in a given particular superior to, them ourselves. By our aloofness from men and their affairs we are enabled to overlook and criticise them. There are but few men who stand on the hills by the roadside.
I am sane only when I have risen above my common sense, when I do not take the foolish view of things which is commonly taken, when I do not live for the low ends for which men commonly live. Wisdom is not common. To what purpose have I senses, if I am thus absorbed in affairs? My pulse must beat with Nature. After a hard day’s work without a thought, turning my very brain into a mere tool, only in the quiet of evening do I so far recover my senses as to hear the cricket, which in fact has been chirping all day. In my better hours I am conscious of the influx of a serene and unquestionable wisdom which partly unfits, and if I yielded to it more rememberingly would wholly unfit me, for what is called the active business of life, for that furnishes nothing on which the eye of reason can rest. What is that other kind of life to which I am thus continually allured? which alone I love? Is it a life for this world? Can a man feed and clothe himself gloriously who keeps only the truth steadily before him? who calls in no evil to his aid? Are there duties which necessarily interfere with the serene perception of truth? Are our serene moments mere foretastes of heaven,—joys gratuitously vouchsafed to us as a consolation,—or simply a transient realization of what might be the whole tenor of our lives?
To be calm, to be serene! There is the calmness of the lake when there is not a breath of wind; there is the calmness of a stagnant ditch.
So is it with us. Sometimes we are clarified and calmed healthily, as we never were before in our lives, not by an opiate, but by some unconscious obedience to the all-just laws, so that we become like a still lake of purest crystal and without an effort our depths are revealed to ourselves. All the world goes by us and is reflected in our deeps. Such clarity! obtained by such pure means! by simple living, by honesty of purpose. We live and rejoice. I awoke into a music which no one about me heard. Whom shall I thank for it? The luxury of wisdom!
the luxury of virtue! Are there any intemperate in these things? I feel my Maker blessing me. To the sane man the world is a musical instrument. The very touch affords an exquisite pleasure.
As I walk the railroad causeway, I notice that the fields and meadows have acquired various tinges as the season advances, the sun gradually using all his paints. There is the rosaceous evening red tinge of red clover,—like an evening sky gone down upon the grass,—the whiteweed tinge, the white clover tinge, which reminds me how sweet it smells.
The tall buttercup stars the meadow on another side, telling of the wealth of dairies. The blue-eyed grass, so beautiful near at hand, imparts a kind of slate or clay blue tinge to the meads.
It is hot noon. The white pines are covered with froth at the base of the new shoots, as I noticed the pitch pines were a week ago; as if they perspired. I am threading an open pitch and white pine wood, easily traversed, where the pine-needles redden all the ground, which is as smooth as a carpet. Still the blackberries love to creep over this floor, for it is not many years since this was a blackberry-field.
And I hear around me, but never in sight, the many wood thrushes whetting their steel-like notes. Such keen singers! It takes a fiery heat, many dry pine leaves added to the furnace of the sun, to temper their strains! Always they are either rising or falling to a new strain. After what a moderate pause they deliver themselves again!
saying ever a new thing, avoiding repetition, methinks answering one another. While most other birds take their siesta, the wood thrush discharges his song. It is delivered like a bolas, or a piece of jingling steel.
The domestic ox has his horns tipped with brass. This and his shoes are the badges of servitude which he wears; as if he would soon get to jacket and trousers. I am singularly affected when I look over a herd of reclining oxen in their pasture, and find that every one has these brazen balls on his horns. They are partly humanized so. It is not pure brute; there is art added. Where are these balls sold? Who is their maker? The bull has a ring in his nose.
The _Lysimachia quadrifolia_ exhibits its small yellow blossoms now in the wood-path. Butter-and-eggs has blossomed. The _Uvularia vulgaris_, or bladderwort, a yellow pea-like flower, has blossomed in stagnant pools.
_June 23._ It is a pleasant sound to me, the squeaking and the booming of nighthawks flying over high open fields in the woods. They fly like butterflies, not to avoid birds of prey but, apparently, to secure their own insect prey. There is a particular part of the railroad just below the shanty where they may be heard and seen in greatest numbers.
But often you must look a long while before you can detect the mote in the sky from which the note proceeds.
