On the Duty of Civil Disobedience


by Henry David Thoreau


[1849, original title:  Resistance to Civil Government]


I heartily accept the motto, "That government is best
which governs least"; and I should like to see it acted up
to more rapidly and systematically.  Carried out, it finally
amounts to this, which also I believe--"That government is
best which governs not at all"; and when men are prepared
for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.
Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments
are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient.
The objections which have been brought against a standing army,
and they are many and weighty, and deserve to prevail,
may also at last be brought against a standing government.
The standing army is only an arm of the standing government.
The government itself, which is only the mode which the people
have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be abused
and perverted before the people can act through it.  Witness the
present Mexican war, the work of comparatively a few individuals
using the standing government as their tool; for in the outset,
the people would not have consented to this measure.

This American government--what is it but a tradition,
though a recent one, endeavoring to transmit itself
unimpaired to posterity, but each instant losing some of its
integrity?  It has not the vitality and force of a single
living man; for a single man can bend it to his will.  It is
a sort of wooden gun to the people themselves.  But it is
not the less necessary for this; for the people must have
some complicated machinery or other, and hear its din, to
satisfy that idea of government which they have.
Governments show thus how successfully men can be imposed
upon, even impose on themselves, for their own advantage.
It is excellent, we must all allow.  Yet this government
never of itself furthered any enterprise, but by the alacrity
with which it got out of its way.  _It_ does not keep the 
country free.  _It_ does not settle the West.  _It_ does not
educate.  The character inherent in the American people has
done all that has been accomplished; and it would have done
somewhat more, if the government had not sometimes got in
its way.  For government is an expedient, by which men would
fain succeed in letting one another alone; and, as has been
said, when it is most expedient, the governed are most let
alone by it.  Trade and commerce, if they were not made of
india-rubber, would never manage to bounce over obstacles
which legislators are continually putting in their way;
and if one were to judge these men wholly by the effects of
their actions and not partly by their intentions, they would
deserve to be classed and punished with those mischievious
persons who put obstructions on the railroads.

But, to speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those
who call themselves no-government men, I ask for, not
_at once_ no government, but at once a better government.
Let every man make known what kind of government would command
his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it.

After all, the practical reason why, when the power is
once in the hands of the people, a majority are permitted,
and for a long period continue, to rule is not because they
are most likely to be in the right, nor because this seems
fairest to the minority, but because they are physically the
strongest.  But a government in which the majority rule in
all cases can not be based on justice, even as far as men
understand it.  Can there not be a government in which the
majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but
conscience?--in which majorities decide only those questions
to which the rule of expediency is applicable?  Must the
citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign
his conscience to the legislator?  Why has every man a
conscience then?  I think that we should be men first, and
subjects afterward.  It is not desirable to cultivate a
respect for the law, so much as for the right.  The only
obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any
time what I think right.  It is truly enough said that a
corporation has no conscience; but a corporation of
conscientious men is a corporation _with_ a conscience.
Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their
respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the
agents on injustice.  A common and natural result of an
undue respect for the law is, that you may see a file of
soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates,
powder-monkeys, and all, marching in admirable order over
hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against
their common sense and consciences, which makes it very
steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart.
They have no doubt that it is a damnable business in
which they are concerned; they are all peaceably inclined.
Now, what are they?  Men at all?  or small movable forts and
magazines, at the service of some unscrupulous man in power?
Visit the Navy Yard, and behold a marine, such a man as an
American government can make, or such as it can make a man
with its black arts--a mere shadow and reminiscence of
humanity, a man laid out alive and standing, and already,
as one may say, buried under arms with funeral accompaniment,
though it may be,

    "Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note,
     As his corse to the rampart we hurried;
     Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot
     O'er the grave where our hero was buried."

The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly,
but as machines, with their bodies.  They are the standing army,
and the militia, jailers, constables, posse comitatus, etc.
In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the
judgement or of the moral sense; but they put themselves
on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men
can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well.
Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt.
They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs.
Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens.
Others--as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers,
and office-holders--serve the state chiefly with their heads;
and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as
likely to serve the devil, without _intending_ it, as God.
A very few--as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the
great sense, and _men_--serve the state with their consciences
also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and
they are commonly treated as enemies by it.  A wise man will
only be useful as a man, and will not submit to be "clay,"
and "stop a hole to keep the wind away," but leave that
office to his dust at least:

    "I am too high born to be propertied,
     To be a second at control,
     Or useful serving-man and instrument
     To any sovereign state throughout the world."

He who gives himself entirely to his fellow men appears
to them useless and selfish; but he who gives himself
partially to them in pronounced a benefactor and philanthropist.

How does it become a man to behave toward the American
government today?  I answer, that he cannot without disgrace
be associated with it.  I cannot for an instant recognize
that political organization as _my_ government which is the
_slave's_ government also.

All men recognize the right of revolution; that is,
the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist,
the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are
great and unendurable.  But almost all say that such is not
the case now.  But such was the case, they think, in the
Revolution of '75.  If one were to tell me that this was a
bad government because it taxed certain foreign commodities
brought to its ports, it is most probable that I should
not make an ado about it, for I can do without them.
All machines have their friction; and possibly this does
enough good to counter-balance the evil.  At any rate, it is
a great evil to make a stir about it.  But when the friction
comes to have its machine, and oppression and robbery are
organized, I say, let us not have such a machine any longer.
In other words, when a sixth of the population of a nation
which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves,
and a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a
foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it
is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize.
What makes this duty the more urgent is that fact that the
country so overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading army.

Paley, a common authority with many on moral questions,
in his chapter on the "Duty of Submission to Civil
Government," resolves all civil obligation into expediency;
and he proceeds to say that "so long as the interest of the
whole society requires it, that is, so long as the established
government cannot be resisted or changed without public
inconvenience, it is the will of God . . . that the
established government be obeyed--and no longer.  This
principle being admitted, the justice of every particular
case of resistance is reduced to a computation of the
quantity of the danger and grievance on the one side, and of
the probability and expense of redressing it on the other."
Of this, he says, every man shall judge for himself.
But Paley appears never to have contemplated those cases
to which the rule of expediency does not apply, in which
a people, as well as an individual, must do justice, cost
what it may.  If I have unjustly wrested a plank from a
drowning man, I must restore it to him though I drown myself.
This, according to Paley, would be inconvenient.
But he that would save his life, in such a case, shall lose it.
This people must cease to hold slaves, and to make war
on Mexico, though it cost them their existence as a people.

