The Thoreau Institute
at Walden Woods Library
Thoreau's
Life & Writings
_____
walking
by Henry D. Thoreau
I wish to speak a word for
Nature, for absolute Freedom and Wildness, as contrasted with a
Freedom and Culture merely civil,—to regard man as an inhabitant,
or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society. I
wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make a emphatic one,
for there are enough champions of civilization; the minister, and
the school-committee, and every one of you will take care of that.
I
have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who
understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks,—who had a
genius, so to speak, for sauntering; which word is
beautifully derived "from idle people who roved about the
country, in the middle ages, and asked charity, under pretence of
going à la Sainte Terre"—to the holy land, till the
children exclaimed, "There goes a Sainte-Terrer", a
Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the holy land in
their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds,
but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I
mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre,
without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will
mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For
this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a
house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all, but the
Saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering
river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course
to the sea. But I prefer the first, which indeed is the most
probable derivation. For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached
by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy
Land from the hands of the Infidels.
It is true, we are
but faint-hearted crusaders, even the walkers, now-a-days, who
undertake no persevering never ending enterprises. Our expeditions
are but tours and come round again at evening to the old hearth side
from which we set out. Half the walk is but retracing our steps. We
should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of
undying adventure, never to return; prepared to send back our
embalmed hearts only, as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are
ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife
and child and friends, and never see them again; if you have paid
your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and
are a free man; then you are ready for a walk.
To come down to my
own experience, my companion and I, for I sometimes have a
companion, take pleasure in fancying ourselves knights of a new, or
rather an old, order,—not Equestrians or Chevaliers, not Ritters
or Riders, but Walkers, a still more ancient and honorable class, I
trust. The chivalric and heroic spirit which once belonged to the
rider seems now to reside in, or perchance to have subsided into the
Walker,—not the Knight but Walker Errant. He is a sort of fourth
estate, outside to Church and State and People.
We have felt that
we almost alone hereabouts practised this noble art; though, to tell
the truth, at least, if their own assertions are to be received,
most of my townsmen would fain walk sometimes, as I do, but they
cannot. No wealth can buy the requisite leisure, freedom, and
independence, which are the capital in this profession. It comes
only by the grace of God. It requires a direct dispensation from
heaven to become a walker. You must be born into the family of the
Walkers. Ambulator nascitur, non fit. Some of my townsmen, it
is true, can remember, and have described to me some walks which
they took ten years ago, in which they were so blessed as to lose
themselves for half an hour in the woods, but I know very well that
they have confined themselves to the highway ever since, whatever
pretensions they may make to belong to this select class. No doubt,
they were elevated for a moment as by the reminiscence of a previous
state of existence, when even they were foresters and outlaws.
"When he came to grene wode,
In a mery mornynge,
There he herde the notes small,
Of byrdes mery syngynge.
"It is ferre gone, sayd Robyn,
That I was last here,
Me lyste a lytell for to shote,
At the donne dere."
I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits unless I spend
four hours a day at least—and it is commonly more than
that—sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields
absoutely free from all wordly engagements. You may safely say a
penny for your thoughts, or a thousand pounds. When sometimes I am
reminded that the mechanics and shop-keepers stay in their shops not
only all the forenoon, but all the afternoon too, sitting with
crossed legs, so many of them,—as if the legs were made to sit
upon, and not to stand or walk upon,—I
think that they deserve some credit for not having all committed
suicide long ago.
I, who cannot stay
in my chamber for a single day without acquiring some rust, and when
sometimes I have stolen forth for a walk at the eleventh hour of
four o’clock in the afternoon, too late to redeem the day, when
the shades of night were already beginning to be mingled with the
daylight, have felt as if I had committed some sin to be atoned for,
I confess that I am astonished at the power of endurance—to say
nothing of the moral insensibility of my neighbors who confine
themselves to shops and offices the whole day for weeks and months,
aye and years almost together. I know not what manner of stuff they
are of,—sitting there now at three o’clock in the afternoon, as
if it were three o’clock in the morning. Buonaparte may talk of
the three o’clock in the morning courage, but it is nothing to the
courage which can sit down cheerfully at this hour in the afternoon
over against one’s self whom you have known all the morning, to
starve out a garrison to whom you are bound by such strong ties of
sympathy. I wonder that about these times, or say between four and
five o’clock in the afternoon, too late for the morning papers and
too early for the evening ones, there is not a general explosion
heard up and down the street, scattering a legion of antiquated and
house-bred notions and whims to the four winds for an airing,—and
so the evil cure itself.
How womankind, who
are confined to the house still more than men, stand it I do not
know; but I have ground to suspect that most of them do not stand
it at all. When, early in a summer afternoon, we have been shaking
the dust of the village from the skirts of our garments, making
haste past those houses with purely Doric or Gothic fronts, which
have such an air of repose about them, my companion whispers that
probably about these times their occupants are all gone to bed! Then
it is that I appreciate the beauty and the glory of architecture,
which itself never turns in, but forever stands out and erect,
keeping watch over the slumberers.
No doubt
temperament, and above all age, have a good deal to do with it. As a
man grows older his ability to sit still and follow in-door
occupations increases. He grows vespertinal in his habits, as the
evening of life approaches, till at last he comes forth only just
before sundown, and gets all the walk that he requires in half an
hour.
But the walking of
which I speak has nothing in it akin to taking exercise, as it is
called, as the sick take medicine at stated hours,—as the swinging
of dumb-bells or chairs; but is itself the enterprise and adventure
of the day. If you would get exercise go in search of the springs of
life. Think of a man’s swinging dumb-bells for his health, when
those springs are bubbling up in far-off pastures unsought by him!
Moreover, you must
walk like a camel which is said to be the only beast which ruminates
when walking. When a traveller asked Wordsworth’s servant to show
him her master’s study, she answered "Here is his library,
but his study is out of doors."
Living much out of
doors, in the sun and wind, will no doubt produce a certain
roughness of character,—will cause a thicker cuticle to grow over
some of the finer qualities of our nature, as on the face and hands,
or as severe manual labor robs the hands of some of their delicacy
of touch. So staying in the house on the other hand may produce a
softness and smoothness, not to say thinness of skin, accompanied by
an increased sensibility to certain impressions. Perhaps we should
be more susceptible to some influences important to our intellectual
and moral growth, if the sun had shone and the wind blown on us a
little less; and no doubt it is a nice matter to proportion rightly
the thick and thin skin. But methinks that is a scurf that will fall
off fast enough,—that the natural remedy is to be found in the
proportion which the night bears to the day, the winter to the
summer, thought to experience. There will be so much the more air
and sunshine in our thoughts. The callous palms of the laborer are
conversant with finer tissues of self-respect and heroism whose
touch thrills the heart, than the languid fingers of idleness. That
is mere sentimentality that lies abed by day and thinks itself
white, far from the tan and callus of experience.
