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Title: Walking
Author: Henry David Thoreau
Date: May 1862
Language: en
Topics: anarcho-naturism, nature, wildness, life, adventure, transcendentalism
Source: Retrieved on May 26, 2022 from https://www.thoreau-online.org/walking.html
Notes: A lecture first delivered at the Concord Lyceum on April 23, 1851.

Henry David Thoreau

Walking

I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as

contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil—to regard man as an

inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of

society. I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an

emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilization: the

minister and the school committee and every one of you will take care of

that.

I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who

understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks—who had a

genius, so to speak, for sauntering, which word is beautifully derived

“from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and

asked charity, under pretense of going a la SainteTerre,” to the Holy

Land, till the children exclaimed, “There goes a Sainte-Terrer,” a

Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their

walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they

who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some,

however, would derive the word from sans terre without land or a home,

which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular

home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of

successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may be

the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no

more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while

sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea. But I prefer the

first, which, indeed, is the most probable derivation. For every walk is

a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth

and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels.

It is true, we are but faint-hearted crusaders, even the walkers,

nowadays, who undertake no persevering, never-ending enterprises. Our

expeditions are but tours, and come round again at evening to the old

hearthside from which we set out. Half the walk is but retracing our

steps. We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit

of undying adventure, never to return, prepared to send back our

embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are

ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and

child and friends, and never see them again—if you have paid your debts,

and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free

man—then you are ready for a walk.

To come down to my own experience, my companion and I, for I sometimes

have a companion, take pleasure in fancying ourselves knights of a new,

or rather an old, order—not Equestrians or Chevaliers, not Ritters or

Riders, but Walkers, a still more ancient and honorable class, I trust.

The Chivalric and heroic spirit which once belonged to the Rider seems

now to reside in, or perchance to have subsided into, the Walker—not the

Knight, but Walker, Errant. He is a sort of fourth estate, outside of

Church and State and People.

We have felt that we almost alone hereabouts practiced this noble art;

though, to tell the truth, at least if their own assertions are to be

received, most of my townsmen would fain walk sometimes, as I do, but

they cannot. No wealth can buy the requisite leisure, freedom, and

independence which are the capital in this profession. It comes only by

the grace of God. It requires a direct dispensation from Heaven to

become a walker. You must be born into the family of the Walkers.

Ambulator nascitur, non fit. Some of my townsmen, it is true, can

remember and have described to me some walks which they took ten years

ago, in which they were so blessed as to lose themselves for half an

hour in the woods; but I know very well that they have confined

themselves to the highway ever since, whatever pretensions they may make

to belong to this select class. No doubt they were elevated for a moment

as by the reminiscence of a previous state of existence, when even they

were foresters and outlaws.

“When he came to grene wode,

In a mery mornynge,

There he herde the notes small

Of byrdes mery syngynge.

“It is ferre gone, sayd Robyn,

That I was last here;

Me Lyste a lytell for to shote

At the donne dere.”

I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend

four hours a day at least—and it is commonly more than that—sauntering

through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from

all worldly engagements. You may safely say, A penny for your thoughts,

or a thousand pounds. When sometimes I am reminded that the mechanics

and shopkeepers stay in their shops not only all the forenoon, but all

the afternoon too, sitting with crossed legs, so many of them—as if the

legs were made to sit upon, and not to stand or walk upon—I think that

they deserve some credit for not having all committed suicide long ago.

I, who cannot stay in my chamber for a single day without acquiring some

rust, and when sometimes I have stolen forth for a walk at the eleventh

hour, or four o'clock in the afternoon, too late to redeem the day, when

the shades of night were already beginning to be mingled with the

daylight, have felt as if I had committed some sin to be atoned for—I

confess that I am astonished at the power of endurance, to say nothing

of the moral insensibility, of my neighbors who confine themselves to

shops and offices the whole day for weeks and months, aye, and years

almost together. I know not what manner of stuff they are of, sitting

there now at three o'clock in the afternoon, as if it were three o'clock

in the morning. Bonaparte may talk of the three-o'clock-in-the-morning

courage, but it is nothing to the courage which can sit down cheerfully

at this hour in the afternoon over against one's self whom you have

known all the morning, to starve out a garrison to whom you are bound by

such strong ties of sympathy. I wonder that about this time, or say

between four and five o'clock in the afternoon, too late for the morning

papers and too early for the evening ones, there is not a general

explosion heard up and down the street, scattering a legion of

antiquated and house-bred notions and whims to the four winds for an

airing—and so the evil cure itself.

How womankind, who are confined to the house still more than men, stand

it I do not know; but I have ground to suspect that most of them do not

stand it at all. When, early in a summer afternoon, we have been shaking

the dust of the village from the skirts of our garments, making haste

past those houses with purely Doric or Gothic fronts, which have such an

air of repose about them, my companion whispers that probably about

these times their occupants are all gone to bed. Then it is that I

appreciate the beauty and the glory of architecture, which itself never

turns in, but forever stands out and erect, keeping watch over the

slumberers.

No doubt temperament, and, above all, age, have a good deal to do with

it. As a man grows older, his ability to sit still and follow indoor

occupations increases. He grows vespertinal in his habits as the evening

of life approaches, till at last he comes forth only just before

sundown, and gets all the walk that he requires in half an hour.

But the walking of which I speak has nothing in it akin to taking

exercise, as it is called, as the sick take medicine at stated hours—as

the Swinging of dumb- bells or chairs; but is itself the enterprise and

adventure of the day. If you would get exercise, go in search of the

springs of life. Think of a man's swinging dumbbells for his health,

when those springs are bubbling up in far-off pastures unsought by him!

Moreover, you must walk like a camel, which is said to be the only beast

which ruminates when walking. When a traveler asked Wordsworth's servant

to show him her master's study, she answered, “Here is his library, but

his study is out of doors.”

Living much out of doors, in the sun and wind, will no doubt produce a

certain roughness of character—will cause a thicker cuticle to grow over

some of the finer qualities of our nature, as on the face and hands, or

as severe manual labor robs the hands of some of their delicacy of

touch. So staying in the house, on the other hand, may produce a

softness and smoothness, not to say thinness of skin, accompanied by an

increased sensibility to certain impressions. Perhaps we should be more

susceptible to some influences important to our intellectual and moral

growth, if the sun had shone and the wind blown on us a little less; and

no doubt it is a nice matter to proportion rightly the thick and thin

skin. But methinks that is a scurf that will fall off fast enough—that

the natural remedy is to be found in the proportion which the night

bears to the day, the winter to the summer, thought to experience. There

will be so much the more air and sunshine in our thoughts. The callous

palms of the laborer are conversant with finer tissues of self-respect

and heroism, whose touch thrills the heart, than the languid fingers of

idleness. That is mere sentimentality that lies abed by day and thinks

itself white, far from the tan and callus of experience.