In their practice, nations agree with Paley; but does
anyone think that Massachusetts does exactly what is right
at the present crisis?

    "A drab of stat,
     a cloth-o'-silver slut,
     To have her train borne up,
     and her soul trail in the dirt."

Practically speaking, the opponents to a reform in
Massachusetts are not a hundred thousand politicians at the
South, but a hundred thousand merchants and farmers here,
who are more interested in commerce and agriculture than
they are in humanity, and are not prepared to do justice to
the slave and to Mexico, _cost what it may_.  I quarrel not
with far-off foes, but with those who, near at home,
co-operate with, and do the bidding of, those far away, and
without whom the latter would be harmless.  We are
accustomed to say, that the mass of men are unprepared; but
improvement is slow, because the few are not as materially
wiser or better than the many.  It is not so important that
many should be good as you, as that there be some absolute
goodness somewhere; for that will leaven the whole lump.
There are thousands who are _in opinion_ opposed to slavery
and to the war, who yet in effect do nothing to put an end
to them; who, esteeming themselves children of Washington
and Franklin, sit down with their hands in their pockets,
and say that they know not what to do, and do nothing; who
even postpone the question of freedom to the question of
free trade, and quietly read the prices-current along with
the latest advices from Mexico, after dinner, and, it may
be, fall asleep over them both.  What is the price-current
of an honest man and patriot today?  They hesitate, and they
regret, and sometimes they petition; but they do nothing in
earnest and with effect.  They will wait, well disposed, for
other to remedy the evil, that they may no longer have it to
regret.  At most, they give up only a cheap vote, and a
feeble countenance and Godspeed, to the right, as it goes by
them.  There are nine hundred and ninety-nine patrons of
virtue to one virtuous man.  But it is easier to deal with
the real possessor of a thing than with the temporary
guardian of it.

All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or
backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with
right and wrong, with moral questions; and betting naturally
accompanies it.  The character of the voters is not staked.
I cast my vote, perchance, as I think right; but I am not
vitally concerned that that right should prevail.  I am
willing to leave it to the majority.  Its obligation,
therefore, never exceeds that of expediency.  Even _voting
for the right_ is _doing_ nothing for it.  It is only
expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail.
A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance,
nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority.
There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men.
When the majority shall at length vote for the abolition of
slavery, it will be because they are indifferent to slavery,
or because there is but little slavery left to be abolished
by their vote.  _They_ will then be the only slaves.  Only _his_
vote can hasten the abolition of slavery who asserts his own
freedom by his vote.

I hear of a convention to be held at Baltimore, or
elsewhere, for the selection of a candidate for the
Presidency, made up chiefly of editors, and men who are
politicians by profession; but I think, what is it to any
independent, intelligent, and respectable man what decision
they may come to?  Shall we not have the advantage of this
wisdom and honesty, nevertheless?  Can we not count upon
some independent votes?  Are there not many individuals in
the country who do not attend conventions?  But no:  I find
that the respectable man, so called, has immediately drifted
from his position, and despairs of his country, when his
country has more reasons to despair of him.  He forthwith
adopts one of the candidates thus selected as the only
_available_ one, thus proving that he is himself _available_
for any purposes of the demagogue.  His vote is of no more
worth than that of any unprincipled foreigner or hireling
native, who may have been bought.  O for a man who is a man,
and, as my neighbor says, has a bone in his back which you
cannot pass your hand through! Our statistics are at fault:
the population has been returned too large.  How many _men_
are there to a square thousand miles in the country?
Hardly one.  Does not America offer any inducement for men
to settle here?  The American has dwindled into an Odd
Fellow--one who may be known by the development of his organ
of gregariousness, and a manifest lack of intellect and
cheerful self-reliance; whose first and chief concern, on
coming into the world, is to see that the almshouses are in
good repair; and, before yet he has lawfully donned the
virile garb, to collect a fund to the support of the widows
and orphans that may be; who, in short, ventures to live
only by the aid of the Mutual Insurance company, which has
promised to bury him decently.

It is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to
devote himself to the eradication of any, even to most
enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns
to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his
hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to
give it practically his support.  If I devote myself to
other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at
least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man's
shoulders.  I must get off him first, that he may pursue his
contemplations too.  See what gross inconsistency is tolerated.
I have heard some of my townsmen say, "I should like to
have them order me out to help put down an insurrection
of the slaves, or to march to Mexico--see if I would go";
and yet these very men have each, directly by their
allegiance, and so indirectly, at least, by their money,
furnished a substitute.  The soldier is applauded who
refuses to serve in an unjust war by those who do not refuse
to sustain the unjust government which makes the war;
is applauded by those whose own act and authority he disregards
and sets at naught; as if the state were penitent to that
degree that it hired one to scourge it while it sinned, but
not to that degree that it left off sinning for a moment.
Thus, under the name of Order and Civil Government, we are
all made at last to pay homage to and support our own meanness.
After the first blush of sin comes its indifference; and from
immoral it becomes, as it were, unmoral, and not quite unnecessary
to that life which we have made.

The broadest and most prevalent error requires the most
disinterested virtue to sustain it.  The slight reproach to
which the virtue of patriotism is commonly liable, the noble
are most likely to incur.  Those who, while they disapprove
of the character and measures of a government, yield to it
their allegiance and support are undoubtedly its most
conscientious supporters, and so frequently the most serious
obstacles to reform.  Some are petitioning the State to
dissolve the Union, to disregard the requisitions of the
President.  Why do they not dissolve it themselves--the
union between themselves and the State--and refuse to pay
their quota into its treasury?  Do not they stand in the same
relation to the State that the State does to the Union?  And
have not the same reasons prevented the State from resisting
the Union which have prevented them from resisting the State?

