Walking by Henry David Thoreau

Walking

by Henry David 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 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 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, as warm and serene and golden as on a

bankside in autumn.