The common cinquefoil (_Potentilla simplex_) greets me with its simple and unobtrusive yellow flower in the grass. The _P. argentea_, hoary cinquefoil, also is now in blossom. _P. sarmentosa_, running cinquefoil, we had common enough in the spring.
gives a reddish tinge to some fields, like sorrel.
Visited a menagerie this afternoon. I am always surprised to see the same spots and stripes on wild beasts from Africa and Asia and also from South America,—on the Brazilian tiger and the African leopard,—and their general similarity. All these wild animals—lions, tigers, chetas, leopards, etc.—have one hue,—tawny and commonly spotted or striped,—what you may call pard-color, a color and marking which I had not associated with America. These are wild beasts. What constitutes the difference between a wild beast and a tame one? How much more human the one than the other! Growling, scratching, roaring, with whatever beauty and gracefulness, still untamable, this royal Bengal tiger or this leopard. They have the character and the importance of another order of men. The majestic lion, the king of beasts,—he must retain his title.
I was struck by the gem-like, changeable, greenish reflections from the eyes of the grizzly bear, so glassy that you never saw the surface of the eye. They [were] quite demonic. Its claws, though extremely large and long, look weak and made for digging or pawing the earth and leaves. It is unavoidable, the idea of transmigration; not merely a fancy of the poets, but an instinct of the race.
_June 29._ There is a great deal of white clover this year. In many fields where there has been no clover seed sown for many years at least, it is more abundant than the red, and the heads are nearly as large. Also pastures which are close cropped, and where I think there was little or no clover last year, are spotted white with a humbler growth. And everywhere, by roadsides, garden borders, etc., even where the sward is trodden hard, the small white heads on short stems are sprinkled everywhere. As this is the season for the swarming of bees, and this clover is very attractive to them, it is probably the more difficult to secure them; at any rate it is the more important to secure their services now that they can make honey so fast. It is an interesting inquiry why this year is so favorable to the growth of clover!
I am interested to observe how old-country methods of farming resources are introduced among us. The Irish laborer, for instance, seeing that his employer is contemplating some agricultural enterprise, as ditching or fencing, suggests some old-country mode with [which] he has been familiar from a boy, which is often found to be cheaper as well as more ornamental than the common; and Patrick is allowed to accomplish the object his own way, and for once exhibits some skill and has not to be shown, but, working with a will as well as with pride, does better than ever in the old country. Even the Irishman exhibits what might be mistaken for a Yankee knack, exercising a merely inbred skill derived from the long teachings and practice of his ancestors.
I saw an Irishman building a bank of sod where his employer had contemplated building a bank wall, piling up very neatly and solidly with his spade and a line the sods taken from the rear, and coping the face at a very small angle from the perpendicular, intermingling the sods with bushes as they came to hand, which would grow and strengthen the whole. It was much more agreeable to the eye, as well as less expensive, than stone would have been, and he thought that it would be equally effective as a fence and no less durable. But it is true only experience will show when the same practice may be followed in this climate and in Ireland,—whether our atmosphere is not too dry to admit of it. At any rate it was wise in the farmer thus to avail himself of any peculiar experience which his hired laborer possessed. That was what he _should_ buy.
Also I noticed the other day where one who raises seeds, when his ropes and poles failed, had used ropes twisted of straw to support his plants,—a resource probably suggested and supplied by his foreign laborers. It is only remarkable that so few improvements or resources are or are to be adopted from the Old World.
I look down on rays of prunella by the roadsides now. The panicled or privet andromeda with its fruit-like white flowers. Swamp-pink I see for the first time this season.
yellow flower with a long tubular calyx, naturalized extensively in Europe. The clasping bellflower (_Campanula perfoliata_, from the heart-shaped leaves clasping the stalk), an interesting flower.
The _Convolvulus sepium_, large bindweed, make a fresh morning impression as of dews and purity. The adder’s-tongue arethusa, a delicate pink flower.
How different is day from day! Yesterday the air was filled with a thick fog-like haze, so that the sun did not once shine with ardor, but everything was so tempered under this thin veil that it was a luxury merely to be outdoors,—you were less out for it. The shadows of the apple trees even early in the afternoon were remarkably distinct.
