a cousin to the pine tree and the rock. I asked him once if he was not sometimes tired at night, after working all day. He answered, with a sincere and serious look, “Gorrappit (a mild exclamation, like ‘By golly’), I never was tired in my life.”

But the intellectual and what is called the spiritual man in him were slumbering, as in an infant. He had been instructed only in that innocent and ultimately ineffective way in which the Catholic priests sometimes teach aboriginal peoples. In this method, the pupil is never truly educated to the level of independent consciousness, but only to the level of trust and reverence. A child taught this way is not made into a self-reliant man, but is kept a child.

When Nature made him, she gave him a strong body and contentment as his main gifts. She supported (“propped”) him on every side with a sense of reverence and reliance on the world around him, so that he might live out his “threescore years and ten” (seventy years, a traditional lifespan) as a kind of child of nature.

He was so genuine and unsophisticated that no formal introduction would serve to properly introduce him, any more than if you formally introduced a woodchuck to your neighbor. You had to get to know him directly, as I did. He would not play any artificial part or role. Men paid him wages for his work, and so helped to feed and clothe him; but he never really exchanged opinions or deep thoughts with them. He was so simply and naturally humble—if one can be called humble who never aspires to be anything different—that humility was not a distinct quality in him; he probably couldn’t even conceive of it.

Wiser, more educated men were like demigods to him. If you told him that such a one was coming to visit, he acted as if he thought that any person so grand would expect nothing of him, but would take all the responsibility for the interaction upon himself, and let him (the woodchopper) remain unnoticed. He never heard the sound of praise directed at himself. He particularly revered writers and preachers. Their performances seemed like miracles to him.

When I told him that I wrote a considerable amount, he thought for a long time that I merely meant that I had good handwriting, for he himself could write a remarkably good hand. I sometimes found the name of his native parish handsomely written in the snow by the highway, with the proper French accent, and I knew that he had passed that way. I asked him if he ever wished to write down his own thoughts. He said that he had read and written letters for those who could not do so themselves. But he had never tried to write his own thoughts—no, he could not, he wouldn’t know what to put down first. He said it would kill him, and then there was all the spelling to be attended to at the same time!

Contentment with the World

I heard that a distinguished wise man and reformer once asked him if he did not want the world to be changed or improved. But the woodchopper answered with a chuckle of surprise, in his Canadian accent, not knowing that such a question had ever even been seriously considered before, “No, I like it well enough as it is.”

It would have suggested many things to a philosopher to have dealings with this man. To a stranger, he might have appeared to know nothing of things in general. Yet I sometimes saw in him a kind of man whom I had not seen before. I did not know whether he was as wise as Shakespeare or as simply ignorant as a child. I didn’t know whether to suspect him of having a fine poetic consciousness hidden within him, or of just being simple-minded (“stupidity”). A townsman once told me that when he met the woodchopper sauntering through the village in his small, close-fitting cap, and whistling to himself, he reminded him of a prince in disguise.

His only books were an almanac and an arithmetic book, and he was considerably expert in arithmetic. The almanac was a sort of encyclopedia (“cyclopædia”) to him, which he supposed contained a summary (“abstract”) of all human knowledge, as indeed it does to a considerable extent. I loved to “sound him out” (get his opinions) on the various reforms of the day, and he never failed to look at them in the most simple and practical light. He had usually never even heard of such things before.

Could he do without factories? I asked. He said he had worn home-made “Vermont gray” cloth, and that was good enough for him. Could he dispense with tea and coffee? Did this country offer any beverage besides water? He had soaked hemlock leaves (likely from the hemlock tree, not the poison hemlock plant) in water and drunk it, and he thought that was better than plain water in warm weather.

When I asked him if he could do without money, he explained the convenience of money in such a way as to suggest and agree with the most philosophical accounts of the origin of this institution, and even with the very derivation of the Latin word pecunia (money, which is related to pecus, meaning cattle, an early form of wealth). He reasoned that if an ox were his only property, and he wished to get needles and thread at the store, he thought it would be inconvenient and soon impossible to go on “mortgaging” some portion of the creature each time to pay for such small items. He could defend many existing institutions better than any philosopher because, in describing them as they concerned him personally, he gave the true, practical reason for their existence (“prevalence”). Abstract speculation about other ways had not occurred to him.

At another time, upon hearing Plato’s definition of a man—“a biped (two-legged animal) without feathers”—and hearing that someone had then exhibited a plucked chicken and called it “Plato’s man,” the woodchopper thought it an important difference that the chicken’s knees bent the “wrong way” (a very literal, practical observation).

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 gotten any new ideas that summer. “Good Lord,” he said, “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 are hoeing with is inclined to race; then, by gorry, your mind must be right there on the work; you think only of weeds.” He would sometimes ask me first on such occasions, if I had made any personal improvement or had any new ideas.

Visitors

My Own View of Society

I think that I love society as much as most people do. I am ready enough to attach myself like a “bloodsucker” (he says this with some humor, meaning to engage deeply) for a time to any vibrant, “full-blooded” person that comes in my way. I am naturally no hermit. In fact, if my business or inclination called me to a barroom, I could probably sit and talk longer than even the most dedicated regular customer there.

Three Chairs for Company

I had three chairs in my house:

• One for solitude (being alone)
• Two for friendship
• Three for society (larger gatherings)

When visitors came in larger and unexpected numbers, there was only that third chair for all of them to share. But they generally made the most of the small space (“economized the room”) by standing up. It is surprising how many great men and women a small house can actually hold. I have had twenty-five or thirty people (“souls, with their bodies,” as he puts it) at once under my roof. And yet, we often parted without being truly aware that we had come very close to one another in understanding or spirit, despite our physical closeness.

Many of our houses, both public buildings and private homes, with their almost countless (“innumerable”) rooms and apartments, their huge halls, and their cellars for storing wines and other “munitions of peace” (supplies for peacetime comfort), appear to me extravagantly large for the people who live in them. These buildings are often so vast and magnificent that the inhabitants seem to be only like vermin (small, insignificant pests) that infest them. I am surprised when a herald (an announcer) blows his trumpet to summon someone before some grand hotel or mansion—like the Tremont House, the Astor House, or the Middlesex House (famous large buildings of his time). Then, to see come creeping out onto the piazza (a large porch), as the sole inhabitant, a “ridiculous mouse” of a person, who soon again slinks back into some hole in the pavement. This image highlights the contrast between grand structures and the often small or unimpressive lives lived within them.

Space for Thoughts

One inconvenience I sometimes experienced in so small a house was the difficulty of getting a sufficient distance from my guest when we began to discuss “big thoughts in big words.” You want room for your thoughts to get into “sailing trim” (properly organized and ready, like a ship prepared to sail) and to run a course or two in your mind before they reach their destination (“make their port”) in the listener’s understanding. The “bullet” of your thought must have overcome its initial sideways or ricocheting motion and settled into its final, steady course before it reaches the ear of the hearer. Otherwise, your thought may fly off wildly and “plough out again through the side of his head” (be completely misunderstood or fail to make a proper impact).

Also, our sentences needed room to unfold and form their proper structure (“columns”) in the space between us. Individuals, like nations, must have suitable broad and natural boundaries, even a considerable neutral ground, between them to communicate effectively and without crowding each other.

I have found it a unique luxury to talk across the pond to a companion on the opposite shore. In my house, we were so close physically that we often could not truly begin to hear each other—we could not speak low enough to be properly understood without our voices overwhelming the small space. It was like when you throw two stones into calm water so near to each other that their ripples (“undulations”) break and interfere with one another, distorting the patterns.

If we are merely talkative (“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, so that all the animal heat and moisture from our bodies may have a chance to evaporate. This allows for a clearer, less physically immediate, and more mentally focused interaction.

If we would enjoy the most intimate kind of society with that part in each of us which is beyond or above mere spoken words—our inner spirit or deeper self—we must not only be silent, but commonly be so far apart bodily that we cannot possibly hear each other’s voice in any case. Judged by this standard, everyday speech is mainly for the convenience of those who are hard of hearing. But there are many fine and subtle things which we cannot say if we have to shout.

As a conversation began to take on a loftier and grander tone, my guest and I would gradually shove our chairs farther apart until they touched the wall in opposite corners of my small cabin. And then, commonly, there was still not enough room for the expansive nature of our thoughts.

My True “Best Room”

My “best” room, however—my withdrawing room, always ready for company, on whose carpet the sun rarely fell (because it was always naturally shaded and cool)—was the pine wood behind my house. There, on summer days, when distinguished guests came, I took them. And a “priceless domestic servant”—Nature herself—swept the floor (with the wind), dusted the “furniture” (the logs and rocks), and kept things in beautiful order.

Simple Hospitality and True Welcome

If one guest came, he sometimes shared (“partook of”) my frugal (simple and inexpensive) meal. It was no interruption to our conversation for me to be stirring a hasty-pudding (a simple cornmeal mush) or watching a loaf of my homemade bread rising and baking in the ashes of my fire.

But if twenty people came and sat in my house, nothing was said about dinner, even though there might be only enough bread for two (and certainly more than enough bread if eating frequently were a forgotten habit). We naturally practiced abstinence from food in such large gatherings. This was never felt to be an offense against hospitality, but rather the most proper and considerate course. The usual waste and decay of physical life, which so often needs repair (through food and rest), seemed miraculously slowed down (“retarded”) in such cases. Our vital energy (“vigor”) stood its ground without needing constant replenishment from food.

I could entertain a thousand people in this way as easily as I could entertain twenty. And if any visitors ever went away disappointed or hungry from my house when they found me at home, they may depend upon it that I sympathized with them at least.

It is so easy—though many housekeepers doubt it—to establish new and better customs in place of the old ones. You need not rest your reputation on the elaborate dinners you give. For my own part, I was never so effectively discouraged (“deterred”) from frequently visiting a man’s house by any kind of guardian (“Cerberus,” the mythical three-headed dog guarding the underworld, here meaning any obstacle) as I was by the great fuss (“parade”) someone made about inviting me to a formal dinner. I took such elaborate efforts to be a very polite and roundabout hint that I should never trouble him so again. I think I shall never revisit those scenes of overly formal hospitality.

I should be proud to have for the motto of my cabin these lines from the poet Edmund Spenser, which one of my visitors inscribed on a yellow walnut leaf for a calling card:

“Arrivéd 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.”

(The meaning is: When guests arrived at the simple house, they filled it. They didn’t look for fancy entertainment where there was none. Rest itself was their feast, and they were free to do as they pleased. The poem suggests that the noblest mind finds the greatest contentment in simple things and freedom.)

A Historical Example of Hospitality

Edward Winslow, who later became governor of the Plymouth Colony, once went with a companion on a formal visit to Massassoit, the sachem (leader) of the Wampanoag people. They traveled on foot through the woods. When they arrived tired and hungry at Massassoit’s lodge (dwelling), they were well received by the king, but nothing was said about eating that day.

When night arrived, to quote their own words from their historical account: “He laid us on the bed with himself and his wife, they at the one end and we at the other, it being only planks, laid a foot from the ground, and a thin mat upon them. Two more of his chief men, for want of room, pressed by and upon us; so that we were worse weary of our lodging than of our journey.”

At one o’clock the next day, Massassoit “brought two fishes that he had shot,” each about three times as big as a bream (a common fish). “These being boiled, there were at least forty people who looked for a share in them. The most of them ate of the fish. This was the only meal we had in two nights and a day; and if one of us had not bought a partridge on the way, we would have made our journey fasting (without any food).”

Fearing that they would become light-headed for want of food and also sleep (which was disturbed, they said, by what they called ‘the savages’ barbarous singing,’ for it was the Wampanoag custom to sing themselves to sleep), and hoping they might get home while they still had strength to travel, Winslow and his companion departed.

As for lodging, it is true they were poorly entertained by their English standards, though what they found an inconvenience was no doubt intended as an honor by Massassoit (sharing his own bed). But as far as eating was concerned, I do not see how the Native Americans could have done better. They simply had nothing to eat themselves at that particular time. They were wiser than to think that apologies could substitute for food for their guests; so they drew their belts tighter and said nothing about it. Another time when Winslow visited them, when it was a season of plenty for the Wampanoag, there was no lack of food in this respect.

The Quality of Visitors in Solitude

As for people, you will hardly fail to find them anywhere. I actually had more visitors while I lived in the woods than at any other period of my life; I mean that I did have some. (This is a humorous understatement, implying he wasn’t overwhelmed with guests but had a number of meaningful interactions.) I met several people there under more favorable circumstances—more natural and genuine conditions—than I could anywhere else. But fewer people came to see me about trivial or unimportant business.

In this respect, my company was “winnowed” (sifted, like grain from chaff, separating the valuable from the less so) by my mere distance from town. I had withdrawn so far within the great ocean of solitude—into which the rivers of ordinary society empty—that for the most part, as far as my needs for companionship were concerned, only the “finest sediment” (the most worthwhile people and interactions) was deposited around me. Besides, from the other side of this ocean of solitude, there were evidences of unexplored and uncultivated continents of thought and experience that were carried (“wafted”) to me.

A Visit from a Man of Nature: The Canadian Woodchopper

One morning, who should come to my cabin (“lodge”) but a true “Homeric” or “Paphlagonian” man? (Homeric refers to the simple, strong, heroic characters in Homer’s ancient Greek epics; Paphlagonia was an ancient, rugged country in Asia Minor, suggesting a rustic, natural, and perhaps unrefined character.) He had so suitable and poetic a name that I am sorry I cannot print it here. He was a Canadian, a woodchopper and a maker of fence posts. He was so skilled he could cut and set (“hole”) fifty posts in a day. He had made his last supper on a woodchuck which his dog had caught.

This man, too, had heard of Homer. And, he said, “if it were not for books,” he would “not know what to do on rainy days.” This was true even though he perhaps had not read a single book completely through for many rainy seasons. Some priest in his native parish far away, who could pronounce the Greek language itself, had taught him to read verses in the New Testament.

And now, I found myself translating for him, while he held the book, Achilles’ scolding words (“reproof”) to his dear friend Patroclus for his sad face, from Homer’s Iliad: “Why are you in tears, Patroclus, like a young girl?” “Or have you alone heard some news from Phthia? They say that Menœtius lives yet, son of Actor, And Peleus lives, son of Æacus, among the Myrmidons, Either of whom having died, we should greatly grieve.” (Achilles is essentially asking Patroclus if he’s crying over terrible news, like the death of their fathers, which would be a valid reason for such sorrow among heroes.)

The woodchopper listened and then simply said, “That’s good.” He had a great bundle of white-oak bark under his arm, which he had gathered that Sunday morning for a sick man. “I suppose there’s no harm in going after such a thing today,” he remarked, perhaps slightly excusing his Sunday labor for a good cause. To him, Homer was a great writer, though he did not really know what Homer’s writing was about in detail.

A more simple and natural man it would be hard to find. Vice and disease, which cast such a somber moral shadow (“hue”) over the civilized world, seemed to have hardly any existence for him.

A Closer Look at the Woodchopper

He was about twenty-eight years old. He had left Canada and his father’s house a dozen years before to work in the United States. He hoped to earn enough money to buy a farm at last, perhaps back in his native country. He was “cast in the coarsest mould”—he was roughly made, a stout but somewhat slow-moving (“sluggish”) body, yet he carried himself gracefully. He had a thick, sunburnt neck, dark bushy hair, and dull, sleepy blue eyes, which were occasionally lit up with expression. He wore a flat gray cloth cap, a dingy wool-colored greatcoat, and cowhide boots.

He was a great consumer of meat. He usually carried his dinner with him to his work—for he chopped wood all summer—a couple of miles past my house. His dinner was in a tin pail and typically consisted of cold meats, often cold woodchucks, and coffee in a stone bottle which dangled by a string from his belt. Sometimes he offered me a drink of his coffee.

He would come along early in the morning, crossing my bean-field, though without any of the anxiety or haste to get to his work that “Yankees” (New Englanders, often seen as driven and overly business-like) typically exhibit. He wasn’t going to hurt himself by rushing. He didn’t much care if he only earned enough for his board (his basic food and lodging).

Frequently, if his dog had caught a woodchuck on the way to work, he would leave his dinner pail in the bushes. He would then walk back a mile and a half to dress the woodchuck (prepare it for cooking) and leave it in the cellar of the house where he boarded. Before doing this, he would first deliberate for half an hour whether he could not sink it safely in the pond until nightfall—he loved to dwell long upon these practical themes and considerations.

As he went by in the morning, he would often say, “How thick the pigeons are! If working every day were not my trade, I could get all the meat I should want by hunting—pigeons, woodchucks, rabbits, partridges—by gosh! I could get all I should want for a week in one day.”

His Skill, Joy, and Connection to Nature

He was a skillful chopper and sometimes indulged in a few flourishes and ornamental touches in his art. He cut his trees level and close to the ground. This was so that the sprouts which came up afterward might be more vigorous, and so a sled could slide over the stumps more easily in winter. And instead of leaving a whole tree standing to support his corded wood (neatly stacked firewood), he would pare it away to a slender stake or splinter which you could finally break off with your hand.

He interested me because he was so quiet and solitary, and yet so happy with everything. He was a well of good humor and contentment which overflowed in his eyes. His joyfulness (“mirth”) was pure and unmixed (“without alloy”). Sometimes I saw him at his work in the woods, felling trees. He would greet me with a laugh of inexpressible satisfaction and a greeting in Canadian French, though he spoke English perfectly well. When I approached him, he would stop his work. With half-suppressed mirth, he would lie along the trunk of a pine tree which he had just felled. He would peel off the inner bark, roll it up into a ball, and chew it while he laughed and talked.

He had such an abundance of animal spirits (natural energy and vitality) that he sometimes tumbled down and rolled on the ground with laughter at anything which made him think and amused (“tickled”) him. Looking around at the trees, he would exclaim, “By George! I can enjoy myself well enough here chopping; I want no better sport.”

Sometimes, when he was 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 would build a fire by which, at noon, he warmed his coffee in a kettle. As he sat on a log to eat his dinner, the chickadees would sometimes come around and land (“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.”

A Man of Physical Strength and Simple Faith

In him, the “animal man”—the physical, natural side of human nature—was chiefly developed. In physical endurance and contentment, he was like a cousin to the pine tree and the rock. I asked him once if he was not sometimes tired at night, after working all day. He answered, with a sincere and serious look, “Gorrappit (a mild exclamation, like ‘By golly’), I never was tired in my life.”

But the intellectual and what is called the spiritual man in him were slumbering, as if in an infant. He had been instructed only in that innocent and ultimately ineffective way in which Catholic priests sometimes teach aboriginal peoples. In this method, the pupil is never truly educated to the level of independent consciousness or critical thought, but only to the level of trust and reverence. A child taught this way is not made into a self-reliant man, but is kept a child.

When Nature made him, she gave him a strong body and contentment as his main gifts. She supported (“propped”) him on every side with a sense of reverence for the world and reliance on its provisions, so that he might live out his “threescore years and ten” (seventy years, a traditional lifespan) as a kind of innocent child of nature.

He was so genuine and unsophisticated that no formal introduction could truly capture who he was, any more than if you formally introduced a woodchuck to your neighbor. You had to get to know him directly, as I did. He would not play any artificial part or pretend to be someone he wasn’t. Men paid him wages for his work, and so helped to feed and clothe him; but he never really exchanged complex opinions or engaged in deep intellectual discussions with them. He was so simply and naturally humble—if one can even be called humble who never aspires to be anything different—that humility was not a distinct quality in him; he probably couldn’t even conceive of it as a virtue to be cultivated.

Wiser, more educated men seemed like demigods to him. If you told him that such a one was coming to visit, he acted as if he thought that any person so grand would expect nothing of him. He seemed to think the grand person would take all the responsibility for the interaction upon himself, and let him (the woodchopper) remain unnoticed and forgotten. He never seemed to hear or register any sound of praise directed at himself. He particularly revered writers and preachers. Their performances and abilities seemed like miracles to him.

When I told him that I wrote a considerable amount, he thought for a long time that I merely meant that I had good handwriting, for he himself could write a remarkably good hand. I sometimes found the name of his native parish in Canada handsomely written in the snow by the highway, with the proper French accent, and I knew that he had passed that way. I asked him if he ever wished to write down his own thoughts. He said that he had read and written letters for those who could not do so themselves. But he had never tried to write his own thoughts—no, he said, he could not. He wouldn’t know what to put down first. He felt it would “kill him” (be too overwhelming a task), and then there was all the spelling to be attended to at the same time!

Contentment with the World As It Is

I heard that a distinguished wise man and reformer once asked the woodchopper if he did not want the world to be changed or improved. But the woodchopper answered with a chuckle of surprise, in his Canadian accent, not knowing that such a question had ever even been seriously considered before, “No, I like it well enough as it is.”

It would have suggested many things to a philosopher to have dealings with this man. To a stranger, he might have appeared to know nothing of things in general. Yet I sometimes saw in him a kind of man whom I had not seen before. I did not know whether he was as wise as Shakespeare or as simply ignorant as a child. I didn’t know whether to suspect him of having a fine poetic consciousness hidden within him, or of just being simple-minded (“stupidity”). A townsman once told me that when he met the woodchopper sauntering through the village in his small, close-fitting cap, and whistling to himself, he reminded him of a prince in disguise.

His only books were an almanac and an arithmetic book, and he was considerably expert in arithmetic. The almanac was a sort of encyclopedia (“cyclopædia”) to him, which he supposed contained a summary (“abstract”) of all human knowledge, as indeed it does to a considerable extent for practical matters. I loved to “sound him out” (get his opinions) on the various social and political reforms of the day, and he never failed to look at them in the most simple and practical light. He had usually never even heard of such things before.

Could he do without factories? I asked. He said he had worn home-made “Vermont gray” cloth (a sturdy, locally made fabric), and that was good enough for him. Could he dispense with tea and coffee? Did this country offer any beverage besides water? He had soaked hemlock leaves (likely from the Eastern Hemlock tree, Tsuga canadensis, which is not poisonous, rather than the highly toxic Poison Hemlock plant, Conium maculatum) in water and drunk it, and he thought that was better than plain water in warm weather.

When I asked him if he could do without money, he explained the convenience of money in such a way as to suggest and agree with the most philosophical accounts of the origin of this institution, and even with the very derivation of the Latin word pecunia (money, which is related to pecus, meaning cattle, an early form of wealth). He reasoned that if an ox were his only property, and he wished to get needles and thread at the store, he thought it would be inconvenient and soon impossible to go on “mortgaging” some portion of the creature each time to pay for such small items. He could defend many existing institutions better than any philosopher because, in describing them as they concerned him personally and practically, he gave the true, down-to-earth reason for their existence (“prevalence”). Abstract speculation about other, more theoretical ways had not occurred to him.

At another time, upon hearing Plato’s definition of a man—“a biped (a two-legged animal) without feathers”—and hearing that someone had then exhibited a plucked chicken and called it “Plato’s man,” the woodchopper thought it an important difference that the chicken’s knees bent the “wrong way” (a very literal, practical, and humorous observation).

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 gotten any new ideas that summer. “Good Lord,” he said, “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 are hoeing with is inclined to race; then, by gorry, your mind must be right there on the work; you think only of weeds.” He would sometimes ask me first on such occasions, if I had made any personal improvement or had any new ideas.

The Bean-Field

My Curious Labor

Meanwhile, my beans were getting impatient to be hoed. The rows I had planted, if added together, would have stretched for seven miles. The earliest plants had grown quite a bit before the latest ones were even in the ground. Indeed, they could not be ignored any longer.

I didn’t fully understand the meaning of this steady and self-respecting work, this small but demanding (“Herculean”) labor. But I came to love my rows and my beans, even though I had planted many more than I actually needed. They attached me to the earth. Through this connection, I gained strength, like Antæus in the Greek myth, who was invincible as long as he touched the ground.

But why should I raise them? Only Heaven knows. This was my curious labor all summer long: to make this particular patch of the earth’s surface produce beans. Before, this land had yielded only cinquefoil, blackberries, St. John’s-wort, and similar wild fruits and pleasant flowers. Now, I was making it produce “this pulse” (beans, a type of legume).

What shall I learn from beans, or what will beans learn from me? I cherish them. I hoe them. Early in the morning and late in the day, I keep an eye on them. This is my day’s work. Their leaves are broad and fine to look at.

My helpers (“auxiliaries”) in this work are:

• The dews and rains, which water this dry soil.
• Whatever fertility is in the soil itself, which for the most part is lean and worn out (“effete”).

My enemies are:

• Worms
• Cool days
• And most of all, woodchucks. The woodchucks have already nibbled a quarter of an acre clean for me.

But what right did I have to drive out (“oust”) the St. John’s-wort and the other native plants, and to break up their ancient herb garden? Soon, however, the remaining beans will be too tough for the woodchucks. Then, they will go forward to meet new foes, like insects or blight.

Childhood Memories and Present Realities

When I was four years old, as I remember well, I was brought from Boston to this town where I was born. We traveled through these very woods and this same field, to the pond. It is one of the oldest scenes stamped on my memory. And now, tonight, my flute has awakened the echoes over that very same water.

The pine trees still stand here, older than I am. Or, if some have fallen, I have cooked my supper with the wood from their stumps. A new growth of trees is rising all around, preparing another landscape for new infant eyes to see in the future. Almost the same St. John’s-wort springs from the same perennial root in this pasture year after year. And now, at last, even I have helped to clothe that fabulous landscape of my childhood dreams. One of the results of my presence and influence here is seen in these bean leaves, corn blades, and potato vines growing in my field.

Ancient Cultivators

I planted about two and a half acres on this upland ground. The land had only been cleared of its original forest about fifteen years before. I myself had gotten out two or three cords (large, neatly stacked piles) of tree stumps from the soil. Because of this recent clearing and my own efforts, I did not give the land any manure.

But in the course of the summer, as I was hoeing, I turned up several arrowheads. This showed me that an extinct nation of Native Americans had anciently lived here. They had planted corn and beans long before white men came to clear the land. And so, to some extent, they had already used up (“exhausted”) the soil for this very same crop of beans.

The Daily Work of Hoeing

Before any woodchuck or squirrel had run across the road in the morning, or before the sun had risen above the shrub oaks, while all the dew was still on the plants—though other 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 the proud (“haughty”) weeds in my bean-field and to “throw dust upon their heads” (cover their freshly cut stems with dry soil to prevent regrowth).

Early in the morning, I worked barefooted. I dabbled in the dewy and crumbling sand like a “plastic artist” (a sculptor, someone who molds and shapes material). But later in the day, the sun blistered my feet. Then, the sun lighted my work as I hoed the beans. I paced slowly backward and forward over that yellow, gravelly upland, between the long green rows. Each row was fifteen rods long (about 247 feet, or 75 meters). One end of my field finished in a thicket (“copse”) of shrub oaks where I could rest in the shade. The other end was a blackberry field, where the green berries were deepening their tints to red and black by the time I had made another pass (“bout”) up and down the rows.

My daily work consisted of:

• Removing the weeds.
• Putting fresh soil around the bean stems.
• Encouraging this “weed” which I had intentionally sown (my beans).
• Making the yellow soil express its summer thoughts in bean leaves and blossoms, rather than in wormwood, piper-grass, or millet grass (common weeds).
• Making the earth say “beans” instead of “grass.”

As I had little help from horses or cattle, or from hired men or boys, or from improved farming tools (“implements of husbandry”), I was much slower in my work. Because of this, I became much more intimate with my beans than is usual for most farmers.

But labor of the hands, even when it is pursued to the verge of drudgery (hard, boring work), is perhaps never the worst form of idleness. Such labor has a constant and undying (“imperishable”) moral value. And for the scholar or thinker, it yields a classic and timeless result.

Observations from the Field

To travelers heading westward through the nearby towns of Lincoln and Wayland, bound for who knows where, I must have seemed a very industrious farmer (agricola laboriosus). They would be sitting at their ease in their carriages (“gigs”), with their elbows on their knees and the reins hanging loosely in loops (“festoons”). I, on the other hand, was the home-staying, laborious native of the soil. But soon, my little homestead was out of their sight and their thoughts.

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 by observing it as they passed. Sometimes, the man working in the field (myself) heard more of the travelers’ gossip and comments than was meant for his ear: “Beans so late! Peas so late!” (For I continued to plant some things when others had already begun to hoe.) The “ministerial husbandman” (a farmer who was also a minister, perhaps a bit formal and set in his ways) had not suspected such late planting. “Corn, my boy, for fodder (animal feed); corn for fodder.” “Does he live there?” asks a woman in a black bonnet to a man in a gray coat.

And the hard-featured farmer reins up his grateful old horse (“dobbin”) to ask what I am doing. He sees no manure in the furrows and recommends adding a little “chip dirt” (rotted wood chips and dust), or any little waste stuff, or perhaps ashes or plaster, to enrich the soil. But here were two and a half acres of furrows, and I had only a hoe for a “cart” and my own two hands to “draw” it—as I had an aversion to using other carts and horses. And the chip dirt he recommended was far away.

Fellow travelers, as they rattled by in their wagons, compared my field aloud with other fields they had passed. So, I came to know how I stood in the agricultural world. This was one field not included in Mr. Colman’s official agricultural report of the time.

And, by the way, who estimates the value of the crop which Nature yields in the still wilder fields that are unimproved by man? The crop of English hay is carefully weighed, its moisture content calculated, and its mineral content (silicates and potash) analyzed. But in all the small valleys (“dells”) and pond holes in the woods, and in the pastures and swamps, grows a rich and various crop that is simply left unreaped by humans.

My bean-field was, in a way, the connecting link between wild fields and cultivated ones. Just as some states or nations are considered civilized, and others half-civilized, and others savage or barbarous, so my field was—though not in a bad sense—a half-cultivated field. The beans I cultivated were cheerfully returning to their wild and primitive state, and my hoe played the “Ranz des Vaches” (a traditional Swiss herdsman’s melody, evoking a sense of simple, pastoral life) for them as I worked.

The Brown Thrasher’s Song

Near at hand, upon the topmost spray of a birch tree, the brown thrasher—or red mavis, as some love to call him—sings all morning. He seems glad of your company and would find another farmer’s field if yours were not here. While you are planting the seed, he cries out in his song: “Drop it, drop it,—cover it up, cover it up,—pull it up, pull it up, pull it up.” (Thoreau playfully interprets the bird’s song as farming advice.) But since these were beans and not corn, they were safe from such enemies as he (birds that eat corn seed).

You may wonder what his long, rambling song (“rigmarole”), his amateur Paganini-like (Paganini was a famous, flamboyant violin virtuoso) performances on one string or on twenty, have to do with your planting. And yet, you might prefer his song to using leached ashes or plaster as fertilizer. The bird’s song was a cheap sort of “top dressing” (fertilizer applied to the surface of the soil) in which I had entire faith. It was a kind of spiritual nourishment for the field and for me.

Echoes of Ancient Nations

As I drew still fresher soil around the rows of beans with my hoe, I disturbed the ashes of unrecorded (“unchronicled”) nations of Native Americans who, in ancient (“primeval”) years, lived under these same heavens. Their small tools (“implements”) of war and hunting were brought to the light of this modern day. They lay mixed with other natural stones, some of which bore the marks of having been burned by Indian fires, and some by the sun. There were also bits of pottery and glass brought here by more recent cultivators of the soil.

When my hoe tinkled against the stones, that music echoed to the woods and the sky. It was an accompaniment to my labor which yielded an instant and immeasurable crop—not of beans, but of thoughts and connection to the past. In those moments, it was no longer beans that I hoed, nor was it merely “I” that hoed beans; I felt part of something larger and timeless. And I remembered with as much pity as pride—if I remembered them at all—my acquaintances who had gone to the city to attend formal musical performances (“oratorios”). My simple “music of the hoe” seemed just as rich.

The night-hawk circled overhead in the sunny afternoons—for I sometimes made a whole day of my work in the field. It looked like a tiny speck (“mote”) in my eye, or in heaven’s eye. From time to time, it would dive (“swoop”) with a sound as if the heavens were being ripped apart (“rent”), torn at last to very rags and tatters. And yet, a seamless blue canopy (“cope”) of sky always remained. These night-hawks are like small, agile spirits (“imps”) that fill the air. They lay their eggs on the bare ground, on sand or rocks on the tops of hills, where few people have ever found them. They are graceful and slender, like ripples caught up from the pond by the wind, or like leaves raised by the wind to float in the heavens. Such kinship (“kindredship”) and interconnectedness exist throughout Nature. The hawk is the aerial brother of the wave which he sails over and surveys. His perfect air-inflated wings correspond to the elemental, unfeathered “wings” (“pinions”) of the sea waves.

Or sometimes I watched a pair of hen-hawks circling high in the sky. They would alternately soar and descend, approach and leave one another, as if they were the embodiment of my own thoughts, rising and falling, coming and going.

Or I was attracted by the passage of wild pigeons from one part of the wood to another, with a slight, quivering, winnowing sound and the haste of a carrier delivering a message. Or sometimes, from under a rotten stump, my hoe turned up a sluggish, ominous-looking (“portentous”), and outlandish spotted salamander—a creature that seemed like a trace of ancient Egypt and the Nile, yet was my contemporary in the field.

When I paused to lean on my hoe, these sounds and sights I heard and saw anywhere in the bean row were a part of the inexhaustible entertainment which the country offers.

Distant Sounds from the Village

On gala days (holidays or celebration days), the town would fire its great guns (cannons). The sound would echo like mere popguns to me in these woods. Sometimes, faint strains (“waifs”) of martial music would occasionally penetrate this far. To me, away there in my bean-field at the other end of the town, the big guns sounded as if a puffball mushroom had burst.

When there was a military parade (“turnout”) of which I was unaware, I have sometimes had a vague sense all day of some sort of itching and unease (“disease”) in the horizon. It was as if some eruption, like scarlatina or canker-rash (types of fevers with rashes), would break out there soon. This feeling would last until at length some more favorable puff of wind, making haste over the fields and up the Wayland road, brought me the information that the “trainers” (the local militia) were practicing.

The distant hum of their activities sounded as if somebody’s bees had swarmed. It seemed as if the neighbors, following Virgil’s ancient advice (to make a clanging noise on metal pans—a tintinnabulum—to settle a swarm), were trying to call the bees down into the hive again. And when the sound finally died quite away, and the hum had ceased, and even the most favorable breezes told no tale of their activities, I knew that they had gotten the last “drone” (straggler) of them all safely into the “Middlesex hive” (a humorous reference to the local militia company). I imagined that now their minds were bent on the “honey” (perhaps the satisfaction or rewards) with which their “hive” was smeared.

A Quiet Patriotism

I felt proud to know that the liberties of Massachusetts and of our fatherland were in such safe keeping by these citizen soldiers. And as I turned to my hoeing again, I was filled with an inexpressible confidence. I pursued my labor cheerfully with a calm trust in the future.

The Village Bands and Heroic Feelings

When there were several bands of musicians playing in the village, it sounded from my distant field as if the entire village were a vast bellows, and all the buildings expanded and collapsed alternately with the din. But sometimes it was a truly noble and inspiring strain of music that reached these woods, perhaps the sound of a trumpet that sings of fame. At such moments, I felt as if I could “spit a Mexican with a good relish” (a rather coarse and dated expression reflecting the patriotic fervor of the Mexican-American War era, meaning he felt ready and eager to take on any great challenge). “For why,” I thought, “should we always stand for trivial matters (‘trifles’)?” I even looked around for a woodchuck or a skunk to exercise my newfound chivalry upon (a humorous, mock-heroic thought).

These martial strains of music seemed as far away as Palestine. They reminded me of a march of crusaders appearing on the distant horizon, accompanied by a slight “tantivy” (the sound of a hunting horn or a brisk gallop) and the tremulous motion of the elm-tree tops which overhung the village. This was one of the “great days” in town, though the sky from my clearing had only the same everlastingly great and unchanging look that it wears daily. I saw no difference in it.

Knowing Beans

It was a unique (“singular”) experience, this long acquaintance which I cultivated with beans. It involved planting, hoeing, harvesting, threshing, picking them over, and selling them—the last part was the hardest of all. I might also add eating them, for I did taste some. I was determined to truly know beans.

When they were growing, I used to hoe from five o’clock in the morning until noon. I commonly spent the rest of the day on other affairs. Consider the intimate and curious acquaintance one makes with various kinds of weeds. (This will bear some repetition in my account, for there was certainly no little repetition in the labor itself!) I was constantly disturbing their delicate organizations quite ruthlessly. I made such “invidious distinctions” (unfairly discriminating choices) with my hoe, leveling whole ranks of one species of weed, while diligently (“sedulously”) cultivating another (my beans).

“That’s Roman wormwood—that’s pigweed—that’s sorrel—that’s piper-grass—have at him, chop him up, turn his roots upward to the sun, don’t let him have a single fiber left in the shade! If you do, he’ll turn himself the other side up and be as green as a leek in two days.” (This is his energetic, almost combative, approach to weeding.)

It was a long war, not with cranes (as in the ancient story of the pygmies), but with weeds—those “Trojans” of the plant world, who had the sun and rain and dews on their side, fighting for survival. Daily, the beans saw me come to their rescue armed with a hoe. I thinned the ranks of their enemies, filling up the trenches between the rows with weedy dead. Many a strong (“lusty”), crest-waving “Hector” (a heroic weed, named after the Trojan hero) that towered a whole foot above his crowding comrades, fell before my weapon and rolled in the dust.

Farming for Experience, Not Just Food

Those summer days, which some of my contemporaries devoted to the fine arts in Boston or Rome, and others to contemplation in India, and still others to trade in London or New York, I—along with the other farmers of New England—devoted to husbandry (farming).

