Henry David Thoreau
Walking
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 an 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 pretense of going a 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,
nowadays, 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 of Church and
State and People.
We have felt that we almost alone hereabouts practiced 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, absolutely free from all
worldly engagements. You may safely say, A penny for your thoughts, or a
thousand pounds. When sometimes I am reminded that the mechanics and
shopkeepers 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, or 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. Bonaparte 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 this time, 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 indoor
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 dumbbells 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 traveler 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
Platanes," where they took subdiales ambulationes in porticos 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 for so many years I have
walked almost every day, and sometimes for several days together, I have not
yet exhausted them. An absolutely 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 farmhouse 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 threescore 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 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 woodside. 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 traveler
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 travelers. 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, the
Latin word vilis and our vile, also villain. This suggests what kind of
degeneracy villagers are liable to. They are wayworn by the travel that goes
by and over them, without traveling 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 Vespueius, nor Columbus, nor the rest were the discoverers
of it. There is a truer amount 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, me - thinks,
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
Where you MIGHT be.
What king
Did the thing,
I am still wondering;
Set up how or when,
By what selectmen,
Gourgas or Lee,
Clark or Darby?
They're a great endeavor
To be something forever;
Blank tablets of stone,
Where a traveler 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 subtle 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
southwest, 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
a thousandth time, that I will walk into the southwest 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 toward the setting sun, and 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 southeastward
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 dropped into the western bay;
At last HE rose, and twitched his mantle blue;
Tomorrow 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 one hundred and forty 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 footprints 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 traveler 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 longer, 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.
Linnaeus said long ago, "Nescio quae facies laeta, glabra plantis
Americanis" (I know not what there is of joyous and smooth in the aspect of
American 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 traveler 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, and 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 seale, 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 traveler 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 today.
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 an 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 river in the light of today, 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 river; 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 fibers 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 was
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 slaughterhouse 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 like 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 farther 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 should 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 meager 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, 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 re-entering 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
woods 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 it is 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 fibers 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 - have been 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 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 cornfield 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 clam-shell. 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 hearthstone 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 green
wood, 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
today, 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 Shine 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 today. 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 Hindus 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 unwieldy 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 "Whoa!" 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 the ox halfway. 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 disposition, this 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 FIERY 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 nicknames. I knew a boy who, from his
peculiar energy, was called "Buster" by his playmates, and this rightly
supplanted his Christian name. Some travelers 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, hovering 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 subtle of the agencies of the universe." But
he observed that "those bodies which underwent this change during the
daylight 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 - Gramatica 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, besides 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:
"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,
Traveler 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 reaction 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 land- scape there is among us! We have to
be told that the Greeks called the world 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 firefly has shown me the causeway
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 faraway 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
settled 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
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 while 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
threescore 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
conelike 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 woodchoppers 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 barnyard within our
horizon, it is belated. That sound commonly reminds us that we are growing
rusty and antique in our employments and habits of thoughts. His philosophy
comes down to a more recent time than ours. There is something suggested by
it that 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 sidewalk 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 sunlight 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 hillside, while our shadows stretched long over the meadow east-
ward, 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, as
warm and serene and golden as on a bankside in autumn.