The landscape wore a classical smoothness. Every object was as in [a] picture with a glass over it. I saw some hills on this side the river, looking from Conantum, on which, the grass being of a yellow tinge, though the sun did not shine out on them, they had the appearance of being shone upon peculiarly. It was merely an unusual yellow tint of the grass. The mere surface of water was an object for the eye to linger on.
The panicled cornel, a low shrub, in blossom by wall-sides now.
I thought that one peculiarity of my “Week” was its _hypæthral_ character, to use an epithet applied to those Egyptian temples which are open to the heavens above, _under the ether_. I thought that it had little of the atmosphere of the house about it, but might wholly have been written, as in fact it was to a considerable extent, out-of-doors.
It was only at a late period in writing it, as it happened, that I used any phrases implying that I lived in a house or led a _domestic_ life.
I trust it does not smell [so much] of the study and library, even of the poet’s attic, as of the fields and woods; that it is a hypæthral or unroofed book, lying open under the ether and permeated by it, open to all weathers, not easy to be kept on a shelf.
The potatoes are beginning to blossom.
Riding to survey a wood-lot yesterday, I observed that a dog accompanied the wagon. Having tied the horse at the last house and entered the woods, I saw no more of the dog while there; but when riding back to the village, I saw the dog again running by the wagon, and in answer to my inquiry was told that the horse and wagon were hired and that the dog always accompanied the horse. I queried whether it might happen that a dog would accompany the wagon if a strange horse were put into it; whether he would ever attach himself to an inanimate object. Methinks the driver, though a stranger, as it were added intellect to the mere animality of the horse, and the dog, not making very nice distinctions, yielded respect to the horse and equipage as if it were human. If the horse were to trot off alone without a wagon or driver, I think it doubtful if the dog would follow; if with the wagon, then the chances of his following would be increased; but if with a driver, though a stranger, I have found by experience that he would follow.
At a distance in the meadow I hear still, at long intervals, the hurried commencement of the bobolink’s strain, the bird just dashing into song, which is as suddenly checked, as it were, by the warder of the seasons, and the strain is left incomplete forever. Like human beings they are inspired to sing only for a short season.[213] That little roadside pea-like-blossomed blue flower[214] is interesting to me. The mulleins are just blossoming.
The voice of the crickets, heard at noon from deep in the grass, allies day to night. It is unaffected by sun and moon. It is a midnight sound heard at noon, a midday sound heard at midnight.
I observed some mulleins growing on the western slope of the sandy railroad embankment, in as warm a place as can easily be found, where the heat was reflected from the sand oppressively at 3 o’clock P. M.
this hot day; yet the green and living leaves felt rather cool than otherwise to the hand, but the dead ones at the root were quite warm.
The living plant thus preserves a cool temperature in the hottest exposure, as if it kept a cellar below, from which cooling liquors were drawn up.
Yarrow is now in full bloom, and elder, and a small many-headed white daisy like a small whiteweed. The epilobium, too, is out.
The night-warbler sings the same strain at noon. The song sparrow still occasionally reminds me of spring.
I observe that the high water in the ponds, which have been rising for a year, has killed most of the pitch pines and alders which it had planted and merely watered at its edge during the years of dryness. But now it comes to undo its own work.
How awful is the least unquestionable meanness, when we cannot deny that we have been guilty of it. There seem to be no bounds to our unworthiness.
_June 30._ Haying has commenced. I see the farmers in distant fields cocking their hay now at six o’clock. The day has been so oppressively warm that some workmen have lain by at noon, and the haymakers are mowing now in the early twilight.
The blue flag (_Iris versicolor_) enlivens the meadow. The lark sings at sundown off in the meadow. It is a note which belongs to a New England summer evening. Though so late, I hear the summer hum of a bee in the grass, as I am on my way to the river behind Hubbard’s to bathe.
After hoeing in a dusty garden all this warm afternoon,—so warm that the baker says he never knew the like and expects to find his horses dead in the stable when he gets home,—it is very grateful to wend one’s way at evening to some pure and cool stream and bathe therein.
The cranberry is now in blossom. Their fresh shoots have run a foot or two over the surface.