It was not that I particularly wanted beans to eat. I am by nature a “Pythagorean” so far as beans are concerned. (The ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras and his followers famously abstained from eating beans for various complex symbolic reasons. Thoreau here implies he’s not a big bean-eater himself, whether “beans” mean porridge or are used in voting, as they sometimes were in ancient times.) I generally exchanged my beans for rice.

But, perhaps, I worked in the fields as some people must, if only for the sake of finding “tropes and expression” (metaphors, vivid language, and literary material). I did it to serve a “parable-maker” (a storyteller, meaning himself) one day. It was, on the whole, a rare amusement. If continued too long, however, it might have become a “dissipation” (a wasteful or distracting indulgence).

Though I gave my beans no manure, and did not hoe them all completely even once, I hoed them unusually well as far as I went. I was paid for my labor in the end, not just in money, but in experience and health. “There being in truth,” as the writer John Evelyn says, “no compost or lætation (manuring) whatsoever comparable to this continual motion, repastination (repeated digging), and turning of the mould with the spade.” Evelyn adds elsewhere, “The earth, 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 temperings being but the vicars succedaneous (inferior substitutes) to this improvement.” (Evelyn means that working the soil itself activates its natural fertility, which is superior to simply adding manure.)

Moreover, this land, being one of those “worn-out and exhausted lay fields which enjoy their sabbath” (fields left fallow to rest), had perhaps, as Sir Kenelm Digby (a 17th-century thinker) thought likely, attracted “vital spirits” from the air. I harvested twelve bushels of beans.

My Farm Accounts

But to be more particular with my finances—for it is complained that Mr. Colman (an agricultural writer of the time) has reported chiefly the expensive experiments of gentlemen farmers—my expenses (“outgoes”) were: (The text indicates a table of expenses would follow here.)

My income was (as the Latin saying goes, patrem familias vendacem, non emacem esse oportet—“the head of a household should be a seller, not a buyer”) from: (The text indicates a table of income would follow here.)

Advice on Raising Beans and Virtues

This is the result of my experience in raising beans. Plant the common small white bush bean about the first of June. Plant them in rows three feet apart, with the beans set about eighteen inches apart within the row. Be careful to select fresh, round, and unmixed seed. First, look out for worms, and fill any empty spots (“vacancies”) by planting anew. Then, look out for woodchucks, if your field is in an exposed place, for they will nibble off the earliest tender leaves almost completely as they appear. And again, when the young tendrils of the bean plants make their appearance, the woodchucks will have notice of it. They will shear off these tendrils along with both the buds and the young pods, often sitting erect like a squirrel while they feast. But above all, harvest your beans as early as possible if you would escape frosts and have a fair and saleable crop. You may save much loss by this means.

This further experience I also gained. I said to myself: I will not plant beans and corn with so much industry another summer. Instead, I will plant such “seeds”—if the seed of these virtues is not lost to the world—as sincerity, truth, simplicity, faith, innocence, and the like. I will see if these will not grow in this soil, even with less toil and less manure, and if they will not sustain me. For surely this soil has not been exhausted for these kinds of crops.

Alas! I said this to myself. But now another summer has gone, and another, and another. And I am obliged to say to you, Reader, that the seeds of virtue which I planted—if indeed they truly were the seeds of those virtues—were either eaten by worms (“wormeaten”) or had lost their vitality. And so, they did not come up.

Commonly, people will only be as brave as their fathers were brave, or as timid. This generation is very sure to plant corn and beans each new year precisely as the Native Americans did centuries ago and taught the first settlers to do, as if there were some unchangeable fate in it. I saw an old man the other day, to my astonishment, making the holes with a hoe for his seeds for the seventieth time at least—and not, I might add, holes for himself to lie down in!

But why should not the New Englander try new adventures? Why not lay so much stress on things other than his grain, his potato and grass crop, and his orchards? Why not raise other kinds of “crops” than these? Why should we concern ourselves so much about our beans for next year’s seed, and not be concerned at all about cultivating a new and better generation of human beings?

We should really be fed and cheered if, when we met a person, we were sure to see that some of the qualities which I have named—qualities which we all prize more than those other agricultural productions, but which are for the most part just scattered (“broadcast”) and floating in the air—had taken root and grown in him. Here comes such a subtle and indescribable (“ineffable”) quality, for instance, as truth or justice, walking along the road—even the slightest amount or a new variety of it. Our ambassadors should be instructed to send home such seeds as these from foreign lands, and Congress should help to distribute them over all our land. We should never stand upon ceremony with sincerity. We should never cheat and insult and banish one another by our meanness, if only there were present in us the kernel of genuine worth and friendliness. We should not meet each other so often in haste and for trivial reasons. Most men I do not really “meet” at all, for they seem not to have time; they are too busy about their beans.

The Farmer: More Than a Plodder

We should not look at a farmer as someone who is always just plodding along, leaning on his hoe or spade like a staff between his periods of work. He is not like a mushroom, simply stuck to the earth. Instead, he seems partially risen out of the earth, something more than just standing erect. He is like a swallow that has landed and is walking on the ground—a creature capable of flight, only temporarily grounded.

As the poet Edmund Spenser wrote: “And as he spake, his wings would now and then Spread, as he meant to fly, then close again,”

So, when we talk with such a person, we should suspect that we might be conversing with an angel in disguise. We should recognize the divine spark or higher potential in every individual, even in a simple laborer.

Bread itself may not always nourish us, either physically or spiritually. But it always does us good to recognize any act of generosity, whether in people or in Nature. Such recognition can take the stiffness out of our joints and make us feel flexible (“supple”) and lighthearted (“buoyant”). This is especially true when we feel a vague sense of unease (“knew not what ailed us”). To share in any pure (“unmixed”) and heroic joy, like the joy found in generosity, is truly uplifting.

Farming: Once Sacred, Now Degraded

Ancient poetry and mythology suggest that farming (“husbandry”) was once considered a sacred art. But today, we often pursue it with irreverent haste and carelessness. Our main goal is merely to have large farms and produce large crops, focusing mostly on quantity and profit.

We have no real festivals, processions, or ceremonies—not even our Cattle-shows or so-called Thanksgivings—by which the farmer can express a sense of the sacredness of his calling, or be reminded of its sacred origin. It is the prize money (“premium”) and the feast that tempt him. He sacrifices not to Ceres (the Roman goddess of agriculture) and the Terrestrial Jove (Jupiter, a god of the earth and sky), but rather to the infernal Plutus (the god of underworld riches, symbolizing greed).

Because of greed (“avarice”) and selfishness, and because of a base (“grovelling”) habit—from which none of us is entirely free—of regarding the soil primarily as property, or as a means of acquiring property, the landscape is deformed. Husbandry itself is degraded in our modern view, and the farmer often leads one of the least fulfilling (“meanest”) of lives. He knows Nature only as a robber, as something to be exploited for gain.

The Roman statesman Cato said that the profits of agriculture are particularly pious or just (maximeque pius quæstus). And according to another Roman writer, Varro, the old Romans “called the same earth Mother and Ceres. They thought that those who cultivated it led a pious and useful life, and that they alone were left of the race of King Saturn” (referring to a mythical Golden Age of peace and simple living).

Nature’s Impartiality and True Harvest

We tend to forget that the sun looks upon our cultivated fields and upon the wild prairies and forests without making any distinction. They all reflect and absorb its rays alike. Our cultivated fields make up only a small part of the glorious picture which the sun beholds in its daily course across the sky. In the sun’s view, the entire earth is equally cultivated, like a vast garden. Therefore, we should receive the benefit of the sun’s light and heat with a corresponding sense of trust and generosity of spirit (“magnanimity”).

What though I value the seed of these beans that I planted, and harvest that crop in the fall of the year? This broad field which I have looked at for so long does not look to me as the principal cultivator. Instead, it looks away from me, towards influences more life-giving (“genial”) to it—the sun, the rain, the soil itself—which water it and make it green. Nature is the primary cultivator.

These beans that I grow have results and purposes that are not harvested by me alone. Do they not grow for the woodchucks partly? The ear of wheat (in Latin spica, an old form of which is speca, derived from spes, meaning hope) should not be the only hope of the farmer. Its kernel or grain (in Latin granum, from gerendo, meaning “bearing” or “producing”) is not all that the plant bears. It also bears life for other creatures, and beauty, and a place in the ecosystem.

How, then, can our harvest truly fail, if we consider all these other outcomes? Shall I not rejoice also at the abundance of the weeds whose seeds are the granary (storehouse of grain) for the birds? It matters little, in the grand scheme of things, whether the cultivated fields fill only the farmer’s barns.

The true husbandman (a wise and thoughtful farmer) will cease from anxiety. He will be like the squirrels, who show no concern whether the woods will bear chestnuts this year or not. He will finish his labor with each day, relinquishing all claim to the absolute ownership of the produce of his fields. He will sacrifice in his mind not only his first fruits but his last fruits also, understanding that he is part of a larger cycle and that nature’s bounty is for all.

The Village

My Visits to Town

After hoeing my beans in the morning, or perhaps after some reading and writing, I usually bathed again in the pond. I would swim across one of its coves as a short exercise. This washed the dust of labor from my body, or smoothed out the last wrinkle that study had made on my mind. For the rest of the afternoon, I was absolutely free.

Every day or two, I strolled to the village. I went there to hear some of the gossip which is always going on. This gossip circulates either from mouth to mouth, or from newspaper to newspaper. Taken in very small amounts (“homœopathic doses”), this gossip was actually as refreshing in its own way as the rustle of leaves or the peeping of frogs.

Just as I walked in the woods to see the birds and squirrels, I walked in the village to see the men and boys. Instead of the sound of the wind among the pine trees, I heard the rattle of carts in the village.

In one direction from my house, there was a colony of muskrats living in the river meadows. In the other direction, on the horizon under a grove of elm and buttonwood trees, was a village of busy people. These people were as curious to me as if they had been prairie dogs. Each one seemed to be sitting at the mouth of his own burrow, or running over to a neighbor’s burrow to gossip. I went to the village frequently to observe their habits.

The Village as a News Center

The village appeared to me to be a great news room. And on one side of this “news room,” to support it financially (much like the Redding & Company reading room on State Street in Boston, which also sold items), they kept nuts and raisins, or salt and meal and other groceries. Some people have such a vast appetite for news—that first item—and such sound digestive organs, that they can sit forever in public places without stirring. They let the news simmer and whisper through them like the gentle Etesian winds (summer winds in the Aegean Sea). It’s as if they were inhaling ether (an anesthetic), which produces numbness and insensibility to pain. Otherwise, hearing all that news would often be painful. This constant intake of news happens without affecting their deeper consciousness.

Whenever I rambled through the village, I hardly ever failed to see a row of such “worthies” (people dedicated to gathering and spreading news). They would either be sitting on a ladder sunning themselves, their bodies inclined forward and their eyes glancing along the street this way and that. From time to time, they would have a self-satisfied (“voluptuous”) expression. Or else, they would be leaning against a barn with their hands in their pockets, looking like caryatides (stone statues of women used as pillars), as if they were trying to prop up the barn. Being commonly outdoors, they heard whatever was “in the wind” (all the latest rumors).

These people are the “coarsest mills,” in which all gossip is first rudely processed (“digested or cracked up”) before it is emptied into finer and more delicate “hoppers” (funnels used in mills) indoors, where it is further refined and spread.

I observed that the vital organs (“vitals”) of the village were:

• The grocery store
• The barroom
• The post office
• The bank

And, as a necessary part of the village machinery, they kept a bell (for alarms or town meetings), a big gun (a cannon, likely for celebrations or serious alarms), and a fire engine at convenient places.

The houses were arranged to “make the most of mankind.” They were built in lanes and facing one another, so that every traveler had to “run the gantlet”—pass down a line of observing people. Every man, woman, and child in the village could get a “lick at him” (have a chance to see, scrutinize, and gossip about the traveler).

Of course, those who were stationed nearest to the head of the line, where they could best see and be seen, and have the first chance to comment on the traveler, paid the highest prices for their prominent places. The few scattered (“straggling”) inhabitants in the outskirts of the village, where long gaps in the line of houses began to occur and where a traveler could get over walls or turn aside into cow paths and so escape scrutiny, paid a very slight property tax (“ground or window tax”).

Signs were hung out on all sides of the street to attract (“allure”) the traveler or customer.

• Some signs aimed to catch him by his appetite, like those for the tavern or the food cellar (“victualling cellar”).
• Some aimed to catch him by his fancy, like those for the dry goods store or the jeweler’s shop.
• And others aimed to catch him by services related to his hair, his feet, or his clothes, like the barber, the shoemaker, or the tailor.

Besides these, there was a still more terrible, unspoken (“standing”) invitation to call at every one of these houses, as company was generally expected around these times.

For the most part, I escaped these social dangers wonderfully. I did this either by proceeding at once boldly and without hesitation to my goal, as is recommended to those who literally have to run a gauntlet. Or, I escaped by keeping my thoughts on high and noble things, like Orpheus in the Greek myth. Orpheus, by “loudly singing the praises of the gods to his lyre, drowned the voices of the Sirens, and kept out of danger.”

Sometimes I “bolted” (ran off) suddenly, and nobody could tell where I had gone. I did not worry much about appearing graceful, and I never hesitated at a gap in a fence. I was even accustomed to making a sudden, unannounced entry (“irruption”) into some houses where I knew I would be well entertained. After learning all the important details (“kernels”) and the very last bits (“sieve-ful”) of news—what had settled down, the prospects of war and peace, and whether the world was likely to hold together much longer—I was often let out through the back ways (“rear avenues”). And so, I escaped to the woods again.

Returning Home at Night: A Voyage

It was very pleasant, when I stayed late in town, to “launch myself into the night.” This was especially true if the night was dark and stormy (“tempestuous”). I would “set sail” from some bright village parlor or lecture room, often with a bag of rye or Indian meal upon my shoulder, heading for my snug harbor in the woods. I would have “made all tight without” (prepared myself for the journey) and “withdrawn under hatches” (retreated into my own thoughts) with a merry crew of ideas, leaving only my outer self (“outer man”) at the helm (guiding my body). Sometimes, when the way was clear (“plain sailing”), I metaphorically even tied up the helm and let my body find its own way. I had many warm and pleasant (“genial”) thoughts by my cabin fire “as I sailed” through the dark woods.

I was never “cast away” (shipwrecked) or distressed in any weather, though I certainly encountered some severe storms on these nighttime walks. It is darker in the woods, even on common nights, than most people suppose. I frequently had to look up at the opening between the trees above the path in order to find my route. And where there was no cart-path, I had to feel with my feet for the faint track which I had worn in the earth. Or, I had to steer by the known relationship of particular trees which I could feel with my hands, perhaps passing between two pine trees that were no more than eighteen inches apart, right in the midst of the woods, invariably finding my way even on the darkest night.

Sometimes, after coming home late on a dark and muggy night, when my feet felt the path which my eyes could not see, I would be dreaming and absent-minded for the whole way. I would only be aroused when I had to raise my hand to lift the latch of my door. On such occasions, I have not been able to recall a single step of my walk. I have thought that perhaps my body would find its way home even if its master (my conscious mind) were to forsake it, just as the hand finds its way to the mouth without conscious assistance.

Several times, when a visitor chanced to stay into the evening, and it proved to be a dark night, I was obliged to lead him to the cart-path at the rear of my house. Then I had to point out to him the direction he was to follow. In keeping to that path, he was to be guided more by his feet than by his eyes.

One very dark night, I directed two young men on their way after they had been fishing in the pond. They lived about a mile away through the woods and were quite used to the route. A day or two later, one of them told me that they had wandered about for the greater part of the night, very close to their own homes (“premises”), and did not get home until toward morning. By that 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 people 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 people who live in the outskirts of town, having come to town a-shopping in their wagons, have been obliged to stay overnight because they couldn’t find their way home in the dark. Gentlemen and ladies making a social call have gone half a mile out of their way, feeling for the sidewalk only with their feet, and not knowing when they had made a wrong turn.

The Value of Being Lost

It is a surprising and memorable, as well as valuable experience, to be lost in the woods at any time. Often in a snowstorm, even by day, a person 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 traveled that road a thousand times, he cannot recognize a single feature in it. It is as strange to him as if it were a road in Siberia. By night, of course, the confusion (“perplexity”) is infinitely greater.

In our most trivial walks, we are constantly, though unconsciously, steering like pilots by certain well-known beacons and headlands (landmarks). If we go beyond our usual course, we still carry in our minds the direction (“bearing”) of some neighboring cape or point of reference. It is not until we are completely lost, or turned around—for a person needs only to be turned around once with his eyes shut in this world to become lost—that we truly begin to appreciate the vastness and strangeness of Nature.

Every person has to learn the points of the compass again as often as he awakes, whether from sleep or from any period of mental distraction (“abstraction”). Not until we are lost, in other words, not until we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations to the universe and to ourselves.

My Arrest and a Night in Jail

One afternoon, near the end of my first summer at Walden, I went to the village to get a shoe from the cobbler’s. I was seized and put into jail. This happened because, as I have related elsewhere, I did not pay a tax to, or recognize the authority of, the state. This was a state which, in my view, supported slavery by buying and selling men, women, and children like cattle at the very door of its senate-house.

I had gone down to the woods for other purposes than to protest the government. But, wherever a person goes, other people will pursue and “paw” him with their “dirty institutions” (their flawed societal structures and laws). And, if they can, they will force him to belong to their “desperate odd-fellow society” (a society that often seems misguided and desperate in its attempts to maintain conformity).

It is true, I might have resisted arrest forcibly, with more or less effect. I might have run “amok” against society. But I preferred that society should run “amok” against me, as it seemed to be the desperate party in this situation.

However, I was released the next day. I obtained my mended shoe and returned to the woods in time to get my dinner of huckleberries on Fair Haven Hill. I was never bothered (“molested”) by any person except by those who represented the state.

I had no lock or bolt on my door, only for the desk which held my papers. I didn’t even have a nail to put over my latch or windows to secure them. I never fastened my door, night or day, even though I was sometimes to be absent for several days. This was true even when, the next fall, I spent two weeks (“a fortnight”) in the woods of Maine. And yet, my house was more respected than if it had been surrounded by a line (“file”) of soldiers.

The tired walker (“rambler”) could rest and warm himself by my fire. The literary person could amuse himself with the few books on my table. Or the curious person, by opening my closet door, could 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 open arrangements. I never missed anything from my house but one small book, a volume of Homer. It was perhaps “improperly gilded” (meaning its value was superficial, or it was not a truly valuable edition to him), and I trust that some “soldier of our camp” (a fellow seeker of simple truths) has found it by this time.

I am convinced that if all people were to live as simply as I then did, thieving and robbery would be unknown. These crimes take place only in communities where some have accumulated more than is sufficient for their needs, while others do not have enough. If such simplicity prevailed, even “the Pope’s Homers” (valuable and rare editions of Homer’s works, hoarded by the wealthy or powerful) would soon get properly distributed among those who could truly appreciate them.

As an old Latin poet said: “Nec bella fuerunt, Faginus astabat dum scyphus ante dapes.” Which means: “Nor did wars trouble men, / When only beechen (simple wooden) bowls were in request at their meals.” (Simple living promotes peace.)

And as Confucius taught about governance: “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.” (Good leadership inspires virtue, making force unnecessary.)

The Ponds

Escaping Society for Nature’s Flavors

Sometimes, after I had had too much (“a surfeit”) of human society and gossip, and had perhaps “worn out” all my village friends with my company, I would ramble still farther westward than where I usually live. I would go into yet more unfrequented parts of the town, “to fresh woods and pastures new,” as the poet John Milton wrote. Or, while the sun was setting, I would make my supper of huckleberries and blueberries on Fair Haven Hill, and gather enough (“laid up a store”) for several days.

The true flavor of these fruits is not yielded to the person who buys them in the market, nor even to the farmer who raises them for sale. There is only one way to obtain that true flavor, yet few people take that way: you must pick them yourself in the wild. If you would truly know the flavor of huckleberries, ask the cow-boy who grazes cattle among them, or ask the partridge that feeds on them. It is a common (“vulgar”) error to suppose that you have tasted huckleberries if you have never plucked them fresh from the bush.

A truly fresh huckleberry, with all its wild flavor, never reaches Boston. Such berries have not been known there since the time huckleberries actually grew on Boston’s own three hills (in its early, less developed days). The ambrosial (divinely fragrant and delicious) and essential part of the fruit is lost along with the delicate bloom (the powdery coating on the berry) which is rubbed off in the market cart. Once that happens, they become mere “provender”—basic, unexciting food, like animal fodder. As long as Eternal Justice reigns, not one innocent huckleberry can be transported from the country’s hills to the city markets with its perfect, wild essence intact.

Companionship and Echoes on the Pond

Occasionally, after my hoeing was done for the day, I would join some impatient companion who had been fishing on the pond since morning. He would have been sitting as silent and motionless as a duck or a floating leaf. After practicing various kinds of “philosophy” (which might mean deep thought, or perhaps just patient waiting and observation), he had commonly concluded by the time I arrived that he belonged to the ancient sect of Cœnobites. (Cœnobites were monks who lived in a community, but Thoreau uses the term humorously here to describe these solitary, contemplative fishermen.)

There was one older man, an excellent fisherman and skilled in all kinds of woodcraft. He was pleased to look upon my house as a building erected for the convenience of fishermen. I was equally pleased when he sat in my doorway to arrange his fishing lines. Once in a while, we sat together on the pond in my boat, he at one end and I at the other. 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 own philosophy. Our interaction (“intercourse”) was thus altogether one of unbroken harmony, far more pleasing to remember than if it had been carried on by much speech.

When, as was commonly the case, I had no one to share my thoughts with (“commune with”), I used to raise echoes by striking the side of my boat with a paddle. This would fill the surrounding woods with circling and expanding (“dilating”) sound. I would stir up the echoes as the keeper of a menagerie (a collection of wild animals) might stir up his beasts, until I elicited a “growl” (a deep, resonant echo) from every wooded valley and hillside.

Evening Flute and Night Fishing

In warm evenings, I frequently sat in my boat playing the flute. I saw the perch (a type of fish), which I seemed to have charmed with the music, hovering around me. I watched the moon traveling over the ribbed sandy bottom of the pond, which was scattered (“strewn”) with the wrecks of the forest—sunken branches and logs.

Formerly, I had come to this pond adventurously, from time to time, on dark summer nights with a companion. We would make a fire close to the water’s edge, which we thought attracted the fish. We caught pouts (a type of small catfish) with a bunch of worms strung on a thread. When we were done, far into the night, we would throw the burning firebrands high into the air like skyrockets. Coming down into the pond, they were extinguished (“quenched”) with a loud hissing sound, and we were suddenly left groping in total darkness. Through this darkness, whistling a tune, we would take our way back to the “haunts of men” (the village). But now, I had made my home by the shore of the pond.

Sometimes, after staying in a village parlor until the family had all gone to bed, I have returned to the woods. Partly with a view to the next day’s dinner, I would spend the hours of midnight fishing from a boat by moonlight. I would be serenaded by owls and foxes, and would hear, from time to time, the creaking note of some unknown bird close at hand.

These experiences were very memorable and valuable to me. I would be anchored in forty feet of water, and perhaps twenty or thirty rods (about 330 to 495 feet, or 100 to 150 meters) from the shore. I was sometimes surrounded by thousands of small perch and shiners, their tails dimpling the surface of the water in the moonlight. I felt I was communicating by a long flaxen fishing line with mysterious nocturnal fishes which had their dwelling forty feet below. Or sometimes I would be dragging sixty feet of line about the pond as I drifted in the gentle night breeze. Now and then, I would feel a slight vibration along the line, indicating some life prowling about its extremity—some creature with a dull, uncertain, blundering purpose down there, slow to make up its mind. At length, you slowly raise the line, pulling hand over hand, and up comes some horned pout, squeaking and squirming into the upper air.

It was very strange (“queer”), especially on dark nights, when your thoughts had wandered to vast and cosmic (“cosmogonal”) themes in other spheres, to suddenly feel this faint jerk on the line. This jerk would interrupt your dreams and link you to Nature again in a very tangible way. It seemed as if I might next cast my line upward into the air, as well as downward into this watery element which was scarcely more dense than the air above. Thus, I felt I caught “two fishes,” as it were, with one hook: one literal fish from the water, and one metaphorical “fish” of thought or connection from the “sky” of my reflections.

Walden’s Humble Beauty, Depth, and Purity

The scenery of Walden Pond is on a humble scale. Though it is very beautiful, it does not approach true grandeur, nor can it much concern someone who has not long frequented it or lived by its shore. Yet, this pond is so remarkable for its depth and purity that it deserves a particular description.

It is a clear and deep green well of water, about half a mile long and a mile and three-quarters in circumference. It contains about sixty-one and a half acres. It is a perennial spring (meaning it flows year-round) in the midst of pine and oak woods. It has no visible inlet or outlet, except by the clouds (rain and snow) and evaporation. The surrounding hills rise abruptly from the water to the height of forty to eighty feet. However, on the southeast and east sides, they reach about one hundred and one hundred and fifty feet respectively, within a quarter and a third of a mile from the pond. These hills are exclusively woodland.

The Colors of Walden

All our Concord waters have at least two colors. One color is seen when viewed from a distance, and another, more true (“proper”) color is seen when viewed close at hand. The first color depends more on the light and follows the color of the sky. In clear weather during the summer, they appear blue at a little distance, especially if the water is agitated by wind. At a great distance, all waters appear alike. In stormy weather, they are sometimes of a dark slate color. The sea, however, is said to be blue one day and green another without any noticeable (“perceptible”) change in the atmosphere. I have seen our Concord River, when the landscape was covered with snow, appear almost as green as grass where the water and ice met. Some people consider blue “to be the color of pure water, whether it is liquid or solid.”

But, looking directly down into our waters from a boat, they are seen to be of very different colors. Walden Pond is blue at one time and green at another, even when viewed from the same point. Lying between the earth and the heavens, it partakes of the color of both. Viewed from a hilltop, it reflects the color of the sky. But when viewed near at hand, it has a yellowish tint next to the shore where you can see the sand. This changes to a light green, which gradually deepens to a uniform dark green in the main body of the pond. In some lights, even when viewed from a hilltop, it is of a vivid green next the shore. Some have attributed this to the reflection of the green foliage (“verdure”) of the surrounding trees. But it is equally green there against the sandy bank of the railroad, and also in the spring, before the leaves have expanded. So, it may simply be the result of the prevailing blue color of deep water mixed with the yellow of the sand. This is the color of its “iris” (the colored edge of the pond, like the iris of an eye).

This shallow edge is also the portion where, in the spring, the ice melts first. The ice is warmed by the heat of the sun reflected from the bottom of the pond, and also by warmth transmitted through the earth. This first melting forms a narrow canal of open water around the still-frozen middle of the pond.

Like the rest of our waters, when Walden is much agitated by wind in clear weather, the surface of the waves may reflect the sky at just the right angle, or perhaps because there is more light mixed with it, it appears at a little distance to be of a darker blue than the sky itself. At such a time, being on its surface and looking with “divided vision”—so as to see both the water and its reflection—I have perceived (“discerned”) a matchless and indescribable light blue. This blue is like the color of “watered” or changeable silks, or the glint on sword blades. It is more intensely sky-blue (“cerulean”) than the sky itself. This light blue alternates with the original dark green color on the opposite sides of the waves (the dark green then appearing somewhat muddy in comparison).

It is a glassy (“vitreous”), greenish-blue, as I remember it. It’s like those patches of the winter sky seen through openings (“vistas”) in the clouds in the west before sundown. Yet, a single glass of Walden’s water held up to the light is as colorless as an equal quantity of air. It is well known that a large plate of glass will have a green tint, owing, as the makers say, to its “body” (its thickness and composition). But a small piece of the same glass will be colorless. I have never proved how large a body of Walden water would be required to reflect a green tint on its own.

The water of our Concord River is black or a very dark brown when one looks directly down into it. Like the water of most ponds, it gives the body of a person bathing in it a yellowish tinge. But the water of Walden Pond is of such crystalline purity that the body of a bather appears to be of an alabaster whiteness. This whiteness is even more unnatural-looking than the yellowish tinge from other waters. Because the limbs are also magnified and distorted by the clear water, it produces a striking (“monstrous”) effect, making fitting studies for an artist like Michelangelo.

Remarkable Transparency

The water of Walden Pond is so transparent that the bottom can easily be seen at a depth of twenty-five or thirty feet. Paddling over it in a boat, you may see, many feet beneath the surface, schools of perch and shiners. These fish may be only an inch long, yet the perch are easily distinguished by their dark vertical stripes (“transverse bars”). You might think that they must be very frugal (“ascetic”) fish to find enough to eat (“a subsistence”) there in that clear water.

Once, in the winter, many years ago, when I had been cutting holes through the ice in order to catch pickerel, as I stepped ashore I tossed my axe back onto the ice. But, as if some evil spirit (“evil genius”) had directed it, the axe slid four or five rods (about 66 to 82 feet, or 20 to 25 meters) and went directly into one of the holes I had cut. The water there was twenty-five feet deep.

Out of curiosity, I lay down on the ice and looked through the hole until I saw the axe a little to one side. It was standing on its head, with its handle (“helve”) erect and gently swaying to and fro with the pulse of the pond. And there it might have stood erect and swaying until, in the course of time, the handle rotted off, if I had not disturbed it. Making another hole in the ice directly over it with an ice chisel which I had, and cutting down the longest birch tree which I could find in the neighborhood with my knife, I made a slip-noose. I attached this noose to the end of the long birch pole and, letting it down carefully, passed it over the knob of the axe handle. I then drew the noose tight by pulling a line attached to it along the birch pole, and so pulled the axe out again.

The Pond’s Shore and Vegetation

The shore of Walden Pond is composed of a belt of smooth, rounded, white stones, like paving stones. There are one or two short sand beaches as well. The shore is so steep that in many places a single leap will carry you into water over your head. And if it were not for the pond’s remarkable transparency, that would be the last you would see of its bottom until it rose up again on the opposite side. Some people think the pond is bottomless.

It is nowhere muddy. A casual observer would say that there were no weeds at all in it. And of noticeable plants—except in the little meadows recently overflowed by rising water, which do not properly belong to the pond itself—a closer look (“scrutiny”) does not detect a flag plant or a bulrush, nor even a lily, either yellow or white. One finds only a few small heart-leaved plants (“heart-leaves”), some pondweeds (“potamogetons”), and perhaps a water-shield (“water-target”) or two. All of these, however, a bather might not even perceive. These plants are as clean and bright as the clear water they grow in. The stones extend a rod or two (about 11 to 22 feet, or 3 to 7 meters) into the water, and then the bottom is pure sand, except in the deepest parts. In the deepest parts, there is usually a little sediment, probably from the decay of leaves which have been blown (“wafted”) onto it over so many successive falls. A bright green weed is sometimes brought up on anchors even in midwinter from these depths.

A Unique Gem of Nature

We have one other pond nearby that is just like this one: White Pond in Nine Acre Corner, about two and a half miles to the west. But, though I am acquainted with most of the ponds within a dozen miles of this center, I do not know a third pond of this pure and well-like character.

Successive nations of people have perhaps drunk at Walden Pond, admired it, and tried to measure its depth (“fathomed it”), and then have passed away. And still, its water is as green and as clear (“pellucid”) as ever. It is not an intermittent spring (one that dries up sometimes); it is constant!

Perhaps on that spring morning when Adam and Eve were driven out of Eden, Walden Pond was already in existence. Even then, perhaps its ice was breaking up in a gentle spring rain, accompanied by mist and a southerly wind. Perhaps it was covered with countless (“myriads of”) ducks and geese, which had not yet heard of mankind’s “fall” from grace—a time when such pure lakes were all they needed. Even then, the pond had probably commenced its cycles of rising and falling water levels. It had clarified its waters and colored them with the beautiful hues they now wear. It had obtained a “patent from heaven” (a divine charter) to be the only Walden Pond in the world and a distiller of heavenly (“celestial”) dews.

Who knows in how many unremembered nations’ literatures this pond has been their Castalian Fountain? (The Castalian Fountain at Delphi in ancient Greece was sacred to the Muses and was considered a source of poetic inspiration.) Or what nymphs (nature spirits) presided over it in the mythical Golden Age? It is a gem of the first water (highest quality) which the town of Concord wears in her crown (“coronet”).

An Ancient Path

Yet perhaps the first people who came to this “well” (the pond) have left some trace of their footsteps. I have been surprised to detect a narrow, shelf-like path encircling the pond in the steep hillside. This path is visible even where a thick wood has just been cut down on the shore. It alternately rises and falls, approaching and receding from the water’s edge. It is probably as old as the human race in this area, worn by the feet of aboriginal hunters. It is still, from time to time, unknowingly (“unwittingly”) trodden by the present occupants of the land.

This path is particularly distinct to someone standing on the middle of the pond in winter, just after a light snow has fallen. It then appears as a clear, undulating white line, not hidden (“unobscured”) by weeds and twigs. It is very obvious from a quarter of a mile off in many places where, in summer, it is hardly distinguishable even close at hand. The snow reprints the path, as it were, in clear white type, like a high-relief sculpture (“alto-relievo”). The ornamented grounds of an elegant house (“villa”) which may one day be built here might still preserve some trace of this ancient pathway.

The Pond’s Fluctuations

Walden Pond rises and falls, but whether it does so regularly or not, and within what period of time, nobody truly knows, though, as usual, many people pretend to know. It is commonly higher in the winter and lower in the summer, though this does not always correspond to the general wetness or dryness of the seasons. I can remember when it was a foot or two lower, and also when it was at least five feet higher, than when I lived by its shore.

There is a narrow sandbar running into the pond, with very deep water on one side. On this sandbar, I helped boil a kettle of chowder some six rods (about 100 feet or 30 meters) from the main shore, around the year 1824. It has not been possible to do that for the past twenty-five years because the water has been too high. On the other hand, my friends used to listen with disbelief (“incredulity”) when I told them that, a few years later, I was accustomed to fish from a boat in a secluded cove in the woods. This cove was fifteen rods (about 247 feet or 75 meters) from the only shore they knew, and the place where I fished was long since converted into a meadow by the falling water levels.

But the pond has risen steadily for the past two years. Now, in the summer of 1852, it is just five feet higher than when I lived there, or as high as it was thirty years ago. Fishing goes on again in the area that was recently a meadow. This makes a difference in water level, at the outside, of six or seven feet. And yet, the amount of water drained (“shed”) by the surrounding hills is insignificant. This overflow and fluctuation must be due to causes which affect the deep underground springs that feed the pond. This same summer of 1852, the pond has begun to fall again. It is remarkable that this fluctuation, whether it is periodical or not, appears to require many years for its full cycle. I have observed one complete rise and a part of two falls in the water level. I expect that a dozen or fifteen years from now, the water will again be as low as I have ever known it.

Flint’s Pond, a mile to the eastward—allowing for the disturbance caused by its own inlets and outlets—and the smaller intermediate ponds also, seem to “sympathize” with Walden Pond; they fluctuate in harmony with it. They recently attained their greatest height at the same time as Walden. The same is true, as far as my observation goes, of White Pond.

The Purpose of the Fluctuations

This rise and fall of Walden’s water level at long intervals serves this useful purpose, at least: the water standing at this great height for a year or more, though it makes it difficult to walk around the pond, kills the shrubs and trees which have sprung up around its edge since the last rise. These include pitch pines, birches, alders, aspens, and others. When the water falls again, it leaves an unobstructed shore. For, unlike many ponds and all waters which are subject to a daily tide, Walden’s shore is cleanest when the water is lowest.

On the side of the pond next to my house, a row of pitch pines fifteen feet high has been killed and tipped over as if by a lever due to a period of high water. Thus, a stop was put to their encroachment on the pond’s edge. Their size indicates how many years have elapsed since the water last rose to this height.

By this fluctuation, the pond asserts its rightful claim (“title”) to a clear shore. The shore is thus kept “shorn” (trimmed and clear), and the trees cannot hold it by right of mere possession or continuous growth. These are the lips of the lake on which no beard grows. It licks its chaps from time to time. (This is a poetic description of the clean, fluctuating shoreline, kept clear by the rising and falling water.)

When the water is at its height, the alders, willows, and maples along the edge send forth a mass of fibrous red roots several feet long from all sides of their stems into the water. These roots extend up to a height of three or four feet from the ground, in an effort by the plants to maintain themselves in the high water. I have also known the high-bush blueberry bushes around the shore, which commonly produce no fruit in drier times, to bear an abundant crop under these circumstances of high water.

The Legend of Walden’s Origin

Some people have been puzzled to explain how the shore of Walden Pond became so regularly paved with smooth stones. My townsmen have all heard the tradition. The oldest people tell me that they heard it in their youth: that anciently, the Native Americans were holding a powwow (a great gathering or ceremony) upon a hill here. This hill, the story goes, rose as high into the heavens as the pond now sinks deep into the earth. During their ceremony, they used much profanity, as the story goes—though Thoreau adds that this particular vice (profanity) is one of which the Native Americans were never actually guilty. And while they were thus engaged, the hill shook and suddenly sank into the earth. Only one old Native American woman (“squaw,” an outdated and now often offensive term), named Walden, escaped. And from her, the pond was named. It has been guessed (“conjectured”) that when the hill shook, these stones rolled down its sides and became the present shore of the pond.

Baker Farm

Wandering to Nature’s Shrines

Sometimes I wandered to pine groves. These groves stood like temples, or like fleets of ships at sea with all their sails set (“full-rigged”). Their boughs were wavy and seemed to ripple with light. They were so soft, green, and shady that ancient Druids (priests of ancient Celtic religion) would have abandoned their sacred oak trees to worship in them.

At other times, I went to the cedar wood beyond Flint’s Pond. There, the trees were covered with frosty-looking (“hoary”) blue berries. They towered (“spiring”) higher and higher, fit to stand before Valhalla (the majestic hall of heroes in Norse mythology). The creeping juniper covered the ground with wreaths full of fruit.