How can a man be satisfied to entertain an opinion merely,
and enjoy _it_?  Is there any enjoyment in it, if his
opinion is that he is aggrieved?  If you are cheated out of
a single dollar by your neighbor, you do not rest satisfied
with knowing you are cheated, or with saying that you are
cheated, or even with petitioning him to pay you your due;
but you take effectual steps at once to obtain the full
amount, and see to it that you are never cheated again.
Action from principle, the perception and the performance of
right, changes things and relations; it is essentially
revolutionary, and does not consist wholly with anything
which was.  It not only divided States and churches, it
divides families; ay, it divides the _individual_, separating
the diabolical in him from the divine.

Unjust laws exist:  shall we be content to obey them, or
shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have
succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?  Men,
generally, under such a government as this, think that they
ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority to
alter them.  They think that, if they should resist, the
remedy would be worse than the evil.  But it is the fault of
the government itself that the remedy is worse than the evil.
_It_ makes it worse.  Why is it not more apt to anticipate and
provide for reform?  Why does it not cherish its wise minority?
Why does it cry and resist before it is hurt?  Why does it not
encourage its citizens to put out its faults, and _do_ better 
than it would have them?  Why does it always crucify Christ and
excommunicate Copernicus and Luther, and pronounce Washington
and Franklin rebels?

One would think, that a deliberate and practical denial
of its authority was the only offense never contemplated by
its government; else, why has it not assigned its definite,
its suitable and proportionate, penalty?  If a man who has
no property refuses but once to earn nine shillings for the
State, he is put in prison for a period unlimited by any law
that I know, and determined only by the discretion of those
who put him there; but if he should steal ninety times nine
shillings from the State, he is soon permitted to go at
large again.

If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of
the machine of government, let it go, let it go:  perchance
it will wear smooth--certainly the machine will wear out.
If the injustice has a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a
crank, exclusively for itself, then perhaps you may consider
whether the remedy will not be worse than the evil; but if
it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent
of injustice to another, then I say, break the law.  Let
your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine.  What I
have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself
to the wrong which I condemn.

As for adopting the ways of the State has provided for
remedying the evil, I know not of such ways.  They take too
much time, and a man's life will be gone.  I have other
affairs to attend to.  I came into this world, not chiefly
to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it,
be it good or bad.  A man has not everything to do, but
something; and because he cannot do _everything_, it is
not necessary that he should be doing _something_ wrong. It is
not my business to be petitioning the Governor
or the Legislature any more than it is theirs to petition me;
and if they should not hear my petition, what should I do then?
But in this case the State has provided no way:  its very
Constitution is the evil.  This may seem to be harsh and
stubborn and unconcilliatory; but it is to treat with the
utmost kindness and consideration the only spirit that can
appreciate or deserves it.  So is all change for the better,
like birth and death, which convulse the body.

I do not hesitate to say, that those who call themselves
Abolitionists should at once effectually withdraw
their support, both in person and property, from the
government of Massachusetts, and not wait till they
constitute a majority of one, before they suffer the right
to prevail through them.  I think that it is enough if they
have God on their side, without waiting for that other one.
Moreover, any man more right than his neighbors constitutes
a majority of one already.

I meet this American government, or its representative,
the State government, directly, and face to face, once a
year--no more--in the person of its tax-gatherer; this is
the only mode in which a man situated as I am necessarily
meets it; and it then says distinctly, Recognize me; and
the simplest, the most effectual, and, in the present
posture of affairs, the indispensablest mode of treating
with it on this head, of expressing your little satisfaction
with and love for it, is to deny it then.  My civil
neighbor, the tax-gatherer, is the very man I have to deal
with--for it is, after all, with men and not with parchment
that I quarrel--and he has voluntarily chosen to be an agent
of the government.  How shall he ever know well that he is
and does as an officer of the government, or as a man,
until he is obliged to consider whether he will treat me,
his neighbor, for whom he has respect, as a neighbor and
well-disposed man, or as a maniac and disturber of the peace,
and see if he can get over this obstruction to his
neighborliness without a ruder and more impetuous thought or
speech corresponding with his action.  I know this well,
that if one thousand, if one hundred, if ten men whom I
could name--if ten _honest_ men only--ay, if _one_ HONEST man,
in this State of Massachusetts, _ceasing to hold slaves_, were
actually to withdraw from this co-partnership, and be locked
up in the county jail therefor, it would be the abolition of
slavery in America.  For it matters not how small the
beginning may seem to be:  what is once well done is done
forever.  But we love better to talk about it:  that we say
is our mission.  Reform keeps many scores of newspapers in
its service, but not one man.  If my esteemed neighbor, the
State's ambassador, who will devote his days to the
settlement of the question of human rights in the Council
Chamber, instead of being threatened with the prisons of
Carolina, were to sit down the prisoner of Massachusetts,
that State which is so anxious to foist the sin of slavery
upon her sister--though at present she can discover only an
act of inhospitality to be the ground of a quarrel with
her--the Legislature would not wholly waive the subject of
the following winter.

Under a government which imprisons unjustly, the true
place for a just man is also a prison.  The proper place
today, the only place which Massachusetts has provided for
her freer and less despondent spirits, is in her prisons, to
be put out and locked out of the State by her own act, as
they have already put themselves out by their principles.
It is there that the fugitive slave, and the Mexican
prisoner on parole, and the Indian come to plead the wrongs
of his race should find them; on that separate but more free
and honorable ground, where the State places those who are
not _with_ her, but _against_ her--the only house in a slave
State in which a free man can abide with honor.  If any
think that their influence would be lost there, and their
voices no longer afflict the ear of the State, that they
would not be as an enemy within its walls, they do not know
by how much truth is stronger than error, nor how much more
eloquently and effectively he can combat injustice who has
experienced a little in his own person.  Cast your whole
vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence.
A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority;
it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when
it clogs by its whole weight.  If the alternative is to keep
all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the
State will not hesitate which to choose.  If a thousand men
were not to pay their tax bills this year, that would not be
a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them,
and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent
blood.  This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable
revolution, if any such is possible.  If the tax-gatherer,
or any other public officer, asks me, as one has done, "But
what shall I do?" my answer is, "If you really wish to do
anything, resign your office."  When the subject has refused
allegiance, and the officer has resigned from office, then
the revolution is accomplished.  But even suppose blood
should flow. Is there not a sort of blood shed when the
conscience is wounded?  Through this wound a man's real
manhood and immortality flow out, and he bleeds to an
everlasting death.  I see this blood flowing now.