I have noticed an abundance of poison sumach this season. It is now in blossom. In some instances it has the size and form of a healthy peach tree.
The cuckoo is faintly heard from a neighboring grove. Now that it is beginning to be dark, as I am crossing a pasture I hear a happy, cricket-like, shrill little lay from a sparrow, either in the grass or else on that distant tree, as if it were the vibrations of a watch-spring; its vespers. The tree-primrose, which was so abundant in one field last Saturday, is now all gone. The cattle on Bear Garden Hill, seen through the twilight, look monstrously large. I find abounding in the meadows the adder’s-tongue arethusa and occasionally with it the _Cymbidium tuberosum_ of the same tint. The obtuse galium is a delicate vine-like plant with a minute white blossom in the same places. The St. John’s-wort has blossomed. The (_Œnothera pumila_, or dwarf tree-primrose, a neat yellow flower, abounds in the meadows; which the careless would mistake at a distance for buttercups. The white buds of the clethra (alder-leaved) rise above their recent shoots. The narrow-leaved cotton-grass spots the meadow with white, seeming like loose down, its stems are so slight. The carrot growing wild which I observed by the railroad is now blossoming, with its dishing blossom. I found by the railroad, a quarter of a mile from the road, some common garden catch-fly, the pink flower, growing wild. Angelica is now in blossom, with its large umbels. Swamp rose, fugacious-petalled. The prinos, or winterberry, budded, with white clustered berry-like flower-buds, is a pretty contrast to itself in the winter,—wax-like. While bathing I plucked the common floating plant like a small yellow lily, the yellow water ranunculus (_R.
aster, like a small many-headed whiteweed, has now for a week been in bloom; a humble weed, but one of the earliest of the asters.[215] The umbelled thesium, a simple white flower, on the edge of the woods.
_Erysimum officinale_, hedge mustard, with its yellow flowers.
I first observed about ten days ago that the fresh shoots of the fir balsam (_Abies balsamifera_), found under the tree wilted, or plucked and kept in the pocket or in the house a few days, emit the fragrance of strawberries, only it is somewhat more aromatic and spicy. It was to me a very remarkable fragrance to be emitted by a pine. A very rich, delicious, aromatic, spicy fragrance, which if the fresh and living shoots emitted, they would be still more to be sought after.
Saw a brood of young partridges yesterday, a little larger than robins.
VI JULY, 1851 (ÆT. 33-34) _July 2._ It is a fresh, cool summer morning. From the road at N.
Barrett’s, on my way to P. Blood’s at 8.30 A. M., the Great Meadows have a slight bluish misty tinge in part; elsewhere a sort of hoary sheen like a fine downiness, inconceivably fine and silvery far away,—the light reflected from the grass blades, a sea of grass hoary with light, the counterpart of the frost in spring. As yet no mower has profaned it; scarcely a footstep since the waters left it. Miles of waving grass adorning the surface of the earth.
Last night, a sultry night which compelled to leave all windows open, I heard two travellers talking aloud, was roused out of my sleep by their loud, day-like, and somewhat unearthly discourse at perchance one o’clock. From the country, whiling away the night with loud discourse. I heard the words “Theodore Parker” and “Wendell Phillips” loudly spoken, and so did half a dozen of my neighbors, who also were awakened. Such is fame. It affected [me] like Dante talking of the men of this world in the infernal regions. If the travellers had called my own name I should equally have thought it an unearthly personage which it would take me some hours into daylight to realize. O traveller, haven’t you got any further than that? My genius hinted before I fairly awoke, “Improve your time.” What is the night that a traveller’s voice should sound so hollow in it? that a man speaking aloud in the night, speaking in regions under the earth, should utter the words “Theodore Parker”?
A traveller! I love his title. A traveller is to be reverenced as such.
His profession is the best symbol of our life. Going from —— toward ——; it is the history of every one of us. I am interested in those that travel in the night.
It takes but little distance to make the hills and even the meadows look blue to-day. That principle which gives the air an azure color is more abundant.
To-day the milkweed is blossoming. Some of the raspberries are ripe, the most innocent and simple of fruits, the purest and most ethereal.
Cherries are ripe. Strawberries in the gardens have passed their prime.
