“Agriculture here already assumes proportions unknown everywhere else.”[126] _Feb. 9._ The last half of January was warm and thawy. The swift streams were open, and the muskrats were seen swimming and diving and bringing up clams, leaving their shells on the ice. We had now forgotten summer and autumn, but had already begun to anticipate spring. Fishermen improved the warmer weather to fish for pickerel through the ice. Before it was only the autumn landscape with a thin layer of snow upon it; we saw the withered flowers through it; but now we do not think of autumn when we look on this snow. That earth is effectually buried. It is midwinter. Within a few days the cold has set in stronger than ever, though the days are much longer now.
Now I travel across the fields on the crust which has frozen since the January thaw, and I can cross the river in most places. It is easier to get about the country than at any other season,—easier than in summer, because the rivers and meadows are frozen and there is no high grass or other crops to be avoided; easier than in December before the crust was frozen.
* * * * * Sir John Mandeville says, “In fro what partie of the earth that men dwell, outher aboven or benethen, it seemeth always to hem that dwellen there, that they gon more right than any other folk.” Again, “And yee shulle undirstonde, that of all theise contrees, and of all theise yles, and of all the dyverse folk, that I have spoken of before, and of dyverse laws and of dyverse beleeves that thei have, yit is there non of hem alle, but that thei have sum resoun within hem and understondinge, but gif it be the fewere.”
I have heard that there is 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, for what is most of our boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit that we know something, which robs us of the advantages of our actual ignorance.[127] * * * * * For a man’s ignorance sometimes is not only useful but beautiful, while his knowledge is oftentimes worse than useless, beside being ugly.[128] In reference to important things, whose knowledge amounts to more than a consciousness of his ignorance? Yet what more refreshing and inspiring knowledge than this?
How often are we wise as serpents without being harmless as doves!
Donne says, “Who are a little wise the best fools be.” Cudworth says, “We have all of us by nature μάντευμά τε (as both Plato and Aristotle call it), a certain divination, presage and parturient vaticination in our minds, of some higher good and perfection than either power or knowledge.” Aristotle himself declares, that there is λόγον τι κρεῖττον, which is λόγον ἀρχή,—(something better than reason and knowledge, which is the principle and original of all). Lavater says, “Who finds the clearest not clear, thinks the darkest not obscure.”
* * * * * My desire for knowledge is intermittent; but my desire to commune with the spirit of the universe, to be intoxicated even with the fumes, call it, of that divine nectar, to bear my head through atmospheres and over heights unknown to my feet, is perennial and constant.[129] It is remarkable how few events or crises there are in our minds’ histories, how little _exercised_ we have been in our minds, how few experiences we have had.[130] [Four pages missing.]
The story of Romulus and Remus being suckled by a wolf is not a mere fable; the founders of every state which has risen to eminence have drawn their nourishment and vigor from a similar source. It is because the children of the empire were not suckled by wolves that they were conquered and displaced by the children of the northern forests who were.[131] America is the she wolf to-day, and the children of exhausted Europe exposed on her uninhabited and savage shores are the Romulus and Remus who, having derived new life and vigor from her breast, have founded a new Rome in the West.
* * * * * It is remarkable how few passages, comparatively speaking, there are in the best literature of the day which betray any intimacy with Nature.
It is apparent enough to me that only one or two of my townsmen or acquaintances—not more than one in many thousand men, indeed—feel or at least obey any strong attraction drawing them toward the forest or to Nature, but all, almost without exception, gravitate exclusively toward men, or society.[132] The young men of Concord and in other towns do not walk in the woods, but congregate in shops and offices. They suck one another. Their strongest attraction is toward the mill-dam.
A thousand assemble about the fountain in the public square,—the town pump,—be it full or dry, clear or turbid, every morning, but not one in a thousand is in the meanwhile drinking at that fountain’s head. It is hard for the young, aye, and the old, man in the outskirts to keep away from the mill-dam a whole day; but he will find some excuse, as an ounce of cloves that might be wanted, or a _New England Farmer_ still in the office, to tackle up the horse, or even go afoot, but he will go at some rate. This is not bad comparatively; this is because he cannot do better. In spite of his hoeing and chopping, he is unexpressed and undeveloped.
