The Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906)/Volume 7/Chapter 4
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IV
1840
(ÆT. 22-23)
Jan. 10.
THE FISHER'S SON[1]
I know the world where land and water meet,
By yonder hill abutting on the main;
One while I hear the waves incessant beat,
Then, turning round, survey the land again.
Within a humble cot that looks to sea,
Daily I breathe this curious warm life;
Beneath a friendly haven's sheltering lee
My noiseless day with myst'ry still is rife.
'Tis here, they say, my simple life began;
And easy credit to the tale I lend,
For well I know 't is here I am a man.
But who will simply tell me of the end?
These eyes, fresh opened, spied the far-off Sea,
Which like a silent godfather did stand,
Nor uttered one explaining word to me,
But introduced straight Godmother Land.
And yonder still stretches that silent main,
With many glancing ships besprinkled o'er;
And earnest still I gaze and gaze again
Upon the selfsame waves and friendly shore,
Till like a watery humor on the eye
It still appears whichever way I turn,
Its silent waste and mute o'erarching sky
With close-shut eyes I clearly still discern.
And yet with lingering doubt I haste each morn
To see if ocean still my gaze will greet,
And with each day once more to life am born,
And tread once more the earth with infant feet.
My years are like a stroll upon the beach,
As near the ocean's edge as I can go;
My tardy steps its waves do oft o'erreach,
Sometimes I stay to let them overflow.
Infinite work my hands find there to do,
Gathering the relics which the waves upcast;
Each storm doth scour the deep for something new,
And every time the strangest is the last.
My sole employment 't is, and scrupulous care,
To place my gains beyond the reach of tides,
Each smoother pebble, and each shell more rare,
Which ocean kindly to my hand confides.
I have no fellow-laborer on the shore;
They scorn the strand who sail upon the sea;
Sometimes I think the ocean they've sailed o'er
Is deeper known upon the strand to me.
The middle sea can show no crimson dulse,
Its deeper waves cast up no pearls to view,
Along the shore my hand is on its pulse,
Whose feeble beat is elsewhere felt by few.
My neighbors come sometimes with lumb'ring carts,
As it would seem my pleasant toil to share,
But straightway take their loads to distant marts,
For only weeds and ballast are their care.
'T is by some strange coincidence, if I
Make common cause with ocean when he storms,
Who can so well support a separate sky,
And people it with multitude of forms.
Oft in the stillness of the night I hear
Some restless bird presage the coming din,
And distant murmurs faintly strike my ear
From some bold bluff projecting far within.
My stillest depths straightway do inly heave
More genially than rests the summer's calm;
The howling winds through my soul's cordage grieve,
Till every shelf and ledge gives the alarm.
Far from the shore the swelling billows rise,
And gathering strength come rolling to the land,
And, as each wave retires, and murmur dies,
I straight pursue upon the streaming sand,
Till the returning surge with gathered strength
Compels once more the backward way to take,
And, creeping up the beach a cable's length,
In many a thirsty hollow leaves a lake.
Oft as some ruling star my tide has swelled
The sea can scarcely brag more wrecks than I;
Ere other influence my waves has quelled,
The stanchest bark that floats is high and dry.
Jan. 19.
By a strong liking we prevail
Against the stoutest fort;
At length the fiercest heart will quail,
And our alliance court.
FRIENDS
Jan. 26. They are like air bubbles on water, hastening to flow together.
History tells of Orestes and Pylades, Damon and Pythias, but why should not we put to shame those old reserved worthies by a community of such?
Constantly, as it were through a remote skylight, I have glimpses of a serene friendship-land, and know the better why brooks murmur and violets grow.
This conjunction of souls, like waves which meet and break, subsides also backward over things, and gives all a fresh aspect.
I would live henceforth with some gentle soul such a life as may be conceived, double for variety, single for harmony,—two, only that we might admire at our oneness, –one, because indivisible. Such community to be a pledge of holy living. How could aught unworthy be admitted into our society? To listen with one ear to each summer sound, to behold with one eye each summer scene, our visual rays so to meet and mingle with the object as to be one bent and doubled; with two tongues to be wearied, and thought to spring ceaselessly from a double fountain.
POETRY
Jan. No definition of poetry is adequate unless it be poetry itself. The most accurate analysis by the rarest wisdom is yet insufficient, and the poet will instantly prove it false by setting aside its requisitions. [2] It is indeed all that we do not know.