When we walk, we
naturally go to the fields and woods: what would become of us if we
walked only in a garden or a mall? Even some sects of philosophers
have felt the necessity of importing the woods to themselves since
they did not go to the woods, "They planted groves and walks of
Platans" where they took subdiales ambulationes in
porticoes open to the air. Of course, it is of no use to direct our
steps to the woods, if they do not carry us thither. I am alarmed
when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily,
without getting there in spirit. In my afternoon walk I would fain
forget all my morning occupations, and my obligations to society.
But it sometimes happens that I cannot easily shake off the village.
The thought of some work will run in my head, and I am not where my
body is,— I am out of my senses. In my walks I would fain return
to my senses. What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of
something out of the woods? I suspect myself, and cannot help a
shudder, when I find myself so implicated even in what are called
good works,—for this may sometimes happen.
My vicinity affords
many good walks, and though I have walked almost every day for so
many years, and sometimes for several days together, I have not yet
exhausted them. An absoutely new prospect is a great happiness, and
I can still get this any afternoon. Two or three hours’ walking
will carry me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see. A
single farm-house which I had not seen before is sometimes as good
as the dominions of the King of Dahomey. There is in fact a sort of
harmony discoverable between the capabilities of the landscape
within a circle of ten miles’ radius, or the limits of an
afternoon walk, and the three-score-years and ten of human life. It
will never become quite familiar to you.
Nowadays almost all
man’s improvements, so called, as the building of houses, and the
cutting down of the forest, and of all large trees, simply deform
the landscape, and make it more and more tame and cheap. A people
who would begin by burning the fences and let the forest stand! I
saw the fences half consumed, their ends lost in the middle of the
prairie, and and some worldly miser with a surveyor looking after
his bounds, while heaven had taken place around him, and he did not
see the angels going to and fro, but was looking for an old
post-hole in the midst of paradise. I looked again and saw him
standing in the middle of a boggy Stygian fen surrounded by devils,
and he had found his bounds without a doubt, three little stones
where a stake had been driven, and looking nearer I saw that the
Prince of Darkness was his surveyor.
I can easily walk
ten, fifteen, twenty, any number of miles, commencing at my own
door, without going by any house, without crossing a road except
where the fox and the mink do. First along by the river, and then
the brook, and then the meadow and the wood-side. There are square
miles in my vicinity which have no inhabitant. From many a hill I
can see civilization and the abodes of man afar. The farmers and
their works are scarcely more obvious than woodchucks and their
burrows. Man and his affairs, church and state and school, trade and
commerce, and manufactures and agriculture, even politics, the most
alarming of them all,—I am pleased to see how little space they
occupy in the landscape. Politics is but a narrow field, and that
still narrower highway yonder leads to it. I sometimes direct the
traveller thither. If you would go to the political world, follow
the great road,—follow that market man, keep his dust in your
eyes, and it will lead you straight to it; for it too has its place
merely, and does not occupy all space. I pass from it as from a
bean-field into the forest, and it is forgotten. In one half-hour I
can walk off to some portion of the earth’s surface where a man
does not stand from one year’s end to another and there
consequently politics are not, for they are but as the cigar smoke
of a man.
The village is the
place to which the roads tend, a sort of expansion of the highway as
a lake of a river. It is the body of which roads are the arms and
legs,—a trivial or quadrivial place, the thoroughfare and ordinary
of travellers. The word is from the Latin villa, which
together with via, a way, or more anciently ved and vella,
Varro derives from veho, to carry, because the villa is the
place to and from which things are carried. They who got their
living by teaming were said vellaturam facere. Hence too
apparently the Latin word vilis and our vile, also villain.
This suggests what kind of degeneracy villagers are liable to. They
are way-worn by the travel that goes by and over them, without
travelling themselves.
Some do not walk at
all; others walk in the highways; a few walk across lots. Roads are
made for horses and men of business. I do not travel in them much
comparatively, because I am not in a hurry to get to any tavern, or
grocery, or livery-stable, or depot to which they lead. I am a good
horse to travel but not from choice a roadster. The landscape
painter uses the figures of men to mark a road. He would not make
that use of my figure. I walk out into a nature such as the old
prophets and poets Menu, Moses, Homer, Chaucer, walked in. You may
name it America, but it is not America. Neither Americus Vespucius,
nor Columbus, nor the rest were the discoverers of it. There is a
truer account of it in Mythology than in any history of America so
called that I have seen.
However, there are
a few old roads that may be trodden with profit, as if they led
somewhere now that they are nearly discontinued. There is the Old
Marlborough Road, which does not go to Marlborough now methinks,
unless that is Marlborough where it carries me. I am the bolder to
speak of it here, because I presume that there are one or two such
roads in every town.
The Old Marlborough Road
Where they once dug for money
But never found any;
Where sometimes Martial Miles
Singly files,
And Elijah Wood,
I fear for no good.
No other man
Save Elisha Dugan,—
O man of wild habits,
Partridges and rabbits,
Who hast no cares
Only to set snares,
Who liv’st all alone,
Close to the bone;
And where life is sweetest
Constantly eatest.
When the spring stirs my blood
With the instinct to
travel,
I can get enough gravel
On the Old Marlborough
Road.
Nobody repairs it,
For nobody wears it;
It is a living way,
As the Christians say,
Not many there be
Who enter therein,
Only the guests of
the
Irishman Quin.
What is it, what is
it
But a direction out there,
And the bare
possibility
Of going somewhere?
Great guide-boards of stone,
But travelers none;
Cenotaphs of the towns
Named on their crowns.
It is worth going to see
What you might be.
What king
Did the thing,
I am still wondering;
Set up how or when,
By what select men,
Gourgas or Lee,
Clark or Darby?
They’re a great endeavor
To be something forever.
Blank tablets of stone,
Where a traveller might groan,
And in one sentence
Grave all that is known.
Which another might read,
In his extreme need,
I know one or two
Lines that would do,
Literature that might stand
All over the land,
Which a man could remember
Till next December,
And read again in the spring,
After the thawing.
If with fancy unfurled
You leave your abode,
You may go round the world
By the old Marlborough Road.
At present, in this vicinity, the best part of the land is not
private property; the landscape is not owned, and the walker enjoys
comparative freedom. But possibly the day will come when it will be
partitioned off into so-called pleasure grounds, in which a few will
take a narrow and exclusive pleasure only,—when fences shall be
multiplied, and man traps and other engines invented to confine men
to the public road; and walking over the surface of God’s
earth, shall be construed to mean trespassing on some gentleman’s
grounds. To enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exclude
yourself from the true enjoyment of it. Let us improve our
opportunities then before the evil days come.