I have contemplated the imprisonment of the offender,
rather than the seizure of his goods--though both will serve
the same purpose--because they who assert the purest right,
and consequently are most dangerous to a corrupt State,
commonly have not spent much time in accumulating property.
To such the State renders comparatively small service, and a
slight tax is wont to appear exorbitant, particularly if
they are obliged to earn it by special labor with their hands.
If there were one who lived wholly without the use of money,
the State itself would hesitate to demand it of him.
But the rich man--not to make any invidious
comparison--is always sold to the institution which makes
him rich.  Absolutely speaking, the more money, the less
virtue; for money comes between a man and his objects, and
obtains them for him; it was certainly no great virtue to
obtain it.  It puts to rest many questions which he would
otherwise be taxed to answer; while the only new question
which it puts is the hard but superfluous one, how to spend
it.  Thus his moral ground is taken from under his feet.
The opportunities of living are diminished in proportion as
that are called the "means" are increased.  The best thing a
man can do for his culture when he is rich is to endeavor to
carry out those schemes which he entertained when he was
poor.  Christ answered the Herodians according to their
condition.  "Show me the tribute-money," said he--and one
took a penny out of his pocket--if you use money which has
the image of Caesar on it, and which he has made current and
valuable, that is, _if you are men of the State_, and gladly
enjoy the advantages of Caesar's government, then pay him
back some of his own when he demands it.  "Render therefore
to Caesar that which is Caesar's and to God those things
which are God's"--leaving them no wiser than before as to
which was which; for they did not wish to know.

When I converse with the freest of my neighbors, I perceive that,
whatever they may say about the magnitude and seriousness
of the question, and their regard for the public tranquillity,
the long and the short of the matter is, that they cannot
spare the protection of the existing government,
and they dread the consequences to their property and
families of disobedience to it.  For my own part, I should
not like to think that I ever rely on the protection of the
State.  But, if I deny the authority of the State when it
presents its tax bill, it will soon take and waste all my
property, and so harass me and my children without end.
This is hard.  This makes it impossible for a man to live
honestly, and at the same time comfortably, in outward
respects.  It will not be worth the while to accumulate
property; that would be sure to go again.  You must hire or
squat somewhere, and raise but a small crop, and eat that
soon.  You must live within yourself, and depend upon
yourself always tucked up and ready for a start, and not
have many affairs.  A man may grow rich in Turkey even, if
he will be in all respects a good subject of the Turkish
government.  Confucius said:  "If a state is governed by the
principles of reason, poverty and misery are subjects of
shame; if a state is not governed by the principles of
reason, riches and honors are subjects of shame."  No:  until
I want the protection of Massachusetts to be extended to me
in some distant Southern port, where my liberty is
endangered, or until I am bent solely on building up an
estate at home by peaceful enterprise, I can afford to
refuse allegiance to Massachusetts, and her right to my
property and life.  It costs me less in every sense to incur
the penalty of disobedience to the State than it would to obey.
I should feel as if I were worth less in that case.

Some years ago, the State met me in behalf of the
Church, and commanded me to pay a certain sum toward the
support of a clergyman whose preaching my father attended,
but never I myself.  "Pay," it said, "or be locked up in the
jail."  I declined to pay.  But, unfortunately, another man
saw fit to pay it.  I did not see why the schoolmaster
should be taxed to support the priest, and not the priest
the schoolmaster; for I was not the State's schoolmaster,
but I supported myself by voluntary subscription.  I did not
see why the lyceum should not present its tax bill, and have
the State to back its demand, as well as the Church.
However, at the request of the selectmen, I condescended to
make some such statement as this in writing:  "Know all men
by these presents, that I, Henry Thoreau, do not wish to be
regarded as a member of any incorporated society which I
have not joined." This I gave to the town clerk; and he has
it.  The State, having thus learned that I did not wish to be
regarded as a member of that church, has never made a like
demand on me since; though it said that it must adhere to
its original presumption that time.  If I had known how to
name them, I should then have signed off in detail from all
the societies which I never signed on to; but I did not know
where to find such a complete list.

I have paid no poll tax for six years.  I was put into
a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood
considering the walls of solid stone, two or three feet
thick, the door of wood and iron, a foot thick, and the iron
grating which strained the light, I could not help being
struck with the foolishness of that institution which
treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to
be locked up.  I wondered that it should have concluded at
length that this was the best use it could put me to, and
had never thought to avail itself of my services in some
way.  I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me
and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to
climb or break through before they could get to be as free
as I was.  I did not for a moment feel confined, and the
walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar.  I felt as
if I alone of all my townsmen had paid my tax.  They plainly
did not know how to treat me, but behaved like persons who
are underbred.  In every threat and in every compliment
there was a blunder; for they thought that my chief desire
was to stand the other side of that stone wall.  I could not
but smile to see how industriously they locked the door on
my meditations, which followed them out again without let or
hindrance, and _they_ were really all that was dangerous.
As they could not reach me, they had resolved to punish
my body; just as boys, if they cannot come at some person
against whom they have a spite, will abuse his dog.  I saw
that the State was half-witted, that it was timid as a lone
woman with her silver spoons, and that it did not know its
friends from its foes, and I lost all my remaining respect
for it, and pitied it.

Thus the state never intentionally confronts a man's
sense, intellectual or moral, but only his body, his senses.
It is not armed with superior wit or honesty, but with
superior physical strength.  I was not born to be forced.
I will breathe after my own fashion.  Let us see who is the
strongest.  What force has a multitude?  They only can force
me who obey a higher law than I.  They force me to become
like themselves.  I do not hear of _men_ being _forced_ to
live this way or that by masses of men.  What sort of life
were that to live?  When I meet a government which says to me,
"Your money or your life," why should I be in haste to give
it my money?  It may be in a great strait, and not know what
to do:  I cannot help that.  It must help itself; do as I do.
It is not worth the while to snivel about it.  I am not
responsible for the successful working of the machinery of
society.  I am not the son of the engineer.  I perceive
that, when an acorn and a chestnut fall side by side, the
one does not remain inert to make way for the other, but
both obey their own laws, and spring and grow and flourish
as best they can, till one, perchance, overshadows and
destroys the other.  If a plant cannot live according to
nature, it dies; and so a man.