The poet does not need to see how meadows are something else than earth, grass, and water, but how they are thus much. He does not need discover that potato blows are as beautiful as violets, as the farmer thinks, but only how good potato blows are.
The poem is drawn out from under the feet of the poet, his whole weight has rested on this ground.
It has a logic more severe than the logician's.
You might as well think to go in pursuit of the rainbow, and embrace it on the next hill, as to embrace the whole of poetry even in thought. The best book is only an advertisement of it, such as is sometimes sewed in with its cover.[3]
Its eccentric and unexplored orbit embraces the system.
Jan. 27. What a tame life we are living! How little heroic it is! Let us devise never so perfect a system of living, and straightway the soul leaves it to shuffle along its own way alone. It is easy enough to establish a durable and harmonious routine; immediately all parts of nature consent to it.[4] The sun-dial still points to the noon mark, and the sun rises and sets for it. The neighbors are never fatally obstinate when such a scheme is to be instituted; but forthwith all lend a hand, and ring the bell, and bring fuel and lights, and put by work and don their best garments, with an earnest conformity which matches the operations of nature. There is always a present and extant life which all combine to uphold, though its insufficiency is manifest enough.[5] Still the sing-song goes on.
Jan. 29. A friend in history looks like some premature soul. The nearest approach to a community of love in these days is like the distant breaking of waves on the seashore. An ocean there must be, for it washes our beach.
This alone do all men sail for, trade for, plow for, preach for, fight for. AESCHYLUS
The Greeks, as the Southerns generally, expressed themselves with more facility than we in distinct and lively images, and as to the grace and completeness with which they treated the subjects suited to their genius they must be allowed to retain their ancient supremacy. But a rugged and uncouth array of thought, though never so modern, may rout them at any moment. It remains for other than Greeks to write the literature of the next century.
AEschylus had a clear eye for the commonest things. His genius was only an enlarged common sense. He adverts with chaste severity to all natural facts. His sublimity is Greek sincerity and simpleness, naked wonder which mythology had not helped to explain.
Tydeus' shield had for device
"An artificial heaven blazing with stars; A bright full moon in the midst of the shield, Eldest of stars, eye of night, is prominent."
The Greeks were stern but simple children in their literature. We have gained nothing by the few ages which we have the start of them. This universal wondering at those old men is as if a matured grown person should discover that the aspirations of his youth argued a diviner life than the contented wisdom of his manhood.
He is competent to express any of the common manly feelings. If his hero is to make a boast, it does not lack fullness, it is as boastful as could be desired; he has a flexible mouth, and can fill it readily with strong, round words, so that you will say the man's speech wants no thing, he has left nothing unsaid, but he has actually wiped his lips of it.
Whatever the common eye sees at all and expresses as best it may, he sees uncommonly and describes with rare completeness. The multitude that thronged the theatre could no doubt go along with him to the end. The Greeks had no transcendent geniuses like Milton and Shakespeare, whose merit only posterity could fully appreciate.
The social condition of genius is the same in all ages. AEschylus was undoubtedly alone and without sym pathy in his simple reverence for the mystery of the universe.
Feb. 10. CRITICISM ON AULUS PERSITTS FLACCUS [6]
Feb. 11. "Truth," says Lord Bacon, "may perhaps come to the price of a pearl, that sheweth best by day; but it will not rise to the price of a diamond or carbuncle, which sheweth best in varied lights." Like the pearl, truth shines with a steady but pale light which invites to introspection; it is intrinsically bright, not accidentally as the diamond. We seem to behold its rear always, as though it were not coming toward us but retiring from us. Its light is not reflected this way, but we see the sombre and wrong side of its rays. As the dust in his beams makes known that the sun shines. Falsehoods that glare and dazzle are sloped toward us, reflecting full in our faces even the light of the sun. Wait till sunset, or go round them, and the falsity will be apparent.
It is never enough that our life is an easy one. We must live on the stretch; not be satisfied with a tame and undisturbed round of weeks and days, but retire to our rest like soldiers on the eve of a battle, looking forward with ardor to the strenuous sortie of the mor row.[7] " Sit not down in the popular seats and common level of virtues, but endeavor to make them heroical. Offer not only peace offerings but holocausts unto God." To the brave soldier the rust and leisure of peace are harder than the fatigues of war. As our bodies court physical encounters, and languish in the mild and even climate of the tropics, so our souls thrive best on unrest and discontent.[8]
He enjoys true leisure who has time to improve his soul's estate.