Or I would go to swamps where the usnea lichen hung in festive loops (“festoons”) from the black spruce trees. Toadstools, looking like round tables for the swamp gods, covered the ground. More beautiful fungi adorned the tree stumps, resembling butterflies or shells, or what he calls “vegetable winkles” (like colorful sea snails, but made of plant matter). In these swamps, the swamp pink and dogwood grew. The red alder-berry glowed like the eyes of mischievous imps. The waxwork vine (American bittersweet) would groove into and even crush the hardest woods with its tight, twisting folds. The wild holly berries, with their beauty, would make the beholder forget his ordinary home. He would be dazzled and tempted by nameless other wild, “forbidden” fruits, too perfectly fair for ordinary mortal taste.

Instead of calling on some scholar for intellectual stimulation, I paid many visits to particular trees. These were trees of kinds that are rare in this neighborhood, often standing far away in the middle of some pasture, or in the depths of a wood or swamp, or on a hilltop. Some of these special trees included:

• The black birch, of which we have some handsome specimens two feet in diameter.
• Its cousin, the yellow birch, with its loose, golden, papery bark (“vest”), perfumed like the black birch.
• The beech, which has so neat a trunk (“bole”) and is beautifully painted with lichens, perfect in all its details. Except for scattered specimens, I know of only one small grove of sizeable beech trees left in the township. Some people suppose this grove was planted by pigeons that were once baited with beech nuts nearby. It is worthwhile to see the silver grain of the wood sparkle when you split it.
• The basswood (or linden tree).
• The hornbeam.
• The Celtis occidentalis, or false elm (also known as hackberry), of which we have but one well-grown specimen.
• Some taller pine tree suitable for a ship’s mast, a “shingle tree” (perhaps the Atlantic white cedar, used for shingles), or a more perfect hemlock than usual, standing like a pagoda in the midst of the woods.
• And I could mention many others.

These were the natural shrines I visited in both summer and winter.

Mirages of Light and Perception

Once, it happened that I stood in the very end-support (“abutment”) of a rainbow’s arch. The rainbow filled the lower layer (“stratum”) of the atmosphere, coloring (“tinging”) the grass and leaves around me. It was dazzling, as if I were looking through colored crystal. It was like a lake of rainbow light, in which, for a short while, I felt I lived like a dolphin, swimming in color. If it had lasted longer, it might have colored my jobs (“employments”) and my whole life.

As I walked on the railroad causeway (the raised bed of the railway), I used to wonder at the halo of light that sometimes appeared around my shadow. I would like to imagine (“fain fancy”) myself as one of the “elect” (chosen or special people). One person who visited me declared that the shadows of some Irishmen he had seen before him had no such halo about them. He claimed that it was only “natives” (perhaps meaning native-born Americans of English descent, reflecting a prejudice of the time) that were so distinguished by this phenomenon.

Benvenuto Cellini, the Renaissance artist, tells us in his memoirs that after a certain terrible dream or vision he had while imprisoned in the castle of St. Angelo, a brilliant (“resplendent”) light appeared over the shadow of his head at morning and evening. This happened whether he was in Italy or France, and it was particularly noticeable (“conspicuous”) when the grass was moist with dew. This was probably the same natural phenomenon to which I have referred (likely an optical effect known as a “glory” or “Brocken spectre”). It is especially observed in the morning, but also at other times, and even by moonlight. Though it is a constant phenomenon, it is not commonly noticed. In the case of an excitable imagination like Cellini’s, it would be enough basis for superstition. Besides, Cellini tells us that he showed it to very few people.

But are they not indeed distinguished who are simply conscious that they are regarded or noticed at all, perhaps by a higher power or by the subtle workings of nature?

A Fishing Trip Interrupted

I set out one afternoon to go fishing at Fair Haven pond, walking through the woods. I hoped to supplement (“eke out”) my scanty diet of vegetables. My way led through Pleasant Meadow, which is part of Baker Farm. This is a peaceful retreat of which a poet has since sung, beginning with these lines:

“Thy entry is a pleasant field, Which some mossy fruit trees yield Partly to a ruddy brook, By gliding musquash (muskrat) undertook, And mercurial trout, Darting about.”

I had thought of living at Pleasant Meadow before I went to Walden Pond. I had playfully “hooked” (stolen) apples there, leaped over the brook, and scared the muskrats and the trout.

It was one of those afternoons which seem indefinitely long before you, an afternoon in which many events may happen, representing a large portion of our natural life. This was true even though it was already half spent when I started my walk. Along the way, a shower came up, which forced me to stand for half an hour under a pine tree. I piled boughs over my head for cover and used my handkerchief as a sort of shed.

When at length I had made one cast with my fishing line over the pickerel-weed, standing up to my middle in water, I found myself suddenly in the shadow of a large cloud. The thunder began to rumble with such emphasis that I could do no more than listen to it. The gods must be proud, I thought, to use such forked flashes of lightning to chase away (“rout”) a poor, unarmed fisherman. So I hurried (“made haste”) for shelter to the nearest hut. It stood half a mile from any road, but was so much nearer to the pond, and had long been uninhabited.

As a poem fancies: “And here a poet builded, In the completed years, For behold a trivial cabin That to destruction steers.” (Meaning, a poet once built this simple cabin in past years, but now it is falling apart.)

Meeting John Field and His Family

So the Muse (the inspiration for poetry) fables. But in that hut, as I found, now lived John Field, an Irishman, and his wife, and several children. These ranged from the broad-faced boy who assisted his father at his work (and who now came running by his father’s side from the bog to escape the rain), to the wrinkled, wise-looking (“sibyl-like”), “cone-headed” infant. (The term “cone-headed” was sometimes used in the 19th century to describe certain head shapes, often in a way that carried negative ethnic or class connotations; Thoreau likely uses it descriptively, though modern readers might find it jarring. The infant, despite its humble surroundings, is portrayed with a certain dignity.) This infant sat upon its father’s knee as if it were in the palaces of nobles. It looked out from its home in the midst of wetness and hunger inquisitively upon me, the stranger. It had the privilege of infancy, not knowing that it was John Field’s poor, starving (“starveling”) child (“brat”), instead of being the last of a noble line and the hope and center of attention (“cynosure”) of the world.

There we sat together under that part of the roof which leaked the least, while it showered and thundered outside. I had sat in that same hut many times in years past, before the ship was built that floated this family to America.

John Field was plainly an honest, hard-working man, but also “shiftless” (inefficient, lacking in practical management skills or ambition to improve his lot by Thoreau’s standards). His wife, too, was brave to cook so many successive dinners in the recesses of that tall, old-fashioned stove. She had a round, greasy face and a bare breast (likely a sign of her poverty and the demands of nursing). She was still thinking that she might improve her condition one day. She had the never-absent mop in one hand, and yet the effects of her cleaning were hardly visible anywhere.

The chickens, which had also taken shelter in the hut from the rain, stalked about the room like members of the family. They seemed too “humanized,” I thought, to roast well (meaning, they were too much like pets or companions to be considered mere food). They stood and looked me in the eye or pecked at my shoe significantly.

Meanwhile, my host, John Field, told me his story. He told me how hard he worked “bogging” (digging peat from a bog, or clearing boggy land) for a neighboring farmer. He was turning up a meadow with a spade or a bog hoe at the rate of ten dollars an acre, plus the use of the cleared land with manure for one year. His little broad-faced son worked cheerfully at his father’s side all the while, not knowing how poor a bargain his father had made.

My Advice to John Field

I tried to help him with my experience. I told him that he was one of my nearest neighbors and that I too, who came fishing here and perhaps looked like a loafer, was getting my living in a similar independent way. I told him that I lived in a tight, light, and clean house, which had hardly cost more than the annual rent he probably paid for such a ruinous place as his. I explained how, if he chose, he might in a month or two build a “palace” of his own (a simple but decent dwelling).

I told him that I did not use tea, nor coffee, nor butter, nor milk, nor fresh meat, and so I did not have to work hard to get them. Again, because I did not work overly hard physically, I did not have to eat heavily, and my food cost me very little (“but a trifle”). But since he began his day with tea, coffee, butter, milk, and beef, he had to work hard to pay for them. And when he had worked hard, he had to eat heavily again to repair the waste of his system. So, his situation was “as broad as it was long” (meaning he made no real net gain from all his effort). Indeed, it was perhaps broader than it was long, for he was discontented and wasted his life in this cycle, into the bargain. And yet, he had considered it a gain in coming to America that here you could get tea, coffee, and meat every day. (Thoreau implies these are not true measures of a better life.)

But, I suggested, the only true America is that country where you are at liberty to pursue a way of life that may enable you to do without these expensive conventional “necessities.” It’s a place where the state does not try to compel you to support slavery and war and other unnecessary (“superfluous”) expenses which directly or indirectly result from the use of such things (like sugar and cotton from slave labor, or taxes for wars). For I purposely talked to him as if he were a philosopher, or desired to be one.

I should be glad if all the meadows on the earth were left in a wild state, if that were the consequence of people beginning to redeem themselves and live more simply. A person will not need to study history to find out what is best for his own culture if he lives in tune with nature and his own needs.

But alas! The culture of an Irishman (like John Field, bound by tradition and difficult circumstances) is an enterprise to be undertaken with a sort of “moral bog hoe.” (Meaning, changing deeply ingrained habits and overcoming systemic poverty requires immense, difficult, and perhaps thankless effort, like trying to cultivate a bog.) I told him that because he worked so hard at bogging, he required thick boots and stout clothing, which yet were soon soiled and worn out. But I, on the other hand, wore light shoes and thin clothing, which cost not half so much (though he might think that I was dressed like a gentleman, which, however, was not the case). And in an hour or two, without hard labor, but as a form of recreation, I could, if I wished, catch as many fish as I should want for two days, or earn enough money to support me for a week. If he and his family would live simply, they might all go huckleberrying in the summer for their amusement and sustenance.

John heaved a sigh at this, and his wife stared with her arms akimbo (hands on hips). Both appeared to be wondering if they had enough capital (money or resources) to begin such a course of life, or enough arithmetic (skill in calculation and planning) to carry it through. It was like “sailing by dead reckoning” (navigating by estimation without clear maps or instruments) for them. They did not see clearly how to reach their desired destination (“make their port”) by such a simple path. Therefore, I suppose they still take life bravely, after their own fashion, facing it directly (“face to face”), fighting it “tooth and nail” (with all their might). They do this not having the skill to split life’s massive problems (“columns”) with any fine, precise “entering wedge,” and to overcome them in detail by systematic planning. They think they must deal with life roughly, as one might handle a thistle. But they fight at an overwhelming disadvantage—John Field, alas, living without “arithmetic” (practical foresight and management), and therefore failing to improve his lot.

A Drink from the Well

“Do you ever fish?” I asked. “Oh yes,” he replied, “I catch a mess (a good quantity) of them now and then when I am idle (‘lying by’); good perch I catch.” “What’s your bait?” I asked. “I catch shiners with fish-worms, and then I bait the perch with the shiners.” “You’d better go now, John,” said his wife, her face glistening and hopeful (perhaps hoping he would catch dinner, or find some respite). But John hesitated (“demurred”).

The shower was now over, and a rainbow above the eastern woods promised a fair evening; so I took my departure. When I had gotten outside, I asked for a drink of water. I was hoping to get a sight of the bottom of their well, to complete my “survey” of their premises (partly out of curiosity, partly to understand their resources). But there, alas, were only shallows and quicksands in the well. The rope was broken, and the bucket was irrecoverable at the bottom.

Meanwhile, after some consultation and long delay, the “right culinary vessel” (a cup or dipper) was selected. Water was “seemingly distilled” (perhaps just carefully fetched and presented as best they could). It was then passed out to me, the thirsty one—not yet allowed to cool, nor allowed to settle so any sediment could sink.

“Such gruel (thin, watery sustenance) sustains life here,” I thought. So, shutting my eyes, and excluding any visible particles (“motes”) by a “skilfully directed under-current” (perhaps by drinking carefully from the bottom or side of the cup to avoid surface debris), I drank to their genuine hospitality the heartiest drink I could. I am not squeamish in such cases when good manners are concerned.

The Message of the “Good Genius”

As I was leaving the Irishman’s roof after the rain, bending my steps again toward the pond, my haste to catch pickerel—wading in retired meadows, in swamps (“sloughs”) and bog-holes, in forlorn and savage places—appeared for an instant trivial to me, someone who had been sent to school and college.

But as I ran down the hill toward the reddening west, with the rainbow over my shoulder, and some faint tinkling sounds borne to my ear through the cleansed air from some unknown quarter, my Good Genius (my inner guiding spirit or intuition) seemed to say to me:

• “Go fish and hunt far and wide, day by day—farther and wider.
• Rest yourself by many brooks and hearth-sides without misgiving or worry.
• Remember your Creator in the days of your youth.
• Rise free from care before the dawn, and seek adventures.
• Let noon find you by other lakes, and let the night overtake you everywhere at home—feel at home wherever you are in nature.
• There are no larger fields than these natural ones, no worthier games than may here be played.”

“Grow wild according to your nature, like these sedges and brakes (ferns), which will never become cultivated English hay. Let the thunder rumble; what if it threatens ruin to farmers’ crops? That is not its errand or message to you. Take shelter under the cloud itself, while other people flee to their carts and sheds. Let not ‘to get a living’ be your trade, but let it be your sport. Enjoy the land, but do not feel you must own it. Through want of enterprise and faith, many people are where they are today—stuck in routines of buying and selling, and spending their lives like serfs (bound laborers).”

O Baker Farm!

(Thoreau then includes or writes several poetic fragments that evoke the spirit of a place like Baker Farm):

“Landscape where the richest element Is a little sunshine innocent.”

“No one runs to revel (celebrate wildly) On thy rail-fenced lea (your grassy meadow).”

“Debate with no man hast thou, With questions art never perplexed, As tame at the first sight as now, In thy plain russet (reddish-brown) gabardine (coarse cloak) dressed.” (This describes the simple, unpretentious, unquestioning nature of the place or perhaps a person like John Field.)

“Come ye who love, And ye who hate, Children of the Holy Dove (symbols of peace/religion), And Guy Faux of the state (symbol of rebellion), And hang conspiracies From the tough rafters of the trees!” (This last fragment is more enigmatic, perhaps a call for all types of people, even those with revolutionary thoughts, to find a connection or refuge in nature.)

Returning from Adventures

People often come tamely home at night only from the next field or street, where their familiar household echoes haunt them. Their life “pines” (weakens and languishes) because it breathes its own breath over and over again; there is stagnation. Their shadows in the morning and evening reach farther than their actual daily steps (meaning their influence or their unfulfilled potential extends beyond their limited physical movements, or they are larger in their dreams than in their actions). We should come home from far, from adventures, and perils, and discoveries every day, bringing new experience and character with us.

Before I had reached the pond after leaving the Fields’, some fresh impulse had brought John Field out too, with an altered mind. He had decided to let go of his “bogging” for the day before sunset and try fishing. But he, poor man, disturbed only a couple of fins while I was catching a fair string of fish. He said it was just his luck. But when we changed seats in the boat, our luck changed seats too. (Perhaps Thoreau then caught less, and Field caught more, or vice versa – the outcome is humorously ambiguous.)

Poor John Field! I trust he does not read this, unless he will improve by it. He was thinking to live by some “derivative old country mode” (an unthinking imitation of traditional ways from Ireland) in this primitive new country of America. He was trying to catch perch with shiners as bait (which is good bait sometimes, I allow). With his horizon all his own—living in a vast new land full of opportunity—yet he remained a poor man, seemingly born to be poor. He carried with him his inherited Irish poverty or poor way of life, his “Adam’s grandmother and boggy ways” (deeply ingrained, perhaps unhelpful, traditional habits that kept him stuck, like being mired in a bog). It seemed he was not to rise in this world, neither he nor his children (“posterity”), until their “wading, webbed, bog-trotting feet” could somehow get “talaria” (the winged sandals of the Roman god Mercury or the Greek god Hermes) attached to their heels—meaning, until they could somehow find a way to transcend their earth-bound, laborious condition and achieve a lighter, freer way of life.

Higher Laws

The Call of the Wild Within

As I was coming home through the woods one night with my string of fish, trailing my fishing pole, it was already quite dark. I caught a glimpse of a woodchuck stealing across my path. At that moment, I felt a strange thrill of savage delight. I was strongly tempted to seize the woodchuck and devour him raw. It wasn’t that I was hungry then, except for a hunger for that very wildness which the woodchuck represented.

Once or twice, however, while I lived at the pond, I found myself roaming (“ranging”) the woods like a half-starved hound. I felt a strange sense of abandonment to my primitive instincts, seeking some kind of wild game (“venison”) which I might devour. No piece of meat could have been too savage for me in those moods. The wildest scenes in nature had become unaccountably familiar and appealing to me.

I found in myself then, and I still find now, two strong instincts. One instinct is toward a higher, or what is called spiritual, life, as most people also feel. But there is another instinct toward a primitive, robust, and even savage life. I have reverence for both of these instincts. I love the wild no less than I love the good.

The wildness and adventure that are in fishing still recommended it to me as an activity. I like sometimes to take a firm, “rank” hold on life and spend my day more as the animals do, living by instinct and direct experience.

Perhaps I owe my closest acquaintance with Nature to this employment of fishing, and also to hunting, when I was quite young. These activities introduce us to, and keep us in, natural scenery at an early age. Otherwise, we might have little real connection with such environments at that time in our lives.

Fishermen, hunters, woodchoppers, and others who spend their lives in the fields and woods are, in a peculiar sense, a part of Nature themselves. They are often in a more favorable mood for truly observing her, during the intervals of their work, than even philosophers or poets, who often approach Nature with specific expectations or theories. Nature is not afraid to show her true self to these practical, outdoor people.

The traveler on the prairie naturally becomes a hunter. On the headwaters of the Missouri and Columbia rivers, he becomes a trapper. And at the Falls of St. Mary (Sault Ste. Marie, known for its fishing), he becomes a fisherman. The person who is only a traveler, passing through, learns things at second-hand and incompletely (“by the halves”). Such a person is a poor authority on the true nature of a place. We are most interested when science reports what those practical, outdoor people already know through their experience or instinct. For that combination of direct knowledge and reflective understanding alone constitutes true humanity, or a true account of human experience.

Yankee Amusements and the Scarcity of Game

They are mistaken who claim that the “Yankee” (a term for New Englanders) has few amusements, just because he does not have as many public holidays, and because men and boys do not play as many organized games as they do in England. For here in New England, the more primitive but solitary amusements of hunting, fishing, and the like have not yet given way to those more social and formal pastimes.

Almost every New England boy among my contemporaries shouldered a fowling piece (a type of shotgun for bird hunting) between the ages of ten and fourteen. And his hunting and fishing grounds were not limited like the private game preserves of an English nobleman. They were more boundless even than those of a native “savage” (a term Thoreau used for indigenous peoples living in a traditional way). No wonder, then, that the New England boy did not often stay to play games on the village common (the public green).

But a change is already taking place. This change is owing not to an increased sense of humanity or compassion for animals, but to an increased scarcity of game. For perhaps the hunter is, in some ways, the greatest friend of the animals hunted, not excepting even the Humane Society. (This is an ironic statement, suggesting that hunters, through their intimate knowledge and perhaps even a vested interest in maintaining game populations for future hunting, might have a different but still significant connection to animal welfare.)

Fishing, Fowling, and a Finer Study

Moreover, when I was at the pond, I sometimes wished to add fish to my diet (“fare”) for variety. I have actually fished from the same kind of necessity that the first, most primitive fishers did. Whatever humane arguments I might try to bring up (“conjure up”) against it felt artificial (“factitious”) and concerned my philosophy more than my actual feelings. I am speaking of fishing only now, for I had long felt differently about hunting birds (“fowling”). I had sold my gun before I went to live in the woods.

It is not that I am less humane than others, but I did not perceive that my feelings were much affected by fishing. I did not pity the fishes, nor the worms I used for bait. This lack of pity was a matter of habit.

As for fowling, during the last years that I carried a gun, my excuse was that I was studying ornithology (the study of birds). I claimed I sought only new or rare birds for scientific purposes. But I confess that I am now inclined to think that there is a finer way of studying ornithology than this. True study requires so much closer attention to the habits of the birds that, if for that reason only, I have been willing to stop using the gun.

Yet, notwithstanding the objection to hunting on the score of humanity, I am compelled to doubt if equally valuable sports (in terms of developing character and connecting with nature) are ever substituted for these activities of hunting and fishing. And when some of my friends have asked me anxiously about their boys, whether they should let them hunt, I have answered, yes. I remembered that hunting was one of the best parts of my own education. Make them hunters, I advised—though perhaps just sportsmen at first, if possible, and then mighty hunters at last. Let them develop to a point where they shall not find game large enough for them in this or any “vegetable wilderness” (meaning their quest will become larger, perhaps for spiritual or intellectual “game”). Let them become hunters as well as “fishers of men” (a Biblical allusion to becoming leaders or teachers who influence others for good).

Thus far, I am of the opinion of Chaucer’s Prioress (a character in The Canterbury Tales), who, as Chaucer wrote, “yave not of the text a pulled hen / That saith that hunters ben not holy men.” (Meaning, she didn’t care a bit for a plucked hen—a thing of no value—or for texts that said hunters are not holy men. She followed her own inclinations, which included a love for her hunting dogs.)

The Hunter Stage of Development

There is a period in the history of the individual, as there is in the history of the human race, when the hunters are the “best men,” as the Algonquin Native Americans called them. We cannot help but pity the boy who has never fired a gun. He is no more humane for his lack of experience, while his education in the ways of nature has been sadly neglected. This was my answer with respect to those youths who were strongly inclined (“bent on”) this pursuit of hunting, trusting that they would soon outgrow it and move on to other things.

No humane being, once past the thoughtless age of boyhood, will cruelly and without reason (“wantonly”) murder any creature which holds its life by the same right (“tenure”) that he does. The hare, in its moment of extreme danger, cries like a child. I warn you, mothers, that my sympathies do not always make the usual philanthropic distinctions. (My compassion extends in ways that might not align with conventional ideas of charity or kindness.)

Hunting and fishing are often the young man’s introduction to the forest, and to the most original and authentic part of himself. He goes there at first as a hunter and fisher. Eventually, if he has the seeds of a better, more thoughtful life in him, he distinguishes his proper objects of pursuit—perhaps as a poet or a naturalist—and leaves the gun and fish-pole behind. The great majority (“mass”) of men are still and always young in this respect; they remain in the hunter stage of development.

In some countries, a hunting parson (clergyman) is no uncommon sight. Such a person might make a good shepherd’s dog, useful for practical tasks, but he is far from being the Good Shepherd (a spiritual leader). I have been surprised to consider that the only obvious employment—except for wood-chopping, ice-cutting, or similar businesses—which ever, to my knowledge, kept any of my fellow-citizens (whether fathers or children of the town) at Walden Pond for a whole half-day, with just one exception, was fishing.

Commonly, they did not think that they were lucky, or well paid for their time, unless they got a long string of fish. This was true even though they had the opportunity of seeing the pond and experiencing its beauty all the while. They might go there a thousand times before the “sediment of fishing”—the mere desire to catch fish—would sink to the bottom of their minds and leave their purpose pure: to simply appreciate the pond itself. But no doubt such a clarifying process would be going on all the while, even if slowly.

The governor and his council faintly remember Walden Pond, for they went fishing there when they were boys. But now they are too old and dignified to go fishing, and so they know the pond no more, forever. Yet even they expect to go to heaven at last. If the legislature pays any attention to the pond, it is chiefly to regulate the number of hooks to be used there. But they know nothing about the “hook of hooks”—the true understanding and appreciation—with which to angle for the pond itself, metaphorically using the legislature itself as bait. Thus, even in so-called civilized communities, the developing individual (“embryo man”) still passes through the hunter stage of development.

A Growing Dislike for Fishing and Animal Food

I have found repeatedly, in recent years, that I cannot fish without falling a little in my own self-respect. I have tried it again and again. I have skill at it, and, like many of my fellows, a certain instinct for it, which revives from time to time. But always when I have finished, I feel that it would have been better if I had not fished. I think that I do not mistake my feeling. It is a faint intimation, a subtle feeling, yet so are the first streaks of morning—subtle but real, heralding a change.

There is unquestionably this fishing instinct in me, which belongs to the “lower orders of creation” (our more primitive, animal nature). Yet with every year, I am less a fisherman, though this is not necessarily because I have more humanity or even more wisdom. At present, I am no fisherman at all. But I can see that if I were to live in a true wilderness, I should again be tempted to become a fisher and hunter in earnest.

Besides, there is something essentially unclean about this diet of animal food, and all flesh. I began to see where true housework commences—the effort to keep things clean. I began to understand the origin of the endeavor, which costs so much time and energy, to wear a tidy and respectable appearance each day, and to keep the house sweet and free from all ill odors and unpleasant sights that come with preparing and eating meat.

Having been my own butcher, my own kitchen helper (“scullion”), and my own cook, as well as the gentleman for whom the dishes were served up, I can speak from an unusually complete experience. The practical objection to animal food, in my case, was its uncleanness. And besides, when I had caught, cleaned, cooked, and eaten my fish, they seemed not to have fed me in any essential way. The meal felt insignificant and unnecessary, and it cost more effort than it was worth. A little bread or a few potatoes would have satisfied my hunger just as well, with less trouble and filth.

Like many of my contemporaries, I had rarely, for many years, used animal food, or tea, or coffee, and so on. This was not so much because of any ill effects which I had traced directly to them, as because they were not agreeable to my imagination. The repugnance (strong dislike) to animal food is not merely the result of experience; it is an instinct. It appeared more beautiful to me to “live low and fare hard” (to live very simply and frugally) in many respects. And though I never fully achieved this ideal, I went far enough in that direction to please my imagination.

I believe that every person who has ever been truly earnest about preserving his higher or poetic faculties in the best condition has been particularly inclined to abstain from animal food, and from eating too much food of any kind.

It is a significant fact, stated by entomologists (scientists who study insects)—I find it in a book by Kirby and Spence—that “some insects in their perfect (adult) state, though furnished with organs of feeding, make no use of them.” And they state it as “a general rule, that almost all insects in this (adult) state eat much less than in that of larvæ (their immature form).” The voracious caterpillar, when transformed into a butterfly, and the gluttonous maggot, when it becomes a fly, content themselves with a drop or two of honey or some other sweet liquid. The abdomen under the wings of the butterfly still physically represents the larva. This is the “tidbit” which tempts birds or other predators to eat it (“tempts his insectivorous fate”).

The Gross Feeder: Man in the Larva State

“The gross feeder is a man in the larva state.” And there are whole nations of people in that condition—nations without much fancy or imagination, whose vast appetites and perhaps physical bulk (“vast abdomens”) betray their unrefined state.

Diet and Imagination

It is hard to provide and cook a diet so simple and clean that it will not offend the imagination. But I think the imagination is to be fed when we feed the body; they should both sit down at the same table. Yet perhaps this ideal can be achieved. Fruits, eaten in moderation (“temperately”), need not make us ashamed of our appetites, nor interrupt our worthiest pursuits. But put an extra spice or rich seasoning (“condiment”) into your dish, and it will poison you. It is not worthwhile to live by means of rich and elaborate cookery.

Most people would feel shame if they were caught preparing with their own hands precisely the kind of elaborate dinner, whether of animal or vegetable food, that is every day prepared for them by others (servants or cooks). Yet until this situation changes—until we are willing to prepare our own simple food, or are not ashamed of doing so—we are not truly civilized. And, if we consider ourselves gentlemen and ladies, we are not true men and women in the fullest sense. This certainly suggests what change needs to be made in our habits.

It may be pointless (“vain”) to ask why the imagination will not be reconciled to eating flesh and fat. I am satisfied that it simply is not. Is it not a reproach to our higher nature that man is a carnivorous (meat-eating) animal? True, he can and does live, in a great measure, by preying on other animals. But this is a miserable way to live—as anyone who will try snaring rabbits, or slaughtering lambs, may learn. And he will be regarded as a benefactor of his race who shall teach mankind to confine itself to a more innocent and wholesome diet.

Whatever my own current practice may be, I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals. This change will happen as surely as the “savage tribes” (as they were then called) left off eating each other when they came in contact with more “civilized” cultures.

Following One’s Genius

If one listens to the faintest but constant suggestions of his own genius—his true inner voice and inspiration—which are certainly true, he often does not see at first to what extremes, or even to what might seem like insanity to others, it may lead him. And yet, that way, as he grows more resolute and faithful to his inner voice, his true road in life lies. The faintest, most assured objection which one healthy and sincere person feels against a common practice will eventually prevail over all the arguments and customs of mankind.

No one ever truly followed his genius until it misled him. Though the result of following one’s genius might sometimes be bodily weakness or worldly failure, yet perhaps no one can say that the consequences were ultimately to be regretted. For these consequences were part of a life lived in conformity with higher principles.

If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and if life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, if it feels more elastic, more starry, more immortal—that is your success. All nature is then your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself. The greatest gains and values in life are often the farthest from being appreciated by conventional standards. We easily come to doubt if they even exist. We soon forget them. Yet, they are the highest reality. Perhaps the facts that are most astounding and most real are never communicated from one person to another through mere words; they must be experienced.

The True Harvest of Daily Life

“The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched.”

Sobriety and Simple Sustenance

Yet, for my part, I was never unusually squeamish. I could sometimes eat a fried rat with a good appetite (“relish”), if it were absolutely necessary. (This is likely an exaggeration to emphasize his adaptability and lack of fussiness, rather than a literal account.)

I am glad to have drunk water for so long as my primary beverage. It is for the same reason that I prefer the natural sky to an opium-eater’s imagined heaven. I would gladly (“fain”) keep sober always; and there are infinite degrees of drunkenness, not just from alcohol. I believe that water is the only drink for a wise man. Wine is not so noble a liquor. And think of dashing the hopes of a fresh morning with a cup of warm coffee, or spoiling an evening with a dish of tea! Ah, how low I fall in my own estimation when I am tempted by them! Even music can be intoxicating if one is not careful. Such apparently slight causes—indulgences in stimulants or excessive pleasures—destroyed ancient Greece and Rome, and will destroy England and America if not kept in check.

Of all forms of intoxication (“ebriosity”), who does not prefer to be intoxicated by the pure air he breathes? I have found it to be the most serious objection to coarse, heavy labors long continued, that they compelled me to eat and drink coarsely as well. But to tell the truth, I find myself at present somewhat less particular in these respects than I once was. I carry less “religion” (strict adherence to rules) to the table now; I ask no formal blessing before eating. This is not because I am wiser than I was. But, I am obliged to confess, it is because (however much it is to be regretted) with the passing years I have grown more coarse and indifferent in some ways. Perhaps these questions about diet and purity are intensely entertained only in youth, as most people believe is the case with poetry. My actual practice is “nowhere” (meaning, not perfectly consistent with my ideals), but my opinion on the matter is stated here.

Nevertheless, I am far from regarding myself as one of those privileged ones to whom the Ved (ancient Hindu scripture) refers when it says that “he who has true faith in the Omnipresent Supreme Being may eat all that exists.” This means such a person is not bound to inquire what his food is, or who prepares it. And even in their case, it is to be observed, as a Hindu commentator has remarked, that the Vedanta (a school of Hindu philosophy) limits this privilege to “the time of distress.”

The True Savor of Food and Life

Who has not sometimes derived an inexpressible satisfaction from his food in which mere physical appetite had no share? I have been thrilled to think that I owed a mental perception or insight to the commonly gross sense of taste. I have been inspired through my palate. Some berries which I had eaten on a hillside seemed to have fed my genius.

Thseng-tseu (Zengzi, a disciple of Confucius) says: “The soul not being mistress of herself, one looks, and one does not see; one listens, and one does not hear; one eats, and one does not know the savor of food.” He who distinguishes the true savor (the subtle essence and flavor) of his food can never be a glutton. He who does not distinguish this true savor cannot be otherwise than a glutton. A puritan may go to his plain brown-bread crust with as gross an appetite as ever an alderman (a city official, often stereotyped as overindulgent) approaches his rich turtle soup.

It is “not that food which entereth into the mouth defileth a man, but the appetite with which it is eaten.” (This is an allusion to a saying of Jesus in the New Testament, Matthew 15:11). It is neither the quality nor the quantity of the food, but the devotion to mere sensual flavors that can be a problem. This happens when that which is eaten is not simple sustenance (“viand”) to sustain our animal life, or to inspire our spiritual life, but is instead “food for the worms that possess us” (feeding our base desires or contributing to our eventual decay).

If the hunter has a taste for mud-turtles, muskrats, and other such “savage tidbits,” the fine lady in society indulges a similar taste for jelly made of a calf’s foot, or for sardines from over the sea. In their underlying sensual indulgence, they are even (equal). He goes to the millpond for his rough fare; she goes to her preserve-pot for her refined delicacies. The wonder is how they—how you and I—can live this slimy, beastly life, so focused on just eating and drinking.

The Moral Universe

Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant’s truce (pause in hostilities) between virtue and vice within us and in the world. Goodness is the only investment that never fails. In the music of the harp which trembles round the world (perhaps meaning the underlying harmony of the universe), it is the insisting on this moral reality which thrills us. The harp is like the traveling salesman (“patterer”) for the Universe’s Insurance Company, recommending its laws. Our little acts of goodness are all the payment (“assessment”) that we make.

Though the youth at last grows indifferent to these moral laws, the laws of the universe are not indifferent. They are forever on the side of the most sensitive and aware. Listen to every gentle breeze (“zephyr”) for some reproof (a gentle correction or moral lesson), for it is surely there. He is unfortunate who does not hear it. We cannot touch a string of life’s harp or move a stop (on its instrument) but the charming moral truth of the universe transfixes us (captivates and pierces us with its meaning). Many an irksome or unpleasant noise, when heard from a long way off, transforms into music—a proud, sweet satire on the meanness of our ordinary lives.

The Animal Within and the Pursuit of Purity

We are conscious of an animal nature within us. This animal nature awakens in proportion as our higher nature slumbers or is neglected. It is reptile-like and sensual, and perhaps it cannot be wholly expelled from our being. It is like the worms which, even in life and health, are said to occupy our bodies. Possibly we may withdraw from its influence, but we can never entirely change its fundamental nature. I fear that this animal part of us may enjoy a certain robust health of its own; that we may be physically well, yet not spiritually pure.

The other day I picked up the lower jaw of a hog. It had white and sound teeth and tusks. This suggested to me that there was an animal health and vigor distinct from, and not dependent on, spiritual qualities. This creature, the hog, succeeded in life by means other than temperance and purity.

Mencius (a Chinese philosopher) says: “That in which men differ from brute beasts is a thing very inconsiderable (a very small thing); the common herd (ordinary people) lose it very soon; superior men preserve it carefully.” (This “small thing” is humaneness, or moral consciousness.)

Who knows what sort of life would result if we had truly attained to purity? If I knew so wise a person as could teach me purity, I would go to seek him immediately.

Higher Laws

The Two Natures Within

An ancient Hindu scripture, the Vedas, declares: “A command over our passions, and over the external senses of the body, and good acts, are indispensable (absolutely necessary) in the mind’s journey toward God.”

Yet, the human spirit, for a time, can fill (“pervade”) and control every part and function of the body. It can transform (“transmute”) what in its raw form is the grossest sensuality into purity and devotion.

Consider the generative energy within us—our fundamental life force, which includes creative and sexual energy.

• When we are “loose” (unrestrained and dissipated in our habits), this energy scatters and makes us feel unclean.
• When we are “continent” (self-restrained and disciplined), this same energy invigorates and inspires us.

Chastity (purity in thought and act, especially but not only in a sexual sense) is the flowering of a human being. And what are called Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and other such high qualities, are merely the various fruits that come after this flowering. A person flows at once toward God when the channel of purity is open within them.

By turns, our purity inspires us, and our impurity casts us down. Blessed is the person who is assured that the “animal” nature within him is dying out day by day, and that the divine nature is being established and strengthened.

Perhaps there is no one who does not have some cause for shame on account of the inferior and brutish (animal-like) nature to which we are all connected. I fear that we are often gods or demigods only in the way that fauns and satyrs of mythology were. (Fauns and satyrs were mythical woodland creatures, half-human and half-goat, often depicted as symbols of lust and unchecked appetite.) We are divine beings allied with beasts, creatures driven by appetite. And, to some extent, our very life, if lived only by appetite, becomes our disgrace.

As an old poem wisely says: “How happy’s he who hath due place assigned To his beasts and disaforested his mind! Can use his horse, goat, wolf, and ev’ry beast, And is not ass himself to all the rest! Else man not only is the herd of swine, But he’s those devils too which did incline Them to a headlong rage, and made them worse.”

(This means: Happy is the person who has put his animal passions—his inner “beasts”—in their proper place and cleared his mind of wild, uncontrolled thoughts. He can use his animal energies constructively without being controlled by them, and is not a fool—an “ass”—ruled by his baser instincts. Otherwise, a person is not only like a herd of swine driven by impulse, but he also embodies the very “devils” or negative forces that drove those swine to their destruction.)

Sensuality, Purity, and Temperance

All forms of sensuality (overindulgence of the senses) are fundamentally one, though they take many different forms. Similarly, all purity is fundamentally one. It is the same essential issue whether a person eats, or drinks, or engages in sexual activity, or even sleeps in a purely sensual, uncontrolled way. These are all just different expressions of one underlying appetite. We only need to see a person do any one of these things with gross indulgence to know how much of a sensualist he is.

The impure person can neither stand nor sit comfortably with purity. When a reptile is attacked at one mouth of its burrow, it simply shows itself at another. (Similarly, if one sensual outlet is blocked, an uncontrolled person will simply find another.)