The night in prison was novel and interesting enough.
The prisoners in their shirtsleeves were enjoying a chat and
the evening air in the doorway, when I entered.  But the
jailer said, "Come, boys, it is time to lock up"; and so
they dispersed, and I heard the sound of their steps
returning into the hollow apartments.  My room-mate was
introduced to me by the jailer as "a first-rate fellow and
clever man."  When the door was locked, he showed me where
to hang my hat, and how he managed matters there.  The rooms
were whitewashed once a month; and this one, at least, was
the whitest, most simply furnished, and probably neatest
apartment in town.  He naturally wanted to know where I came
from, and what brought me there; and, when I had told him, I
asked him in my turn how he came there, presuming him to be
an honest man, of course; and as the world goes, I believe he
was.  "Why," said he, "they accuse me of burning a barn; but
I never did it."  As near as I could discover, he had
probably gone to bed in a barn when drunk, and smoked his
pipe there; and so a barn was burnt.  He had the reputation
of being a clever man, had been there some three months
waiting for his trial to come on, and would have to wait as
much longer; but he was quite domesticated and contented,
since he got his board for nothing, and thought that he was
well treated.

He occupied one window, and I the other; and I saw that
if one stayed there long, his principal business would be to
look out the window.  I had soon read all the tracts that
were left there, and examined where former prisoners had
broken out, and where a grate had been sawed off, and heard
the history of the various occupants of that room; for I
found that even there there was a history and a gossip which
never circulated beyond the walls of the jail.  Probably
this is the only house in the town where verses are
composed, which are afterward printed in a circular form,
but not published.  I was shown quite a long list of young
men who had been detected in an attempt to escape, who
avenged themselves by singing them.

I pumped my fellow-prisoner as dry as I could, for fear
I should never see him again; but at length he showed me
which was my bed, and left me to blow out the lamp.

It was like travelling into a far country, such as I
had never expected to behold, to lie there for one night.
It seemed to me that I never had heard the town clock strike
before, nor the evening sounds of the village; for we slept
with the windows open, which were inside the grating.  It
was to see my native village in the light of the Middle
Ages, and our Concord was turned into a Rhine stream, and
visions of knights and castles passed before me.  They were
the voices of old burghers that I heard in the streets.  I
was an involuntary spectator and auditor of whatever was
done and said in the kitchen of the adjacent village inn--a
wholly new and rare experience to me.  It was a closer view
of my native town.  I was fairly inside of it.  I never had
seen its institutions before.  This is one of its peculiar
institutions; for it is a shire town.  I began to comprehend
what its inhabitants were about.

In the morning, our breakfasts were put through the hole
in the door, in small oblong-square tin pans, made to fit,
and holding a pint of chocolate, with brown bread, and
an iron spoon.  When they called for the vessels again,
I was green enough to return what bread I had left, but my
comrade seized it, and said that I should lay that up for
lunch or dinner.  Soon after he was let out to work at
haying in a neighboring field, whither he went every day,
and would not be back till noon; so he bade me good day,
saying that he doubted if he should see me again.

When I came out of prison--for some one interfered, and
paid that tax--I did not perceive that great changes had
taken place on the common, such as he observed who went in a
youth and emerged a gray-headed man; and yet a change had
come to my eyes come over the scene--the town, and State,
and country, greater than any that mere time could effect.
I saw yet more distinctly the State in which I lived.  I saw
to what extent the people among whom I lived could be
trusted as good neighbors and friends; that their friendship
was for summer weather only; that they did not greatly
propose to do right; that they were a distinct race from me
by their prejudices and superstitions, as the Chinamen and
Malays are; that in their sacrifices to humanity they ran no
risks, not even to their property; that after all they were
not so noble but they treated the thief as he had treated
them, and hoped, by a certain outward observance and a few
prayers, and by walking in a particular straight though
useless path from time to time, to save their souls.
This may be to judge my neighbors harshly; for I believe
that many of them are not aware that they have such an
institution as the jail in their village.

It was formerly the custom in our village, when a poor
debtor came out of jail, for his acquaintances to salute
him, looking through their fingers, which were crossed to
represent the jail window, "How do ye do?" My neighbors did
not thus salute me, but first looked at me, and then at one
another, as if I had returned from a long journey.  I was
put into jail as I was going to the shoemaker's to get a
shoe which was mended.  When I was let out the next morning,
I proceeded to finish my errand, and, having put on my
mended shoe, joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient
to put themselves under my conduct; and in half an hour--for
the horse was soon tackled--was in the midst of a
huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles
off, and then the State was nowhere to be seen.

This is the whole history of "My Prisons."

I have never declined paying the highway tax, because I
am as desirous of being a good neighbor as I am of being a
bad subject; and as for supporting schools, I am doing my
part to educate my fellow countrymen now.  It is for no
particular item in the tax bill that I refuse to pay it.  I
simply wish to refuse allegiance to the State, to withdraw
and stand aloof from it effectually.  I do not care to trace
the course of my dollar, if I could, till it buys a man or a 
musket to shoot one with--the dollar is innocent--but I am
concerned to trace the effects of my allegiance.  In fact, I
quietly declare war with the State, after my fashion, though
I will still make use and get what advantages of her I can,
as is usual in such cases.

If others pay the tax which is demanded of me, from a
sympathy with the State, they do but what they have already
done in their own case, or rather they abet injustice to a
greater extent than the State requires.  If they pay the tax
from a mistaken interest in the individual taxed, to save
his property, or prevent his going to jail, it is because
they have not considered wisely how far they let their
private feelings interfere with the public good.

This, then, is my position at present.  But one cannot be too
much on his guard in such a case, lest his actions be biased
by obstinacy or an undue regard for the opinions of men.
Let him see that he does only what belongs to himself and
to the hour.