Feb. 12. Opposition is often so strong a likeness as to remind us of the difference.
Truth has properly no opponent, for nothing gets so far up on the other side as to be opposite. She looks broadcast over the field and sees no opponent.
The ring-leader of the mob will soonest be admitted into the councils of state. Knavery is more foolish than folly, for that, half knowing its own foolishness, it still persists. The knave has reduced folly to a system, is the prudent, common-sense fool. The witling has the simplicity and directness of genius, is the inspired fool. His incomprehensible ravings become the creed of the dishonest of a succeeding era.
Feb. 13. An act of integrity is to an act of duty what the French verb être is to devoir. Duty is ce que devrait être.
Duty belongs to the understanding, but genius is not dutiful, the highest talent is dutiful. Goodness results from the wisest use of talent.
The perfect man has both genius and talent. The one is his head, the other his foot; by one he is, by the other he lives.
The unconsciousness of man is the consciousness of God, the end of the world.[9]
The very thrills of genius are disorganizing. The body is never quite acclimated to its atmosphere, but how often succumbs and goes into a decline! Feb. 14. Beauty lives by rhymes. Double a deform ity is a beauty. Draw this blunt quill over the paper, and fold it once transversely to the line, pressing it sud denly before the ink dries, and a delicately shaded and regular figure is the result, which art cannot surpass.[10] A very meagre natural history suffices to make me a child. Only their names and genealogy make me love fishes. I would know even the number of their fin- rays, and how many scales compose the lateral line. I fancy I am amphibious and swim in all the brooks and pools in the neighborhood, with the perch and bream, or doze under the pads of our river amid the winding aisles and corridors formed by their stems, with the stately pickerel. I am the wiser in respect to all knowledges, and the better qualified for all for tunes, for knowing that there is a minnow in the brook. Methinks I have need even of his sympathy, and to be his fellow in a degree. I do like him sometimes when he balances himself for an hour over the yellow floor of his basin.[11]
Feb. 15. The good seem to inhale a more generous atmosphere and be bathed in a more precious light than other men. Accordingly Virgil describes the sedes beatas thus : —
"Largior hie campos aether et lumine vestit Purpureo : Solemque suum, sua sidera norunt."[12]
Feb. 16. Divination is prospective memory.
There is a kindred principle at the bottom of all affinities. The magnet cultivates a steady friendship with the pole, all bodies with all others. The friendliness of nature is that goddess Ceres who presides over every sowing and harvest, and we bless the same in sun and rain. The seed in the ground tarries for a season with its genial friends there; all the earths and grasses and minerals are its hosts, who entertain it hospitably, and plenteous crops and teeming wagons are the result.
Feb. 18. All romance is grounded on friendship. What is this rural, this pastoral, this poetical life but its invention ? Does not the moon shine for Endymion ? Smooth pastures and mild airs are for some Corydon and Phyllis. Paradise belongs to Adam and Eve. Plato's republic is governed by Platonic love.
Feb. 20. The coward's hope is suspicion, the hero's doubt a sort of hope. The gods neither hope nor doubt.
Feb. 22. The river is unusually high, owing to the melting of the snow. Men go in boats over their gar dens and potato-fields, and all the children of the village are on tiptoe to see whose fence will be carried away next. Great numbers of muskrats, which have been driven out of then* holes by the water, are killed by the sportsmen.
They are to us instead of the beaver. The wind from over the meadows is laden with a strong scent of musk, and by its racy freshness advertises us of an unexplored wildness. Those backwoods are not far off. I am af fected by the sight of their cabins of mud and grass, raised four or five feet, along the river, as when I read of the Pyramids, or the barrows of Asia.[13]
People step brisker in the street for this unusual movement of the waters. You seem to hear the roar of a waterfall and the din of factories where the river breaks over the road.
Who would have thought that a few feet might not have been spared from the trunks of most trees? Such as grow in the meadows, and are now surrounded by that depth of water, have a dwarfish appearance. No matter whether they are longer or shorter, they are now equally out of proportion.
Feb. 24.