Many large trees, especially elms, about a house are a surer indication of old family distinction and worth than any evidence of wealth. Any evidence of care bestowed on these trees secures the traveller’s respect as for a nobler husbandry than the raising of corn and potatoes.
I passed a regular country dooryard this forenoon, the unpainted one-story house, long and low with projecting stoop, a deep grass-plot unfenced for yard, hens and chickens scratching amid the chip dirt about the door,—this last the main feature, relics of wood-piles, sites of the wooden towers.
The nightshade has bloomed and the prinos, or winterberry.
_July 5._ The vetch-like flower by the Marlborough road, the _Tephrosia Virginica_, is in blossom, with mixed red and yellowish blossoms.
Also the white fine-flowered Jersey tea (_Ceanothus Americana_), and, by the side of wood-paths, the humble cow-wheat (_Apocynum_, etc.).
The blue flower by the roadside, slender but pretty spike, is the pale lobelia (_L. pallida_). The reddish blossoms of the umbelled wintergreen (_Pyrola umbellata_) are now in perfection and are exceedingly beautiful. Also the white sweet-scented flowers of the _P.
rotundifolia_.
It is a remarkably cool, clear, breezy atmosphere to-day. One would say there were fewer flowers just now than there have been and are to be; _i. e._ we do not look so much for the blossoming of new flowers.
The earliest small fruits are just beginning to be ripe,—the raspberry, thimble-berry, blueberry, etc. We have no longer the blossoms of those which must ripen their fruits in early autumn.
I am interested in those fields in the woods where the potato is cultivated, growing in the light, dry, sandy soil, free from weeds; now in blossom, the slight vine not crowded in the hill. I think they do not promise many potatoes, though mealy and wholesome like nuts. Many fields have now received their last hoeing, and the farmers’ work seems to be soon over with them. What a pleasant interview he must have had with them! What a liberal education with these professors! Better than a university. It is pleasing to consider man’s cultivating this plant thus assiduously, without reference to any crop it may yield him, as if he were to cultivate johnswort in like manner. What influences does he receive from this long intercourse.
The flowers of the umbelled pyrola, or common wintergreen, are really very handsome now, dangling red from their little umbels like jewelry,—especially the unexpanded buds with their red calyx-leaves against the white globe of petals.
There is a handsome wood-path on the east side of White Pond. The shadows of the pine stems and branches falling across the path, which is perfectly red with pine-needles, make a very handsome carpet. Here is a small road running north and south along the edge of the wood, which would be a good place to walk by moonlight.
The calamint grows by the lane beyond Seven-Star Lane; now in blossom.
As we come over Hubbard’s Bridge between 5 and 6 P. M., the sun getting low, a cool wind blowing up the valley, we sit awhile on the rails which are destined for the new railing. The light on the Indian hill is very soft and glorious, giving the idea of the most wonderful fertility. The most barren hills are gilded like waving grain-fields.
What a paradise to sail by! The cliffs and woods up the stream are nearer and have more shadow and actuality about them. This retired bridge is a favorite spot with me. I have witnessed many a fair sunset from it.
_July 6. Sunday._ I walked by night last moon, and saw its disk reflected in Walden Pond, the broken disk, now here, now there, a pure and memorable flame unearthly bright, like a cucullo[216] of a water-bug. Ah! but that first faint tinge of moonlight on the gap!
(seen some time ago),[217]—a silvery light from the east before day had departed in the west. What an immeasurable interval there is between the first tinge of moonlight which we detect, lighting with mysterious, silvery, poetic light the western slopes, like a paler grass, and the last wave of daylight on the eastern slopes! It is wonderful how our senses ever span so vast an interval, how from being aware of the one we become aware of the other. And now the night wind blows,—from where?
What gave it birth? It suggests an interval equal to that between the most distant periods recorded in history. The silver age is not more distant from the golden than moonlight is from sunlight. I am looking into the west, where the red clouds still indicate the course of departing day. I turn and see the silent, spiritual, contemplative moonlight shedding the softest imaginable light on the western slopes of the hills, as if, after a thousand years of polishing, their surfaces were just beginning to be bright,—a pale whitish lustre.
