WALDEN & ON THE DUTY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

Contents

WALDEN

1. Economy

2. Where I Lived, and What I Lived For

3. Reading

4. Sounds

5. Solitude

6. Visitors

7. The Bean-Field

8. The Village

9. The Ponds

10. Baker Farm

11. Higher Laws

12. Brute Neighbors

13. House-Warming

14. Inhabitants and Winter Visitors

15. Winter Animals

 16. The Pond in Winter

17. Spring

18. Conclusion

-- On the Duty of Civil Disobedience --

Economy

When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I

lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house

which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord,

Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only.

I lived there two years and two months. At present I am a

sojourner

in civilized life again.

I should not obtrude my affairs so much on the notice of my

readers if very particular inquiries had not been made by my

townsmen concerning my mode of life, which some would call

impertinent, though they do not appear to me at all impertinent,

but, considering the circumstances, very natural and pertinent.

Some have asked what I got to eat; if I did not feel lonesome; if I

was not afraid; and the like. Others have been curious to learn

what portion of my income I devoted to charitable purposes; and

some, who have large families, how many poor children I

maintained.

I will therefore ask those of my readers who feel no particular

interest in me to pardon me if I undertake to answer some of these

questions in this book. In most books, the I, or first person, is

omitted; in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism,

is the main difference. We commonly do not remember that it is,

after all, always the first person that is speaking. I should not

talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew

as

well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the

narrowness

of my experience. Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer,

first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not

merely what he has heard of other men's lives; some such account

as

he would send to his kindred from a distant land; for if he has

lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me. Perhaps

these pages are more particularly addressed to poor students. As

for the rest of my readers, they will accept such portions as apply

to them. I trust that none will stretch the seams in putting on the

coat, for it may do good service to him whom it fits.

I would fain say something, not so much concerning the

Chinese

and Sandwich Islanders as you who read these pages, who are said

to

live in New England; something about your condition, especially

your

outward condition or circumstances in this world, in this town, what

it is, whether it is necessary that it be as bad as it is, whether

it cannot be improved as well as not. I have travelled a good deal

in Concord; and everywhere, in shops, and offices, and fields, the

inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand

remarkable ways. What I have heard of Bramins sitting exposed to

four fires and looking in the face of the sun; or hanging suspended,

with their heads downward, over flames; or looking at the heavens

over their shoulders "until it becomes impossible for them to

resume

their natural position, while from the twist of the neck nothing but

liquids can pass into the stomach"; or dwelling, chained for life,

at the foot of a tree; or measuring with their bodies, like

caterpillars, the breadth of vast empires; or standing on one leg on

the tops of pillars -- even these forms of conscious penance are

hardly more incredible and astonishing than the scenes which I daily

witness. The twelve labors of Hercules were trifling in comparison

with those which my neighbors have undertaken; for they were only

twelve, and had an end; but I could never see that these men slew

or

captured any monster or finished any labor. They have no friend

Iolaus to burn with a hot iron the root of the hydra's head, but as

soon as one head is crushed, two spring up.

I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have

inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these

are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been

born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might

have

seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in.

Who

made them serfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty

acres,

when man is condemned to eat only his peck of dirt? Why should

they

begin digging their graves as soon as they are born? They have got
to live a man's life, pushing all these things before them, and get

on as well as they can. How many a poor immortal soul have I met

well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the

road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty,

its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land,

tillage, mowing, pasture, and woodlot! The portionless, who

struggle with no such unnecessary inherited encumbrances, find it

labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh.

But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is

soon plowed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate,

commonly

called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book,

laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves

break through and steal. It is a fool's life, as they will find

when they get to the end of it, if not before. It is said that

Deucalion and Pyrrha created men by throwing stones over their

heads

behind them:--

Inde genus durum sumus, experiensque laborum,

Et documenta damus qua simus origine nati.

Or, as Raleigh rhymes it in his sonorous way,--

"From thence our kind hard-hearted is, enduring pain and care,

Approving that our bodies of a stony nature are."

So much for a blind obedience to a blundering oracle, throwing the

stones over their heads behind them, and not seeing where they

fell.

Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through

mere

ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and

superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be

plucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy

and tremble too much for that. Actually, the laboring man has not

leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain

the manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the

market. He has no time to be anything but a machine. How can

he

remember well his ignorance -- which his growth requires -- who

has

so often to use his knowledge? We should feed and clothe him

gratuitously sometimes, and recruit him with our cordials, before

we

judge of him. The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on

fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we

do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly.

Some of you, we all know, are poor, find it hard to live, are

sometimes, as it were, gasping for breath. I have no doubt that

some of you who read this book are unable to pay for all the dinners

which you have actually eaten, or for the coats and shoes which are

fast wearing or are already worn out, and have come to this page to

spend borrowed or stolen time, robbing your creditors of an hour.

It is very evident what mean and sneaking lives many of you live,

for my sight has been whetted by experience; always on the limits,

trying to get into business and trying to get out of debt, a very

ancient slough, called by the Latins aes alienum, another's brass,

for some of their coins were made of brass; still living, and dying,

and buried by this other's brass; always promising to pay, promising

to pay, tomorrow, and dying today, insolvent; seeking to curry

favor, to get custom, by how many modes, only not state-prison

offenses; lying, flattering, voting, contracting yourselves into a

nutshell of civility or dilating into an atmosphere of thin and

vaporous generosity, that you may persuade your neighbor to let

you
make his shoes, or his hat, or his coat, or his carriage, or import

his groceries for him; making yourselves sick, that you may lay up

something against a sick day, something to be tucked away in an old

chest, or in a stocking behind the plastering, or, more safely, in

the brick bank; no matter where, no matter how much or how little.

I sometimes wonder that we can be so frivolous, I may almost

say, as to attend to the gross but somewhat foreign form of

servitude called Negro Slavery, there are so many keen and subtle

masters that enslave both North and South. It is hard to have a

Southern overseer; it is worse to have a Northern one; but worst of

all when you are the slave-driver of yourself. Talk of a divinity

in man! Look at the teamster on the highway, wending to market

by

day or night; does any divinity stir within him? His highest duty

to fodder and water his horses! What is his destiny to him

compared

with the shipping interests? Does not he drive for Squire

Make-a-stir? How godlike, how immortal, is he? See how he

cowers

and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being immortal

nor

divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a
fame won by his own deeds. Public opinion is a weak tyrant

compared

with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that

it

is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.

Self-emancipation even in the West Indian provinces of the fancy

and

imagination -- what Wilberforce is there to bring that about?

Think, also, of the ladies of the land weaving toilet cushions

against the last day, not to betray too green an interest in their

fates! As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is

called

resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you

go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the

bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious

despair is concealed even under what are called the games and

amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes

after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do

desperate things.

When we consider what, to use the words of the catechism, is

the
chief end of man, and what are the true necessaries and means of

life, it appears as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode

of living because they preferred it to any other. Yet they honestly

think there is no choice left. But alert and healthy natures

remember that the sun rose clear. It is never too late to give up

our prejudices. No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can

be trusted without proof. What everybody echoes or in silence

passes by as true to-day may turn out to be falsehood to-morrow,

mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted for a cloud that

would

sprinkle fertilizing rain on their fields. What old people say you

cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old

people,

and new deeds for new. Old people did not know enough once,

perchance, to fetch fresh fuel to keep the fire a-going; new people

put a little dry wood under a pot, and are whirled round the globe

with the speed of birds, in a way to kill old people, as the phrase

is. Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor

as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost. One may

almost doubt if the wisest man has learned anything of absolute

value by living. Practically, the old have no very important advice

to give the young, their own experience has been so partial, and
their lives have been such miserable failures, for private reasons,

as they must believe; and it may be that they have some faith left

which belies that experience, and they are only less young than they

were. I have lived some thirty years on this planet, and I have yet

to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from

my seniors. They have told me nothing, and probably cannot tell

me

anything to the purpose. Here is life, an experiment to a great

extent untried by me; but it does not avail me that they have tried

it. If I have any experience which I think valuable, I am sure to

reflect that this my Mentors said nothing about.

One farmer says to me, "You cannot live on vegetable food

solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with"; and so he

religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with

the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his

oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his

lumbering

plow along in spite of every obstacle. Some things are really

necessaries of life in some circles, the most helpless and diseased,

which in others are luxuries merely, and in others still are

entirely unknown.

The whole ground of human life seems to some to have been

gone

over by their predecessors, both the heights and the valleys, and

all things to have been cared for. According to Evelyn, "the wise

Solomon prescribed ordinances for the very distances of trees; and

the Roman praetors have decided how often you may go into your

neighbor's land to gather the acorns which fall on it without

trespass, and what share belongs to that neighbor." Hippocrates

has

even left directions how we should cut our nails; that is, even with

the ends of the fingers, neither shorter nor longer. Undoubtedly

the very tedium and ennui which presume to have exhausted the

variety and the joys of life are as old as Adam. But man's

capacities have never been measured; nor are we to judge of what

he

can do by any precedents, so little has been tried. Whatever have

been thy failures hitherto, "be not afflicted, my child, for who

shall assign to thee what thou hast left undone?"

We might try our lives by a thousand simple tests; as, for

instance, that the same sun which ripens my beans illumines at

once

a system of earths like ours. If I had remembered this it would

have prevented some mistakes. This was not the light in which I
hoed them. The stars are the apexes of what wonderful triangles!

What distant and different beings in the various mansions of the

universe are contemplating the same one at the same moment!

Nature

and human life are as various as our several constitutions. Who

shall say what prospect life offers to another? Could a greater

miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for

an instant? We should live in all the ages of the world in an hour;

ay, in all the worlds of the ages. History, Poetry, Mythology! -- I

know of no reading of another's experience so startling and

informing as this would be.

The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my

soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be

my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so

well?

You may say the wisest thing you can, old man -- you who have lived

seventy years, not without honor of a kind -- I hear an irresistible

voice which invites me away from all that. One generation

abandons

the enterprises of another like stranded vessels.

I think that we may safely trust a good deal more than we do.

We may waive just so much care of ourselves as we honestly bestow

elsewhere. Nature is as well adapted to our weakness as to our

strength. The incessant anxiety and strain of some is a well-nigh

incurable form of disease. We are made to exaggerate the

importance

of what work we do; and yet how much is not done by us! or, what

if

we had been taken sick? How vigilant we are! determined not to

live

by faith if we can avoid it; all the day long on the alert, at night

we unwillingly say our prayers and commit ourselves to

uncertainties. So thoroughly and sincerely are we compelled to

live, reverencing our life, and denying the possibility of change.

This is the only way, we say; but there are as many ways as there

can be drawn radii from one centre. All change is a miracle to

contemplate; but it is a miracle which is taking place every

instant. Confucius said, "To know that we know what we know,

and

that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge."

When one man has reduced a fact of the imagination to be a fact to

his understanding, I foresee that all men at length establish their

lives on that basis.

Let us consider for a moment what most of the trouble and

anxiety which I have referred to is about, and how much it is

necessary that we be troubled, or at least careful. It would be

some advantage to live a primitive and frontier life, though in the

midst of an outward civilization, if only to learn what are the

gross necessaries of life and what methods have been taken to

obtain

them; or even to look over the old day-books of the merchants, to

see what it was that men most commonly bought at the stores,

what

they stored, that is, what are the grossest groceries. For the

improvements of ages have had but little influence on the essential

laws of man's existence; as our skeletons, probably, are not to be

distinguished from those of our ancestors.

By the words, necessary of life, I mean whatever, of all that

man obtains by his own exertions, has been from the first, or from

long use has become, so important to human life that few, if any,

whether from savageness, or poverty, or philosophy, ever attempt

to

do without it. To many creatures there is in this sense but one

necessary of life, Food. To the bison of the prairie it is a few

inches of palatable grass, with water to drink; unless he seeks the

Shelter of the forest or the mountain's shadow. None of the brute

creation requires more than Food and Shelter. The necessaries of

life for man in this climate may, accurately enough, be distributed

under the several heads of Food, Shelter, Clothing, and Fuel; for

not till we have secured these are we prepared to entertain the true

problems of life with freedom and a prospect of success. Man has

invented, not only houses, but clothes and cooked food; and

possibly

from the accidental discovery of the warmth of fire, and the

consequent use of it, at first a luxury, arose the present necessity

to sit by it. We observe cats and dogs acquiring the same second

nature. By proper Shelter and Clothing we legitimately retain our

own internal heat; but with an excess of these, or of Fuel, that is,

with an external heat greater than our own internal, may not

cookery

properly be said to begin? Darwin, the naturalist, says of the

inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego, that while his own party, who were

well clothed and sitting close to a fire, were far from too warm,

these naked savages, who were farther off, were observed, to his

great surprise, "to be streaming with perspiration at undergoing

such a roasting." So, we are told, the New Hollander goes naked

with impunity, while the European shivers in his clothes. Is it

impossible to combine the hardiness of these savages with the

intellectualness of the civilized man? According to Liebig, man's

body is a stove, and food the fuel which keeps up the internal

combustion in the lungs. In cold weather we eat more, in warm

less.

The animal heat is the result of a slow combustion, and disease and

death take place when this is too rapid; or for want of fuel, or

from some defect in the draught, the fire goes out. Of course the

vital heat is not to be confounded with fire; but so much for

analogy. It appears, therefore, from the above list, that the

expression, animal life, is nearly synonymous with the expression,

animal heat; for while Food may be regarded as the Fuel which

keeps

up the fire within us -- and Fuel serves only to prepare that Food

or to increase the warmth of our bodies by addition from without --

Shelter and Clothing also serve only to retain the heat thus

generated and absorbed.

The grand necessity, then, for our bodies, is to keep warm, to

keep the vital heat in us. What pains we accordingly take, not only

with our Food, and Clothing, and Shelter, but with our beds, which

are our night-clothes, robbing the nests and breasts of birds to

prepare this shelter within a shelter, as the mole has its bed of

grass and leaves at the end of its burrow! The poor man is wont to
complain that this is a cold world; and to cold, no less physical

than social, we refer directly a great part of our ails. The

summer, in some climates, makes possible to man a sort of Elysian

life. Fuel, except to cook his Food, is then unnecessary; the sun

is his fire, and many of the fruits are sufficiently cooked by its

rays; while Food generally is more various, and more easily

obtained, and Clothing and Shelter are wholly or half unnecessary.

At the present day, and in this country, as I find by my own

experience, a few implements, a knife, an axe, a spade, a

wheelbarrow, etc., and for the studious, lamplight, stationery, and

access to a few books, rank next to necessaries, and can all be

obtained at a trifling cost. Yet some, not wise, go to the other

side of the globe, to barbarous and unhealthy regions, and devote

themselves to trade for ten or twenty years, in order that they may

live -- that is, keep comfortably warm -- and die in New England at

last. The luxuriously rich are not simply kept comfortably warm,

but unnaturally hot; as I implied before, they are cooked, of course

a la mode.

Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of

life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the

elevation of mankind. With respect to luxuries and comforts, the

wisest have ever lived a more simple and meagre life than the poor.
The ancient philosophers, Chinese, Hindoo, Persian, and Greek,

were

a class than which none has been poorer in outward riches, none so

rich in inward. We know not much about them. It is remarkable

that

we know so much of them as we do. The same is true of the more

modern reformers and benefactors of their race. None can be an

impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage

ground

of what we should call voluntary poverty. Of a life of luxury the

fruit is luxury, whether in agriculture, or commerce, or literature,

or art. There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not

philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once

admirable to live. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle

thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to

live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence,

magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of

life, not only theoretically, but practically. The success of great

scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not

kingly, not manly. They make shift to live merely by conformity,

practically as their fathers did, and are in no sense the

progenitors of a noble race of men. But why do men degenerate

ever?

What makes families run out? What is the nature of the luxury

which

enervates and destroys nations? Are we sure that there is none of

it in our own lives? The philosopher is in advance of his age even

in the outward form of his life. He is not fed, sheltered, clothed,

warmed, like his contemporaries. How can a man be a

philosopher and

not maintain his vital heat by better methods than other men?

When a man is warmed by the several modes which I have

described, what does he want next? Surely not more warmth of

the

same kind, as more and richer food, larger and more splendid

houses,

finer and more abundant clothing, more numerous, incessant, and

hotter fires, and the like. When he has obtained those things

which

are necessary to life, there is another alternative than to obtain

the superfluities; and that is, to adventure on life now, his

vacation from humbler toil having commenced. The soil, it

appears,

is suited to the seed, for it has sent its radicle downward, and it
may now send its shoot upward also with confidence. Why has

man

rooted himself thus firmly in the earth, but that he may rise in the

same proportion into the heavens above? -- for the nobler plants

are

valued for the fruit they bear at last in the air and light, far

from the ground, and are not treated like the humbler esculents,

which, though they may be biennials, are cultivated only till they

have perfected their root, and often cut down at top for this

purpose, so that most would not know them in their flowering

season.

I do not mean to prescribe rules to strong and valiant natures,

who will mind their own affairs whether in heaven or hell, and

perchance build more magnificently and spend more lavishly than

the

richest, without ever impoverishing themselves, not knowing how

they

live -- if, indeed, there are any such, as has been dreamed; nor to

those who find their encouragement and inspiration in precisely the

present condition of things, and cherish it with the fondness and

enthusiasm of lovers -- and, to some extent, I reckon myself in this

number; I do not speak to those who are well employed, in

whatever

circumstances, and they know whether they are well employed or

not;

-- but mainly to the mass of men who are discontented, and idly

complaining of the hardness of their lot or of the times, when they

might improve them. There are some who complain most

energetically

and inconsolably of any, because they are, as they say, doing their

duty. I also have in my mind that seemingly wealthy, but most

terribly impoverished class of all, who have accumulated dross, but

know not how to use it, or get rid of it, and thus have forged their

own golden or silver fetters.

If I should attempt to tell how I have desired to spend my life

in years past, it would probably surprise those of my readers who

are somewhat acquainted with its actual history; it would certainly

astonish those who know nothing about it. I will only hint at some

of the enterprises which I have cherished.

In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been

anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too;

to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future,

which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line. You will

pardon some obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade

than

in most men's, and yet not voluntarily kept, but inseparable from

its very nature. I would gladly tell all that I know about it, and

never paint "No Admittance" on my gate.

I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle dove, and am

still on their trail. Many are the travellers I have spoken

concerning them, describing their tracks and what calls they

answered to. I have met one or two who had heard the hound,

and the

tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a

cloud,

and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost

them

themselves.

To anticipate, not the sunrise and the dawn merely, but, if

possible, Nature herself! How many mornings, summer and

winter,

before yet any neighbor was stirring about his business, have I been

about mine! No doubt, many of my townsmen have met me

returning

from this enterprise, farmers starting for Boston in the twilight,

or woodchoppers going to their work. It is true, I never assisted

the sun materially in his rising, but, doubt not, it was of the last

importance only to be present at it.

So many autumn, ay, and winter days, spent outside the town,

trying to hear what was in the wind, to hear and carry it express!

I well-nigh sunk all my capital in it, and lost my own breath into

the bargain, running in the face of it. If it had concerned either

of the political parties, depend upon it, it would have appeared in

the Gazette with the earliest intelligence. At other times watching

from the observatory of some cliff or tree, to telegraph any new

arrival; or waiting at evening on the hill-tops for the sky to fall,

that I might catch something, though I never caught much, and that,

manna-wise, would dissolve again in the sun.

For a long time I was reporter to a journal, of no very wide

circulation, whose editor has never yet seen fit to print the bulk

of my contributions, and, as is too common with writers, I got only

my labor for my pains. However, in this case my pains were their

own reward.

For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snow-storms

and

rain-storms, and did my duty faithfully; surveyor, if not of

highways, then of forest paths and all across-lot routes, keeping

them open, and ravines bridged and passable at all seasons, where
the public heel had testified to their utility.

I have looked after the wild stock of the town, which give a

faithful herdsman a good deal of trouble by leaping fences; and I

have had an eye to the unfrequented nooks and corners of the

farm;

though I did not always know whether Jonas or Solomon worked in

particular field to-day; that was none of my business. I have

watered the red huckleberry, the sand cherry and the nettle-tree,

the red pine and the black ash, the white grape and the yellow

violet, which might have withered else in dry seasons.

In short, I went on thus for a long time (I may say it without

boasting), faithfully minding my business, till it became more and

more evident that my townsmen would not after all admit me into

the

list of town officers, nor make my place a sinecure with a moderate

allowance. My accounts, which I can swear to have kept faithfully,

I have, indeed, never got audited, still less accepted, still less

paid and settled. However, I have not set my heart on that.

Not long since, a strolling Indian went to sell baskets at the

house of a well-known lawyer in my neighborhood. "Do you wish

to
buy any baskets?" he asked. "No, we do not want any," was the

reply. "What!" exclaimed the Indian as he went out the gate, "do

you mean to starve us?" Having seen his industrious white

neighbors

so well off -- that the lawyer had only to weave arguments, and, by

some magic, wealth and standing followed -- he had said to himself:

I will go into business; I will weave baskets; it is a thing which I

can do. Thinking that when he had made the baskets he would

have

done his part, and then it would be the white man's to buy them.

He

had not discovered that it was necessary for him to make it worth

the other's while to buy them, or at least make him think that it

was so, or to make something else which it would be worth his

while

to buy. I too had woven a kind of basket of a delicate texture, but

I had not made it worth any one's while to buy them. Yet not the

less, in my case, did I think it worth my while to weave them, and

instead of studying how to make it worth men's while to buy my

baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling

them. The life which men praise and regard as successful is but

one
kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of

the

others?

Finding that my fellow-citizens were not likely to offer me any

room in the court house, or any curacy or living anywhere else, but

I must shift for myself, I turned my face more exclusively than ever

to the woods, where I was better known. I determined to go into

business at once, and not wait to acquire the usual capital, using

such slender means as I had already got. My purpose in going to

Walden Pond was not to live cheaply nor to live dearly there, but to

transact some private business with the fewest obstacles; to be

hindered from accomplishing which for want of a little common

sense,

a little enterprise and business talent, appeared not so sad as

foolish.

I have always endeavored to acquire strict business habits; they

are indispensable to every man. If your trade is with the Celestial

Empire, then some small counting house on the coast, in some

Salem

harbor, will be fixture enough. You will export such articles as

the country affords, purely native products, much ice and pine

timber and a little granite, always in native bottoms. These will

be good ventures. To oversee all the details yourself in person; to

be at once pilot and captain, and owner and underwriter; to buy

and

sell and keep the accounts; to read every letter received, and write

or read every letter sent; to superintend the discharge of imports

night and day; to be upon many parts of the coast almost at the

same

time -- often the richest freight will be discharged upon a Jersey

shore; -- to be your own telegraph, unweariedly sweeping the

horizon, speaking all passing vessels bound coastwise; to keep up a

steady despatch of commodities, for the supply of such a distant

and

exorbitant market; to keep yourself informed of the state of the

markets, prospects of war and peace everywhere, and anticipate

the

tendencies of trade and civilization -- taking advantage of the

results of all exploring expeditions, using new passages and all

improvements in navigation; -- charts to be studied, the position of

reefs and new lights and buoys to be ascertained, and ever, and

ever, the logarithmic tables to be corrected, for by the error of

some calculator the vessel often splits upon a rock that should have

reached a friendly pier -- there is the untold fate of La Prouse;

-- universal science to be kept pace with, studying the lives of all

great discoverers and navigators, great adventurers and merchants,

from Hanno and the Phoenicians down to our day; in fine, account

of

stock to be taken from time to time, to know how you stand. It is a

labor to task the faculties of a man -- such problems of profit and

loss, of interest, of tare and tret, and gauging of all kinds in it,

as demand a universal knowledge.

I have thought that Walden Pond would be a good place for

business, not solely on account of the railroad and the ice trade;

it offers advantages which it may not be good policy to divulge; it

is a good port and a good foundation. No Neva marshes to be

filled;

though you must everywhere build on piles of your own driving. It

is said that a flood-tide, with a westerly wind, and ice in the

Neva, would sweep St. Petersburg from the face of the earth.