I do not know where to find in any literature, whether ancient or modern, any adequate account of that Nature with which I am acquainted.
Mythology comes nearest to it of any.[133] The actual life of men is not without a dramatic interest at least to the thinker. It is not always and everywhere prosaic. Seventy thousand pilgrims proceed annually to Mecca from the various nations of Islam.
But this is not so significant as the far simpler and more unpretending pilgrimage to the shrines of some obscure individual, which yet makes no bustle in the world.
I believe that Adam in paradise was not so favorably situated on the whole as is the backwoodsman in America.[134] You all know how miserably the former turned out,—or was turned out,—but there is some consolation at least in the fact that it yet remains to be seen how the western Adam in the wilderness will turn out.
In Adam’s fall We sinned all.
In the new Adam’s rise We shall all reach the skies.
An infusion of hemlock in our tea, if we must drink tea,—not the poison hemlock, but the hemlock spruce, I mean,[135]—or perchance the Arbor-Vitæ, the tree of life,—is what we want.
_Feb. 12. Wednesday._ A beautiful day, with but little snow or ice on the ground. Though the air is sharp, as the earth is half bare the hens have strayed to some distance from the barns. The hens, standing around their lord and pluming themselves and still fretting a little, strive to fetch the year about.
A thaw has nearly washed away the snow and raised the river and the brooks and flooded the meadows, covering the old ice, which is still fast to the bottom.
I find that it is an excellent walk for variety and novelty and wildness, to keep round the edge of the meadow,—the ice not being strong enough to bear and transparent as water,—on the bare ground or snow, just between the highest water mark and the present water line,—a narrow, meandering walk, rich in unexpected views and objects.
The line of rubbish which marks the higher tides—withered flags and reeds and twigs and cranberries—is to my eyes a very agreeable and significant line, which Nature traces along the edge of the meadows. It is a strongly marked, enduring natural line, which in summer reminds me that the water has once stood over where I walk. Sometimes the grooved trees tell the same tale. The wrecks of the meadow, which fill a thousand coves, and tell a thousand tales to those who can read them.
Our prairial, mediterranean shore. The gentle rise of water around the trees in the meadow, where oaks and maples stand far out in the sea, and young elms sometimes are seen standing close around some rock which lifts its head above the water, as if protecting it, preventing it from being washed away, though in truth they owe their origin and preservation to it. It first invited and detained their seed, and now preserves the soil in which they grow. A pleasant reminiscence of the rise of waters, to go up one side of the river and down the other, following this way, which meanders so much more than the river itself.
If you cannot go on the ice, you are then gently compelled to take this course, which is on the whole more beautiful,—to follow the sinuosities of the meadow. Between the highest water mark and the present water line is a space generally from a few feet to a few rods in width. When the water comes over the road, then my spirits rise,—when the fences are carried away. A prairial walk. Saw a caterpillar crawling about on the snow.
The earth is so bare that it makes an impression on me as if it were catching cold.
I saw to-day something new to me as I walked along the edge of the meadow. Every half-mile or so along the channel of the river I saw at a distance where apparently the ice had been broken up while freezing by the pressure of other ice,—thin cakes of ice forced up on their edges and reflecting the sun like so many mirrors, whole fleets of shining sails, giving a very lively appearance to the river,—where for a dozen rods the flakes of ice stood on their edges, like a fleet beating up-stream against the sun, a fleet of ice-boats.
It is remarkable that the cracks in the ice on the meadows sometimes may be traced a dozen rods from the water through the snow in the neighboring fields.
It is only necessary that man should start a fence that Nature should carry it on and complete it. The farmer cannot plow quite up to the rails or wall which he himself has placed, and hence it often becomes a hedgerow and sometimes a coppice.