When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and woods: what would become

of us, if we walked only in a garden or a mall? Even some sects of

philosophers have felt the necessity of importing the woods to

themselves, since they did not go to the woods. “They planted groves and

walks of Platanes,” where they took subdiales ambulationes in porticos

open to the air. Of course it is of no use to direct our steps to the

woods, if they do not carry us thither. I am alarmed when it happens

that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there

in spirit. In my afternoon walk I would fain forget all my morning

occupations and my obligations to Society. But it sometimes happens that

I cannot easily shake off the village. The thought of some work will run

in my head and I am not where my body is—I am out of my senses. In my

walks I would fain return to my senses. What business have I in the

woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods? I suspect myself,

and cannot help a shudder when I find myself so implicated even in what

are called good works—for this may sometimes happen.

My vicinity affords many good walks; and though for so many years I have

walked almost every day, and sometimes for several days together, I have

not yet exhausted them. An absolutely new prospect is a great happiness,

and I can still get this any afternoon. Two or three hours' walking will

carry me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see. A single

farmhouse which I had not seen before is sometimes as good as the

dominions of the King of Dahomey. There is in fact a sort of harmony

discoverable between the capabilities of the landscape within a circle

of ten miles' radius, or the limits of an afternoon walk, and the

threescore years and ten of human life. It will never become quite

familiar to you.

Nowadays almost all man's improvements, so called, as the building of

houses and the cutting down of the forest and of all large trees, simply

deform the landscape, and make it more and more tame and cheap. A people

who would begin by burning the fences and let the forest stand! I saw

the fences half consumed, their ends lost in the middle of the prairie,

and some worldly miser with a surveyor looking after his bounds, while

heaven had taken place around him, and he did not see the angels going

to and fro, but was looking for an old post-hole in the midst of

paradise. I looked again, and saw him standing in the middle of a boggy

Stygian fen, surrounded by devils, and he had found his bounds without a

doubt, three little stones, where a stake had been driven, and looking

nearer, I saw that the Prince of Darkness was his surveyor.

I can easily walk ten, fifteen, twenty, any number of miles, commencing

at my own door, without going by any house, without crossing a road

except where the fox and the mink do: first along by the river, and then

the brook, and then the meadow and the woodside. There are square miles

in my vicinity which have no inhabitant. From many a hill I can see

civilization and the abodes of man afar. The farmers and their works are

scarcely more obvious than woodchucks and their burrows. Man and his

affairs, church and state and school, trade and commerce, and

manufactures and agriculture even politics, the most alarming of them

all—I am pleased to see how little space they occupy in the landscape.

Politics is but a narrow field, and that still narrower highway yonder

leads to it. I sometimes direct the traveler thither. If you would go to

the political world, follow the great road, follow that market-man, keep

his dust in your eyes, and it will lead you straight to it; for it, too,

has its place merely, and does not occupy all space. I pass from it as

from a bean field into the forest, and it is forgotten. In one half-hour

I can walk off to some portion of the earth's surface where a man does

not stand from one year's end to another, and there, consequently,

politics are not, for they are but as the cigar-smoke of a man.

The village is the place to which the roads tend, a sort of expansion of

the highway, as a lake of a river. It is the body of which roads are the

arms and legs—a trivial or quadrivial place, the thoroughfare and

ordinary of travelers. The word is from the Latin villa which together

with via, a way, or more anciently ved andvella, Varro derives from

veho, to carry, because the villa is the place to and from which things

are carried. They who got their living by teaming were said vellaturam

facere. Hence, too, the Latin word vilis and our vile, also villain.

This suggests what kind of degeneracy villagers are liable to. They are

wayworn by the travel that goes by and over them, without traveling

themselves.

Some do not walk at all; others walk in the highways; a few walk across

lots. Roads are made for horses and men of business. I do not travel in

them much, comparatively, because I am not in a hurry to get to any

tavern or grocery or livery-stable or depot to which they lead. I am a

good horse to travel, but not from choice a roadster. The

landscape-painter uses the figures of men to mark a road. He would not

make that use of my figure. I walk out into a nature such as the old

prophets and poets, Menu, Moses, Homer, Chaucer, walked in. You may name

it America, but it is not America; neither Americus Vespueius, nor

Columbus, nor the rest were the discoverers of it. There is a truer

amount of it in mythology than in any history of America, so called,

that I have seen.

However, there are a few old roads that may be trodden with profit, as

if they led somewhere now that they are nearly discontinued. There is

the Old Marlborough Road, which does not go to Marlborough now,

me-thinks, unless that is Marlborough where it carries me. I am the

bolder to speak of it here, because I presume that there are one or two

such roads in every town.

The Old Marlborough Road

Where they once dug for money,

But never found any;

Where sometimes Martial Miles

Singly files,

And Elijah Wood,

I fear for no good:

No other man,

Save Elisha Dugan—

O man of wild habits,

Partridges and rabbits

Who hast no cares

Only to set snares,

Who liv'st all alone,

Close to the bone

And where life is sweetest

Constantly eatest.

When the spring stirs my blood

With the instinct to travel,

I can get enough gravel

On the Old Marlborough Road.

Nobody repairs it,

For nobody wears it;

It is a living way,

As the Christians say.

Not many there be

Who enter therein,

Only the guests of the

Irishman Quin.

What is it, what is it

But a direction out there,

And the bare possibility

Of going somewhere?

Great guide-boards of stone,

But travelers none;

Cenotaphs of the towns

Named on their crowns.

It is worth going to see

Where you might be.

What king Did the thing,

I am still wondering;

Set up how or when,

By what selectmen,

Gourgas or Lee,

Clark or Darby?

They're a great endeavor

To be something forever;

Blank tablets of stone,

Where a traveler might groan,

And in one sentence

Grave all that is known

Which another might read,

In his extreme need.

I know one or two

Lines that would do,

Literature that might stand

All over the land

Which a man could remember

Till next December,

And read again in the spring,

After the thawing.

If with fancy unfurled

You leave your abode

You may go round the world

By the Old Marlborough Road.

At present, in this vicinity, the best part of the land is not private

property; the landscape is not owned, and the walker enjoys comparative

freedom. But possibly the day will come when it will be partitioned off

into so-called pleasure-grounds, in which a few will take a narrow and

exclusive pleasure only—when fences shall be multiplied, and man-traps

and other engines invented to confine men to the public road, and

walking over the surface of God's earth shall be construed to mean

trespassing on some gentleman's grounds. To enjoy a thing exclusively is

commonly to exclude yourself from the true enjoyment of it. Let us

improve our opportunities, then, before the evil days come.