As this business was to be entered into without the usual

capital, it may not be easy to conjecture where those means, that

will still be indispensable to every such undertaking, were to be

obtained. As for Clothing, to come at once to the practical part of

the question, perhaps we are led oftener by the love of novelty and

a regard for the opinions of men, in procuring it, than by a true

utility. Let him who has work to do recollect that the object of

clothing is, first, to retain the vital heat, and secondly, in this

state of society, to cover nakedness, and he may judge how much of

any necessary or important work may be accomplished without

adding

to his wardrobe. Kings and queens who wear a suit but once,

though

made by some tailor or dressmaker to their majesties, cannot know

the comfort of wearing a suit that fits. They are no better than

wooden horses to hang the clean clothes on. Every day our

garments

become more assimilated to ourselves, receiving the impress of the

wearer's character, until we hesitate to lay them aside without such

delay and medical appliances and some such solemnity even as our

bodies. No man ever stood the lower in my estimation for having

patch in his clothes; yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety,

commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched

clothes, than to have a sound conscience. But even if the rent is

not mended, perhaps the worst vice betrayed is improvidence. I

sometimes try my acquaintances by such tests as this -- Who could

wear a patch, or two extra seams only, over the knee? Most
behave

as if they believed that their prospects for life would be ruined if

they should do it. It would be easier for them to hobble to town

with a broken leg than with a broken pantaloon. Often if an

accident happens to a gentleman's legs, they can be mended; but if

similar accident happens to the legs of his pantaloons, there is no

help for it; for he considers, not what is truly respectable, but

what is respected. We know but few men, a great many coats and

breeches. Dress a scarecrow in your last shift, you standing

shiftless by, who would not soonest salute the scarecrow? Passing

cornfield the other day, close by a hat and coat on a stake, I

recognized the owner of the farm. He was only a little more

weather-beaten than when I saw him last. I have heard of a dog

that

barked at every stranger who approached his master's premises

with

clothes on, but was easily quieted by a naked thief. It is an

interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if

they were divested of their clothes. Could you, in such a case,

tell surely of any company of civilized men which belonged to the

most respected class? When Madam Pfeiffer, in her adventurous

travels round the world, from east to west, had got so near home as

Asiatic Russia, she says that she felt the necessity of wearing

other than a travelling dress, when she went to meet the

authorities, for she "was now in a civilized country, where ...

people are judged of by their clothes." Even in our democratic

New

England towns the accidental possession of wealth, and its

manifestation in dress and equipage alone, obtain for the possessor

almost universal respect. But they yield such respect, numerous

as

they are, are so far heathen, and need to have a missionary sent to

them. Beside, clothes introduced sewing, a kind of work which

you

may call endless; a woman's dress, at least, is never done.

A man who has at length found something to do will not need

to

get a new suit to do it in; for him the old will do, that has lain

dusty in the garret for an indeterminate period. Old shoes will

serve a hero longer than they have served his valet -- if a hero

ever has a valet -- bare feet are older than shoes, and he can make

them do. Only they who go to soires and legislative balls must
have new coats, coats to change as often as the man changes in

them.

But if my jacket and trousers, my hat and shoes, are fit to worship

God in, they will do; will they not? Who ever saw his old clothes

-- his old coat, actually worn out, resolved into its primitive

elements, so that it was not a deed of charity to bestow it on some

poor boy, by him perchance to be bestowed on some poorer still, or

shall we say richer, who could do with less? I say, beware of all

enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer

of

clothes. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be

made

to fit? If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old

clothes. All men want, not something to do with, but something

to

do, or rather something to be. Perhaps we should never procure a

new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so

conducted, so enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel like

new men in the old, and that to retain it would be like keeping new

wine in old bottles. Our moulting season, like that of the fowls,

must be a crisis in our lives. The loon retires to solitary ponds

to spend it. Thus also the snake casts its slough, and the
caterpillar its wormy coat, by an internal industry and expansion;

for clothes are but our outmost cuticle and mortal coil. Otherwise

we shall be found sailing under false colors, and be inevitably

cashiered at last by our own opinion, as well as that of mankind.

We don garment after garment, as if we grew like exogenous

plants by addition without. Our outside and often thin and

fanciful

clothes are our epidermis, or false skin, which partakes not of our

life, and may be stripped off here and there without fatal injury;

our thicker garments, constantly worn, are our cellular integument,

or cortex; but our shirts are our liber, or true bark, which cannot

be removed without girdling and so destroying the man. I believe

that all races at some seasons wear something equivalent to the

shirt. It is desirable that a man be clad so simply that he can lay

his hands on himself in the dark, and that he live in all respects

so compactly and preparedly that, if an enemy take the town, he

can,

like the old philosopher, walk out the gate empty-handed without

anxiety. While one thick garment is, for most purposes, as good as

three thin ones, and cheap clothing can be obtained at prices really

to suit customers; while a thick coat can be bought for five

dollars, which will last as many years, thick pantaloons for two
dollars, cowhide boots for a dollar and a half a pair, a summer hat

for a quarter of a dollar, and a winter cap for sixty-two and a half

cents, or a better be made at home at a nominal cost, where is he

so

poor that, clad in such a suit, of his own earning, there will not

be found wise men to do him reverence?

When I ask for a garment of a particular form, my tailoress

tells me gravely, "They do not make them so now," not emphasizing

the "They" at all, as if she quoted an authority as impersonal as

the Fates, and I find it difficult to get made what I want, simply

because she cannot believe that I mean what I say, that I am so

rash. When I hear this oracular sentence, I am for a moment

absorbed in thought, emphasizing to myself each word separately

that

I may come at the meaning of it, that I may find out by what degree

of consanguinity They are related to me, and what authority they

may have in an affair which affects me so nearly; and, finally, I am

inclined to answer her with equal mystery, and without any more

emphasis of the "they" -- "It is true, they did not make them so

recently, but they do now." Of what use this measuring of me if

she

does not measure my character, but only the breadth of my

shoulders,

as it were a peg to bang the coat on? We worship not the Graces,

nor the Parcae, but Fashion. She spins and weaves and cuts with

full authority. The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveller's cap,

and all the monkeys in America do the same. I sometimes despair

of

getting anything quite simple and honest done in this world by the

help of men. They would have to be passed through a powerful

press

first, to squeeze their old notions out of them, so that they would

not soon get upon their legs again; and then there would be some

one

in the company with a maggot in his head, hatched from an egg

deposited there nobody knows when, for not even fire kills these

things, and you would have lost your labor. Nevertheless, we will

not forget that some Egyptian wheat was handed down to us by a

mummy.

On the whole, I think that it cannot be maintained that

dressing

has in this or any country risen to the dignity of an art. At

present men make shift to wear what they can get. Like

shipwrecked
sailors, they put on what they can find on the beach, and at a

little distance, whether of space or time, laugh at each other's

masquerade. Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but

follows religiously the new. We are amused at beholding the

costume

of Henry VIII, or Queen Elizabeth, as much as if it was that of the

King and Queen of the Cannibal Islands. All costume off a man is

pitiful or grotesque. It is only the serious eye peering from and

the sincere life passed within it which restrain laughter and

consecrate the costume of any people. Let Harlequin be taken

with a

fit of the colic and his trappings will have to serve that mood too.

When the soldier is hit by a cannonball, rags are as becoming as

purple.

The childish and savage taste of men and women for new

patterns

keeps how many shaking and squinting through kaleidoscopes that

they

may discover the particular figure which this generation requires

today. The manufacturers have learned that this taste is merely

whimsical. Of two patterns which differ only by a few threads

more
or less of a particular color, the one will be sold readily, the

other lie on the shelf, though it frequently happens that after the

lapse of a season the latter becomes the most fashionable.

Comparatively, tattooing is not the hideous custom which it is

called. It is not barbarous merely because the printing is

skin-deep and unalterable.

I cannot believe that our factory system is the best mode by

which men may get clothing. The condition of the operatives is

becoming every day more like that of the English; and it cannot be

wondered at, since, as far as I have heard or observed, the

principal object is, not that mankind may be well and honestly clad,

but, unquestionably, that corporations may be enriched. In the

long

run men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, though they should

fail immediately, they had better aim at something high.

As for a Shelter, I will not deny that this is now a necessary

of life, though there are instances of men having done without it

for long periods in colder countries than this. Samuel Laing says

that "the Laplander in his skin dress, and in a skin bag which he

puts over his head and shoulders, will sleep night after night on

the snow ... in a degree of cold which would extinguish the life of

one exposed to it in any woollen clothing." He had seen them

asleep

thus. Yet he adds, "They are not hardier than other people." But,

probably, man did not live long on the earth without discovering the

convenience which there is in a house, the domestic comforts,

which

phrase may have originally signified the satisfactions of the house

more than of the family; though these must be extremely partial

and

occasional in those climates where the house is associated in our

thoughts with winter or the rainy season chiefly, and two thirds of

the year, except for a parasol, is unnecessary. In our climate, in

the summer, it was formerly almost solely a covering at night. In

the Indian gazettes a wigwam was the symbol of a day's march, and

row of them cut or painted on the bark of a tree signified that so

many times they had camped. Man was not made so large limbed

and

robust but that he must seek to narrow his world and wall in a

space

such as fitted him. He was at first bare and out of doors; but

though this was pleasant enough in serene and warm weather, by

daylight, the rainy season and the winter, to say nothing of the
torrid sun, would perhaps have nipped his race in the bud if he had

not made haste to clothe himself with the shelter of a house.

Adam

and Eve, according to the fable, wore the bower before other

clothes. Man wanted a home, a place of warmth, or comfort, first

of

warmth, then the warmth of the affections.

We may imagine a time when, in the infancy of the human

race,

some enterprising mortal crept into a hollow in a rock for shelter.

Every child begins the world again, to some extent, and loves to

stay outdoors, even in wet and cold. It plays house, as well as

horse, having an instinct for it. Who does not remember the

interest with which, when young, he looked at shelving rocks, or any

approach to a cave? It was the natural yearning of that portion,

any portion of our most primitive ancestor which still survived in

us. From the cave we have advanced to roofs of palm leaves, of

bark

and boughs, of linen woven and stretched, of grass and straw, of

boards and shingles, of stones and tiles. At last, we know not what

it is to live in the open air, and our lives are domestic in more

senses than we think. From the hearth the field is a great

distance. It would be well, perhaps, if we were to spend more of

our days and nights without any obstruction between us and the

celestial bodies, if the poet did not speak so much from under a

roof, or the saint dwell there so long. Birds do not sing in caves,

nor do doves cherish their innocence in dovecots.

However, if one designs to construct a dwelling-house, it

behooves him to exercise a little Yankee shrewdness, lest after all

he find himself in a workhouse, a labyrinth without a clue, a

museum, an almshouse, a prison, or a splendid mausoleum instead.

Consider first how slight a shelter is absolutely necessary. I have

seen Penobscot Indians, in this town, living in tents of thin cotton

cloth, while the snow was nearly a foot deep around them, and I

thought that they would be glad to have it deeper to keep out the

wind. Formerly, when how to get my living honestly, with freedom

left for my proper pursuits, was a question which vexed me even

more

than it does now, for unfortunately I am become somewhat callous,

used to see a large box by the railroad, six feet long by three

wide, in which the laborers locked up their tools at night; and it

suggested to me that every man who was hard pushed might get

such a
one for a dollar, and, having bored a few auger holes in it, to

admit the air at least, get into it when it rained and at night, and

hook down the lid, and so have freedom in his love, and in his soul

be free. This did not appear the worst, nor by any means a

despicable alternative. You could sit up as late as you pleased,

and, whenever you got up, go abroad without any landlord or

house-lord dogging you for rent. Many a man is harassed to death

to

pay the rent of a larger and more luxurious box who would not have

frozen to death in such a box as this. I am far from jesting.

Economy is a subject which admits of being treated with levity, but

it cannot so be disposed of. A comfortable house for a rude and

hardy race, that lived mostly out of doors, was once made here

almost entirely of such materials as Nature furnished ready to their

hands. Gookin, who was superintendent of the Indians subject to

the

Massachusetts Colony, writing in 1674, says, "The best of their

houses are covered very neatly, tight and warm, with barks of trees,

slipped from their bodies at those seasons when the sap is up, and

made into great flakes, with pressure of weighty timber, when they

are green.... The meaner sort are covered with mats which they

make
of a kind of bulrush, and are also indifferently tight and warm, but

not so good as the former.... Some I have seen, sixty or a hundred

feet long and thirty feet broad.... I have often lodged in their

wigwams, and found them as warm as the best English houses."

He

adds that they were commonly carpeted and lined within with

well-wrought embroidered mats, and were furnished with various

utensils. The Indians had advanced so far as to regulate the effect

of the wind by a mat suspended over the hole in the roof and

moved

by a string. Such a lodge was in the first instance constructed in

a day or two at most, and taken down and put up in a few hours;

and

every family owned one, or its apartment in one.

In the savage state every family owns a shelter as good as the

best, and sufficient for its coarser and simpler wants; but I think

that I speak within bounds when I say that, though the birds of the

air have their nests, and the foxes their holes, and the savages

their wigwams, in modern civilized society not more than one half

the families own a shelter. In the large towns and cities, where

civilization especially prevails, the number of those who own a

shelter is a very small fraction of the whole. The rest pay an

annual tax for this outside garment of all, become indispensable

summer and winter, which would buy a village of Indian wigwams,

but

now helps to keep them poor as long as they live. I do not mean

to

insist here on the disadvantage of hiring compared with owning, but

it is evident that the savage owns his shelter because it costs so

little, while the civilized man hires his commonly because he cannot

afford to own it; nor can he, in the long run, any better afford to

hire. But, answers one, by merely paying this tax, the poor

civilized man secures an abode which is a palace compared with the

savage's. An annual rent of from twenty-five to a hundred dollars

(these are the country rates) entitles him to the benefit of the

improvements of centuries, spacious apartments, clean paint and

paper, Rumford fire-place, back plastering, Venetian blinds, copper

pump, spring lock, a commodious cellar, and many other things.

But

how happens it that he who is said to enjoy these things is so

commonly a poor civilized man, while the savage, who has them

not,

is rich as a savage? If it is asserted that civilization is a real

advance in the condition of man -- and I think that it is, though

only the wise improve their advantages -- it must be shown that it

has produced better dwellings without making them more costly;

and

the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is

required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run. An

average house in this neighborhood costs perhaps eight hundred

dollars, and to lay up this sum will take from ten to fifteen years

of the laborer's life, even if he is not encumbered with a family --

estimating the pecuniary value of every man's labor at one dollar a

day, for if some receive more, others receive less; -- so that he

must have spent more than half his life commonly before his

wigwam

will be earned. If we suppose him to pay a rent instead, this is

but a doubtful choice of evils. Would the savage have been wise

to

exchange his wigwam for a palace on these terms?

It may be guessed that I reduce almost the whole advantage of

holding this superfluous property as a fund in store against the

future, so far as the individual is concerned, mainly to the

defraying of funeral expenses. But perhaps a man is not required

to

bury himself. Nevertheless this points to an important distinction

between the civilized man and the savage; and, no doubt, they have

designs on us for our benefit, in making the life of a civilized

people an institution, in which the life of the individual is to a

great extent absorbed, in order to preserve and perfect that of the

race. But I wish to show at what a sacrifice this advantage is at

present obtained, and to suggest that we may possibly so live as to

secure all the advantage without suffering any of the disadvantage.

What mean ye by saying that the poor ye have always with you, or

that the fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth

are set on edge?

"As I live, saith the Lord God, ye shall not have occasion any

more to use this proverb in Israel.

"Behold all souls are mine; as the soul of the father, so also

the soul of the son is mine: the soul that sinneth, it shall die."

When I consider my neighbors, the farmers of Concord, who

are at

least as well off as the other classes, I find that for the most

part they have been toiling twenty, thirty, or forty years, that

they may become the real owners of their farms, which commonly

they

have inherited with encumbrances, or else bought with hired

money --
and we may regard one third of that toil as the cost of their houses

-- but commonly they have not paid for them yet. It is true, the

encumbrances sometimes outweigh the value of the farm, so that

the

farm itself becomes one great encumbrance, and still a man is

found

to inherit it, being well acquainted with it, as he says. On

applying to the assessors, I am surprised to learn that they cannot

at once name a dozen in the town who own their farms free and

clear.

If you would know the history of these homesteads, inquire at the

bank where they are mortgaged. The man who has actually paid

for

his farm with labor on it is so rare that every neighbor can point

to him. I doubt if there are three such men in Concord. What

has

been said of the merchants, that a very large majority, even

ninety-seven in a hundred, are sure to fail, is equally true of the

farmers. With regard to the merchants, however, one of them

says

pertinently that a great part of their failures are not genuine

pecuniary failures, but merely failures to fulfil their engagements,

because it is inconvenient; that is, it is the moral character that

breaks down. But this puts an infinitely worse face on the matter,

and suggests, beside, that probably not even the other three

succeed

in saving their souls, but are perchance bankrupt in a worse sense

than they who fail honestly. Bankruptcy and repudiation are the

springboards from which much of our civilization vaults and turns

its somersets, but the savage stands on the unelastic plank of

famine. Yet the Middlesex Cattle Show goes off here with eclat

annually, as if all the joints of the agricultural machine were

suent.

The farmer is endeavoring to solve the problem of a livelihood

by a formula more complicated than the problem itself. To get his

shoestrings he speculates in herds of cattle. With consummate

skill

he has set his trap with a hair spring to catch comfort and

independence, and then, as he turned away, got his own leg into it.

This is the reason he is poor; and for a similar reason we are all

poor in respect to a thousand savage comforts, though surrounded

by

luxuries. As Chapman sings,

 "The false society of men --

-- for earthly greatness

All heavenly comforts rarefies to air."

And when the farmer has got his house, he may not be the

richer

but the poorer for it, and it be the house that has got him. As I

understand it, that was a valid objection urged by Momus against

the

house which Minerva made, that she "had not made it movable, by

which means a bad neighborhood might be avoided"; and it may

still

be urged, for our houses are such unwieldy property that we are

often imprisoned rather than housed in them; and the bad

neighborhood to be avoided is our own scurvy selves. I know one

or

two families, at least, in this town, who, for nearly a generation,

have been wishing to sell their houses in the outskirts and move

into the village, but have not been able to accomplish it, and only

death will set them free.

Granted that the majority are able at last either to own or hire

the modern house with all its improvements. While civilization

has

been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men

who

are to inhabit them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy

to create noblemen and kings. And if the civilized man's pursuits

are no worthier than the savage's, if he is employed the greater

part of his life in obtaining gross necessaries and comforts merely,

why should he have a better dwelling than the former?

But how do the poor minority fare? Perhaps it will be found

that just in proportion as some have been placed in outward

circumstances above the savage, others have been degraded below

him.

The luxury of one class is counterbalanced by the indigence of

another. On the one side is the palace, on the other are the

almshouse and "silent poor." The myriads who built the pyramids

to

be the tombs of the Pharaohs were fed on garlic, and it may be

were

not decently buried themselves. The mason who finishes the

cornice

of the palace returns at night perchance to a hut not so good as a

wigwam. It is a mistake to suppose that, in a country where the

usual evidences of civilization exist, the condition of a very large

body of the inhabitants may not be as degraded as that of savages.

I refer to the degraded poor, not now to the degraded rich. To

know

this I should not need to look farther than to the shanties which

everywhere border our railroads, that last improvement in

civilization; where I see in my daily walks human beings living in

sties, and all winter with an open door, for the sake of light,

without any visible, often imaginable, wood-pile, and the forms of

both old and young are permanently contracted by the long habit of

shrinking from cold and misery, and the development of all their

limbs and faculties is checked. It certainly is fair to look at

that class by whose labor the works which distinguish this

generation are accomplished. Such too, to a greater or less extent,

is the condition of the operatives of every denomination in England,

which is the great workhouse of the world. Or I could refer you to

Ireland, which is marked as one of the white or enlightened spots

on

the map. Contrast the physical condition of the Irish with that of

the North American Indian, or the South Sea Islander, or any other

savage race before it was degraded by contact with the civilized

man. Yet I have no doubt that that people's rulers are as wise as
the average of civilized rulers. Their condition only proves what

squalidness may consist with civilization. I hardly need refer now

to the laborers in our Southern States who produce the staple

exports of this country, and are themselves a staple production of

the South. But to confine myself to those who are said to be in

moderate circumstances.

Most men appear never to have considered what a house is,

and

are actually though needlessly poor all their lives because they

think that they must have such a one as their neighbors have. As if

one were to wear any sort of coat which the tailor might cut out for

him, or, gradually leaving off palm-leaf hat or cap of woodchuck

skin, complain of hard times because he could not afford to buy him

a crown! It is possible to invent a house still more convenient and

luxurious than we have, which yet all would admit that man could

not

afford to pay for. Shall we always study to obtain more of these

things, and not sometimes to be content with less? Shall the

respectable citizen thus gravely teach, by precept and example, the

necessity of the young man's providing a certain number of

superfluous glow-shoes, and umbrellas, and empty guest chambers

for
empty guests, before he dies? Why should not our furniture be as

simple as the Arab's or the Indian's? When I think of the

benefactors of the race, whom we have apotheosized as

messengers

from heaven, bearers of divine gifts to man, I do not see in my mind

any retinue at their heels, any carload of fashionable furniture.

Or what if I were to allow -- would it not be a singular allowance?

-- that our furniture should be more complex than the Arab's, in

proportion as we are morally and intellectually his superiors! At

present our houses are cluttered and defiled with it, and a good

housewife would sweep out the greater part into the dust hole, and

not leave her morning's work undone. Morning work! By the

blushes

of Aurora and the music of Memnon, what should be man's

morning work

in this world? I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I

was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, when

the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and threw them out

the window in disgust. How, then, could I have a furnished house?

I would rather sit in the open air, for no dust gathers on the

grass, unless where man has broken ground.

It is the luxurious and dissipated who set the fashions which

the herd so diligently follow. The traveller who stops at the best

houses, so called, soon discovers this, for the publicans presume

him to be a Sardanapalus, and if he resigned himself to their tender

mercies he would soon be completely emasculated. I think that in

the railroad car we are inclined to spend more on luxury than on

safety and convenience, and it threatens without attaining these to

become no better than a modern drawing-room, with its divans,

and

ottomans, and sun-shades, and a hundred other oriental things,

which

we are taking west with us, invented for the ladies of the harem and

the effeminate natives of the Celestial Empire, which Jonathan

should be ashamed to know the names of. I would rather sit on a

pumpkin and have it all to myself than be crowded on a velvet

cushion. I would rather ride on earth in an ox cart, with a free

circulation, than go to heaven in the fancy car of an excursion

train and breathe a malaria all the way.

The very simplicity and nakedness of man's life in the primitive

ages imply this advantage, at least, that they left him still but a

sojourner in nature. When he was refreshed with food and sleep,

he

contemplated his journey again. He dwelt, as it were, in a tent in

this world, and was either threading the valleys, or crossing the

plains, or climbing the mountain-tops. But lo! men have become

the

tools of their tools. The man who independently plucked the fruits

when he was hungry is become a farmer; and he who stood under a

tree

for shelter, a housekeeper. We now no longer camp as for a night,

but have settled down on earth and forgotten heaven. We have

adopted Christianity merely as an improved method of agri-culture.

We have built for this world a family mansion, and for the next a

family tomb. The best works of art are the expression of man's

struggle to free himself from this condition, but the effect of our

art is merely to make this low state comfortable and that higher

state to be forgotten. There is actually no place in this village

for a work of fine art, if any had come down to us, to stand, for

our lives, our houses and streets, furnish no proper pedestal for

it. There is not a nail to hang a picture on, nor a shelf to

receive the bust of a hero or a saint. When I consider how our

houses are built and paid for, or not paid for, and their internal

economy managed and sustained, I wonder that the floor does not

give

way under the visitor while he is admiring the gewgaws upon the
mantelpiece, and let him through into the cellar, to some solid and

honest though earthy foundation. I cannot but perceive that this

so-called rich and refined life is a thing jumped at, and I do not

get on in the enjoyment of the fine arts which adorn it, my

attention being wholly occupied with the jump; for I remember that

the greatest genuine leap, due to human muscles alone, on record,

is

that of certain wandering Arabs, who are said to have cleared

twenty-five feet on level ground. Without factitious support, man

is sure to come to earth again beyond that distance. The first

question which I am tempted to put to the proprietor of such great

impropriety is, Who bolsters you? Are you one of the ninety-seven

who fail, or the three who succeed? Answer me these questions,

and

then perhaps I may look at your bawbles and find them ornamental.