I found to-day apples still green under the snow, and others frozen and thawed, sweeter far than when sound,—a sugary sweetness.[136] There is something more than association at the bottom of the excitement which the roar of a cataract produces. It is allied to the circulation in our veins. We have a waterfall which corresponds even to Niagara somewhere within us.[137] It is astonishing what a rush and tumult a slight inclination will produce in a swollen brook. How it proclaims its glee, its boisterousness, rushing headlong in its prodigal course as if it would exhaust itself in half an hour! How it spends itself! I would say to the orator and poet, Flow freely and _lavishly_ as a brook that is full,—without stint. Perchance I have stumbled upon the origin of the word “lavish.” It does not hesitate to tumble down the steepest precipice and roar or tinkle as it goes, for fear it will exhaust its fountain. The impetuosity of descending water even by the slightest inclination! It seems to flow with ever increasing rapidity.
It is difficult to believe what philosophers assert, that it is merely a difference in the form of the elementary particles—as whether they are square or globular—which makes the difference between the steadfast, everlasting, and reposing hillside and the impetuous torrent which tumbles down it.
It is refreshing to walk over sprout-lands, where oak and chestnut sprouts are mounting swiftly up again into the sky, and already perchance their sere leaves begin to rustle in the breeze and reflect the light on the hillsides.
“Heroic underwoods that take the air With freedom, nor respect their parents’ death.”[138] I trust that the walkers of the present day are conscious of the blessings which they enjoy in the comparative freedom with which they can ramble over the country and enjoy the landscape, anticipating with compassion that future day when possibly it will be partitioned off into so-called pleasure-grounds, where only a few may enjoy the narrow and exclusive pleasure which is compatible with ownership,—when walking over the surface of God’s earth shall be construed to mean trespassing on some gentleman’s grounds, when fences shall be multiplied and man traps and other engines invented to confine men to the public road. I am thankful that we have yet so much room in America.[139] _Feb. 13._ Skated to Sudbury. A beautiful, summer-like day. The meadows were frozen just enough to bear. Examined now the fleets of ice-flakes close at hand. They are a very singular and interesting phenomenon, which I do not remember to have seen. I should say that when the water was frozen about as thick as pasteboard, a violent gust had here and there broken it up, and while the wind and waves held it up on its edge, the increasing cold froze it in firmly. So it seemed, for the flakes were for the most part turned one way; _i. e._ standing on one side, you saw only their edges, on another—the northeast or southwest—their sides. They were for the most part of a triangular form, like a shoulder[_sic_]-of-mutton sail, slightly scalloped, like shells. They looked like a fleet of a thousand mackerel-fishers under a press of sail careering before a smacking breeze. Sometimes the sun and wind had reduced them to the thinness of writing-paper, and they fluttered and rustled and tinkled merrily. I skated through them and strewed their wrecks around. They appear to have been elevated expressly to reflect the sun like mirrors, to adorn the river and attract the eye of the skater. Who will say that their principal end is not answered when they excite the admiration of the skater? Every half-mile or mile, as you skate up the river, you see these crystal fleets. Nature is a great imitator and loves to repeat herself. She wastes her wonders on the town. It impresses me as one superiority in her art, if art it may be called, that she does not require that man appreciate her, takes no steps to attract his attention.
The trouble is in getting on and off the ice; when you are once on you can go well enough. It melts round the edges.
Again I saw to-day, half a mile off in Sudbury, a sandy spot on the top of a hill, where I prophesied that I should find traces of the Indians.
When within a dozen rods, I distinguished the foundation of a lodge, and merely passing over it, I saw many fragments of the arrowhead stone. I have frequently distinguished these localities half a mile [off], gone forward, and picked up arrowheads.
Saw in a warm, muddy brook in Sudbury, quite open and exposed, the skunk-cabbage spathes above water. The tops of the spathes were frost-bitten, but the fruit [_sic_] sound. There was one partly expanded. The first flower of the season; for it is a flower. I doubt if there is [a] month without its flower. Examined by the botany all its parts,—the first flower I have seen. The _Ictodes fœtidus_.
Also mosses, mingled red and green. The red will pass for the blossom.