What is it that makes it so hard sometimes to determine whither we will

walk? I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, if we

unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright. It is not indifferent

to us which way we walk. There is a right way; but we are very liable

from heedlessness and stupidity to take the wrong one. We would fain

take that walk, never yet taken by us through this actual world, which

is perfectly symbolical of the path which we love to travel in the

interior and ideal world; and sometimes, no doubt, we find it difficult

to choose our direction, because it does not yet exist distinctly in our

idea.

When I go out of the house for a walk, uncertain as yet whither I will

bend my steps, and submit myself to my instinct to decide for me, I

find, strange and whimsical as it may seem, that I finally and

inevitably settle southwest, toward some particular wood or meadow or

deserted pasture or hill in that direction. My needle is slow to settle,

varies a few degrees, and does not always point due southwest, it is

true, and it has good authority for this variation, but it always

settles between west and south-southwest. The future lies that way to

me, and the earth seems more unexhausted and richer on that side. The

outline which would bound my walks would be, not a circle, but a

parabola, or rather like one of those cometary orbits which have been

thought to be non-returning curves, in this case opening westward, in

which my house occupies the place of the sun. I turn round and round

irresolute sometimes for a quarter of an hour, until I decide, for a

thousandth time, that I will walk into the southwest or west. Eastward I

go only by force; but westward I go free. Thither no business leads me.

It is hard for me to believe that I shall find fair landscapes or

sufficient wildness and freedom behind the eastern horizon. I am not

excited by the prospect of a walk thither; but I believe that the forest

which I see in the western horizon stretches uninterruptedly toward the

setting sun, and there are no towns nor cities in it of enough

consequence to disturb me. Let me live where I will, on this side is the

city, on that the wilderness, and ever I am leaving the city more and

more, and withdrawing into the wilderness. I should not lay so much

stress on this fact, if I did not believe that something like this is

the prevailing tendency of my countrymen. I must walk toward Oregon, and

not toward Europe. And that way the nation is moving, and I may say that

mankind progress from east to west. Within a few years we have witnessed

the phenomenon of a southeastward migration, in the settlement of

Australia; but this affects us as a retrograde movement, and, judging

from the moral and physical character of the first generation of

Australians, has not yet proved a successful experiment. The eastern

Tartars think that there is nothing west beyond Thibet. "The world ends

there," say they; "beyond there is nothing but a shoreless sea." It is

unmitigated East where they live.

We go eastward to realize historyand study the works of art and

literature, retracing the steps of the race; we go westward as into the

future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure. The Atlantic is a

Lethean stream, in our passage over which we have had an opportunity to

forget the Old World and its institutions. If we do not succeed this

time, there is perhaps one more chance for the race left before it

arrives on the banks of the Styx; and that is in the Lethe of the

Pacific, which is three times as wide.

I know not how significant it is, or how far it is an evidence of

singularity, that an individual should thus consent in his pettiest walk

with the general movement of the race; but I know that something akin to

the migratory instinct in birds and quadrupeds—which, in some instances,

is known to have affected the squirrel tribe, impelling them to a

general and mysterious movement, in which they were seen, say some,

crossing the broadest rivers, each on its particular chip, with its tail

raised for a sail, and bridging narrower streams with their dead—that

something like the furor which affects the domestic cattle in the

spring, and which is referred to a worm in their tails, affects both

nations and individuals, either perennially or from time to time. Not a

flock of wild geese cackles over our town, but it to some extent

unsettles the value of real estate here, and, if I were a broker, I

should probably take that disturbance into account.

“Than longen folk to gon on pilgrimages,

And palmeres for to seken strange strondes.”

Every sunset which I witness inspires me with the desire to go to a West

as distant and as fair as that into which the sun goes down. He appears

to migrate westward daily, and tempt us to follow him. He is the Great

Western Pioneer whom the nations follow. We dream all night of those

mountain-ridges in the horizon, though they may be of vapor only, which

were last gilded by his rays. The island of Atlantis, and the islands

and gardens of the Hesperides, a sort of terrestrial paradise, appear to

have been the Great West of the ancients, enveloped in mystery and

poetry. Who has not seen in imagination, when looking into the sunset

sky, the gardens of the Hesperides, and the foundation of all those

fables?

Columbus felt the westward tendency more strongly than any before. He

obeyed it, and found a New World for Castile and Leon. The herd of men

in those days scented fresh pastures from afar,

“And now the sun had stretched out all the hills,

And now was dropped into the western bay;

At last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue;

Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new.”

Where on the globe can there be found an area of equal extent with that

occupied by the bulk of our States, so fertile and so rich and varied in

its productions, and at the same time so habitable by the European, as

this is? Michaux, who knew but part of them, says that “the species of

large trees are much more numerous in North America than in Europe; in

the United States there are more than one hundred and forty species that

exceed thirty feet in height; in France there are but thirty that attain

this size.” Later botanists more than confirm his observations. Humboldt

came to America to realize his youthful dreams of a tropical vegetation,

and he beheld it in its greatest perfection in the primitive forests of

the Amazon, the most gigantic wilderness on the earth, which he has so

eloquently described. The geographer Guyot, himself a European, goes

farther—farther than I am ready to follow him; yet not when he says: “As

the plant is made for the animal, as the vegetable world is made for the

animal world, America is made for the man of the Old World.... The man

of the Old World sets out upon his way. Leaving the highlands of Asia,

he descends from station to station towards Europe. Each of his steps is

marked by a new civilization superior to the preceding, by a greater

power of development. Arrived at the Atlantic, he pauses on the shore of

this unknown ocean, the bounds of which he knows not, and turns upon his

footprints for an instant.” When he has exhausted the rich soil of

Europe, and reinvigorated himself, “then recommences his adventurous

career westward as in the earliest ages.” So far Guyot.

From this western impulse coming in contact with the barrier of the

Atlantic sprang the commerce and enterprise of modern times. The younger

Michaux, in his Travels West of the Alleghanies in 1802, says that the

common inquiry in the newly settled West was, “‘From what part of the

world have you come?’ As if these vast and fertile regions would

naturally be the place of meeting and common country of all the

inhabitants of the globe.”

To use an obsolete Latin word, I might say, Ex Oriente lux; ex Occidente

FRUX. From the East light; from the West fruit.

Sir Franeis Head, an English traveler and a Governor- General of Canada,

tells us that “in both the northern and southern hemispheres of the New

World, Nature has not only outlined her works on a larger scale, but has

painted the whole picture with brighter and more costly colors than she

used in delineating and in beautifying the Old World.... The heavens of

America appear infinitely higher, the sky is bluer, the air is fresher,

the cold is intenser, the moon looks larger, the stars are brighter the

thunder is louder, the lightning is vivider, the wind is stronger, the

rain is heavier, the mountains are higher, the rivers longer, the

forests bigger, the plains broader.” This statement will do at least to

set against Buffon's account of this part of the world and its

productions.