The cart before the horse is neither beautiful nor useful. Before

we can adorn our houses with beautiful objects the walls must be

stripped, and our lives must be stripped, and beautiful

housekeeping

and beautiful living be laid for a foundation: now, a taste for the

beautiful is most cultivated out of doors, where there is no house

and no housekeeper.
 Old Johnson, in his "Wonder-Working Providence," speaking of

the

first settlers of this town, with whom he was contemporary, tells us

that "they burrow themselves in the earth for their first shelter

under some hillside, and, casting the soil aloft upon timber, they

make a smoky fire against the earth, at the highest side." They did

not "provide them houses," says he, "till the earth, by the Lord's

blessing, brought forth bread to feed them," and the first year's

crop was so light that "they were forced to cut their bread very

thin for a long season." The secretary of the Province of New

Netherland, writing in Dutch, in 1650, for the information of those

who wished to take up land there, states more particularly that

"those in New Netherland, and especially in New England, who have

no

means to build farmhouses at first according to their wishes, dig a

square pit in the ground, cellar fashion, six or seven feet deep, as

long and as broad as they think proper, case the earth inside with

wood all round the wall, and line the wood with the bark of trees or

something else to prevent the caving in of the earth; floor this

cellar with plank, and wainscot it overhead for a ceiling, raise a

roof of spars clear up, and cover the spars with bark or green sods,

so that they can live dry and warm in these houses with their entire
families for two, three, and four years, it being understood that

partitions are run through those cellars which are adapted to the

size of the family. The wealthy and principal men in New England,

in the beginning of the colonies, commenced their first

dwelling-houses in this fashion for two reasons: firstly, in order

not to waste time in building, and not to want food the next season;

secondly, in order not to discourage poor laboring people whom

they

brought over in numbers from Fatherland. In the course of three

or

four years, when the country became adapted to agriculture, they

built themselves handsome houses, spending on them several

thousands."

In this course which our ancestors took there was a show of

prudence at least, as if their principle were to satisfy the more

pressing wants first. But are the more pressing wants satisfied

now? When I think of acquiring for myself one of our luxurious

dwellings, I am deterred, for, so to speak, the country is not yet

adapted to human culture, and we are still forced to cut our

spiritual bread far thinner than our forefathers did their wheaten.

Not that all architectural ornament is to be neglected even in the

rudest periods; but let our houses first be lined with beauty, where
they come in contact with our lives, like the tenement of the

shellfish, and not overlaid with it. But, alas! I have been inside

one or two of them, and know what they are lined with.

Though we are not so degenerate but that we might possibly

live

in a cave or a wigwam or wear skins today, it certainly is better to

accept the advantages, though so dearly bought, which the

invention

and industry of mankind offer. In such a neighborhood as this,

boards and shingles, lime and bricks, are cheaper and more easily

obtained than suitable caves, or whole logs, or bark in sufficient

quantities, or even well-tempered clay or flat stones. I speak

understandingly on this subject, for I have made myself acquainted

with it both theoretically and practically. With a little more wit

we might use these materials so as to become richer than the

richest

now are, and make our civilization a blessing. The civilized man is

a more experienced and wiser savage. But to make haste to my

own

experiment.

Near the end of March, 1845, I borrowed an axe and went

down to
the woods by Walden Pond, nearest to where I intended to build my

house, and began to cut down some tall, arrowy white pines, still in

their youth, for timber. It is difficult to begin without

borrowing, but perhaps it is the most generous course thus to

permit

your fellow-men to have an interest in your enterprise. The owner

of the axe, as he released his hold on it, said that it was the

apple of his eye; but I returned it sharper than I received it. It

was a pleasant hillside where I worked, covered with pine woods,

through which I looked out on the pond, and a small open field in

the woods where pines and hickories were springing up. The ice in

the pond was not yet dissolved, though there were some open

spaces,

and it was all dark-colored and saturated with water. There were

some slight flurries of snow during the days that I worked there;

but for the most part when I came out on to the railroad, on my way

home, its yellow sand heap stretched away gleaming in the hazy

atmosphere, and the rails shone in the spring sun, and I heard the

lark and pewee and other birds already come to commence another

year

with us. They were pleasant spring days, in which the winter of

man's discontent was thawing as well as the earth, and the life that
had lain torpid began to stretch itself. One day, when my axe had

come off and I had cut a green hickory for a wedge, driving it with

a stone, and had placed the whole to soak in a pond-hole in order to

swell the wood, I saw a striped snake run into the water, and he lay

on the bottom, apparently without inconvenience, as long as I

stayed

there, or more than a quarter of an hour; perhaps because he had

not

yet fairly come out of the torpid state. It appeared to me that for

a like reason men remain in their present low and primitive

condition; but if they should feel the influence of the spring of

springs arousing them, they would of necessity rise to a higher and

more ethereal life. I had previously seen the snakes in frosty

mornings in my path with portions of their bodies still numb and

inflexible, waiting for the sun to thaw them. On the 1st of April

it rained and melted the ice, and in the early part of the day,

which was very foggy, I heard a stray goose groping about over the

pond and cackling as if lost, or like the spirit of the fog.

So I went on for some days cutting and hewing timber, and also

studs and rafters, all with my narrow axe, not having many

communicable or scholar-like thoughts, singing to myself, --

 Men say they know many things;

But lo! they have taken wings --

The arts and sciences,

And a thousand appliances;

The wind that blows

Is all that any body knows.

I hewed the main timbers six inches square, most of the studs

on

two sides only, and the rafters and floor timbers on one side,

leaving the rest of the bark on, so that they were just as straight

and much stronger than sawed ones. Each stick was carefully

mortised or tenoned by its stump, for I had borrowed other tools by

this time. My days in the woods were not very long ones; yet I

usually carried my dinner of bread and butter, and read the

newspaper in which it was wrapped, at noon, sitting amid the green

pine boughs which I had cut off, and to my bread was imparted

some

of their fragrance, for my hands were covered with a thick coat of

pitch. Before I had done I was more the friend than the foe of the

pine tree, though I had cut down some of them, having become

better
acquainted with it. Sometimes a rambler in the wood was

attracted

by the sound of my axe, and we chatted pleasantly over the chips

which I had made.

By the middle of April, for I made no haste in my work, but

rather made the most of it, my house was framed and ready for the

raising. I had already bought the shanty of James Collins, an

Irishman who worked on the Fitchburg Railroad, for boards. James

Collins' shanty was considered an uncommonly fine one. When I

called to see it he was not at home. I walked about the outside, at

first unobserved from within, the window was so deep and high. It

was of small dimensions, with a peaked cottage roof, and not much

else to be seen, the dirt being raised five feet all around as if it

were a compost heap. The roof was the soundest part, though a

good

deal warped and made brittle by the sun. Doorsill there was none,

but a perennial passage for the hens under the door board. Mrs.

C.

came to the door and asked me to view it from the inside. The

hens

were driven in by my approach. It was dark, and had a dirt floor

for the most part, dank, clammy, and aguish, only here a board and
there a board which would not bear removal. She lighted a lamp

to

show me the inside of the roof and the walls, and also that the

board floor extended under the bed, warning me not to step into

the

cellar, a sort of dust hole two feet deep. In her own words, they

were "good boards overhead, good boards all around, and a good

window" -- of two whole squares originally, only the cat had passed

out that way lately. There was a stove, a bed, and a place to sit,

an infant in the house where it was born, a silk parasol,

gilt-framed looking-glass, and a patent new coffee-mill nailed to an

oak sapling, all told. The bargain was soon concluded, for James

had in the meanwhile returned. I to pay four dollars and

twenty-five cents tonight, he to vacate at five tomorrow morning,

selling to nobody else meanwhile: I to take possession at six. It

were well, he said, to be there early, and anticipate certain

indistinct but wholly unjust claims on the score of ground rent and

fuel. This he assured me was the only encumbrance. At six I

passed

him and his family on the road. One large bundle held their all --

bed, coffee-mill, looking-glass, hens -- all but the cat; she took

to the woods and became a wild cat, and, as I learned afterward,

trod in a trap set for woodchucks, and so became a dead cat at last.

I took down this dwelling the same morning, drawing the nails,

and removed it to the pond-side by small cartloads, spreading the

boards on the grass there to bleach and warp back again in the sun.

One early thrush gave me a note or two as I drove along the

woodland

path. I was informed treacherously by a young Patrick that

neighbor

Seeley, an Irishman, in the intervals of the carting, transferred

the still tolerable, straight, and drivable nails, staples, and

spikes to his pocket, and then stood when I came back to pass the

time of day, and look freshly up, unconcerned, with spring thoughts,

at the devastation; there being a dearth of work, as he said. He

was there to represent spectatordom, and help make this seemingly

insignificant event one with the removal of the gods of Troy.

I dug my cellar in the side of a hill sloping to the south,

where a woodchuck had formerly dug his burrow, down through

sumach

and blackberry roots, and the lowest stain of vegetation, six feet

square by seven deep, to a fine sand where potatoes would not

freeze

in any winter. The sides were left shelving, and not stoned; but
the sun having never shone on them, the sand still keeps its place.

It was but two hours' work. I took particular pleasure in this

breaking of ground, for in almost all latitudes men dig into the

earth for an equable temperature. Under the most splendid house

in

the city is still to be found the cellar where they store their

roots as of old, and long after the superstructure has disappeared

posterity remark its dent in the earth. The house is still but a

sort of porch at the entrance of a burrow.

At length, in the beginning of May, with the help of some of my

acquaintances, rather to improve so good an occasion for

neighborliness than from any necessity, I set up the frame of my

house. No man was ever more honored in the character of his

raisers

than I. They are destined, I trust, to assist at the raising of

loftier structures one day. I began to occupy my house on the 4th

of July, as soon as it was boarded and roofed, for the boards were

carefully feather-edged and lapped, so that it was perfectly

impervious to rain, but before boarding I laid the foundation of a

chimney at one end, bringing two cartloads of stones up the hill

from the pond in my arms. I built the chimney after my hoeing in

the fall, before a fire became necessary for warmth, doing my

cooking in the meanwhile out of doors on the ground, early in the

morning: which mode I still think is in some respects more

convenient and agreeable than the usual one. When it stormed

before

my bread was baked, I fixed a few boards over the fire, and sat

under them to watch my loaf, and passed some pleasant hours in

that

way. In those days, when my hands were much employed, I read

but

little, but the least scraps of paper which lay on the ground, my

holder, or tablecloth, afforded me as much entertainment, in fact

answered the same purpose as the Iliad.

It would be worth the while to build still more deliberately

than I did, considering, for instance, what foundation a door, a

window, a cellar, a garret, have in the nature of man, and perchance

never raising any superstructure until we found a better reason for

it than our temporal necessities even. There is some of the same

fitness in a man's building his own house that there is in a bird's

building its own nest. Who knows but if men constructed their

dwellings with their own hands, and provided food for themselves

and

families simply and honestly enough, the poetic faculty would be

universally developed, as birds universally sing when they are so

engaged? But alas! we do like cowbirds and cuckoos, which lay

their

eggs in nests which other birds have built, and cheer no traveller

with their chattering and unmusical notes. Shall we forever resign

the pleasure of construction to the carpenter? What does

architecture amount to in the experience of the mass of men? I

never in all my walks came across a man engaged in so simple and

natural an occupation as building his house. We belong to the

community. It is not the tailor alone who is the ninth part of a

man; it is as much the preacher, and the merchant, and the farmer.

Where is this division of labor to end? and what object does it

finally serve? No doubt another may also think for me; but it is

not therefore desirable that he should do so to the exclusion of my

thinking for myself.

True, there are architects so called in this country, and I have

heard of one at least possessed with the idea of making

architectural ornaments have a core of truth, a necessity, and hence

a beauty, as if it were a revelation to him. All very well perhaps

from his point of view, but only a little better than the common

dilettantism. A sentimental reformer in architecture, he began at

the cornice, not at the foundation. It was only how to put a core
of truth within the ornaments, that every sugarplum, in fact, might

have an almond or caraway seed in it -- though I hold that almonds

are most wholesome without the sugar -- and not how the

inhabitant,

the indweller, might build truly within and without, and let the

ornaments take care of themselves. What reasonable man ever

supposed that ornaments were something outward and in the skin

merely -- that the tortoise got his spotted shell, or the shell-fish

its mother-o'-pearl tints, by such a contract as the inhabitants of

Broadway their Trinity Church? But a man has no more to do with

the

style of architecture of his house than a tortoise with that of its

shell: nor need the soldier be so idle as to try to paint the

precise color of his virtue on his standard. The enemy will find it

out. He may turn pale when the trial comes. This man seemed

to me

to lean over the cornice, and timidly whisper his half truth to the

rude occupants who really knew it better than he. What of

architectural beauty I now see, I know has gradually grown from

within outward, out of the necessities and character of the

indweller, who is the only builder -- out of some unconscious

truthfulness, and nobleness, without ever a thought for the

appearance and whatever additional beauty of this kind is destined

to be produced will be preceded by a like unconscious beauty of

life. The most interesting dwellings in this country, as the

painter knows, are the most unpretending, humble log huts and

cottages of the poor commonly; it is the life of the inhabitants

whose shells they are, and not any peculiarity in their surfaces

merely, which makes them picturesque; and equally interesting will

be the citizen's suburban box, when his life shall be as simple and

as agreeable to the imagination, and there is as little straining

after effect in the style of his dwelling. A great proportion of

architectural ornaments are literally hollow, and a September gale

would strip them off, like borrowed plumes, without injury to the

substantials. They can do without architecture who have no olives

nor wines in the cellar. What if an equal ado were made about the

ornaments of style in literature, and the architects of our bibles

spent as much time about their cornices as the architects of our

churches do? So are made the belles-lettres and the beaux-arts

and

their professors. Much it concerns a man, forsooth, how a few

sticks are slanted over him or under him, and what colors are

daubed

upon his box. It would signify somewhat, if, in any earnest sense,
he slanted them and daubed it; but the spirit having departed out of

the tenant, it is of a piece with constructing his own coffin -- the

architecture of the grave -- and "carpenter" is but another name for

"coffin-maker." One man says, in his despair or indifference to

life, take up a handful of the earth at your feet, and paint your

house that color. Is he thinking of his last and narrow house?

Toss up a copper for it as well. What an abundance of leisure be

must have! Why do you take up a handful of dirt? Better paint

your

house your own complexion; let it turn pale or blush for you. An

enterprise to improve the style of cottage architecture! When you

have got my ornaments ready, I will wear them.

Before winter I built a chimney, and shingled the sides of my

house, which were already impervious to rain, with imperfect and

sappy shingles made of the first slice of the log, whose edges I was

obliged to straighten with a plane.

I have thus a tight shingled and plastered house, ten feet wide

by fifteen long, and eight-feet posts, with a garret and a closet, a

large window on each side, two trap doors, one door at the end,

and

a brick fireplace opposite. The exact cost of my house, paying the

usual price for such materials as I used, but not counting the work,
all of which was done by myself, was as follows; and I give the

details because very few are able to tell exactly what their houses

cost, and fewer still, if any, the separate cost of the various

materials which compose them:--

Boards .......................... $ 8.03+, mostly shanty boards.

Refuse shingles for roof sides ... 4.00

Laths ............................ 1.25

Two second-hand windows

with glass .................... 2.43

One thousand old brick ........... 4.00

Two casks of lime ................ 2.40 That was high.

Hair ............................. 0.31 More than I needed.

Mantle-tree iron ................. 0.15

Nails ............................ 3.90

Hinges and screws ................ 0.14

Latch ............................ 0.10

Chalk ............................ 0.01

Transportation ................... 1.40 I carried a good part

------- on my back.

In all ...................... $28.12+

 These are all the materials, excepting the timber, stones, and

sand, which I claimed by squatter's right. I have also a small

woodshed adjoining, made chiefly of the stuff which was left after

building the house.

I intend to build me a house which will surpass any on the

main

street in Concord in grandeur and luxury, as soon as it pleases me

as much and will cost me no more than my present one.

I thus found that the student who wishes for a shelter can

obtain one for a lifetime at an expense not greater than the rent

which he now pays annually. If I seem to boast more than is

becoming, my excuse is that I brag for humanity rather than for

myself; and my shortcomings and inconsistencies do not affect the

truth of my statement. Notwithstanding much cant and hypocrisy

--

chaff which I find it difficult to separate from my wheat, but for

which I am as sorry as any man -- I will breathe freely and stretch

myself in this respect, it is such a relief to both the moral and

physical system; and I am resolved that I will not through humility

become the devil's attorney. I will endeavor to speak a good word

for the truth. At Cambridge College the mere rent of a student's

room, which is only a little larger than my own, is thirty dollars

each year, though the corporation had the advantage of building

thirty-two side by side and under one roof, and the occupant suffers

the inconvenience of many and noisy neighbors, and perhaps a

residence in the fourth story. I cannot but think that if we had

more true wisdom in these respects, not only less education would

be

needed, because, forsooth, more would already have been

acquired,

but the pecuniary expense of getting an education would in a great

measure vanish. Those conveniences which the student requires

at

Cambridge or elsewhere cost him or somebody else ten times as

great

a sacrifice of life as they would with proper management on both

sides. Those things for which the most money is demanded are

never

the things which the student most wants. Tuition, for instance, is

an important item in the term bill, while for the far more valuable

education which he gets by associating with the most cultivated of

his contemporaries no charge is made. The mode of founding a

college is, commonly, to get up a subscription of dollars and cents,

and then, following blindly the principles of a division of labor to

its extreme -- a principle which should never be followed but with

circumspection -- to call in a contractor who makes this a subject

of speculation, and he employs Irishmen or other operatives

actually

to lay the foundations, while the students that are to be are said

to be fitting themselves for it; and for these oversights successive

generations have to pay. I think that it would be better than this,

for the students, or those who desire to be benefited by it, even to

lay the foundation themselves. The student who secures his

coveted

leisure and retirement by systematically shirking any labor

necessary to man obtains but an ignoble and unprofitable leisure,

defrauding himself of the experience which alone can make leisure

fruitful. "But," says one, "you do not mean that the students

should go to work with their hands instead of their heads?" I do

not mean that exactly, but I mean something which he might think a

good deal like that; I mean that they should not play life, or study

it merely, while the community supports them at this expensive

game,

but earnestly live it from beginning to end. How could youths

better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of

living? Methinks this would exercise their minds as much as

mathematics. If I wished a boy to know something about the arts

and

sciences, for instance, I would not pursue the common course,

which

is merely to send him into the neighborhood of some professor,

where

anything is professed and practised but the art of life; -- to

survey the world through a telescope or a microscope, and never

with

his natural eye; to study chemistry, and not learn how his bread is

made, or mechanics, and not learn how it is earned; to discover new

satellites to Neptune, and not detect the motes in his eyes, or to

what vagabond he is a satellite himself; or to be devoured by the

monsters that swarm all around him, while contemplating the

monsters

in a drop of vinegar. Which would have advanced the most at the

end

of a month -- the boy who had made his own jackknife from the ore

which he had dug and smelted, reading as much as would be

necessary

for this -- or the boy who had attended the lectures on metallurgy

at the Institute in the meanwhile, and had received a Rodgers'

penknife from his father? Which would be most likely to cut his

fingers?... To my astonishment I was informed on leaving college

that I had studied navigation! -- why, if I had taken one turn down

the harbor I should have known more about it. Even the poor

student

studies and is taught only political economy, while that economy of

living which is synonymous with philosophy is not even sincerely

professed in our colleges. The consequence is, that while he is

reading Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Say, he runs his father in debt

irretrievably.

As with our colleges, so with a hundred "modern

improvements";

there is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive

advance. The devil goes on exacting compound interest to the last

for his early share and numerous succeeding investments in them.

Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our

attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an

unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive

at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste

to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine

and

Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. Either

is

in such a predicament as the man who was earnest to be introduced

to

a distinguished deaf woman, but when he was presented, and one

end

of her ear trumpet was put into his hand, had nothing to say. As if

the main object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly. We are

eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some

weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak

through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the

Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough. After all, the man

whose

horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important

messages; he is not an evangelist, nor does he come round eating

locusts and wild honey. I doubt if Flying Childers ever carried a

peck of corn to mill.

One says to me, "I wonder that you do not lay up money; you

love

to travel; you might take the cars and go to Fitchburg today and see

the country." But I am wiser than that. I have learned that the

swiftest traveller is he that goes afoot. I say to my friend,

Suppose we try who will get there first. The distance is thirty
miles; the fare ninety cents. That is almost a day's wages. I

remember when wages were sixty cents a day for laborers on this

very

road. Well, I start now on foot, and get there before night; I have

travelled at that rate by the week together. You will in the

meanwhile have earned your fare, and arrive there some time

tomorrow, or possibly this evening, if you are lucky enough to get a

job in season. Instead of going to Fitchburg, you will be working

here the greater part of the day. And so, if the railroad reached

round the world, I think that I should keep ahead of you; and as for

seeing the country and getting experience of that kind, I should

have to cut your acquaintance altogether.

Such is the universal law, which no man can ever outwit, and

with regard to the railroad even we may say it is as broad as it is

long. To make a railroad round the world available to all mankind

is equivalent to grading the whole surface of the planet. Men have

an indistinct notion that if they keep up this activity of joint

stocks and spades long enough all will at length ride somewhere, in

next to no time, and for nothing; but though a crowd rushes to the

depot, and the conductor shouts "All aboard!" when the smoke is

blown away and the vapor condensed, it will be perceived that a

few
are riding, but the rest are run over -- and it will be called, and

will be, "A melancholy accident." No doubt they can ride at last

who shall have earned their fare, that is, if they survive so long,

but they will probably have lost their elasticity and desire to

travel by that time. This spending of the best part of one's life

earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the

least valuable part of it reminds me of the Englishman who went to

India to make a fortune first, in order that he might return to

England and live the life of a poet. He should have gone up garret

at once. "What!" exclaim a million Irishmen starting up from all

the shanties in the land, "is not this railroad which we have built

a good thing?" Yes, I answer, comparatively good, that is, you

might have done worse; but I wish, as you are brothers of mine, that

you could have spent your time better than digging in this dirt.

Before I finished my house, wishing to earn ten or twelve

dollars by some honest and agreeable method, in order to meet my

unusual expenses, I planted about two acres and a half of light and

sandy soil near it chiefly with beans, but also a small part with

potatoes, corn, peas, and turnips. The whole lot contains eleven

acres, mostly growing up to pines and hickories, and was sold the

preceding season for eight dollars and eight cents an acre. One

farmer said that it was "good for nothing but to raise cheeping
squirrels on." I put no manure whatever on this land, not being

the

owner, but merely a squatter, and not expecting to cultivate so

much

again, and I did not quite hoe it all once. I got out several cords

of stumps in plowing, which supplied me with fuel for a long time,

and left small circles of virgin mould, easily distinguishable

through the summer by the greater luxuriance of the beans there.

The dead and for the most part unmerchantable wood behind my

house,

and the driftwood from the pond, have supplied the remainder of

my

fuel. I was obliged to hire a team and a man for the plowing,

though I held the plow myself. My farm outgoes for the first

season

were, for implements, seed, work, etc., $14.72+. The seed corn

was

given me. This never costs anything to speak of, unless you plant

more than enough. I got twelve bushels of beans, and eighteen

bushels of potatoes, beside some peas and sweet corn. The yellow

corn and turnips were too late to come to anything. My whole

income
from the farm was

$ 23.44

Deducting the outgoes ............ 14.72+

-------

There are left .................. $ 8.71+

beside produce consumed and on hand at the time this estimate

was

made of the value of $4.50 -- the amount on hand much more than

balancing a little grass which I did not raise. All things

considered, that is, considering the importance of a man's soul and

of today, notwithstanding the short time occupied by my

experiment,

nay, partly even because of its transient character, I believe that

that was doing better than any farmer in Concord did that year.