THE FRESHET
A stir is on the Worcester hills,
And Nobscot too the valley fills;
Where scarce you'd fill an acorn cup
In summer when the sun was up,
No more you'll find a cup at all,
But in its place a waterfall.
O that the moon were in conjunction
To the dry land's extremest unction,
Till every dike and pier were flooded,
And all the land with islands studded,
For once to teach all human kind,
Both those that plow and those that grind,
There is no fixture in the land,
But all unstable is as sand.
The river swelleth more and more,
Like some sweet influence stealing o'er
The passive town; and for a while
Each tussock makes a tiny isle,
Where, on some friendly Ararat,
Resteth the weary water-rat.
No ripple shows Musketaquid,
Her very current e'en is hid,
As deepest souls do calmest rest
When thoughts are swelling in the breast;
And she, that in the summer's drought
Doth make a rippling and a rout,
Sleeps from Nawshawtuct to the Cliff,
Unruffled by a single skiff;
So like a deep and placid mind
Whose currents underneath it wind,
For by a thousand distant hills
The louder roar a thousand rills,
And many a spring which now is dumb,
And many a stream with smothered hum,
Doth faster well and swifter glide,
Though buried deep beneath the tide.
Our village shows a rural Venice,
Its broad lagunes where yonder fen is,
Far lovelier than the Bay of Naples
Yon placid cove amid the maples,
And in my neighbor's field of corn
I recognize the Golden Horn.
Here Nature taught from year to year,
When only red men came to hear,
Methinks 't was in this school of art
Venice and Naples learned their part,
But still their mistress, to my mind,
Her young disciples leaves behind.[14]
Feb. 26. The most important events make no stir on their first taking place, nor indeed in their effects directly. They seem hedged about by secrecy. It is concussion, or the rushing together of air to fill a vacuum, which makes a noise. The great events to which all things consent, and for which they have prepared the way, produce no explosion, for they are gradual, and create no vacuum which requires to be suddenly filled; as a birth takes place in silence, and is whispered about the neighborhood, but an assassination, which is at war with the constitution of things, creates a tumult immediately.
Corn grows in the night.[15]
Feb. 27. Some geniuses seem to hover in the horizon, like heat lightning, which is not accompanied with fertilizing rain to us, but we are obliged to rest contented with the belief that it is purifying the air somewhere. Others make known their presence by their effects, like that vivid lightning which is accompanied by copious rain and thunder and, though it clears our atmosphere, sometimes destroys our lives. Others still impart a steady and harmless light at once to large tracts, as the aurora borealis; and this phenomenon is hardest to be accounted for, some thinking it to be a reflection of the polar splendor, others a subtle fluid which pervades all things and tends always to the zenith. All are agreed that these are equally electrical phenomena, as some clever persons have shown by drawing a spark with their knuckles. Modern philosophy thinks it has drawn down lightning from the clouds.
Feb. 28. On the death of a friend, we should consider that the fates through confidence have devolved on us the task of a double living, that we have hence forth to fulfill the promise of our friend's life also, in our own, to the world.
Feb. 29. A friend advises by his whole behavior, 1 and never condescends to particulars ; another chides away a fault, he loves it away. While he sees the other's error, he is silently conscious of it, and only the more loves truth himself, and assists his friend in loving it, till the fault is expelled and gently extinguished.
March 2. Love is the burden of all Nature's odes. The song of the birds is an epithalamium, a hymeneal. The marriage of the flowers spots the meadows and fringes the hedges with pearls and diamonds. In the deep water, in the high air, in woods and pastures, and the bowels of the earth, this is the employment and condition of all things.