I think sometimes, Why, this people mean well, they are
only ignorant; they would do better if they knew how:  why
give your neighbors this pain to treat you as they are not
inclined to?  But I think again, This is no reason why I
should do as they do, or permit others to suffer much
greater pain of a different kind.  Again, I sometimes say to
myself, When many millions of men, without heat, without ill
will, without personal feelings of any kind, demand of you a
few shillings only, without the possibility, such is their
constitution, of retracting or altering their present
demand, and without the possibility, on your side, of appeal
to any other millions, why expose yourself to this
overwhelming brute force?  You do not resist cold and
hunger, the winds and the waves, thus obstinately; you
quietly submit to a thousand similar necessities.  You do
not put your head into the fire.  But just in proportion as
I regard this as not wholly a brute force, but partly a
human force, and consider that I have relations to those
millions as to so many millions of men, and not of mere
brute or inanimate things, I see that appeal is possible,
first and instantaneously, from them to the Maker of them,
and, secondly, from them to themselves.  But if I put my
head deliberately into the fire, there is no appeal to fire
or to the Maker of fire, and I have only myself to blame.
If I could convince myself that I have any right to be
satisfied with men as they are, and to treat them
accordingly, and not according, in some respects, to my
requisitions and expectations of what they and I ought to
be, then, like a good Mussulman and fatalist, I should
endeavor to be satisfied with things as they are, and say it
is the will of God.  And, above all, there is this
difference between resisting this and a purely brute or
natural force, that I can resist this with some effect; but
I cannot expect, like Orpheus, to change the nature of the
rocks and trees and beasts.

I do not wish to quarrel with any man or nation.  I do
not wish to split hairs, to make fine distinctions, or set
myself up as better than my neighbors.  I seek rather, I may
say, even an excuse for conforming to the laws of the land.
I am but too ready to conform to them.  Indeed, I have
reason to suspect myself on this head; and each year, as the
tax-gatherer comes round, I find myself disposed to review
the acts and position of the general and State governments,
and the spirit of the people to discover a pretext for conformity.

    "We must affect our country as our parents,
     And if at any time we alienate
     Our love or industry from doing it honor,
     We must respect effects and teach the soul
     Matter of conscience and religion,
     And not desire of rule or benefit."

I believe that the State will soon be able to take all my
work of this sort out of my hands, and then I shall be no
better patriot than my fellow-countrymen.  Seen from a lower
point of view, the Constitution, with all its faults, is
very good; the law and the courts are very respectable; even
this State and this American government are, in many
respects, very admirable, and rare things, to be thankful
for, such as a great many have described them; seen from a
higher still, and the highest, who shall say what they are,
or that they are worth looking at or thinking of at all?

However, the government does not concern me much, and I shall
bestow the fewest possible thoughts on it.  It is not many
moments that I live under a government, even in this world.
If a man is thought-free, fancy-free, imagination-free,
that which _is not_ never for a long time appearing _to be_
to him, unwise rulers or reformers cannot fatally interrupt him.

I know that most men think differently from myself; but
those whose lives are by profession devoted to the study of
these or kindred subjects content me as little as any.
Statesmen and legislators, standing so completely within the
institution, never distinctly and nakedly behold it.
They speak of moving society, but have no resting-place
without it.  They may be men of a certain experience and
discrimination, and have no doubt invented ingenious and
even useful systems, for which we sincerely thank them;
but all their wit and usefulness lie within certain not very
wide limits.  They are wont to forget that the world is not
governed by policy and expediency.  Webster never goes behind
government, and so cannot speak with authority about it.
His words are wisdom to those legislators who contemplate no
essential reform in the existing government; but for thinkers,
and those who legislate for all time, he never once glances
at the subject.  I know of those whose serene and wise
speculations on this theme would soon reveal the limits
of his mind's range and hospitality.  Yet, compared with
the cheap professions of most reformers, and the still
cheaper wisdom and eloquence of politicians in general,
his are almost the only sensible and valuable words,
and we thank Heaven for him.  Comparatively, he is always
strong, original, and, above all, practical.  Still, his
quality is not wisdom, but prudence.  The lawyer's truth
is not Truth, but consistency or a consistent expediency.
Truth is always in harmony with herself, and is not
concerned chiefly to reveal the justice that may consist
with wrong-doing.  He well deserves to be called, as he has
been called, the Defender of the Constitution.  There are
really no blows to be given him but defensive ones.  He is
not a leader, but a follower.  His leaders are the men of
'87.  "I have never made an effort," he says, "and never
propose to make an effort; I have never countenanced an
effort, and never mean to countenance an effort, to disturb
the arrangement as originally made, by which various States
came into the Union."  Still thinking of the sanction which
the Constitution gives to slavery, he says, "Because it was
part of the original compact--let it stand."
Notwithstanding his special acuteness and ability, he is
unable to take a fact out of its merely political relations,
and behold it as it lies absolutely to be disposed of by the
intellect--what, for instance, it behooves a man to do here
in American today with regard to slavery--but ventures, or
is driven, to make some such desperate answer to the
following, while professing to speak absolutely, and as a
private man--from which what new and singular of social
duties might be inferred?  "The manner," says he, "in which
the governments of the States where slavery exists are to
regulate it is for their own consideration, under the
responsibility to their constituents, to the general laws of
propriety, humanity, and justice, and to God.  Associations
formed elsewhere, springing from a feeling of humanity, or
any other cause, have nothing whatever to do with it.  They
have never received any encouragement from me and they never
will."  [These extracts have been inserted since the lecture
was read -HDT]

They who know of no purer sources of truth, who have
traced up its stream no higher, stand, and wisely stand, by
the Bible and the Constitution, and drink at it there with
reverence and humanity; but they who behold where it comes
trickling into this lake or that pool, gird up their loins
once more, and continue their pilgrimage toward its
fountainhead.

No man with a genius for legislation has appeared in America.
They are rare in the history of the world.  There are orators,
politicians, and eloquent men, by the thousand; but the
speaker has not yet opened his mouth to speak who is
capable of settling the much-vexed questions of the day.
We love eloquence for its own sake, and not for any truth
which it may utter, or any heroism it may inspire.  Our
legislators have not yet learned the comparative value of
free trade and of freedom, of union, and of rectitude, to a
nation.  They have no genius or talent for comparatively
humble questions of taxation and finance, commerce and
manufactures and agriculture.  If we were left solely to the
wordy wit of legislators in Congress for our guidance,
uncorrected by the seasonable experience and the effectual
complaints of the people, America would not long retain her
rank among the nations.  For eighteen hundred years, though
perchance I have no right to say it, the New Testament has
been written; yet where is the legislator who has wisdom and
practical talent enough to avail himself of the light which
it sheds on the science of legislation.