As for antiquities, one of our old deserted country roads, marked only by the parallel fences and cellar-hole with its bricks where the last inhabitant died, the victim of intemperance, fifty years ago, with its bare and exhausted fields stretching around, suggests to me an antiquity greater and more remote from the America of the newspapers than the tombs of Etruria. I insert the rise and fall of Rome in the interval. This is the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.
* * * * * It is important to observe not only the subject of our pure and unalloyed joys, but also the secret of any dissatisfaction one may feel.
In society, in the best institutions of men, I remark a certain precocity. When we should be growing children, we are already little men. Infants as we are, we make haste to be weaned from our great mother’s breast, and cultivate our parts by intercourse with one another.
I have not much faith in the method of restoring impoverished soils which relies on manuring mainly and does not add some virgin soil or muck.
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 to study, he honestly slumbered a fool’s allowance.[140] I would not have every man cultivated, any more than I would have every acre of earth cultivated. Some must be preparing a mould by the annual decay of the forests which they sustain.[141] Saw half a dozen cows let out and standing about in a retired meadow as in a cow-yard.
_Feb. 14._ Consider the farmer, who is commonly regarded as the healthiest man. He may be the toughest, but he is not the healthiest.
He has lost his elasticity; he can neither run nor jump. Health is the free use and command of all our faculties, and equal development.
His is the health of the ox, an overworked buffalo. His joints are stiff. The resemblance is true even in particulars. He is cast away in a pair of cowhide boots, and travels at an ox’s pace. Indeed, in some places he puts his foot into the skin of an ox’s shin. It would do him good to be thoroughly shampooed to make him supple. His health is an insensibility to all influence. But only the healthiest man in the world is sensible to the finest influence; he who is affected by more or less of electricity in the air.
We shall see but little way if we require to understand what we see.
How few things can a man measure with the tape of his understanding!
How many greater things might he be seeing in the meanwhile!
One afternoon in the fall, November 21st, I saw Fair Haven Pond with its island and meadow; between the island and the shore, a strip of perfectly smooth water in the lee of the island; and two hawks sailing over it; and something more I saw which cannot easily be described, which made me say to myself that the landscape could not be improved.
I did not see how it could be improved. Yet I do not know what these things can be; I begin to see such objects only when I leave off understanding them, and afterwards remember that I did not appreciate them before. But I get no further than this. How adapted these forms and colors to our eyes, a meadow and its islands! What are these things? Yet the hawks and the ducks keep so aloof, and nature is so reserved! We are made to love the river and the meadow, as the wind to ripple the water.[142] There is a difference between eating for strength and from mere gluttony. The Hottentots eagerly devour the marrow of the koodoo and other antelopes raw, as a matter of course, and herein perchance have stolen a march on the cooks of Paris. The eater of meat must come to this. This is better than stall-fed cattle and slaughter-house pork.
Possibly they derive a certain wild-animal vigor therefrom which the most artfully cooked meats do not furnish.[143] We learn by the January thaw that the winter is intermittent and are reminded of other seasons. The back of the winter is broken.
_Feb. 15._ Fatal is the discovery that our friend is fallible, that he has prejudices. He is, then, only prejudiced in our favor. What is the value of his esteem who does not justly esteem another?
Alas! Alas! when my friend begins to deal in confessions, breaks silence, makes a theme of friendship (which then is always something past), and descends to merely human relations! As long as there is a spark of love remaining, cherish that alone. Only _that_ can be kindled into a flame. I thought that friendship, that love was still possible between [us]. I thought that we had not withdrawn very far asunder.
But now that my friend rashly, thoughtlessly, profanely speaks, _recognizing_ the distance between us, that distance seems infinitely increased.
Of our friends we do not incline to speak, to complain, to others; we would not disturb the foundations of confidence that may still be.
* * * * * Why should we not still continue to live with the intensity and rapidity of infants? Is not the world, are not the heavens, as unfathomed as ever? Have we exhausted any joy, any sentiment?
* * * * * The author of Festus well exclaims:— “Could we but think with the intensity We love with, we might do great things, I think.”