March 4. I learned to-day that my ornithology had done me no service. The birds I heard, which fortunately did not come within the scope of my science, sung as freshly as if it had been the first morning of creation, and had for background to their song an un trodden wilderness, stretching through many a Carolina and Mexico of the soul.[16] March 6. There is no delay in answering great ques tions; for them all things have an answer ready. The Pythian priestess gave her answers instantly, and oft- times before the questions were fairly propounded. Great topics do not wait for past or future to be deter mined, but the state of the crops or Brighton market no bird concerns itself about. March 8. The wind shifts from northeast and east to northwest and south, and every icicle which has tin kled on the meadow grass so long trickles down its stem and seeks its water level unerringly with a million comrades. In the ponds the ice cracks with a busy and inspiriting din and down the larger streams is whirled, grating hoarsely and crashing its way along, which was so lately a firm field for the woodman's team and the fox, sometimes with the tracks of the skaters still fresh upon it, and the holes cut for pickerel. Town committees inspect the bridges and causeways, as if by mere eye-force to intercede with the ice and save the treasury. In the brooks the slight grating sound of small cakes of ice, floating with various speed, is full of content and promise, and where the water gurgles under a natural bridge, you may hear these hasty rafts hold conversation in an undertone. Every rill is a channel for the juices of the meadow.[17] Last year's grasses and flower-stalks have been steeped in rain and snow, and now the brooks flow with meadow tea,—thoroughwort, mint, flagroot, and pennyroyal, all at one draught.
In the ponds the sun makes incroachments around the edges first, as ice melts in a kettle on the fire, darting his rays through this crevice, and preparing the deep water to act simultaneously on the under side.
Two years and twenty now have flown;
Their meanness time away has flung;
These limbs to man's estate have grown,
But cannot claim a manly tongue.
Amidst such boundless wealth without
I only still am poor within;
The birds have sung their summer out,
But still my spring does not begin.
In vain I see the morning rise,
In vain observe the western blaze,
Who idly look to other skies,
Expecting life by other ways.
The sparrow sings at earliest dawn,
Building her nest without delay;
All things are ripe to hear her song,
And now arrives the perfect day.
Shall I then wait the autumn wind,
Compelled to seek a milder ray,
And leave no empty nest behind,
No wood still echoing to my lay?[18]
March 16. The cabins of the settlers are the points whence radiate these rays of green and yellow and russet over the landscape; out of these go the axes and spades with which the landscape is painted. How much is the Indian summer and the budding of spring related to the cottage? Have not the flight of the crow and the gyrations of the hawk a reference to that roof?
The ducks alight at this season on the windward side of the river, in the smooth water, and swim about by twos and threes, pluming themselves and diving to peck at the root of the lily and the cranberries which the frost has not loosened. It is impossible to approach them within gunshot when they are accompanied by the gull, which rises sooner and makes them restless. They fly to windward first, in order to get under weigh, and are more easily reached by the shot if approached on that side. When preparing to fly, they swim about with their heads erect, and then, gliding along a few feet with their bodies just touching the surface, rise heavily with much splashing and fly low at first, if not suddenly aroused, but otherwise rise directly to survey the danger. The cunning sportsman is not in haste to desert his position, but waits to ascertain if, having got them-selves into flying trim, they will not return over the ground in their course to a new resting-place.
March 20. In society all the inspiration of my lonely hours seems to flow back on me, and then first have expression.
Love never degrades its votaries, but lifts them up to higher walks of being. They over-look one another.
All other charities are swallowed up in this; it is gift and reward both.
We will have no vulgar Cupid for a go-between, to make us the playthings of each other, but rather cultivate an irreconcilable hatred instead of this.
March 21. The world is a fit theatre to-day in which any part may be acted. There is this moment proposed to me every kind of life that men lead anywhere, or that imagination can paint. By another spring I may be a mail-carrier in Peru, or a South African planter, or a Siberian exile, or a Greenland whaler, or a settler on the Columbia River, or a Canton merchant, or a soldier in Florida, or a mackerel-fisher off Cape Sable, or a Robinson Crusoe in the Pacific, or a silent navigator of any sea. So wide is the choice of parts, what a pity if the part of Hamlet be left out!
I am freer than any planet; no complaint reaches round the world. I can move away from public opinion, from government, from religion, from education, from society. Shall I be reckoned a ratable poll in the county of Middlesex, or be rated at one spear under the palm trees of Guinea? Shall I raise corn and potatoes in Massachusetts, or figs and olives in Asia Minor? sit out the day in my office in State Street, or ride it out on the steppes of Tartary ? For my Brobdingnag I may sail to Patagonia; for my Lilliput, to Lapland. In Arabia and Persia, my day's adventures may surpass the Arabian Nights' Entertainments. I may be a logger on the head waters of the Penobscot, to be recorded in fable hereafter as an amphibious river-god, by as sounding a name as Triton or Proteus ; carry furs from Nootka to China, and so be more renowned than Jason and his golden fleece; or go on a South Sea exploring expedition, to be hereafter recounted along with the periplus of Hanno. I may repeat the adventures of Marco Polo or Mandeville.
