The Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906)/Volume 7/Chapter 7

by Henry David Thoreau

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VII

1845-1846

(ÆT. 27-29)

July 5. Saturday. Walden.—Yesterday I came here to live. My house makes me think of some mountain houses I have seen, which seemed to have a fresher auroral atmosphere about them, as I fancy of the halls of Olympus. I lodged at the house of a saw-miller last summer, on the Caatskill Mountains, high up as Pine Orchard, in the blueberry and raspberry region, where the quiet and cleanliness and coolness seemed to be all one,—which had their ambrosial character. He was the miller of the Kaaterskill Falls. They were a clean and wholesome family, inside and out, like their house. The latter was not plastered, only lathed, and the inner doors were not hung. The house seemed high-placed, airy, and perfumed, fit to entertain a travelling god. It was so high, indeed, that all the music, the broken strains, the waifs and accompaniments of tunes, that swept over the ridge of the Caatskills, passed through its aisles. Could not man be man in such an abode? And would he ever find out this grovelling life?^[1] It was the very light and atmosphere in which the works of Grecian art were composed, and in which they rest. They have appropriated to themselves a loftier hall than mortals ever occupy, at least on a level with the mountain-brows of the world. There was wanting a little of the glare of the lower vales, and in its place a pure twilight as became the precincts of heaven. Yet so equable and calm was the season there that you could not tell whether it was morning or noon or evening. Always there was the sound of the morning cricket. July 6. I wish to meet the facts of life the vital facts, which are the phenomena or actuality the gods meant to show us face to face, and so I came down here. Life ! who knows what it is, what it does ? If I am not quite right here, I am less wrong than before; and now let us see what they will have. The preacher, instead of vexing the ears of drowsy farmers on their day of rest, at the end of the week, for Sunday always seemed to me like a fit conclusion of an ill-spent week and not the fresh and brave beginning of a new one, with this one other draggletail and postponed affair of a sermon, from thirdly to fifteenthly, should teach them with a thundering voice pause and simplicity. " Stop ! Avast ! Why so fast?"^[2] In all studies we go not forward but rather backward with redoubled pauses. We always study antiques with silence and reflection. Even time has a depth, and below its surface the waves do not lapse and roar. I wonder men can be so frivolous almost as to attend to the gross form of negro slavery, there are so many keen and subtle masters who subject us both. Self-emancipation in the West Indies of a man's thinking and imagining provinces, which should be more than his island territory, one emancipated heart Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/453 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/454 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/455 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/456 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/457 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/458 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/459 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/460 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/461 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/462 is the only food of the gods, and inasmuch as we are partially divine we are compelled to respect it.

 

Tell me, ye wise ones, if ye can,
Whither and whence the race of man.
For I have seen his slender clan
Clinging to hoar hills with their feet,
Threading the forest for their meat.
Moss and lichens, bark and grain
They rake together with might and main,
And they digest them with anxiety and pain.
I meet them in their rags and unwashed hair,
Instructed to eke out their scanty fare—
Brave race—with a yet humbler prayer.
Beggars they are, aye, on the largest scale.
They beg their daily bread at heaven's door,
And if their this year's crop alone should fail,
They neither bread nor begging would know more.
They are the titmen of their race,
And hug the vales with mincing pace
Like Troglodytes, and fight with cranes.
We walk 'mid great relations' feet.
What they let fall alone we eat.
We are only able
To catch the fragments from their table.
These elder brothers of our race,
By us unseen, with larger pace
Walk o'er our heads, and live our lives,
Embody our desires and dreams,
Anticipate our hoped-for gleams.
We grub the earth for our food.
We know not what is good.
Where does the fragrance of our orchards go,
Our vineyards, while we toil below?
A finer race and finer fed
Feast and revel above our head.
The tints and fragrance of the flowers and fruits
Are but the crumbs from off their table,
While we consume the pulp and roots.
Sometimes we do assert our kin,
And stand a moment where once they have been.
We hear their sounds and see their sights,
And we experience their delights.
But for the moment that we stand
Astonished on the Olympian land,
We do discern no traveller's face,
No elder brother of our race,
To lead us to the monarch's court
And represent our case;
But straightway we must journey back,
Retracing slow the arduous track,
Without the privilege to tell,
Even, the sight we know so well.^[3]

In my father's house are many mansions.

Who ever explored the mansions of the air? Who knows who his neighbors are? We seem to lead our human lives amid a concentric system of worlds, of realm on realm, close bordering on each other, where dwell the unknown and the imagined races, as various in degree as our own thoughts are, a system of invisible partitions more infinite in number and more inconceivable in intricacy than the starry one which science has penetrated. When I play my flute to-night, earnest as if to leap the bounds [of] the narrow fold where human life is penned, and range the surrounding plain, I hear echo from a neighboring wood, a stolen pleasure, occasionally not rightfully heard, much more for other ears than ours, for 't is the reverse of sound. It is not our own melody that comes back to us, but an amended strain. And I would only hear myself as I would hear my echo, cor rected and repronounced for me. It is as when my friend reads my verse. The borders of our plot are set with flowers, whose seeds were blown from more Elysian fields adjacent. They are the pot-herbs of the gods, which our laborious feet have never reached, and fairer fruits and unaccus tomed fragrance betray another realm's vicinity. There, too, is Echo found, with which we play at evening. There is the abutment of the rainbow's arch.^[4] Aug. 6. Walden. I have just been reading a book called "The Crescent and the Cross,"^[5] till now I am somewhat ashamed of myself. Am I sick, or idle, that I can sacrifice my energy, America, and to-day to this man's ill-remembered and indolent story ? Carnac and Luxor are but names, and still more desert sand and at length a wave of the great ocean itself are needed to wash away the filth that attaches to their grandeur. Carnac! Carnac! this is Carnac for me, and I behold the columns of a larger and a purer temple.^[6] May our childish and fickle aspirations be divine, while we descend to this mean intercourse. Our reading should be heroic, in an unknown tongue, a dialect always but imperfectly learned, through which we stammer line by line, catching but a glimmering of the sense, and still afterward admiring its unexhausted hieroglyphics, its untranslated columns. Here grow around me nameless trees and shrubs, each morning freshly sculptured, rising new stories day by day, instead of hideous ruins,—their myriad-handed worker uncompelled as uncompelling. This is my Carnac; that its unmeasured dome. The measuring art man has invented flourishes and dies upon this temple's floor, nor ever dreams to reach that ceiling's height. Carnac and Luxor crumble underneath. Their shadowy roofs let in the light once more reflected from the ceiling of the sky.