The next year I did better still, for I spaded up all the land

which I required, about a third of an acre, and I learned from the

experience of both years, not being in the least awed by many

celebrated works on husbandry, Arthur Young among the rest, that

if

one would live simply and eat only the crop which he raised, and

raise no more than he ate, and not exchange it for an insufficient

quantity of more luxurious and expensive things, he would need to

cultivate only a few rods of ground, and that it would be cheaper to

spade up that than to use oxen to plow it, and to select a fresh

spot from time to time than to manure the old, and he could do all

his necessary farm work as it were with his left hand at odd hours

in the summer; and thus he would not be tied to an ox, or horse, or

cow, or pig, as at present. I desire to speak impartially on this

point, and as one not interested in the success or failure of the

present economical and social arrangements. I was more

independent

than any farmer in Concord, for I was not anchored to a house or

farm, but could follow the bent of my genius, which is a very

crooked one, every moment. Beside being better off than they

already, if my house had been burned or my crops had failed, I

should have been nearly as well off as before.

I am wont to think that men are not so much the keepers of

herds

as herds are the keepers of men, the former are so much the freer.

Men and oxen exchange work; but if we consider necessary work

only,

the oxen will be seen to have greatly the advantage, their farm is

so much the larger. Man does some of his part of the exchange
work

in his six weeks of haying, and it is no boy's play. Certainly no

nation that lived simply in all respects, that is, no nation of

philosophers, would commit so great a blunder as to use the labor

of

animals. True, there never was and is not likely soon to be a

nation of philosophers, nor am I certain it is desirable that there

should be. However, I should never have broken a horse or bull

and

taken him to board for any work he might do for me, for fear I

should become a horseman or a herdsman merely; and if society

seems

to be the gainer by so doing, are we certain that what is one man's

gain is not another's loss, and that the stable-boy has equal cause

with his master to be satisfied? Granted that some public works

would not have been constructed without this aid, and let man

share

the glory of such with the ox and horse; does it follow that he

could not have accomplished works yet more worthy of himself in

that

case? When men begin to do, not merely unnecessary or artistic,

but
luxurious and idle work, with their assistance, it is inevitable

that a few do all the exchange work with the oxen, or, in other

words, become the slaves of the strongest. Man thus not only

works

for the animal within him, but, for a symbol of this, he works for

the animal without him. Though we have many substantial houses

of

brick or stone, the prosperity of the farmer is still measured by

the degree to which the barn overshadows the house. This town

is

said to have the largest houses for oxen, cows, and horses

hereabouts, and it is not behindhand in its public buildings; but

there are very few halls for free worship or free speech in this

county. It should not be by their architecture, but why not even by

their power of abstract thought, that nations should seek to

commemorate themselves? How much more admirable the

Bhagvat-Geeta

than all the ruins of the East! Towers and temples are the luxury

of princes. A simple and independent mind does not toil at the

bidding of any prince. Genius is not a retainer to any emperor, nor

is its material silver, or gold, or marble, except to a trifling

extent. To what end, pray, is so much stone hammered? In

Arcadia,

when I was there, I did not see any hammering stone. Nations are

possessed with an insane ambition to perpetuate the memory of

themselves by the amount of hammered stone they leave. What if

equal pains were taken to smooth and polish their manners? One

piece of good sense would be more memorable than a monument

as high

as the moon. I love better to see stones in place. The grandeur

of

Thebes was a vulgar grandeur. More sensible is a rod of stone wall

that bounds an honest man's field than a hundred-gated Thebes

that

has wandered farther from the true end of life. The religion and

civilization which are barbaric and heathenish build splendid

temples; but what you might call Christianity does not. Most of

the

stone a nation hammers goes toward its tomb only. It buries itself

alive. As for the Pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them

so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded

enough

to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby,

whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the
Nile, and then given his body to the dogs. I might possibly invent

some excuse for them and him, but I have no time for it. As for

the

religion and love of art of the builders, it is much the same all

the world over, whether the building be an Egyptian temple or the

United States Bank. It costs more than it comes to. The

mainspring

is vanity, assisted by the love of garlic and bread and butter. Mr.

Balcom, a promising young architect, designs it on the back of his

Vitruvius, with hard pencil and ruler, and the job is let out to

Dobson & Sons, stonecutters. When the thirty centuries begin to

look down on it, mankind begin to look up at it. As for your high

towers and monuments, there was a crazy fellow once in this town

who

undertook to dig through to China, and he got so far that, as he

said, he heard the Chinese pots and kettles rattle; but I think that

I shall not go out of my way to admire the hole which he made.

Many

are concerned about the monuments of the West and the East -- to

know who built them. For my part, I should like to know who in

those days did not build them -- who were above such trifling. But

to proceed with my statistics.

 By surveying, carpentry, and day-labor of various other kinds in

the village in the meanwhile, for I have as many trades as fingers,

I had earned $13.34. The expense of food for eight months,

namely,

from July 4th to March 1st, the time when these estimates were

made,

though I lived there more than two years -- not counting potatoes, a

little green corn, and some peas, which I had raised, nor

considering the value of what was on hand at the last date -- was

Rice .................... $ 1.73 1/2

Molasses ................. 1.73 Cheapest form of the

saccharine.

Rye meal ................. 1.04 3/4

Indian meal .............. 0.99 3/4 Cheaper than rye.

Pork ..................... 0.22

All experiments which failed:

Flour .................... 0.88 Costs more than Indian meal,

both money and

trouble.

Sugar .................... 0.80

Lard ..................... 0.65

 Apples ................... 0.25

Dried apple .............. 0.22

Sweet potatoes ........... 0.10

One pumpkin .............. 0.06

One watermelon ........... 0.02

Salt ..................... 0.03

Yes, I did eat $8.74, all told; but I should not thus unblushingly

publish my guilt, if I did not know that most of my readers were

equally guilty with myself, and that their deeds would look no

better in print. The next year I sometimes caught a mess of fish

for my dinner, and once I went so far as to slaughter a woodchuck

which ravaged my bean-field -- effect his transmigration, as a

Tartar would say -- and devour him, partly for experiment's sake;

but though it afforded me a momentary enjoyment,

notwithstanding a

musky flavor, I saw that the longest use would not make that a good

practice, however it might seem to have your woodchucks ready

dressed by the village butcher.

Clothing and some incidental expenses within the same dates,

though little can be inferred from this item, amounted to

 $ 8.40-3/4

Oil and some household utensils ........ 2.00

So that all the pecuniary outgoes, excepting for washing and

mending, which for the most part were done out of the house, and

their bills have not yet been received -- and these are all and more

than all the ways by which money necessarily goes out in this part

of the world -- were

House ................................. $ 28.12+

Farm one year ........................... 14.72+

Food eight months ....................... 8.74

Clothing, etc., eight months ............ 8.40-3/4

Oil, etc., eight months ................. 2.00

-----------

In all ............................ $ 61.99-3/4

I address myself now to those of my readers who have a living to

get. And to meet this I have for farm produce sold

$ 23.44

Earned by day-labor .................... 13.34

 -------

In all ............................ $ 36.78,

which subtracted from the sum of the outgoes leaves a balance of

$25.21 3/4 on the one side -- this being very nearly the means with

which I started, and the measure of expenses to be incurred -- and

on the other, beside the leisure and independence and health thus

secured, a comfortable house for me as long as I choose to occupy

it.

These statistics, however accidental and therefore

uninstructive

they may appear, as they have a certain completeness, have a

certain

value also. Nothing was given me of which I have not rendered

some

account. It appears from the above estimate, that my food alone

cost me in money about twenty-seven cents a week. It was, for

nearly two years after this, rye and Indian meal without yeast,

potatoes, rice, a very little salt pork, molasses, and salt; and my

drink, water. It was fit that I should live on rice, mainly, who

love so well the philosophy of India. To meet the objections of

some inveterate cavillers, I may as well state, that if I dined out

occasionally, as I always had done, and I trust shall have

opportunities to do again, it was frequently to the detriment of my

domestic arrangements. But the dining out, being, as I have

stated,

a constant element, does not in the least affect a comparative

statement like this.

I learned from my two years' experience that it would cost

incredibly little trouble to obtain one's necessary food, even in

this latitude; that a man may use as simple a diet as the animals,

and yet retain health and strength. I have made a satisfactory

dinner, satisfactory on several accounts, simply off a dish of

purslane (Portulaca oleracea) which I gathered in my cornfield,

boiled and salted. I give the Latin on account of the savoriness of

the trivial name. And pray what more can a reasonable man

desire,

in peaceful times, in ordinary noons, than a sufficient number of

ears of green sweet corn boiled, with the addition of salt? Even

the little variety which I used was a yielding to the demands of

appetite, and not of health. Yet men have come to such a pass

that

they frequently starve, not for want of necessaries, but for want of

luxuries; and I know a good woman who thinks that her son lost his
life because he took to drinking water only.

The reader will perceive that I am treating the subject rather

from an economic than a dietetic point of view, and he will not

venture to put my abstemiousness to the test unless he has a

well-stocked larder.

Bread I at first made of pure Indian meal and salt, genuine

hoe-cakes, which I baked before my fire out of doors on a shingle or

the end of a stick of timber sawed off in building my house; but it

was wont to get smoked and to have a piny flavor, I tried flour

also; but have at last found a mixture of rye and Indian meal most

convenient and agreeable. In cold weather it was no little

amusement to bake several small loaves of this in succession,

tending and turning them as carefully as an Egyptian his hatching

eggs. They were a real cereal fruit which I ripened, and they had

to my senses a fragrance like that of other noble fruits, which I

kept in as long as possible by wrapping them in cloths. I made a

study of the ancient and indispensable art of bread-making,

consulting such authorities as offered, going back to the primitive

days and first invention of the unleavened kind, when from the

wildness of nuts and meats men first reached the mildness and

refinement of this diet, and travelling gradually down in my studies

through that accidental souring of the dough which, it is supposed,

taught the leavening process, and through the various

fermentations

thereafter, till I came to "good, sweet, wholesome bread," the staff

of life. Leaven, which some deem the soul of bread, the spiritus

which fills its cellular tissue, which is religiously preserved like

the vestal fire -- some precious bottleful, I suppose, first brought

over in the Mayflower, did the business for America, and its

influence is still rising, swelling, spreading, in cerealian billows

over the land -- this seed I regularly and faithfully procured from

the village, till at length one morning I forgot the rules, and

scalded my yeast; by which accident I discovered that even this was

not indispensable -- for my discoveries were not by the synthetic

but analytic process -- and I have gladly omitted it since, though

most housewives earnestly assured me that safe and wholesome

bread

without yeast might not be, and elderly people prophesied a speedy

decay of the vital forces. Yet I find it not to be an essential

ingredient, and after going without it for a year am still in the

land of the living; and I am glad to escape the trivialness of

carrying a bottleful in my pocket, which would sometimes pop and

discharge its contents to my discomfiture. It is simpler and more

respectable to omit it. Man is an animal who more than any other
can adapt himself to all climates and circumstances. Neither did I

put any sal-soda, or other acid or alkali, into my bread. It would

seem that I made it according to the recipe which Marcus Porcius

Cato gave about two centuries before Christ. "Panem depsticium

sic

facito. Manus mortariumque bene lavato. Farinam in mortarium

indito, aquae paulatim addito, subigitoque pulchre. Ubi bene

subegeris, defingito, coquitoque sub testu." Which I take to mean,

-- "Make kneaded bread thus. Wash your hands and trough well.

Put

the meal into the trough, add water gradually, and knead it

thoroughly. When you have kneaded it well, mould it, and bake it

under a cover," that is, in a baking kettle. Not a word about

leaven. But I did not always use this staff of life. At one time,

owing to the emptiness of my purse, I saw none of it for more than

month.

Every New Englander might easily raise all his own breadstuffs

in this land of rye and Indian corn, and not depend on distant and

fluctuating markets for them. Yet so far are we from simplicity and

independence that, in Concord, fresh and sweet meal is rarely sold

in the shops, and hominy and corn in a still coarser form are hardly
used by any. For the most part the farmer gives to his cattle and

hogs the grain of his own producing, and buys flour, which is at

least no more wholesome, at a greater cost, at the store. I saw

that I could easily raise my bushel or two of rye and Indian corn,

for the former will grow on the poorest land, and the latter does

not require the best, and grind them in a hand-mill, and so do

without rice and pork; and if I must have some concentrated sweet,

found by experiment that I could make a very good molasses either

of

pumpkins or beets, and I knew that I needed only to set out a few

maples to obtain it more easily still, and while these were growing

I could use various substitutes beside those which I have named.

"For," as the Forefathers sang,--

"we can make liquor to sweeten our lips

Of pumpkins and parsnips and walnut-tree chips."

Finally, as for salt, that grossest of groceries, to obtain this

might be a fit occasion for a visit to the seashore, or, if I did

without it altogether, I should probably drink the less water. I do

not learn that the Indians ever troubled themselves to go after it.
 Thus I could avoid all trade and barter, so far as my food was

concerned, and having a shelter already, it would only remain to get

clothing and fuel. The pantaloons which I now wear were woven

in a

farmer's family -- thank Heaven there is so much virtue still in

man; for I think the fall from the farmer to the operative as great

and memorable as that from the man to the farmer; -- and in a new

country, fuel is an encumbrance. As for a habitat, if I were not

permitted still to squat, I might purchase one acre at the same

price for which the land I cultivated was sold -- namely, eight

dollars and eight cents. But as it was, I considered that I

enhanced the value of the land by squatting on it.

There is a certain class of unbelievers who sometimes ask me

such questions as, if I think that I can live on vegetable food

alone; and to strike at the root of the matter at once -- for the

root is faith -- I am accustomed to answer such, that I can live on

board nails. If they cannot understand that, they cannot

understand

much that I have to say. For my part, I am glad to bear of

experiments of this kind being tried; as that a young man tried for

a fortnight to live on hard, raw corn on the ear, using his teeth

for all mortar. The squirrel tribe tried the same and succeeded.
The human race is interested in these experiments, though a few

old

women who are incapacitated for them, or who own their thirds in

mills, may be alarmed.

My furniture, part of which I made myself -- and the rest cost

me nothing of which I have not rendered an account -- consisted of

bed, a table, a desk, three chairs, a looking-glass three inches in

diameter, a pair of tongs and andirons, a kettle, a skillet, and a

frying-pan, a dipper, a wash-bowl, two knives and forks, three

plates, one cup, one spoon, a jug for oil, a jug for molasses, and a

japanned lamp. None is so poor that he need sit on a pumpkin.

That

is shiftlessness. There is a plenty of such chairs as I like best

in the village garrets to be had for taking them away. Furniture!

Thank God, I can sit and I can stand without the aid of a furniture

warehouse. What man but a philosopher would not be ashamed

to see

his furniture packed in a cart and going up country exposed to the

light of heaven and the eyes of men, a beggarly account of empty

boxes? That is Spaulding's furniture. I could never tell from

inspecting such a load whether it belonged to a so-called rich man

or a poor one; the owner always seemed poverty-stricken. Indeed,

the more you have of such things the poorer you are. Each load

looks as if it contained the contents of a dozen shanties; and if

one shanty is poor, this is a dozen times as poor. Pray, for what

do we move ever but to get rid of our furniture, our exuvioe: at

last to go from this world to another newly furnished, and leave

this to be burned? It is the same as if all these traps were

buckled to a man's belt, and he could not move over the rough

country where our lines are cast without dragging them -- dragging

his trap. He was a lucky fox that left his tail in the trap. The

muskrat will gnaw his third leg off to be free. No wonder man has

lost his elasticity. How often he is at a dead set! "Sir, if I may

be so bold, what do you mean by a dead set?" If you are a seer,

whenever you meet a man you will see all that he owns, ay, and

much

that he pretends to disown, behind him, even to his kitchen

furniture and all the trumpery which he saves and will not burn, and

he will appear to be harnessed to it and making what headway he

can.

I think that the man is at a dead set who has got through a

knot-hole or gateway where his sledge load of furniture cannot

follow him. I cannot but feel compassion when I hear some trig,
compact-looking man, seemingly free, all girded and ready, speak of

his "furniture," as whether it is insured or not. "But what shall I

do with my furniture?" -- My gay butterfly is entangled in a

spider's web then. Even those who seem for a long while not to

have

any, if you inquire more narrowly you will find have some stored in

somebody's barn. I look upon England today as an old gentleman

who

is travelling with a great deal of baggage, trumpery which has

accumulated from long housekeeping, which he has not the courage

to

burn; great trunk, little trunk, bandbox, and bundle. Throw away

the first three at least. It would surpass the powers of a well man

nowadays to take up his bed and walk, and I should certainly advise

a sick one to lay down his bed and run. When I have met an

immigrant tottering under a bundle which contained his all --

looking like an enormous wen which had grown out of the nape of

his

neck -- I have pitied him, not because that was his all, but because

he had all that to carry. If I have got to drag my trap, I will

take care that it be a light one and do not nip me in a vital part.

But perchance it would be wisest never to put one's paw into it.
 I would observe, by the way, that it costs me nothing for

curtains, for I have no gazers to shut out but the sun and moon, and

I am willing that they should look in. The moon will not sour milk

nor taint meat of mine, nor will the sun injure my furniture or fade

my carpet; and if he is sometimes too warm a friend, I find it still

better economy to retreat behind some curtain which nature has

provided, than to add a single item to the details of housekeeping.

A lady once offered me a mat, but as I had no room to spare within

the house, nor time to spare within or without to shake it, I

declined it, preferring to wipe my feet on the sod before my door.

It is best to avoid the beginnings of evil.

Not long since I was present at the auction of a deacon's

effects, for his life had not been ineffectual:--

"The evil that men do lives after them."

As usual, a great proportion was trumpery which had begun to

accumulate in his father's day. Among the rest was a dried

tapeworm. And now, after lying half a century in his garret and

other dust holes, these things were not burned; instead of a

bonfire, or purifying destruction of them, there was an auction, or

increasing of them. The neighbors eagerly collected to view them,

bought them all, and carefully transported them to their garrets and

dust holes, to lie there till their estates are settled, when they

will start again. When a man dies he kicks the dust.

The customs of some savage nations might, perchance, be

profitably imitated by us, for they at least go through the

semblance of casting their slough annually; they have the idea of

the thing, whether they have the reality or not. Would it not be

well if we were to celebrate such a "busk," or "feast of first

fruits," as Bartram describes to have been the custom of the

Mucclasse Indians? "When a town celebrates the busk," says he,

"having previously provided themselves with new clothes, new pots,

pans, and other household utensils and furniture, they collect all

their worn out clothes and other despicable things, sweep and

cleanse their houses, squares, and the whole town of their filth,

which with all the remaining grain and other old provisions they

cast together into one common heap, and consume it with fire.

After

having taken medicine, and fasted for three days, all the fire in

the town is extinguished. During this fast they abstain from the

gratification of every appetite and passion whatever. A general

amnesty is proclaimed; all malefactors may return to their town."

"On the fourth morning, the high priest, by rubbing dry wood
together, produces new fire in the public square, from whence

every

habitation in the town is supplied with the new and pure flame."

They then feast on the new corn and fruits, and dance and sing

for three days, "and the four following days they receive visits and

rejoice with their friends from neighboring towns who have in like

manner purified and prepared themselves."

The Mexicans also practised a similar purification at the end of

every fifty-two years, in the belief that it was time for the world

to come to an end.

I have scarcely heard of a truer sacrament, that is, as the

dictionary defines it, "outward and visible sign of an inward and

spiritual grace," than this, and I have no doubt that they were

originally inspired directly from Heaven to do thus, though they

have no Biblical record of the revelation.

For more than five years I maintained myself thus solely by the

labor of my hands, and I found that, by working about six weeks in a

year, I could meet all the expenses of living. The whole of my

winters, as well as most of my summers, I had free and clear for

study. I have thoroughly tried school-keeping, and found that my

expenses were in proportion, or rather out of proportion, to my

income, for I was obliged to dress and train, not to say think and
believe, accordingly, and I lost my time into the bargain. As I did

not teach for the good of my fellow-men, but simply for a

livelihood, this was a failure. I have tried trade but I found that

it would take ten years to get under way in that, and that then I

should probably be on my way to the devil. I was actually afraid

that I might by that time be doing what is called a good business.

When formerly I was looking about to see what I could do for a

living, some sad experience in conforming to the wishes of friends

being fresh in my mind to tax my ingenuity, I thought often and

seriously of picking huckleberries; that surely I could do, and its

small profits might suffice -- for my greatest skill has been to

want but little -- so little capital it required, so little

distraction from my wonted moods, I foolishly thought. While my

acquaintances went unhesitatingly into trade or the professions, I

contemplated this occupation as most like theirs; ranging the hills

all summer to pick the berries which came in my way, and

thereafter

carelessly dispose of them; so, to keep the flocks of Admetus. I

also dreamed that I might gather the wild herbs, or carry evergreens

to such villagers as loved to be reminded of the woods, even to the

city, by hay-cart loads. But I have since learned that trade curses

everything it handles; and though you trade in messages from

heaven,

the whole curse of trade attaches to the business.

As I preferred some things to others, and especially valued my

freedom, as I could fare hard and yet succeed well, I did not wish

to spend my time in earning rich carpets or other fine furniture, or

delicate cookery, or a house in the Grecian or the Gothic style just

yet. If there are any to whom it is no interruption to acquire

these things, and who know how to use them when acquired, I

relinquish to them the pursuit. Some are "industrious," and

appear

to love labor for its own sake, or perhaps because it keeps them out

of worse mischief; to such I have at present nothing to say. Those

who would not know what to do with more leisure than they now

enjoy,

I might advise to work twice as hard as they do -- work till they

pay for themselves, and get their free papers. For myself I found

that the occupation of a day-laborer was the most independent of

any, especially as it required only thirty or forty days in a year

to support one. The laborer's day ends with the going down of the

sun, and he is then free to devote himself to his chosen pursuit,

independent of his labor; but his employer, who speculates from

month to month, has no respite from one end of the year to the
other.

In short, I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to

maintain one's self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime,

if we will live simply and wisely; as the pursuits of the simpler

nations are still the sports of the more artificial. It is not

necessary that a man should earn his living by the sweat of his

brow, unless he sweats easier than I do.

One young man of my acquaintance, who has inherited some

acres,

told me that he thought he should live as I did, if he had the

means. I would not have any one adopt my mode of living on any

account; for, beside that before he has fairly learned it I may have

found out another for myself, I desire that there may be as many

different persons in the world as possible; but I would have each

one be very careful to find out and pursue his own way, and not his

father's or his mother's or his neighbor's instead. The youth may

build or plant or sail, only let him not be hindered from doing that

which he tells me he would like to do. It is by a mathematical

point only that we are wise, as the sailor or the fugitive slave

keeps the polestar in his eye; but that is sufficient guidance for

all our life. We may not arrive at our port within a calculable

period, but we would preserve the true course.

 Undoubtedly, in this case, what is true for one is truer still

for a thousand, as a large house is not proportionally more

expensive than a small one, since one roof may cover, one cellar

underlie, and one wall separate several apartments. But for my

part, I preferred the solitary dwelling. Moreover, it will commonly

be cheaper to build the whole yourself than to convince another of

the advantage of the common wall; and when you have done this,

the

common partition, to be much cheaper, must be a thin one, and

that

other may prove a bad neighbor, and also not keep his side in

repair. The only co-operation which is commonly possible is

exceedingly partial and superficial; and what little true

co-operation there is, is as if it were not, being a harmony

inaudible to men. If a man has faith, he will co-operate with equal

faith everywhere; if he has not faith, he will continue to live like

the rest of the world, whatever company he is joined to. To

co-operate in the highest as well as the lowest sense, means to get

our living together. I heard it proposed lately that two young men

should travel together over the world, the one without money,

earning his means as he went, before the mast and behind the plow,

the other carrying a bill of exchange in his pocket. It was easy to

see that they could not long be companions or co-operate, since

one

would not operate at all. They would part at the first interesting

crisis in their adventures. Above all, as I have implied, the man

who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another

must

wait till that other is ready, and it may be a long time before they

get off.