Already the crickets chirp to the moon a different strain, and the night wind rustles the leaves of the wood. A different dynasty has commenced. Yet moonlight, like daylight, is more valuable for what it suggests than for what it actually is. It is a long past season of which I dream. And the reason is perchance because it is a more sacred and glorious season, to which I instantly refer all glorious actions in past time. Let a nobler landscape present itself, let a purer air blow, and I locate all the worthies of the world. Ah, there is the mysterious light which for some hours has illustrated Asia and the scene of Alexander’s victories, now at length, after two or three hours spent in surmounting the billows of the Atlantic, come to shine on America.
There, on that illustrated sand-bank, was revealed an antiquity beside which Nineveh is young. Such a light as sufficed for the earliest ages.
From what star has it arrived on this planet? Yet even at midday I see the full moon shining in the sky. What if, in some vales, only its light is reflected? What if there are some spirits which walk in its light alone still? who separate the moonlight from the sunlight, and are shined on by the former only? I passed from dynasty to dynasty, from one age of the world to another age of the world, from Jove perchance back to Saturn. What river of Lethe was there to run between?
I bade farewell to that light setting in the west and turned to salute the new light rising in the east.
There is some advantage in being the humblest, cheapest, least dignified man in the village, so that the very stable boys shall damn you. Methinks I enjoy that advantage to an unusual extent. There is many a coarsely well-meaning fellow, who knows only the skin of me, who addresses me familiarly by my Christian name. I get the whole good of him and lose nothing myself. There is “Sam,” the jailer,—whom I never call Sam, however,—who exclaimed last evening: “Thoreau, are you going up the street pretty soon? Well, just take a couple of these handbills along and drop one in at Hoar’s piazza and one at Holbrook’s, and I’ll do as much for you another time.” I am not above being used, aye abused, sometimes.
The red clover heads are now turned black. They no longer impart that rosaceous tinge to the meadows and fertile fields. It is but a short time that their rich bloom lasts. The white is black or withering also. Whiteweed still looks white in the fields. Blue-eyed grass is now rarely seen. The grass in the fields and meadows is not so fresh and fair as it was a fortnight ago. It is dryer and riper and ready for the mowers. Now June is past. June is the month for grass and flowers.
Now grass is turning to hay, and flowers to fruits. Already I gather ripe blueberries on the hills. The red-topped grass is in its prime, tingeing the fields with red.
It is a free, flowing wind, with wet clouds in the sky, though the sun shines. The distant hills look unusually near in this atmosphere.
Acton meeting-houses seen to stand on the side of some hills, Nagog or Nashoba, beyond, as never before. Nobscot looks like a high pasture in the sunlight not far off. From time to time I hear a few drops of rain falling on the leaves, but none is felt and the sun does not cease to shine. All serious showers go round me and get out of my way.
The clasping harebell is certainly a pretty flower, and so is the tephrosia. The poke has blossomed and the indigo-weed.
_July 7._ The intimations of the night are divine, methinks. Men might meet in the morning and report the news of the night,—what divine suggestions have been made to them. I find that I carry with me into the day often some such hint derived from the gods,—such impulses to purity, to heroism, to literary effort even, as are never day-born.[218] One of those mornings which usher in no day, but rather an endless morning, a protracted auroral season, for clouds prolong the twilight the livelong day.
And now that there is an interregnum in the blossoming of the flowers, so is there in the singing of the birds. The golden robin is rarely heard, and the bobolink, etc.
I rejoice when in a dream I have loved virtue and nobleness.
Where is Grecian history? It is when in the morning I recall the intimations of the night.
* * * * * The moon is now more than half full. When I come through the village at 10 o’clock this cold night, cold as in May, the heavy shadows of the elms covering the ground with their rich tracery impress me as if men had got so much more than they had bargained for, not only trees to stand in the air, but to checker the ground with their shadows. At night they lie along the earth. They tower, they arch, they droop over the streets like chandeliers of darkness. In my walk the other afternoon, I saw the sun shining into the depths of a thick pine wood, checkering the ground like moonlight and illuminating the lichen-covered bark of a large white pine, from which it was reflected through the surrounding thicket as from another sun. This was so deep in the woods that you would have said no sun could penetrate thither.
