The Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906)/Volume 7/Chapter 9
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IX
1837-1847
(ÆT. 20-30)
[THIS chapter consists of paragraphs (chiefly undated) taken from a large commonplace-book containing transcripts from earlier journals. Thoreau drew largely from this book in writing the "Week," and to a less extent in writing "Walden." Passages used in these volumes (as far as noted), and those duplicating earlier journal entries already printed in the preceding pages, have been omitted. All the matter in the book appears to have been written before 1847.]
I was born upon thy bank, river,
My blood flows in thy stream,
And thou meanderest forever
At the bottom of my dream.
This great but silent traveller which had been so long moving past my door at three miles an hour,—might I not trust myself under its escort?
In friendship we worship moral beauty without the formality of religion.
Consider how much the sun and the summer, the buds of spring and the sered leaves of autumn, are related to the cabins of the settlers which we discover on the shore, how all the rays which paint the land scape radiate from them. The flight of the crow and the gyrations of the hawk have reference to their roofs. Friends do not interchange their common wealth, but each puts his finger into the private coffer of the other. They will be most familiar, they will be most un familiar, for they will be so one and single that common themes will not have to be bandied between them, but in silence they will digest them as one mind ; but they will at the same time be so two and double that each will be to the other as admirable and as inaccessible as a star. He will view him as it were through " optic glass," "at evening from the top of Fesole." And after the longest earthly period, he will still be in apogee to him. It [the boat] had been loaded at the door the evening before, half a mile from the river, and provided with wheels against emergencies, but, with the bulky cargo which we stevedores had stowed in it, it proved but an indifferent land carriage. For water and water-casks there was a plentiful supply of muskmelons from our patch, which had just begun to be ripe, and chests and spare spars and sails and tent and guns and munitions for the galleon. And as we pushed it through the meadows to the river's bank, we stepped as lightly about it as if a portion of our own bulk and burden was stored in its hold. We were amazed to find ourselves outside still, with scarcely independent force enough to push or pull effectually.
Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/530 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/531 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/532 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/533 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/534 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/535 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/536 All actions and objects and events lose their distinct importance in this hour, in the brightness of the vision, as, when sometimes the pure light that attends the setting sun falls on the trees and houses, the light itself is the phenomenon, and no single object is so distinct to our admiration as the light itself.
If criticism is liable to abuse, it has yet a great and humane apology. When my sentiments aspire to be universal, then my neighbor has an equal interest to see that the expression be just, with myself.
My friends, why should we live?
Life is an idle war, a toilsome peace;
To-day I would not give
One small consent for its securest ease.
Shall we outwear the year
In our pavilions on its dusty plain,
And yet no signal hear
To strike our tents and take the road again?
Or else drag up the slope
The heavy ordnance of religion's train?
Useless, but in the hope
Some far remote and heavenward hill to gain.
The tortoises rapidly dropped into the water, as our boat ruffled the surface amid the willows. We glided along through the transparent water, breaking the reflections of the trees.
Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/538 meteors and lightning. It is a war of positions, of silent tactics.
I mark the summer's swift decline;
The springing sward its grave-clothes weaves.[1]
Oh, could I catch the sounds remote!
Could I but tell to human ear
The strains which on the breezes float
And sing the requiem of the dying year!
Sept. 29, 1842. To-day the lark sings again down in the meadow, and the robin peeps, and the bluebirds, old and young, have revisited their box, as if they would fain repeat the summer without the intervention of winter, if Nature would let them.
Beauty is a finer utility whose end we do not see.
Oct. 7, 1842. A little girl has just brought me a purple finch or American linnet. These birds are now moving south. It reminds me of the pine and spruce, and the juniper and cedar on whose berries it feeds. It has the crimson hues of the October evenings, and its plumage still shines as if it had caught and preserved some of their tints (beams?). We know it chiefly as a traveller. It reminds me of many things I had forgotten. Many a serene evening lies snugly packed under its wing.
Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/540 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/541 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/542 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/543 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/544 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/545 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/546 Far o'er the bow,
Amid the drowsy noon,
Souhegan, creeping slow,
Appeareth soon.[2]
Methinks that by a strict behavior
I could elicit back the brightest star
That hides behind a cloud.
I have rolled near some other spirit's path,
And with a pleased anxiety have felt
Its purer influence on my opaque mass,
But always was I doomed to learn, alas!
I had scarce changèd its sidereal time.
Gray sedulously cultivated poetry, but the plant would not thrive. His life seems to have needed some more sincere and ruder experience.
Occasionally we rowed near enough to a cottage to see the sunflowers before the door, and the seed-vessels of the poppy, like small goblets filled with the waters of Lethe, but without disturbing the sluggish household.
Driving the small sandpiper before us.
FOG[3]
Thou drifting meadow of the air,
Where bloom the daisied banks and violets,
And in whose fenny labyrinths
The bittern booms and curlew peeps,
The heron wades and boding rain-crow clucks;
Low-anchored cloud,
Newfoundland air,
Fountain-head and source of rivers,
Ocean branch that flowest to the sun,
Diluvian spirit, or Deucalion shroud,
Dew-cloth, dream drapery,
And napkin spread by fays,
Spirit of lakes and seas and rivers,
Sea-fowl that with the east wind
Seek'st the shore, groping thy way inland,
By whichever name I please to call thee,
Bear only perfumes and the scent
Of healing herbs to just men's fields.
I am amused with the manner in which Quarles and his contemporary poets speak of Nature,—with a sort of gallantry, as a knight of his lady,—not as lovers, but as having a thorough respect for her and some title to her acquaintance. They speak manfully, and their lips are not closed by affection.
"The pale-faced lady of the black-eyed night."
Nature seems to have held her court then, and all authors were her gentlemen and esquires and had ready an abundance of courtly expressions.
Quarles is never weak or shallow, though coarse and untasteful. He presses able-bodied and strong-backed words into his service, which have a certain rustic fragrance and force, as if now first devoted to literature after having served sincere and stern uses. He has the pronunciation of a poet though he stutters. He certainly speaks the English tongue with a right manly accent. To be sure his poems have the[4] musty odor of a confessional.
How little curious is man,
Who hath not searched his mystery a span,
But dreams of mines of treasure
Which he neglects to measure,
For threescore years and ten
Walks to and fro amid his fellow men
O'er this small tract of continental land,
His fancy bearing no divining wand.
Our uninquiring corpses lie more low
Than our life's curiosity doth go;
Our most ambitious steps climb not so high
As in their hourly sport the sparrows fly.
Yonder cloud's blown farther in a day
Than our most vagrant feet may ever stray.
Surely, O Lord, he hath not greatly erred
Who hath so little from his birthplace stirred.
He wanders through this low and shallow world,
Scarcely his bolder thoughts and hopes unfurled,
Through this low wallèd world, which his huge sin
Hath hardly room to rest and harbor in.
Bearing his head just o'er some fallow ground,
Some cowslip'd meadows where the bitterns sound,
He wanders round until his end draws nigh,
And then lays down his aged head to die.
And this is life! this is that famous strife!
His head doth court a fathom from the land,
Six feet from where his grovelling feet do stand.
What is called talking is a remarkable though I believe universal phenomenon of human society. The most constant phenomenon when men or women come together is talking. A chemist might try this experiment in his laboratory with certainty, and set down the fact in his journal. This characteristic of the race may be considered as established. No doubt every one can call to mind numerous conclusive instances. Some nations, it is true, are said to articulate more distinctly than others; yet the rule holds with those who have the fewest letters in their alphabet. Men cannot stay long together without talking, according to the rules of polite society. (As all men have two ears and but one tongue, they must spend the extra and unavoidable hours of silence in listening to the whisperings of genius, and this fact it is that makes silence always respectable in my eyes.) Not that they have anything to communicate, or do anything quite natural or important to be done so, but by common consent they fall to using the invention of speech, and make a conversation, good or bad. They say things, first this one and then that. They express their "opinions," as they are called.