But all this is very selfish, I have heard some of my townsmen

say. I confess that I have hitherto indulged very little in

philanthropic enterprises. I have made some sacrifices to a sense

of duty, and among others have sacrificed this pleasure also.

There

are those who have used all their arts to persuade me to undertake

the support of some poor family in the town; and if I had nothing to

do -- for the devil finds employment for the idle -- I might try my

hand at some such pastime as that. However, when I have thought

to

indulge myself in this respect, and lay their Heaven under an

obligation by maintaining certain poor persons in all respects as

comfortably as I maintain myself, and have even ventured so far as

to make them the offer, they have one and all unhesitatingly
preferred to remain poor. While my townsmen and women are

devoted

in so many ways to the good of their fellows, I trust that one at

least may be spared to other and less humane pursuits. You must

have a genius for charity as well as for anything else. As for

Doing-good, that is one of the professions which are full.

Moreover, I have tried it fairly, and, strange as it may seem, am

satisfied that it does not agree with my constitution. Probably I

should not consciously and deliberately forsake my particular

calling to do the good which society demands of me, to save the

universe from annihilation; and I believe that a like but infinitely

greater steadfastness elsewhere is all that now preserves it. But I

would not stand between any man and his genius; and to him who

does

this work, which I decline, with his whole heart and soul and life,

I would say, Persevere, even if the world call it doing evil, as it

is most likely they will.

I am far from supposing that my case is a peculiar one; no

doubt

many of my readers would make a similar defence. At doing

something

-- I will not engage that my neighbors shall pronounce it good -- I

do not hesitate to say that I should be a capital fellow to hire;

but what that is, it is for my employer to find out. What good I

do, in the common sense of that word, must be aside from my main

path, and for the most part wholly unintended. Men say,

practically, Begin where you are and such as you are, without aiming

mainly to become of more worth, and with kindness aforethought

go

about doing good. If I were to preach at all in this strain, I

should say rather, Set about being good. As if the sun should stop

when he had kindled his fires up to the splendor of a moon or a star

of the sixth magnitude, and go about like a Robin Goodfellow,

peeping in at every cottage window, inspiring lunatics, and tainting

meats, and making darkness visible, instead of steadily increasing

his genial heat and beneficence till he is of such brightness that

no mortal can look him in the face, and then, and in the meanwhile

too, going about the world in his own orbit, doing it good, or

rather, as a truer philosophy has discovered, the world going about

him getting good. When Phaeton, wishing to prove his heavenly

birth

by his beneficence, had the sun's chariot but one day, and drove out

of the beaten track, he burned several blocks of houses in the lower

streets of heaven, and scorched the surface of the earth, and dried
up every spring, and made the great desert of Sahara, till at length

Jupiter hurled him headlong to the earth with a thunderbolt, and

the

sun, through grief at his death, did not shine for a year.

There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness

tainted. It is human, it is divine, carrion. If I knew for a

certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious

design of doing me good, I should run for my life, as from that dry

and parching wind of the African deserts called the simoom, which

fills the mouth and nose and ears and eyes with dust till you are

suffocated, for fear that I should get some of his good done to me

-- some of its virus mingled with my blood. No -- in this case I

would rather suffer evil the natural way. A man is not a good man

to me because he will feed me if I should be starving, or warm me if

I should be freezing, or pull me out of a ditch if I should ever

fall into one. I can find you a Newfoundland dog that will do as

much. Philanthropy is not love for one's fellow-man in the

broadest

sense. Howard was no doubt an exceedingly kind and worthy man

in

his way, and has his reward; but, comparatively speaking, what are a

hundred Howards to us, if their philanthropy do not help us in our

best estate, when we are most worthy to be helped? I never heard

of

a philanthropic meeting in which it was sincerely proposed to do

any

good to me, or the like of me.

The Jesuits were quite balked by those Indians who, being

burned

at the stake, suggested new modes of torture to their tormentors.

Being superior to physical suffering, it sometimes chanced that they

were superior to any consolation which the missionaries could

offer;

and the law to do as you would be done by fell with less

persuasiveness on the ears of those who, for their part, did not

care how they were done by, who loved their enemies after a new

fashion, and came very near freely forgiving them all they did.

Be sure that you give the poor the aid they most need, though

it

be your example which leaves them far behind. If you give money,

spend yourself with it, and do not merely abandon it to them. We

make curious mistakes sometimes. Often the poor man is not so

cold

and hungry as he is dirty and ragged and gross. It is partly his

taste, and not merely his misfortune. If you give him money, he

will perhaps buy more rags with it. I was wont to pity the clumsy

Irish laborers who cut ice on the pond, in such mean and ragged

clothes, while I shivered in my more tidy and somewhat more

fashionable garments, till, one bitter cold day, one who had slipped

into the water came to my house to warm him, and I saw him strip

off

three pairs of pants and two pairs of stockings ere he got down to

the skin, though they were dirty and ragged enough, it is true, and

that he could afford to refuse the extra garments which I offered

him, he had so many intra ones. This ducking was the very thing

he

needed. Then I began to pity myself, and I saw that it would be a

greater charity to bestow on me a flannel shirt than a whole

slop-shop on him. There are a thousand hacking at the branches

of

evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who

bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is

doing

the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives

in vain to relieve. It is the pious slave-breeder devoting the

proceeds of every tenth slave to buy a Sunday's liberty for the

rest. Some show their kindness to the poor by employing them in

their kitchens. Would they not be kinder if they employed

themselves there? You boast of spending a tenth part of your

income

in charity; maybe you should spend the nine tenths so, and done

with

it. Society recovers only a tenth part of the property then. Is

this owing to the generosity of him in whose possession it is found,

or to the remissness of the officers of justice?

Philanthropy is almost the only virtue which is sufficiently

appreciated by mankind. Nay, it is greatly overrated; and it is our

selfishness which overrates it. A robust poor man, one sunny day

here in Concord, praised a fellow-townsman to me, because, as he

said, he was kind to the poor; meaning himself. The kind uncles

and

aunts of the race are more esteemed than its true spiritual fathers

and mothers. I once heard a reverend lecturer on England, a man

of

learning and intelligence, after enumerating her scientific,

literary, and political worthies, Shakespeare, Bacon, Cromwell,

Milton, Newton, and others, speak next of her Christian heroes,

whom, as if his profession required it of him, he elevated to a

place far above all the rest, as the greatest of the great. They

were Penn, Howard, and Mrs. Fry. Every one must feel the

falsehood

and cant of this. The last were not England's best men and

women;

only, perhaps, her best philanthropists.

I would not subtract anything from the praise that is due to

philanthropy, but merely demand justice for all who by their lives

and works are a blessing to mankind. I do not value chiefly a

man's

uprightness and benevolence, which are, as it were, his stem and

leaves. Those plants of whose greenness withered we make herb

tea

for the sick serve but a humble use, and are most employed by

quacks. I want the flower and fruit of a man; that some fragrance

be wafted over from him to me, and some ripeness flavor our

intercourse. His goodness must not be a partial and transitory act,

but a constant superfluity, which costs him nothing and of which he

is unconscious. This is a charity that hides a multitude of sins.

The philanthropist too often surrounds mankind with the

remembrance

of his own castoff griefs as an atmosphere, and calls it sympathy.

We should impart our courage, and not our despair, our health and

ease, and not our disease, and take care that this does not spread

by contagion. From what southern plains comes up the voice of

wailing? Under what latitudes reside the heathen to whom we

would

send light? Who is that intemperate and brutal man whom we

would

redeem? If anything ail a man, so that he does not perform his

functions, if he have a pain in his bowels even -- for that is the

seat of sympathy -- he forthwith sets about reforming -- the world.

Being a microcosm himself, he discovers -- and it is a true

discovery, and he is the man to make it -- that the world has been

eating green apples; to his eyes, in fact, the globe itself is a

great green apple, which there is danger awful to think of that the

children of men will nibble before it is ripe; and straightway his

drastic philanthropy seeks out the Esquimau and the Patagonian,

and

embraces the populous Indian and Chinese villages; and thus, by a

few years of philanthropic activity, the powers in the meanwhile

using him for their own ends, no doubt, he cures himself of his

dyspepsia, the globe acquires a faint blush on one or both of its

cheeks, as if it were beginning to be ripe, and life loses its

crudity and is once more sweet and wholesome to live. I never

dreamed of any enormity greater than I have committed. I never

knew, and never shall know, a worse man than myself.

I believe that what so saddens the reformer is not his sympathy

with his fellows in distress, but, though he be the holiest son of

God, is his private ail. Let this be righted, let the spring come

to him, the morning rise over his couch, and he will forsake his

generous companions without apology. My excuse for not

lecturing

against the use of tobacco is, that I never chewed it, that is a

penalty which reformed tobacco-chewers have to pay; though there

are

things enough I have chewed which I could lecture against. If you

should ever be betrayed into any of these philanthropies, do not let

your left hand know what your right hand does, for it is not worth

knowing. Rescue the drowning and tie your shoestrings. Take

your

time, and set about some free labor.

Our manners have been corrupted by communication with the

saints. Our hymn-books resound with a melodious cursing of God

and

enduring Him forever. One would say that even the prophets and
redeemers had rather consoled the fears than confirmed the hopes

of

man. There is nowhere recorded a simple and irrepressible

satisfaction with the gift of life, any memorable praise of God.

All health and success does me good, however far off and

withdrawn

it may appear; all disease and failure helps to make me sad and

does

me evil, however much sympathy it may have with me or I with it.

If, then, we would indeed restore mankind by truly Indian, botanic,

magnetic, or natural means, let us first be as simple and well as

Nature ourselves, dispel the clouds which hang over our own brows,

and take up a little life into our pores. Do not stay to be an

overseer of the poor, but endeavor to become one of the worthies

of

the world.

I read in the Gulistan, or Flower Garden, of Sheik Sadi of

Shiraz, that "they asked a wise man, saying: Of the many celebrated

trees which the Most High God has created lofty and umbrageous,

they

call none azad, or free, excepting the cypress, which bears no

fruit; what mystery is there in this? He replied, Each has its

appropriate produce, and appointed season, during the continuance

of

which it is fresh and blooming, and during their absence dry and

withered; to neither of which states is the cypress exposed, being

always flourishing; and of this nature are the azads, or religious

independents. -- Fix not thy heart on that which is transitory; for

the Dijlah, or Tigris, will continue to flow through Bagdad after

the race of caliphs is extinct: if thy hand has plenty, be liberal

as the date tree; but if it affords nothing to give away, be an

azad, or free man, like the cypress."

COMPLEMENTAL VERSES

The Pretensions of Poverty

Thou dost presume too much, poor needy wretch,

To claim a station in the firmament

Because thy humble cottage, or thy tub,

Nurses some lazy or pedantic virtue

In the cheap sunshine or by shady springs,

With roots and pot-herbs; where thy right hand,

Tearing those humane passions from the mind,

Upon whose stocks fair blooming virtues flourish,

Degradeth nature, and benumbeth sense,

And, Gorgon-like, turns active men to stone.

We not require the dull society

Of your necessitated temperance,

Or that unnatural stupidity

That knows nor joy nor sorrow; nor your forc'd

Falsely exalted passive fortitude

Above the active. This low abject brood,

That fix their seats in mediocrity,

Become your servile minds; but we advance

Such virtues only as admit excess,

Brave, bounteous acts, regal magnificence,

All-seeing prudence, magnanimity

That knows no bound, and that heroic virtue

For which antiquity hath left no name,

But patterns only, such as Hercules,

Achilles, Theseus. Back to thy loath'd cell;

And when thou seest the new enlightened sphere,

Study to know but what those worthies were.

T. CAREW

Where I Lived, and What I Lived For

 At a certain season of our life we are accustomed to consider

every spot as the possible site of a house. I have thus surveyed

the country on every side within a dozen miles of where I live. In

imagination I have bought all the farms in succession, for all were

to be bought, and I knew their price. I walked over each farmer's

premises, tasted his wild apples, discoursed on husbandry with him,

took his farm at his price, at any price, mortgaging it to him in my

mind; even put a higher price on it -- took everything but a deed of

it -- took his word for his deed, for I dearly love to talk --

cultivated it, and him too to some extent, I trust, and withdrew

when I had enjoyed it long enough, leaving him to carry it on. This

experience entitled me to be regarded as a sort of real-estate

broker by my friends. Wherever I sat, there I might live, and the

landscape radiated from me accordingly. What is a house but a

sedes, a seat? -- better if a country seat. I discovered many a

site for a house not likely to be soon improved, which some might

have thought too far from the village, but to my eyes the village

was too far from it. Well, there I might live, I said; and there I

did live, for an hour, a summer and a winter life; saw how I could

let the years run off, buffet the winter through, and see the spring

come in. The future inhabitants of this region, wherever they may
place their houses, may be sure that they have been anticipated.

An

afternoon sufficed to lay out the land into orchard, wood-lot, and

pasture, and to decide what fine oaks or pines should be left to

stand before the door, and whence each blasted tree could be seen

to

the best advantage; and then I let it lie, fallow, perchance, for a

man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can

afford to let alone.

My imagination carried me so far that I even had the refusal of

several farms -- the refusal was all I wanted -- but I never got my

fingers burned by actual possession. The nearest that I came to

actual possession was when I bought the Hollowell place, and had

begun to sort my seeds, and collected materials with which to make

wheelbarrow to carry it on or off with; but before the owner gave

me

a deed of it, his wife -- every man has such a wife -- changed her

mind and wished to keep it, and he offered me ten dollars to release

him. Now, to speak the truth, I had but ten cents in the world, and

it surpassed my arithmetic to tell, if I was that man who had ten

cents, or who had a farm, or ten dollars, or all together. However,

I let him keep the ten dollars and the farm too, for I had carried

it far enough; or rather, to be generous, I sold him the farm for

just what I gave for it, and, as he was not a rich man, made him a

present of ten dollars, and still had my ten cents, and seeds, and

materials for a wheelbarrow left. I found thus that I had been a

rich man without any damage to my poverty. But I retained the

landscape, and I have since annually carried off what it yielded

without a wheelbarrow. With respect to landscapes,

"I am monarch of all I survey,

My right there is none to dispute."

I have frequently seen a poet withdraw, having enjoyed the

most

valuable part of a farm, while the crusty farmer supposed that he

had got a few wild apples only. Why, the owner does not know it

for

many years when a poet has put his farm in rhyme, the most

admirable

kind of invisible fence, has fairly impounded it, milked it, skimmed

it, and got all the cream, and left the farmer only the skimmed

milk.
 The real attractions of the Hollowell farm, to me, were: its

complete retirement, being, about two miles from the village, half a

mile from the nearest neighbor, and separated from the highway by

broad field; its bounding on the river, which the owner said

protected it by its fogs from frosts in the spring, though that was

nothing to me; the gray color and ruinous state of the house and

barn, and the dilapidated fences, which put such an interval

between

me and the last occupant; the hollow and lichen-covered apple

trees,

nawed by rabbits, showing what kind of neighbors I should have;

but

above all, the recollection I had of it from my earliest voyages up

the river, when the house was concealed behind a dense grove of

red

maples, through which I heard the house-dog bark. I was in haste

to

buy it, before the proprietor finished getting out some rocks,

cutting down the hollow apple trees, and grubbing up some young

birches which had sprung up in the pasture, or, in short, had made

any more of his improvements. To enjoy these advantages I was

ready

to carry it on; like Atlas, to take the world on my shoulders -- I

never heard what compensation he received for that -- and do all

those things which had no other motive or excuse but that I might

pay for it and be unmolested in my possession of it; for I knew all

the while that it would yield the most abundant crop of the kind I

wanted, if I could only afford to let it alone. But it turned out

as I have said.

All that I could say, then, with respect to farming on a large

scale -- I have always cultivated a garden -- was, that I had had my

seeds ready. Many think that seeds improve with age. I have no

doubt that time discriminates between the good and the bad; and

when

at last I shall plant, I shall be less likely to be disappointed.

But I would say to my fellows, once for all, As long as possible

live free and uncommitted. It makes but little difference whether

you are committed to a farm or the county jail.

Old Cato, whose "De Re Rustica" is my "Cultivator," says -- and

the only translation I have seen makes sheer nonsense of the

passage

-- "When you think of getting a farm turn it thus in your mind, not

to buy greedily; nor spare your pains to look at it, and do not
think it enough to go round it once. The oftener you go there the

more it will please you, if it is good." I think I shall not buy

greedily, but go round and round it as long as I live, and be buried

in it first, that it may please me the more at last.

The present was my next experiment of this kind, which I

purpose

to describe more at length, for convenience putting the experience

of two years into one. As I have said, I do not propose to write an

ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the

morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up.

When first I took up my abode in the woods, that is, began to

spend my nights as well as days there, which, by accident, was on

Independence Day, or the Fourth of July, 1845, my house was not

finished for winter, but was merely a defence against the rain,

without plastering or chimney, the walls being of rough,

weather-stained boards, with wide chinks, which made it cool at

night. The upright white hewn studs and freshly planed door and

window casings gave it a clean and airy look, especially in the

morning, when its timbers were saturated with dew, so that I

fancied

that by noon some sweet gum would exude from them. To my

imagination it retained throughout the day more or less of this

auroral character, reminding me of a certain house on a mountain

which I had visited a year before. This was an airy and unplastered

cabin, fit to entertain a travelling god, and where a goddess might

trail her garments. The winds which passed over my dwelling were

such as sweep over the ridges of mountains, bearing the broken

strains, or celestial parts only, of terrestrial music. The morning

wind forever blows, the poem of creation is uninterrupted; but few

are the ears that hear it. Olympus is but the outside of the earth

everywhere.

The only house I had been the owner of before, if I except a

boat, was a tent, which I used occasionally when making excursions

in the summer, and this is still rolled up in my garret; but the

boat, after passing from hand to hand, has gone down the stream of

time. With this more substantial shelter about me, I had made

some

progress toward settling in the world. This frame, so slightly

clad, was a sort of crystallization around me, and reacted on the

builder. It was suggestive somewhat as a picture in outlines. I

did not need to go outdoors to take the air, for the atmosphere

within had lost none of its freshness. It was not so much within

doors as behind a door where I sat, even in the rainiest weather.

The Harivansa says, "An abode without birds is like a meat without
seasoning." Such was not my abode, for I found myself suddenly

neighbor to the birds; not by having imprisoned one, but having

caged myself near them. I was not only nearer to some of those

which commonly frequent the garden and the orchard, but to those

smaller and more thrilling songsters of the forest which never, or

rarely, serenade a villager -- the wood thrush, the veery, the

scarlet tanager, the field sparrow, the whip-poor-will, and many

others.

I was seated by the shore of a small pond, about a mile and a

half south of the village of Concord and somewhat higher than it, in

the midst of an extensive wood between that town and Lincoln, and

about two miles south of that our only field known to fame,

Concord

Battle Ground; but I was so low in the woods that the opposite

shore, half a mile off, like the rest, covered with wood, was my

most distant horizon. For the first week, whenever I looked out on

the pond it impressed me like a tarn high up on the side of a

mountain, its bottom far above the surface of other lakes, and, as

the sun arose, I saw it throwing off its nightly clothing of mist,

and here and there, by degrees, its soft ripples or its smooth

reflecting surface was revealed, while the mists, like ghosts, were

stealthily withdrawing in every direction into the woods, as at the

breaking up of some nocturnal conventicle. The very dew seemed

to

hang upon the trees later into the day than usual, as on the sides

of mountains.

This small lake was of most value as a neighbor in the intervals

of a gentle rain-storm in August, when, both air and water being

perfectly still, but the sky overcast, mid-afternoon had all the

serenity of evening, and the wood thrush sang around, and was

heard

from shore to shore. A lake like this is never smoother than at

such a time; and the clear portion of the air above it being,

shallow and darkened by clouds, the water, full of light and

reflections, becomes a lower heaven itself so much the more

important. From a hill-top near by, where the wood had been

recently cut off, there was a pleasing vista southward across the

pond, through a wide indentation in the hills which form the shore

there, where their opposite sides sloping toward each other

suggested a stream flowing out in that direction through a wooded

valley, but stream there was none. That way I looked between and

over the near green hills to some distant and higher ones in the

horizon, tinged with blue. Indeed, by standing on tiptoe I could

catch a glimpse of some of the peaks of the still bluer and more
distant mountain ranges in the northwest, those true-blue coins

from

heaven's own mint, and also of some portion of the village. But in

other directions, even from this point, I could not see over or

beyond the woods which surrounded me. It is well to have some

water

in your neighborhood, to give buoyancy to and float the earth.

One

value even of the smallest well is, that when you look into it you

see that earth is not continent but insular. This is as important

as that it keeps butter cool. When I looked across the pond from

this peak toward the Sudbury meadows, which in time of flood I

distinguished elevated perhaps by a mirage in their seething valley,

like a coin in a basin, all the earth beyond the pond appeared like

a thin crust insulated and floated even by this small sheet of

interverting water, and I was reminded that this on which I dwelt

was but dry land.

Though the view from my door was still more contracted, I did

not feel crowded or confined in the least. There was pasture

enough

for my imagination. The low shrub oak plateau to which the

opposite
shore arose stretched away toward the prairies of the West and the

steppes of Tartary, affording ample room for all the roving families

of men. "There are none happy in the world but beings who enjoy

freely a vast horizon" -- said Damodara, when his herds required

new

and larger pastures.

Both place and time were changed, and I dwelt nearer to those

parts of the universe and to those eras in history which had most

attracted me. Where I lived was as far off as many a region viewed

nightly by astronomers. We are wont to imagine rare and

delectable

places in some remote and more celestial corner of the system,

behind the constellation of Cassiopeia's Chair, far from noise and

disturbance. I discovered that my house actually had its site in

such a withdrawn, but forever new and unprofaned, part of the

universe. If it were worth the while to settle in those parts near

to the Pleiades or the Hyades, to Aldebaran or Altair, then I was

really there, or at an equal remoteness from the life which I had

left behind, dwindled and twinkling with as fine a ray to my nearest

neighbor, and to be seen only in moonless nights by him. Such

was

that part of creation where I had squatted;

 "There was a shepherd that did live,

And held his thoughts as high

As were the mounts whereon his flocks

Did hourly feed him by."

What should we think of the shepherd's life if his flocks always

wandered to higher pastures than his thoughts?

Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of

equal

simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself. I have

been as sincere a worshipper of Aurora as the Greeks. I got up

early and bathed in the pond; that was a religious exercise, and one

of the best things which I did. They say that characters were

engraven on the bathing tub of King Tchingthang to this effect:

"Renew thyself completely each day; do it again, and again, and

forever again." I can understand that. Morning brings back the

heroic ages. I was as much affected by the faint hum of a

mosquito

making its invisible and unimaginable tour through my apartment at

earliest dawn, when I was sitting with door and windows open, as I

could be by any trumpet that ever sang of fame. It was Homer's

requiem; itself an Iliad and Odyssey in the air, singing its own

wrath and wanderings. There was something cosmical about it; a

standing advertisement, till forbidden, of the everlasting vigor and

fertility of the world. The morning, which is the most memorable

season of the day, is the awakening hour. Then there is least

somnolence in us; and for an hour, at least, some part of us awakes

which slumbers all the rest of the day and night. Little is to be

expected of that day, if it can be called a day, to which we are not

awakened by our Genius, but by the mechanical nudgings of some

servitor, are not awakened by our own newly acquired force and

aspirations from within, accompanied by the undulations of celestial

music, instead of factory bells, and a fragrance filling the air --

to a higher life than we fell asleep from; and thus the darkness

bear its fruit, and prove itself to be good, no less than the light.