The authority of government, even such as I am willing
to submit to--for I will cheerfully obey those who know and
can do better than I, and in many things even those who
neither know nor can do so well--is still an impure one:  to
be strictly just, it must have the sanction and consent of
the governed.  It can have no pure right over my person and
property but what I concede to it.  The progress from an
absolute to a limited monarchy, from a limited monarchy to a
democracy, is a progress toward a true respect for the
individual.  Even the Chinese philosopher was wise enough to
regard the individual as the basis of the empire.  Is a
democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible
in government?  Is it not possible to take a step further
towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man?  There
will never be a really free and enlightened State until the
State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and
independent power, from which all its own power and
authority are derived, and treats him accordingly.  I please
myself with imagining a State at last which can afford to be
just to all men, and to treat the individual with respect as
a neighbor; which even would not think it inconsistent with
its own repose if a few were to live aloof from it, not
meddling with it, nor embraced by it, who fulfilled all the
duties of neighbors and fellow men.  A State which bore this
kind of fruit, and suffered it to drop off as fast as it
ripened, would prepare the way for a still more perfect and
glorious State, which I have also imagined, but not yet
anywhere seen.WALDEN, and ON THE DUTY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

By Henry David Thoreau


Contents

         WALDEN
              1. Economy
              2. Where I Lived, and What I Lived For
              3. Reading
              4. Sounds
              5. Solitude
              6. Visitors
              7. The Bean-Field
              8. The Village
              9. The Ponds
             10. Baker Farm
             11. Higher Laws
             12. Brute Neighbors
             13. House-Warming
             14. Inhabitants and Winter Visitors
             15. Winter Animals
             16. The Pond in Winter
             17. Spring
             18. Conclusion

        ON THE DUTY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE





Economy

When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived
alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had
built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts,
and earned my living by the labor of my hands only. I lived there two
years and two months. At present I am a sojourner in civilized life
again.

I should not obtrude my affairs so much on the notice of my readers if
very particular inquiries had not been made by my townsmen concerning
my mode of life, which some would call impertinent, though they do not
appear to me at all impertinent, but, considering the circumstances,
very natural and pertinent. Some have asked what I got to eat; if I did
not feel lonesome; if I was not afraid; and the like. Others have been
curious to learn what portion of my income I devoted to charitable
purposes; and some, who have large families, how many poor children
I maintained. I will therefore ask those of my readers who feel no
particular interest in me to pardon me if I undertake to answer some of
these questions in this book. In most books, the I, or first person, is
omitted; in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism, is
the main difference. We commonly do not remember that it is, after all,
always the first person that is speaking. I should not talk so
much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.
Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my
experience. Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first or
last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what
he has heard of other men's lives; some such account as he would send to
his kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, it
must have been in a distant land to me. Perhaps these pages are more
particularly addressed to poor students. As for the rest of my readers,
they will accept such portions as apply to them. I trust that none will
stretch the seams in putting on the coat, for it may do good service to
him whom it fits.

I would fain say something, not so much concerning the Chinese and
Sandwich Islanders as you who read these pages, who are said to live
in New England; something about your condition, especially your outward
condition or circumstances in this world, in this town, what it is,
whether it is necessary that it be as bad as it is, whether it cannot
be improved as well as not. I have travelled a good deal in Concord;
and everywhere, in shops, and offices, and fields, the inhabitants have
appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways. What
I have heard of Bramins sitting exposed to four fires and looking in the
face of the sun; or hanging suspended, with their heads downward, over
flames; or looking at the heavens over their shoulders "until it becomes
impossible for them to resume their natural position, while from the
twist of the neck nothing but liquids can pass into the stomach"; or
dwelling, chained for life, at the foot of a tree; or measuring with
their bodies, like caterpillars, the breadth of vast empires; or
standing on one leg on the tops of pillars--even these forms of
conscious penance are hardly more incredible and astonishing than
the scenes which I daily witness. The twelve labors of Hercules were
trifling in comparison with those which my neighbors have undertaken;
for they were only twelve, and had an end; but I could never see that
these men slew or captured any monster or finished any labor. They have
no friend Iolaus to burn with a hot iron the root of the hydra's head,
but as soon as one head is crushed, two spring up.

I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited
farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more
easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the
open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with
clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in. Who made them
serfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is
condemned to eat only his peck of dirt? Why should they begin digging
their graves as soon as they are born? They have got to live a man's
life, pushing all these things before them, and get on as well as they
can. How many a poor immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed and
smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before
it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed,
and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and woodlot!
The portionless, who struggle with no such unnecessary inherited
encumbrances, find it labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic
feet of flesh.

But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon plowed
into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity,
they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which
moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is
a fool's life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not
before. It is said that Deucalion and Pyrrha created men by throwing
stones over their heads behind them:--

           Inde genus durum sumus, experiensque laborum,
           Et documenta damus qua simus origine nati.

Or, as Raleigh rhymes it in his sonorous way,--

  "From thence our kind hard-hearted is, enduring pain and care,
   Approving that our bodies of a stony nature are."

So much for a blind obedience to a blundering oracle, throwing the
stones over their heads behind them, and not seeing where they fell.

Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere
ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and
superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be
plucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and
tremble too much for that. Actually, the laboring man has not leisure
for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the
manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the market.
He has no time to be anything but a machine. How can he remember well
his ignorance--which his growth requires--who has so often to use his
knowledge? We should feed and clothe him gratuitously sometimes, and
recruit him with our cordials, before we judge of him. The finest
qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only
by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one
another thus tenderly.

Some of you, we all know, are poor, find it hard to live, are sometimes,
as it were, gasping for breath. I have no doubt that some of you who
read this book are unable to pay for all the dinners which you have
actually eaten, or for the coats and shoes which are fast wearing or are
already worn out, and have come to this page to spend borrowed or stolen
time, robbing your creditors of an hour. It is very evident what mean
and sneaking lives many of you live, for my sight has been whetted by
experience; always on the limits, trying to get into business and trying
to get out of debt, a very ancient slough, called by the Latins aes
alienum, another's brass, for some of their coins were made of brass;
still living, and dying, and buried by this other's brass; always
promising to pay, promising to pay, tomorrow, and dying today,
insolvent; seeking to curry favor, to get custom, by how many modes,
only not state-prison offenses; lying, flattering, voting, contracting
yourselves into a nutshell of civility or dilating into an atmosphere of
thin and vaporous generosity, that you may persuade your neighbor to let
you make his shoes, or his hat, or his coat, or his carriage, or import
his groceries for him; making yourselves sick, that you may lay up
something against a sick day, something to be tucked away in an old
chest, or in a stocking behind the plastering, or, more safely, in the
brick bank; no matter where, no matter how much or how little.