What is it that
makes it so hard sometimes to determine whither we will walk? I
believe that there is a subtile magnetism in Nature, which, if we
unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright. It is not
indifferent to us which way we walk. There is a right way; but we
are very liable from heedlessness and stupidity to take the wrong
one. We would fain take that walk, never yet taken by us through
this actual world, which is perfectly symbolical of the path which
we love to travel in the interior and ideal world; and sometimes, no
doubt, we find it difficult to choose our direction, because it does
not yet exist distinctly in our idea.
When I go out of
the house for a walk, uncertain as yet whither I will bend my steps,
and submit myself to my instinct to decide for me, I find, strange
and whimsical as it may seem, that I finally and inevitably settle
south-west, toward some particular wood or meadow or deserted
pasture or hill in that direction. My needle is slow to
settle,—varies a few degrees, and does not always point due
southwest, it is true, and it has good authority for this variation,
but it always settles between west and south-southwest. The future
lies that way to me, and the earth seems more unexhausted and richer
on that side. The outline which would bound my walks, would be, not
a circle, but a parabola, or rather like one of those cometary
orbits, which have been thought to be non-returning curves, in this
case opening westward, in which my house occupies the place of the
sun. I turn round and round irresolute sometimes for a quarter of an
hour, until I decide for the thousandth time, that I will walk into
the south-west or west. Eastward I go only by force; but westward I
go free. Thither no business leads me. It is hard for me to believe
that I shall find fair landscapes, or sufficient wildness and
freedom behind the eastern horizon. I am not excited by the prospect
of a walk thither; but I believe that the forest which I see in the
western horizon stretches uninterruptedly towards the setting sun,
and that there are no towns nor cities in it of enough consequence
to disturb me. Let me live where I will, on this side is the city,
on that the wilderness, and ever I am leaving the city more and
more, and withdrawing into the wilderness. I should not lay so much
stress on this fact, if I did not believe that something like this
is the prevailing tendency of my countrymen. I must walk toward
Oregon, and not toward Europe. And that way the nation is moving,
and I may say that mankind progress from east to west. Within a few
years we have witnessed the phenomenon of a south-eastward
migration, in the settlement of Australia; but this affects us as a
retrograde movement, and, judging from the moral and physical
character of the first generation of Australians, has not yet proved
a successful experiment. The eastern Tartars think that there is
nothing west beyond Thibet. "The World ends there", say
they, "beyond there is nothing but a shoreless sea." It is
unmitigated East where they live.
We go eastward to
realize history, and study the works of art and literature,
retracing the steps of the race; we go westward as into the future,
with a spirit of enterprise and adventure. The Atlantic is a Lethean
stream, in our passage over which we have had an opportunity to
forget the old world and its institutions. If we do not succeed this
time, there is perhaps one more chance for the race left before it
arrives on the banks of the Styx; and that is in the Lethe of the
Pacific, which is three times as wide.
I know not how
significant it is, or how far it is an evidence of singularity, that
an individual should thus consent in his pettiest walk, with the
general movement of the race; but I know that something akin to the
migratory instinct in birds and quadrupeds,—which, in some
instances, is known to have affected the squirrel tribe, impelling
them to a general and mysterious movement, in which they were seen,
say some, crossing the broadest rivers, each on its particular chip,
with its tail raised for a sail, and bridging narrower streams with
their dead,—that something like the furor which affects the
domestic cattle in the spring, and which is referred to a worm in
their tails, affects both nations and individuals, either
perennially or from time to time. Not a flock of wild geese cackles
over our town but it to some extent unsettles the value of real
estate here, and if I were a broker I should probably take that
disturbance into account.
"Than longen folk to gon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken strange strondes."
Every sunset which I witness inspires me with the desire to go to a
West as distant and as fair as that into which the Sun goes down. He
appears to migrate westward daily and tempt us to follow him. He is
the Great Western Pioneer whom the nations follow. We dream all
night of those mountain-ridges in the horizon, though they may be of
vapor only, which were last gilded by his rays. The island of
Atlantis, and the islands and gardens of the Hesperides, a sort of
terrestrial paradise, appear to have been the Great West of the
ancients, enveloped in mystery and poetry. Who has not seen in
imagination, when looking into the sunset sky, the gardens of the
Hesperides, and the foundation of all those fables?
Columbus felt the
westward tendency more strongly than any before. He obeyed it, and
found a New World for Castile and Leon. The herd of men in those
days scented fresh pastures from afar.
"And now the sun had stretched out all the hills,
And now was dropt into the western bay;
At last he rose, and twitch’d his mantle blue;
To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new."
Where on the globe can there be found an area of equal extent with
that occupied by the bulk of our states, so fertile and so rich and
varied in its productions, and at the same time so habitable by the
European, as this is? Michaux who knew but part of them, says that
"the species of large trees are much more numerous in North
America than in Europe: in the United States there are more than 140
species that exceed thirty feet in height; in France there are but
thirty that attain this size." Later botanists more than
confirm his observations. Humboldt came to America to realize his
youthful dreams of a tropical vegetation, and he beheld it in its
greatest perfection in the primitive forests of the Amazon, the most
gigantic wilderness on the earth, which he has so eloquently
described. The geographer Guyot, himself a European, goes
farther,—farther than I am ready to follow him; yet not when he
says: "As the plant is made for the animal, as the vegetable
world is made for the animal world, America is made for the man of
the Old World. . . . The man of the Old World sets out upon his way.
Leaving the highlands of Asia, he descends from station to station,
towards Europe. Each of his steps is marked by a new civilization
superior to the preceding, by a greater power of development.
Arrived at the Atlantic, he pauses on the shore of this unknown
Ocean, the bounds of which he knows not, and turns upon his foot
prints for an instant." When he has exhausted the rich soil of
Europe and reinvigorated himself, "then recommences his
adventurous career westward as in the earliest ages." So far
Guyot.
From this western
impulse coming in contact with the barrier of the Atlantic sprang
the commerce and enterprise of modern times. The younger Michaux, in
his "Travels West of the Alleghanies in 1802," says that
the common inquiry in the newly settled West was, "‘From what
part of the world have you come?’ As if these vast and fertile
regions would naturally be the place of meeting and common country
of all the inhabitants of the globe."
To use an obsolete
Latin word, I might say, Ex Oriente lux; ex Occidente FRUX.
From the East light; from the West fruit.
Sir Francis Head,
an English traveller, and a Governor General of Canada, tells us
that "in both the northern and southern hemispheres of the New
World, Nature has not only outlined her works on a larger scale, but
has painted the whole picture with brighter and more costly colors
than she used in delineating and in beautifying the Old World. . . .
The heavens of America appear infinitely higher, the sky is bluer,
the air is fresher, the cold is intenser, the moon looks larger, the
stars are brighter, the thunder is louder, the lightning is vivider,
the wind is stronger, the rain is heavier, the mountains are higher,
the rivers larger, the forests bigger, the plains broader."