_Feb. 16._ Do we call this the land of the free? What is it to be free from King George the Fourth and continue the slaves of prejudice? What is it [to] be born free and equal, and not to live? What is the value of any political freedom, but as a means to moral freedom? Is it a freedom to be slaves or a freedom to be free, of which we boast? We are a nation of politicians, concerned about the outsides of freedom, the means and outmost defenses of freedom. It is our children’s children who may perchance be essentially free. We tax ourselves unjustly.
There is a part of us which is not represented. It is taxation without representation. We quarter troops upon ourselves. In respect to virtue or true manhood, we are essentially provincial, not metropolitan,—mere Jonathans. We are provincial, because we do not find at home our standards; because we do not worship truth but the reflection of truth; because we are absorbed in and narrowed by trade and commerce and agriculture, which are but means and not the end. We are essentially provincial, I say, and so is the English Parliament. Mere country bumpkins they betray themselves, when any more important question arises for them to settle. Their natures are subdued to what they work in!
The finest manners in the world are awkwardness and fatuity when contrasted with a finer intelligence. They appear but as the fashions of past days,—mere courtliness, small-clothes, and knee-buckles,—have the vice of getting out of date; an attitude merely. The vice of manners is that they are continually deserted by the character; they are cast-off clothes or shells, claiming the respect of the living creature. You are presented with the shells instead of the meat, and it is no excuse generally that, in the case of some fish, the shells are of more worth than the meat. The man who thrusts his manners upon me does as if he were to insist on introducing me to his cabinet of curiosities, when I wish to see himself. Manners are conscious; character is unconscious.[144] My neighbor does not recover from his formal bow so soon as I do from the pleasure of meeting him.
* * * * * _Feb. 18. Tuesday._ Ground nearly bare of snow. Pleasant day with a strong south wind. Skated, though the ice was soft in spots. Saw the skunk-cabbage in flower. Gathered nuts and apples on the bare ground, still sound and preserving their colors, red and green, many of them.
Yesterday the river was over the road by Hubbard’s Bridge.
Surveyed White Pond yesterday, February 17th.
There is little or nothing to be remembered written on the subject of getting an honest living. Neither the New Testament nor Poor Richard speaks to our condition. I cannot think of a single page which entertains, much less answers, the questions which I put to myself on this subject. How to make the getting our living poetic! for if it is not poetic, it is not life but death that we get. Is it that men are too disgusted with their experience to speak of it? or that commonly they do not question the common modes? The most practically important of all questions, it seems to me, is how shall I get my living, and yet I find little or nothing said to the purpose in any book. Those who are living on the interest of money inherited, or dishonestly, _i.
e._ by false methods, acquired, are of course incompetent to answer it.
I consider that society with all its arts, has done nothing for us in this respect. One would think, from looking at literature, that this question had never disturbed a solitary individual’s musings. Cold and hunger seem more friendly to my nature than those methods which men have adopted and advise to ward them off.[145] If it were not that I desire to do something here,—accomplish some work,—I should certainly prefer to suffer and die rather than be at the pains to get a living by the modes men propose.
There may be an excess even of informing light.
Niepce, a Frenchman, announced that “no substance can be exposed to the sun’s rays without undergoing a chemical change.” Granite rocks and stone structures and statues of metal, etc., “are,” says Robert Hunt, “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 subtile of the agencies of the universe.” But Niepce showed, says Hunt, “that those bodies which underwent this change during daylight possessed the power of restoring themselves to their original conditions during the hours of night, when this excitement was no longer influencing them.” So, in the case of the daguerreotype, “the picture which we receive to-night, unless we adopt some method of securing its permanency, fades away before the morning, and we try to restore it in vain.” (Infers) “the hours of darkness are as necessary to the inorganic creation as we know night and sleep are to the organic kingdom.” Such is the influence of “actinism,” that power in the sun’s rays which produces a chemical effect.[146] _Feb. 25._ A very windy day. A slight snow which fell last night was melted at noon. A strong, gusty wind; the waves on the meadows make a fine show. I saw at Hubbard’s Bridge that all the ice had been blown up-stream from the meadows, and was collected over the channel against the bridge in large cakes. These were covered and intermingled with a remarkable quantity of the meadow’s crust. There was no ice to be seen up-stream and no more downstream.