That man who does not believe that each day contains an earlier,

more sacred, and auroral hour than he has yet profaned, has

despaired of life, and is pursuing a descending and darkening way.

After a partial cessation of his sensuous life, the soul of man, or

its organs rather, are reinvigorated each day, and his Genius tries

again what noble life it can make. All memorable events, I should

say, transpire in morning time and in a morning atmosphere. The

Vedas say, "All intelligences awake with the morning." Poetry and
art, and the fairest and most memorable of the actions of men, date

from such an hour. All poets and heroes, like Memnon, are the

children of Aurora, and emit their music at sunrise. To him whose

elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a

perpetual morning. It matters not what the clocks say or the

attitudes and labors of men. Morning is when I am awake and

there

is a dawn in me. Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep.

Why is it that men give so poor an account of their day if they have

not been slumbering? They are not such poor calculators. If they

had not been overcome with drowsiness, they would have

performed

something. The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but

only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual

exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life.

To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was

quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?

We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by

mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which

does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more

encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate

his life by a conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to

paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a

few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and

paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look,

which

morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the

highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its

details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and

critical hour. If we refused, or rather used up, such paltry

information as we get, the oracles would distinctly inform us how

this might be done.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to

front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn

what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I

had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is

so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite

necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of

life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all

that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive

life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it

proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine

meanness of

it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to

know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in

my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are in a

strange

uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have

somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to

"glorify God and enjoy him forever."

Still we live meanly, like ants; though the fable tells us that

we were long ago changed into men; like pygmies we fight with

cranes; it is error upon error, and clout upon clout, and our best

virtue has for its occasion a superfluous and evitable wretchedness.

Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need

to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add

his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity,

simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a

hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and

keep your accounts on your thumb-nail. In the midst of this

chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and

quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a

man

has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not

make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great

calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify. Instead of

three meals a day, if it be necessary eat but one; instead of a

hundred dishes, five; and reduce other things in proportion. Our

life is like a German Confederacy, made up of petty states, with its

boundary forever fluctuating, so that even a German cannot tell you

how it is bounded at any moment. The nation itself, with all its

so-called internal improvements, which, by the way are all external

and superficial, is just such an unwieldy and overgrown

establishment, cluttered with furniture and tripped up by its own

traps, ruined by luxury and heedless expense, by want of calculation

and a worthy aim, as the million households in the land; and the

only cure for it, as for them, is in a rigid economy, a stern and

more than Spartan simplicity of life and elevation of purpose. It

lives too fast. Men think that it is essential that the Nation have

commerce, and export ice, and talk through a telegraph, and ride

thirty miles an hour, without a doubt, whether they do or not; but

whether we should live like baboons or like men, is a little

uncertain. If we do not get out sleepers, and forge rails, and

devote days and nights to the work, but go to tinkering upon our

lives to improve them, who will build railroads? And if railroads

are not built, how shall we get to heaven in season? But if we stay

at home and mind our business, who will want railroads? We do

not
ride on the railroad; it rides upon us. Did you ever think what

those sleepers are that underlie the railroad? Each one is a man,

an Irishman, or a Yankee man. The rails are laid on them, and they

are covered with sand, and the cars run smoothly over them. They

are sound sleepers, I assure you. And every few years a new lot is

laid down and run over; so that, if some have the pleasure of riding

on a rail, others have the misfortune to be ridden upon. And when

they run over a man that is walking in his sleep, a supernumerary

sleeper in the wrong position, and wake him up, they suddenly stop

the cars, and make a hue and cry about it, as if this were an

exception. I am glad to know that it takes a gang of men for every

five miles to keep the sleepers down and level in their beds as it

is, for this is a sign that they may sometime get up again.

Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are

determined to be starved before we are hungry. Men say that a

stitch in time saves nine, and so they take a thousand stitches

today to save nine tomorrow. As for work, we haven't any of any

consequence. We have the Saint Vitus' dance, and cannot

possibly

keep our heads still. If I should only give a few pulls at the

parish bell-rope, as for a fire, that is, without setting the bell,

there is hardly a man on his farm in the outskirts of Concord,

notwithstanding that press of engagements which was his excuse so

many times this morning, nor a boy, nor a woman, I might almost

say,

but would forsake all and follow that sound, not mainly to save

property from the flames, but, if we will confess the truth, much

more to see it burn, since burn it must, and we, be it known, did

not set it on fire -- or to see it put out, and have a hand in it,

if that is done as handsomely; yes, even if it were the parish

church itself. Hardly a man takes a half-hour's nap after dinner,

but when he wakes he holds up his head and asks, "What's the

news?"

as if the rest of mankind had stood his sentinels. Some give

directions to be waked every half-hour, doubtless for no other

purpose; and then, to pay for it, they tell what they have dreamed.

After a night's sleep the news is as indispensable as the breakfast.

"Pray tell me anything new that has happened to a man anywhere

on

this globe" -- and he reads it over his coffee and rolls, that a man

has had his eyes gouged out this morning on the Wachito River;

never

dreaming the while that he lives in the dark unfathomed mammoth

cave
of this world, and has but the rudiment of an eye himself.

For my part, I could easily do without the post-office. I think

that there are very few important communications made through it.

To speak critically, I never received more than one or two letters

in my life -- I wrote this some years ago -- that were worth the

postage. The penny-post is, commonly, an institution through

which

you seriously offer a man that penny for his thoughts which is so

often safely offered in jest. And I am sure that I never read any

memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed,

or

murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel

wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the

Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers

in the winter -- we never need read of another. One is enough. If

you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a

myriad

instances and applications? To a philosopher all news, as it is

called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over

their tea. Yet not a few are greedy after this gossip. There was

such a rush, as I hear, the other day at one of the offices to learn

the foreign news by the last arrival, that several large squares of
plate glass belonging to the establishment were broken by the

pressure -- news which I seriously think a ready wit might write a

twelve-month, or twelve years, beforehand with sufficient accuracy.

As for Spain, for instance, if you know how to throw in Don Carlos

and the Infanta, and Don Pedro and Seville and Granada, from time

to

time in the right proportions -- they may have changed the names a

little since I saw the papers -- and serve up a bull-fight when

other entertainments fail, it will be true to the letter, and give

us as good an idea of the exact state or ruin of things in Spain as

the most succinct and lucid reports under this head in the

newspapers: and as for England, almost the last significant scrap of

news from that quarter was the revolution of 1649; and if you have

learned the history of her crops for an average year, you never need

attend to that thing again, unless your speculations are of a merely

pecuniary character. If one may judge who rarely looks into the

newspapers, nothing new does ever happen in foreign parts, a

French

revolution not excepted.

What news! how much more important to know what that is

which

was never old! "Kieou-he-yu (great dignitary of the state of Wei)

sent a man to Khoung-tseu to know his news. Khoung-tseu caused

the

messenger to be seated near him, and questioned him in these

terms:

What is your master doing? The messenger answered with

respect: My

master desires to diminish the number of his faults, but he cannot

come to the end of them. The messenger being gone, the

philosopher

remarked: What a worthy messenger! What a worthy

messenger!" The

preacher, instead of vexing the ears of drowsy farmers on their day

of rest at the end of the week -- for Sunday is the fit conclusion

of an ill-spent week, and not the fresh and brave beginning of a new

one -- with this one other draggle-tail of a sermon, should shout

with thundering voice, "Pause! Avast! Why so seeming fast, but

deadly slow?"

Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while

reality is fabulous. If men would steadily observe realities only,

and not allow themselves to be deluded, life, to compare it with

such things as we know, would be like a fairy tale and the Arabian

Nights' Entertainments. If we respected only what is inevitable

and

has a right to be, music and poetry would resound along the streets.

When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and

worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that

petty

fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality. This

is always exhilarating and sublime. By closing the eyes and

slumbering, and consenting to be deceived by shows, men establish

and confirm their daily life of routine and habit everywhere, which

still is built on purely illusory foundations. Children, who play

life, discern its true law and relations more clearly than men, who

fail to live it worthily, but who think that they are wiser by

experience, that is, by failure. I have read in a Hindoo book, that

"there was a king's son, who, being expelled in infancy from his

native city, was brought up by a forester, and, growing up to

maturity in that state, imagined himself to belong to the barbarous

race with which he lived. One of his father's ministers having

discovered him, revealed to him what he was, and the

misconception

of his character was removed, and he knew himself to be a prince.

So soul," continues the Hindoo philosopher, "from the

circumstances
in which it is placed, mistakes its own character, until the truth

is revealed to it by some holy teacher, and then it knows itself to

be Brahme." I perceive that we inhabitants of New England live

this

mean life that we do because our vision does not penetrate the

surface of things. We think that that is which appears to be. If a

man should walk through this town and see only the reality, where,

think you, would the "Mill-dam" go to? If he should give us an

account of the realities he beheld there, we should not recognize

the place in his description. Look at a meeting-house, or a

court-house, or a jail, or a shop, or a dwelling-house, and say what

that thing really is before a true gaze, and they would all go to

pieces in your account of them. Men esteem truth remote, in the

outskirts of the system, behind the farthest star, before Adam and

after the last man. In eternity there is indeed something true and

sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now and

here. God himself culminates in the present moment, and will

never

be more divine in the lapse of all the ages. And we are enabled to

apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual

instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us. The

universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions;

whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us. Let us

spend our lives in conceiving then. The poet or the artist never

yet had so fair and noble a design but some of his posterity at

least could accomplish it.

Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be

thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito's wing that

falls on the rails. Let us rise early and fast, or break fast,

gently and without perturbation; let company come and let

company

go, let the bells ring and the children cry -- determined to make a

day of it. Why should we knock under and go with the stream?

Let

us not be upset and overwhelmed in that terrible rapid and

whirlpool

called a dinner, situated in the meridian shallows. Weather this

danger and you are safe, for the rest of the way is down hill. With

unrelaxed nerves, with morning vigor, sail by it, looking another

way, tied to the mast like Ulysses. If the engine whistles, let it

whistle till it is hoarse for its pains. If the bell rings, why

should we run? We will consider what kind of music they are like.

Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward

through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition,
and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe,

through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and

Concord,

through Church and State, through poetry and philosophy and

religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we

can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake; and then begin,

having a point d'appui, below freshet and frost and fire, a place

where you might found a wall or a state, or set a lamp-post safely,

or perhaps a gauge, not a Nilometer, but a Realometer, that future

ages might know how deep a freshet of shams and appearances had

gathered from time to time. If you stand right fronting and face to

face to a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces,

as if it were a cimeter, and feel its sweet edge dividing you

through the heart and marrow, and so you will happily conclude

your

mortal career. Be it life or death, we crave only reality. If we

are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel

cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our

business.

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but

while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is.

Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink
deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I

cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. I

have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was

born. The intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way

into the secret of things. I do not wish to be any more busy with

my hands than is necessary. My head is hands and feet. I feel all

my best faculties concentrated in it. My instinct tells me that my

head is an organ for burrowing, as some creatures use their snout

and fore paws, and with it I would mine and burrow my way

through

these hills. I think that the richest vein is somewhere hereabouts;

so by the divining-rod and thin rising vapors I judge; and here I

will begin to mine.

Reading

With a little more deliberation in the choice of their pursuits,

all men would perhaps become essentially students and observers,

for

certainly their nature and destiny are interesting to all alike. In

accumulating property for ourselves or our posterity, in founding a

family or a state, or acquiring fame even, we are mortal; but in

dealing with truth we are immortal, and need fear no change nor

accident. The oldest Egyptian or Hindoo philosopher raised a

corner

of the veil from the statue of the divinity; and still the trembling

robe remains raised, and I gaze upon as fresh a glory as he did,

since it was I in him that was then so bold, and it is he in me that

now reviews the vision. No dust has settled on that robe; no time

has elapsed since that divinity was revealed. That time which we

really improve, or which is improvable, is neither past, present,

nor future.

My residence was more favorable, not only to thought, but to

serious reading, than a university; and though I was beyond the

range of the ordinary circulating library, I had more than ever come

within the influence of those books which circulate round the

world,

whose sentences were first written on bark, and are now merely

copied from time to time on to linen paper. Says the poet Mr

Udd, "Being seated, to run through the region of the

spiritual world; I have had this advantage in books. To be

intoxicated by a single glass of wine; I have experienced this

pleasure when I have drunk the liquor of the esoteric doctrines." I

kept Homer's Iliad on my table through the summer, though I

looked

at his page only now and then. Incessant labor with my hands, at

first, for I had my house to finish and my beans to hoe at the same

time, made more study impossible. Yet I sustained myself by the

prospect of such reading in future. I read one or two shallow

books

of travel in the intervals of my work, till that employment made me

ashamed of myself, and I asked where it was then that I lived.

The student may read Homer or AEschylus in the Greek

without

danger of dissipation or luxuriousness, for it implies that he in

some measure emulate their heroes, and consecrate morning hours

to

their pages. The heroic books, even if printed in the character of

our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate

times; and we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and

line, conjecturing a larger sense than common use permits out of

what wisdom and valor and generosity we have. The modern

cheap and

fertile press, with all its translations, has done little to bring

us nearer to the heroic writers of antiquity. They seem as

solitary, and the letter in which they are printed as rare and
curious, as ever. It is worth the expense of youthful days and

costly hours, if you learn only some words of an ancient language,

which are raised out of the trivialness of the street, to be

perpetual suggestions and provocations. It is not in vain that the

farmer remembers and repeats the few Latin words which he has

heard.

Men sometimes speak as if the study of the classics would at length

make way for more modern and practical studies; but the

adventurous

student will always study classics, in whatever language they may

be

written and however ancient they may be. For what are the

classics

but the noblest recorded thoughts of man? They are the only

oracles

which are not decayed, and there are such answers to the most

modern

inquiry in them as Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might as

well

omit to study Nature because she is old. To read well, that is, to

read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that

will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of
the

day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent,

the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books

must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.

It is not enough even to be able to speak the language of that

nation by which they are written, for there is a memorable interval

between the spoken and the written language, the language heard

and

the language read. The one is commonly transitory, a sound, a

tongue, a dialect merely, almost brutish, and we learn it

unconsciously, like the brutes, of our mothers. The other is the

maturity and experience of that; if that is our mother tongue, this

is our father tongue, a reserved and select expression, too

significant to be heard by the ear, which we must be born again in

order to speak. The crowds of men who merely spoke the Greek

and

Latin tongues in the Middle Ages were not entitled by the accident

of birth to read the works of genius written in those languages; for

these were not written in that Greek or Latin which they knew, but

in the select language of literature. They had not learned the

nobler dialects of Greece and Rome, but the very materials on

which
they were written were waste paper to them, and they prized

instead

a cheap contemporary literature. But when the several nations of

Europe had acquired distinct though rude written languages of their

own, sufficient for the purposes of their rising literatures, then

first learning revived, and scholars were enabled to discern from

that remoteness the treasures of antiquity. What the Roman and

Grecian multitude could not hear, after the lapse of ages a few

scholars read, and a few scholars only are still reading it.

However much we may admire the orator's occasional bursts

of

eloquence, the noblest written words are commonly as far behind

or

above the fleeting spoken language as the firmament with its stars

is behind the clouds. There are the stars, and they who can may

read them. The astronomers forever comment on and observe

them.

They are not exhalations like our daily colloquies and vaporous

breath. What is called eloquence in the forum is commonly found

to

be rhetoric in the study. The orator yields to the inspiration of a

transient occasion, and speaks to the mob before him, to those who
can hear him; but the writer, whose more equable life is his

occasion, and who would be distracted by the event and the crowd

which inspire the orator, speaks to the intellect and health of

mankind, to all in any age who can understand him.

No wonder that Alexander carried the Iliad with him on his

expeditions in a precious casket. A written word is the choicest of

relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more

universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest

to life itself. It may be translated into every language, and not

only be read but actually breathed from all human lips; -- not be

represented on canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the

breath of life itself. The symbol of an ancient man's thought

becomes a modern man's speech. Two thousand summers have

imparted

to the monuments of Grecian literature, as to her marbles, only a

maturer golden and autumnal tint, for they have carried their own

serene and celestial atmosphere into all lands to protect them

against the corrosion of time. Books are the treasured wealth of

the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.

Books, the oldest and the best, stand naturally and rightfully on

the shelves of every cottage. They have no cause of their own to

plead, but while they enlighten and sustain the reader his common
sense will not refuse them. Their authors are a natural and

irresistible aristocracy in every society, and, more than kings or

emperors, exert an influence on mankind. When the illiterate and

perhaps scornful trader has earned by enterprise and industry his

coveted leisure and independence, and is admitted to the circles of

wealth and fashion, he turns inevitably at last to those still

higher but yet inaccessible circles of intellect and genius, and is

sensible only of the imperfection of his culture and the vanity and

insufficiency of all his riches, and further proves his good sense

by the pains which be takes to secure for his children that

intellectual culture whose want he so keenly feels; and thus it is

that he becomes the founder of a family.

Those who have not learned to read the ancient classics in the

language in which they were written must have a very imperfect

knowledge of the history of the human race; for it is remarkable

that no transcript of them has ever been made into any modern

tongue, unless our civilization itself may be regarded as such a

transcript. Homer has never yet been printed in English, nor

AEschylus, nor Virgil even -- works as refined, as solidly done, and

as beautiful almost as the morning itself; for later writers, say

what we will of their genius, have rarely, if ever, equalled the

elaborate beauty and finish and the lifelong and heroic literary
labors of the ancients. They only talk of forgetting them who

never

knew them. It will be soon enough to forget them when we have

the

learning and the genius which will enable us to attend to and

appreciate them. That age will be rich indeed when those relics

which we call Classics, and the still older and more than classic

but even less known Scriptures of the nations, shall have still

further accumulated, when the Vaticans shall be filled with Vedas

and Zendavestas and Bibles, with Homers and Dantes and

Shakespeares,

and all the centuries to come shall have successively deposited

their trophies in the forum of the world. By such a pile we may

hope to scale heaven at last.

The works of the great poets have never yet been read by

mankind, for only great poets can read them. They have only been

read as the multitude read the stars, at most astrologically, not

astronomically. Most men have learned to read to serve a paltry

convenience, as they have learned to cipher in order to keep

accounts and not be cheated in trade; but of reading as a noble

intellectual exercise they know little or nothing; yet this only is

reading, in a high sense, not that which lulls us as a luxury and

suffers the nobler faculties to sleep the while, but what we have to

stand on tip-toe to read and devote our most alert and wakeful

hours

to.

I think that having learned our letters we should read the best

that is in literature, and not be forever repeating our a-b-abs, and

words of one syllable, in the fourth or fifth classes, sitting on

the lowest and foremost form all our lives. Most men are satisfied

if they read or hear read, and perchance have been convicted by the

wisdom of one good book, the Bible, and for the rest of their lives

vegetate and dissipate their faculties in what is called easy

reading. There is a work in several volumes in our Circulating

Library entitled "Little Reading," which I thought referred to a

town of that name which I had not been to. There are those who,

like cormorants and ostriches, can digest all sorts of this, even

after the fullest dinner of meats and vegetables, for they suffer

nothing to be wasted. If others are the machines to provide this

provender, they are the machines to read it. They read the nine

thousandth tale about Zebulon and Sophronia, and how they loved

as

none had ever loved before, and neither did the course of their true

love run smooth -- at any rate, how it did run and stumble, and get
up again and go on! how some poor unfortunate got up on to a

steeple, who had better never have gone up as far as the belfry; and

then, having needlessly got him up there, the happy novelist rings

the bell for all the world to come together and hear, O dear! how he

did get down again! For my part, I think that they had better

metamorphose all such aspiring heroes of universal noveldom into

man

weather-cocks, as they used to put heroes among the

constellations,

and let them swing round there till they are rusty, and not come

down at all to bother honest men with their pranks. The next time

the novelist rings the bell I will not stir though the meeting-house

burn down. "The Skip of the Tip-Toe-Hop, a Romance of the

Middle

Ages, by the celebrated author of `Tittle-Tol-Tan,' to appear in

monthly parts; a great rush; don't all come together." All this

they read with saucer eyes, and erect and primitive curiosity, and

with unwearied gizzard, whose corrugations even yet need no

sharpening, just as some little four-year-old bencher his two-cent

gilt-covered edition of Cinderella -- without any improvement, that

I can see, in the pronunciation, or accent, or emphasis, or any more

skill in extracting or inserting the moral. The result is dulness

of sight, a stagnation of the vital circulations, and a general

deliquium and sloughing off of all the intellectual faculties. This

sort of gingerbread is baked daily and more sedulously than pure

wheat or rye-and-Indian in almost every oven, and finds a surer

market.

The best books are not read even by those who are called good

readers. What does our Concord culture amount to? There is in

this

town, with a very few exceptions, no taste for the best or for very

good books even in English literature, whose words all can read and

spell. Even the college-bred and so-called liberally educated men

here and elsewhere have really little or no acquaintance with the

English classics; and as for the recorded wisdom of mankind, the

ancient classics and Bibles, which are accessible to all who will

know of them, there are the feeblest efforts anywhere made to

become

acquainted with them. I know a woodchopper, of middle age, who

takes a French paper, not for news as he says, for he is above that,

but to "keep himself in practice," he being a Canadian by birth; and

when I ask him what he considers the best thing he can do in this

world, he says, beside this, to keep up and add to his English.

This is about as much as the college-bred generally do or aspire to

do, and they take an English paper for the purpose. One who has

just come from reading perhaps one of the best English books will

find how many with whom he can converse about it? Or suppose

he

comes from reading a Greek or Latin classic in the original, whose

praises are familiar even to the so-called illiterate; he will find

nobody at all to speak to, but must keep silence about it. Indeed,

there is hardly the professor in our colleges, who, if he has

mastered the difficulties of the language, has proportionally

mastered the difficulties of the wit and poetry of a Greek poet, and

has any sympathy to impart to the alert and heroic reader; and as

for the sacred Scriptures, or Bibles of mankind, who in this town

can tell me even their titles? Most men do not know that any

nation

but the Hebrews have had a scripture. A man, any man, will go

considerably out of his way to pick up a silver dollar; but here are

golden words, which the wisest men of antiquity have uttered, and

whose worth the wise of every succeeding age have assured us of; --

and yet we learn to read only as far as Easy Reading, the primers

and class-books, and when we leave school, the "Little Reading,"

and

story-books, which are for boys and beginners; and our reading, our
conversation and thinking, are all on a very low level, worthy only

of pygmies and manikins.

I aspire to be acquainted with wiser men than this our Concord

soil has produced, whose names are hardly known here. Or shall I

hear the name of Plato and never read his book? As if Plato were

my

townsman and I never saw him -- my next neighbor and I never

heard

him speak or attended to the wisdom of his words. But how

actually

is it? His Dialogues, which contain what was immortal in him, lie

on the next shelf, and yet I never read them. We are underbred

and

low-lived and illiterate; and in this respect I confess I do not

make any very broad distinction between the illiterateness of my

townsman who cannot read at all and the illiterateness of him who

has learned to read only what is for children and feeble intellects.

We should be as good as the worthies of antiquity, but partly by

first knowing how good they were. We are a race of tit-men, and

soar but little higher in our intellectual flights than the columns

of the daily paper.

It is not all books that are as dull as their readers. There

are probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we

could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the

morning or the spring to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on

the face of things for us. How many a man has dated a new era in

his life from the reading of a book! The book exists for us,

perchance, which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones.

The

at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered.

These

same questions that disturb and puzzle and confound us have in

their

turn occurred to all the wise men; not one has been omitted; and

each has answered them, according to his ability, by his words and

his life. Moreover, with wisdom we shall learn liberality. The

solitary hired man on a farm in the outskirts of Concord, who has

had his second birth and peculiar religious experience, and is

driven as he believes into the silent gravity and exclusiveness by

his faith, may think it is not true; but Zoroaster, thousands of

years ago, travelled the same road and had the same experience;

but

he, being wise, knew it to be universal, and treated his neighbors

accordingly, and is even said to have invented and established

worship among men. Let him humbly commune with Zoroaster

then, and

through the liberalizing influence of all the worthies, with Jesus

Christ himself, and let "our church" go by the board.