This statement will do at least to set against Buffon’s account of
this part of the world and its productions.
Linnæus said long
ago, "Nescio quae facies laeta, glabra plantis
Americanis." I know not what there is of joyous and smooth in
the aspect of Amercian plants; and I think that in this country
there are no, or at most, very few, Africanae bestiae,
African beasts, as the Romans called them, and that in this respect
also it is peculiarly fitted for the habitation of man. We are told
that within three miles of the center of the East Indian city of
Singapore some of the inhabitants are annually carried off by
tigers; but the traveller can lie down in the woods at night almost
anywhere in North America without fear of wild beasts.
These are
encouraging testimonies. If the moon looks larger here than in
Europe, probably the sun looks larger also. If the heavens of
America appear infinitely higher, the stars brighter, I trust that
these facts are symbolical of the height to which the philosophy and
poetry and religion of her inhabitants may one day soar. At length
perchance the immaterial heaven will appear as much higher to the
American mind, and the intimations that star it as much brighter.
For I believe that climate does thus react on man,—as there is
something in the mountain air that feeds the spirit and inspires.
Will not man grow to greater perfection intellectually as well as
physically under these influences? Or is it unimportant how many
foggy days there are in his life? I trust that we shall be more
imaginative; that our thoughts will be clearer, fresher and more
ethereal, as our sky,—our understanding more comprehensive and
broader, like our plains,—our intellect generally on a grander
scale, like our thunder and lightning, our rivers and mountains and
forests,—and our hearts shall even correspond in breadth and depth
and grandeur to our inland seas. Perchance there will appear to the
traveller something, he knows not what, of laeta and glabra,
of joyous and serene, in our very faces. Else, to what end does the
world go on, and why was America discovered?
To Americans I hardly
need to say,—
"Westward the star of empire takes its way."
As a true patriot I should
be ashamed to think that Adam in paradise was more favorably
situated on the whole than the backwoodsman in this country.
Our sympathies in
Massachusetts are not confined to New England, though we may be
estranged from the South, we sympathize with the West. There is the
home of the younger sons, as among the Scandinavians they took to
the sea for their inheritance. It is too late to be studying Hebrew;
it is more important to understand even the slang of to-day.
Some months ago I
went to see a panorama of the Rhine. It was like a dream of the
Middle Ages. I floated down its historic stream in something more
than imagination, under bridges built by the Romans, and repaired by
later heroes, past cities and castles whose very names were music to
my ears, and each of which was the subject of a legend. There were
Ehrenbreitstein and Rolandseck and Coblentz, which I knew only in
history. They were ruins that interested me chiefly. There seemed to
come up from its waters and its vine-clad hills and valleys a hushed
music as of Crusaders departing for the Holy Land. I floated along
under the spell of enchantment, as if I had been transported to a
heroic age, and breathed an atmosphere of chivalry.
Soon after, I went
to see a panorama of the Mississippi, and as I worked my way up the
stream in the light of to-day, and saw the steamboats wooding up,
counted the rising cities, gazed on the fresh ruins of Nauvoo,
beheld the Indians moving west across the stream, and, as before I
had looked up the Moselle, now looked up the Ohio and the Missouri,
and heard the legends of Dubuque and of Wenona’s Cliff,— still
thinking more of the future than of the past or present,—I saw
that this was a Rhine stream of a different kind; that the
foundations of castles were yet to be laid, and the famous bridges
were yet to be thrown over the stream; and I felt that this was
the Heroic Age itself though we know it not, for the hero is
commonly the simplest and obscurest of men.
The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what
I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the
preservation of the world. Every tree sends its fibres forth in
search of the Wild. The cities import it at any price. Men plow and
sail for it. From the forest and wilderness come the tonics and
barks which brace mankind. Our ancestors were savages. The story of
Romulus and Remus being suckled by a wolf is not a meaningless
fable. The founders of every state which has risen to eminence, have
drawn their nourishment and vigor from a similar wild source. It is
because the children of the empire were not suckled by the wolf that
they were conquered and displaced by the children of the northern
forests who were.
I believe in the
forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows.
We require an infusion of hemlock spruce or Arbor vitae in our tea.
There is a difference between eating and drinking for strength and
from mere gluttony. The Hottentots eagerly devour the marrow of the
Koodoo and other antelopes raw, as a matter of course. Some of our
northern Indians eat raw the marrow of the Arctic reindeer, as well
as various other parts, including the summits of the antlers as long
as they are soft. And herein perchance they have stolen a march on
the cooks of Paris. They get what usually goes to feed the fire.
This is probably better than stall-fed beef and slaughter-house pork
to make a man of. Give me a Wildness whose glance no civilization
can endure,—as if we lived on the marrow of koodoos devoured raw.
There are some
intervals which border the strain of the wood thrush, to which I
would migrate,—wild lands where no settler has squatted; to which,
methinks, I am already acclimated.
The African hunter
Cumming tells us that the skin of the eland, as well as that of most
other antelopes just killed, emits the most delicious perfume of
trees and grass. I would have every man so much a wild antelope, so
much a part and parcel of Nature, that his very person should thus
sweetly advertise our senses of his presence, and remind us of those
parts of nature which he most haunts. I feel no disposition to be
satirical when the trapper’s coat emits the odor of musquash even;
it is a sweeter scent to me than that which commonly exhales from
the merchant’s or the scholar’s garments. When I go into their
wardrobes and handle their vestments, I am reminded of no grassy
plains and flowery meads which they have frequented, but of dusty
merchants’ exchanges and libraries rather.
A tanned skin is
something more than respectable, and perhaps olive is a fitter color
than white for a man,—a denizen of the woods. "The pale white
man!" I do not wonder that the African pitied him. Darwin the
naturalist says "A white man bathing by the side of a Tahitian
was like a plant bleached by the gardener’s art compared with a
fine, dark green one growing vigorously in the open fields."
Ben Jonson
exclaims,—
"How near to good is what is fair!"
So I would say,—
How near to good is what is wild!
Life consists with
Wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its
presence refreshes him. One who pressed forward incessantly and
never rested from his labors, who grew fast and made infinite
demands on life, would always find himself in a new country or
wilderness, and surrounded by the raw material of life. He would be
climbing over the prostrate stems of primitive forest trees.