The meadows have been flooded for a fortnight, and this water has been frozen barely thick enough to bear once only. The old ice on the meadows was covered several feet deep. I observed from the bridge, a few rods off northward, what looked like an island directly over the channel. It was the crust of the meadow afloat. I reached [it] with a little risk and found it to be four rods long by one broad,—the surface of the meadow with cranberry vines, etc., all connected and in their natural position, and no ice visible but around its edges. It appeared to be the frozen crust (which was separated from the unfrozen soil as ice is from the water beneath), buoyed up (?), perchance, by the ice around its edges frozen to the stubble. Was there any pure ice under it? Had there been any above it? Will frozen meadow float?
Had ice which originally supported it from above melted except about the edges? When the ice melts or the soil thaws, of course it falls to the bottom, wherever it may be. Here is another agent employed in the distribution of plants. I have seen where a smooth shore which I frequented for bathing was in one season strewn with these hummocks, bearing the button-bush with them, which have now changed the character of the shore. There were many rushes and lily-pad stems on the ice. Had the ice formed about them as they grew, broken them off when it floated away, and so they were strewn about on it?
_Feb. 26. Wednesday._ Examined the floating meadow again to-day. It is more than a foot thick, the under part much mixed with ice,—ice and muck. It appeared to me that the meadow surface had been heaved by the frost, and then the water had run down and under it, and finally, when the ice rose, lifted it up, wherever there was ice enough mixed with it to float it. I saw large cakes of ice with other large cakes, the latter as big as a table, on top of them. Probably the former rose while the latter were already floating about. The plants scattered about were bulrushes and lily-pad stems.
Saw five red-wings and a song sparrow (?) this afternoon.
_Feb. 27._ Saw to-day on Pine Hill behind Mr. Joseph Merriam’s house a Norway pine, the first I have seen in Concord. Mr. Gleason pointed it out to me as a singular pine which he did not know the name of. It was a very handsome tree, about twenty-five feet high. E. Wood thinks that he has lost the surface of two acres of his meadow by the ice. Got fifteen cartloads out of a hummock left on another meadow. Blue-joint was introduced into the first meadow where it did not grow before.
* * * * * Of two men, one of whom knows nothing about a subject, and, what is extremely rare, knows that he knows nothing, and the other really knows something about it, but thinks that he knows all,—what great advantage has the latter over the former? which is the best to deal with? I do not know that knowledge amounts to anything more definite than a novel and grand surprise, or a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of all that we had called knowledge before; an indefinite sense of the grandeur and glory of the universe. It is the lighting up of the mist by the sun. But man cannot be said to know in any higher sense, [any more] than he can look serenely and with impunity in the face of the sun.[147] A culture which imports much muck from the meadows and deepens the soil, not that which trusts to heating manures and improved agricultural implements only.
* * * * * How, when a man purchases a thing, he is determined to get and get hold of it, using how many expletives and how long a string of synonymous or similar terms signifying possession, in the legal process! What’s mine’s my own. An old deed of a small piece of swamp land, which I have lately surveyed at the risk of being mired past recovery, says that “the said Spaulding his Heirs and Assigns, shall and may from this (?)
time, and at all times forever hereafter, by force and virtue of these presents, lawfully, peaceably and quietly have, hold, use, occupy, possess and enjoy the said swamp,” etc.
* * * * * Magnetic iron, being anciently found in _Magnesia_,—hence _magnes_, or magnet,—employed by Pliny and others. Chinese appear to have discovered the magnet very early, A. D. 121 and before (?); used by them to steer ships in 419; mentioned by an Icelander, 1068; in a French poem, 1181; in Torfæus’ History of Norway, 1266. Used by De Gama in 1427. Leading stone, hence loadstone.
The peroxide of hydrogen, or ozone, at first thought to be a chemical curiosity merely, is found to be very generally diffused through nature.