Linnaeus said long ago, “Nescio quae facies laeta, glabra plantis

Americanis” (I know not what there is of joyous and smooth in the aspect

of American plants); and I think that in this country there are no, or

at most very few, Africanae bestiae, African beasts, as the Romans

called them, and that in this respect also it is peculiarly fitted for

the habitation of man. We are told that within three miles of the center

of the East-Indian city of Singapore, some of the inhabitants are

annually carried off by tigers; but the traveler can lie down in the

woods at night almost anywhere in North America without fear of wild

beasts.

These are encouraging testimonies. If the moon looks larger here than in

Europe, probably the sun looks larger also. If the heavens of America

appear infinitely higher, and the stars brighter, I trust that these

facts are symbolical of the height to which the philosophy and poetry

and religion of her inhabitants may one day soar. At length, perchance,

the immaterial heaven will appear as much higher to the American mind,

and the intimations that star it as much brighter. For I believe that

climate does thus react on man—as there is something in the mountain air

that feeds the spirit and inspires. Will not man grow to greater

perfection intellectually as well as physically under these influences?

Or is it unimportant how many foggy days there are in his life? I trust

that we shall be more imaginative, that our thoughts will be clearer,

fresher, and more ethereal, as our sky—our understanding more

comprehensive and broader, like our plains—our intellect generally on a

grander seale, like our thunder and lightning, our rivers and mountains

and forests—and our hearts shall even correspond in breadth and depth

and grandeur to our inland seas. Perchance there will appear to the

traveler something, he knows not what, of laeta and glabra, of joyous

and serene, in our very faces. Else to what end does the world go on,

and why was America discovered?

To Americans I hardly need to say,

“Westward the star of empire takes its way.”

As a true patriot, I should be ashamed to think that Adam in paradise

was more favorably situated on the whole than the backwoodsman in this

country.

Our sympathies in Massachusetts are not confined to New England; though

we may be estranged from the South, we sympathize with the West. There

is the home of the younger sons, as among the Scandinavians they took to

the sea for their inheritance. It is too late to be studying Hebrew; it

is more important to understand even the slang of today.

Some months ago I went to see a panorama of the Rhine. It was like a

dream of the Middle Ages. I floated down its historic stream in

something more than imagination, under bridges built by the Romans, and

repaired by later heroes, past cities and castles whose very names were

music to my ears, and each of which was the subject of a legend. There

were Ehrenbreitstein and Rolandseck and Coblentz, which I knew only in

history. They were ruins that interested me chiefly. There seemed to

come up from its waters and its vine-clad hills and valleys a hushed

music as of Crusaders departing for the Holy Land. I floated along under

the spell of enchantment, as if I had been transported to an heroic age,

and breathed an atmosphere of chivalry.

Soon after, I went to see a panorama of the Mississippi, and as I worked

my way up the river in the light of today, and saw the steamboats

wooding up, counted the rising cities, gazed on the fresh ruins of

Nauvoo, beheld the Indians moving west across the stream, and, as before

I had looked up the Moselle, now looked up the Ohio and the Missouri and

heard the legends of Dubuque and of Wenona's Cliff—still thinking more

of the future than of the past or present—I saw that this was a Rhine

stream of a different kind; that the foundations of castles were yet to

be laid, and the famous bridges were yet to be thrown over the river;

and I felt that this was the heroic age itself, though we know it not,

for the hero is commonly the simplest and obscurest of men.

The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I

have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of

the World. Every tree sends its fibers forth in search of the Wild. The

cities import it at any price. Men plow and sail for it. From the forest

and wilderness come the tonics and barks which brace mankind. Our

ancestors were savages. The story of Romulus and Remus being suckled by

a wolf is not a meaningless fable. The founders of every state which has

risen to eminence have drawn their nourishment and vigor from a similar

wild source. It was because the children of the Empire were not suckled

by the wolf that they were conquered and displaced by the children of

the northern forests who were.

I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which

the corn grows. We require an infusion of hemlock, spruce or arbor vitae

in our tea. There is a difference between eating and drinking for

strength and from mere gluttony. The Hottentots eagerly devour the

marrow of the koodoo and other antelopes raw, as a matter of course.

Some of our northern Indians eat raw the marrow of the Arctic reindeer,

as well as various other parts, including the summits of the antlers, as

long as they are soft. And herein, perchance, they have stolen a march

on the cooks of Paris. They get what usually goes to feed the fire. This

is probably better than stall-fed beef and slaughterhouse pork to make a

man of. Give me a wildness whose glance no civilization can endure—as if

we lived on the marrow of koodoos devoured raw.

There are some intervals which border the strain of the wood thrush, to

which I would migrate—wild lands where no settler has squatted; to

which, methinks, I am already acclimated.

The African hunter Cumming tells us that the skin of the eland, as well

as that of most other antelopes just killed, emits the most delicious

perfume of trees and grass. I would have every man so much like a wild

antelope, so much a part and parcel of nature, that his very person

should thus sweetly advertise our senses of his presence, and remind us

of those parts of nature which he most haunts. I feel no disposition to

be satirical, when the trapper's coat emits the odor of musquash even;

it is a sweeter scent to me than that which commonly exhales from the

merchant's or the scholar's garments. When I go into their wardrobes and

handle their vestments, I am reminded of no grassy plains and flowery

meads which they have frequented, but of dusty merchants' exchanges and

libraries rather.

A tanned skin is something more than respectable, and perhaps olive is a

fitter color than white for a man—a denizen of the woods. “The pale

white man!” I do not wonder that the African pitied him. Darwin the

naturalist says, “A white man bathing by the side of a Tahitian was like

a plant bleached by the gardener's art, compared with a fine, dark green

one, growing vigorously in the open fields.”

Ben Jonson exclaims,

“How near to good is what is fair!”

So I would say,

“How near to good is what is wild!”

Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet

subdued to man, its presence refreshes him. One who pressed forward

incessantly and never rested from his labors, who grew fast and made

infinite demands on life, would always find himself in a new country or

wilderness, and surrounded by the raw material of life. He would be

climbing over the prostrate stems of primitive forest-trees.

Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not

in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps. When,

formerly, I have analyzed my partiality for some farm which I had

contemplated purchasing, I have frequently found that I was attracted

solely by a few square rods of impermeable and unfathomable bog—a

natural sink in one corner of it. That was the jewel which dazzled me. I

derive more of my subsistence from the swamps which surround my native

town than from the cultivated gardens in the village. There are no

richer parterres to my eyes than the dense beds of dwarf andromeda

(Cassandra calyculata) which cover these tender places on the earth's

surface. Botany cannot go farther than tell me the names of the shrubs

which grow there—the high blueberry, panicled andromeda, lambkill,

azalea, and rhodora—all standing in the quaking sphagnum. I often think

that I should like to have my house front on this mass of dull red

bushes, omitting other flower plots and borders, transplanted spruce and

trim box, even graveled walks—to have this fertile spot under my

windows, not a few imported barrowfuls of soil only to cover the sand

which was thrown out in digging the cellar. Why not put my house, my

parlor, behind this plot, instead of behind that meager assemblage of

curiosities, that poor apology for a Nature and Art, which I call my

front yard? It is an effort to clear up and make a decent appearance

when the carpenter and mason have departed, though done as much for the

passer-by as the dweller within. The most tasteful front-yard fence was

never an agreeable object of study to me; the most elaborate ornaments,

acorn tops, or what not, soon wearied and disgusted me. Bring your sills

up to the very edge of the swamp, then (though it may not be the best

place for a dry cellar), so that there be no access on that side to

citizens. Front yards are not made to walk in, but, at most, through,

and you could go in the back way.

Yes, though you may think me perverse, if it were proposed to me to

dwell in the neighborhood of the most beautiful garden that ever human

art contrived, or else of a Dismal Swamp, I should certainly decide for

the swamp. How vain, then, have been all your labors, citizens, for me!

My spirits infallibly rise in proportion to the outward dreariness. Give

me the ocean, the desert, or the wilderness! In the desert, pure air and

solitude compensate for want of moisture and fertility. The traveler

Burton says of it: “Your morale improves; you become frank and cordial,

hospitable and single-minded.... In the desert, spirituous liquors

excite only disgust. There is a keen enjoyment in a mere animal

existence.” They who have been traveling long on the steppes of Tartary

say, “On re-entering cultivated lands, the agitation, perplexity, and

turmoil of civilization oppressed and suffocated us; the air seemed to

fail us, and we felt every moment as if about to die of asphyxia.” When

I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest woods the thickest and most

interminable and, to the citizen, most dismal, swamp. I enter a swamp as

a sacred place, a sanctum sanctorum. There is the strength, the marrow,

of Nature. The wildwood covers the virgin mould, and the same soil is

good for men and for trees. A man's health requires as many acres of

meadow to his prospect as his farm does loads of muck. There are the

strong meats on which he feeds. A town is saved, not more by the

righteous men in it than by the woods and swamps that surround it. A

township where one primitive forest waves above while another primitive

forest rots below—such a town is fitted to raise not only corn and

potatoes, but poets and philosophers for the coming ages. In such a soil

grew Homer and Confucius and the rest, and out of such a wilderness

comes the Reformer eating locusts and wild honey.

To preserve wild animals implies generally the creation of a forest for

them to dwell in or resort to. So it is with man. A hundred years ago

they sold bark in our streets peeled from our own woods. In the very

aspect of those primitive and rugged trees there was, methinks, a

tanning principle which hardened and consolidated the fibers of men's

thoughts. Ah! already I shudder for these comparatively degenerate days

of my native village, when you cannot collect a load of bark of good

thickness, and we no longer produce tar and turpentine.

The civilized nations—Greece, Rome, England—have been sustained by the

primitive forests which anciently rotted where they stand. They survive

as long as the soil is not exhausted. Alas for human culture! little is

to be expected of a nation, when the vegetable mould is exhausted, and

it is compelled to make manure of the bones of its fathers. There the

poet sustains himself merely by his own superfluous fat, and the

philosopher comes down on his marrow-bones.

It is said to be the task of the American “to work the virgin soil,” and

that “agriculture here already assumes proportions unknown everywhere

else.” I think that the farmer displaces the Indian even because he

redeems the meadow, and so makes himself stronger and in some respects

more natural. I was surveying for a man the other day a single straight

line one hundred and thirty- two rods long, through a swamp at whose

entrance might have been written the words which Dante read over the

entrance to the infernal regions, “Leave all hope, ye that enter”—that

is, of ever getting out again; where at one time I saw my employer

actually up to his neck and swimming for his life in his property,

though it was still winter. He had another similar swamp which I could

not survey at all, because it was completely under water, and

nevertheless, with regard to a third swamp, which I did survey from a

distance, he remarked to me, true to his instincts, that he would not

part with it for any consideration, on account of the mud which it

contained. And that man intends to put a girdling ditch round the whole

in the course of forty months, and so redeem it by the magic of his

spade. I refer to him only as the type of a class.

The weapons with which we have gained our most important victories,

which should be handed down as heirlooms from father to son, are not the

sword and the lance, but the bushwhack, the turf-cutter, the spade, and

the bog hoe, rusted with the blood of many a meadow, and begrimed with

the dust of many a hard- fought field. The very winds blew the Indian's

cornfield into the meadow, and pointed out the way which he had not the

skill to follow. He had no better implement with which to intrench

himself in the land than a clam- shell. But the farmer is armed with

plow and spade.

In literature it is only the wild that attracts us. Dullness is but

another name for tameness. It is the uncivilized free and wild thinking

in Hamlet and the Iliad, in all the scriptures and mythologies, not

learned in the schools, that delights us. As the wild duck is more swift

and beautiful than the tame, so is the wild—the mallard—thought, which

'mid falling dews wings its way above the fens. A truly good book is

something as natural, and as unexpectedly and unaccountably fair and

perfect, as a wild-flower discovered on the prairies of the West or in

the jungles of the East. Genius is a light which makes the darkness

visible, like the lightning's flash, which perchance shatters the temple

of knowledge itself—and not a taper lighted at the hearthstone of the

race, which pales before the light of common day.

English literature, from the days of the minstrels to the Lake

PoetsVhaueer and Spenser and Milton, and even Shakespeare,

included—breathes no quite fresh and, in this sense, wild strain. It is

an essentially tame and civilized literature, reflecting Greece and

Rome. Her wilderness is a greenwood, her wild man a Robin Hood. There is

plenty of genial love of Nature, but not so much of Nature herself. Her

Chronicles inform us when her wild animals, but not when the wild man in

her, became extinct.

The science of Humboldt is one thing, poetry is another thing. The poet

today, notwithstanding all the discoveries of science, and the

accumulated learning of mankind, enjoys no advantage over Homer.

Where is the literature which gives expression to Nature? He would be a

poet who could impress the winds and streams into his service, to speak

for him; who nailed words to their primitive senses, as farmers drive

down stakes in the spring, which the frost has heaved; who derived his

words as often as he used them—transplanted them to his page with earth

adhering to their roots; whose words were so true and fresh and natural

that they would appear to expand like the buds at the approach of

spring, though they lay half smothered between two musty leaves in a

library—aye, to bloom and bear fruit there, after their kind, annually,

for the faithful reader, in sympathy with surrounding Nature.

