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The Thoreau Institute
at Walden Woods Library
Thoreau's
Life & Writings
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Henry D. Thoreau Quotation Pages
On Music
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Each more melodious
note I hear
Brings this reproach to me,
That I alone afford the ear,
Who would the music be. ["The Service"]
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I sailed on the North River last night
with my flute, and my music was a tinkling stream which meandered with
the river, and fell from note to note as a brook from rock to rock. I
did not hear the strains after they had issued from the flute, but
before they were breathed into it, for the original strain precedes the
sound by as much as the echo follows after, and the rest is the
perquisite of the rocks and trees and beasts. Unpremeditated music is
the true gauge which measures the current of our thoughts, the very
undertow of our life’s stream. [Journal, 18 August 1841]
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You cannot hear music
and noise at the same time. [Journal, 27 April 1854]
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Listen to music
religiously, as if it were the last strain you might hear. [Journal,
12 June 1851]
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Was awakened in
the night to a strain of music dying away,—passing travellers singing.
My being was so expanded and infinitely and divinely related for a brief
season that I saw how unexhausted, how almost wholly unimproved, was
man’s capacity for a divine life. When I remembered what a narrow and
finite life I should anon awake to!
[Journal, 19 April 1856]
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The music of all
creatures has to do with their loves, even of toads and frogs. Is it not
the same with man? [Journal, 6 May 1852]
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A thrumming of
piano-strings beyond the gardens and through the elms. At length the
melody steals into my being. I know not when it began to occupy me. By
some fortunate coincidence of thought or circumstance I am attuned to
the universe, I am fitted to hear, my being moves in a sphere of melody,
my fancy and imagination are excited to an inconceivable degree. This is
no longer the dull earth on which I stood. [Journal, 3 August
1852]
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When I hear
music I fear no danger, I am invulnerable, I see no foe. I am related to
the earliest times and to the latest. [Journal, 13 January 1857]
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What is there in
music that it should so stir our deeps? We are all ordinarily in a state
of desperation; such is our life; ofttimes it drives us to suicide. To
how many, perhaps to most, life is barely tolerable, and if it were not
for the fear of death or of dying, what a multitude would immediately
commit suicide! But let us hear a strain of music, we are at once
advertised of a life which no man had told us of, which no preacher
preaches. Suppose I try to describe faithfully the prospect which a
strain of music exhibits to me. The field of my life becomes a boundless
plain, glorious to tread, with no death nor disappointment at the end of
it. All meanness and trivialness disappear. I become adequate to any
deed. No particulars survive this expansion; persons do not survive it.
In the light of this strain there is no thou nor I. We are actually
lifted above ourselves. [Journal, 15 January 1857]
A
Note on the Text:
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Source:
Unless otherwise noted, quotations are from The Writings of Henry
David Thoreau (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906)
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Report
errors to the
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