By a well-directed silence I have sometimes seen threatening and troublesome people routed. You sit musing as if you were in broad nature again. They cannot stand it. Their position becomes more and Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/551 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/552 poems, in its outward aspect like the thousands which the press sends forth, and, if the gods permitted their own inspiration to be breathed in vain, this might be forgotten in the mass, but the accents of truth are as sure to be heard on earth as in heaven. The more I read it the more I am impressed by its sincerity, its depth and grandeur. It already seems ancient and has lost the traces of its modern birth. It is an evidence of many virtues in the writer. More serenely and humbly confident, this man has listened to the inspiration which all may hear, and with greater fidelity reported it. It is therefore a true prophecy, and shall at length come to pass. It has the grandeur of the Greek tragedy, or rather its Hebrew original, yet it is not necessarily referred to any form of faith. The slumbering, heavy depth of its sentences is perhaps without recent parallel. It lies like the sward in its native pasture, where its roots are never disturbed, and not spread over a sandy embankment.
On fields o'er which the reaper's hand has passed,
Lit by the harvest moon and autumn sun,
My thoughts like stubble floating in the wind
And of such fineness as October airs,
There, after harvest, could I glean my life,
A richer harvest reaping without toil,
And weaving gorgeous fancies at my will,
In subtler webs than finest summer haze.
In October the air is really the fine element the poets describe.[5] The fields emit a dry and temperate Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/554 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/555 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/556 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/557 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/558 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/559 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/560 To the poet considered as an artist, his words must be as the relation of his oldest and finest memory, and wisdom derived from the remotest experience.
I have thought, when walking in the woods through a certain retired dell, bordered with shrub oaks and pines, far from the village and affording a glimpse only through an opening of the mountains in the horizon, how my life might pass there, simple and true and natural, and how many things would be impossible to be done there. How many books I might not read!
Why avoid my friends and live among strangers? Why not reside in my native country?
Many a book is written which does not necessarily suggest or imply the phenomenon or object to explain which it professes to have been written.
Every child should be encouraged to study not man's system of nature but nature's.
Giles Fletcher knew how to write, and has left English verses behind. He is the most valuable imitator of the Spenserian stanza, and adds a moral tone of his own.
TO A MARSH HAWK IN SPRING
There is health in thy gray wing,
Health of nature's furnishing.
Say, thou modern-winged antique,
Was thy mistress ever sick?
In each heaving of thy wing
Thou dost health and leisure bring,
Thou dost waive disease and pain
And resume new life again.
Man walks in nature still alone,
And knows no one,
Discovers no lineament nor feature
Of any creature.
Though all the firmament
Is o'er me bent,
Yet still I miss the grace
Of an intelligent and kindred face.
I still must seek the friend
Who does with nature blend.
Who is the person in her mask,
He is the friend I ask;
Who is the expression of her meaning,
Who is the uprightness of her leaning,
Who is the grown child of her weaning.
We twain would walk together
Through every weather,
And see this aged Nature
Go with a bending stature.
The centre of this world,
The face of Nature,
The site of human life,
Some sure foundation
And nucleus of a nation,
At least, a private station.
It is the saddest thought of all, that what we are to others, that we are much more to ourselves,—avaricious, mean, irascible, affected,—we are the victims of these faults. If our pride offends our humble neighbor, much more does it offend ourselves, though our lives are never so private and solitary.
If the Indian is somewhat of a stranger in nature, the gardener is too much a familiar. There is something vulgar and foul in the latter's closeness to his mistress, something noble and cleanly in the former's distance. Yet the hunter seems to have a property in the moon which even the farmer has not. Ah! the poet knows uses of plants which are not easily reported, though he cultivates no parterre. See how the sun smiles on him while he walks in the gardener's aisles, rather than on the gardener.
Not only has the foreground of a picture its glass of transparent crystal spread over it, but the picture itself is a glass or transparent medium to a remoter background. We demand only of all pictures that they be perspicuous, that the laws of perspective have been truly observed. It is not the fringed foreground of the desert nor the intermediate oases that detain the eye and the imagination, but the infinite, level, and roomy horizon, where the sky meets the sand, and heavens and Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/564 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/565 Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/566 and Leander" tells better for his character than the anecdotes which survive.