Behold these flowers! Let us be up with Time, not dreaming of three thousand years ago. Erect ourselves and let those columns lie, not stoop to raise a foil against the sky. Where is the spirit of that time but in this present day, this present line? Three thousand years ago are not agone; they are still lingering here this summer morn.

 

And Memnon's mother sprightly greets us now;
Wears still her youthful blushes on her brow.
And Carnac's columns, why stand they on the plain?
T' enjoy our opportunities they would fain remain.
This is my Carnac, whose unmeasured dome
Shelters the measuring art and measurer's home,
Whose propylæum is the system high [?]
And sculptured façade the visible sky.

 

Where there is memory which compelleth Time, the Muses' mother, and the Muses nine, there are all ages, past and future time,—unwearied memory that does not forget the actions of the past, that does not forego to stamp them freshly, that Old Mortality, industrious to retouch the monuments of time, in the world's cemetery throughout every clime.^[7]

 

The student may read Homer or Æschylus in the original Greek; for to do so implies to emulate their heroes,—the consecration of morning hours to their pages.

The heroic books, though printed in the character of our mother tongue, are always written in a foreign language, dead to idle and degenerate times, and we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a larger sense than the text renders us, at last, out of our own valor and generosity.^[8]

 

A man must find his own occasion in himself. The natural day is very calm, and will hardly reprove our indolence. If there is no elevation in our spirits, the pond will not seem elevated like a mountain tarn, but a low pool, a silent muddy water, a place for fishermen.

I sit here at my window like a priest of Isis, and observe the phenomena of three thousand years ago, yet unimpaired. The tantivy of wild pigeons, an ancient race of birds, gives a voice to the air, flying by twos and threes athwart my view or perching restless on the white pine boughs occasionally; a fish hawk dimples the glassy surface of the pond and brings up a fish; and for the last half -hour I have heard the rattle of railroad cars conveying travellers from Boston to the country.^[9] After the evening train has gone by and left the world to silence and to me, the whip-poor-will chants her ves pers for half an hour. And when all is still at night, the owls take up the strain, like mourning women their ancient ululu. Their most 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, but the mutual con solations of suicide lovers remembering the pangs and the delights of supernal love in the infernal groves. And 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 tear ful side of music, the regrets and sighs, that would fain be sung. The spirits, the low spirits and melancholy forebodings, of fallen spirits who once in human shape night-walked the earth and did the deeds of darkness, now expiating with their wailing hymns, threnodiai, their sins in the very scenery of their transgressions. They give me a new sense of the vastness and mystery of that nature which is the common dwelling of us both. Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/469 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/470 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/471 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/472 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/473 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/474 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/475 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/476 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/477 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/478 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/479 out for him, or, gradually leaving off palm-leaf hat and cap of woodchuck-skin, should complain of hard times because he could not buy him a crown!^[10]

 

It reflects no little dignity on Nature, the fact that the Romans once inhabited her,—that from this same unaltered hill, forsooth, the Roman once looked out upon the sea, as from a signal station. The vestiges of military roads, of houses and tessellated courts and baths,—Nature need not be ashamed of these relics of her children. The hero's cairn,—one doubts at length whether his relations or Nature herself raised the hill. The whole earth is but a hero's cairn. How often are the Romans flattered by the historian and antiquary! Their vessels penetrated into this frith and up that river of some remote isle. Their military monuments still remain on the hills and under the sod of the valleys. The oft-repeated Roman story is written in still legible characters in every quarter of the old world, and but today a new coin is dug up whose inscription repeats and confirms their fame. Some "Judæa Capta," with a woman mourning under a palm tree, with silent argument and demonstration puts at rest whole pages of history.^[11]

 

⁠The Earth
Which seems so barren once gave birth
To heroes, who o'erran her plains,
Who plowed her seas and reaped her grains.

 

Some make the mythology of the Greeks to have Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/481 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/482 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/483 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/484 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/485 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/486 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/487 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/488 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/489 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/490 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/491 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/492

1. [Walden, p. 94; Riv. 134.]
2. [Walden, p. 106; Riv. 150.]
3. [Eight lines, somewhat altered, Week, pp. 407, 408; Riv. 503.]
4. [Week, p. 407; Riv. 503.]
5. [By Eliot Warburton, London, 1844, and New York, 1845.]
6. [Week, pp. 266, 267; Riv. 331.]
7. [Week, pp. 266, 267; Riv. 330-332.]
8. [Walden, p. 111; Riv. 157, 158.]
9. [Walden, p. 127; Riv. 179, 180.]
10. [Walden, p. 39; Riv. 58.]
11. [Week, p. 264; Riv. 328.]