We boast that we belong to the Nineteenth Century and are

making

the most rapid strides of any nation. But consider how little this

village does for its own culture. I do not wish to flatter my

townsmen, nor to be flattered by them, for that will not advance

either of us. We need to be provoked -- goaded like oxen, as we

are, into a trot. We have a comparatively decent system of

common

schools, schools for infants only; but excepting the half-starved

Lyceum in the winter, and latterly the puny beginning of a library

suggested by the State, no school for ourselves. We spend more

on

almost any article of bodily aliment or ailment than on our mental

aliment. It is time that we had uncommon schools, that we did

not

leave off our education when we begin to be men and women. It

is

time that villages were universities, and their elder inhabitants

the fellows of universities, with leisure -- if they are, indeed, so

well off -- to pursue liberal studies the rest of their lives.

Shall the world be confined to one Paris or one Oxford forever?

Cannot students be boarded here and get a liberal education under

the skies of Concord? Can we not hire some Abelard to lecture to

us? Alas! what with foddering the cattle and tending the store, we

are kept from school too long, and our education is sadly neglected.

In this country, the village should in some respects take the place

of the nobleman of Europe. It should be the patron of the fine

arts. It is rich enough. It wants only the magnanimity and

refinement. It can spend money enough on such things as farmers

and

traders value, but it is thought Utopian to propose spending money

for things which more intelligent men know to be of far more

worth.

This town has spent seventeen thousand dollars on a town-house,

thank fortune or politics, but probably it will not spend so much on

living wit, the true meat to put into that shell, in a hundred

years. The one hundred and twenty-five dollars annually

subscribed

for a Lyceum in the winter is better spent than any other equal sum

raised in the town. If we live in the Nineteenth Century, why

should we not enjoy the advantages which the Nineteenth Century

offers? Why should our life be in any respect provincial? If we

will read newspapers, why not skip the gossip of Boston and take

the

best newspaper in the world at once? -- not be sucking the pap of

"neutral family" papers, or browsing "Olive Branches" here in New

England. Let the reports of all the learned societies come to us,

and we will see if they know anything. Why should we leave it to

Harper & Brothers and Redding & Co. to select our reading? As

the

nobleman of cultivated taste surrounds himself with whatever

conduces to his culture -- genius -- learning -- wit -- books --

paintings -- statuary -- music -- philosophical instruments, and the

like; so let the village do -- not stop short at a pedagogue, a

parson, a sexton, a parish library, and three selectmen, because our

Pilgrim forefathers got through a cold winter once on a bleak rock

with these. To act collectively is according to the spirit of our

institutions; and I am confident that, as our circumstances are more

flourishing, our means are greater than the nobleman's. New

England

can hire all the wise men in the world to come and teach her, and

board them round the while, and not be provincial at all. That is
the uncommon school we want. Instead of noblemen, let us have

noble

villages of men. If it is necessary, omit one bridge over the

river, go round a little there, and throw one arch at least over the

darker gulf of ignorance which surrounds us.

Sounds

But while we are confined to books, though the most select

and

classic, and read only particular written languages, which are

themselves but dialects and provincial, we are in danger of

forgetting the language which all things and events speak without

metaphor, which alone is copious and standard. Much is

published,

but little printed. The rays which stream through the shutter will

be no longer remembered when the shutter is wholly removed.

No

method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever

on the alert. What is a course of history or philosophy, or poetry,

no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most

admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking

always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student

merely, or a seer? Read your fate, see what is before you, and

walk

on into futurity.

I did not read books the first summer; I hoed beans. Nay, I

often did better than this. There were times when I could not

afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work,

whether of the head or hands. I love a broad margin to my life.

Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed

bath, I

sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery,

amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude

and stillness, while the birds sing around or flitted noiseless

through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or

the noise of some traveller's wagon on the distant highway, I was

reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in those seasons like corn in

the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands

would

have been. They were not time subtracted from my life, but so

much

over and above my usual allowance. I realized what the Orientals

mean by contemplation and the forsaking of works. For the most

part, I minded not how the hours went. The day advanced as if to

light some work of mine; it was morning, and lo, now it is evening,

and nothing memorable is accomplished. Instead of singing like

the

birds, I silently smiled at my incessant good fortune. As the

sparrow had its trill, sitting on the hickory before my door, so had

I my chuckle or suppressed warble which he might hear out of my

nest. My days were not days of the week, bearing the stamp of

any

heathen deity, nor were they minced into hours and fretted by the

ticking of a clock; for I lived like the Puri Indians, of whom it is

said that "for yesterday, today, and tomorrow they have only one

word, and they express the variety of meaning by pointing

backward

for yesterday forward for tomorrow, and overhead for the passing

day." This was sheer idleness to my fellow-townsmen, no doubt;

but

if the birds and flowers had tried me by their standard, I should

not have been found wanting. A man must find his occasions in

himself, it is true. The natural day is very calm, and will hardly

reprove his indolence.

 I had this advantage, at least, in my mode of life, over those

who were obliged to look abroad for amusement, to society and the

theatre, that my life itself was become my amusement and never

ceased to be novel. It was a drama of many scenes and without an

end. If we were always, indeed, getting our living, and regulating

our lives according to the last and best mode we had learned, we

should never be troubled with ennui. Follow your genius closely

enough, and it will not fail to show you a fresh prospect every

hour. Housework was a pleasant pastime. When my floor was

dirty, I

rose early, and, setting all my furniture out of doors on the grass,

bed and bedstead making but one budget, dashed water on the

floor,

and sprinkled white sand from the pond on it, and then with a

broom

scrubbed it clean and white; and by the time the villagers had

broken their fast the morning sun had dried my house sufficiently to

allow me to move in again, and my meditations were almost

uninterupted. It was pleasant to see my whole household effects

out

on the grass, making a little pile like a gypsy's pack, and my

three-legged table, from which I did not remove the books and pen
and ink, standing amid the pines and hickories. They seemed glad

to

get out themselves, and as if unwilling to be brought in. I was

sometimes tempted to stretch an awning over them and take my

seat

there. It was worth the while to see the sun shine on these things,

and hear the free wind blow on them; so much more interesting

most

familiar objects look out of doors than in the house. A bird sits

on the next bough, life-everlasting grows under the table, and

blackberry vines run round its legs; pine cones, chestnut burs, and

strawberry leaves are strewn about. It looked as if this was the

way these forms came to be transferred to our furniture, to tables,

chairs, and bedsteads -- because they once stood in their midst.

My house was on the side of a hill, immediately on the edge of

the larger wood, in the midst of a young forest of pitch pines and

hickories, and half a dozen rods from the pond, to which a narrow

footpath led down the hill. In my front yard grew the strawberry,

blackberry, and life-everlasting, johnswort and goldenrod, shrub

oaks and sand cherry, blueberry and groundnut. Near the end of

May,

the sand cherry (Cerasus pumila) adorned the sides of the path with
its delicate flowers arranged in umbels cylindrically about its

short stems, which last, in the fall, weighed down with goodsized

and handsome cherries, fell over in wreaths like rays on every side.

I tasted them out of compliment to Nature, though they were

scarcely

palatable. The sumach (Rhus glabra) grew luxuriantly about the

house, pushing up through the embankment which I had made, and

growing five or six feet the first season. Its broad pinnate

tropical leaf was pleasant though strange to look on. The large

buds, suddenly pushing out late in the spring from dry sticks which

had seemed to be dead, developed themselves as by magic into

graceful green and tender boughs, an inch in diameter; and

sometimes, as I sat at my window, so heedlessly did they grow and

tax their weak joints, I heard a fresh and tender bough suddenly

fall like a fan to the ground, when there was not a breath of air

stirring, broken off by its own weight. In August, the large masses

of berries, which, when in flower, had attracted many wild bees,

gradually assumed their bright velvety crimson hue, and by their

weight again bent down and broke the tender limbs.

As I sit at my window this summer afternoon, hawks are

circling

about my clearing; the tantivy of wild pigeons, flying by two and

threes athwart my view, or perching restless on the white pine

boughs behind my house, gives a voice to the air; a fish hawk

dimples the glassy surface of the pond and brings up a fish; a mink

steals out of the marsh before my door and seizes a frog by the

shore; the sedge is bending under the weight of the reed-birds

flitting hither and thither; and for the last half-hour I have heard

the rattle of railroad cars, now dying away and then reviving like

the beat of a partridge, conveying travellers from Boston to the

country. For I did not live so out of the world as that boy who, as

I hear, was put out to a farmer in the east part of the town, but

ere long ran away and came home again, quite down at the heel

and

homesick. He had never seen such a dull and out-of-the-way

place;

the folks were all gone off; why, you couldn't even hear the

whistle! I doubt if there is such a place in Massachusetts now:--

"In truth, our village has become a butt

For one of those fleet railroad shafts, and o'er

Our peaceful plain its soothing sound is -- Concord."

The Fitchburg Railroad touches the pond about a hundred rods

south of where I dwell. I usually go to the village along its

causeway, and am, as it were, related to society by this link. The

men on the freight trains, who go over the whole length of the road,

bow to me as to an old acquaintance, they pass me so often, and

apparently they take me for an employee; and so I am. I too

would

fain be a track-repairer somewhere in the orbit of the earth.

The whistle of the locomotive penetrates my woods summer

and

winter, sounding like the scream of a hawk sailing over some

farmer's yard, informing me that many restless city merchants are

arriving within the circle of the town, or adventurous country

traders from the other side. As they come under one horizon, they

shout their warning to get off the track to the other, heard

sometimes through the circles of two towns. Here come your

groceries, country; your rations, countrymen! Nor is there any

man

so independent on his farm that he can say them nay. And here's

your pay for them! screams the countryman's whistle; timber like

long battering-rams going twenty miles an hour against the city's

walls, and chairs enough to seat all the weary and heavy-laden that

dwell within them. With such huge and lumbering civility the
country hands a chair to the city. All the Indian huckleberry hills

are stripped, all the cranberry meadows are raked into the city. Up

comes the cotton, down goes the woven cloth; up comes the silk,

down

goes the woollen; up come the books, but down goes the wit that

writes them.

When I meet the engine with its train of cars moving off with

planetary motion -- or, rather, like a comet, for the beholder knows

not if with that velocity and with that direction it will ever

revisit this system, since its orbit does not look like a returning

curve -- with its steam cloud like a banner streaming behind in

golden and silver wreaths, like many a downy cloud which I have

seen, high in the heavens, unfolding its masses to the light -- as

if this traveling demigod, this cloud-compeller, would ere long take

the sunset sky for the livery of his train; when I hear the iron

horse make the hills echo with his snort like thunder, shaking the

earth with his feet, and breathing fire and smoke from his nostrils

(what kind of winged horse or fiery dragon they will put into the

new Mythology I don't know), it seems as if the earth had got a race

now worthy to inhabit it. If all were as it seems, and men made

the

elements their servants for noble ends! If the cloud that hangs
over the engine were the perspiration of heroic deeds, or as

beneficent as that which floats over the farmer's fields, then the

elements and Nature herself would cheerfully accompany men on

their

errands and be their escort.

I watch the passage of the morning cars with the same feeling

that I do the rising of the sun, which is hardly more regular.

Their train of clouds stretching far behind and rising higher and

higher, going to heaven while the cars are going to Boston, conceals

the sun for a minute and casts my distant field into the shade, a

celestial train beside which the petty train of cars which hugs the

earth is but the barb of the spear. The stabler of the iron horse

was up early this winter morning by the light of the stars amid the

mountains, to fodder and harness his steed. Fire, too, was

awakened

thus early to put the vital heat in him and get him off. If the

enterprise were as innocent as it is early! If the snow lies deep,

they strap on his snowshoes, and, with the giant plow, plow a

furrow

from the mountains to the seaboard, in which the cars, like a

following drill-barrow, sprinkle all the restless men and floating

merchandise in the country for seed. All day the fire-steed flies
over the country, stopping only that his master may rest, and I am

awakened by his tramp and defiant snort at midnight, when in some

remote glen in the woods he fronts the elements incased in ice and

snow; and he will reach his stall only with the morning star, to

start once more on his travels without rest or slumber. Or

perchance, at evening, I hear him in his stable blowing off the

superfluous energy of the day, that he may calm his nerves and cool

his liver and brain for a few hours of iron slumber. If the

enterprise were as heroic and commanding as it is protracted and

unwearied!

Far through unfrequented woods on the confines of towns,

where

once only the hunter penetrated by day, in the darkest night dart

these bright saloons without the knowledge of their inhabitants;

this moment stopping at some brilliant station-house in town or

city, where a social crowd is gathered, the next in the Dismal

Swamp, scaring the owl and fox. The startings and arrivals of the

cars are now the epochs in the village day. They go and come with

such regularity and precision, and their whistle can be heard so

far, that the farmers set their clocks by them, and thus one

well-conducted institution regulates a whole country. Have not

men
improved somewhat in punctuality since the railroad was invented?

Do they not talk and think faster in the depot than they did in the

stage-office? There is something electrifying in the atmosphere of

the former place. I have been astonished at the miracles it has

wrought; that some of my neighbors, who, I should have

prophesied,

once for all, would never get to Boston by so prompt a conveyance,

are on hand when the bell rings. To do things "railroad fashion" is

now the byword; and it is worth the while to be warned so often

and

so sincerely by any power to get off its track. There is no

stopping to read the riot act, no firing over the heads of the mob,

in this case. We have constructed a fate, an Atropos, that never

turns aside. (Let that be the name of your engine.) Men are

advertised that at a certain hour and minute these bolts will be

shot toward particular points of the compass; yet it interferes with

no man's business, and the children go to school on the other track.

We live the steadier for it. We are all educated thus to be sons of

Tell. The air is full of invisible bolts. Every path but your own

is the path of fate. Keep on your own track, then.

What recommends commerce to me is its enterprise and

bravery.
It does not clasp its hands and pray to Jupiter. I see these men

every day go about their business with more or less courage and

content, doing more even than they suspect, and perchance better

employed than they could have consciously devised. I am less

affected by their heroism who stood up for half an hour in the front

line at Buena Vista, than by the steady and cheerful valor of the

men who inhabit the snowplow for their winter quarters; who have

not

merely the three-o'-clock-in-the-morning courage, which Bonaparte

thought was the rarest, but whose courage does not go to rest so

early, who go to sleep only when the storm sleeps or the sinews of

their iron steed are frozen. On this morning of the Great Snow,

perchance, which is still raging and chilling men's blood, I bear

the muffled tone of their engine bell from out the fog bank of their

chilled breath, which announces that the cars are coming, without

long delay, notwithstanding the veto of a New England northeast

snow-storm, and I behold the plowmen covered with snow and

rime,

their heads peering, above the mould-board which is turning down

other than daisies and the nests of field mice, like bowlders of the

Sierra Nevada, that occupy an outside place in the universe.

Commerce is unexpectedly confident and serene, alert,

adventurous, and unwearied. It is very natural in its methods

withal, far more so than many fantastic enterprises and sentimental

experiments, and hence its singular success. I am refreshed and

expanded when the freight train rattles past me, and I smell the

stores which go dispensing their odors all the way from Long Wharf

to Lake Champlain, reminding me of foreign parts, of coral reefs,

and Indian oceans, and tropical climes, and the extent of the globe.

I feel more like a citizen of the world at the sight of the

palm-leaf which will cover so many flaxen New England heads the

next

summer, the Manilla hemp and cocoanut husks, the old junk, gunny

bags, scrap iron, and rusty nails. This carload of torn sails is

more legible and interesting now than if they should be wrought

into

paper and printed books. Who can write so graphically the history

of the storms they have weathered as these rents have done?

They

are proof-sheets which need no correction. Here goes lumber

from

the Maine woods, which did not go out to sea in the last freshet,

risen four dollars on the thousand because of what did go out or

was
split up; pine, spruce, cedar -- first, second, third, and fourth

qualities, so lately all of one quality, to wave over the bear, and

moose, and caribou. Next rolls Thomaston lime, a prime lot, which

will get far among the hills before it gets slacked. These rags in

bales, of all hues and qualities, the lowest condition to which

cotton and linen descend, the final result of dress -- of patterns

which are now no longer cried up, unless it be in Milwaukee, as

those splendid articles, English, French, or American prints,

ginghams, muslins, etc., gathered from all quarters both of fashion

and poverty, going to become paper of one color or a few shades

only, on which, forsooth, will be written tales of real life, high

and low, and founded on fact! This closed car smells of salt fish,

the strong New England and commercial scent, reminding me of the

Grand Banks and the fisheries. Who has not seen a salt fish,

thoroughly cured for this world, so that nothing can spoil it, and

putting, the perseverance of the saints to the blush? with which you

may sweep or pave the streets, and split your kindlings, and the

teamster shelter himself and his lading against sun, wind, and rain

behind it -- and the trader, as a Concord trader once did, hang it

up by his door for a sign when he commences business, until at last

his oldest customer cannot tell surely whether it be animal,

vegetable, or mineral, and yet it shall be as pure as a snowflake,

and if it be put into a pot and boiled, will come out an excellent

dun-fish for a Saturday's dinner. Next Spanish hides, with the

tails still preserving their twist and the angle of elevation they

had when the oxen that wore them were careering over the pampas

of

the Spanish Main -- a type of all obstinacy, and evincing how almost

hopeless and incurable are all constitutional vices. I confess,

that practically speaking, when I have learned a man's real

disposition, I have no hopes of changing it for the better or worse

in this state of existence. As the Orientals say, "A cur's tail may

be warmed, and pressed, and bound round with ligatures, and after

twelve years' labor bestowed upon it, still it will retain its

natural form." The only effectual cure for such inveteracies as

these tails exhibit is to make glue of them, which I believe is what

is usually done with them, and then they will stay put and stick.

Here is a hogshead of molasses or of brandy directed to John Smith,

Cuttingsville, Vermont, some trader among the Green Mountains,

who

imports for the farmers near his clearing, and now perchance stands

over his bulkhead and thinks of the last arrivals on the coast, how

they may affect the price for him, telling his customers this
moment, as he has told them twenty times before this morning,

that

he expects some by the next train of prime quality. It is

advertised in the Cuttingsville Times.

While these things go up other things come down. Warned

by the

whizzing sound, I look up from my book and see some tall pine,

hewn

on far northern hills, which has winged its way over the Green

Mountains and the Connecticut, shot like an arrow through the

township within ten minutes, and scarce another eye beholds it;

going

"to be the mast

Of some great ammiral."

And hark! here comes the cattle-train bearing the cattle of a

thousand hills, sheepcots, stables, and cow-yards in the air,

drovers with their sticks, and shepherd boys in the midst of their

flocks, all but the mountain pastures, whirled along like leaves

blown from the mountains by the September gales. The air is

filled

with the bleating of calves and sheep, and the hustling of oxen, as
if a pastoral valley were going by. When the old bell-wether at the

head rattles his bell, the mountains do indeed skip like rams and

the little hills like lambs. A carload of drovers, too, in the

midst, on a level with their droves now, their vocation gone, but

still clinging to their useless sticks as their badge of office.

But their dogs, where are they? It is a stampede to them; they are

quite thrown out; they have lost the scent. Methinks I hear them

barking behind the Peterboro' Hills, or panting up the western slope

of the Green Mountains. They will not be in at the death. Their

vocation, too, is gone. Their fidelity and sagacity are below par

now. They will slink back to their kennels in disgrace, or

perchance run wild and strike a league with the wolf and the fox.

So is your pastoral life whirled past and away. But the bell rings,

and I must get off the track and let the cars go by;--

What's the railroad to me?

I never go to see

Where it ends.

It fills a few hollows,

And makes banks for the swallows,

It sets the sand a-blowing,

And the blackberries a-growing,

but I cross it like a cart-path in the woods. I will not have my

eyes put out and my ears spoiled by its smoke and steam and

hissing.

Now that the cars are gone by and all the restless world with

them, and the fishes in the pond no longer feel their rumbling, I am

more alone than ever. For the rest of the long afternoon, perhaps,

my meditations are interrupted only by the faint rattle of a

carriage or team along the distant highway.

Sometimes, on Sundays, I heard the bells, the Lincoln, Acton,

Bedford, or Concord bell, when the wind was favorable, a faint,

sweet, and, as it were, natural melody, worth importing into the

wilderness. At a sufficient distance over the woods this sound

acquires a certain vibratory hum, as if the pine needles in the

horizon were the strings of a harp which it swept. All sound heard

at the greatest possible distance produces one and the same effect,

a vibration of the universal lyre, just as the intervening

atmosphere makes a distant ridge of earth interesting to our eyes by

the azure tint it imparts to it. There came to me in this case a

melody which the air had strained, and which had conversed with

every leaf and needle of the wood, that portion of the sound which

the elements had taken up and modulated and echoed from vale to
vale. The echo is, to some extent, an original sound, and therein

is the magic and charm of it. It is not merely a repetition of what

was worth repeating in the bell, but partly the voice of the wood;

the same trivial words and notes sung by a wood-nymph.

At evening, the distant lowing of some cow in the horizon

beyond

the woods sounded sweet and melodious, and at first I would

mistake

it for the voices of certain minstrels by whom I was sometimes

serenaded, who might be straying over hill and dale; but soon I was

not unpleasantly disappointed when it was prolonged into the

cheap

and natural music of the cow. I do not mean to be satirical, but to

express my appreciation of those youths' singing, when I state that

I perceived clearly that it was akin to the music of the cow, and

they were at length one articulation of Nature.

Regularly at half-past seven, in one part of the summer, after

the evening train had gone by, the whip-poor-wills chanted their

vespers for half an hour, sitting on a stump by my door, or upon the

ridge-pole of the house. They would begin to sing almost with as

much precision as a clock, within five minutes of a particular time,

referred to the setting of the sun, every evening. I had a rare

opportunity to become acquainted with their habits. Sometimes I

heard four or five at once in different parts of the wood, by

accident one a bar behind another, and so near me that I

distinguished not only the cluck after each note, but often that

singular buzzing sound like a fly in a spider's web, only

proportionally louder. Sometimes one would circle round and

round

me in the woods a few feet distant as if tethered by a string, when

probably I was near its eggs. They sang at intervals throughout the

night, and were again as musical as ever just before and about

dawn.

When other birds are still, the screech owls take up the strain,

like mourning women their ancient u-lu-lu. Their dismal scream is

truly Ben Jonsonian. Wise midnight hags! It is no honest and

blunt

tu-whit tu-who of the poets, but, without jesting, a most solemn

graveyard ditty, the mutual consolations of suicide lovers

remembering the pangs and the delights of supernal love in the

infernal groves. Yet I love to hear their wailing, their doleful

responses, trilled along the woodside; reminding me sometimes of

music and singing birds; as if it were the dark and tearful side of

music, the regrets and sighs that would fain be sung. They are the
spirits, the low spirits and melancholy forebodings, of fallen souls

that once in human shape night-walked the earth and did the deeds

of

darkness, now expiating their sins with their wailing hymns or

threnodies in the scenery of their transgressions. They give me a

new sense of the variety and capacity of that nature which is our

common dwelling. Oh-o-o-o-o that I never had been bor-r-r-r-n!

sighs one on this side of the pond, and circles with the

restlessness of despair to some new perch on the gray oaks. Then

--

that I never had been bor-r-r-r-n! echoes another on the farther

side with tremulous sincerity, and -- bor-r-r-r-n! comes faintly

from far in the Lincoln woods.

I was also serenaded by a hooting owl. Near at hand you

could

fancy it the most melancholy sound in Nature, as if she meant by

this to stereotype and make permanent in her choir the dying

moans

of a human being -- some poor weak relic of mortality who has left

hope behind, and howls like an animal, yet with human sobs, on

entering the dark valley, made more awful by a certain gurgling

melodiousness -- I find myself beginning with the letters gl when I

try to imitate it -- expressive of a mind which has reached the

gelatinous, mildewy stage in the mortification of all healthy and

courageous thought. It reminded me of ghouls and idiots and

insane

howlings. But now one answers from far woods in a strain made

really melodious by distance -- Hoo hoo hoo, hoorer hoo; and

indeed

for the most part it suggested only pleasing associations, whether

heard by day or night, summer or winter.