If you would be chaste, you must first be temperate—moderate in all your appetites. What is chastity? How shall a person know if he is chaste? He shall not truly know it by self-assessment. We have all heard of this virtue, but we do not truly know what it is in its essence. We usually speak according to the rumor and reputation of virtue that we have heard.

From exertion—from effort and discipline—come wisdom and purity. From sloth (laziness) come ignorance and sensuality. In a student, sensuality often takes the form of a sluggish, lazy habit of mind. An unclean person (morally or physically) is almost universally a slothful one. He is one who sits by a stove all day, whom the sun shines on while he is lying down (“prostrate”), who rests without ever having been truly fatigued by useful work.

If you would avoid uncleanness and all the sins that follow from it, work earnestly at something, even if it is something as humble as cleaning a stable. Our lower nature is hard to overcome, but it must be overcome.

What good is it (“What avails it”) that you call yourself a Christian, if you are not purer than those you call “heathen”? What good is it if you deny yourself no more indulgences than they do, if you are not, in practice, more truly religious? I know of many systems of religion, often esteemed “heathenish” by conventional society, whose precepts (teachings) can fill the reader with a sense of shame for his own shortcomings and provoke him to new endeavors, even if those endeavors are only the performance of rites and ceremonies.

Speaking of Sensuality and Bodily Functions

I hesitate to say these things, not because of the subject itself—I do not care how “obscene” (frank and direct) my words are—but because I cannot speak of them without betraying my own impurity and imperfection. We talk freely and without shame about one form of sensuality (for example, the appetite for food), yet we are silent about another (for example, sexual appetite). We are so degraded by false shame and convention that we cannot speak simply and naturally about the necessary functions of human nature.

In earlier ages, in some countries, every bodily function was spoken of reverently and was even regulated by law. Nothing was considered too trivial for the ancient Hindu lawgiver (as seen in texts like the Laws of Manu), however offensive some of these detailed regulations might be to modern taste. The Hindu lawgiver teaches how to eat, drink, engage in sexual relations (“cohabit”), eliminate waste (“void excrement and urine”), and the like. He does this by elevating what is common (“mean”) and by not falsely excusing himself from addressing these topics by calling them mere “trifles.”

The Body as a Temple

Every man is the builder of a temple, called his body. He builds this temple to the god he worships, and he builds it after a style purely his own. He cannot get off the hook by hammering marble to build an external temple instead. We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones. Any touch of nobleness within us begins at once to refine a person’s outward features. Any meanness or sensuality begins at once to make them coarse or “imbrute” (beast-like).

John Farmer’s Awakening

Imagine John Farmer (a symbolic common man). He sat at his door one September evening, after a hard day’s work. His mind was still running on his labor, more or less. Having bathed, he sat down to refresh his intellectual self (“recreate his intellectual man”). It was a rather cool evening, and some of his neighbors were expecting a frost.

He had not been attending to the train of his thoughts for long when he heard someone playing a flute nearby. That sound harmonized with his mood. He still thought of his work, but the main feeling (“burden”) of his thought was this: though the details of his work kept running in his head, and he found himself planning and contriving things almost against his will, yet these worldly concerns affected him very little at a deeper level. They were no more to his true self than the “scurf” (dry, dead flakes) of his skin, which was constantly being shuffled off.

But the notes of the flute came home to his ears from a different sphere, a different world, than the one he worked in. They suggested work for certain faculties (higher abilities) which lay slumbering within him. The music gently did away with the street, and the village, and the ordinary state in which he lived.

A voice seemed to say to him: “Why do you stay here and live this mean, toiling (‘moiling’) life, when a glorious existence is possible for you? Those same stars that twinkle over these fields also twinkle over other, better fields.” But how could he come out of his current condition and actually migrate to that better state? All that he could think of at that moment was to practice some new form of self-discipline (“austerity”). He thought of letting his mind descend into his body and redeem it (make it pure and whole). He resolved to treat himself with ever-increasing respect.

Brute Neighbors

A Fishing Trip and a Dialogue

Sometimes I had a companion on my fishing trips. He would come through the village to my house from the other side of town. For us, the act of catching dinner was as much a social exercise as the eating of it.

(The scene opens with a playful dialogue between the Hermit, representing Thoreau, and a visiting Poet.)

Hermit: I wonder what the world is doing now. I haven’t heard so much as a locust chirping over the sweet-fern plants these last three hours. The pigeons are all asleep on their roosts—there’s no flutter from them. Was that a farmer’s noon horn I heard sounding from beyond the woods just now? The farmhands must be coming in to their meal of boiled salt beef, cider, and Indian bread (cornbread). Why will people worry themselves so much? A person who does not eat does not need to work so hard. I wonder how much they have harvested. Who would choose to live over there, where a person can never think straight because of the constant barking of “Bose” (a common name for a dog)?

And oh, the housekeeping! To keep the devil’s doorknobs (fancy, unnecessary things) bright, and to scrub his tubs on this bright day! It would be better not to keep a house at all. Imagine, say, living in a hollow tree; and then what would become of morning calls from visitors and formal dinner parties! You would only hear a woodpecker tapping.

Oh, people and their cares, they swarm like insects! The sun is too warm in society; people there are born too far into the complexities of life for my taste. I have simple water from the spring, and a loaf of brown bread on the shelf.—Hark! I hear a rustling of the leaves. Is it some ill-fed village hound yielding to the instinct of the chase? Or is it the lost pig which is said to be in these woods, whose tracks I saw after the rain? It comes quickly (“apace”); my sumach bushes and sweetbriars are trembling.—Eh, Mr. Poet, is it you? How do you like the world today?

Poet: See those clouds; how they hang in the sky! That’s the greatest thing I have seen today. There’s nothing like it in old paintings, nothing like it in foreign lands—unless it was that time when we were off the coast of Spain. That’s a true Mediterranean sky. I thought, since I have my living to get, and I haven’t eaten today, that I might go fishing. That’s the true industry for poets. It is the only trade I have ever truly learned. Come, let’s go along.

Hermit: I cannot resist your invitation. My brown bread will soon be gone anyway. I will go with you gladly, soon, but I am just concluding a serious meditation. I think that I am near the end of it. So, leave me alone, then, for a little while. But so that we may not be delayed, you shall be digging the bait in the meantime.

Angleworms are rarely to be met with in these parts, where the soil was never fattened with manure; the local race of worms is nearly extinct. The sport of digging the bait is nearly equal to that of catching the fish, when one’s appetite is not too keen; and this pleasure of digging you may have all to yourself today. I would advise you to put your spade in the ground down yonder among the groundnuts, where you see the St. John’s-wort plant waving. I think that I can guarantee (“warrant”) you one worm for every three clumps of sod (“sods”) you turn up, if you look well in among the roots of the grass, as if you were weeding. Or, if you choose to go farther away to dig, that will not be unwise, for I have found that the amount of good bait to be found increases very nearly as the square of the distance from my cabin! (This is a humorous, pseudo-scientific way of saying bait is scarce nearby.)

(The Poet goes off to dig bait.)

Hermit (Alone): Let me see; where was I in my thoughts? I think I was nearly in this frame of mind; the world lay before me at this particular angle of perception. Shall I go to heaven (continue my spiritual meditation) or go fishing (engage in a simple, earthly pleasure)? If I should soon bring this meditation to an end, would another such sweet opportunity for insight be likely to offer itself again? I was as near to being resolved into the essence of things as I ever was in my life.

I fear my thoughts will not come back to me now. If it would do any good, I would whistle for them. When deep thoughts or inspirations make us an offer, is it wise to say, “We will think of it?” My thoughts have left no track, and I cannot find the path again. What was it that I was thinking of? It was a very hazy day. I will just try these three sentences of Confucius (“Con-fut-see”); they may bring that state of mind back again. I don’t know whether my mood was one of low spirits (“the dumps”) or a budding ecstasy. (He makes a mental note, “Mem.”): There never is but one opportunity of a particular kind.

(The Poet returns.)

Poet: How now, Hermit, is it too soon? I have got just thirteen whole worms, besides several which are imperfect or undersized. But they will do for the smaller fish (“fry”); they do not cover up the hook so much. Those village worms one sometimes gets are quite too large; a shiner (a small bait fish) might make a whole meal off one without ever finding the “skewer” (the hook).

Hermit: Well, then, let’s be off. Shall we go to the Concord River? There’s good sport there if the water is not too high.

Animals as Carriers of Thought

Why do precisely these objects which we behold around us make up a world? Why does mankind have just these particular species of animals for his neighbors—as if nothing but a mouse could have filled this specific crevice in creation? I suspect that “Pilpay & Co.” (a reference to the ancient Indian fables of Bidpai or Pilpay, like the Panchatantra, where animals speak and embody human traits and moral lessons) have put animals to their best use. For, in a sense, all animals are beasts of burden, made to carry some portion of our thoughts and reflections about life.

The Mice in My House

The mice which haunted my house were not the common ones, which are said to have been introduced into this country. They were a wild native kind (Mus leucopus, the white-footed mouse) not usually found in the village. I sent one to a distinguished naturalist, and it interested him greatly.

When I was building my house, one of these mice had its nest underneath the floor. Before I had laid the second layer of flooring and swept out all the wood shavings, a mouse would come out regularly at lunchtime and pick up the crumbs at my feet. It probably had never seen a human being before. It soon became quite familiar and would run over my shoes and even up my clothes. It could easily climb (“ascend”) the sides of the room by making short, quick movements (“impulses”), much like a squirrel, which it resembled in its motions.

At length, as I leaned with my elbow on the bench one day, it ran up my clothes, along my sleeve, and round and round the paper which held my dinner. All the while, I kept my dinner close to me, and dodged and played peek-a-boo (“bopeep”) with the little creature. When at last I held a piece of cheese still between my thumb and finger, it came and nibbled it, sitting right in my hand. Afterward, it cleaned its face and paws, just like a fly does, and then walked away.

Other Feathered and Furry Neighbors

A phoebe soon built its nest in my shed. A robin, seeking protection, built its nest in a pine tree that grew close against my house. In June, the partridge (Tetrao umbellus, the ruffed grouse), which is normally a very shy bird, led her brood of young past my windows. She came from the woods in the rear of my house to the front. She clucked and called to her young like a hen, and in all her behavior, she proved herself to be the true “hen of the woods.”

The young partridges suddenly scatter (“disperse”) when you approach, at a signal from their mother, as if a whirlwind had swept them away. They so exactly resemble the dried leaves and twigs on the forest floor that many a traveler has placed his foot right in the midst of a brood without seeing them. He might hear the whir of the old bird as she flew off, and her anxious calls and mewing, or see her trail her wings as if injured to attract his attention, all without suspecting that her young were nearby. The parent bird will sometimes roll and spin around in front of you in such a disheveled state (“dishabille”), feigning injury so convincingly, that for a few moments, you cannot even tell what kind of creature it is.

The young birds squat perfectly still and flat on the ground, often tucking their heads under a leaf. They mind only their mother’s directions, which she gives from a distance. Your approach will not make them run again and betray their hiding place. You may even tread on them, or have your eyes on them for a minute, without discovering them. I have held them in my open hand at such a time. Still, their only concern, obedient to their mother and their instinct, was to squat there without any fear or trembling.

So perfect is this instinct that once, when I had laid some young partridges I had briefly held back on the leaves, and one accidentally fell on its side, it was found with the rest of the brood in exactly the same still position ten minutes afterward. They are not helpless and unfledged (“callow”) like the young of most birds. They are more perfectly developed and remarkably mature (“precocious”) even than chickens. The remarkably adult yet innocent expression of their open and serene eyes is very memorable. All intelligence seems to be reflected in them. They suggest not merely the purity of infancy, but a wisdom that has been clarified by experience. Such an eye was not born when the bird was hatched; it is as old and deep (“coeval with”) as the sky it reflects. The woods do not yield another gem as precious as this. The traveler does not often get to look into such a clear and pure well of being (“limpid well”).

The ignorant or reckless sportsman often shoots the parent bird at such a time of vulnerability, and leaves these innocent young ones to fall prey to some prowling beast or bird of prey, or to gradually mingle with the decaying leaves which they so much resemble. It is said that when partridge eggs are hatched by a domestic hen, the young will directly scatter on any alarm and become lost, because they never hear their true mother’s call which normally gathers them again. These wild partridges were my “hens and chickens.”

Hidden Life at Brister’s Spring

It is remarkable how many creatures live wild and free, though secretly, in the woods. They still sustain themselves in the neighborhood of towns, suspected to exist only by hunters. How retired and hidden the otter manages to live here! He grows to be four feet long, as big as a small boy, perhaps without any human being ever getting a glimpse of him. I formerly saw raccoons in the woods behind where my house is now built, and I probably still heard their chattering (“whinnering”) at night sometimes.

Commonly, I rested for an hour or two in the shade at noon, after planting my beans. I ate my lunch and read a little by a spring which was the source of a swamp and of a brook. This spring oozed from under Brister’s Hill, about half a mile from my field. The approach to this spring was through a succession of descending grassy hollows, full of young pitch pines, leading into a larger wood surrounding the swamp. There, in a very secluded and shaded spot, under a spreading white pine tree, there was still a clean, firm patch of grass (“sward”) to sit on. I had dug out the spring and made a well of clear gray water, where I could dip up a pailful without muddying (“roiling”) it. I went there for this purpose almost every day in midsummer, when the pond water was warmest.

There too, the woodcock led her brood to probe the mud for worms. She would fly just a foot above them as they went down the bank, while they ran in a little troop beneath. But at last, if she spotted me, she would leave her young and circle round and round me, coming nearer and nearer, until she was within four or five feet. She would pretend to have broken wings and legs to attract my attention and lead me away from her young. Her young, in the meantime, would have already started their march, with faint, wiry peeps, in single file through the swamp, just as she directed. Sometimes I heard the peep of the young birds when I could not see the parent bird at all.

There too, the turtle-doves often sat over the spring, or fluttered from bough to bough of the soft white pine trees above my head. Or the red squirrel, running quickly (“coursing”) down the nearest bough, was particularly familiar and inquisitive. You only need to sit still long enough in some attractive spot in the woods for all its inhabitants to eventually show themselves to you by turns.

The War of the Ants

I was also a witness to events of a less peaceful character. One day when I went out to my woodpile (or rather, my pile of tree stumps), I observed two large ants. One was red, the other much larger—nearly half an inch long—and black. They were fiercely fighting (“contending”) with one another. Having once gotten a hold of each other, they never let go, but struggled and wrestled and rolled on the wood chips incessantly.

Looking farther, I was surprised to find that the chips were covered with such combatants. It was not a duellum (a duel between two individuals), but a bellum (a full-scale war) between two races of ants. The red ants were always pitted against the black ants, and frequently there were two red ones fighting a single black one. The legions of these ant “Myrmidons” (referencing the fierce warriors of Achilles in the Trojan War) covered all the hills and valleys in my woodyard. The ground was already strewn with the dead and dying, both red and black.

It was the only battle which I have ever witnessed, the only battlefield I ever trod while the battle was actually raging. It was an “internecine war” (a war destructive to both sides). The “red republicans” were on one hand, and the “black imperialists” on the other (he humorously assigns them political factions). On every side, they were engaged in deadly combat, yet without any noise that I could hear. Human soldiers never fought so resolutely.

I watched a pair that were fast locked in each other’s embraces, in a little sunny valley amidst the wood chips. It was noonday, and they were prepared to fight until the sun went down, or until life went out. The smaller red champion had fastened himself like a vise to his adversary’s front. Through all the tumblings on that field, he never for an instant ceased to gnaw at one of his enemy’s feelers near the root, having already caused the other feeler to be lost (“go by the board”). Meanwhile, the stronger black one dashed him from side to side. As I saw on looking nearer, the black ant had already torn off several of the red ant’s limbs (“members”). They fought with more stubbornness (“pertinacity”) than bulldogs. Neither one showed the least inclination (“disposition”) to retreat. It was evident that their battle cry was “Conquer or die!”

In the meantime, there came along a single red ant on the hillside of this little valley. He was evidently full of excitement. He either had already dispatched his own foe, or he had not yet taken part in the battle. It was probably the latter, for he had lost none of his limbs. Perhaps his mother had charged him, like a Spartan warrior, “to return with his shield or upon it” (meaning, to return victorious or dead). Or perchance he was some Achilles, who had been nursing his wrath apart, and had now come to avenge or rescue his Patroclus (his dear friend).

He saw this unequal combat from afar—for the black ants were nearly twice the size of the red ones. He drew near with rapid pace until he stood on his guard within half an inch of the combatants. Then, watching his opportunity, he sprang upon the black warrior and began his operations near the root of the black ant’s right foreleg. He left the foe to choose which of its own body parts to defend. And so there were three ants united for life in this deadly struggle, as if a new kind of magnetic attraction had been invented which put all other locks and cements to shame.

I should not have been surprised by this time to find that they had their respective musical bands stationed on some prominent wood chip, playing their national airs all the while, to excite the slow fighters and to cheer the dying combatants. I was myself somewhat excited, even as if they had been men. The more you think of it, the less the difference seems between such a battle and human wars.

And certainly, there is no fight recorded in Concord history, at least—if even in the history of America—that will bear a moment’s comparison with this one. This is true whether you consider the numbers engaged in it, or the patriotism and heroism displayed. For numbers of combatants and for sheer carnage, it was like an Austerlitz or a Dresden (two of the largest and bloodiest battles of the Napoleonic Wars). Concord Fight! (The first battle of the American Revolution, fought in his town.) In that famous human battle, only two were killed on the patriots’ side, and Luther Blanchard was wounded! Why, here in this ant battle, every ant was a Major Buttrick (who famously shouted, “Fire! for God’s sake fire!” at the Concord Fight). Thousands of these ants shared the fate of Davis and Hosmer (two American militiamen killed at Concord). There was not one “hireling” (a soldier fighting only for pay) there among the ants. I have no doubt that it was a principle they fought for, as much as our ancestors did, and not just to avoid a three-penny tax on their tea. And the results of this ant battle will be as important and memorable to those whom it concerns (the ant nations) as those of the battle of Bunker Hill were to humans, at least.

Observing the Aftermath

I took up the wood chip on which the three ants I have particularly described were struggling. I carried it into my house and placed it under a glass tumbler (an overturned drinking glass) on my windowsill, in order to see the outcome (“issue”).

Holding a microscope to the first-mentioned red ant, I saw that, though he was diligently (“assiduously”) gnawing at the near foreleg of his enemy (having already severed his enemy’s remaining feeler), his own breast was all torn away. This exposed what vital organs he had there to the jaws of the black warrior, whose breastplate was apparently too thick for the red ant to pierce. And the dark, jewel-like (“carbuncles”) eyes of the sufferer shone with a ferocity such as only war could excite.

They struggled for half an hour longer under the tumbler. When I looked again, the black soldier had severed the heads of his two red foes from their bodies. The still-living heads were hanging on either side of him like ghastly trophies at his saddlebow. They were still apparently as firmly fastened as ever. The black ant was endeavoring with feeble struggles—being now without feelers and with only the remnant of one leg, and I know not how many other wounds—to rid himself (“divest himself”) of these gruesome burdens. This, at length, after half an hour more, he accomplished. I then raised the glass, and he went off over the windowsill in that crippled state.

Whether he finally survived that combat and spent the remainder of his days in some “Hôtel des Invalides” (a famous hospital for disabled soldiers in Paris), I do not know. But I thought that his ability to work (“industry”) would not be worth much thereafter. I never learned which party was victorious in the larger war, nor the cause of the war. But I felt for the rest of that day as if my own feelings had been intensely excited and deeply distressed (“harrowed”) by witnessing the struggle, the ferocity, and the carnage of a human battle right before my own door.

Historical Accounts of Ant Wars

The entomologists Kirby and Spence tell us that the battles of ants have long been celebrated and the dates of them recorded. However, they say that the naturalist Huber is the only modern author who appears to have actually witnessed them. “Æneas Sylvius,” they say (quoting an older source, who later became Pope Pius II), “after giving a very detailed (‘circumstantial’) account of one battle contested with great stubbornness (‘obstinacy’) by a large and a small species of ant on the trunk of a pear tree,” adds that “‘This action was fought during the papacy (‘pontificate’) of Eugenius the Fourth, in the presence of Nicholas Pistoriensis, an eminent lawyer, who related the whole history of the battle with the greatest fidelity.’” A similar engagement between large and small ants is recorded by Olaus Magnus (a Swedish writer and cartographer). In this battle, the small ants, being victorious, are said to have buried the bodies of their own soldiers, but left those of their giant enemies as prey for the birds. This event happened prior to the expulsion of the tyrant King Christiern the Second from Sweden.

The ant battle which I witnessed took place during the Presidency of James K. Polk, five years before the passage of Daniel Webster’s Fugitive Slave Bill (a highly controversial American law). (By placing his observation in this historical context, Thoreau subtly links the seemingly small-scale conflict of the ants to the larger human conflicts and moral struggles of his time.)

Other “Brute Neighbors”

Many a village dog named “Bose”—a dog fit only to chase a mud turtle in a food cellar (“victualling cellar”)—would sometimes sport his heavy body (“quarters”) in the woods, without the knowledge of his master. He would ineffectually sniff at old fox burrows and woodchucks’ holes. He might be led, perhaps, by some small, insignificant mongrel (“slight cur”) which nimbly threaded its way through the wood and might still inspire a natural terror in the actual wild inhabitants (“denizens”) of the forest. The big dog would now be far behind his guide, barking like a “canine bull” toward some small squirrel which had climbed a tree for safety and was now looking down to scrutinize him. Then, the dog would go cantering off, bending the bushes with his weight, imagining that he was on the track of some stray member of the “gerbille family” (gerbils are not native to New England; Thoreau uses this exotic reference humorously to emphasize the dog’s cluelessness).

Once I was surprised to see a cat walking along the stony shore of the pond, for domestic cats rarely wander so far from home. The surprise was mutual between me and the cat. Nevertheless, the most domestic cat, which has lain on a rug all her days, appears quite at home in the woods. By her sly and stealthy behavior, she proves herself more truly native there than many of the regular wild inhabitants.

Wild Cats in the Woods

One time, when I was out picking berries, I encountered a wild cat in the woods with her young kittens. Like their mother, they all arched their backs and hissed at me fiercely.

A few years before I lived in the woods, people in Lincoln talked about a “winged cat.” This cat lived at Mr. Gilian Baker’s farmhouse, the one closest to the pond. I went to see this cat in June 1842, but it was out hunting in the woods, as it usually was. The owner, its mistress, told me about the cat, though she wasn’t sure if it was male or female.

She said the cat had appeared in the neighborhood a little over a year earlier, in April. Eventually, her family took it into their house. Here’s what the cat looked like:

• Color: Dark brownish-gray.
• Markings: A white spot on its throat and white feet.
• Tail: Large and bushy, like a fox’s tail.
• Winter Fur: In the winter, its fur grew very thick. This extra fur flattened out along its sides, forming strips. These strips were about ten or twelve inches long and two and a half inches wide. It also had thick fur under its chin, like a fluffy scarf. The top part of this fur was loose, while the underside was matted together, like felt.
• Spring Shedding: In the spring, these extra furry pieces would fall off.

The owners gave me a pair of these “wings,” and I still have them. They don’t have any skin-like layer, as a bat’s wing would.

Some people thought the cat might have been part flying squirrel or another wild animal. This is possible. Scientists who study nature have found that martens (a type of weasel-like animal) and domestic cats can produce offspring together.

If I had decided to keep a cat, this “winged” type would have been the perfect kind for me. After all, a poet imagines a winged horse; why shouldn’t a poet’s cat also have wings?

The Loon and the Hunters

In the fall, the loon (scientific name Colymbus glacialis) would visit the pond as usual. It came to shed its old feathers and bathe. Before I even got up in the morning, I would often hear its wild, laughing call echoing through the woods.

When news spread that the loon had arrived, all the hunters from the nearby Mill-dam area would get ready. They came in small groups, some in light carriages and others on foot. They carried special rifles, cone-shaped bullets, and spyglasses (small telescopes to see far away).

These hunters would rustle through the woods like dry autumn leaves. There were often at least ten hunters for every one loon. Some hunters would wait on one side of the pond, while others waited on the opposite side. They knew the poor bird couldn’t be in all places at once. If it dived in one spot, it had to come up for air somewhere else.

But then, a kind October wind would often start to blow. This wind rustled the leaves and created ripples on the water’s surface. Because of this, the loon could not be easily heard or seen. The hunters would scan the pond with their spyglasses. They would fire their guns, the loud shots echoing through the woods, but they couldn’t find the loon. The waves seemed to rise up and crash angrily, as if protecting all the waterfowl. The hunters would eventually have to give up. They would return to town, to their shops, and to their unfinished jobs.

Unfortunately, the hunters were successful too often.

Early in the morning, when I went to get a pail of water, I frequently saw this elegant bird. It would be swimming gracefully out of the small bay near my house, just a short distance away. If I tried to follow it in my boat to see how it would move, it would dive underwater. It would disappear completely. Sometimes, I wouldn’t see it again until much later in the day. However, on the surface of the water, I was faster than the loon. It usually left the area when it started to rain.

Chasing the Loon on the Pond

One very calm October afternoon, I was paddling along the north shore. Loons especially like to settle on lakes on calm days, landing gently like fluffy milkweed seeds. I had been looking all over the pond for a loon but hadn’t seen any.

Suddenly, one appeared! It was swimming from the shore toward the middle of the pond, a short way in front of me. It let out its wild laugh, giving away its position.

I started to chase it with my paddle, and it dived. When it came up, I was closer than before. It dived again. This time, I guessed wrong about where it would surface. We were a good distance apart when it came up. I had actually paddled in a way that made the gap between us wider. The loon laughed long and loud again, and this time it had more reason to laugh at me.

The loon was so clever in its movements that I couldn’t get very close to it. Each time it came to the surface, it turned its head from side to side. It calmly looked at the water and the land. It seemed to choose its path carefully. It always aimed to come up where the pond was widest and where it would be farthest from my boat. It was amazing how quickly the loon made decisions and acted on them.

It led me right to the widest part of the pond, and I couldn’t make it leave that area. While the loon was thinking, I was trying my best to guess its thoughts. It was like a fun game on the smooth surface of the pond: a human against a loon. Imagine playing checkers: your opponent’s piece suddenly disappears under the board. Your challenge is to guess where it will reappear and place your piece as close as possible.

Sometimes, the loon would surprise me by coming up on the opposite side of my boat. It seemed like it had swum directly underneath me. It could hold its breath for a very long time and never seemed to get tired. Even after swimming a long way underwater, it would immediately dive again. Then, it was impossible to guess where it was in the deep pond. Hidden beneath the smooth surface, it could be speeding through the water like a fish. It had the time and ability to go to the very bottom of the pond, even in its deepest part.

People say that loons in New York lakes have been caught on fishing hooks set for trout as deep as eighty feet underwater. Walden Pond is even deeper than that. Imagine how surprised the fish must be! They would see this somewhat clumsy-looking visitor from the world above, speeding through their schools.

Yet, the loon seemed to know its course underwater just as surely as it did on the surface. And it swam much faster underwater. Once or twice, I saw a ripple on the water as it neared the surface. It would stick its head out for a quick look around and then instantly dive again.

I realized it was better for me to stop paddling and just wait for the loon to reappear. Trying to guess where it would come up never worked. Time after time, when I was straining my eyes to see it in one direction, I’d suddenly be startled by its strange laugh coming from behind me.

But I wondered: why did it always give itself away with that loud laugh the moment it surfaced? It was so clever in its movements. Wasn’t its white chest visible enough to betray its location? I thought it was a rather silly loon for doing that. I could usually hear the splash of water when it came up, so that also helped me find it.

Even after an hour of this chase, the loon seemed as fresh as when we started. It dived just as willingly and swam even farther than at first. It was surprising to see how calmly it glided on the water when it surfaced. Its chest remained smooth and unruffled, while its webbed feet did all the work hidden beneath the water.

Its usual call was that wild, almost devilish laughter, though it also sounded a bit like other waterfowl. But sometimes, when it had outsmarted me completely and come up a long way off, it made a long, eerie howl. This howl was probably more like a wolf’s than any bird’s. It was like the sound an animal makes when it puts its snout to the ground and howls deliberately. This was its special “looning” call – perhaps the wildest sound ever heard in that area, making the woods echo far and wide.

I decided the loon was laughing at my efforts because it was confident in its own ability to escape.

By this time, the sky had become overcast. However, the pond’s surface was so smooth that I could see where the loon broke the water, even if I didn’t hear it. Its white chest, the stillness of the air, and the smooth water were all disadvantages for the loon, making it easier to spot.

At last, after surfacing a long way off, the loon let out one of those long howls. It sounded as if it were calling on the god of loons for help. Immediately, a wind began to blow from the east. The wind created ripples on the surface and filled the air with a misty rain. I felt as if the loon’s prayer had been answered and its god was angry with me. So, I left the loon as it disappeared into the distance on the now choppy water.

The Cautious Ducks

On fall days, I would spend hours watching the ducks on the pond. They were very cunning. They would zig-zag and change direction to stay in the middle of the pond, far away from any hunters. These are tricks they probably wouldn’t need to use as much in the bayous of Louisiana, perhaps because there are fewer hunters or more hiding spots there.

When the ducks were forced to fly, they would sometimes circle high above the pond. From that height, they could easily see other ponds and the river. They looked like tiny black specks in the sky.

Just when I thought they had flown far away to those other places, they would suddenly glide down. They would fly about a quarter of a mile and land on a distant part of the pond that was empty and safe.

I’m not sure what other benefits they got from swimming in the middle of Walden Pond, besides safety. Unless, perhaps, they loved its water for the same reasons I did.

House-Warming

Gathering Autumn’s Gifts

In October, I went to the river meadows to gather grapes. I filled my arms with bunches of grapes. They were more valuable for their beauty and smell than as food.

While I was there, I also admired the cranberries, but I didn’t pick any. They looked like small, waxy gems, red and pearly, hanging from the meadow grass. Farmers collect these cranberries with a rough rake. This tool tears up the smooth meadow, leaving it messy. The farmers only care about how many bushels they get and how much money they’ll make. They sell these beautiful berries, gathered from the meadows, to people in cities like Boston and New York. There, the cranberries are made into jam to please city dwellers who love nature. This reminded me of how butchers on the prairie would rip out bison tongues from the grass, not caring about the damaged plants left behind.

The bright red fruit of the barberry bush was also just something for me to look at and enjoy with my eyes. However, I did collect a small supply of wild apples that the landowner and other travelers had missed. These apples were good for slow cooking until soft.

When the chestnuts were ripe, I gathered about half a bushel to store for the winter. It was very exciting during that season to walk through the chestnut woods of Lincoln. Back then, these woods seemed endless. (Now, those chestnut trees are gone, and a railroad runs over the land where they once stood.) I would roam with a bag on my shoulder and a stick in my hand to open the prickly chestnut burrs. I didn’t always wait for the frost to open them. As I walked, leaves rustled underfoot, and red squirrels and jays loudly scolded me. Sometimes I’d take the half-eaten nuts they had dropped, because the burrs they chose always contained good nuts. Occasionally, I climbed the trees and shook them to make the nuts fall.

Chestnut trees also grew behind my house. One large tree almost cast a shadow over my entire home. When it was in bloom, it was like a giant bouquet that made the whole neighborhood smell sweet. But the squirrels and jays got most of its fruit. The jays would come in flocks early in the morning. They would pick the nuts out of the burrs before they even fell to the ground. I let them have the nuts from these nearby trees. Instead, I went to more distant woods that were made up entirely of chestnut trees.

These chestnuts, as many as I gathered, were a good replacement for bread. Perhaps many other natural foods could also serve as substitutes.

One day, while I was digging for fishing worms, I found something interesting. It was the ground-nut (Apios tuberosa), growing on its string-like root. This was the “potato” of the Native Americans, a kind of amazing, almost mythical food. I had told people I had dug and eaten it as a child, but I had started to doubt if that memory was real or just a dream. I had often seen its crinkled, red, velvety flower growing on the stems of other plants without realizing it was the same ground-nut.

Sadly, farming has almost wiped out the ground-nut. It has a slightly sweet taste, much like a potato that has been touched by frost. I found it tasted better boiled than roasted. This root seemed like a small sign from Nature. It was as if Nature was promising to raise its own children and feed them simply here, at some point in the future.

In our current times, we focus on fattened cattle and large fields of grain. This humble root, which was once a sacred symbol for a Native American tribe, is mostly forgotten. If people know it at all, it’s only by its flowering vine. But imagine if wild Nature ruled here again. The delicate and carefully cultivated English grains would probably vanish, overcome by many natural challenges. Without human care, crows might even carry the last corn seed back to the great cornfield of the Native American’s God in the Southwest, where it is said to have come from. But the ground-nut, now almost gone, might just revive and grow well, despite frosts and wild conditions. It could prove itself to be a native plant. It could regain its old importance and respect as a main food source for a hunter gatherer way of life. Some Native American spirit of farming or wisdom must have invented it and given it as a gift. When a time of poetry and deeper appreciation for nature begins here, its leaves and strings of nuts might be shown in our artwork.

Nature’s Artistry in Autumn

By the first of September, I had already seen two or three small maple trees across the pond turn a brilliant scarlet red. They grew near the water, at the tip of a small piece of land, where the white trunks of three aspen trees spread out. Oh, their vibrant color told so many stories!

Week by week, the true character of each tree began to show. Each tree seemed to admire its own reflection in the smooth, mirror-like surface of the lake. Every morning, it was as if the manager of this natural art gallery replaced the old picture on the wall with a new one, each more brilliant or beautifully colored than the last.

Sharing Shelter with Wasps

In October, thousands of wasps came to my small house, looking for a place to spend the winter. They settled on the inside of my windows and on the walls overhead. Sometimes, they even discouraged visitors from coming inside!

Each morning, when the cold made them numb and slow, I would sweep some of them out. But I didn’t worry too much about getting rid of all of them. In a way, I felt complimented that they considered my house a good shelter. They never bothered me seriously, even though they shared my living space. Gradually, they disappeared. I don’t know what tiny cracks or holes they went into, but they found a way to avoid the harsh winter and the extreme cold.

Finding Warmth in Nature

Like the wasps seeking shelter, I also used to go to a particular spot before finally settling indoors for the winter in November. I would go to the northeast side of Walden Pond. The sun, reflecting off the pitch pine woods and the stony shore, made this spot feel like the pond’s own fireside. It is so much more pleasant and healthier to be warmed by the sun when you can, rather than by an artificial fire. So, I warmed myself by the leftover warmth of summer, like the glowing embers of a fire left behind by a hunter who has moved on.

Building the Heart of the Home: The Chimney

When it was time to build my chimney, I studied the art of masonry, which is stone or brick work. My bricks were second-hand, meaning they had been used before. I had to clean them with a trowel (a small hand tool for smoothing mortar). Because of this, I learned more than usual about the qualities of bricks and trowels.

The mortar (the cement-like mixture used to hold bricks together) on these old bricks was fifty years old. People said it was still getting harder with time. But this is one of those sayings that people love to repeat, whether it’s true or not. Such sayings themselves seem to get harder and stick more firmly with age. It would take many sharp taps with a trowel to get such an old idea out of a stubborn person’s head.

Many villages in ancient Mesopotamia (a region in the Middle East) are built with second-hand bricks of very good quality. These bricks came from the ruins of the ancient city of Babylon. The cement on them is even older and probably harder still.

Regardless of that, I was impressed by how tough the steel of my trowel was. It endured so many strong blows against the old mortar without wearing out. My bricks had been part of a chimney before. Although I didn’t find any ancient king’s name like Nebuchadnezzar carved on them, I picked out as many fireplace bricks as I could. This was to save work and avoid waste. I filled the spaces between the bricks around the fireplace with stones I found on the pond shore. I also made my mortar with white sand from the same place.

I spent the most time working on the fireplace, as I felt it was the most essential part of the house. In fact, I worked so carefully and slowly on it that sometimes, even though I started laying bricks at ground level in the morning, a course of bricks just a few inches high would serve as my pillow at night! Yet, I don’t remember getting a stiff neck from it. My stiff neck is from an older problem.

Around that time, I had a poet stay with me as a boarder for two weeks. This made my small house feel even more crowded. He brought his own knife, even though I had two. We used to clean our knives by sticking them into the earth. He helped me with the cooking.

I was pleased to see my chimney rising, looking square and solid, bit by bit. I thought that even if the work went slowly, it was being built to last a long time. The chimney, in some ways, is an independent structure. It stands on the ground and rises up through the house towards the sky. Even if the house burns down, the chimney sometimes remains standing. Its importance and independence become very clear then. This chimney work was happening towards the end of summer. By the time I finished, it was November.

Making the House a Home

The north wind had already started to cool the pond. However, because the pond is so deep, it took many weeks of steady blowing for the water to really get cold.

When I began to have a fire in my fireplace in the evenings, before I had plastered the walls of my house, the chimney drew smoke up and out very well. This was because there were many small gaps between the wooden boards of the walls. I spent some cheerful evenings in that cool and airy room. I was surrounded by the rough, brown boards, full of knots, and the rafters overhead still had their bark on.

My house never looked as pleasing to my eye after I plastered the walls, even though I had to admit it was more comfortable. Shouldn’t every room where a person lives be tall enough to create some shadowy spaces overhead? In these spaces, flickering shadows from the firelight can play around the rafters in the evening. These shifting shapes are more pleasing to the imagination than fancy paintings or expensive furniture.