The following bears on the floating ice which has risen from the bottom of the meadows. Robert Hunt says: “Water conducts heat downward but very slowly; a mass of ice will remain undissolved but a few inches under water on the surface of which ether or any other inflammable body is burning. If ice swam beneath the surface, the summer sun would scarcely have power to thaw it; and thus our lakes and seas would be gradually converted into solid masses.”
The figures of serpents, of griffins, flying dragons, and other embellishments of heraldry, the eastern idea of the world on an elephant, that on a tortoise, and that on a serpent again, etc., usually regarded as mythological in the common sense of that word, are thought by some to “indicate a faint and shadowy knowledge of a previous state of organic existence,” such as geology partly reveals.
The fossil tortoise has been found in Asia large enough to support an elephant.
Ammonites, snake-stones, or petrified snakes have been found from of old, often decapitated.
In the northern part of Great Britain the fossil remains of encrinites Westward is heaven, or rather heavenward is the west. The way to heaven is from east to west round the earth. The sun leads and shows it. The stars, too, light it.
Nature and man; some prefer the one, others the other; but that is all _de gustibus_. It makes no odds at what well you drink, provided it be a well-head.
Walking in the woods, it may be, some afternoon, the shadow of the wings of a thought flits across the landscape of my mind, and I am reminded how little eventful are our lives. What have been all these wars and rumors of wars, and modern discoveries and improvements so-called? A mere irritation in the skin. But this shadow which is so soon past, and whose substance is not detected, suggests that there are events of importance whose interval is to us a true historic period.[148] The lecturer is wont to describe the Nineteenth Century, the American [of] the last generation, in an off-hand and triumphant strain, wafting him to paradise, spreading his fame by steam and telegraph, recounting the number of wooden stopples he has whittled.
But who does not perceive that this is not a sincere or pertinent account of any man’s or nation’s life? It is the hip-hip-hurrah and mutual-admiration-society style. Cars go by, and we know their substance as well as their shadow. They stop and we get into them. But those sublime thoughts passing on high do not stop, and we never get into them. Their conductor is not like one of us.
I feel that the man who, in his conversation with me about the life of man in New England, lays much stress on railroads, telegraphs, and such enterprises does not go below the surface of things. He treats the shallow and transitory as if it were profound and enduring. In one of the mind’s avatars, in the interval between sleeping and waking, aye, even in one of the interstices of a Hindoo dynasty, perchance, such things as the Nineteenth Century, with all its improvements, may come and go again. Nothing makes a deep and lasting impression but what is weighty.
Obey the law which reveals, and not the law revealed.
I wish my neighbors were wilder.
A wildness whose glance no civilization could endure.[149] He who lives according to the highest law is in one sense lawless. That is an unfortunate discovery, certainly, that of a law which binds us where we did not know that we were bound. Live free, child of the mist!
He for whom the law is made, who does not obey the law but whom the law obeys, reclines on pillows of down and is wafted at will whither he pleases, for man is superior to all laws, both of heaven and earth, when he takes his liberty.[150] Wild as if we lived on the marrow of antelopes devoured raw.[151] There would seem to be men in whose lives there have been no events of importance, more than in the beetle’s which crawls in our path.
_March 19._ The ice in the pond is now soft and will not bear a heavy stone thrown from the bank. It is melted for a rod from the shore. The ground has been bare of snow for some weeks, but yesterday we had a violent northeast snow-storm, which has drifted worse than any the past winter. The spring birds—ducks and geese, etc.—had come, but now the spring seems far off.
No good ever came of obeying a law which you had discovered.
_March 23._ For a week past the elm buds have been swollen. The willow catkins have put out. The ice still remains in Walden, though it will not bear. Mather Howard saw a large meadow near his house which had risen up but was prevented from floating away by the bushes.
_March 27._ Walden is two-thirds broken up. It will probably be quite open by to-morrow night.
_March 30._ Spring is already upon us. I see the tortoises, or rather I hear them drop from the bank into the brooks at my approach. The catkins of the alders have blossomed. The pads are springing at the