I do not know of any poetry to quote which adequately expresses this

yearning for the Wild. Approached from this side, the best poetry is

tame. I do not know where to find in any literature, ancient or modern,

any account which contents me of that Nature with which even I am

acquainted. You will perceive that I demand something which no Augustan

nor Elizabethan age, which no culture, in short, can give. Mythology

comes nearer to it than anything. How much more fertile a Nature, at

least, has Grecian mythology its root in than English literature!

Mythology is the crop which the Old World bore before its soil was

exhausted, before the fancy and imagination were affected with blight;

and which it still bears, wherever its pristine vigor is unabated. All

other literatures endure only as the elms which overshadow our houses;

but this is like the great dragon-tree of the Western Isles, as old as

mankind, and, whether that does or not, will endure as long; for the

decay of other literatures makes the soil in which it thrives.

The West is preparing to add its fables to those of the East. The

valleys of the Ganges, the Nile, and the Shine having yielded their

crop, it remains to be seen what the valleys of the Amazon, the Plate,

the Orinoco, the St. Lawrence, and the Mississippi will produce.

Perchance, when, in the course of ages, American liberty has become a

fiction of the past—as it is to some extent a fiction of the present—the

poets of the world will be inspired by American mythology.

The wildest dreams of wild men, even, are not the less true, though they

may not recommend themselves to the sense which is most common among

Englishmen and Americans today. It is not every truth that recommends

itself to the Common sense. Nature has a place for the wild Clematis as

well as for the Cabbage. Some expressions of truth are reminiscent,

others merely sensible, as the phrase is, others prophetic. Some forms

of disease, even, may prophesy forms of health. The geologist has

discovered that the figures of serpents, griffins, flying dragons, and

other fanciful embellishments of heraldry, have their prototypes in the

forms of fossil species which were extinct before man was created, and

hence “indicate a faint and shadowy knowledge of a previous state of

organic existence.” The Hindus dreamed that the earth rested on an

elephant, and the elephant on a tortoise, and the tortoise on a serpent;

and though it may be an unimportant coincidence, it will not be out of

place here to state, that a fossil tortoise has lately been discovered

in Asia large enough to support an elephant. I confess that I am partial

to these wild fancies, which transcend the order of time and

development. They are the sublimest recreation of the intellect. The

partridge loves peas, but not those that go with her into the pot.

In short, all good things are wild and free. There is something in a

strain of music, whether produced by an instrument or by the human

voice—take the sound of a bugle in a summer night, for instance-which by

its wildness, to speak without satire, reminds me of the cries emitted

by wild beasts in their native forests. It is so much of their wildness

as I can understand. Give me for my friends and neighbors wild men, not

tame ones. The wildness of the savage is but a faint symbol of the awful

ferity with which good men and lovers meet.

I love even to see the domestic animals reassert their native rights—any

evidence that they have not wholly lost their original wild habits and

vigor; as when my neighbor's cow breaks out of her pasture early in the

spring and boldly swims the river, a cold, gray tide, twenty-five or

thirty rods wide, swollen by the melted snow. It is the buffalo crossing

the Mississippi. This exploit confers some dignity on the herd in my

eyes—already dignified. The seeds of instinct are preserved under the

thick hides of cattle and horses, like seeds in the bowels of the earth,

an indefinite period.

Any sportiveness in cattle is unexpected. I saw one day a herd of a

dozen bullocks and cows running about and frisking in unwieldy sport,

like huge rats, even like kittens. They shook their heads, raised their

tails, and rushed up and down a hill, and I perceived by their horns, as

well as by their activity, their relation to the deer tribe. But, alas!

a sudden loud Whoa! would have damped their ardor at once, reduced them

from venison to beef, and stiffened their sides and sinews like the

locomotive. Who but the Evil One has cried “Whoa!” to mankind? Indeed,

the life of cattle, like that of many men, is but a sort of

locomotiveness; they move a side at a time, and man, by his machinery,

is meeting the horse and the ox halfway. Whatever part the whip has

touched is thenceforth palsied. Who would ever think of a side of any of

the supple cat tribe, as we speak of a side of beef?

I rejoice that horses and steers have to be broken before they can be

made the slaves of men, and that men themselves have some wild oats

still left to sow before they become submissive members of society.

Undoubtedly, all men are not equally fit subjects for civilization; and

because the majority, like dogs and sheep, are tame by inherited

disposition, this is no reason why the others should have their natures

broken that they may be reduced to the same level. Men are in the main

alike, but they were made several in order that they might be various.

If a low use is to be served, one man will do nearly or quite as well as

another; if a high one, individual excellence is to be regarded. Any man

can stop a hole to keep the wind away, but no other man could serve so

rare a use as the author of this illustration did. Confucius says, “The

skins of the tiger and the leopard, when they are tanned, are as the

skins of the dog and the sheep tanned.” But it is not the part of a true

culture to tame tigers, any more than it is to make sheep ferocious; and

tanning their skins for shoes is not the best use to which they can be

put.

When looking over a list of men's names in a foreign language, as of

military officers, or of authors who have written on a particular

subject, I am reminded once more that there is nothing in a name. The

name Menschikoff, for instance, has nothing in it to my ears more human

than a whisker, and it may belong to a rat. As the names of the Poles

and Russians are to us, so are ours to them. It is as if they had been

named by the child's rigmarole, Iery fiery ichery van, tittle-tol-tan. I

see in my mind a herd of wild creatures swarming over the earth, and to

each the herdsman has affixed some barbarous sound in his own dialect.

The names of men are, of course, as cheap and meaningless as Bose and

Tray, the names of dogs.

Methinks it would be some advantage to philosophy if men were named

merely in the gross, as they are known. It would be necessary only to

know the genus and perhaps the race or variety, to know the individual.

We are not prepared to believe that every private soldier in a Roman

army had a name of his own—because we have not supposed that he had a

character of his own.

At present our only true names are nicknames. I knew a boy who, from his

peculiar energy, was called “Buster” by his playmates, and this rightly

supplanted his Christian name. Some travelers tell us that an Indian had

no name given him at first, but earned it, and his name was his fame;

and among some tribes he acquired a new name with every new exploit. It

is pitiful when a man bears a name for convenience merely, who has

earned neither name nor fame.