I can say that I truly began to live in my house when I started using it for warmth, not just as a shelter from the rain or sun. I had a couple of old fire-dogs (metal supports for holding wood in a fireplace) to keep the burning wood off the hearth. It felt good to see soot forming on the back of the chimney I had built. I poked the fire with a greater sense of ownership and satisfaction than usual.

My house was small. I could hardly entertain an echo in it! But it seemed larger because it was just one single room and far from any neighbors. All the attractions of a house were concentrated in that one room. It was my kitchen, bedroom, living room, and general keeping-room all in one. Whatever satisfaction a parent or child, or a master or servant, gets from living in a house, I enjoyed all of it there.

An ancient Roman writer named Cato said that the head of a family should have in his country farmhouse “an oil and wine cellar, and many storage barrels.” This was so he could face hard times with a sense of security. Cato believed this preparation would be to his advantage, and a sign of his virtue and bring him glory.

In my own cellar, I had:

• A small barrel of potatoes.
• About two quarts of peas (which had some small insects, called weevils, in them). On my shelf, I had:
• A little rice.
• A jug of molasses.
• A small bag each of rye flour and cornmeal (Indian meal).

A Dream of the Ideal Dwelling

Sometimes I dream of a larger house, one that could hold more people. I imagine it existing in a golden age, built from materials that last forever. It would have no fussy, overly ornate decorations (what the author calls “ginger-bread work”). This ideal house would still consist of only one room. This room would be a huge, rough, solid, and basic hall. It would have no ceiling or plastering on the walls. Bare rafters and wooden beams (purlins) would support a kind of lower sky over one’s head, useful for keeping off rain and snow.

In this dream house:

• The main wooden posts (king and queen posts) would stand out, ready to receive your respect, after you’ve already acknowledged the ancient foundation (like a fallen god, Saturn) when you step inside.
• It would be a cavernous house, so large you’d need to lift a torch on a pole to see the roof.
• Some people might live near the fireplace, some in the recessed area of a window, and some on benches.
• Others might be at one end of the hall, or the other, or even up in the rafters with the spiders, if they chose.
• It would be a house you’ve fully entered once you’ve opened the outside door; the formal welcoming ceremony is over then.
• Weary travelers could wash, eat, talk, and sleep there without needing to journey further.
• It would be the kind of shelter you’d be glad to reach on a stormy night. It would contain all the essentials of a house, but nothing extra just for show or complicated housekeeping.
• You could see all the treasures of the house at a single glance. Everything a person needs would be hanging on its own peg.
• It would be a kitchen, pantry, parlor, bedroom, store-house, and attic, all in one.
• You could easily see necessary things like a barrel or a ladder, and convenient things like a cupboard.
• You could hear the pot boiling on the fire.
• You could pay your respects to the fire that cooks your dinner and the oven that bakes your bread.
• The necessary furniture and tools would be the main decorations.
• The washing wouldn’t be sent out, the fire wouldn’t be hidden, nor would the mistress of the house be out of sight.
• Perhaps sometimes you’d be asked to move from a trap-door in the floor when the cook needed to go down to the cellar. This way, you’d learn if the ground beneath you was solid or hollow without even needing to stamp on it.

This house would have an inside as open and obvious as a bird’s nest. You couldn’t go in the front door and out the back without seeing some of the people living there. To be a guest in such a house would mean being given the freedom of the entire house. You wouldn’t be carefully kept out of most of it, shut up in a particular room, and told to “make yourself at home” there – which often feels like solitary confinement.

Nowadays, a host often doesn’t welcome you to his own fireside. Instead, he has a builder create a separate one for you somewhere out of the way, perhaps in an alley. Hospitality has become the art of keeping you at the greatest possible distance. There’s so much secrecy about the cooking, it’s as if the host is planning to poison you!

I know I have been on many people’s property, and they could have legally ordered me to leave. But I am not aware that I have truly been inside many people’s houses in a welcoming way. If I were wearing my old clothes, I could visit a king and queen who lived simply in the kind of house I’ve described, if I happened to be going their way. But if I ever found myself caught in a modern palace, the only thing I’d want to learn is how to back out of it quickly.

Plain Living and Plain Speaking

It seems that the very language we use in our formal living rooms (parlors) would lose all its strength and become meaningless chatter. This happens because our lives are lived so far away from the real things that our words and symbols originally represented. Our metaphors and figures of speech are necessarily “far-fetched.” They have to travel a long way, as if through slides and dumb-waiters (small elevators for food), to connect to their meaning. In other words, the parlor is too far from the kitchen and the workshop. Even dinner is often just a symbol or a performance of a dinner, not the real, hearty thing. It’s as if only people living a “savage” life, close to Nature and Truth, can use language that directly and truly reflects their experiences.

How can a scholar, living far away in a remote place like the old North West Territory or the Isle of Man, truly understand what is practical and sensible (what is “parliamentary”) in everyday life, like in the kitchen?

Finishing the Walls: Plastering

However, only one or two of my guests were ever brave enough to stay and eat a simple meal of hasty-pudding (a type of cornmeal porridge) with me. When they saw that meal approaching, they usually made a quick exit instead! It was as if they thought eating it would shake the house to its foundations. Nevertheless, my little house stood firm through many servings of hasty-pudding.

I didn’t plaster my walls until the weather was freezing. For this job, I brought over some whiter and cleaner sand from the opposite shore of the pond in my boat. Using the boat was such a pleasant way to transport things that it would have tempted me to go much farther if I needed to. In the meantime, my house had been covered with shingles from top to bottom on all sides.

When I was putting up the laths (thin strips of wood that form a base for plaster), I was pleased that I could drive each nail in with a single blow of the hammer. It was my ambition to transfer the plaster from the board to the wall neatly and quickly.

I remembered a story about a conceited man. He used to dress in fine clothes and walk around the village, giving advice to workmen but not doing any work himself. One day, deciding to show his skill with actions instead of just words, he rolled up his cuffs and grabbed a plasterer’s board. He managed to load his trowel with plaster without any trouble. Then, with a self-satisfied look towards the laths overhead, he made a bold gesture to fling the plaster onto the wall. But, to his complete embarrassment, the entire load of wet plaster fell right into his fancy, ruffled shirtfront!

As I worked, I gained a new appreciation for how economical and convenient plastering is. It effectively shuts out the cold and gives the walls a handsome finish. I also learned about the various accidents and problems that a plasterer can face. I was surprised to see how thirsty the bricks were. They drank up all the moisture from my plaster before I had a chance to smooth it properly. It also takes many pails of water to “christen” a new hearth (to use it for the first time, implying a kind of initiation with water for cleaning or mixing).

The previous winter, I had made a small amount of lime for an experiment. I did this by burning the shells of a river mussel called Unio fluviatilis, which our river provided. So, I knew where my plastering materials came from. I could have found good limestone within a mile or two of my house and burned it myself to make lime, if I had wanted to take the trouble.

The Wonders of the First Ice

Meanwhile, the pond had started to freeze over in the shadiest and shallowest coves. This happened some days or even weeks before the main part of the pond froze.

The very first ice is especially interesting and perfect. It is hard, dark, and transparent. It provides the best opportunity ever to examine the bottom of the pond where the water is shallow. You can lie down flat on ice that is only an inch thick, like a skater insect on the surface of the water. You can then study the bottom at your leisure, only two or three inches away from your eyes, as if looking at a picture behind a sheet of glass. The water underneath is always smooth at this time.

You can see many furrows in the sand on the bottom, where some creature has traveled about and even retraced its tracks. The bottom is also scattered with the empty cases of caddis worms. These cases are made of tiny grains of white quartz. Perhaps these caddis worms made the furrows, because you find some of their cases in these tracks, although the tracks seem quite deep and broad for such small creatures.

But the ice itself is the most interesting thing to study, though you must take the very first opportunity to do so. If you look at it closely the morning after it freezes, you find that most of the bubbles, which at first seemed to be within the ice, are actually trapped against its undersurface. More bubbles are continually rising from the bottom of thepond. At this early stage, the ice is still relatively solid and dark, meaning you can see the water through it.

These bubbles range in size from very tiny (about one-eightieth of an inch) to small (about one-eighth of an inch) in diameter. They are very clear and beautiful. You can even see your face reflected in them through the ice. There might be thirty or forty of these bubbles in a single square inch of ice.

There are also narrow, oblong, vertical bubbles already trapped within the ice. These are about half an inch long and look like sharp cones with the point facing upward. Or, more often, if the ice is very fresh, you’ll see tiny round bubbles arranged one directly above another, like a string of beads. But these bubbles within the ice are not as numerous or as obvious as those trapped beneath it.

I sometimes used to throw stones onto the ice to test its strength. When a stone broke through, it carried air down with it. This trapped air formed very large and noticeable white bubbles beneath the new ice. One day, I came back to the same spot forty-eight hours later. I found that those large bubbles were still perfect, even though another inch of ice had formed on top. I could see this clearly by the seam in the edge of a piece of ice.

However, the last two days had been very warm, like an Indian summer (a period of warm weather in late autumn). Because of this, the ice was no longer transparent and dark, showing the dark green color of the water and the pond bottom. Instead, it had become opaque and whitish or gray. Even though it was now twice as thick as before, it was hardly any stronger. The air bubbles had greatly expanded under the heat and had merged. They had lost their regular patterns. They were no longer neatly one above another. Instead, they often looked like silvery coins poured from a bag, one overlapping another, or like thin flakes filling small cracks in the ice. The beauty of the clear ice was gone, and it was too late to study the bottom of the pond through it.

Ice Bubble Discoveries

I was curious to know where my big bubbles were located in relation to the new ice. So, I broke out a piece of ice that contained a medium-sized bubble and turned it upside down. The new ice had formed around and underneath the bubble. This meant the bubble was trapped between the two layers of ice. It was completely within the lower layer of ice but pressed right up against the upper layer. The bubble was flattish, perhaps slightly lens-shaped, with a rounded edge. It was about a quarter of an inch deep and four inches across.

I was surprised to find something else. Directly under the bubble, the older ice had melted in a very regular, saucer-like shape. This melted area was about five-eighths of an inch deep in the middle. This left only a thin layer of ice between the water and the bubble, hardly an eighth of an inch thick. In many places, the small bubbles in this thin layer had burst downward. It’s likely there was no ice at all under the largest bubbles, which were a foot across.

I figured that the huge number of tiny bubbles I had first seen on the underside of the ice were now frozen in place. I also realized that each bubble, depending on its size, had acted like a magnifying glass focusing sunlight. This focused light had helped to melt and weaken the ice beneath it. These are the little “air-guns” that help make the ice crack and make booming sounds.

Winter’s True Arrival

At last, winter truly began, just as I had finished plastering my house. The wind started to howl around the house. It was as if it hadn’t been allowed to do so until then. Night after night, geese flew in noisily in the dark. I could hear their loud calls and the whistling of their wings. This happened even after the ground was covered with snow. Some geese landed in Walden Pond. Others flew low over the woods toward Fair Haven, heading south for Mexico.

Several times, when I was returning from the village around ten or eleven o’clock at night, I heard a flock of geese or ducks walking on the dry leaves in the woods. This was near a small pond-hole behind my house where they had come to feed. I would hear the faint honk or quack of their leader as they quickly hurried away.

Here are the dates when Walden Pond froze over completely for the first time in those years:

• In 1845: The night of December 22nd. (Flint’s Pond, other shallower ponds, and the river had already been frozen for ten days or more.)
• In 1846: December 16th.
• In 1849: Around December 31st.
• In 1850: Around December 27th.
• In 1852: January 5th.
• In 1853: December 31st.

The snow had already covered the ground since November 25th that year. It suddenly surrounded me with winter scenery. I pulled back further into my cozy home, like a turtle into its shell. I tried hard to keep a bright fire burning, both in my fireplace and in my spirits.

Fuel for the Winter Fire

My main outdoor job now was to collect dead wood in the forest. I would bring it in my hands or on my shoulders. Sometimes I would drag a dead pine tree under each arm to my shed. An old forest fence that was falling apart was a great find for me. I offered it as a sacrifice to Vulcan, the Roman god of fire, because it was too old to serve Terminus, the Roman god of boundaries and landmarks.

Think about how much more interesting a man’s supper is when he has just gone out into the snow to hunt – or you might even say, steal – the fuel to cook it with! His bread and meat taste especially sweet.

In the forests of most of our towns, there are enough fallen branches and waste wood of all kinds to keep many fires burning. But right now, this wood warms no one. Some people even think it stops young trees from growing well.

There was also driftwood from the pond. During the summer, I had found a raft of pitch pine logs with the bark still on. Irish workers who built the railroad had pinned these logs together. I pulled part of this raft onto the shore. The logs had soaked in the water for two years and then lay on the shore, drying high up, for six months. After all that time, the wood was perfectly solid, even though it was so waterlogged it would never fully dry out.

One winter day, I had fun sliding these logs, piece by piece, across the frozen pond. It was nearly half a mile. I skated behind, balancing one end of a fifteen-foot log on my shoulder, while the other end slid on the ice. Other times, I tied several logs together with a flexible birch branch. Then, using a longer birch or alder pole with a hook on the end, I dragged them across the ice.

Even though these logs were completely waterlogged and almost as heavy as lead, they didn’t just burn for a long time; they also made a very hot fire. In fact, I thought they burned better because they had been soaked. It was as if the pine resin, trapped by the water, burned longer and more steadily, like fuel in a lamp.

The Forest’s True Worth

Mr. Gilpin, in his writings about people living near England’s forests, mentions that old forest laws considered certain things great annoyances. These included “people trespassing and building houses and fences on the forest borders.” Such actions were severely punished under the name of “purprestures.” The laws said these actions tended to frighten the wild animals and harm the forest.

But I cared more about protecting the deer (the “venison”) and the green plants (the “vert”) than most hunters or woodchoppers did. I felt as strongly about it as if I were the Lord Warden, the official in charge of the forest. If any part of the forest was burned, even if I burned it myself by accident, I felt a sadness that lasted longer and was harder to comfort than the sadness of the landowners. In fact, I even felt sad when the landowners themselves cut down the trees.

I wish that our farmers, when they cut down a forest, would feel some of the deep respect that the ancient Romans felt. When Romans thinned a sacred grove of trees or let light into it, they believed the grove was holy and belonged to some god. A Roman would make a special offering to apologize for disturbing the grove. He would pray something like: “Whatever god or goddess this grove is sacred to, please be kind to me, my family, and my children.”

Wood: A Universal Treasure

It’s remarkable how much value people still place on wood, even in this modern age and in this new country. Wood has a value that is more permanent and widespread than that of gold. After all our discoveries and inventions, no one will simply walk by a pile of wood without noticing it. It is as precious to us as it was to our Saxon and Norman ancestors long ago. If they made their bows from it, we make our gun handles from it.

More than thirty years ago, a writer named Michaux said that the price of wood for fuel in New York and Philadelphia “nearly equals, and sometimes exceeds, that of the best wood in Paris.” This was true even though Paris, a huge city, needed more than three hundred thousand cords of wood each year and was surrounded by cultivated plains for three hundred miles.

In this town, the price of wood rises almost steadily. The only question each year is how much higher it will be than the last. Mechanics and tradesmen, who normally wouldn’t come to the forest for any other reason, make sure to attend wood auctions. They even pay a high price for the chance to pick up leftover wood after the woodchoppers are done.

For many years now, people have gone to the forest for fuel and for materials to make things. The New Englander and the person from Holland, the Parisian and the Celt, the farmer and the legendary Robin Hood, characters from stories like Goody Blake and Harry Gill – in most parts of the world, the prince and the peasant, the scholar and the person living a simple, natural life, all still need a few sticks from the forest to warm themselves and cook their food. I couldn’t do without them either.

The Comfort of a Woodpile

Every man looks at his woodpile with a kind of fondness. I loved to have my woodpile in front of my window. The more wood chips scattered around, the better, as they reminded me of my pleasant work.

I had an old axe that nobody claimed. Sometimes on winter days, when the sun was shining on the side of my house, I would use it to chop up the tree stumps I had dug out of my bean-field. As the man driving the plow had predicted when I was plowing, these stumps warmed me twice: once while I was splitting them, and again when they were burning in the fire. So, no fuel could give out more heat.

As for the axe, someone advised me to get the village blacksmith to “jump” it. This means reforging the steel edge to make it sharp and strong again. But I “jumped” the blacksmith instead – meaning I decided to fix it myself. I fitted a new handle made of hickory wood from the forest onto the axe head, and it worked well enough. If it was dull, at least the axe head was set straight on the handle.

Kindling the Hearth’s Glow

A few pieces of fat pine (resinous pine wood that burns easily) were a great treasure. It’s interesting to remember how much of this excellent fire-starting material is still hidden in the earth. In previous years, I had often gone “prospecting” or searching on bare hillsides where pitch pine woods used to stand. There, I would dig out the fat pine roots.

These roots are almost indestructible. Tree stumps that are thirty or forty years old, at least, will still be solid at the core. This is true even though the outer wood (sapwood) has all rotted into soil. You can tell where the heartwood is by the scales of thick bark forming a ring on the ground, four or five inches away from the solid center. With an axe and shovel, you explore this “mine.” You follow the rich, resinous store of wood, which is yellow like beef fat, or as if you had struck a vein of gold deep in the earth.

But usually, I started my fire with dry leaves from the forest. I had stored these in my shed before the snow came. Finely split green hickory wood also makes good kindling for a woodchopper when he has a camp in the woods. Once in a while, I got a little of this.

When the villagers were lighting their fires far away beyond the horizon, I too would send a signal to the various wild animals living in Walden valley. A smoky streamer rising from my chimney would announce that I was awake.

Light-winged Smoke, like Icarus you fly, Your wings dissolving as you rise so high. A silent lark, a messenger of day, You circle over villages, then drift away; Or else, a fading dream, a shadowy sight From visions of the midnight, taking flight; By night, you hide the stars; by day, you seem To dim the light and hide the sun’s bright beam. Go now, my incense, upward from this hearth, And ask the gods to pardon this clear flame’s birth.

Fire as a Housemate

Hard green wood that was freshly cut answered my purpose better than any other, though I used only a little of it. It burned slowly and steadily. Sometimes I left a good fire burning when I went for a walk on a winter afternoon. When I returned three or four hours later, it would still be alive and glowing. My house was not empty even though I was gone. It was as if I had left a cheerful housekeeper behind. It was I and Fire that lived there together. And usually, my housekeeper, Fire, proved trustworthy.

One day, however, as I was splitting wood, I thought I should just look in at the window to see if the house was on fire. It was the only time I remember being particularly worried about that. So, I looked and saw that a spark had landed on my bed. I went in and put out the fire when it had burned a spot as big as my hand.

But my house was in such a sunny and sheltered spot, and its roof was so low, that I could afford to let the fire go out in the middle of almost any winter day without the house getting too cold.

Creature Comforts: Man and Animal

Moles nested in my cellar. They nibbled on every third potato and made a cozy bed for themselves there. They used some hair left over from my plastering work and pieces of brown paper. This shows that even the wildest animals love comfort and warmth as much as humans do. They survive the winter only because they are so careful to find these things.

Some of my friends spoke as if I was moving to the woods on purpose to freeze myself. An animal simply makes a bed in a sheltered place, which it warms with its own body. But humans, having discovered fire, do something more. A person builds a house, trapping some air in a spacious room, and warms that air with fire. Instead of just warming his own body, he makes the warmed room his “bed.” In this space, he can move about without heavy, bulky clothing. He can create a kind of summer in the middle of winter. By using windows, he can even let in daylight, and with a lamp, he can make the day last longer.

In this way, humans go a step or two beyond basic instinct. This allows them to save a little time for other pursuits, like the “fine arts” – activities beyond mere survival. Though, when I had been exposed to the harshest cold winds for a long time, my whole body would start to feel numb and sluggish. But when I reached the warm atmosphere of my house, I soon recovered my energy and felt my life prolonged.

But even the person living in the most luxurious house has little to boast about in this regard. We don’t need to spend much time wondering how the human race might eventually be destroyed. It would be easy to end human existence with just a slightly sharper blast of cold wind from the north. We often remember and date events from “Cold Fridays” and “Great Snows” – times of extreme weather. But a slightly colder Friday, or a greater snowstorm, could easily put an end to human life on Earth.

The Stove: A Lost Companion

The next winter, I used a small cooking stove to save money on wood, since I didn’t own the forest. But the stove didn’t keep the fire going as well as the open fireplace did. Cooking, for the most part, was no longer a poetic or inspiring activity, but merely a chemical process.

In these days of stoves, people will soon forget that we used to roast potatoes in the ashes of an open fire, the way Native Americans did. The stove not only took up room and made the house smell different, but it also hid the fire. I felt as if I had lost a companion.

You can always see a face in an open fire. The laborer, looking into the fire in the evening, purifies his thoughts, clearing away the dirt and stress that have built up during the day. But with the stove, I could no longer sit and look into the fire. The fitting words of a poet came back to me with new meaning:

Never, bright flame, may I be kept apart From your dear, life-reflecting, friendly heart. What, but my hopes, ever shot up so bright? What, but my fortunes, sank so low in night?

Why are you forced from our hearth and our hall, You who are welcomed and beloved by all? Was your existence then too full of grace For our life’s common light, in this dull place? Did your bright gleam hold conversations deep With souls like ours? Secrets too bold to keep?

Well, we are safe and strong, for now we sit Beside a hearth where no dim shadows flit, Where nothing cheers or saddens, but a fire Warms feet and hands—and does no more aspire; By whose compact and useful, tidy heap The present time may sit and fall asleep, Nor fear the ghosts who from the dim past walked, And with us by the shifting light of the old wood fire talked.

Former Inhabitants; and Winter Visitors

I experienced some enjoyable snowstorms. I also spent some cheerful winter evenings by my fireside. Outside, the snow swirled wildly, and even the hooting of the owl was silent. For many weeks, the only people I met on my walks were those who occasionally came to cut wood and haul it to the village on sleds.

However, the elements of nature helped me make a path through the deepest snow in the woods. Once I had walked through, the wind blew oak leaves into my tracks. These leaves stayed there. By absorbing the sun’s rays, they melted the snow. This not only made a dry place for my feet but also created a dark line that guided me at night.

For human company, I had to imagine the people who used to live in these woods. Many of my townspeople remembered a time when the road near my house was filled with the laughter and talk of inhabitants. The woods along the road were dotted here and there with their small gardens and homes. Back then, the area was much more enclosed by the forest than it is now.

In some places, even within my own memory, the pine trees grew so close that their branches would scrape both sides of a carriage at once. Women and children who had to travel this way to Lincoln alone and on foot did so with fear. They often ran a good part of the distance.

Although it was mostly just a humble route to nearby villages or for the woodcutter’s team of horses, the road once entertained travelers more than it does now because it was more varied. It also stayed longer in their memories. Where firm, open fields now stretch from the village to the woods, the road then ran through a maple swamp. It was built on a foundation of logs. The remains of these logs, no doubt, still lie under the present dusty highway, from the Stratton Farm (now the Alms House Farm, a place for the poor) to Brister’s Hill.

Cato Ingraham’s Homestead

East of my bean-field, across the road, lived Cato Ingraham. He was an enslaved man belonging to Duncan Ingraham, Esquire, a gentleman of Concord village. Duncan Ingraham built a house for Cato and gave him permission to live in Walden Woods. This was Cato of Concord, not the famous Cato of Utica from Roman history. Some say he was a Black man from Guinea, Africa.

A few people remember his small plot of land among the walnut trees. He let the trees grow, planning to use them when he was old and needed them. But a younger, white land buyer eventually got them. That buyer, however, now also lies in an equally small grave. Cato’s cellar hole, where his house once stood, is still there, though it’s partly hidden by pine trees and known to few. It is now filled with smooth sumac (Rhus glabra). One of the earliest types of goldenrod (Solidago stricta) also grows there abundantly.

Zilpha’s Song and Sorrows

Here, by the very corner of my field, even closer to town, a Black woman named Zilpha had her little house. She spun linen for the townspeople. Her shrill singing would make the Walden Woods ring because she had a loud and noticeable voice.

Later, during the War of 1812, English soldiers who were prisoners released on parole set her house on fire while she was away. Her cat, dog, and hens all burned up together in the fire. She lived a hard life, and in some ways, it was an inhumane existence. One old man who often visited these woods remembers passing her house one noon. He heard her muttering to herself over her bubbling pot, “You are all bones, bones!” I have seen old bricks in the small group of oak trees there, likely from her home.

Brister Freeman and Fenda

Down the road, on the right, on Brister’s Hill, lived Brister Freeman. He was described as “a handy Negro” (a skilled Black man) and was once enslaved by Squire Cummings. The apple trees that Brister planted and cared for still grow there. They are large, old trees now, but their fruit still tastes wild and sharp, good for cider.

Not long ago, I read his tombstone inscription in the old Lincoln burying-ground. It was a little to one side, near the unmarked graves of some British soldiers who died during the retreat from Concord. On the tombstone, he is called “Sippio Brister.” The name perhaps playfully hinted he had some right to be called Scipio Africanus, after the famous Roman general. The inscription also called him “a man of color,” as if being non-white was a kind of discoloration – a phrasing the author found odd. It also told me, with stark emphasis, when he died. This was just an indirect way of telling me that he had, in fact, once lived.

With him lived Fenda, his hospitable wife. She told fortunes but did so in a pleasant way. She was large, round, and very Black – darker than any “child of the night.” She was like a dark, round celestial body, the likes of which had never appeared in Concord before or since.

The Lost Stratton Orchard

Farther down the hill, on the left, on the old road in the woods, are signs of a former homestead belonging to the Stratton family. Their orchard once covered the entire slope of Brister’s Hill. But pitch pine trees killed it out long ago. Only a few tree stumps remain. Their old roots still provide the wild rootstock for many healthy village apple trees today.

Breed’s Place and the Demon Rum

Closer yet to town, you come to Breed’s former place. It’s on the other side of the road, right on the edge of the woods. This land was famous for the pranks of a demon not clearly named in old myths. This demon has played a prominent and shocking role in New England life. It deserves, as much as any mythical character, to have its biography written one day. This demon first appears disguised as a friend or a hired worker. Then, it robs and murders the whole family. This demon is New England Rum (meaning alcohol, specifically rum).

But history should not yet tell the tragedies that happened here. Let some time pass to lessen the pain and give these events a softer, more distant appearance, like a landscape seen through a blue haze. Here, the faintest and most doubtful local stories say that a tavern once stood. The well is the same one that cooled travelers’ drinks and refreshed their horses. Here, men greeted each other, heard and shared the news, and then went on their way.

A Memorable Fire

Breed’s hut was still standing only about twelve years ago, though it had been empty for a long time. It was about the size of my own small house. Mischievous boys set it on fire one Election night, if I remember correctly. I was living on the edge of the village then. I had just been completely absorbed in reading a long poem called Davenant’s Gondibert. That winter, I was struggling with a great tiredness and lack of energy. (By the way, I never knew whether to consider this tiredness a family trait – I have an uncle who falls asleep while shaving and has to sprout potatoes in a cellar on Sundays just to stay awake and observe the Sabbath – or if it was the result of my attempt to read Chalmers’ entire collection of English poetry without skipping any parts.) Reading all that poetry fairly wore me out.

I had just put my head down when the town bells rang, signaling a fire. In a great hurry, the fire engines rolled that way. They were led by a scattered group of men and boys, and I was among the first, as I had quickly leaped over the brook. We who had run to fires before – whether a barn, shop, dwelling, or all of them burning together – thought it was far south, beyond the woods. “It’s Baker’s barn!” cried one person. “It’s the Codman Place!” stated another. Then, fresh sparks flew up above the woods, as if a roof had fallen in. We all shouted, “Concord to the rescue!”

Wagons shot past at furious speed, carrying heavy loads. Perhaps among the people on them was the agent of the Insurance Company, who had to go no matter how far the fire was. Every now and then, the fire engine’s bell tinkled behind, moving more slowly but surely. Last of all, as it was whispered later, came the very people who had set the fire and then raised the alarm.

So we kept on like true idealists, ignoring the evidence of our senses. Then, at a turn in the road, we heard the crackling of the fire. We actually felt its heat from over a wall. And then, alas, we realized we were there. The very nearness of the fire cooled our enthusiasm. At first, we thought about trying to empty a nearby frog-pond onto it. But we decided to let it burn because it was too far gone and so worthless.

So we stood around our fire engine. We jostled one another. We expressed our opinions through speaking trumpets (early megaphones) or in lower tones. We talked about the great fires the world had seen, including the fire at Bascom’s shop. Between ourselves, we thought that if we had arrived in time with our “tub” (a hand-pumped fire engine) and a full frog-pond nearby, we could have turned that threatening, supposedly final and universal fire into just another small flood.

We finally left without causing any trouble – we returned to our sleep and, in my case, to the poem Gondibert. But speaking of Gondibert, I would take issue with the passage in its preface about wit being the soul’s gunpowder. The author adds, “but most of mankind are strangers to wit, as Indians are to powder.” (This meant that just as Native Americans were initially unfamiliar with gunpowder, most people are unfamiliar with true wit or intelligence.)

The Last Heir of Breed’s Hollow

It happened that I walked that way across the fields the following night, around the same hour. I heard a low moaning sound at this spot. I drew near in the dark and found the only survivor of that family that I know. He was the heir to both its good qualities and its faults. He alone was truly interested in this burning. He was lying on his stomach, looking over the cellar wall at the still smoldering cinders beneath. He was muttering to himself, as he often did.

He had been working far away in the river meadows all day. He had used the first moments he could call his own to visit the home of his ancestors and his youth. He gazed into the cellar from all sides and different angles, always lying down to look. It was as if there was some treasure he remembered, hidden between the stones, where there was now absolutely nothing but a heap of bricks and ashes. With the house gone, he looked at what was left.

He seemed soothed by the unspoken sympathy my mere presence offered. He showed me, as well as the darkness allowed, where the well was covered up. Thank Heaven, the well could never be burned. He groped around the wall for a long time to find the well-sweep (a long pole for drawing water) that his father had cut and set up. He was feeling for the iron hook or staple where a bucket would have been fastened to the heavy end. This well-sweep was all he could now cling to, to convince me that it was no ordinary, poorly made one (a “common rider”). I felt it, and I still notice it almost daily on my walks, for the history of a family hangs by it.

Other Former Neighbors: Nutting, Le Grosse, and Wyman the Potter

Once more, on the left side of the road, where you can see the well and lilac bushes by the wall in the now open field, lived Nutting and Le Grosse. But let’s turn back towards Lincoln.

Farther in the woods than any of these other old homes, where the road comes closest to the pond, a potter named Wyman once lived as a squatter (someone living on land without full legal right). He supplied his townspeople with earthenware pottery and left descendants to continue his trade. They were not rich in worldly goods. They lived on the land by permission while they were alive. The sheriff often came in vain to collect taxes from them. As I read in his official accounts, the sheriff would “attach a chip” (a legal formality of seizing a tiny, worthless item when no real property could be taken) because there was nothing else he could claim.

One day in midsummer, when I was hoeing my field, a man carrying a load of pottery to market stopped his horse near my field. He asked about Wyman the younger. He had bought a potter’s wheel from him long ago and wanted to know what had become of him. I had read about potter’s clay and wheels in the Bible. But it had never occurred to me that the pots we use were not ancient ones passed down unbroken from those days, or that they didn’t grow on trees like gourds somewhere. I was pleased to hear that such a creative art using clay (a “fictile an art”) was once practiced in my neighborhood.

Hugh Quoil: The Last Inhabitant Before Me

The last inhabitant of these woods before me was an Irishman named Hugh Quoil. (I hope I’ve spelled his name with enough “coil,” playing on the sound). He lived in Wyman’s old dwelling and was known as Colonel Quoil. Rumor said he had been a soldier at the Battle of Waterloo. If he had lived, I would have made him tell me all about his battles. His job here was digging ditches. Napoleon, the French emperor, went to the island of St. Helena after his defeat; Quoil came to Walden Woods.

All I know of him is tragic. He was a man of manners, like someone who had seen the world. He was capable of more polite and intelligent conversation than you might expect or easily pay attention to. He wore a heavy greatcoat even in mid-summer because he suffered from the “trembling delirium” (likely delirium tremens, from alcohol withdrawal). His face was a deep red color (carmine). He died in the road at the foot of Brister’s Hill shortly after I came to the woods, so I don’t remember him as a neighbor.

Before his house was pulled down, when his former comrades avoided it, calling it “an unlucky castle,” I visited it. His old clothes lay there, curled up from use, as if they were his very self, upon his raised plank bed. His pipe lay broken on the hearth. This was different from the biblical image of “a bowl broken at the fountain” symbolizing death. That image could never have been the symbol of his death. He confessed to me that although he had heard of Brister’s Spring, he had never actually seen it. Soiled playing cards – kings of diamonds, spades, and hearts – were scattered over the floor.

One black chicken, which the person managing his affairs after his death could not catch, still went to roost in the next empty room. It was as black as night and just as silent, not even croaking, as if waiting for Reynard the fox to come. In the back, there was the dim outline of a garden. It had been planted but had never received its first hoeing, due to those terrible shaking fits he suffered from, even though it was now harvest time. The garden was overgrown with Roman wormwood and beggar-ticks; the seeds of the beggar-ticks stuck to my clothes as the only “fruit” I got there. The skin of a woodchuck was freshly stretched on the back of the house, a trophy of his last “Waterloo” (his last hunt). But he would no longer need a warm cap or mittens.

Traces of Bygone Lives

Now, only a dent in the earth marks the site of these old homes. Buried cellar stones lie beneath. Strawberries, raspberries, thimble-berries, hazel-bushes, and sumacs grow in the sunny grassy area there. Some pitch pine or gnarled oak tree now grows where the chimney nook once was. A sweet-scented black birch tree, perhaps, waves where the doorstep used to be.

Sometimes the dent of an old well is visible, where a spring once flowed. Now, only dry and tearless grass grows there. Or perhaps the well was covered deep with a flat stone under the sod when the last of the family departed – not to be discovered until some much later day. What a sorrowful act that must be – the covering up of wells! It happens at the same time as the opening of wells of tears.

These cellar dents, like deserted fox burrows or old holes, are all that is left where once there was the activity and noise of human life. Here, philosophical topics like “fate, freewill, and absolute foreknowledge” were discussed in some form or dialect. But all I can learn of their conclusions amounts to just this: that “Cato and Brister pulled wool.” This means their philosophical discussions were probably not very profound or useful, perhaps as unhelpful as the history of more famous schools of philosophy.

Lingering Lilacs: A Living Memorial

Still, the hardy lilac grows, a generation after the door, the beam above it (lintel), and the windowsill are gone. It unfolds its sweet-scented flowers each spring, to be plucked by the thoughtful traveler. Children’s hands once planted and tended these lilacs in front-yard plots. Now they stand by old wall-sides in remote pastures, giving way to newly rising forests. They are the last of that family line, the sole survivor of that household.

Little did the dark-skinned children think that the small lilac cutting, with only two buds (“eyes”), which they stuck in the ground in the shadow of the house and watered daily, would root itself so well. They didn’t imagine it would outlive them and the house that shaded it, and also outlive the grown man’s garden and orchard. They didn’t know it would faintly tell their story to the lone wanderer half a century after they had grown up and died. Yet it blossoms as beautifully and smells as sweet as it did in that first spring. I notice its still tender, civilized, cheerful, lilac colors.

Why Did This Village Fail?

But this small village, which could have been the start of something more, why did it fail while the town of Concord continues to thrive? Were there no natural advantages here – no rights to use water for mills, for example? Yes, there were! There was the deep Walden Pond and the cool Brister’s Spring. These offered the privilege to drink long and healthy draughts of water. But these men only used this water to dilute their alcoholic drinks. They were, as a group, a very thirsty people.

Could not businesses like basket-making, stable-broom making, mat-making, corn-parching, linen-spinning, and pottery have thrived here? Could they not have made the wilderness blossom like a rose, and allowed many future generations to inherit the land of their fathers? The poor quality of the soil here (sterile soil) would at least have prevented the people from becoming soft or less virtuous, a “degeneracy” sometimes associated with easier living in fertile lowlands.

Alas! How little the memory of these human inhabitants adds to the beauty of the landscape! Then again, perhaps Nature will try once more, with me as the first new settler. My house, raised last spring, might become the oldest in this new little hamlet.

A Home on Untouched Ground

I am not aware that any man has ever built on the exact spot where I now live. Save me from a city built on the site of an even older city, whose building materials are ruins, and whose gardens are cemeteries! The soil in such places is bleached, overused, and cursed. Before that becomes necessary for the whole world, the earth itself will be destroyed.

With such thoughts and memories, I repeopled the woods in my imagination and lulled myself to sleep.

Deep Winter Isolation

At this season, I seldom had a visitor. When the snow lay deepest, no traveler ventured near my house for a week or two at a time. But there I lived, as snug as a meadow mouse. I was like cattle and poultry, which are said to have survived for a long time buried in deep snowdrifts, even without food. Or I was like that early settler’s family in the town of Sutton, in this state. Their cottage was completely covered by the great snow of 1717 when the father was absent. A Native American found it only by the hole that the chimney’s smoke had made in the snowdrift, and so he rescued the family. But no friendly Native American worried about me; nor did he need to, for the master of the house was at home.

The Great Snow! How cheerful it is to hear stories about it! Farmers could not get to the woods and swamps with their teams of horses. They were forced to cut down the shade trees in front of their houses for fuel. And when the snow crust was very hard, they had to cut trees in the swamps ten feet from the ground, as became clear the next spring when the snow melted.

My Winding Snow Path

In the deepest snows, the path I used from the highway to my house, about half a mile long, might have looked like a winding, dotted line on a map, with wide gaps between the dots. For a week of consistent weather, I took exactly the same number of steps, and each step was the same length, whether I was coming or going. I stepped deliberately, with the precision of a pair of dividers (a measuring tool), in my own deep tracks. Winter reduces us to such routines. Yet often, these tracks were filled with the beautiful blue color of the sky reflected in the snow.