These are but few of my chances, and how many more things may I do with which there are none to be compared !
Thank Fortune, we are not rooted to the soil, and here is not all the world. The buckeye does not grow in New England; the mockingbird is rarely heard here. Why not keep pace with the day, and not allow of a sunset nor fall behind the summer and the migration of birds ? Shall we not compete with the buffalo, who keeps pace with the seasons, cropping the pastures of the Colorado till a greener and sweeter grass awaits him by the Yellowstone? The wild goose is more a cosmopolite than we; he breaks his fast in Canada, takes a luncheon in the Susquehanna, and plumes him self for the night in a Louisiana bayou. The pigeon carries an acorn in his crop from the King of Holland's to Mason and Dixon's line. Yet we think if rail fences are pulled down and stone walls set up on our farms, bounds are henceforth set to our lives and our fates decided. If you are chosen town clerk, forsooth, you can't go to Tierra del Fuego this summer.[19]
But what of all this? A man may gather his limbs snugly within the shell of a mammoth squash, with his back to the northeastern boundary, and not be unusually straitened after all. Our limbs, indeed, have room enough, but it is our souls that rust in a corner. Let us migrate interiorly without intermission, and pitch our tent each day nearer the western horizon. The really fertile soils and luxuriant prairies lie on this side the Alleghanies. There has been no Hanno of the affections. Their domain is untravelled ground, to the Mogul's dominions.
March 22. While I bask in the sun on the shores of Walden Pond, by this heat and this rustle I am absolved from all obligation to the past. The council of nations may reconsider their votes; the grating of a pebble annuls them. [20]
March 27. How many are now standing on the European coast whom another spring will find located on the Red River, or Wisconsin! To-day we live an antediluvian life on our quiet homesteads, and to-morrow are transported to the turmoil and bustle of a crusading era. Think how finite after all the known world is. Money coined at Philadelphia is a legal tender over how much of it ! You may carry ship biscuit, beef, and pork quite round to the place you set out from. England sends her felons to the other side for safe keeping and convenience.
March 30. Pray, what things interest me at present? A long, soaking rain, the drops trickling down the stubble, while I lay drenched on a last year's bed of wild oats, by the side of some bare hill, ruminating. These things are of moment. To watch this crystal globe just sent from heaven to associate with me. While these clouds and this sombre drizzling weather shut all in, we two draw nearer and know one another. The gathering in of the clouds with the last rush and dying breath of the wind, and then the regular dripping of twigs and leaves the country o'er, the impression of inward comfort and sociableness, the drenched stubble and trees that drop beads on you as you pass, their dim outline seen through the rain on all sides drooping in sympathy with yourself. These are my undisputed territory. This is Nature's English comfort. The birds draw closer and are more familiar under the thick foliage, composing new strains on their roosts against the sunshine.
April 4. We look to windward for fair weather.
April 8. How shall I help myself ? By withdrawing into the garret, and associating with spiders and mice, determining to meet myself face to face sooner or later. Completely silent and attentive I will be this hour, and the next, and forever. The most positive life that his tory notices has been a constant retiring out of life, a wiping one's hands of it, seeing how mean it is, and having nothing to do with it.
April 9. I read in Cudworth how "Origen determines that the stars do not make but signify; and that the heavens are a kind of divine volume, in whose characters they that are skilled may read or spell out human events." Nothing can be truer, and yet astrology is possible. Men seem to be just on the point of discerning a truth when the imposition is greatest.
April 17. Farewell, etiquette! My neighbor inhabits a hollow sycamore, and I a beech tree. What then becomes of morning calls with cards, and deference paid to door-knockers and front entries, and presiding at one's own table ?
April 19. The infinite bustle of Nature of a summer's noon, or her infinite silence of a summer's night, gives utterance to no dogma. They do not say to us even with a seer's assurance, that this or that law is immutable and so ever and only can the universe exist. But they are the indifferent occasion for all things and the annulment of all laws.
April 20. The universe will not wait to be explained. Whoever seriously attempts a theory of it is already behind his age. His yea has reserved no nay for the morrow.
The wisest solution is no better than dissolution. Already the seer whispers his convictions to bare walls ; no audience in the land can attend to them.