I will not allow mere names to make distinctions for me, but still see

men in herds for all them. A familiar name cannot make a man less

strange to me. It may be given to a savage who retains in secret his own

wild title earned in the woods. We have a wild savage in us, and a

savage name is perchance somewhere recorded as ours. I see that my

neighbor, who bears the familiar epithet William or Edwin, takes it off

with his jacket. It does not adhere to him when asleep or in anger, or

aroused by any passion or inspiration. I seem to hear pronounced by some

of his kin at such a time his original wild name in some jaw-breaking or

else melodious tongue.

Here is this vast, savage, hovering mother of ours, Nature, lying all

around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the

leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to

that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man—a sort of

breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a

civilization destined to have a speedy limit.

In society, in the best institutions of men, it is easy to detect a

certain precocity. When we should still be growing children, we are

already little men. Give me a culture which imports much muck from the

meadows, and deepens the soil—not that which trusts to heating manures,

and improved implements and modes of culture only!

Many a poor sore-eyed student that I have heard of would grow faster,

both intellectually and physically, if, instead of sitting up so very

late, he honestly slumbered a fool's allowance.

There may be an excess even of informing light. Niepce, a Frenchman,

discovered “actinism,” that power in the sun's rays which produces a

chemical effect; that granite rocks, and stone structures, and statues

of metal “are all alike destructively acted upon during the hours of

sunshine, and, but for provisions of Nature no less wonderful, would

soon perish under the delicate touch of the most subtle of the agencies

of the universe.” But he observed that “those bodies which underwent

this change during the daylight possessed the power of restoring

themselves to their original conditions during the hours of night, when

this excitement was no longer influencing them.” Hence it has been

inferred that “the hours of darkness are as necessary to the inorganic

creation as we know night and sleep are to the organic kingdom.” Not

even does the moon shine every night, but gives place to darkness.

I would not have every man nor every part of a man cultivated, any more

than I would have every acre of earth cultivated: part will be tillage,

but the greater part will be meadow and forest, not only serving an

immediate use, but preparing a mould against a distant future, by the

annual decay of the vegetation which it supports.

There are other letters for the child to learn than those which Cadmus

invented. The Spaniards have a good term to express this wild and dusky

knowledge, Gramatica parda, tawny grammar, a kind of mother-wit derived

from that same leopard to which I have referred.

We have heard of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. It is

said that knowledge is power, and the like. Methinks there is equal need

of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Ignorance, what we will call

Beautiful Knowledge, a knowledge useful in a higher sense: for what is

most of our boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit that we know

something, which robs us of the advantage of our actual ignorance? What

we call knowledge is often our positive ignorance; ignorance our

negative knowledge. By long years of patient industry and reading of the

newspapers—for what are the libraries of science but files of

newspapers—a man accumulates a myriad facts, lays them up in his memory,

and then when in some spring of his life he saunters abroad into the

Great Fields of thought, he, as it were, goes to grass like a horse and

leaves all his harness behind in the stable. I would say to the Society

for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, sometimes, Go to grass. You have

eaten hay long enough. The spring has come with its green crop. The very

cows are driven to their country pastures before the end of May; though

I have heard of one unnatural farmer who kept his cow in the barn and

fed her on hay all the year round. So, frequently, the Society for the

Diffusion of Useful Knowledge treats its cattle.

A man's ignorance sometimes is not only useful, but beautiful—while his

knowledge, so called, is oftentimes worse than useless, besides being

ugly. Which is the best man to deal with—he who knows nothing about a

subject, and, what is extremely rare, knows that he knows nothing, or he

who really knows something about it, but thinks that he knows all?

My desire for knowledge is intermittent, but my desire to bathe my head

in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant. The highest

that we can attain to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence.

I do not know that this higher knowledge amounts to anything more

definite than a novel and grand surprise on a sudden revelation of the

insufficiency of all that we called Knowledge before—a discovery that

there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our

philosophy. It is the lighting up of the mist by the sun. Man cannot

know in any higher sense than this, any more than he can look serenely

and with impunity in the face of the sun: “You will not perceive that,

as perceiving a particular thing,” say the Chaldean Oracles.

There is something servile in the habit of seeking after a law which we

may obey. We may study the laws of matter at and for our convenience,

but a successful life knows no law. It is an unfortunate discovery

certainly, that of a law which binds us where we did not know before

that we were bound. Live free, child of the mist—and with respect to

knowledge we are all children of the mist. The man who takes the liberty

to live is superior to all the laws, by virtue of his relation to the

lawmaker. “That is active duty,” says the Vishnu Purana, “which is not

for our bondage; that is knowledge which is for our liberation: all

other duty is good only unto weariness; all other knowledge is only the

Cleverness of an artist.”

It is remarkable how few events or crises there are in our histories,

how little exercised we have been in our minds, how few experiences we

have had. I would fain be assured that I am growing apace and rankly,

though my very growth disturb this dull equanimity—though it be with

struggle through long, dark, muggy nights or seasons of gloom. It would

be well if all our lives were a divine tragedy even, instead of this

trivial comedy or farce. Dante, Bunyan, and others appear to have been

exercised in their minds more than we: they were subjected to a kind of

culture such as our district schools and colleges do not contemplate.

Even Mahomet, though many may scream at his name, had a good deal more

to to live for, aye, and to die for, than they have commonly.

When, at rare intervals, some thought visits one, as perchance he is

walking on a railroad, then, indeed, the cars go by without his hearing

them. But soon, by some inexorable law, our life goes by and the cars

return.

“Gentle breeze, that wanderestunseen,

And bendest the thistlesround Loira of storms,

Traveler of the windyglens,

Why hast thou leftmy ear so soon?”

While almost all men feel an attraction drawing them to society, few are

attracted strongly to Nature. In their reaction to Nature men appear to

me for the most part, notwithstanding their arts, lower than the

animals. It is not often a beautiful relation, as in the case of the

animals. How little appreciation of the beauty of the land- scape there

is among us! We have to be told that the Greeks called the world Kόσμος,

Beauty, or Order, but we do not see clearly why they did so, and we

esteem it at best only a curious philological fact.

For my part, I feel that with regard to Nature I live a sort of border

life, on the confines of a world into which I make occasional and

transient forays only, and my patriotism and allegiance to the state

into whose territories I seem to retreat are those of a moss-trooper.

Unto a life which I call natural I would gladly follow even a

will-o'-the-wisp through bogs and sloughs unimaginable, but no moon nor

firefly has shown me the causeway to it. Nature is a personality so vast

and universal that we have never seen one of her features. The walker in

the familiar fields which stretch around my native town sometimes finds

himself in another land than is described in their owners' deeds, as it

were in some faraway field on the confines of the actual Concord, where

her jurisdiction ceases, and the idea which the word Concord suggests

ceases to be suggested. These farms which I have myself surveyed, these

bounds which I have set up, appear dimly still as through a mist; but

they have no chemistry to fix them; they fade from the surface of the

glass, and the picture which the painter painted stands out dimly from

beneath. The world with which we are commonly acquainted leaves no

trace, and it will have no anniversary.