Hope and the future
for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and
cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps. When, formerly, I
have analyzed my partiality for some farm which I had contemplated
purchasing, I have frequently found that I was attracted solely by a
few square rods of impermeable and unfathomable bog,—a natural
sink in one corner of it. That was the jewel which dazzled me. I
derive more of my subsistence from the swamps which surround my
native town than from the cultivated gardens in the village. There
are no richer parterres to my eyes than the dense beds of dwarf
andromeda (Cassandra calyculata) which cover these tender
places on the earth’s surface. Botany cannot go further than tell
me the names of the shrubs which grow there,—the high-blueberry,
panicled andromeda, lambkill, azalea, and rhodora,—all standing in
the quaking sphagnum. I often think that I would like to have my
house front on this mass of dull red bushes, omitting other flower
plots and borders, transplanted spruce and trim box, even graveled
walks,—to have this fertile spot under my windows, not a few
imported barrowfuls of soil only, to cover the sand which was thrown
out in digging the cellar. Why not put my house, my parlor, behind
this plot instead of behind that meagre assemblage of curiosities,
that poor apology for a Nature and Art, which I call my front yard?
It is an effort to clear up and make a decent appearance when the
carpenter and mason have departed, though done as much for the
passer by as the dweller within. The most tasteful front-yard fence
was never an agreeable object of study to me; the most elaborate
ornaments, acorn tops, or what not, soon wearied and disgusted me.
Bring your sills up to the very edge of the swamp then, (though it
may not be the best place for a dry cellar,) so that there be no
access on that side to citizens. Front yards are not made to walk
in, but, at most, through, and you could go in the back way.
Yes; though you may
think me perverse, if it were proposed to me to dwell in the
neighborhood of the most beautiful garden that ever human art
contrived, or else of a Dismal Swamp, I should certainly decide for
the swamp. How vain, then, have been all your labors, citizens, for
me!
My spirits
infallibly rise in proportion to the outward dreariness. Give me the
ocean, the desert, or the wilderness! In the desert a pure air and
solitude compensate for want of moisture and fertility. The traveler
Burton says of it: "Your morale improves: you become
frank and cordial, hospitable and single-minded. . . . In the desert
spirituous liquors excite only disgust. There is a keen enjoyment in
a mere animal existence." They who have been traveling long on
the steppes of Tartary, say "On reëntering
cultivated lands, the agitation, perplexity and turmoil of
civilization oppressed and suffocated us; the air seemed to fail us,
and we felt every moment as if about to die of asphyxia." When
I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and
most interminable, and, to the citizen, most dismal swamp. I enter a
swamp as a sacred place—a sanctum sanctorum. There is the
strength, the marrow, of Nature. The wildwood covers the virgin
mould, and the same soil is good for men and for trees. A man’s
health requires as many acres of meadow to his prospect as his farm
does loads of muck. There are the strong meats on which he feeds. A
town is saved, not more by the righteous men in it, than by the
woods and swamps that surround it. A township where one primitive
forest waves above, while another primitive forest rots
below,—such a town is fitted to raise not only corn and potatoes,
but poets and philosophers for the coming ages. In such a soil grew
Homer and Confucius and the rest, and out of such a wilderness comes
the reformer eating locusts and wild honey.
To preserve wild
animals implies generally the creation of a forest for them to dwell
in or resort to. So is it with man. A hundred years ago they sold
bark in our streets peeled from our own woods. In the very aspect of
those primitive and rugged trees, there was methinks a tanning
principle which hardened and consolidated the fibres of men’s
thoughts. Ah! already I shudder for these comparatively degenerate
days of my native village, when you cannot collect a load of bark of
good thickness—and we no longer produce tar and turpentine.
The civilized
nations—Greece, Rome, England—are sustained by the primitive
forests which anciently rotted where they stand. They survive as
long as the soil is not exhausted. Alas for human culture! little is
to be expected of a nation when the vegetable mould is exhausted,
and it is compelled to make manure of the bones of its fathers.
There the poet sustains himself merely by his own superfluous fat,
and the philosopher comes down on to his marrow-bones.
It is said to be
the task of the American "to work the virgin soil," and
that "Agriculture here already assumes proportions unknown
everywhere else." I think that The farmer displaces the Indian
even because he redeems the meadow, and so makes himself stronger
and in some respects more natural. I was surveying for a man the
other day a single straight line one hundred and thirty-two rods
long through a swamp, at whose entrance might have been written the
words which Dante read over the entrance to the infernal regions,
"Leave all hope, ye that enter,"—that is, of ever
getting out again; where at one time I saw my employer actually up
to his neck and swimming for his life in his property, though it was
still winter. He had another similar swamp which I could not survey
at all because it was completely under water, and nevertheless, with
regard to a third swamp which I did survey from a distance,
he remarked to me, true to his instincts, that he would not part
with it for any consideration, on account of the mud which it
contained. And that man intends to put a girdling ditch round the
whole in the course of forty months, and so redeem it by the magic
of his spade. I refer to him only as the type of a class.
The weapons with
which we have gained our most important victories, which should be
handed down as heirlooms from father to son, are not the sword and
the lance, but the bushwhack, the turf-cutter, the spade, and the
bog hoe, rusted with the blood of many a meadow, and begrimed with
the dust of many a hard-fought field. The very winds blew the
Indian’s corn-field into the meadow, and pointed out the way which
he had not the skill to follow. He had no better implement with
which to intrench himself in the land than a clamshell. But the
farmer is armed with plow and spade.
In Literature, it
is only the wild that attracts us. Dullness is but another name for
tameness. It is the uncivilized free and wild thinking in Hamlet and
the Iliad, in all the scriptures and mythologies, not learned in the
Schools, that delights us. As the wild duck is more swift and
beautiful than the tame, so is the wild—the mallard—thought,
which, ‘mid falling dews wings its way above the fens. A truly
good book is something as natural, and as unexpectedly and
unaccountably fair and perfect, as a wild-flower discovered on the
prairies of the West, or in the jungles of the East. Genius is a
light which makes the darkness visible, like the lightning’s
flash, which perchance shatters the temple of knowledge
itself,—and not a taper lighted at the hearth-stone of the race
which pales before the light of common day.
English literature
from the days of the minstrels to the Lake Poets,—Chaucer and
Spenser and Milton, and even Shakespeare included,—breathes no
quite fresh and in this sense wild strain. It is an essentially tame
and civilized literature, reflecting Greece and Rome. Her wilderness
is a greenwood, her wild man a Robin Hood. There is plenty of genial
love of Nature, but not so much of Nature herself. Her chronicles
inform us when her wild animals, but not when the wild man in her,
became extinct.
The science of
Humboldt is one thing, poetry is another thing. The poet to-day,
notwithstanding all the discoveries of science, and the accumulated
learning of mankind, enjoys no advantage over Homer.
Where is the
literature which gives expression to Nature? He would be a poet who
could impress the winds and streams into his service, to speak for
him; who nailed words to their primitive senses, as farmers drive
down stakes in the spring which the frost has heaved; who derived
his words as often as he used them,—transplanted them to his page
with earth adhering to their roots; whose words were so true, and
fresh, and natural that they would appear to expand like the buds at
the approach of spring, though they lay half smothered between two
musty leaves in a library,—aye, to bloom and bear fruit there
after their kind annually for the faithful reader, in sympathy with
surrounding Nature.