I fain would stretch me by the highway-side,
To thaw and trickle with the melting snow,
That mingled soul and body with the tide
I too might through the pores of Nature flow,[6]
Might help to forward the new spring along,
If it were mine to choose my toil or day,
Scouring the roads with yonder sluice-way throng,
And so work out my tax on Her highway.
Yet let us thank the purblind race
Who still have thought it good
With lasting stone to mark the place
Where braver men have stood.
In Concord, town of quiet name
And quiet fame as well,...
I've seen ye, sisters, on the mountain-side,
When your green mantles fluttered in the wind;
I Ve seen your footprints on the lake's smooth shore,
Lesser than man's, a more ethereal trace;
I have heard of ye as some far-famed race,
Daughters of gods, whom I should one day meet,
Or mothers, I might say, of all our race.
I reverence your natures, so like mine
Yet strangely different, like but still unlike.
Thou only stranger that hast crossed my path,
Accept my hospitality; let me hear
The message which thou bring'st.
Made different from me,
Perchance thou 'rt made to be
The creature of a different destiny.
I know not who ye are that meekly stand
Thus side by side with man in every land.
When did ye form alliance with our race,
Ye children of the moon, who in mild nights
Vaulted upon the hills and sought this earth?
Reveal that which I fear ye cannot tell,
Wherein ye are not I, wherein ye dwell
Where I can never come.
What boots it that I do regard ye so?
Does it make suns to shine or crops to grow?
What boots [it] that I never should forget
That I have sisters sitting for me yet?
And what are sisters?
The robust man, who can so stoutly strive,
In this bleak world is hardly kept alive.
And who is it protects ye, smooths your way?
We can afford to lend a willing ear occasionally to those earnest reformers of the age. Let us treat them hospitably. Shall we be charitable only to the poor? What though they are fanatics? Their errors are likely to be generous errors, and these may be they who will put to rest the American Church and the American government, and awaken better ones in their stead.
Let us not meanly seek to maintain our delicate lives in chambers or in legislative halls by a timid watchfulness of the rude mobs that threaten to pull down our baby-houses. Let us not think to raise a revenue which shall maintain our domestic quiet by an impost on the liberty of speech. Let us not think to live by the principle of self-defense. Have we survived our accidents hitherto, think you, by virtue of our good swords,—that three-foot lath that dangles by your side, or those brazen-mouthed pieces under the burying hill which the trainers keep to hurrah with in the April and July mornings? Do our protectors burrow under the burying-ground hill, on the edge of the bean-field which you all know, gorging themselves once a year with powder and smoke, and kept bright and in condition by a chafing of oiled rags and rotten stone? Have we resigned the protection of our hearts and civil liberties to that feathered race of wading birds and marching men who drill but once a month?—and I mean no reproach to our Concord train-bands, who certainly make a handsome appearance—and dance well. Do we enjoy the sweets of domestic life undisturbed, because the naughty boys are all shut up in that whitewashed "stone-yard," as it is called, and see the Concord meadows only through a grating.
No, let us live amid the free play of the elements. Let the dogs bark, let the cocks crow, and the sun shine, and the winds blow!
Ye do commend me to all virtue ever,
And simple truth, the law by which we live.
Methinks that I can trust your clearer sense
And your immediate knowledge of the truth.
I would obey your influence, one with fate.
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- ↑ Vide the Fall of the Leaf poem. [This note is written in pencil between this line and the following stanza. The poem referred to is reprinted (without these lines) in Excursions, and Poems, p. 407.]
- ↑ [The first four lines of a poem the rest of which appears on pp. 234, 235 of Week (Riv. 290, 291).]
- ↑ [This poem appears, slightly abridged and altered, in Week, p. 261 (Riv. 249).]
- ↑ [There is a blank space here before "musty," as if Thoreau had sought another adjective to go with it.]
- ↑ [Week, p. 377; Riv. 465.]
- ↑ [Excursions, and Poems, p. 409. See also p. 71.]