I took a walk on Spaulding's Farm the other afternoon. I saw the setting

sun lighting up the opposite side of a stately pine wood. Its golden

rays straggled into the aisles of the wood as into some noble hall. I

was impressed as if some ancient and altogether admirable and shining

family had settled there in that part of the land called Concord,

unknown to me—to whom the sun was servant—who had not gone into society

in the village—who had not been called on. I saw their park, their

pleasure-ground, beyond through the wood, in Spaulding's

cranberry-meadow. The pines furnished them with gables as they grew.

Their house was not obvious to vision; the trees grew through it. I do

not know whether I heard the sounds of a suppressed hilarity or not.

They seemed to recline on the sunbeams. They have sons and daughters.

They are quite well. The farmer's cart-path, which leads directly

through their hall, does not in the least put them out, as the muddy

bottom of a pool is sometimes seen through the reflected skies. They

never heard of Spaulding, and do not know that he is their

neighbor—notwithstanding I heard him whistle as he drove his team

through the house. Nothing can equal the serenity of their lives. Their

coat-of-arms is simply a lichen. I saw it painted on the pines and oaks.

Their attics were in the tops of the trees. They are of no politics.

There was no noise of labor. I did not perceive that they were weaving

or spinning. Yet I did detect, when the wind lulled and hearing was done

away, the finest imaginable sweet musical hum—as of a distant hive in

May—which perchance was the sound of their thinking. They had no idle

thoughts, and no one without could see their work, for their industry

was not as in knots and excrescences embayed.

But I find it difficult to remember them. They fade irrevocably out of

my mind even now while I speak, and endeavor to recall them and

recollect myself. It is only after a long and serious effort to

recollect my best thoughts that I become again aware of their

cohabitancy. If it were not for such families as this, I think I should

move out of Concord.

We are accustomed to say in New England that few and fewer pigeons visit

us every year. Our forests furnish no mast for them. So, it would seem,

few and fewer thoughts visit each growing man from year to year, for the

grove in our minds is laid waste—sold to feed unnecessary fires of

ambition, or sent to mill—and there is scarcely a twig left for them to

perch on. They no longer build nor breed with us. In some more genial

season, perchance, a faint shadow flits across the landscape of the

mind, cast by the wings of some thought in its vernal or autumnal

migration, but, looking up, we are unable to detect the substance of the

thought itself. Our winged thoughts are turned to poultry. They no

longer soar, and they attain only to a Shanghai and Cochin- China

grandeur. Those gra-a-ate thoughts, those gra-a-ate men you hear of!

We hug the earth—how rarely we mount! Methinks we might elevate

ourselves a little more. We might climb a tree, at least. I found my

account in climbing a tree once. It was a tall white pine, on the top of

a hill; and though I got well pitched, I was well paid for it, for I

discovered new mountains in the horizon which I had never seen before—so

much more of the earth and the heavens. I might have walked about the

foot of the tree for threescore years and ten, and yet I certainly

should never have seen them. But, above all, I discovered around me—it

was near the end of June—on the ends of the topmost branches only, a few

minute and delicate red conelike blossoms, the fertile flower of the

white pine looking heavenward. I carried straightway to the village the

topmost spire, and showed it to stranger jury- men who walked the

streets—for it was court week—and to farmers and lumber-dealers and

woodchoppers and hunters, and not one had ever seen the like before, but

they wondered as at a star dropped down. Tell of ancient architects

finishing their works on the tops of columns as perfectly as on the

lower and more visible parts! Nature has from the first expanded the

minute blossoms of the forest only toward the heavens, above men's heads

and unobserved by them. We see only the flowers that are under our feet

in the meadows. The pines have developed their delicate blossoms on the

highest twigs of the wood every summer for ages, as well over the heads

of Nature's red children as of her white ones; yet scarcely a farmer or

hunter in the land has ever seen them.

Above all, we cannot afford not to live in the present. He is blessed

over all mortals who loses no moment of the passing life in remembering

the past. Unless our philosophy hears the cock crow in every barnyard

within our horizon, it is belated. That sound commonly reminds us that

we are growing rusty and antique in our employments and habits of

thoughts. His philosophy comes down to a more recent time than ours.

There is something suggested by it that is a newer testament—the gospel

according to this moment. He has not fallen astern; he has got up early

and kept up early, and to be where he is is to be in season, in the

foremost rank of time. It is an expression of the health and soundness

of Nature, a brag for all the world—healthiness as of a spring burst

forth, a new fountain of the Muses, to celebrate this last instant of

time. Where he lives no fugitive slave laws are passed. Who has not

betrayed his master many times since last he heard that note?

The merit of this bird's strain is in its freedom from all

plaintiveness. The singer can easily move us to tears or to laughter,

but where is he who can excite in us a pure morning joy? When, in

doleful dumps, breaking the awful stillness of our wooden sidewalk on a

Sunday, or, perchance, a watcher in the house of mourning, I hear a

cockerel crow far or near, I think to myself, “There is one of us well,

at any rate,” and with a sudden gush return to my senses.

We had a remarkable sunset one day last November. I was walking in a

meadow, the source of a small brook, when the sun at last, just before

setting, after a cold, gray day, reached a clear stratum in the horizon,

and the softest, brightest morning sunlight fell on the dry grass and on

the stems of the trees in the opposite horizon and on the leaves of the

shrub oaks on the hillside, while our shadows stretched long over the

meadow east- ward, as if we were the only motes in its beams. It was

such a light as we could not have imagined a moment before, and the air

also was so warm and serene that nothing was wanting to make a paradise

of that meadow. When we reflected that this was not a solitary

phenomenon, never to happen again, but that it would happen forever and

ever, an infinite number of evenings, and cheer and reassure the latest

child that walked there, it was more glorious still.

The sun sets on some retired meadow, where no house is visible, with all

the glory and splendor that it lavishes on cities, and perchance as it

has never set before—where there is but a solitary marsh hawk to have

his wings gilded by it, or only a musquash looks out from his cabin, and

there is some little black-veined brook in the midst of the marsh, just

beginning to meander, winding slowly round a decaying stump. We walked

in so pure and bright a light, gilding the withered grass and leaves, so

softly and serenely bright, I thought I had never bathed in such a

golden flood, without a ripple or a murmur to it. The west side of every

wood and rising ground gleamed like the boundary of Elysium, and the sun

on our backs seemed like a gentle herdsman driving us home at evening.

So we saunter toward the Holy Land, till one day the sun shall shine

more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our

minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening

light, as warm and serene and golden as on a bankside in autumn.