Here is the continued simplified rewrite of “Former Inhabitants; and Winter Visitors.”

Winter Walks and Wildlife Encounters

But no weather ever completely stopped my walks, or rather, my trips outdoors. I frequently walked eight or ten miles through the deepest snow. I did this to keep an “appointment” with a beech tree, a yellow birch, or an old pine tree friend. The ice and snow would weigh down their branches, making their tops look sharper, and changing the pines into fir-trees in appearance. I waded to the tops of the highest hills when the snow was nearly two feet deep on flat ground. Every step I took would shake down another snowstorm on my head from the trees above. Sometimes I had to creep and struggle there on my hands and knees, especially when the hunters had already gone into their winter shelters.

One afternoon, I amused myself by watching a barred owl (Strix nebulosa). It was sitting on one of the lower dead branches of a white pine tree, close to the trunk. This was in broad daylight, and I was standing only about sixteen feet away from it. The owl could hear me when I moved and crunched the snow with my feet, but it could not see me clearly. When I made more noise, it would stretch out its neck, raise its neck feathers, and open its eyes wide. But its eyelids soon fell again, and it began to nod.

I, too, felt a sleepy influence after watching the owl for half an hour. It sat there with its eyes half open, like a cat – a winged brother of the cat. There was only a narrow slit left between its eyelids. Through this slit, it kept a kind of distant, almost cut-off connection to me. With its half-shut eyes, it seemed to be looking out from the land of dreams. It was trying to make sense of me, some vague object or tiny speck that was interrupting its visions.

Eventually, if I made a louder noise or moved closer, the owl would grow uneasy. It would sluggishly turn about on its perch, as if annoyed at having its dreams disturbed. And when it launched itself off the branch and flapped through the pines, spreading its wings to an unexpected width, I could not hear the slightest sound from them. In this way, guided among the pine branches more by a delicate sense of their nearness than by sight, it felt its dim, twilight path as if with its sensitive wings. It found a new perch where it could peacefully wait for the true dawning of its day (when it would become active).

Braving the Elements to Reach Town

As I walked over the long, raised road (causeway) built for the railroad through the meadows, I faced many blustering and biting winds. Nowhere else did the wind have such free play. And when the frost had struck me on one cheek, I, like a “heathen” (someone not following common religious rules, used humorously here), turned the other cheek to it also, just to be fair.

It wasn’t much better by the carriage road from Brister’s Hill. I still went to town, like a friendly Native American visiting. By then, the contents of the broad open fields – like harvested crops – were all piled up between the walls of snow along the Walden road. Half an hour was enough for the wind to wipe out the tracks of the last traveler. And when I returned, new snowdrifts would have formed. I would have to flounder through them, where the busy northwest wind had been depositing fine, powdery snow around a sharp turn in the road. Not even a rabbit’s track, or the fine print – the tiny footprints – of a deer mouse, could be seen.

Yet, even in mid-winter, I rarely failed to find some warm and springy swamp. In these swamps, the grass and the skunk-cabbage still showed their year-round greenery. Some hardier bird would occasionally be there, waiting for the return of spring.

Unexpected Winter Guests

Sometimes, despite the snow, when I returned from my walk in the evening, I would find fresh, deep tracks of a woodchopper leading from my door. I’d find his pile of wood shavings (whittlings) on my hearth. My house would be filled with the smell of his pipe.

Or on a Sunday afternoon, if I happened to be at home, I would hear the crunching of snow made by the steps of a thoughtful farmer. He would come from far through the woods, seeking out my house to have a friendly chat (a social “crack”). He was one of the few farmers who were truly “men on their farms” – genuine and grounded in their work. He wore a simple work coat (a frock) instead of a professor’s gown. He was as ready to find a moral lesson in church or government affairs as he was to haul a load of manure from his barnyard. We talked of rough and simple times, when men sat around large fires in cold, refreshing weather, with clear heads. And when other desserts failed, we tried our teeth on many a nut that wise squirrels had long since given up on, because those with the thickest shells are often empty inside.

The Poet: A Determined Visitor

The visitor who came from the farthest away to my little house, through the deepest snows and most dismal storms, was a poet. A farmer, a hunter, a soldier, a reporter, even a philosopher, might be discouraged by such conditions. But nothing can stop a poet, because he is driven by pure love for what he does. Who can predict when a poet will come or go? His business calls him out at all hours, even when doctors are asleep.

We made that small house ring with loud, joyful laughter. It echoed with the murmur of much serious talk. Our conversations made up for the long silences that usually filled Walden valley. Broadway in New York City would have seemed still and deserted in comparison. At suitable moments, there were regular bursts of laughter. These could have been in response to the last joke told or one that was about to be told. We created many “brand new” theories of life over a thin dish of simple porridge (gruel). This simple meal combined the advantages of a friendly, sociable atmosphere with the clear-headedness that philosophy requires.

The Philosopher: A Welcome Friend

I should not forget that during my last winter at the pond, there was another welcome visitor. He, at one time, came through the village, through snow and rain and darkness, until he saw my lamp through the trees. He shared some long winter evenings with me.

He was one of the last of the true philosophers. Connecticut gave him to the world. He first sold goods from Connecticut (peddled her wares). Afterwards, as he says, he began to “peddle” his brains – his ideas. These ideas he still offers to the world. His thoughts often challenge common beliefs about God and humanity. His main “fruit” or product is his thought, just as a nut’s main product is its kernel. I think he must be the man with the most faith of anyone alive. His words and attitude always assume a better state of things than other people are familiar with. He will be the last man to be disappointed as time goes on because his hope is not in current circumstances. He has no investment in the way things are now. But though he is mostly disregarded now, when his time comes, laws that most people don’t suspect will take effect. Heads of families and rulers will come to him for advice.

As someone said, “How blind are those who cannot see serenity!”

He was a true friend of humanity, almost the only real friend of human progress. He was like “Old Mortality” (a figure who re-engraved old tombstones), or rather, an “Immortality.” With tireless patience and faith, he worked to make plain the divine image engraved in human beings – the God of whom people are but damaged and leaning monuments. With his welcoming mind, he embraces children, beggars, the mentally ill, and scholars. He entertains the thoughts of everyone, usually adding some breadth and elegance to them.

I think he should keep a caravansary (a large inn for travelers) on the world’s main highway. Philosophers of all nations could stay there. On his sign should be printed: “Entertainment for humans, but not for their animals. Enter, you who have leisure and a quiet mind, who earnestly seek the right road.” He is perhaps the sanest man I know and has the fewest peculiar or stubborn ideas (crotchets). He is the same yesterday and tomorrow.

In the past, we had walked and talked together, effectively putting the ordinary world behind us. He was not tied to any institution in society; he was free-spirited and genuine (ingenuus). Whichever way we turned, it seemed that the heavens and the earth had met together, because he enhanced the beauty of the landscape. He was like a man robed in blue, whose most fitting roof is the overarching sky, which reflects his serenity. I do not see how he can ever die; Nature cannot afford to lose him.

Conversations That Stretched the Mind

Having each gathered some “shingles of thought” (well-considered ideas) that were well dried and ready, we sat and “whittled” them. We were like woodcarvers trying our knives, admiring the clear, yellowish grain of our ideas, like that of pumpkin pine wood. We moved so gently and respectfully in our conversations, or we worked together so smoothly, that the “fishes of thought” (our ideas) were not scared from the stream of conversation. They did not fear any angler on the bank (anyone trying to catch or limit them). Instead, our ideas came and went grandly, like the clouds that float through the western sky, or the iridescent, mother-of-pearl clouds that sometimes form and dissolve there.

There we worked, re-examining old myths, improving a fable here and there, and building castles in the air for which the earth offered no worthy foundation. He was a Great Looker, a keen observer! He was a Great Expecter, one who hoped for great things! To talk with him was a true “New England Night’s Entertainment” (a wonderful and imaginative experience, like the tales of the Arabian Nights).

Ah, such discussions we had – the hermit (myself), the philosopher, and the old settler I have spoken of. We three – our talk expanded and strained my little house! I shouldn’t dare to say how many pounds of intellectual weight there was above the normal atmospheric pressure on every circular inch of that room. It opened the seams of the house so much that they had to be sealed (calked) afterwards with a lot of dull, ordinary effort to stop the leaks. But I had enough of that kind of “oakum” (boring, mundane thoughts or tasks) already picked and ready.

Quiet Hopes and Unseen Guests

There was one other person with whom I had “solid seasons” – deep and meaningful times, long to be remembered. These took place at his house in the village, and he also visited me from time to time. But I had no more close social connections there.

There too, as everywhere, I sometimes expected the Visitor who never comes. An ancient Eastern scripture, the Vishnu Purana, says, “The house-holder is to remain at eventide in his court-yard as long as it takes to milk a cow, or longer if he pleases, to await the arrival of a guest.” I often performed this duty of hospitality. I waited long enough to milk a whole herd of cows, but I did not see the hoped-for visitor approaching from the town.

Winter Animals

Frozen Ponds: New Paths and Perspectives

When the ponds were firmly frozen, they offered more than just new and shorter routes to many places. They also provided new views of the familiar landscape around them from their icy surfaces.

One time, I crossed Flint’s Pond after it was covered with snow. Even though I had often paddled my boat and skated on it, the pond seemed so unexpectedly wide and strange. I could only think of Baffin’s Bay, a vast, icy bay in the Arctic. The Lincoln hills rose up around me at the far edge of a snowy plain. I didn’t remember ever standing in such a wide-open snowy space before.

Fishermen, at some hard-to-determine distance out on the ice, moved slowly about with their wolf-like dogs. They looked like seal hunters or Inuit people (Esquimaux). In misty weather, they appeared as large and indistinct as mythical creatures. I couldn’t tell if they were giants or tiny figures (pygmies).

I took this route across the frozen ponds when I went to give a lecture in Lincoln in the evening. I traveled without using any road and passed no houses between my own hut and the lecture room.

Goose Pond lay in my path. A colony of muskrats lived there. They had built their dome-shaped homes (cabins) high above the ice. However, I couldn’t see any muskrats outside when I crossed the pond.

Walden Pond, like the other ponds, was usually bare of snow, or had only shallow, broken snowdrifts on it. It was like my own private yard. I could walk there freely even when the snow was nearly two feet deep elsewhere on flat ground, and the villagers were stuck walking only on their cleared streets. There, far from the village street, and mostly far from the jingle of sleigh-bells (except at very long intervals), I slid and skated. It felt like being in a vast, well-trodden moose-yard. Oak woods and solemn pine trees, bent down with snow or bristling with icicles, surrounded it.

Winter Sounds: Owls and Geese

For sounds in winter nights, and often on winter days, I heard the lonely but musical note of a hooting owl from somewhere indefinitely far away. It was the kind of sound the frozen earth might make if someone struck it with a suitable pick (plectrum). It was the true native language (lingua vernacula) of Walden Wood. This sound became quite familiar to me eventually, though I never saw the bird while it was making it.

I seldom opened my door on a winter evening without hearing it. “Hoo hoo hoo, hoorer hoo,” it sounded, rich and full. The first three syllables were accented somewhat like the phrase “how der do.” Sometimes it was only “hoo hoo.”

One night at the beginning of winter, before the pond froze over, around nine o’clock, I was startled by the loud honking of a goose. Stepping to the door, I heard the sound of their wings. It was like a storm in the woods as they flew low over my house. They passed over the pond toward Fair Haven. It seemed my light discouraged them from landing. Their leader (commodore) kept honking with a regular beat the whole time.

Suddenly, an unmistakable cat-owl (likely a Great Horned Owl), from very near me, responded to the goose at regular intervals. It had the harshest and most tremendous voice I ever heard from any creature in the woods. It was as if the owl was determined to expose and embarrass this intruder from Hudson’s Bay. The owl seemed to show off its greater range and volume of voice, as a native bird, and to “boo-hoo” the goose out of Concord’s horizon. It was as if the owl was saying: “What do you mean by alarming my territory (citadel) at this time of night, which is sacred to me? Do you think I am ever caught napping at such an hour? Do you think I don’t have lungs and a voice box (larynx) as good as yours? Boo-hoo, boo-hoo, boo-hoo!”

It was one of the most thrilling, clashing sound combinations (discords) I ever heard. And yet, if you had a sharp ear, you could hear in it the elements of a harmony that these plains had never seen or heard before.

The Earth’s Winter Noises

I also heard the booming and creaking (whooping) of the ice on the pond. The pond was my great bed-fellow in that part of Concord. The ice sounded as if it were restless in its bed and wanted to turn over. It sounded as if it were troubled with gas (flatulency) and bad dreams.

Other times, I was awakened by the cracking of the ground from the frost. It sounded as if someone had driven a team of horses and a wagon right up to my door. In the morning, I would find a crack in the earth a quarter of a mile long and a third of an inch wide.

Foxes in the Moonlight

Sometimes, on moonlit nights, I heard foxes as they roamed over the snow crust. They were searching for a partridge or other game. They barked raggedly and wildly, like forest dogs. They sounded as if they were struggling with some anxiety, or trying to express something. They seemed to be struggling for understanding and to be truly free dogs, running openly in the streets. For if we consider the long ages of time, might there not be a kind of civilization developing among animals as well as among humans? They seemed to me to be like primitive, burrowing men, still defensive and waiting for their transformation into something more.

Sometimes a fox came near my window, attracted by my light. It would bark a fox-like curse (vulpine curse) at me, and then retreat.

The Lively Red Squirrel

Usually, the red squirrel (Sciurus Hudsonius) woke me at dawn. It would race over the roof and up and down the sides of the house, as if it had been sent out of the woods just for this purpose.

During the winter, I threw out about half a bushel of sweet corn ears onto the snow crust by my door. The corn hadn’t ripened properly. I was amused by watching the movements of the various animals that were attracted by this bait.

In the dim light of twilight and at night, rabbits came regularly and ate a hearty meal. All day long, the red squirrels came and went. They provided me with much entertainment through their clever movements (maneuvers).

One squirrel would first approach cautiously through the scrub oak bushes. It ran over the snow crust in fits and starts, like a leaf blown by the wind. It would dash a few steps this way with wonderful speed and a great waste of energy. It made unbelievable haste with its little feet (“trotters”), as if it were racing for a bet. Then it would dash as many steps that way, but never getting more than about eight feet forward at a time.

Then, it would suddenly pause with a funny expression and do an unnecessary somersault. It was as if all the eyes in the universe were fixed on him. Indeed, all the movements of a squirrel, even in the most solitary parts of the forest, seem to imply that there are spectators, just like the movements of a dancing girl. The squirrel wasted more time in hesitating and looking around than it would have taken to simply walk the whole distance. (I never actually saw one walk; they always seem to run or dart.)

Then suddenly, before you could say “Jack Robinson” (meaning very quickly), it would be at the top of a young pitch pine tree. There, it would chatter away as if winding up a noisy clock. It would scold all imaginary spectators and talk to the entire universe at the same time. I could never figure out why it did this, and I suspect the squirrel itself wasn’t aware of any reason.

At last, it would reach the corn. It would select a suitable ear. Then, it would frisk about in the same uncertain, zig-zagging (trigonometrical) way to the very top stick of my woodpile, right before my window. There, it would look me in the face and sit for hours. It supplied itself with a new ear of corn from time to time. At first, it nibbled greedily, throwing the half-eaten cobs about.

Eventually, it grew even more particular and played with its food. It tasted only the inside of the kernel. Sometimes the ear of corn, which was held balanced over the stick by one paw, slipped from its careless grasp and fell to the ground. The squirrel would then look down at it with a comical expression of uncertainty. It was as if it suspected the corn cob had life, and it couldn’t decide whether to get it again, find a new one, or just leave. One moment it was thinking of corn, the next it was listening to hear what news the wind was bringing.

So the little cheeky (impudent) fellow would waste many an ear of corn in a single morning. Finally, it would seize a longer and plumper one, considerably bigger than itself. Skillfully balancing it, the squirrel would set out with it to the woods. It looked like a tiger carrying a buffalo. It followed the same zig-zag course and made frequent pauses. It scratched along with the corn as if it were too heavy for him and kept dropping it. The corn would fall in a diagonal line as the squirrel struggled, but it was determined to get it through no matter what. It was a remarkably silly and unpredictable (frivolous and whimsical) fellow.

And so, it would get away with the corn to where it lived. Perhaps it would carry it to the top of a pine tree forty or fifty rods (about 220 to 275 yards) distant. I would later find the cobs strewn about the woods in various directions.

Jays and Chickadees: Foraging for Food

At length, the jays arrive. Their harsh, clashing (discordant) screams were heard long before, as they cautiously made their approach from about an eighth of a mile away. In a stealthy and sneaking manner, they flit from tree to tree, getting nearer and nearer. They pick up the kernels of corn that the squirrels have dropped.

Then, sitting on a pitch pine branch, they try to swallow a kernel in their haste. But the kernel is too big for their throats and chokes them. After great effort, they cough it up (disgorge it). Then they spend an hour trying to crack it by hitting it repeatedly with their bills. They were clearly thieves, and I didn’t have much respect for them. But the squirrels, though shy at first, went to work as if they were taking what was rightfully theirs.

Meanwhile, flocks of chickadees also came. They picked up the crumbs the squirrels had dropped. They flew to the nearest twig and placed the crumbs under their claws. Then, they hammered away at them with their little bills, as if the crumb were an insect in the tree bark, until the pieces were small enough for their slender throats.

A little flock of these tit-mice (another name for chickadees) came daily to pick a dinner out of my woodpile, or the crumbs at my door. They made faint, flitting, lisping notes, like the tinkling of icicles in the grass. Or sometimes they made a lively “day day day” call. More rarely, on spring-like days, they would sing a wiry, summery “phe-be” call from the edge of the woods. They were so familiar that eventually one landed on an armful of wood I was carrying in. It pecked at the sticks without any fear.

I once had a sparrow alight on my shoulder for a moment while I was hoeing in a village garden. I felt I was more honored by that event than I would have been by any military decoration (epaulet) I could have worn. The squirrels also eventually grew quite familiar. They occasionally stepped on my shoe when that was the nearest way for them.

Partridges in the Snow

When the ground was not yet quite covered with snow, and again near the end of winter when the snow had melted on my south-facing hillside and around my woodpile, the partridges came out of the woods in the morning and evening to feed there.

Whichever side of the woods you walk on, the partridge bursts away on whirring wings. This jars the snow from the dry leaves and twigs high up, and the snow comes sifting down in the sunbeams like golden dust. This brave bird is not to be scared by winter. It is frequently covered up by snowdrifts. It is said that it “sometimes plunges from the air into the soft snow, where it remains hidden for a day or two.”

I also used to startle them in the open land. They would come out of the woods at sunset to eat the buds (“bud”) of the wild apple trees. They will come regularly every evening to particular trees, where cunning sportsmen lie in wait for them. The distant orchards next to the woods suffer quite a bit from this. I am glad that the partridge gets fed, at any rate. It is Nature’s own bird, which lives on buds and simple “diet-drink” (water or dew).

The Fox Hunt: Tales and Observations

In dark winter mornings, or on short winter afternoons, I sometimes heard a pack of hounds moving through all the woods. They made loud baying cries and yelps, unable to resist the instinct of the chase. The note of the hunting horn at intervals proved that humans were following behind. The woods would ring with the sound again, and yet no fox would burst out onto the open, level surface of the pond, nor would a pack of hounds appear pursuing their Actæon (a mythical hunter torn apart by his own dogs).

And perhaps in the evening, I would see the hunters returning. A single fox tail (brush) might be trailing from their sleigh as a trophy, as they sought their inn. They tell me that if the fox would stay hidden in the frozen earth, it would be safe. Or, if it would run in a straight line away from the hunters, no foxhound could overtake it. But, after leaving its pursuers far behind, the fox stops to rest and listen until they catch up. And when it runs, it circles around back to its old haunts, where the hunters are waiting for him.

Sometimes, however, a fox will run along a wall for many rods (a rod is about 16.5 feet), and then leap off far to one side. It seems to know that water will not hold its scent. A hunter told me that he once saw a fox pursued by hounds burst out onto Walden Pond when the ice was covered with shallow puddles. The fox ran part way across and then returned to the same shore. Before long, the hounds arrived, but here they lost the scent.

Sometimes a pack of hounds hunting by themselves would pass my door. They would circle around my house, yelping and baying, without paying any attention to me. It was as if they were afflicted by a kind of madness, so that nothing could distract them from the pursuit. They circle like this until they come upon the recent trail of a fox, because a wise hound will abandon everything else for this scent.

One day, a man came to my hut from the nearby town of Lexington. He was looking for his hound that made a large track and had been hunting by itself for a week. But I fear that he wasn’t any wiser for anything I told him. Every time I tried to answer his questions, he interrupted me by asking, “What do you do here?” He had lost a dog but found a man.

One old hunter, who had a dry way of talking, used to come to bathe in Walden Pond once every year when the water was warmest. At such times, he would visit me. He told me that many years ago, he took his gun one afternoon and went out for a ramble (a cruise) in Walden Wood. As he walked the Wayland road, he heard the cry of hounds approaching. Before long, a fox leaped over the wall into the road. As quick as a thought, it leaped over the other wall out of the road. The hunter’s swift bullet had not touched him. Some way behind came an old hound and her three pups in full pursuit, hunting on their own. They disappeared again into the woods.

Late in the afternoon, as the hunter was resting in the thick woods south of Walden, he heard the voice of the hounds far over toward Fair Haven, still pursuing the fox. On they came. Their baying cry, which made all the woods ring, sounded nearer and nearer, now from Well-Meadow, now from the Baker Farm. For a long time, he stood still and listened to their music, which is so sweet to a hunter’s ear.

Suddenly, the fox appeared. It moved through the solemn forest paths (aisles) with an easy, coursing pace. The sound of its movement was hidden by a sympathetic rustle of the leaves. It was swift and still, keeping close to the ground, leaving its pursuers far behind. Leaping upon a rock in the woods, it sat upright and listened, with its back to the hunter.

For a moment, compassion stopped the hunter’s arm. But that was a short-lived mood. As quick as one thought can follow another, his gun was aimed, and Whang! The fox rolled over the rock and lay dead on the ground. The hunter kept his place and listened to the hounds. Still on they came. Now the near woods echoed through all their paths with the hounds’ wild, almost demonic cry.

At length, the old hound burst into view, its muzzle to the ground, snapping the air as if possessed. It ran directly to the rock. But upon seeing the dead fox, she suddenly stopped her baying, as if struck silent with amazement. She walked round and round the fox in silence. One by one, her pups arrived. Like their mother, they were sobered into silence by the mystery of the dead fox. Then the hunter came forward and stood in their midst, and the mystery was solved. They waited in silence while he skinned the fox. Then they followed the fox’s tail (the brush) for a while, and at length turned off into the woods again.

That evening, a Squire (a country gentleman) from the town of Weston came to the Concord hunter’s cottage to ask about his hounds. He told how for a week they had been hunting on their own, starting from Weston woods. The Concord hunter told him what he knew and offered him the fox skin. But the other man declined it and left. He did not find his hounds that night. But the next day, he learned that they had crossed the river and stayed at a farmhouse for the night. There, having been well fed, they took their leave early in the morning.

Echoes of Hunters Past

The hunter who told me this story could remember one Sam Nutting. Nutting used to hunt bears on Fair Haven Ledges and exchange their skins for rum in Concord village. He even told the hunter that he had seen a moose there. Nutting had a famous foxhound named Burgoyne – he pronounced it “Bugine” – which my informant (the hunter telling the story) used to borrow.

In the informal account book (“Wast Book”) of an old trader of this town, who was also a captain, town clerk, and representative, I find the following entry: January 18th, 1742-3, “John Melven, Credit by 1 Grey Fox, for a price of two shillings and three pence.” Grey foxes are not found here now. And in his main ledger, February 7th, 1743, Hezekiah Stratton has credit “by ½ a Cat skin, for one shilling and fourpence halfpenny.” Of course, this was a wildcat, because Stratton was a sergeant in the old French war, and would not have gotten credit for hunting less noble game. Credit is given for deer skins also, and they were sold daily.

One man still preserves the horns of the last deer that was killed in this area. Another has told me the details of the hunt in which his uncle was involved. The hunters were formerly a numerous and merry group here. I remember well one thin, gaunt hunter, a real “Nimrod” (a mighty hunter). He would pick up a leaf by the roadside and play a tune on it that was wilder and more musical, if my memory serves me, than any hunting horn.

Midnight Encounters

At midnight, when there was a moon, I sometimes met hounds in my path, prowling about the woods. They would sneak out of my way, as if afraid, and stand silent among the bushes until I had passed.

Winter Competition: Squirrels, Mice, and Pines

Squirrels and wild mice competed for my store of nuts. There were dozens of pitch pine trees around my house, from one to four inches in diameter. Mice had gnawed these trees the previous winter. It was a “Norwegian winter” for them, meaning a very hard winter, because the snow lay long and deep. They were forced to mix a large proportion of pine bark with their other food.

These trees were alive and seemed to be flourishing at midsummer. Many of them had grown a foot, even though their bark had been completely eaten away in a ring around the trunk (girdled). But after another winter, such trees were all dead, without exception. It is remarkable that a single mouse should thus be allowed a whole pine tree for its dinner, gnawing around it instead of up and down. But perhaps it is necessary in order to thin out these trees, which tend to grow up very densely.

The Familiar Hare

The hares (Lepus Americanus, or snowshoe hares) were very familiar. One had her resting place (form) under my house all winter. She was separated from me only by the flooring. She startled me each morning by her hasty departure when I began to stir – thump, thump, thump – striking her head against the floor timbers in her hurry.

The hares used to come around my door at dusk. They came to nibble on the potato peels I had thrown out. They were so nearly the color of the ground that they could hardly be seen when they were still.

Sometimes, in the dim twilight, I would alternately lose sight of one and then see it again as it sat motionless under my window. When I opened my door in the evening, off they would go with a squeak and a bounce.

When they were close by, they only made me feel pity for them. One evening, a hare sat by my door, just two paces from me. At first, it trembled with fear, yet it was unwilling to move. It was a poor, tiny thing. It was lean and bony, with ragged ears and a sharp nose. It had a small tail and slender paws. It looked as if Nature no longer produced strong, noble animals of its kind, but was down to its very last, weakest examples. Its large eyes appeared young and unhealthy, almost swollen (dropsical).

I took a step, and suddenly, away it darted! It made an elastic spring over the snow crust. It straightened its body and limbs into a graceful length. Soon, it put the forest between me and itself. It was wild, free game (venison), asserting its energy and the dignity of Nature. Its slenderness was not without reason; it was built for speed. Such then was its nature. (Some think its scientific name Lepus comes from levipes, meaning light-foot.)

What is a country without rabbits and partridges? They are among the most simple and native animal products of the land. They are ancient and respected families of creatures, known in olden times just as they are in modern times. They are the very color (hue) and substance of Nature itself, most closely connected to the leaves and the ground – and to one another. An animal is either winged or it is legged.

It hardly feels as if you’ve seen a truly wild creature when a rabbit or a partridge suddenly bursts away. They seem like natural parts of the environment, as much to be expected as rustling leaves. The partridge and the rabbit are still sure to thrive, like true natives of the soil, no matter what great changes (revolutions) happen in the land. If the forest is cut down, the new sprouts and bushes that spring up give them hiding places, and they become more numerous than ever. That must be a poor country indeed that does not support a hare.

Our woods are full of (teem with) them both. Around every swamp, you may see the walk of a partridge or a rabbit. These paths are often surrounded by simple traps made of twigs (“twiggy fences”) and snares made of horsehair, which some local boy (cow-boy) tends.

The Pond in Winter

Waking to Winter’s Stillness

After a still winter night, I woke up with the feeling that someone had asked me a question in my sleep. I felt I had been trying hard but failing to answer it – questions like what, how, when, or where? But then I saw Nature at dawn. All creatures live in Nature. She was looking in at my broad windows with a calm and satisfied face, and she had no questions on her lips. I woke up to an answered question – the answer was Nature and daylight.

The deep snow lying on the earth, dotted with young pine trees, and the very slope of the hill where my house stood, all seemed to say, “Forward!” Nature doesn’t ask questions, and she doesn’t answer any that we humans ask. She made up her mind long ago. It’s like a wise person saying: “Oh Prince, our eyes look with admiration at the wonderful and varied show of this universe, and this image fills our souls. The night, without a doubt, hides a part of this glorious creation; but daylight comes to show us this great work, which stretches from the earth even into the heavens.”

Drawing Water from the Frozen Pond

Then, it was time for my morning work. First, I take an axe and a pail and go to find water, if my need for water isn’t just a dream. After a cold and snowy night, it felt like I needed a special stick (a divining rod) to find the water source.

Every winter, the liquid and trembling surface of the pond becomes solid. This surface was once so sensitive to every breath of wind and reflected every light and shadow. Now, it freezes to a depth of a foot or a foot and a half. This ice is so thick that it can support the heaviest teams of horses. Perhaps the snow covers it to an equal depth, making it impossible to tell apart from any level field. Like the marmots (groundhogs) in the surrounding hills, the pond closes its eyelids and becomes inactive for three months or more.

Standing on the snow-covered plain of ice, as if in a pasture among hills, I cut my way first through a foot of snow, and then through a foot of ice. This opens a window under my feet. Kneeling there to drink, I look down into the quiet underwater world of the fishes. It is filled with a softened light, as if seen through a frosted glass window. The bright, sandy floor looks the same as it does in summer. A constant, wave-free peacefulness (a perennial waveless serenity) rules there, like the calm, amber-colored twilight sky. This mood matches the cool and even temperament of the fish that live there. Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.

Winter Fishermen: A Breed Apart

Early in the morning, while everything is crisp with frost, men come with fishing reels and small lunches. They let down their fine fishing lines through holes in the snowy ice to catch pickerel and perch. These are wild men. They instinctively follow different fashions and trust different authorities than the people in town. By their comings and goings, they connect towns in places where they would otherwise be isolated.

They sit and eat their lunch on the dry oak leaves on the shore, wearing warm, heavy coats (stout fear-naughts). They are as wise in nature’s knowledge (natural lore) as a city person is in artificial knowledge. They never consulted books for their skills. They know and can tell much less than they have actually done. The things they practice are often skills not yet widely known or written about.

Here is one man fishing for pickerel, using grown perch for bait. You look into his pail with wonder, as if looking into a summer pond. It’s as if he kept summer locked up at home, or knew where summer had gone to hide. How, you might ask, did he get these live perch in mid-winter? Oh, he got worms out of rotten logs after the ground froze, and that’s how he caught the perch.

His life itself goes deeper into Nature than the studies of a naturalist can reach. He himself is a subject for the naturalist to study. The naturalist gently lifts moss and bark with his knife to search for insects. The fisherman, however, lays open logs to their core with his axe, sending moss and bark flying everywhere. He makes his living by tasks like stripping bark from trees. Such a man has some right to fish, and I love to see Nature’s ways carried out in him. The perch swallows the grub-worm, the pickerel swallows the perch, and the fisherman swallows the pickerel. And so, all the empty spaces (chinks) in the ladder of being are filled.

When I walked around the pond in misty weather, I was sometimes amused by the simple methods some rougher fishermen used. One might have placed alder branches over narrow holes in the ice. These holes would be spaced about sixty to eighty feet apart and the same distance from the shore. He would have tied the end of his fishing line to a stick to prevent it from being pulled through the hole. Then, he would have passed the slack line over a twig of the alder branch, a foot or more above the ice. He would tie a dry oak leaf to the line. When a fish bit, the leaf would be pulled down, showing him he had a bite. These alder branches appeared through the mist at regular intervals as you walked halfway around the pond.

The Astonishing Beauty of Walden Pickerel

Ah, the pickerel of Walden Pond! When I see them lying on the ice, or in the well (a larger hole) that the fisherman cuts in the ice to get water, I am always surprised by their rare beauty. They look like fabulous, mythical fishes. They are so foreign to the city streets, and even to the woods. They are as foreign as Arabia would be to our Concord life.

They have a quite dazzling and extraordinary (transcendent) beauty. This beauty separates them by a wide gap from the pale, corpse-like (cadaverous) cod and haddock, whose fame is loudly announced in our city streets. Walden pickerel are not green like the pines, nor gray like the stones, nor blue like the sky. To my eyes, they have even rarer colors, if that’s possible. They look like flowers and precious stones. It’s as if they were the pearls, the living gems (animalized nuclei or crystals) of Walden water. They are, of course, completely Walden, through and through. They are themselves like small Waldens in the animal kingdom – true “Waldensians” of the pond.

It is surprising that they are caught here. It’s amazing that in this deep and spacious spring, far beneath the rattling wagons, carriages, and tinkling sleighs that travel the Walden road, this great gold and emerald fish swims. I never happened to see its kind in any market; it would be the cynosure (center of attention) of all eyes there. Easily, with a few quick, convulsive movements, they give up their watery ghosts. It’s like a mortal person taken to heaven (translated) before his time, into the thin air.

Uncovering the True Depth of Walden

I wanted to discover the long-lost bottom of Walden Pond. So, I surveyed it carefully before the ice broke up, early in 1846. I used a compass, a chain for measuring, and a sounding line (a weighted rope for measuring depth).

Many stories had been told about the bottom of this pond – or rather, about it having no bottom. These stories certainly had no foundation in fact. It is remarkable how long people will believe in the bottomlessness of a pond without taking the trouble to measure its depth. I have visited two such “Bottomless Ponds” in one walk in this neighborhood. Many people believed that Walden Pond reached all the way through to the other side of the globe.

Some who have lain flat on the ice for a long time, looking down through the deceptive (illusive) water and ice, perhaps with watery eyes into the bargain, have jumped to hasty conclusions. Driven by the fear of catching a cold, they claimed to have seen vast holes “into which a load of hay might be driven,” if there were anyone to drive it. They thought these holes were the source of the mythical River Styx and the entrance to the Underworld (Infernal Regions) from these parts.

Others have come down from the village with a “fifty-six” (a 56-pound weight) and a wagonload of inch-thick rope, but still failed to find any bottom. While the heavy weight was resting by the side of the hole, they were letting out more and more rope in a pointless attempt to measure their truly immeasurable capacity for believing in the marvelous.

But I can assure my readers that Walden has a reasonably solid bottom at a not unreasonable, though unusual, depth. I measured it easily with a strong fishing line (cod-line) and a stone weighing about a pound and a half. I could tell accurately when the stone left the bottom, because I had to pull so much harder before the water got underneath the stone to help me lift it.

The greatest depth was exactly 102 feet. To this may be added the five feet the water level has risen since then, making it 107 feet. This is a remarkable depth for such a small area. Yet, not an inch of this depth can be spared by the imagination. What if all ponds were shallow? Wouldn’t that affect the minds of humans? I am thankful that this pond was made deep and pure to be a symbol. As long as people believe in the infinite, some ponds will be thought to be bottomless.

Ponds, Valleys, and the Power of Imagination

A factory owner, hearing what depth I had found, thought it couldn’t be true. Judging from his experience with dams, he believed sand would not lie at such a steep angle on the pond bottom. But the deepest ponds are not as deep in proportion to their surface area as most people suppose. If drained, they would not leave very remarkable valleys. They are not like cups set between the hills. For this pond, which is so unusually deep for its area, looks no deeper than a shallow plate if you imagine a vertical slice through its center. Most ponds, if emptied, would leave a meadow no more hollow than what we frequently see.

William Gilpin is a writer who is so admirable in all that relates to landscapes, and usually so correct. He stood at the head of Loch Fyne in Scotland, a lake he describes as “a bay of saltwater, sixty or seventy fathoms deep (360-420 feet), four miles wide,” and about fifty miles long, surrounded by mountains. He observes, “If we could have seen it immediately after the great flood (diluvian crash), or whatever convulsion of Nature caused it, before the waters gushed in, what a horrid chasm it must have appeared!” He quotes a poem:

“So high the bulging (tumid) hills were heaved, so low Down sunk a hollow bottom, broad, and deep, A spacious bed for waters—.”

But if we use the shortest width of Loch Fyne and apply these proportions to Walden Pond (which, as we have seen, already looks like a shallow plate in a vertical slice), Walden would appear four times shallower still. So much for the increased horrors of the empty chasm of Loch Fyne.

No doubt many a smiling valley with its stretching cornfields now occupies exactly such a “horrid chasm” from which the waters have receded. However, it requires the insight and far-reaching vision of a geologist to convince the unsuspecting inhabitants of this fact. Often, an observant (inquisitive) eye may detect the shores of an ancient (primitive) lake in the low hills on the horizon. No later rising of the plain was needed to hide their history. But, as those who work on highways know, it is easiest to find the hollows by looking for puddles after a rain shower.

The point is, the imagination, if given the least freedom (license), dives deeper and soars higher than Nature actually goes. So, probably, the depth of the ocean will also be found to be very small compared with its breadth.

Mapping the Pond’s Hidden Floor

As I measured the depth (sounded) through the ice, I could determine the shape of the bottom with greater accuracy than is possible when surveying harbors that do not freeze over. I was surprised at its general regularity. In the deepest part, there are several acres more level than almost any field exposed to the sun, wind, and plow.

In one instance, on a line I chose randomly, the depth did not vary more than one foot in about 500 feet (thirty rods). Generally, near the middle, I could predict the variation in depth for each one hundred feet in any direction to within three or four inches. Some people are used to speaking of deep and dangerous holes even in quiet, sandy ponds like this one. But the effect of water in these circumstances is to level out all unevenness.