I do not know of
any poetry to quote which adequately expresses this yearning for the
Wild. Approached from this side the best poetry is tame. I do not
know where to find in any literature, ancient or modern, any account
which contents me, of that Nature with which even I am acquainted.
You will perceive that I demand something which no Augustan nor
Elizabethan age, which no culture in short can give.
Mythology comes nearer to it than anything. How much more fertile a
nature at least has Grecian mythology its root in than English
Literature! Mythology is the crop which the old world bore before
its soil was exhausted, before the fancy and imagination were
affected with blight; and which it still bears wherever its pristine
vigor is unabated. All other literatures endure only as the elms
which overshadow our houses, but this is like the great dragon-tree
of the Western isles, as old as mankind, and whether that does or
not, will endure as long; for the decay of other literatures makes
the soil in which it thrives.
The West is
preparing to add its fables to those of the East. The valleys of the
Ganges, the Nile, and the Rhine having yielded their crop, it
remains to be seen what the valleys of the Amazon, the Plate, the
Orinoco, the St. Lawrence, and the Mississippi will produce.
Perchance, when in the course of ages, American liberty has become a
fiction of the past,—as it is to some extent a fiction of the
present,—the poets of the world will be inspired by American
Mythology.
The wildest dreams
of wild men, even, are not the less true, though they may not
recommend themselves to the sense which is most common among
Englishmen and Americans to-day. It is not every truth that
recommends itself to the common sense. Nature has a place for the
wild clematis as well as for the cabbage. Some expressions of truth
are reminiscent,—others merely sensible, as the phrase
is—others prophetic. Some forms of disease even may prophesy forms
of health. The geologist has discovered that the figures of
serpents, griffins, flying dragons, and other fanciful
embellishments of heraldry, have their prototypes in the forms of
fossil species which were extinct before man was created, and hence
"indicate a faint and shadowy knowledge of a previous state of
organic existence." The Hindoos dreamed that the earth rested
on an elephant, and the elephant on a tortoise, and the tortoise on
a serpent; and though it may be an unimportant coincidence, it will
not be out of place here to state, that a fossil tortoise has lately
been discovered in Asia large enough to support an elephant. I
confess that I am partial to these wild fancies, which transcend the
order of time and development. They are the sublimest recreation of
the intellect. The partridge loves peas, but not those that go with
her into the pot.
In short, all good
things are wild and free. There is something in a strain of music,
whether produced by an instrument or by the human voice,—take the
sound of a bugle in a summer night, for instance,—which by its
wildness, to speak without satire, reminds me of the cries emitted
by wild beasts in their native forests. It is so much of their
wildness as I can understand. Give me for my friends and neighbors
wild men, not tame ones. The wildness of the savage is but a faint
symbol of the awful ferity with which good men and lovers meet.
I love even to see
the domestic animals reassert their native rights,—any evidence
that they have not wholly lost their original wild habits and vigor;
as when my neighbor’s cow breaks out of her pasture early in the
spring and boldly swims the river, a cold gray tide, twenty-five or
thirty rods wide, swollen by the melted snow. It is the buffalo
crossing the Mississippi. This exploit confers some dignity on the
herd in my eyes—already dignified. The seeds of instinct are
preserved under the thick hides of cattle and horses, like seeds in
the bowels of the earth, an indefinite period.
Any sportiveness in
cattle is unexpected. I saw one day a herd of a dozen bullocks and
cows running about and frisking in unwieldly sport, like huge rats,
even like kittens. They shook their heads, raised their tails, and
rushed up and down a hill, and I perceived by their horns, as well
as by their activity, their relation to the deer tribe. But, alas! a
sudden loud Whoa! would have damped their ardor at once,
reduced them from venison to beef, and stiffened their sides and
sinews like the locomotive. Who but the Evil One has cried Who! to
mankind? Indeed, the life of cattle, like that of many men, is but a
sort of locomotiveness, they move a side at a time, and Man by his
machinery is meeting the horse and ox half way. Whatever part the
whip has touched is thenceforth palsied. Who would ever think of a side
of any of the supple cat tribe, as we speak of a side of
beef?
I rejoice that
horses and steers have to be broken before they can be made the
slaves of men, and that men themselves have some wild oats still
left to sow before they become submissive members of society.
Undoubtedly, all men are not equally fit subjects for civilization,
and because the majority, like dogs and sheep are tame by inherited
dispositon, is no reason why the others should have their natures
broken that they may be reduced to the same level. Men are in the
main alike, but they were made several in order that they might be
various. If a low use is to be served, one man will do nearly or
quite as well as another; if a high one, individual excellence is to
be regarded. Any man can stop a hole to keep the wind away, but no
other man could serve so rare a use as the author of this
illustration did. Confucius says "The skins of the tiger and
the leopard when they are tanned, are as the skins of the dog and
the sheep tanned." But it is not the part of a true culture to
tame tigers, any more than it is to make sheep ferocious, and
tanning their skins for shoes is not the best use to which they can
be put.
When looking over a
list of men’s names in a foreign language, as of military officers
or of authors who have written on a particular subject, I am
reminded once more that there is nothing in a name. The name
Menschikoff, for instance, has nothing in it to my ears more human
than a whisker, and it may belong to a rat. As the names of the
Poles and Russians are to us, so are ours to them. It is as if they
had been named by the child’s rigmarole—Iery-wiery ichery
van, tittle-tol-tan. I see in my mind a herd of wild creatures
swarming over the earth, and to each the herdsman has affixed some
barbarous sound in his own dialect. The names of men are of course
as cheap and meaningless as Bose and Tray, the names
of dogs.
Methinks it would
be some advantage to philosophy if men were named merely in the
gross as they are known. It would be necessary only to know the
genus, and perhaps the race or variety, to know the individual. We
are not prepared to believe that every private soldier in a Roman
army had a name of his own,—because we have not supposed that he
had a character of his own.
At present our only true
names are nick-names. I knew a boy who from his peculiar energy was
called "Buster" by his playmates, and this rightly
supplanted his Christian name. Some travellers tell us that an
Indian had no name given him at first, but earned it, and his name
was his fame; and among some tribes he acquired a new name with
every new exploit. It is pitiful when a man bears a name for
convenience merely, who has earned neither name nor fame.
I will not allow
mere names to make distinctions for me, but still see men in herds
for all them. A familiar name cannot make a man less strange to me.
It may be given to a savage who retains in secret his own wild title
earned in the woods. We have a wild savage in us, and a savage name
is perchance somewhere recorded as ours. I see that my neighbor, who
bears the familiar epithet William, or Edwin, takes it off with his
jacket. It does not adhere to him when asleep or in anger, or
aroused by any passion or inspiration. I seem to hear pronounced by
some of his kin at such a time, his original wild name in some
jaw-breaking or else melodious tongue.