An early morning walk is a blessing for the whole day. To my neighbors who have risen in mist and rain I tell of a clear sunrise and the singing of birds as some traditionary mythus. I look back to those fresh but now remote hours as to the old dawn of time, when a solid and blooming health reigned and every deed was simple and heroic.
April 22. Thales was the first of the Greeks who taught that souls are immortal, and it takes equal wisdom to discern this old fact to-day. What the first philosopher taught, the last will have to repeat. The world makes no progress.
I cannot turn on my heel in a carpeted room. What a gap in the morning is a breakfast! A supper super sedes the sunset.
Methinks I hear the ranz des vaches and shall soon be tempted to desert.
Will not one thick garment suffice for three thin ones ? Then I shall be less compound, and can lay my hand on myself in the dark.
May 14. A kind act or gift lays us under obligation not so much to the giver as to Truth and Love. We must then be truer and kinder ourselves. Just in pro portion to our sense of the kindness, and pleasure at it, is the debt paid. What is it to be grateful but to be gratified, –to be pleased ? The nobly poor will dissolve all obligations by nobly accepting a kindness.
If we are not sensible of kindness, then indeed we incur a debt. Not to be pleased by generous deeds at any time, though done to another, but to sit crabbedly silent in a corner, what is it but a voluntary imprisonment for debt ? It is to see the world through a grating. Not to let the light of virtuous actions shine on us at all times, through every crevice, is to live in a dungeon.
War is the sympathy of concussion. We would fain rub one against another. Its rub may be friction merely, but it would rather be titillation. We discover in the quietest scenes how faithfully war has copied the moods of peace. Men do not peep into heaven but they see embattled hosts there. Milton's heaven was a camp. When the sun bursts through the morning fog I seem to hear the din of war louder than when his chariot thundered on the plains of Troy. Every man is a warrior when he aspires. He marches on his post. The soldier is the practical idealist; he has no sympathy with matter, he revels in the annihilation of it. So do we all at times. When a freshet destroys the works of man, or a fire consumes them, or a Lisbon earthquake shakes them down, our sympathy with persons is swallowed up in a wider sympathy with the universe. A crash is apt to grate agreeably on our ears. Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/218 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/219 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/220 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/221 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/222 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/223 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/225 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/226 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/227 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/228 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/229 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/230 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/231 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/232 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/233 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/234 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/235 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/236 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/237 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/238 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/239 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/240 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/241 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/242 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/243 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/244 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/245 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/246 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/247 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/248 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/249 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/250 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/251 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/252 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/253 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/254 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/255 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/256 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/257 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/258
- ↑ [Stanzas 8, 10, 11, 12, with revision, Week, p. 255; Riv. 317. Stanzas 2-5, 9, 13, Familiar Letters, Introduction.]
- ↑ [Week, p. 93; Riv. 116.]
- ↑ [Week, p.93 ; Riv 116.]
- ↑ [Week. p 132 ; Riv. 164]
- ↑ [Week, p. 132; Riv 165.]
- ↑ [The criticism was not transcribed here. The title was inserted doubtless as a memorandum and to record the date of its composition. See Week, p. 327 ; Riv. 405.]
- ↑ [Cape Cod, and Miscellanies, p. 279 ; Misc., Riv. 37.]
- ↑ [The Service, p. 20.]
- ↑ [Week, p. 351; Riv. 434.]
- ↑ [Week, p. 351; Riv. 434. A sheet with specimens of this familiar school-boy amusement is slipped into one of the manuscript Journal volumes.]
- ↑ [Excursions, p. 118 ; Riv. 146.]
- ↑ [Week, p. 406 ; Riv. 501.]
- ↑ [Excursions, p. 114 ; Riv. 141.]
- ↑ [Excursions, pp. 120, 121; Riv. 148, 149.]
- ↑ [See pp. 174 and 263.]
- ↑ [Excursions, p. 114; Riv. 140.]
- ↑ [Excursions, pp. 119, 120; Riv. 147, 148.]
- ↑ [Stanzas 3, 2, and 5, in this order, with slight alterations, are printed in Week, p. 366 (Riv. 453), under the title of "The Poet's Delay."]
- ↑ [Walden, p. 352 ; Riv. 493.]
- ↑ [Week, p. 383 ; Riv. 474.]