The regularity of the bottom and how well it matched the shape of the shores and the range of the neighboring hills were so perfect that a distant point of land (promontory) revealed its underwater extension in my soundings quite clearly across the pond. Its direction could be figured out by observing the opposite shore. A cape on land becomes an underwater bar, a flat plain becomes a shallow area (shoal), and a valley or gorge on land becomes deep water or a channel in the pond.

A Theory of Depths: From Ponds to Oceans

When I had mapped the pond using a scale of ten rods (165 feet) to an inch on my map, and put down all the depth measurements (more than a hundred in all), I observed a remarkable coincidence. I noticed that the number indicating the greatest depth was apparently in the center of the map. So, I laid a ruler on the map lengthwise, and then across its width. I found, to my surprise, that the line of greatest length crossed the line of greatest breadth exactly at the point of greatest depth.

This was true even though the middle of the pond is nearly level, the outline of the pond is far from regular, and the extreme length and breadth were found by measuring into the coves. I said to myself, “Who knows if this hint could lead to finding the deepest part of the ocean, as well as of a pond or puddle? Isn’t this also the rule for the height of mountains, if we consider them as the opposite of valleys?” We know that a hill is not highest at its narrowest part.

Coves, Bars, and Guiding Principles

Of five coves in the pond, three of them (or all that I had measured) were observed to have a sandbar across their mouths. The water within the coves, behind the bars, was deeper. So, the bay tended to be an expansion of water within the land not only horizontally but also vertically, forming a basin or independent little pond. The direction of the two points of land (capes) at the mouth of the cove showed the course of the bar. Every harbor on the sea-coast also has its bar at its entrance. The wider the mouth of the cove was compared with its length, the deeper the water over the bar was compared with the water in the main basin of the cove. So, if you are given the length and breadth of a cove, and the character of the surrounding shore, you almost have enough information to create a formula for all such cases.

Testing the Theory on White Pond

To see how closely I could guess the deepest point in a pond with this experience, just by observing the outlines of its surface and the character of its shores, I made a plan of White Pond. White Pond covers about forty-one acres. Like Walden, it has no island in it, nor any visible inlet or outlet.

The line of greatest breadth in White Pond fell very near the line of least breadth, where two opposite capes approached each other and two opposite bays receded. I ventured to mark a point a short distance from this narrowest line, but still on the line of greatest length, as the deepest spot. The actual deepest part was found to be within one hundred feet of my marked point, still farther in the direction I had guessed. It was only one foot deeper than I had anticipated, namely, sixty feet. Of course, a stream running through a pond, or an island in it, would make the problem of finding the deepest spot much more complicated.

Nature’s Laws and Human Understanding

If we knew all the laws of Nature, we would need only one fact, or the description of one actual natural event (phenomenon), to figure out all the particular results at that point. As it is, we know only a few laws. Our results are flawed (vitiated), not because of any confusion or irregularity in Nature, but because of our ignorance of essential elements needed for the calculation.

Our ideas of law and harmony are usually limited to those instances we can easily see or detect. But the harmony that results from a far greater number of seemingly conflicting, but actually cooperating (concurring), laws, which we have not yet detected, is even more wonderful. The particular laws we observe are like our points of view. For a traveler, the outline of a mountain changes with every step. A mountain has an infinite number of profiles, though it absolutely has only one true form. Even when a mountain is split open (cleft) or bored through, we still don’t understand it completely.

The Pond as a Mirror for Character

What I have observed about the pond is no less true in ethics (the study of moral principles). It is the law of averages. Such a rule of the two diameters (length and breadth intersecting at the deepest point) not only guides us toward the sun in the solar system and the heart in a human being, but it can also draw lines through the sum total (aggregate) of a person’s particular daily behaviors and waves of life, into their personal “coves” and “inlets” (their private inclinations and experiences). Where these lines intersect will be the height or depth of that person’s character.

Perhaps we only need to know how a person’s “shores” (their outward presentation or boundaries) trend, and what their “adjacent country” or circumstances are, to figure out their depth and concealed bottom (their inner character). If a person is surrounded by “mountainous circumstances” – like a strong, heroic (Achillean) shore, whose peaks overshadow and are reflected in their soul (bosom) – these suggest a corresponding depth in that person. But a low and smooth shore on one side proves them to be shallow in that aspect of their character.

In our bodies, a bold, projecting brow often leads down to and indicates a corresponding depth of thought. Also, there is a “bar” across the entrance of our every “cove,” or particular inclination. Each inclination is like our harbor for a season, in which we are detained and partially land-locked. These inclinations are not usually random (whimsical). Their form, size, and direction are determined by the “promontories” of our life’s shore – the ancient guiding forces (axes of elevation) that have shaped us.

When this bar (to an inclination) is gradually built up by storms, tides, or currents in our life, or if there is a lowering (subsidence) of our spiritual waters, so that the bar reaches the surface, then what was at first just an inclination in our shore where a thought was harbored becomes an individual lake. It gets cut off from the main ocean of life. In this isolated state, the thought secures its own conditions. It changes, perhaps, from salt water (connected to the vast ocean) to fresh water (independent). It might become a sweet sea, a dead sea, or a marsh.

At the arrival (advent) of each individual into this life, may we not suppose that such a bar has risen to the surface somewhere, shaping their initial character or tendencies? It is true, we are such poor navigators of life that our thoughts, for the most part, just hover near a coast without good harbors. They are familiar only with the shallow inlets (bights of the bays) of poetry (poesy). Or they steer for the public ports of entry – common, accepted ideas – and go into the “dry docks” of science. There, they are merely repaired (refit) for this world, and no natural currents help to make them unique or individual.

Walden’s True Inlets and Outlets

As for any physical inlet or outlet of Walden Pond, I have not discovered any except for rain and snow coming in, and evaporation going out. However, perhaps with a thermometer and a sounding line, such places might be found. Where water flows into a pond, it will probably be coldest in summer and warmest in winter.

When the ice-men were at work here in the winter of 1846–47, the blocks of ice (cakes) sent to the shore were one day rejected by those who were stacking them up. The blocks were not thick enough to lie side by side with the rest. The ice cutters thus discovered that the ice over a small area was two or three inches thinner than elsewhere. This made them think that there was an inlet there.

They also showed me another place that they thought was a “leach hole.” They believed the pond leaked out through this hole, under a hill, into a neighboring meadow. They pushed me out on a cake of ice to see it. It was a small cavity under ten feet of water. But I think I can guarantee that the pond won’t need sealing (soldering) until they find a worse leak than that one.

Here is the continued simplified rewrite of “The Pond in Winter.”

Tracing a Leak and Ice’s Movements

Someone suggested that if such a “leach hole” (a place where the pond might be leaking) were found, its connection with the nearby meadow could be proven. They said you could put some colored powder or sawdust into the mouth of the hole. Then, you could put a strainer over the spring in the meadow. The strainer would catch some of the colored particles if they were carried through by the current of water.

While I was surveying the pond, the ice, which was sixteen inches thick, moved in gentle waves (undulated) under a slight wind, much like water. It is well known that a leveling tool cannot be used accurately on ice. At about sixteen feet (one rod) from the shore, the ice’s greatest up-and-down movement (fluctuation) was three-quarters of an inch. I observed this using a level on land aimed at a marked measuring rod (graduated staff) placed on the ice. This happened even though the ice appeared firmly attached to the shore. The movement was probably greater in the middle of the pond.

Who knows, if our instruments were sensitive enough, we might even detect a similar wave-like movement in the crust of the earth. When two legs of my leveling tool were on the shore and the third was on the ice, and I was sighting over the ice, a tiny (infinitesimal) rise or fall of the ice made a difference of several feet on a tree across the pond.

How Cutting Ice Holes Drained the Surface

When I began to cut holes in the ice to measure the pond’s depth, there were three or four inches of water on top of the main ice. This water was under a deep layer of snow that had pressed the ice down. But the water immediately began to run into the holes I cut. It continued to run for two days in deep streams. These streams wore away the ice on every side of the holes. This process significantly, if not mainly, helped to dry the surface of the pond. As the water on top ran into the holes, it allowed the main sheet of ice to rise and float higher. This was somewhat like cutting a hole in the bottom of a leaky ship to let the water out.

When such holes freeze over again, and then it rains, and finally a new freeze forms fresh, smooth ice over everything, the new ice is beautifully patterned (mottled) on the inside. It has dark figures shaped somewhat like a spider’s web. You might call these patterns ice rosettes. They are produced by the channels worn by the water flowing from all sides toward the center of the hole.

Sometimes, also, when the ice was covered with shallow puddles, I saw a double shadow of myself. One shadow seemed to be standing on the head of the other. One was on the ice, and the other was on the trees or hillside.

The Prudent Ice Harvester

While it is still cold January, and snow and ice are thick and solid, the wise (prudent) landlord comes from the village. He comes to get ice to cool his summer drinks. It is impressively, even movingly (pathetically), wise of him to foresee the heat and thirst of July while it is still January. He wears a thick coat and mittens, preparing for summer when so many other things in life are not yet provided for. It may be that he stores up no treasures in this world that will cool his summer drink in the next life.

He cuts and saws the solid pond. He “unroofs” the house of the fishes by removing the ice. He carts off their very element and air (the frozen water). The ice is held fast by chains and stakes like stacks of firewood (corded wood). It is moved through the supportive winter air to wintry cellars, where it will lie ready to cool things in the summer. As it is drawn through the streets from far off, the ice looks like solidified blue sky (azure). These ice-cutters are a merry group, full of jokes and fun. When I went among them, they used to invite me to saw with them “pit-fashion” (a two-person sawing method), with me standing underneath.

A Grand Ice-Harvesting Operation

In the winter of 1846–47, a hundred men of “Hyperborean extraction” (meaning from the far north, or simply robust, northern-looking men) swooped down onto our pond one morning. They came with many train-car loads of awkward-looking (ungainly) farming tools: sleds, plows, seed drills (drill-barrows), tools for cutting sod (turf-knives), spades, saws, and rakes. Each man was armed with a double-pointed spear (pike-staff), the kind not described in farming magazines like the New-England Farmer or the Cultivator.

I didn’t know if they had come to plant a crop of winter rye, or some other kind of grain recently brought from Iceland. Since I saw no manure, I judged that they meant to just take the top layer of the land (skim the land), as I had done with my bean-field. Perhaps they thought the soil was deep and had been left unplanted (fallow) long enough.

They said that a gentleman farmer, who was organizing things from “behind the scenes,” wanted to double his money. As I understood, he already had half a million dollars. But in order to cover each one of his existing dollars with a new one, he took off the only coat – yes, the very skin itself – of Walden Pond in the midst of a hard winter.

They went to work at once. They were plowing, breaking up the soil (harrowing), rolling it flat, and making furrows, all in admirable order. It was as if they were determined to make this a model farm. But when I was looking closely to see what kind of seed they dropped into the furrow, a group of men by my side suddenly began to hook up the undisturbed topsoil (virgin mould) itself. They did this with a peculiar jerk, digging clean down to the sand, or rather to the water – for it was a very springy, wet soil. Indeed, they took all the solid ground (terra firma) there was and hauled it away on sleds. Then I guessed that they must be cutting peat (a type of fuel) in a bog.

So they came and went every day, with a peculiar shriek from the locomotive engine. They seemed to travel to and from some point in the polar regions, like a flock of arctic snow-birds.

But sometimes Walden Pond itself had its revenge. A hired man, walking behind his team of horses, slipped through a crack in the ground, falling down towards what felt like Tartarus (the underworld of Greek myth). This man, who was so brave before, suddenly became like “the ninth part of a man” (meaning he felt very small and defeated). He almost lost all his body heat (animal heat). He was glad to take refuge in my house and admitted that there was some good (virtue) in having a stove. Other times, the frozen soil took a piece of steel out of a plow’s cutting blade (ploughshare), or a plow got stuck in the furrow and had to be cut out.

To speak literally, a hundred Irishmen, with American (Yankee) overseers, came from Cambridge every day to get out the ice. They divided it into blocks (cakes) by methods too well known to need description. These blocks, after being moved by sled to the shore, were rapidly hauled onto an ice platform. They were then raised by grappling irons and a system of ropes and pulleys (block and tackle), worked by horses, onto a stack. This was done as surely as if they were stacking barrels of flour. There, the ice blocks were placed evenly side by side, and row upon row, as if they formed the solid base of a tall stone monument (obelisk) designed to pierce the clouds.

They told me that on a good day, they could get out a thousand tons of ice, which was the amount harvested from about one acre of the pond. Deep ruts and “cradle holes” (large indentations) were worn into the ice by the passage of the sleds over the same track, just as they are on solid ground. The horses always ate their oats out of blocks of ice that had been hollowed out like buckets.

They stacked up the ice blocks in the open air in a pile. It was thirty-five feet high on one side and about one hundred feet (six or seven rods) square. They put hay between the outside layers of ice to keep the air out. When the wind, no matter how cold, finds a passage through an ice stack, it will wear away large cavities. This leaves only slight supports or studs here and there, and eventually, the stack will topple down.

At first, the ice stack looked like a vast blue fort or Valhalla (the mythical hall of heroes in Norse mythology). But when they began to tuck coarse meadow hay into the crevices, and this hay became covered with frost (rime) and icicles, it looked like an ancient (venerable), moss-grown, and grayish-white (hoary) ruin. It seemed built of blue-tinted (azure-tinted) marble. It looked like the home (abode) of Winter, that old man we see in the almanac – his little hut (shanty), as if he planned to spend the summer resting (estivate) with us.

They calculated that not even twenty-five percent of this ice would reach its final destination. They also figured that two or three percent would be wasted in the train cars during transport. However, a still greater part of this heap of ice had a different destiny than what was intended. Either because the ice was found not to keep as well as expected (it contained more air than usual), or for some other reason, it never got to market. This heap, made in the winter of 1846–47 and estimated to contain ten thousand tons, was finally covered with hay and boards. Though its roof was removed the following July, and a part of it was carried off, the rest remained exposed to the sun. It stood over that summer and the next winter and was not completely melted until September 1848. Thus, the pond got most of its ice back.

The Colors and Qualities of Walden Ice

Like the water, Walden ice, when seen up close, has a green tint. But from a distance, it is beautifully blue. You can easily tell it apart from the white ice of the river, or the merely greenish ice of some other ponds, even from a quarter of a mile away.

Sometimes one of those great blocks of ice slips from the ice-man’s sled into the village street. It lies there for a week like a great emerald, an object of interest to all who pass by. I have noticed that a portion of Walden water which looks green will often, when frozen, appear blue from the same point of view. So too, the hollows around this pond will sometimes in the winter be filled with greenish water somewhat like the pond’s own. But the next day, this water will have frozen blue. Perhaps the blue color of water and ice is due to the light and air they contain. The most transparent ice and water are the bluest.

Ice is an interesting subject to think about. The ice-cutters told me that they had some ice in the ice-houses at nearby Fresh Pond that was five years old and was still as good as ever. Why is it that a bucket of water soon becomes rotten (putrid), but frozen water remains sweet forever? It is commonly said that this is like the difference between emotions (the affections) and reason (the intellect). Emotions can spoil, but pure reason endures.

Fleeting Human Activity, Enduring Nature

So, for sixteen days, I saw from my window a hundred men at work. They looked like busy farmers (husbandmen), with teams of horses and apparently all the tools of farming. It was a picture like we see on the first page of an almanac. As often as I looked out, I was reminded of the fable of the lark and the reapers, or the parable of the sower, and similar old stories.

And now they are all gone. In thirty days more, probably, I shall look from the same window onto the pure, sea-green Walden water. It will be reflecting the clouds and the trees, and sending up its mist (evaporations) in solitude. No traces will appear that a human has ever stood there. Perhaps I shall hear a solitary loon laugh as he dives and preens himself. Or I shall see a lonely fisherman in his boat, like a floating leaf, watching his own form reflected in the waves, where lately a hundred men had securely worked.

Walden’s Water: A Well for the World

Thus it appears that the sweltering inhabitants of Charleston and New Orleans, of Madras and Bombay and Calcutta in India, all drink at my well.

In the morning, I bathe my intellect in the amazing and universe-creating (stupendous and cosmogonal) philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita. This is an ancient Hindu scripture, so old that “years of the gods” have passed since its composition. In comparison with its wisdom, our modern world and its literature seem small (puny) and insignificant (trivial). I wonder if that philosophy should not be referred to a previous state of existence, because its greatness (sublimity) is so far beyond our usual understanding.

I lay down the book and go to my well for water. And look! There I meet the servant of the Brahmin. The Brahmin is a Hindu priest of Brahma, Vishnu, and Indra. He still sits in his temple on the Ganges River reading the sacred texts (Vedas), or lives at the root of a tree with his simple food (crust) and water jug. I meet his servant, who has come to draw water for his master. Our buckets, as it were, rub against each other in the same well. The pure Walden water is mixed with the sacred water of the Ganges.

With favorable winds, this symbolic water is carried (wafted) past the site of the fabulous islands of Atlantis and the Hesperides (mythical gardens of gold). It makes the ancient voyage (periplus) of Hanno around Africa. Floating by the Spice Islands of Ternate and Tidore and the mouth of the Persian Gulf, it melts in the tropic winds (gales) of the Indian seas. It is finally landed in ports of which Alexander the Great only heard the names.

Spring

Walden’s Unique Spring Thaw

When ice-cutters open up large areas of a pond, it commonly causes the pond to break up (melt) earlier. This is because the water, stirred up (agitated) by the wind even in cold weather, wears away the surrounding ice. But this didn’t happen on Walden Pond that year. The pond had soon formed a thick new layer of ice to replace the old one.

This pond never breaks up as early as the other ponds in this neighborhood. There are two reasons for this: it is much deeper, and it has no stream passing through it to melt or wear away the ice from within. I never knew it to open up in the middle of a winter, not even the winter of 1852–53, which was a very severe test for the ponds.

Walden Pond usually opens about the first of April. This is a week or ten days later than Flint’s Pond and Fair Haven Pond. It begins to melt on the north side and in the shallower parts where it first began to freeze. Better than any other water around here, Walden shows the true progress of the season because it is least affected by temporary (transient) changes in temperature. A few days of severe cold in March might greatly slow down (retard) the opening of the other ponds, while the temperature of Walden Pond increases almost without interruption.

On March 6th, 1847, a thermometer pushed into the middle of Walden Pond registered 32°F, which is freezing point. Near the shore, it was 33°F. In the middle of Flint’s Pond on the same day, it was 32.5°F. About a dozen rods (around 200 feet) from the shore of Flint’s Pond, in shallow water under ice a foot thick, the temperature was 36°F. This difference of three and a half degrees between the deep water and the shallow water in Flint’s Pond, and the fact that much of it is quite shallow, show why it breaks up so much sooner than Walden. The ice in the shallowest part of Flint’s Pond at this time was several inches thinner than in the middle. In mid-winter, the middle of Walden had been the warmest part, and the ice was thinnest there.

Also, everyone who has waded around the shores of a pond in summer must have noticed how much warmer the water is close to the shore, where it’s only three or four inches deep, compared to a little distance out. It’s also warmer on the surface where the water is deep than it is near the bottom.

The Science of Melting Ice

In spring, the sun has an influence not only through the increased temperature of the air and earth. Its heat also passes through ice that is a foot or more thick. This heat is reflected from the bottom in shallow water. This warms the water from below and melts the underside of the ice. At the same time, the sun is melting the ice more directly from above. This makes the ice uneven. It also causes the air bubbles trapped in the ice to expand upwards and downwards until the ice is completely full of holes (honey-combed). Finally, the ice disappears suddenly in a single spring rain.

Ice has a grain, just like wood. When a block of ice begins to rot or “comb” – that is, to look like a honeycomb – the air cells inside are always at right angles to what was the original water surface, no matter how the block is positioned. Where there is a rock or a log rising near the surface, the ice over it is much thinner. It is often completely melted by this reflected heat from the rock or log. I have been told that in an experiment at Cambridge to freeze water in a shallow wooden container, even though cold air circulated underneath and so could cool both sides, the sun’s reflection from the bottom more than canceled out this advantage, melting the ice faster.

When a warm rain in the middle of winter melts off the snow-ice from Walden Pond, leaving hard, dark, or transparent ice on the middle, there will be a strip of rotten, though thicker, white ice around the shores. This strip will be a rod (about 16.5 feet) or more wide, and it’s created by this reflected heat from the bottom near the shore. Also, as I have said, the bubbles themselves within the ice act like tiny magnifying glasses (burning glasses) to melt the ice beneath them.

The Pond’s Daily Cycle and Winter Sounds

The yearly cycle of seasons happens every day in a pond on a small scale. Generally speaking, every morning the shallow water is warmed more rapidly than the deep water, though it may not get as warm overall. Every evening, the shallow water cools more rapidly until the next morning. The day is a perfect small example (epitome) of the year. The night is winter; the morning and evening are spring and fall; and noon is summer.

The cracking and booming of the ice indicate a change of temperature. One pleasant morning after a cold night, on February 24th, 1850, I had gone to Flint’s Pond to spend the day. I noticed with surprise that when I struck the ice with the head of my axe, it echoed like a gong for many rods around. It sounded as if I had struck a tightly stretched drumhead. The pond began to boom about an hour after sunrise, when it felt the warmth of the sun’s rays slanting upon it from over the hills. The ice stretched itself and yawned like a waking man, with a gradually increasing noise (tumult) that continued for three or four hours. It took a short nap (siesta) at noon and boomed once more toward night, as the sun’s influence was fading. When the weather is just right, a pond will “fire its evening gun” (make a loud booming sound) with great regularity. But in the middle of the day, being full of cracks, and the air also being less elastic, the ice had completely lost its ability to echo (resonance). Probably, fish and muskrats could not then have been stunned by a blow on it.

The fishermen say that the “thundering of the pond” scares the fish and stops them from biting. The pond does not thunder every evening, and I cannot tell for sure when to expect its thundering; but even if I perceive no difference in the weather, the pond does. Who would have suspected that such a large, cold, and thick-skinned thing could be so sensitive? Yet, it has its own law. It thunders in obedience to this law when it should, just as surely as buds expand in the spring. The earth is all alive and covered with tiny, sensitive projections (papillæ). The largest pond is as sensitive to atmospheric changes as the small ball (globule) of mercury in a thermometer tube.

Eagerly Awaiting Spring’s Arrival

One attraction in coming to the woods to live was that I would have the leisure and opportunity to see spring arrive. The ice in the pond eventually begins to get honey-combed, and I can press my heel into it as I walk. Fogs, rains, and warmer suns are gradually melting the snow. The days have grown noticeably (sensibly) longer. I see how I shall get through the winter without adding to my woodpile, because large fires are no longer necessary.

I am on the alert for the first signs of spring. I listen for the chance song of some arriving bird, or the chirp of the striped squirrel (chipmunk), for his stored food must be nearly gone by now. I watch to see the woodchuck venture out of his winter quarters. On the 13th of March, after I had heard the bluebird, song-sparrow, and red-winged blackbird, the ice on the pond was still nearly a foot thick.

As the weather grew warmer, the ice was not noticeably worn away by the water. Nor was it broken up and floated off as happens in rivers. Instead, though it had completely melted for about eight feet (half a rod) in width around the shore, the middle part was merely honey-combed and soaked with water. You could put your foot through it when it was only six inches thick. But by the next day evening, perhaps, after a warm rain followed by fog, it would have wholly disappeared. It would be all gone off with the fog, as if spirited away. One year, I went across the middle of the pond only five days before it disappeared entirely.

In 1845, Walden Pond was first completely open on April 1st.

• In 1846, it opened on March 25th.
• In 1847, on April 8th.
• In 1851, on March 28th.
• In 1852, on April 18th.
• In 1853, on March 23rd.
• In 1854, about April 7th.

The Dramatic Break-Up of Ice

Every event connected with the breaking up of the rivers and ponds and the settling of the weather is particularly interesting to those of us who live in a climate with such great extremes. When the warmer days come, people who live near the river hear the ice crack at night. It makes a startling “whoop” as loud as a cannon (artillery), as if its icy chains (fetters) were torn from end to end. Within a few days, they see the ice rapidly going out. In a similar way, the alligator comes out of the mud in southern regions with shakings of the earth.

The Roar of Drifting Ice: An Old Man’s Tale

One old man has been a close observer of Nature. He seems as thoroughly wise about all her operations as if Nature had been a ship put on supports (stocks) when he was a boy, and he had helped to lay her main timber (keel). He has reached his full growth and can hardly learn more about nature (natural lore) even if he should live to be as old as Methuselah (a very old biblical figure). This man told me something, and I was surprised to hear him express wonder at any of Nature’s operations, because I thought there were no secrets between them.

He said that one spring day, he took his gun and boat. He thought he would have a little sport hunting ducks. There was still ice on the meadows, but it was all gone out of the river. He floated down without any obstruction from Sudbury, where he lived, to Fair Haven Pond. To his surprise, he found most of Fair Haven Pond covered with a firm field of ice. It was a warm day, and he was surprised to see so much ice remaining.

Not seeing any ducks, he hid his boat on the north or back side of an island in the pond. Then he concealed himself in the bushes on the south side to wait for them. The ice had melted for about fifty to sixty feet (three or four rods) from the shore. There was a smooth and warm sheet of water there, with a muddy bottom, the kind that ducks love. He thought it likely that some ducks would come along pretty soon.

After he had lain still there for about an hour, he heard a low and seemingly very distant sound. But it was singularly grand and impressive, unlike anything he had ever heard before. It gradually swelled and increased as if it would have a universal and memorable ending. It was a sullen rush and roar. It seemed to him all at once like the sound of a vast flock of birds coming in to land there. Seizing his gun, he started up in haste, very excited.

But he found, to his surprise, that the whole body of the ice had started to move while he lay there. It had drifted in towards the shore. The sound he had heard was made by the edge of the ice grating on the shore. At first, the ice was gently nibbled and crumbled off. But at length, it heaved up and scattered its broken pieces (wrecks) along the island to a considerable height before it finally came to a standstill.

Spring’s Arrival: A Changing Landscape

At last, the sun’s rays have reached the right angle. Warm winds blow up mist and rain and melt the snowbanks. The sun, scattering the mist, smiles on a checkered landscape of reddish-brown earth (russet) and white snow. This landscape seems to be “smoking with incense” from the rising mist. Through this scene, the traveler picks his way from one dry spot (islet) to another. He is cheered by the music of a thousand tinkling small streams (rills and rivulets). Their veins are filled with the “blood of winter” – the meltwater – which they are carrying away.

Nature’s Masterpiece: The Thawing Sandbank

Few natural events (phenomena) gave me more delight than to observe the forms that thawing sand and clay take on when flowing down the sides of a deep cut made for the railroad. I passed this cut on my way to the village. This phenomenon is not very common on such a large scale, though the number of freshly exposed banks of the right material must have greatly increased since railroads were invented.

The material was sand of every degree of fineness and of various rich colors, commonly mixed with a little clay. When the frost comes out of the ground in the spring, and even on a thawing day in winter, the sand begins to flow down the slopes like lava. Sometimes it bursts out through the snow and overflows it where no sand was visible before.

Countless (innumerable) little streams of sand overlap and weave through one another. They create a sort of hybrid product – part flowing liquid, part plant-like growth. It half obeys the law of currents and half obeys the law of vegetation. As it flows, it takes the forms of juicy (sappy) leaves or vines. It makes heaps of soft, fleshy, branching forms (pulpy sprays) a foot or more deep. As you look down on them, they resemble the complex, overlapping, and fringed patterns (laciniated, lobed, and imbricated thalluses) of some lichens. Or you are reminded of coral, of leopards’ paws or birds’ feet, of brains or lungs or internal organs (bowels), and excrement of all kinds.

It is a truly strange and fantastic (grotesque) kind of “vegetation.” We see its forms and colors imitated in bronze sculptures. It is a sort of architectural foliage (leaf-like design) more ancient and typical than the designs of acanthus, chicory, ivy, vine, or any actual vegetable leaves. It is destined perhaps, under some circumstances, to become a puzzle to future geologists. The whole railroad cut impressed me as if it were a cave with its icicle-like formations (stalactites) laid open to the light. The various shades of the sand are unusually rich and agreeable, including different iron colors: brown, gray, yellowish, and reddish.

When the flowing mass of sand reaches the drain at the foot of the bank, it spreads out flatter into strands. The separate streams lose their semi-cylindrical form and gradually become flatter and broader. They run together as they become more moist, until they form an almost flat sandy area. This area is still variously and beautifully shaded, and in it, you can trace the original plant-like forms. Eventually, in the water itself, these sandy flows are converted into banks, like those formed at the mouths of rivers. The plant-like forms are lost in the ripple marks on the bottom.

The Earth’s Creative Force at Work

The whole bank, which is from twenty to forty feet high, is sometimes covered with a mass of this kind of sandy foliage, or sandy flow (rupture), for a quarter of a mile on one or both sides. This is all the product of a single spring day. What makes this sand foliage remarkable is that it springs into existence so suddenly.

When I see on one side the inactive (inert) bank – because the sun acts on one side first – and on the other side this lush (luxuriant) sandy foliage, created in just an hour, I am deeply affected. It feels as if, in a special sense, I stood in the laboratory of the Artist who made the world and me. It’s as if I had come to where He was still at work, playing on this bank, and with an excess of energy, scattering His fresh designs all around.

I feel as if I were nearer to the essential inner parts (vitals) of the globe itself. This sandy overflow is a leaf-like (foliaceous) mass, much like the vital organs of an animal body. You find in the very sands an anticipation of the vegetable leaf. No wonder that the earth expresses itself outwardly in leaves; it so labors with the idea of the leaf inwardly. The atoms have already learned this law and are full of it (pregnant by it). The overhanging leaf of a real plant sees its original model (prototype) here in the sand.

The Leaf: Nature’s Basic Pattern

Internally, whether in the globe or an animal body, a fundamental form is a moist, thick, rounded part (a lobe). This idea applies to the liver and lungs and fatty tissues. Externally, this form becomes a dry, thin leaf. It’s like how the sounds ‘f’ and ‘v’ are pressed and dried versions of the sound ‘b’. The basic components of the word “lobe” suggest a soft mass pressed forward by a liquid quality. In the word “globe,” a throat sound (‘g’) adds the idea of the throat’s capacity to the meaning of the rounded form. The feathers and wings of birds are still drier and thinner versions of leaves. In the same way, you see a transformation from the lumpy grub in the earth to the airy and fluttering butterfly. The very globe itself continually goes beyond and transforms itself (transcends and translates itself). It becomes winged in its orbit around the sun.

Even ice begins with delicate crystal leaves. It’s as if it had flowed into molds that the leaf-like parts (fronds) of water plants have impressed on the watery mirror. The whole tree itself is essentially one leaf. Rivers are still vaster leaves whose soft inner part (pulp) is the earth between them. Towns and cities are like insect eggs (ova) laid in the angles (axils) of these great leaves.

The Human Form: Echoes of Nature’s Flow

When the sun withdraws, the sand stops flowing. But in the morning, the streams will start once more and branch and branch again into a countless number (myriad) of others. Here you perhaps see how blood vessels are formed.

If you look closely, you observe that first, a stream of softened sand with a drop-like point pushes forward from the thawing mass. It’s like the ball of your finger, feeling its way slowly and blindly downward. At last, with more heat and moisture as the sun gets higher, the most fluid portion, in its effort to obey the natural law that even the most inactive matter yields to, separates from the thicker part. It forms for itself a winding channel or artery within that thicker mass. In this channel, you can see a little silvery stream glancing like lightning from one stage of soft, leaf-like branches to another, and now and then it gets swallowed up in the sand. It is wonderful how rapidly yet perfectly the sand organizes itself as it flows. It uses the best material its mass can provide to form the sharp edges of its channel. Such are the sources of rivers. In the sandy, silica-containing matter (silicious matter) that the water deposits, we perhaps see the bony system of creation. In the still finer soil and organic matter, we see the fleshy fiber or cellular tissue.

What is man but a mass of thawing clay? The ball of the human finger is just a solidified (congealed) drop. The fingers and toes flow to their full extent from the thawing mass of the body. Who knows what the human body would expand and flow out to under a milder, more favorable sky (a more genial heaven)? Is not the hand a spreading palm leaf with its lobes and veins? The ear may be regarded, fancifully, as a lichen (umbilicaria type) on the side of the head, with its lobe or drop shape. The lip (perhaps from a word meaning to flow or slip, labor or lapsus) hangs or drops from the sides of the cavernous mouth. The nose is clearly a solidified drop or a small stalactite. The chin is a still larger drop, the collected (confluent) dripping of the face. The cheeks are a slide from the brows into the valley of the face, shaped and spread out by the cheekbones. Each rounded lobe of a vegetable leaf, too, is a thick and now slow-moving (loitering) drop, larger or smaller. The lobes are the “fingers” of the leaf. As many lobes as it has, in so many directions it tends to flow. More heat or other favorable (genial) influences would have caused it to flow yet farther.

Spring: Nature’s Renewal and a Cleansing of Winter

Thus it seemed that this one hillside illustrated the principle of all the operations of Nature. The Maker of this earth simply “patented” a leaf – using it as the basic design for everything. What great decipherer, like Champollion who understood Egyptian hieroglyphics, will unlock this natural hieroglyphic for us, so that we may finally “turn over a new leaf” and understand life better?

This phenomenon of the thawing sand is more exhilarating to me than the richness (luxuriance) and fertility of vineyards. True, it is somewhat raw and earthy (excrementitious) in its character. There is no end to the heaps of forms that look like internal organs (“liver, lights, and bowels”), as if the globe were turned wrong side outward. But this suggests at least that Nature has some “bowels” – some deep, compassionate, and creative inner workings. And there again, Nature is the mother of humanity.

This is the frost coming out of the ground; this is Spring. It comes before the green and flowery spring, just as mythology comes before regular poetry. I know of nothing more cleansing (purgative) of winter’s gloom and stagnation (“winter fumes and indigestions”).

Here is the continued simplified rewrite of “Spring.”

Earth’s Spring Awakening

This convinces me that Earth is still in her “swaddling clothes,” like a baby, and stretches out baby fingers on every side. Fresh curls of new growth spring from the baldest-looking ground. There is nothing that is not alive or part of a living system (nothing inorganic). These leaf-like (foliaceous) heaps of sand lie along the bank like the waste material (slag) from a furnace. They show that Nature is “in full blast” with creative energy from within.

The earth is not just a piece of dead history, with layers upon layers (stratum upon stratum) like the pages of a book, to be studied mainly by geologists and historians (antiquaries). Instead, it is living poetry, like the leaves of a tree, which come before flowers and fruit. It is not a fossil earth, but a living earth. Compared with its great central life, all animal and vegetable life is merely dependent on it (parasitic). The earth’s powerful movements (throes) will one day push our shed skins and remains (exuviæ) up from their graves. You may melt your metals and cast them into the most beautiful molds you can create. But they will never excite me like the forms that this molten, flowing earth creates. And not only the earth itself, but also the human institutions upon it, are moldable (plastic) like clay in the hands of the potter.

The Gentle Power of Thaw

Before long, the frost comes out of the ground, not only on these banks but on every hill and plain and in every hollow. It’s like a sleeping four-legged animal (dormant quadruped) emerging from its burrow. It seeks the sea with musical sounds of melting water, or it travels to other climates in the form of clouds. Thaw, with its gentle persuasion, is more powerful than the Norse god Thor with his hammer. The thaw melts, while Thor only breaks things into pieces.

Winter’s Beauty Lingers in Spring

When the ground was partly bare of snow, and a few warm days had dried its surface somewhat, it was pleasant to compare the first tender signs of the infant year just peeking out with the stately beauty of the withered plants that had survived the winter. Plants like life-everlasting, goldenrods, pinweeds, and graceful wild grasses often looked more obvious and interesting then than even in summer, as if their beauty was not fully ripe until then. Even cotton-grass, cattails, mulleins, St. John’s-wort, hardhack, meadowsweet, and other strong-stemmed plants – those unspent seed-pods (granaries) that feed the earliest birds – were decent weeds, at least, that “widowed Nature” (Nature in its bare winter state) wore. I am particularly attracted by the arching and sheaf-like top of the wool-grass. It brings back summer to our winter memories. It is among the forms that art loves to copy. In the plant kingdom, these forms have the same kind of fundamental, recognized pattern for humans that astronomy has in the stars. It is an ancient style, older than Greek or Egyptian art.

Many of the sights and sounds (phenomena) of Winter suggest an indescribable tenderness and fragile delicacy. We are used to hearing Winter, the king of the season, described as a rude and noisy tyrant. But with the gentleness of a lover, he decorates the “hair” (tresses) of Summer with frost and ice.

Playful Squirrels Announce Spring

As spring approached, red squirrels got under my house, two at a time. They were directly under my feet as I sat reading or writing. They kept up the strangest chuckling, chirping, and complex, agile gurgling sounds (vocal pirouetting) that were ever heard. When I stamped my foot, they only chirped louder, as if they were past all fear and respect in their mad, playful activities (pranks), daring any human to stop them. “No you don’t—chickaree—chickaree,” they seemed to say. They were completely deaf to my arguments or failed to understand their force. They then launched into a series of scolding sounds (a strain of invective) that was impossible to resist or ignore.

The First Songs of Hope

The first sparrow of spring! The year beginning with younger hope than ever! The faint, silvery warblings heard over the partly bare and moist fields from the bluebird, the song sparrow, and the red-winged blackbird! It was as if the last flakes of winter tinkled like tiny bells as they fell! At such a time, what are histories, timelines (chronologies), traditions, and all written accounts (revelations)? The brooks sing joyful songs (carols and glees) to the spring. The marsh hawk, sailing low over the meadow, is already seeking the first slimy bit of life that awakens. The sinking sound of melting snow is heard in all small valleys (dells), and the ice dissolves quickly (apace) in the ponds.