Here is this vast,
savage, howling Mother of ours, Nature lying all around, with such
beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard,—and
yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that
culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man,—a sort
of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English
nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.
In society, in the
best institutions of men it is easy to detect a certain precocity.
When we should still be growing children, we are already little men.
Give me a culture which imports much muck from the meadows, and
deepens the soil, not that which trusts to heating manures, and
improved implements and modes of culture only!
Many a poor
sore-eyed student that I have heard of, would grow faster both
intellectually and physically, if, instead of sitting up so very
late, he honestly slumbered a fool’s allowance.
There may be an
excess even of informing light. Niepce, a Frenchman, discovered
"actinism," that power in the sun’s rays which produces
a chemical effect; that granite rocks, and stone structures, and
statues of metal "are all alike destructively acted upon during
the hours of sunshine, and but for provisions of nature no less
wonderful, would soon perish under the delicate touch of the most
subtile of the agencies of the universe." But he observed
"that those bodies which underwent this change during the
day-light possessed the power of restoring themselves to their
original conditions during the hours of night, when this excitement
was no longer influencing them." Hence it has been inferred
that "The hours of darkness are as necessary to the inorganic
creation, as we know night and sleep are to the organic
kingdom." Not even does the moon shine every night, but gives
place to darkness.
I would not have
every man nor every part of a man cultivated, any more than I would
have every acre of earth cultivated; part will be tillage, but the
greater part will be meadow and forest, not only serving an
immediate use, but preparing a mould against a distant future, by
the annual decay of the vegetation which it supports.
There are other
letters for the child to learn than those which Cadmus invented. The
Spaniards have a good term to express this wild and dusky knowledge,
Gramática parda, tawny grammar, a kind of mother-wit derived
from that same leopard to which I have referred.
We have heard of a
Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. It is said that
Knowledge is power; and the like. Methinks there is equal need of a
Society for the Diffusion of Useful Ignorance, what we will call
Beautiful Knowledge, a knowledge useful in a higher sense; for what
is most of our boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit that we
know something, which robs us of the advantage of our actual
ignorance? What we call knowledge is often our positive ignorance;
ignorance our negative knowledge. By long years of patient industry
and reading of the newspapers,—for what are the libraries of
science but files of newspapers?—a man accumulates a myriad facts,
lays them up in his memory, and then when in some spring of his life
he saunters abroad into the great Fields of thought, he as it were
goes to grass like a horse, and leaves all his harness behind in the
stable. I would say to the Society for the Diffusion of Useful
Knowledge, sometimes,—Go to grass. You have eaten hay long enough.
The Spring has come with its green crop. The very cows are driven to
their country pastures before the end of May; though I have heard of
one unnatural farmer who kept his cow in the barn and fed her on hay
all the year round. So, frequently the Society for the Diffusion of
Useful Knowledge treats its cattle.
A man’s ignorance
sometimes is not only useful, but beautiful,—while his knowledge,
so called, is oftentimes worse than useless beside being ugly. Which
is the best man to deal with,—he who knows nothing about a
subject, and, what is extremely rare, knows that he knows nothing,
or he who really knows something about it, but thinks that he knows
all?
My desire for
knowledge is intermittent; but my desire to bathe my head in
atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant. The
highest that we can attain to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with
Intelligence. I do not know that this higher knowledge amounts to
anything more definite than a novel and grand surprise on a sudden
revelation of the insufficiency of all that we called Knowledge
before—a discovery that there are more things in heaven and earth
than are dreamed of in our philosophy. It is the lighting up of the
mist by the sun. Man cannot know in any higher sense than
this, any more than he can look serenely and with impunity in the
face of the sun:
Ώς
τί υοωυ, ού
κειυου, "You
will not perceive that as perceiving a particular thing," say
the Chaldean Oracles.
There is something
servile in the habit of seeking after a law which we may obey. We
may study the laws of matter at and for our convenience, but a
successful life knows no law. It is an unfortunate discovery
certainly, that of a law which binds us where we did not know before
that we were bound. Live free, child of the mist,—and with respect
to knowledge we are all children of the mist. The man who takes the
liberty to live is superior to all the laws, by virtue of his
relation to the lawmaker. "That is active duty," says the
Vishnu Purana, "which is not for our bondage; that is knowledge
which is for our liberation; all other duty is good only unto
weariness; all other knowledge, is only the cleverness of an
artist."
It is remarkable
how few events or crises there are in our histories; how little
exercised we have been in our minds; how few experiences we have
had. I would fain be assured that I am growing apace and rankly,
though my very growth disturb this dull equanimity,—though it be
with struggle through long dark muggy nights or seasons of gloom. It
would be well if all our lives were a divine tragedy even, instead
of this trivial comedy or farce. Dante, Bunyan, and others appear to
have been exercised in their minds more than we: they were subjected
to a kind of culture such as our district schools and colleges do
not contemplate. Even Mahomet, though many may scream at his name,
had a good deal more to live for, aye and to die for than they have
commonly.
When, at rare
intervals, some thought visits one, as perchance he is walking on a
railroad, then indeed the cars go by without his hearing them. But
soon, by some inexorable law our life goes by and the cars return.
"Gentle breeze, that wanderest unseen,
And bendest the thistles round Loira of storms
Traveller of the windy glens,
Why hast thou left my ear so soon?"
While almost all men feel an attraction drawing them to Society, few
are attracted strongly to Nature. In their relation to Nature men
appear to me for the most part, notwithstanding their arts, lower
than the animals. It is not often a beautiful relation, as in the
case of the animals. How little appreciation of the beauty of the
landscape there is among us! We have to be told that the Greeks
called the world Κόσμος,
Beauty, or Order, but we do not see clearly why they did so, and we
esteem it at best only a curious philological fact.
For my part, I feel
that with regard to Nature I live a sort of border life, on the
confines of a world, into which I make occasional and transient
forays only, and my patriotism and allegiance to the state into
whose territories I seem to retreat are those of a moss-trooper.
Unto a life which I call natural I would gladly follow even a
will-o’-the-wisp through bogs and sloughs unimaginable, but no
moon nor fire-fly has shown me the cause-way to it. Nature is a
personality so vast and universal that we have never seen one of her
features. The Walker in the familiar fields which stretch around my
native town, sometimes finds himself in another land than is
described in their owners’ deeds, As it were in some far away
field on the confines of the actual Concord, where her jurisdiction
ceases, and the idea which the word Concord suggests ceases to be
suggested. These farms which I have myself surveyed, these bounds
which I have set up appear dimly still as through a mist; but they
have no chemistry to fix them; they fade from the surface of the
glass; and the picture which the painter painted stands out dimly
from beneath. The world with which we are commonly acquainted leaves
no trace, and it will have no anniversary.