I have been to-night with Anthony Wright to look through Perez Blood’s telescope a second time. A dozen of Blood’s neighbors were swept along in the stream of our curiosity. One who lived half a mile this side said that Blood had been down that way within a day or two with his terrestrial, or day, glass, looking into the eastern horizon [at] the hills of Billerica, Burlington, and Woburn. I was amused to see what sort of respect this man with a telescope had obtained from his neighbors, something akin to that which savages award to civilized men, though in this case the interval between the parties was very slight.
Mr. Blood, with his skull-cap on, his short figure, his north European figure, made me think of Tycho Brahe. He did not invite us into his house this cool evening,—men nor women,—nor did he ever before to my knowledge. I am still contented to see the stars with my naked eye. Mr.
Wright asked him what his instrument cost. He answered, “Well, that is something I don’t like to tell.” (Stuttering or hesitating in his speech a little as usual.) “It is a very proper question, however.”
“Yes,” said I, “and you think that you have given a very proper answer.”
Returning, my companion, Wright, the sexton, told me how dusty he found it digging a grave that afternoon,—for one who had been a pupil of mine. For two feet, he said, notwithstanding the rain, he found the soil as dry as ashes.
With a certain wariness, but not without a slight shudder at the danger oftentimes, I perceive how near I had come to admitting into my mind the details of some trivial affair, as a case at court; and I am astonished to observe how willing men are to lumber their minds with such rubbish,—to permit idle rumors, tales, incidents, even of an insignificant kind, to intrude upon what should be the sacred ground of the thoughts. Shall the temple of our thought be a public arena where the most trivial affairs of the market and the gossip of the tea-table is discussed,—a dusty, noisy, trivial place? Or shall it be a quarter of heaven itself, a place consecrated to the service of the gods, a hypæthral temple? I find it so difficult to dispose of the few facts which to me are significant, that I hesitate to burden my mind with the most insignificant, which only a divine mind could illustrate.
Such is, for the most part, the news,—in newspapers and conversation.
It is important to preserve the mind’s chastity in this respect. Think of admitting the details of a single case of the criminal court into the mind, to stalk profanely through its very _sanctum sanctorum_ for an hour, aye, for many hours! to make a very bar-room of your mind’s inmost apartment, as if for a moment the dust of the street had occupied you, aye, the very street itself, with all its travel, passed through your very mind of minds, your thoughts’ shrine, with all its filth and bustle! Would it not be an intellectual suicide? By all manner of boards and traps, threatening the extreme penalty of the divine law, excluding trespassers from these grounds, it behooves us to preserve the purity and sanctity of the mind.[219] It is so hard to forget what it is worse than useless to remember. If I am to be a channel or thoroughfare, I prefer that it be of the mountain springs, and not the town sewers,—the Parnassian streams. There is inspiration, the divine gossip which comes to the ear of the attentive mind from the courts of heaven; there is the profane and stale revelation of the bar-room and the police court. The same ear is fitted to receive both communications. Only the character of the individual determines to which source chiefly it shall be open and to which closed. I believe that the mind can be profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things, so that all our thoughts shall be tinged with triviality. They shall be dusty as stones in the street. Our very minds shall be paved and macadamized, as it were, their foundation broken into fragments for the wheels of travel to roll over. If we have thus desecrated ourselves, the remedy will be, by circumspection and wariness, by our aspiration and devotion, to consecrate ourselves, to make a fane of the mind. I think that we should treat our minds as innocent and ingenuous children whose guardians we are,—be careful what objects and what subjects we thrust on their attention. Even the facts of science may dust the mind by their dryness, unless they are in a sense effaced each morning, or rather rendered fertile by the dews of fresh and living truth. Every thought that passes through the mind helps to wear and tear it, and to deepen the ruts, which, as in the streets of Pompeii, evince how much it has been used. How many things there are concerning which we might well deliberate whether we had better know them![220] Routine, conventionality, manners, etc., etc.,—how insensibly an undue attention to these dissipates and impoverishes the mind, robs it of its simplicity and strength, emasculates it!
Knowledge does not come to us by details but by _lieferungs_ from the gods. What else is it to wash and purify ourselves? Conventionalities