The grass flames up on the hillsides like a spring fire. An ancient writer said, “and first the grass arises, called forth by the first rains” (et primitus oritur herba imbribus primoribus evocata). It is as if the earth sent forth an inward heat to greet the returning sun. Not yellow, but green is the color of its flame. The grass-blade is the symbol of everlasting (perpetual) youth. Like a long green ribbon, it streams from the turf (sod) into the summer. It is held back (checked) indeed by the frost, but soon (anon) it pushes on again, lifting its spear of last year’s hay with the fresh life below. It grows as steadily as a tiny stream (rill) oozes out of the ground. It is almost identical with that stream, for in the growing days of June, when the little streams are dry, the grass blades themselves are their channels. From year to year, the herds drink at this ever-flowing (perennial) green stream, and the mower, in good time (betimes), draws from it their winter supply of hay. So our human life also just dies down to its root in winter, but still puts forth its green blade toward eternity.

Walden Pond Thaws and Sings

Walden is melting quickly (apace). There is a canal of open water about thirty-three feet (two rods) wide along the northerly and westerly sides, and wider still at the east end. A great field of ice has cracked off from the main body. I hear a song sparrow singing from the bushes on the shore: “olit, olit, olit,—chip, chip, chip, che char,—che wiss, wiss, wiss.” He too is helping to crack the ice with his song.

How handsome are the great sweeping curves in the edge of the ice! They somewhat match the curves of the shore but are more regular. The ice is unusually hard, owing to the recent severe but temporary (transient) cold. Its surface is all watered or waved, like a palace floor. But the wind slides eastward over its opaque (non-transparent) surface in vain, until it reaches the living, open water beyond. It is glorious to see this ribbon of water sparkling in the sun. The bare face of the pond is full of happiness (glee) and youth. It is as if it spoke the joy of the fishes within it, and of the sands on its shore. It has a silvery shine (sheen) as if from the scales of a leuciscus (a type of shiny freshwater fish). It seems like it is all one active, shimmering fish. Such is the contrast between winter and spring. Walden was dead and is alive again. But this spring, it broke up more steadily, as I have said.

The Turning Point: Winter to Spring

The change from storm and winter to calm (serene) and mild weather, from dark and sluggish hours to bright and energetic (elastic) ones, is a memorable turning point (crisis) that all things announce. It seems to happen instantaneously at last. Suddenly, a flood (influx) of light filled my house, though the evening was approaching. The clouds of winter still overhung it, and the eaves were dripping with sleety rain. I looked out the window, and look! Where yesterday there was cold gray ice, there lay the transparent pond, already calm and full of hope as on a summer evening. It reflected a summer evening sky in its waters (bosom), though no such sky was visible overhead. It was as if the pond had a secret understanding (intelligence) with some remote horizon.

I heard a robin in the distance. It was the first I had heard for what felt like many thousands of years (methought). I shall not forget its note for many thousands more. It was the same sweet and powerful song of long ago (yore). Oh, the evening robin, at the end of a New England summer day! If I could ever find the exact twig he sits upon! I mean “he,” the bird; I mean “the twig” he sits on. This, at least, is not the scientifically named Turdus migratorius (American Robin), but the spirit of the robin.

The pitch pines and scrub oaks about my house, which had drooped for so long, suddenly resumed their individual characters. They looked brighter, greener, and more erect and alive, as if effectively cleansed and restored by the rain. I knew that it would not rain any more. You can tell by looking at any twig in the forest, yes, even at your very woodpile, whether its winter is past or not.

As it grew darker, I was startled by the honking of geese flying low over the woods. They were like weary travelers getting in late from southern lakes. They were finally indulging in unrestrained complaint and mutual consolation. Standing at my door, I could hear the rush of their wings. When, driving toward my house, they suddenly saw my light, they hushed their noise (clamor), wheeled, and settled in the pond. So I came in, shut the door, and passed my first spring night in the woods.

Geese Journey North

In the morning, I watched the geese from my door through the mist. They were sailing in the middle of the pond, about 275 yards (fifty rods) off. They were so large and their movements so active (tumultuous) that Walden appeared like an artificial pond made for their amusement. But when I stood on the shore, they at once rose up with a great flapping of wings at the signal of their commander. When they had gotten into rank, they circled about over my head – twenty-nine of them. Then they steered straight to Canada, with a regular honk from the leader at intervals. They were trusting to break their fast (eat their first meal) in muddier pools farther north. A group (a “plump”) of ducks rose at the same time and took the route to the north, in the wake of their noisier cousins, the geese.

More Signs of Spring’s Arrival

For a week, I heard the circling, searching, loud call (groping clangor) of some solitary goose in the foggy mornings. It was seeking its companion and still filling the woods with the sound of a larger life than the woods themselves could hold (sustain).

In April, the pigeons were seen again, flying directly and swiftly (express) in small flocks. In due time, I heard the martins twittering over my clearing. It hadn’t seemed that the whole township contained so many martins that it could spare me any. I fancied that they were a special, ancient race that lived in hollow trees before white men came.

In almost all climates, the tortoise and the frog are among the forerunners (precursors) and announcers (heralds) of this season. Birds fly with song and gleaming (glancing) plumage. Plants spring up and bloom. Winds blow to correct the slight shift (oscillation) of the Earth’s poles and preserve the balance (equilibrium) of Nature.

Spring: A New Creation and Golden Age

Just as every season seems best to us in its turn, so the coming in of spring is like the creation of an orderly universe (Cosmos) out of Chaos. It is like the realization of the Golden Age – a mythical time of peace and happiness.

The author then recalls ancient writings that describe this. One says: “The East Wind withdrew to the lands of the dawn, to Aurora, and the Nabathæan kingdom, and Persia, and the mountain ridges under the morning rays.”

Another ancient text speaks of humanity’s creation: “Mankind was born. Whether that Maker (Artificer) of things, the origin of a better world, made humans from divine seed; or whether the Earth, being new and recently separated from the high heavens (Ether), still retained some seeds of its related heaven.”

A single gentle rain makes the grass many shades greener. In the same way, our prospects in life brighten when better thoughts come to us. We would be blessed if we always lived in the present. We should take advantage of every event (accident) that happened to us, like the grass which acknowledges the influence of the slightest dew that falls on it. We should not spend our time trying to make up for (atoning for) the neglect of past opportunities, which we often call “doing our duty.” We linger (loiter) in winter while it is already spring.

In a pleasant spring morning, it feels as if all people’s sins are forgiven. Such a day is a pause (a truce) to bad behavior (vice). While such a sun holds out to burn, the worst (vilest) sinner may return to goodness. Through our own recovered innocence, we recognize (discern) the innocence of our neighbors. Yesterday, you may have known your neighbor as a thief, a drunkard, or someone focused only on sensual pleasures (a sensualist). You might have merely pitied or despised him, and despaired of the world. But the sun shines bright and warm this first spring morning, re-creating the world. You meet him at some peaceful (serene) work. You see how his exhausted and debauched veins expand with quiet joy and bless the new day. He feels the spring influence with the innocence of infancy, and all his faults are forgotten. There is not only an atmosphere of goodwill about him, but even a hint (savor) of holiness trying (groping) to express itself. It may be blind and ineffective, like a newborn instinct. For a short hour, the south hillside echoes with no crude (vulgar) jest. You see some innocent, fair shoots preparing to burst from his rough, twisted outer self (gnarled rind) and try another year’s life, as tender and fresh as the youngest plant. Even he has entered into the joy of his Lord (a state of spiritual happiness).

Why doesn’t the jailer leave open his prison doors? Why doesn’t the judge dismiss his case? Why doesn’t the preacher dismiss his congregation? It is because they do not obey the hint which God gives them, nor accept the pardon which He freely offers to all.

The author then reflects on another wise teaching. It says that a return to goodness, produced each day by the calm and life-giving (beneficent) breath of the morning, helps one approach the original good nature of humans. This is like the new sprouts that grow in a forest that has been cut down. In the same way, the evil that one does during a day prevents the seeds (germs) of virtues, which began to spring up again, from developing and destroys them.

After the seeds of virtue have been prevented many times from developing, then the life-giving breath of evening is not enough to preserve them. As soon as the breath of evening is no longer enough to preserve them, then human nature does not differ much from that of an animal (the brute). When people see that this person’s nature is like that of an animal, they think that he has never possessed the inborn ability (innate faculty) of reason. Are those the true and natural feelings of humans?

He also remembers ancient writers describing a Golden Age: “The Golden Age was first created. In this age, without any need for punishment (avenger), people spontaneously, without law, cherished faithfulness and right behavior (rectitude). Punishment and fear did not exist; nor were threatening words read on bronze tablets displayed in public. Nor did the pleading (suppliant) crowd fear the words of their judge; they were safe without any enforcer of laws. Not yet had the pine tree, cut down on its mountains, descended to the liquid waves to see a foreign world. Mortals knew no shores but their own.” “There was eternal spring, and gentle breezes (placid zephyrs) with warm air (blasts) soothed the flowers that were born without seed.”

The Graceful Merlin

On April 29th, as I was fishing from the bank of the river near the Nine-Acre-Corner bridge, I was standing on the quaking grass and willow roots where muskrats hide. I heard a unique (singular) rattling sound, somewhat like that of sticks that boys play with by snapping them with their fingers. Looking up, I observed a very slight and graceful hawk, like a nighthawk. It was alternately soaring like a ripple in the air and then tumbling a rod or two (16-33 feet) over and over. It showed the underside of its wings, which gleamed like a satin ribbon in the sun, or like the pearly inside of a shell. This sight reminded me of falconry (the sport of hunting with falcons) and the nobility and poetry associated with that sport. It seemed to me it might be called a Merlin (a type of small falcon), but I do not care about its name.

It was the most light and airy (ethereal) flight I had ever witnessed. It did not simply flutter like a butterfly, nor soar like the larger hawks. Instead, it played (sported) with proud confidence in the fields of air. Mounting again and again with its strange chuckle, it repeated its free and beautiful fall, turning over and over like a kite. Then it recovered from its lofty tumbling as if it had never set its foot on solid ground (terra firma). It appeared to have no companion in the universe – playing there alone. It seemed to need nothing but the morning and the sky (ether) with which it played. It was not lonely itself but made all the earth beneath it seem lonely. Where was the parent that hatched it, its relatives (kindred), and its father in the heavens? As a tenant of the air, it seemed related to the earth only by an egg hatched some time in the crack (crevice) of a cliff (crag). Or was its native nest made in the corner of a cloud, woven from the trimmings of the rainbow and the sunset sky, and lined with some soft midsummer haze caught up from earth? Its high nest (eyry) was now some cliff-like cloud.

Spring’s Abundant Life

Besides this sight, I caught a rare variety (mess) of golden, silver, and bright copper-colored (cupreous) fishes, which looked like a string of jewels. Ah! I have entered those meadows on the morning of many a first spring day. I’ve jumped from mound to mound (hummock to hummock), from willow root to willow root. The wild river valley and the woods were bathed in so pure and bright a light that it would have awakened the dead, if they had been slumbering in their graves, as some suppose. There needs no stronger proof of immortality. All things must live in such a light. “O Death, where was thy sting? O Grave, where was thy victory, then?” (This is a hopeful quote from the Bible, suggesting death has lost its power).

The Need for Wildness

Our village life would become stagnant and dull if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows that surround it. We need the refreshing and invigorating quality (tonic) of wildness. We need to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen hide, and hear the booming sound of the snipe. We need to smell the whispering sedge (a grass-like plant) where only some wilder and more solitary bird builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground.

At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we also require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable. We need land and sea to be infinitely wild, unmeasured (unsurveyed) and uncomprehended (unfathomed) by us because they are ultimately beyond full comprehension (unfathomable). We can never have enough of Nature.

We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible energy (vigor), vast and powerful (Titanic) features: the sea-coast with its shipwrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thundercloud, and the rain that lasts for three weeks and produces floods (freshets). We need to witness our own limits being surpassed (transgressed), and see some life grazing (pasturing) freely where we never wander. We are cheered when we observe the vulture feeding on the decaying flesh (carrion) which disgusts and disheartens us, and see it deriving health and strength from that meal (repast).

There was a dead horse in the hollow by the path to my house. It sometimes compelled me to go out of my way, especially at night when the air was heavy. But the assurance it gave me of the strong appetite and unbreakable (inviolable) health of Nature was my compensation for this. I love to see that Nature is so full of (rife with) life that countless numbers (myriads) can be afforded to be sacrificed and allowed to prey on one another. I love to see that tender organisms can be so calmly squashed out of existence like pulp – tadpoles which herons gobble up, and tortoises and toads run over in the road. And that sometimes it has rained flesh and blood! With the possibility (liability) of accidents, we must see how little importance should be given to them. The impression made on a wise man is that of universal innocence. Poison is not truly poisonous in the grand scheme of things, nor are any wounds ultimately fatal to the cycle of life. Compassion, as a fixed stance, is a very hard position to maintain (untenable ground). It must be quick and efficient (expeditious). Its arguments (pleadings) will not bear being repeated in a fixed, unoriginal way (stereotyped).

A Brightness in the Woods

Early in May, the oaks, hickories, maples, and other trees were just putting out their new leaves. Amidst the pine woods around the pond, they gave a brightness like sunshine to the landscape, especially on cloudy days. It was as if the sun were breaking through mists and shining faintly on the hillsides here and there.

Here is the final simplified rewrite for the “Spring” chapter.

Spring’s Farewell and a Year’s Passing

On the third or fourth of May, I saw a loon in the pond. During the first week of May, I heard the whippoorwill, the brown thrasher, the veery, the wood pewee, the chewink, and other birds. I had heard the wood thrush long before. The phoebe had already come back and looked in at my door and window. She was checking to see if my house was like a cave (cavern-like) enough for her to nest in. She held herself in the air on humming wings with her claws tightly closed (clinched talons), as if she were holding onto the air itself while she examined the premises.

The yellow, sulfur-like pollen of the pitch pine soon covered the pond and the stones and rotten wood along the shore. You could have collected a barrelful of it. This is what people mean by the “sulfur showers” we hear about. Even in an ancient Indian play, Shakuntala by Kalidasa, we read of small streams (rills) “dyed yellow with the golden dust of the lotus.”

And so the seasons went rolling on into summer, just as a person wanders (rambles) into higher and higher grass.

Thus, my first year’s life in the woods was completed. The second year was similar to it. I finally left Walden on September 6th, 1847.

Conclusion

The Wide Universe Beyond Our Views

Doctors wisely recommend a change of air and scenery for sick people. Thank Heaven, this place where I live is not the entire world. The buckeye tree does not grow in New England, and the mockingbird is rarely heard here.

The wild goose is more of a world traveler (cosmopolite) than we are. It eats breakfast in Canada, has lunch in Ohio, and prepares for the night (plumes himself) in a southern swamp (bayou). Even the bison, to some extent, follows the seasons. It grazes in the pastures of Colorado only until greener and sweeter grass waits for it by the Yellowstone River.

Yet, we humans often think that if rail-fences are pulled down and stone walls are piled up on our farms, our lives are then limited, and our fates are decided. If you are chosen to be the town clerk, for example, you might think you cannot go to Tierra del Fuego (a remote part of South America) this summer. But you may still go to the “land of infernal fire” (a place of inner suffering or hell) nonetheless. The universe is wider than our views of it.

Look Inward: Exploring the Self

We should more often look over the railing (tafferel) of our ship, like curious passengers on life’s journey. We should not make the voyage like stupid sailors, tediously picking apart old ropes (picking oakum). The other side of the globe is simply the home of people we might write to (our correspondent). Our physical voyages are only like sailing in big circles on the globe (great-circle sailing). The cures doctors usually prescribe are just for skin-deep diseases.

One person might hurry to Southern Africa to chase giraffes. But surely, that is not the true “game” or goal he should be after. How long, really, would a man hunt giraffes if he could? Snipe and woodcock birds may also offer exciting sport. But I believe it would be a nobler “game” to “shoot one’s self” – meaning, to aim for self-improvement and inner exploration.

An old poem says: “Direct your eyesight inward, and you’ll find A thousand regions in your mind Yet undiscovered. Travel them, and be An expert in your own inner universe (home-cosmography).”

What does Africa, or the American West, truly represent for us? Isn’t our own inner self like an unexplored white area on a map? It might prove to be dark and complex, like a newly discovered coastline, once we explore it.

Are we truly trying to find the source of the Nile River, or the Niger, or the Mississippi, or a North-West Passage around this continent? Are these the problems that most concern humanity? Was Sir John Franklin (a lost Arctic explorer) the only man who is lost, that his wife should be so determined to find him? Does Mr. Grinnell (who funded expeditions to find Franklin) even know where he himself truly is?

The Unexplored Continents Within

Instead, be like Mungo Park, Lewis and Clarke, or Frobisher – famous explorers – but explore your own inner streams and oceans. Explore your own higher latitudes of thought and spirit. You can have shiploads of preserved meats to support you, if they are necessary for such a journey. You can pile the empty cans sky-high as a sign of your progress. Were preserved meats invented only to preserve meat?

No, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you. Open new channels, not of trade, but of thought. Every person is the lord of a realm. Compared to this inner realm, the earthly empire of the Russian Czar is just a tiny state, a small hill of ice (a hummock) left behind by a glacier.

Yet some people can be patriotic to their country even when they have no self-respect. They sacrifice the greater value (their inner self) to the lesser value (their nation). They love the soil that will one day make their graves, but they have no connection (sympathy) with the spirit that could still bring their bodies (clay) to life. For them, patriotism is like a maggot in their heads – a small, consuming, and unthinking thing.

What was the real meaning of that South-Sea Exploring Expedition, with all its display and expense? It was an indirect admission of the fact that there are continents and seas in the moral world within each person. Every individual is like a narrow land bridge (isthmus) or an inlet to these inner worlds, yet they remain unexplored by him. But it is easier to sail many thousands of miles through cold, storms, and cannibals, in a government ship with five hundred men and boys to help, than it is to explore the private sea – the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean – of one’s own being, alone.

An ancient writer said something like this: “Let others wander far and examine strange lands. I find more of life and God by staying here; they mostly just experience more of the journey itself.”

It is not worthwhile to go around the world just to count the cats in Zanzibar. Yet, even doing that is better than doing nothing, until you can do something better. And by such travels, you may perhaps find some “Symmes’ Hole” (a mythical opening to the Earth’s interior) by which to get at the inside of things at last.

England and France, Spain and Portugal, the Gold Coast and the Slave Coast of Africa – all these places border on this private, inner sea of the self. But no ship from these lands has dared to sail out of sight of its own shores, though this inner exploration is without doubt the direct way to the true “India” – a land of spiritual riches.

If you would learn to speak all languages and follow the customs of all nations, if you would travel farther than all other travelers, become a citizen (naturalized) in all climates, and cause the mythical Sphinx to dash her head against a stone in defeat (by answering her riddle) – then you must obey the command of the old philosopher: “Explore thyself.” This task demands a keen eye and strong nerve. Only the defeated and deserters go to actual wars; they are cowards that run away from themselves and enlist.

Start now on that farthest western way of inner exploration. This path does not stop at the Mississippi River or the Pacific Ocean. It does not lead toward a worn-out, ancient China or Japan. Instead, it leads directly onward, like a line touching the edge of this sphere (a tangent), through summer and winter, day and night, sundown, moondown, and at last, earth down too (transcending the physical).

True Resolution

It is said that Mirabeau, a French revolutionary, took up highway robbery. He did this “to find out what degree of determination (resolution) was necessary to place oneself in formal opposition to the most sacred laws of society.” He declared that “a soldier who fights in the ranks does not require half so much courage as a common street robber (a foot-pad).” He also said that “honor and religion have never stood in the way of a well-considered and a firm resolve.”

This was manly, according to the world’s standards. And yet, it was a pointless (idle) act, if not a desperate one. A saner man would have often enough found himself “in formal opposition” to what are considered “the most sacred laws of society” simply by obeying yet more sacred laws – the laws of his own conscience. He could have tested his determination in this way without going out of his way to break societal laws. It is not for a man to put himself in such an attitude of opposition to society. Instead, he should maintain himself in whatever attitude he naturally finds himself in, by obeying the laws of his own being. These true laws will never lead him to oppose a just government, if he should happen to find one.

Why I Left the Woods

I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live and could not spare any more time for that particular one. It is remarkable how easily and unthinkingly (insensibly) we fall into a particular routine (route) and make a well-worn path (a beaten track) for ourselves.

I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond-side. Even though it is five or six years since I last walked on it, it is still quite distinct. It is true, I fear that others may have fallen into it and so helped to keep it open. The surface of the earth is soft and easily marked (impressible) by the feet of men. So too are the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world! How deep the ruts of tradition and conformity!

I did not wish to travel through life in a comfortable cabin (a cabin passage). Instead, I wanted to go “before the mast” (like a common sailor) and be on the deck of the world. There I could best see the moonlight among the mountains. I do not wish to go below deck now.

Lessons from My Experiment: Living Your Dreams

I learned this, at least, by my experiment: if a person advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and tries hard (endeavors) to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success that is unexpected in common hours.

He will put some things behind him. He will pass an invisible boundary. New, universal, and more liberating (liberal) laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him. Or, the old laws will be expanded and interpreted in his favor in a more liberating sense. He will then live with the freedom (license) of a higher order of beings.

In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex. Solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now, put the foundations under them.

Speak Your Own Truth

It is a ridiculous demand that England and America make: that you shall speak only so that they can understand you. Neither humans nor toadstools grow in such a conforming way. As if that were important, and as if there were not enough people who could understand you without them. As if Nature could support only one kind of understanding. As if Nature could not sustain birds as well as four-legged animals (quadrupeds), flying things as well as creeping things. As if the simple sounds “hush” and “who,” which even a simple person (Bright) can understand, were the best English. As if there were safety only in stupidity.

I chiefly fear that my expression may not be “extra-vagant” enough – may not wander far enough beyond the narrow limits of my daily experience – so as to be adequate to the truth of which I have been convinced. “Extra vagance” (wandering beyond bounds)! It depends on how you are confined (yarded). The migrating buffalo, which seeks new pastures in another latitude, is not extravagant like the cow which kicks over the pail, leaps the cow-yard fence, and runs after her calf at milking time.

I desire to speak somewhere without limits. I want to speak like a man in a fully awake moment, to other people in their fully awake moments. For I am convinced that I cannot exaggerate enough even to lay the foundation of a true expression. Who that has heard a beautiful piece of music (a strain of music) ever feared then that he might speak too extravagantly in the future?

In view of the future or the possible, we should live quite loosely (laxly) and undefined in what lies ahead. Our outlines on that side should be dim and misty, just as our shadows reveal an unnoticeable emission (insensible perspiration) toward the sun. The fleeting (volatile) truth of our words should continually show the inadequacy of the fixed, leftover statement (residual statement). Their truth is instantly understood and felt (translated); only its literal, dead form (monument) remains. The words which express our faith and deep reverence (piety) are not definite or precise. Yet, they are significant and fragrant like incense (frankincense) to superior natures.

Beyond Common Sense

Why should we always lower our understanding (level downward) to our dullest perception and praise that as common sense? The commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, which they express by snoring. Sometimes we are inclined to classify those who are more than normally intelligent (“once-and-a-half witted”) with the half-witted, because we appreciate only a third part of their intelligence (wit). Some people would find fault with the beautiful morning sunrise (morning-red), if they ever got up early enough to see it.

“They pretend,” as I hear, “that the verses of Kabir (an Indian mystic poet) have four different senses: illusion, spirit, intellect, and the public teachings (exoteric doctrine) of the Vedas (Hindu scriptures).” But in this part of the world, it is considered a reason for complaint if a man’s writings can be interpreted in more than one way. While England tries to cure the potato-rot (a plant disease), will not anyone try to cure the “brain-rot” – the decay of intellect – which is so much more widespread and deadly?

I do not suppose that I have achieved obscurity in my writing. But I should be proud if no more fatal fault were found with my pages on this score than was found with the Walden ice. Southern customers objected to its blue color, which is the evidence of its purity. They thought it looked muddy and preferred the Cambridge ice, which is white but tastes of weeds. The purity that men generally love is like the mists which cover the earth, not like the clear blue sky (azure ether) beyond.

Living Dogs and Dead Lions: Modern Potential

Some people are constantly telling us (dinning in our ears) that we Americans, and modern people generally, are intellectual dwarfs compared with the ancients, or even with the people of Elizabethan England. But what does that matter? A living dog is better than a dead lion (a biblical proverb meaning it’s better to be alive and ordinary than famous and dead). Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to a race of pygmies? Should he not try to be the biggest pygmy that he can be? Let everyone mind his own business and try to be what he was made to be.

Marching to a Different Drummer

Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate kinds of enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away it may be. It is not important that he should mature as soon as an apple tree or an oak tree. Shall he turn his spring into summer prematurely? If the ideal condition of things for which we were made is not yet here, what reality can we substitute for it that would be worthwhile? We will not be shipwrecked on a pointless (vain) reality. Shall we take great pains to build a heaven of blue glass over ourselves, even though when it is done, we shall be sure to still gaze at the true, ethereal heaven far above, as if our blue-glass heaven did not exist?

The Artist of Kouroo: A Story of Perfection and Time

There was an artist in the city of Kouroo who was determined to strive for perfection. One day, it came into his mind to make a staff (a walking stick). He considered that in an imperfect work, time is an ingredient. But into a perfect work, time does not enter. So, he said to himself, “It shall be perfect in all respects, though I should do nothing else in my life.”

He went instantly to the forest for wood, determined that the staff should not be made of unsuitable material. As he searched for and rejected stick after stick, his friends gradually deserted him. They grew old in their own works and died, but he did not grow older by a single moment. His singleness of purpose, his resolution, and his elevated spiritual devotion (piety) gifted him, without his knowledge, with everlasting (perennial) youth. Because he made no compromise with Time, Time kept out of his way. Time only sighed at a distance because it could not overcome him.

Before he had found a piece of wood suitable in all respects, the city of Kouroo was an ancient (hoary) ruin. He sat on one of its mounds to peel the stick. Before he had given it the proper shape, the dynasty of the Candahars (an ancient ruling family) was at an end. With the point of the stick, he wrote the name of the last of that race in the sand, and then resumed his work. By the time he had smoothed and polished the staff, Kalpa (a star) was no longer the pole-star. Before he had put on the metal tip (ferrule) and the head adorned with precious stones, Brahma (the Hindu creator god) had awoken and slumbered many times (each slumber and awakening representing vast cosmic cycles).

But why do I stop to mention these things? When the finishing stroke was put to his work, it suddenly expanded before the eyes of the astonished artist into the fairest of all the creations of Brahma. He had made a new system, a new world with full and fair proportions, in making that staff. In this new world, though the old cities and dynasties had passed away, fairer and more glorious ones had taken their places. And now he saw by the heap of shavings still fresh at his feet that, for him and his work, the former passage of time had been an illusion. No more time had elapsed than is required for a single spark (scintillation) from the brain of Brahma to fall on and ignite the receptive material (tinder) of a mortal brain. The material was pure, and his art was pure; how could the result be anything other than wonderful?

Truth Wears Well

No face or appearance which we can give to a matter will serve us (stead us) so well at last as the truth. This alone wears well and lasts. For the most part, we are not truly where we are, but in a false position. Through a weakness (infirmity) of our natures, we suppose a certain situation, and put ourselves into it. Hence, we are in two situations at the same time, and it is doubly difficult to get out. In sane moments, we regard only the facts, the case that actually is.

Say what you have to say, not what you think you ought to say. Any truth is better than make-believe. Tom Hyde, the tinker (a mender of pots and pans), standing on the gallows about to be hanged, was asked if he had anything to say. “Tell the tailors,” he said, “to remember to make a knot in their thread before they take the first stitch.” His companion’s prayer is forgotten.

Living Your Life, However Mean

However poor or humble (mean) your life is, meet it and live it. Do not avoid (shun) it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are (meaning, your attitude can make it seem worse). It looks poorest when you are richest in material things but poor in spirit. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poorhouse (a place for the very poor). The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the poorhouse (alms-house) as brightly as from the rich man’s home. The snow melts before its door as early in the spring. I do not see why a quiet mind may not live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace.

The town’s poor often seem to me to live the most independent lives of any. Maybe they are simply great enough to receive help without shame or doubt (misgiving). Most people think that they are above being supported by the town. But it more often happens that they are not above supporting themselves by dishonest means, which should be considered more shameful (disreputable).

Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn to the old things; return to them. Things do not change; we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will see that you do not lack society. If I were confined to a corner of an attic room (garret) all my days, like a spider, the world would be just as large to me while I had my thoughts about me.

The philosopher Confucius said: “From an army of three divisions, one can take away its general and put it in disorder; from the most humble and common (abject and vulgar) man, one cannot take away his thought.”

Do not seek so anxiously to be developed, to subject yourself to many influences to be played upon. It is all a waste of energy (dissipation). Humility, like darkness, reveals the heavenly lights. The shadows of poverty and meanness gather around us, “and lo! creation widens to our view.” We are often reminded that if we were given the wealth of Crœsus (a legendary rich king), our aims must still be the same, and our means of achieving them essentially the same.

Moreover, if you are restricted in your range by poverty – if you cannot buy books and newspapers, for instance – you are simply confined to the most significant and vital experiences. You are compelled to deal with the material which yields the most “sugar” and the most “starch” – the most essential nourishment. It is life near the bone where it is sweetest. You are protected from being a person who wastes time on unimportant things (a trifler). No man ever loses on a lower level by being generous and noble-spirited (magnanimity) on a higher level. Excess (superfluous) wealth can buy only unnecessary things (superfluities). Money is not required to buy any necessity of the soul.

The Noise of Contemporaries vs. Inner Stillness

I live in the angle of a dull, leaden wall (a metaphor for his ordinary surroundings or the limitations of his time). Into its composition was poured a little alloy of bell metal (something that can resonate or has a higher quality). Often, in the quiet (repose) of my mid-day, a confused tinkling sound (tintinnabulum) reaches my ears from outside. It is the noise of my contemporaries – the people living in my time.

My neighbors tell me of their adventures with famous gentlemen and ladies, what notable people (notabilities) they met at the dinner table. But I am no more interested in such things than in the contents of the Daily Times (a generic newspaper). The interest and the conversation are chiefly about clothing (costume) and manners. But a goose is a goose still, dress it as you will.

They tell me of California and Texas, of England and the Indies, of the Honorable Mr. So-and-so of Georgia or of Massachusetts. These are all temporary (transient) and fleeting things (phenomena). Eventually, I am ready to leap from their court-yard like the Mameluke bey (an Egyptian leader who leaped to his death to escape a massacre, symbolizing a desire to escape triviality).

I delight to get my bearings – not to walk in a procession with pomp and parade, in a conspicuous place, but to walk instead with the Builder of the universe, if I may. I choose not to live in this restless, nervous, bustling, trivial Nineteenth Century, but to stand or sit thoughtfully while it goes by. What are men celebrating? They are all on a committee of arrangements, and hourly expect a speech from somebody. God is only the president of the day, and Daniel Webster (a famous orator) is His speaker.

Here is the final simplified rewrite for the “Conclusion” chapter.

Seek Solid Ground and True Work

I love to feel my weight, to settle, to be drawn naturally (gravitate) toward whatever most strongly and rightfully attracts me. I don’t want to try to hang from the arm of a scale to weigh less. I don’t want to suppose a hypothetical case, but to take the case that actually is. I want to travel the only path I truly can, the one on which no power can resist me.

It gives me no satisfaction to start building an arch before I have a solid foundation. Let us not play risky games on thin ice (kittly-benders). There is a solid bottom everywhere.

We read a story about a traveler who asked a boy if the swamp before him had a hard bottom. The boy replied that it did. But soon, the traveler’s horse sank into the mud up to its belly (girths). He said to the boy, “I thought you said that this bog had a hard bottom.” “So it has,” answered the boy, “but you have not gotten halfway to it yet.”

So it is with the bogs and quicksands of society; but only an experienced person (an old boy) knows this. Only what is thought, said, or done at a certain rare, fitting moment (coincidence) is truly good. I would not want to be one of those who will foolishly drive a nail into mere thin wood strips and plaster (lath and plastering); such a poorly done deed would keep me awake at nights.

Give me a hammer, and let me feel for the solid wood strips (the furring) behind the wall. Do not depend on superficial fixes (the putty). Drive a nail home and bend its end over to secure it (clinch it) so faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction. This should be a work at which you would not be ashamed to call upon your highest inspiration (invoke the Muse). So will God help you, and only so. Every nail driven should be like another strong pin (rivet) in the machine of the universe, with you carrying on the important work.

Give Me Truth Above All Else

Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. I once sat at a table where there was rich food and wine in abundance, and overly eager servants (obsequious attendance). But sincerity and truth were not there. I went away hungry from that unwelcoming table (inhospitable board). The hospitality was as cold as the ices they served. I thought there was no need for ice to freeze them; their attitude was already frozen. They talked to me of the age of the wine and the fame of its year (vintage). But I thought of an older, a newer, and purer wine, of a more glorious vintage, which they did not have and could not buy. The style, the house and grounds, and the “entertainment” mean nothing to me without truth.

I once called on a king, but he made me wait in his hall. He acted like a man incapable of true hospitality. There was a man in my neighborhood who lived in a hollow tree. His manners were truly regal and noble. I would have done better if I had called on him.

Beyond Stale Virtues and Self-Praise

How long shall we sit on our covered porches (porticoes) practicing useless (idle) and old-fashioned (musty) virtues, which any real work would make seem out of place (impertinent)? It’s as if one were to begin the day by practicing patient endurance of hardship (long-suffering), and then hire a man to hoe his potatoes. And in the afternoon, he would go out to practice Christian meekness and charity with carefully planned (aforethought) goodness!

Consider the insular pride (like the “China pride” of that era) and unmoving (stagnant) self-satisfaction (self-complacency) of mankind. This generation leans back a little to congratulate itself on being the last of a famous (illustrious) line of ancestors. In Boston and London and Paris and Rome, thinking of its long history (descent), it speaks of its progress in art and science and literature with satisfaction. There are the Records of the Philosophical Societies, and the public speeches of praise (Eulogies) for Great Men! It is like the good Adam (the first man) admiring his own virtue. “Yes, we have done great deeds, and sung divine songs, which shall never die,” they say – that is, as long as we can remember them. The learned societies and great men of ancient Assyria – where are they now?

What youthful philosophers and experimenters we are! There is not one of my readers who has yet lived a whole human life. These current times may be just the spring months in the life of the human race. If we have had the “seven-years’ itch” (a common, recurring problem), we have not yet seen the “seventeen-year locust” (a creature that emerges after a long period of unseen development) in Concord.

Our Limited View of Ourselves and the World

We are familiar with only a thin skin (pellicle) of the globe on which we live. Most people have not dug (delved) six feet beneath the surface, nor leaped as many above it. We do not know where we truly are. Besides, we are sound asleep nearly half our time. Yet we consider ourselves wise and have an established order on the surface. Truly, we are deep thinkers, we are ambitious spirits!

As I stand over an insect crawling among the pine needles on the forest floor, trying to hide itself from my sight, I ask myself why it will cherish those humble thoughts and hide its head from me. I might perhaps be its benefactor and share (impart) some cheering information with its race. When I think this, I am reminded of the greater Benefactor and Intelligence that stands over me, the human insect.

The Potential Within: Life Like a River

There is a constant flow (incessant influx) of newness (novelty) into the world, and yet we tolerate incredible dullness. I only need to suggest what kind of sermons are still listened to in the most enlightened countries. There are words like “joy” and “sorrow,” but they are often only the repetitive chorus (burden) of a religious song (psalm), sung with an unpleasant nasal tone (nasal twang), while we mostly believe in what is ordinary and insignificant (mean). We think that we can only change our clothes, not our fundamental selves or our world.

It is said that the British Empire is very large and respectable, and that the United States is a first-rate power. We do not believe that a powerful tide rises and falls behind every individual. This inner tide could float the entire British Empire like a wood chip, if a person should ever truly recognize and harbor that power in his mind. Who knows what sort of “seventeen-year locust” – what new and transformative thing – will next come out of the ground? The government of the world I live in was not created (framed) in after-dinner conversations over wine, like that of Britain.

The life in us is like the water in the river. It may rise this year higher than anyone has ever known it and flood the dry (parched) higher ground (uplands). This very year may be the momentous (eventful) one that will drown out all our small, timid habits (our muskrats). It was not always dry land where we now live. I see far inland the banks which the stream anciently washed, before science began to record its floods (freshets).

The Rebirth of Wonder: A Bug’s Tale

Everyone has heard the story which has gone around New England about a strong and beautiful bug. This bug came out of the dry leaf of an old table made of apple-tree wood. The table had stood in a farmer’s kitchen for sixty years, first in Connecticut, and afterward in Massachusetts. The bug came from an egg deposited in the living tree many years earlier still, as was clear by counting the annual tree rings beyond where the egg was. The bug was heard gnawing its way out for several weeks. Perhaps it was hatched by the heat of an urn placed on the table.

Who does not feel his faith in a resurrection and immortality strengthened by hearing of this? Who knows what beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many circular layers of lifeless wood (concentric layers of woodenness) in the dead, dry life of society – an egg deposited at first in the living sapwood (alburnum) of a green tree, which has gradually been converted into the appearance of its well-seasoned tomb – may unexpectedly come forth? Perhaps this new life has been heard gnawing its way out now for years by the astonished family of mankind as they sat around their festive table. Perhaps it will emerge from amidst society’s most trivial and ordinary (handselled) furniture to enjoy its perfect summer life at last!

Awaken to a New Dawn

I do not say that ordinary people (John or Jonathan) will realize all this. But such is the character of that tomorrow which the mere passage of time can never make to dawn. The light which is too bright and puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.