I took a walk on
Spaulding’s Farm the other afternoon. I saw the setting sun
lighting up the opposite side of a stately pine wood. Its golden
rays straggled into the aisles of the wood as into some noble hall.
I was impressed as if some ancient and altogether admirable and
shining family had seated there in that part of the land called
Concord, unknown to me,—to whom the sun was servant,—who had not
gone into society in the village,— who had not been called on. I
saw their park, their pleasure-ground, beyond through the wood, in
Spaulding’s cranberry-meadow. The pines furnished them with gables
as they grew. Their house was not obvious to vision; the trees grew
through it. I do not know whether I heard the sounds of a suppressed
hilarity or not. They seemed to recline on the sunbeams. They have
sons and daughters. They are quite well. The farmer’s cart- path
which leads directly through their hall does not in the least put
them out,—as the muddy bottom of a pool is sometimes seen through
the reflected skies. They never heard of Spaulding, and do not know
that he is their neighbor,—notwithstanding that I heard him
whistle as he drove his team through the house. Nothing can equal
the serenity of their lives. Their coat-of-arms is simply a lichen.
I saw it painted on the pines and oaks. Their attics were in the
tops of the trees. They are of no politics. There was no noise of
labor. I did not perceive that they were weaving or spinning. Yet I
did detect, when the wind lulled and hearing was done away, the
finest imaginable sweet musical hum,—as of a distant hive in
May,—which perchance was the sound of their thinking. They had no
idle thoughts, and no one without could see their work, for their
industry was not as in knots and excrescences embayed.
But I find it
difficult to remember them. They fade irrevocably out of my mind
even now that I speak and endeavor to recall them, and recollect
myself. It is only after a long and serious effort to recollect my
best thoughts that I become again aware of their cohabitancy. If it
were not for such families as this I think I should move out of
Concord.
We are accustomed
to say in New England that few and fewer pigeons visit us every
year. Our forests furnish no mast for them. So, it would seem, few
and fewer thoughts visit each growing man from year to year, for the
grove in our minds is laid waste,—sold to feed unnecessary fires
of ambition, or sent to mill,—and there is scarcely a twig left
for them to perch on. They no longer build nor breed with us. In
some more genial season, perchance, a faint shadow flits across the
landscape of the mind, cast by the wings of some thought in
its vernal or autumnal migration, but looking up, we are unable to
detect the substance of the thought itself. Our winged thoughts are
turned to poultry. They no longer soar, and they attain only to a
Shanghai and Cochin China grandeur. Those gra-a-ate thoughts,
those gra-a-ate men you hear of!
We hug the
earth,—how rarely we mount! Methinks we might elevate ourselves a
little more. We might climb a tree at least. I found my account in
climbing a tree once. It was a tall white pine on the top of a hill,
and though I got well pitched I was well paid for it, for I
discovered new mountains in the horizon which I had never seen
before,—so much more of the earth and the heavens. I might have
walked about the foot of the tree for three score years and ten, and
yet I certainly should never have seen them. But, above all, I
discovered around me,—it was near the end of June,—on the ends
of the topmost branches only, a few minute and delicate red
cone-like blossoms, the fertile flower of the white pine looking
heavenward. I carried straightway to the village the topmost spire,
and showed it to stranger jurymen who walked the streets,—for it
was court week,—and to farmers and lumber dealers, and
wood-choppers and hunters, and not one had ever seen the like
before, but they wondered as at a star dropped down! Tell of ancient
architects finishing their works on the tops of columns as perfectly
as on the lower and more visible parts! Nature has from the first
expanded the minute blossoms of the forest only toward the heavens,
above men’s heads and unobserved by them. We see only the flowers
that are under our feet in the meadows. The pines have developed
their delicate blossoms on the highest twigs of the wood every
summer for ages, as well over the heads of Nature’s red children,
as of her white ones. Yet scarcely a farmer or hunter in the land
has ever seen them.
Above all, we
cannot afford not to live in the present. He is blessed over all
mortals who loses no moment of the passing life in remembering the
past. Unless our philosophy hears the cock crow in every barn-yard
within our horizon, it is belated. That sound commonly reminds us
that we are growing rusty and antique in our employments and habits
of thought. His philosophy comes down to a more recent time than
ours. There is something suggested by it not in Plato nor the New
Testament. It is a newer testament,—the gospel according to this
moment. He has not fallen astern; he has got up early, and kept up
early, and to be where he is, is to be in season, in the foremost
rank of time. It is an expression of the health and soundness of
Nature, a brag for all the world,—healthiness as of a spring burst
forth—a new fountain of the Muses, to celebrate this last instant
of time. Where he lives no fugitive slave laws are passed. Who has
not betrayed his master many times since last he heard that note?
The merit of this
bird’s strain is in its freedom from all plaintiveness. The singer
can easily move us to tears or to laughter, but where is he who can
excite in us a pure morning joy? When, in doleful dumps, breaking
the awful stillness of our wooden side-walk on a Sunday, or,
perchance a watcher in the house of mourning, I hear a cockerel crow
far or near, I think to myself, "There is one of us well, at
any rate," — and with a sudden gush return to my senses.
We had a remarkable
sunset one day last November. I was walking in a meadow the source
of a small brook, when the sun at last, just before setting, after a
cold gray day, reached a clear stratum in the horizon, and the
softest brightest morning sun- light fell on the dry grass and on
the stems of the trees in the opposite horizon, and on the leaves of
the shrub-oaks on the hill-side, while our shadows stretched long
over the meadow eastward, as if we were the only motes in its beams.
It was such a light as we could not have imagined a moment before,
and the air also was so warm and serene that nothing was wanting to
make a paradise of that meadow. When we reflected that this was not
a solitary phenomenon, never to happen again, but that it would
happen forever and ever an infinite number of evenings, and cheer
and reassure the latest child that walked there, it was more
glorious still.
The sun sets on
some retired meadow, where no house is visible, with all the glory
and splendor that it lavishes on cities, and perchance, as it has
never set before,—where there is but a solitary marsh hawk to have
his wings gilded by it, or only a musquash looks out from his cabin,
and there is some little black-veined brook in the midst of the
marsh, just beginning to meander, winding slowly round a decaying
stump. We walked in so pure and bright a light, gilding the withered
grass and leaves, so softly and serenely bright, I thought I had
never bathed in such a golden flood, without a ripple or a murmur to
it. The west side of every wood and rising ground gleamed like the
boundary of Elysium, and the sun on our backs seemed like a gentle
herdsman, driving us home at evening.
So we saunter
toward the Holy Land; till one day the sun shall shine more brightly
than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and
hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light,
so warm and serene and golden as on a bankside in Autumn.
A
Note on the Text:
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1st
published in The Atlantic Monthly (July 1862).
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Source:
Excursions and Poems [The Writings of Henry David Thoreau
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906) p. [205]-248]
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