I rejoice that there are owls. Let them do the idiotic and

maniacal hooting for men. It is a sound admirably suited to

swamps

and twilight woods which no day illustrates, suggesting a vast and

undeveloped nature which men have not recognized. They

represent

the stark twilight and unsatisfied thoughts which all have. All day

the sun has shone on the surface of some savage swamp, where the

single spruce stands hung with usnea lichens, and small hawks

circulate above, and the chickadee lisps amid the evergreens, and

the partridge and rabbit skulk beneath; but now a more dismal and

fitting day dawns, and a different race of creatures awakes to

express the meaning of Nature there.

 Late in the evening I heard the distant rumbling of wagons over

bridges -- a sound heard farther than almost any other at night --

the baying of dogs, and sometimes again the lowing of some

disconsolate cow in a distant barn-yard. In the mean-while all the

shore rang with the trump of bullfrogs, the sturdy spirits of

ancient wine-bibbers and wassailers, still unrepentant, trying to

sing a catch in their Stygian lake -- if the Walden nymphs will

pardon the comparison, for though there are almost no weeds,

there

are frogs there -- who would fain keep up the hilarious rules of

their old festal tables, though their voices have waxed hoarse and

solemnly grave, mocking at mirth, and the wine has lost its flavor,

and become only liquor to distend their paunches, and sweet

intoxication never comes to drown the memory of the past, but

mere

saturation and waterloggedness and distention. The most

aldermanic,

with his chin upon a heart-leaf, which serves for a napkin to his

drooling chaps, under this northern shore quaffs a deep draught of

the once scorned water, and passes round the cup with the

ejaculation tr-r-r-oonk, tr-r-r--oonk, tr-r-r-oonk! and straightway

comes over the water from some distant cove the same password
repeated, where the next in seniority and girth has gulped down to

his mark; and when this observance has made the circuit of the

shores, then ejaculates the master of ceremonies, with satisfaction,

tr-r-r-oonk! and each in his turn repeats the same down to the least

distended, leakiest, and flabbiest paunched, that there be no

mistake; and then the howl goes round again and again, until the

sun

disperses the morning mist, and only the patriarch is not under the

pond, but vainly bellowing troonk from time to time, and pausing

for

a reply.

I am not sure that I ever heard the sound of cock-crowing from

my clearing, and I thought that it might be worth the while to keep

a cockerel for his music merely, as a singing bird. The note of

this once wild Indian pheasant is certainly the most remarkable of

any bird's, and if they could be naturalized without being

domesticated, it would soon become the most famous sound in our

woods, surpassing the clangor of the goose and the hooting of the

owl; and then imagine the cackling of the hens to fill the pauses

when their lords' clarions rested! No wonder that man added this

bird to his tame stock -- to say nothing of the eggs and drumsticks.

To walk in a winter morning in a wood where these birds abounded,

their native woods, and hear the wild cockerels crow on the trees,

clear and shrill for miles over the resounding earth, drowning the

feebler notes of other birds -- think of it! It would put nations

on the alert. Who would not be early to rise, and rise earlier and

earlier every successive day of his life, till he became unspeakably

healthy, wealthy, and wise? This foreign bird's note is celebrated

by the poets of all countries along with the notes of their native

songsters. All climates agree with brave Chanticleer. He is more

indigenous even than the natives. His health is ever good, his

lungs are sound, his spirits never flag. Even the sailor on the

Atlantic and Pacific is awakened by his voice; but its shrill sound

never roused me from my slumbers. I kept neither dog, cat, cow,

pig, nor hens, so that you would have said there was a deficiency of

domestic sounds; neither the churn, nor the spinning-wheel, nor

even

the singing of the kettle, nor the hissing of the urn, nor children

crying, to comfort one. An old-fashioned man would have lost his

senses or died of ennui before this. Not even rats in the wall, for

they were starved out, or rather were never baited in -- only

squirrels on the roof and under the floor, a whip-poor-will on the

ridge-pole, a blue jay screaming beneath the window, a hare or

woodchuck under the house, a screech owl or a cat owl behind it, a
flock of wild geese or a laughing loon on the pond, and a fox to

bark in the night. Not even a lark or an oriole, those mild

plantation birds, ever visited my clearing. No cockerels to crow

nor hens to cackle in the yard. No yard! but unfenced nature

reaching up to your very sills. A young forest growing up under

your meadows, and wild sumachs and blackberry vines breaking

through

into your cellar; sturdy pitch pines rubbing and creaking against

the shingles for want of room, their roots reaching quite under the

house. Instead of a scuttle or a blind blown off in the gale -- a

pine tree snapped off or torn up by the roots behind your house for

fuel. Instead of no path to the front-yard gate in the Great Snow

-- no gate -- no front-yard -- and no path to the civilized world.

Solitude

This is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense,

and imbibes delight through every pore. I go and come with a

strange liberty in Nature, a part of herself. As I walk along the

stony shore of the pond in my shirt-sleeves, though it is cool as

well as cloudy and windy, and I see nothing special to attract me,
all the elements are unusually congenial to me. The bullfrogs

trump

to usher in the night, and the note of the whip-poor-will is borne

on the rippling wind from over the water. Sympathy with the

fluttering alder and poplar leaves almost takes away my breath; yet,

like the lake, my serenity is rippled but not ruffled. These small

waves raised by the evening wind are as remote from storm as the

smooth reflecting surface. Though it is now dark, the wind still

blows and roars in the wood, the waves still dash, and some

creatures lull the rest with their notes. The repose is never

complete. The wildest animals do not repose, but seek their prey

now; the fox, and skunk, and rabbit, now roam the fields and woods

without fear. They are Nature's watchmen -- links which connect

the

days of animated life.

When I return to my house I find that visitors have been there

and left their cards, either a bunch of flowers, or a wreath of

evergreen, or a name in pencil on a yellow walnut leaf or a chip.

They who come rarely to the woods take some little piece of the

forest into their hands to play with by the way, which they leave,

either intentionally or accidentally. One has peeled a willow wand,

woven it into a ring, and dropped it on my table. I could always

tell if visitors had called in my absence, either by the bended

twigs or grass, or the print of their shoes, and generally of what

sex or age or quality they were by some slight trace left, as a

flower dropped, or a bunch of grass plucked and thrown away, even

as

far off as the railroad, half a mile distant, or by the lingering

odor of a cigar or pipe. Nay, I was frequently notified of the

passage of a traveller along the highway sixty rods off by the scent

of his pipe.

There is commonly sufficient space about us. Our horizon is

never quite at our elbows. The thick wood is not just at our door,

nor the pond, but somewhat is always clearing, familiar and worn

by

us, appropriated and fenced in some way, and reclaimed from

Nature.

For what reason have I this vast range and circuit, some square

miles of unfrequented forest, for my privacy, abandoned to me by

men? My nearest neighbor is a mile distant, and no house is

visible

from any place but the hill-tops within half a mile of my own. I

have my horizon bounded by woods all to myself; a distant view of

the railroad where it touches the pond on the one hand, and of the
fence which skirts the woodland road on the other. But for the

most

part it is as solitary where I live as on the prairies. It is as

much Asia or Africa as New England. I have, as it were, my own

sun

and moon and stars, and a little world all to myself. At night

there was never a traveller passed my house, or knocked at my

door,

more than if I were the first or last man; unless it were in the

spring, when at long intervals some came from the village to fish

for pouts -- they plainly fished much more in the Walden Pond of

their own natures, and baited their hooks with darkness -- but they

soon retreated, usually with light baskets, and left "the world to

darkness and to me," and the black kernel of the night was never

profaned by any human neighborhood. I believe that men are

generally still a little afraid of the dark, though the witches are

all hung, and Christianity and candles have been introduced.

Yet I experienced sometimes that the most sweet and tender,

the

most innocent and encouraging society may be found in any natural

object, even for the poor misanthrope and most melancholy man.

There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst
of Nature and has his senses still. There was never yet such a

storm but it was AEolian music to a healthy and innocent ear.

Nothing can rightly compel a simple and brave man to a vulgar

sadness. While I enjoy the friendship of the seasons I trust that

nothing can make life a burden to me. The gentle rain which

waters

my beans and keeps me in the house today is not drear and

melancholy, but good for me too. Though it prevents my hoeing

them,

it is of far more worth than my hoeing. If it should continue so

long as to cause the seeds to rot in the ground and destroy the

potatoes in the low lands, it would still be good for the grass on

the uplands, and, being good for the grass, it would be good for me.

Sometimes, when I compare myself with other men, it seems as if I

were more favored by the gods than they, beyond any deserts that I

am conscious of; as if I had a warrant and surety at their hands

which my fellows have not, and were especially guided and

guarded.

I do not flatter myself, but if it be possible they flatter me. I

have never felt lonesome, or in the least oppressed by a sense of

solitude, but once, and that was a few weeks after I came to the

woods, when, for an hour, I doubted if the near neighborhood of

man

was not essential to a serene and healthy life. To be alone was

something unpleasant. But I was at the same time conscious of a

slight insanity in my mood, and seemed to foresee my recovery. In

the midst of a gentle rain while these thoughts prevailed, I was

suddenly sensible of such sweet and beneficent society in Nature, in

the very pattering of the drops, and in every sound and sight around

my house, an infinite and unaccountable friendliness all at once

like an atmosphere sustaining me, as made the fancied advantages

of

human neighborhood insignificant, and I have never thought of

them

since. Every little pine needle expanded and swelled with

sympathy

and befriended me. I was so distinctly made aware of the

presence

of something kindred to me, even in scenes which we are

accustomed

to call wild and dreary, and also that the nearest of blood to me

and humanest was not a person nor a villager, that I thought no

place could ever be strange to me again.

 "Mourning untimely consumes the sad;

Few are their days in the land of the living,

Beautiful daughter of Toscar."

Some of my pleasantest hours were during the long

rain-storms in

the spring or fall, which confined me to the house for the afternoon

as well as the forenoon, soothed by their ceaseless roar and

pelting; when an early twilight ushered in a long evening in which

many thoughts had time to take root and unfold themselves. In

those

driving northeast rains which tried the village houses so, when the

maids stood ready with mop and pail in front entries to keep the

deluge out, I sat behind my door in my little house, which was all

entry, and thoroughly enjoyed its protection. In one heavy

thunder-shower the lightning struck a large pitch pine across the

pond, making a very conspicuous and perfectly regular spiral groove

from top to bottom, an inch or more deep, and four or five inches

wide, as you would groove a walking-stick. I passed it again the

other day, and was struck with awe on looking up and beholding

that

mark, now more distinct than ever, where a terrific and resistless
bolt came down out of the harmless sky eight years ago. Men

frequently say to me, "I should think you would feel lonesome down

there, and want to be nearer to folks, rainy and snowy days and

nights especially." I am tempted to reply to such -- This whole

earth which we inhabit is but a point in space. How far apart,

think you, dwell the two most distant inhabitants of yonder star,

the breadth of whose disk cannot be appreciated by our

instruments?

Why should I feel lonely? is not our planet in the Milky Way? This

which you put seems to me not to be the most important question.

What sort of space is that which separates a man from his fellows

and makes him solitary? I have found that no exertion of the legs

can bring two minds much nearer to one another. What do we

want

most to dwell near to? Not to many men surely, the depot, the

post-office, the bar-room, the meeting-house, the school-house, the

grocery, Beacon Hill, or the Five Points, where men most

congregate,

but to the perennial source of our life, whence in all our

experience we have found that to issue, as the willow stands near

the water and sends out its roots in that direction. This will vary

with different natures, but this is the place where a wise man will
dig his cellar.... I one evening overtook one of my townsmen, who

has accumulated what is called "a handsome property" -- though I

never got a fair view of it -- on the Walden road, driving a pair of

cattle to market, who inquired of me how I could bring my mind to

give up so many of the comforts of life. I answered that I was very

sure I liked it passably well; I was not joking. And so I went home

to my bed, and left him to pick his way through the darkness and

the

mud to Brighton -- or Bright-town -- which place he would reach

some

time in the morning.

Any prospect of awakening or coming to life to a dead man

makes

indifferent all times and places. The place where that may occur is

always the same, and indescribably pleasant to all our senses. For

the most part we allow only outlying and transient circumstances to

make our occasions. They are, in fact, the cause of our

distraction. Nearest to all things is that power which fashions

their being. Next to us the grandest laws are continually being

executed. Next to us is not the workman whom we have hired,

with

whom we love so well to talk, but the workman whose work we are.
 "How vast and profound is the influence of the subtile powers

of

Heaven and of Earth!"

"We seek to perceive them, and we do not see them; we seek

to

hear them, and we do not hear them; identified with the substance

of

things, they cannot be separated from them."

"They cause that in all the universe men purify and sanctify

their hearts, and clothe themselves in their holiday garments to

offer sacrifices and oblations to their ancestors. It is an ocean

of subtile intelligences. They are everywhere, above us, on our

left, on our right; they environ us on all sides."

We are the subjects of an experiment which is not a little

interesting to me. Can we not do without the society of our

gossips

a little while under these circumstances -- have our own thoughts to

cheer us? Confucius says truly, "Virtue does not remain as an

abandoned orphan; it must of necessity have neighbors."

With thinking we may be beside ourselves in a sane sense. By

conscious effort of the mind we can stand aloof from actions and
their consequences; and all things, good and bad, go by us like a

torrent. We are not wholly involved in Nature. I may be either

the

driftwood in the stream, or Indra in the sky looking down on it. I

may be affected by a theatrical exhibition; on the other hand, I may

not be affected by an actual event which appears to concern me

much

more. I only know myself as a human entity; the scene, so to

speak,

of thoughts and affections; and am sensible of a certain doubleness

by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another.

However

intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism

of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but

spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is

no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of

life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction,

a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned. This

doubleness may easily make us poor neighbors and friends

sometimes.

I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time.

To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and

dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that

was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more

lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our

chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be

where he will. Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that

intervene between a man and his fellows. The really diligent

student in one of the crowded hives of Cambridge College is as

solitary as a dervish in the desert. The farmer can work alone in

the field or the woods all day, hoeing or chopping, and not feel

lonesome, because he is employed; but when he comes home at

night he

cannot sit down in a room alone, at the mercy of his thoughts, but

must be where he can "see the folks," and recreate, and, as he

thinks, remunerate himself for his day's solitude; and hence he

wonders how the student can sit alone in the house all night and

most of the day without ennui and "the blues"; but he does not

realize that the student, though in the house, is still at work in

his field, and chopping in his woods, as the farmer in his, and in

turn seeks the same recreation and society that the latter does,

though it may be a more condensed form of it.

Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short

intervals,
not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We

meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of

that old musty cheese that we are. We have had to agree on a

certain set of rules, called etiquette and politeness, to make this

frequent meeting tolerable and that we need not come to open war.

We meet at the post-office, and at the sociable, and about the

fireside every night; we live thick and are in each other's way, and

stumble over one another, and I think that we thus lose some

respect

for one another. Certainly less frequency would suffice for all

important and hearty communications. Consider the girls in a

factory -- never alone, hardly in their dreams. It would be better

if there were but one inhabitant to a square mile, as where I live.

The value of a man is not in his skin, that we should touch him.

I have heard of a man lost in the woods and dying of famine

and

exhaustion at the foot of a tree, whose loneliness was relieved by

the grotesque visions with which, owing to bodily weakness, his

diseased imagination surrounded him, and which he believed to be

real. So also, owing to bodily and mental health and strength, we

may be continually cheered by a like but more normal and natural

society, and come to know that we are never alone.

 I have a great deal of company in my house; especially in the

morning, when nobody calls. Let me suggest a few comparisons,

that

some one may convey an idea of my situation. I am no more

lonely

than the loon in the pond that laughs so loud, or than Walden Pond

itself. What company has that lonely lake, I pray? And yet it has

not the blue devils, but the blue angels in it, in the azure tint of

its waters. The sun is alone, except in thick weather, when there

sometimes appear to be two, but one is a mock sun. God is alone

--

but the devil, he is far from being alone; he sees a great deal of

company; he is legion. I am no more lonely than a single mullein

or

dandelion in a pasture, or a bean leaf, or sorrel, or a horse-fly,

or a bumblebee. I am no more lonely than the Mill Brook, or a

weathercock, or the north star, or the south wind, or an April

shower, or a January thaw, or the first spider in a new house.

I have occasional visits in the long winter evenings, when the

snow falls fast and the wind howls in the wood, from an old settler

and original proprietor, who is reported to have dug Walden Pond,

and stoned it, and fringed it with pine woods; who tells me stories
of old time and of new eternity; and between us we manage to pass

cheerful evening with social mirth and pleasant views of things,

even without apples or cider -- a most wise and humorous friend,

whom I love much, who keeps himself more secret than ever did

Goffe

or Whalley; and though he is thought to be dead, none can show

where

he is buried. An elderly dame, too, dwells in my neighborhood,

invisible to most persons, in whose odorous herb garden I love to

stroll sometimes, gathering simples and listening to her fables; for

she has a genius of unequalled fertility, and her memory runs back

farther than mythology, and she can tell me the original of every

fable, and on what fact every one is founded, for the incidents

occurred when she was young. A ruddy and lusty old dame, who

delights in all weathers and seasons, and is likely to outlive all

her children yet.

The indescribable innocence and beneficence of Nature -- of

sun

and wind and rain, of summer and winter -- such health, such cheer,

they afford forever! and such sympathy have they ever with our

race,
that all Nature would be affected, and the sun's brightness fade,

and the winds would sigh humanely, and the clouds rain tears, and

the woods shed their leaves and put on mourning in midsummer, if

any

man should ever for a just cause grieve. Shall I not have

intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable

mould myself?

What is the pill which will keep us well, serene, contented?

Not my or thy great-grandfather's, but our great-grandmother

Nature's universal, vegetable, botanic medicines, by which she has

kept herself young always, outlived so many old Parrs in her day,

and fed her health with their decaying fatness. For my panacea,

instead of one of those quack vials of a mixture dipped from

Acheron

and the Dead Sea, which come out of those long shallow

black-schooner looking wagons which we sometimes see made to

carry

bottles, let me have a draught of undiluted morning air. Morning

air! If men will not drink of this at the fountainhead of the day,

why, then, we must even bottle up some and sell it in the shops, for

the benefit of those who have lost their subscription ticket to

morning time in this world. But remember, it will not keep quite
till noonday even in the coolest cellar, but drive out the stopples

long ere that and follow westward the steps of Aurora. I am no

worshipper of Hygeia, who was the daughter of that old

herb-doctor

AEsculapius, and who is represented on monuments holding a

serpent

in one hand, and in the other a cup out of which the serpent

sometimes drinks; but rather of Hebe, cup-bearer to Jupiter, who

was

the daughter of Juno and wild lettuce, and who had the power of

restoring gods and men to the vigor of youth. She was probably

the

only thoroughly sound-conditioned, healthy, and robust young lady

that ever walked the globe, and wherever she came it was spring.

Visitors

I think that I love society as much as most, and am ready

enough

to fasten myself like a bloodsucker for the time to any full-blooded

man that comes in my way. I am naturally no hermit, but might

possibly sit out the sturdiest frequenter of the bar-room, if my

business called me thither.

I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for

friendship, three for society. When visitors came in larger and

unexpected numbers there was but the third chair for them all, but

they generally economized the room by standing up. It is

surprising

how many great men and women a small house will contain. I

have had

twenty-five or thirty souls, with their bodies, at once under my

roof, and yet we often parted without being aware that we had

come

very near to one another. Many of our houses, both public and

private, with their almost innumerable apartments, their huge halls

and their cellars for the storage of wines and other munitions of

peace, appear to be extravagantly large for their inhabitants. They

are so vast and magnificent that the latter seem to be only vermin

which infest them. I am surprised when the herald blows his

summons

before some Tremont or Astor or Middlesex House, to see come

creeping out over the piazza for all inhabitants a ridiculous mouse,

which soon again slinks into some hole in the pavement.

 One inconvenience I sometimes experienced in so small a

house,

the difficulty of getting to a sufficient distance from my guest

when we began to utter the big thoughts in big words. You want

room

for your thoughts to get into sailing trim and run a course or two

before they make their port. The bullet of your thought must have

overcome its lateral and ricochet motion and fallen into its last

and steady course before it reaches the ear of the hearer, else it

may plow out again through the side of his head. Also, our

sentences wanted room to unfold and form their columns in the

interval. Individuals, like nations, must have suitable broad and

natural boundaries, even a considerable neutral ground, between

them. I have found it a singular luxury to talk across the pond to

a companion on the opposite side. In my house we were so near

that

we could not begin to hear -- we could not speak low enough to be

heard; as when you throw two stones into calm water so near that

they break each other's undulations. If we are merely loquacious

and loud talkers, then we can afford to stand very near together,

cheek by jowl, and feel each other's breath; but if we speak

reservedly and thoughtfully, we want to be farther apart, that all

animal heat and moisture may have a chance to evaporate. If we

would enjoy the most intimate society with that in each of us which

is without, or above, being spoken to, we must not only be silent,

but commonly so far apart bodily that we cannot possibly hear each

other's voice in any case. Referred to this standard, speech is for

the convenience of those who are hard of hearing; but there are

many

fine things which we cannot say if we have to shout. As the

conversation began to assume a loftier and grander tone, we

gradually shoved our chairs farther apart till they touched the wall

in opposite corners, and then commonly there was not room

enough.

My "best" room, however, my withdrawing room, always ready

for

company, on whose carpet the sun rarely fell, was the pine wood

behind my house. Thither in summer days, when distinguished

guests

came, I took them, and a priceless domestic swept the floor and

dusted the furniture and kept the things in order.

If one guest came he sometimes partook of my frugal meal,

and it

was no interruption to conversation to be stirring a hasty-pudding,

or watching the rising and maturing of a loaf of bread in the ashes,

in the meanwhile. But if twenty came and sat in my house there

was

nothing said about dinner, though there might be bread enough for

two, more than if eating were a forsaken habit; but we naturally

practised abstinence; and this was never felt to be an offence

against hospitality, but the most proper and considerate course.

The waste and decay of physical life, which so often needs repair,

seemed miraculously retarded in such a case, and the vital vigor

stood its ground. I could entertain thus a thousand as well as

twenty; and if any ever went away disappointed or hungry from my

house when they found me at home, they may depend upon it that

sympathized with them at least. So easy is it, though many

housekeepers doubt it, to establish new and better customs in the

place of the old. You need not rest your reputation on the dinners

you give. For my own part, I was never so effectually deterred

from

frequenting a man's house, by any kind of Cerberus whatever, as by

the parade one made about dining me, which I took to be a very

polite and roundabout hint never to trouble him so again. I think I

shall never revisit those scenes. I should be proud to have for the
motto of my cabin those lines of Spenser which one of my visitors

inscribed on a yellow walnut leaf for a card:--

"Arrived there, the little house they fill,

Ne looke for entertainment where none was;

Rest is their feast, and all things at their will:

The noblest mind the best contentment has."

When Winslow, afterward governor of the Plymouth Colony,

went

with a companion on a visit of ceremony to Massasoit on foot

through

the woods, and arrived tired and hungry at his lodge, they were well

received by the king, but nothing was said about eating that day.

When the night arrived, to quote their own words -- "He laid us on

the bed with himself and his wife, they at the one end and we at the

other, it being only planks laid a foot from the ground and a thin

mat upon them. Two more of his chief men, for want of room,

pressed

by and upon us; so that we were worse weary of our lodging than of

our journey." At one o'clock the next day Massasoit "brought two

fishes that he had shot," about thrice as big as a bream. "These

being boiled, there were at least forty looked for a share in them;

the most eat of them. This meal only we had in two nights and a

day; and had not one of us bought a partridge, we had taken our

journey fasting." Fearing that they would be l