I sometimes wonder that we can be so frivolous, I may almost say, as to
attend to the gross but somewhat foreign form of servitude called Negro
Slavery, there are so many keen and subtle masters that enslave both
North and South. It is hard to have a Southern overseer; it is worse to
have a Northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver
of yourself. Talk of a divinity in man! Look at the teamster on the
highway, wending to market by day or night; does any divinity stir
within him? His highest duty to fodder and water his horses! What is his
destiny to him compared with the shipping interests? Does not he drive
for Squire Make-a-stir? How godlike, how immortal, is he? See how he
cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being immortal
nor divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a
fame won by his own deeds. Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with
our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which
determines, or rather indicates, his fate. Self-emancipation even in the
West Indian provinces of the fancy and imagination--what Wilberforce
is there to bring that about? Think, also, of the ladies of the land
weaving toilet cushions against the last day, not to betray too green
an interest in their fates! As if you could kill time without injuring
eternity.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called
resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you
go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the
bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair
is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of
mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is
a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.

When we consider what, to use the words of the catechism, is the chief
end of man, and what are the true necessaries and means of life, it
appears as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode of living
because they preferred it to any other. Yet they honestly think there is
no choice left. But alert and healthy natures remember that the sun
rose clear. It is never too late to give up our prejudices. No way of
thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. What
everybody echoes or in silence passes by as true to-day may turn out to
be falsehood to-morrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted
for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilizing rain on their fields. What
old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds
for old people, and new deeds for new. Old people did not know enough
once, perchance, to fetch fresh fuel to keep the fire a-going; new
people put a little dry wood under a pot, and are whirled round the
globe with the speed of birds, in a way to kill old people, as the
phrase is. Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor
as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost. One may
almost doubt if the wisest man has learned anything of absolute value by
living. Practically, the old have no very important advice to give the
young, their own experience has been so partial, and their lives have
been such miserable failures, for private reasons, as they must
believe; and it may be that they have some faith left which belies that
experience, and they are only less young than they were. I have lived
some thirty years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first
syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors. They have
told me nothing, and probably cannot tell me anything to the purpose.
Here is life, an experiment to a great extent untried by me; but it does
not avail me that they have tried it. If I have any experience which I
think valuable, I am sure to reflect that this my Mentors said nothing
about.

One farmer says to me, "You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it
furnishes nothing to make bones with"; and so he religiously devotes a
part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of
bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with
vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite
of every obstacle. Some things are really necessaries of life in some
circles, the most helpless and diseased, which in others are luxuries
merely, and in others still are entirely unknown.

The whole ground of human life seems to some to have been gone over by
their predecessors, both the heights and the valleys, and all things to
have been cared for. According to Evelyn, "the wise Solomon prescribed
ordinances for the very distances of trees; and the Roman praetors have
decided how often you may go into your neighbor's land to gather the
acorns which fall on it without trespass, and what share belongs to that
neighbor." Hippocrates has even left directions how we should cut our
nails; that is, even with the ends of the fingers, neither shorter nor
longer. Undoubtedly the very tedium and ennui which presume to have
exhausted the variety and the joys of life are as old as Adam. But man's
capacities have never been measured; nor are we to judge of what he can
do by any precedents, so little has been tried. Whatever have been thy
failures hitherto, "be not afflicted, my child, for who shall assign to
thee what thou hast left undone?"

We might try our lives by a thousand simple tests; as, for instance,
that the same sun which ripens my beans illumines at once a system of
earths like ours. If I had remembered this it would have prevented some
mistakes. This was not the light in which I hoed them. The stars are the
apexes of what wonderful triangles! What distant and different beings in
the various mansions of the universe are contemplating the same one at
the same moment! Nature and human life are as various as our several
constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another? Could
a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's
eyes for an instant? We should live in all the ages of the world in an
hour; ay, in all the worlds of the ages. History, Poetry, Mythology!--I
know of no reading of another's experience so startling and informing as
this would be.

The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul
to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good
behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well? You may say
the wisest thing you can, old man--you who have lived seventy years, not
without honor of a kind--I hear an irresistible voice which invites me
away from all that. One generation abandons the enterprises of another
like stranded vessels.

I think that we may safely trust a good deal more than we do. We may
waive just so much care of ourselves as we honestly bestow elsewhere.
Nature is as well adapted to our weakness as to our strength. The
incessant anxiety and strain of some is a well-nigh incurable form of
disease. We are made to exaggerate the importance of what work we do;
and yet how much is not done by us! or, what if we had been taken sick?
How vigilant we are! determined not to live by faith if we can avoid it;
all the day long on the alert, at night we unwillingly say our prayers
and commit ourselves to uncertainties. So thoroughly and sincerely are
we compelled to live, reverencing our life, and denying the possibility
of change. This is the only way, we say; but there are as many ways as
there can be drawn radii from one centre. All change is a miracle to
contemplate; but it is a miracle which is taking place every instant.
Confucius said, "To know that we know what we know, and that we do not
know what we do not know, that is true knowledge." When one man has
reduced a fact of the imagination to be a fact to his understanding, I
foresee that all men at length establish their lives on that basis.

Let us consider for a moment what most of the trouble and anxiety which
I have referred to is about, and how much it is necessary that we be
troubled, or at least careful. It would be some advantage to live
a primitive and frontier life, though in the midst of an outward
civilization, if only to learn what are the gross necessaries of life
and what methods have been taken to obtain them; or even to look over
the old day-books of the merchants, to see what it was that men most
commonly bought at the stores, what they stored, that is, what are the
grossest groceries. For the improvements of ages have had but little
influence on the essential laws of man's existence; as our skeletons,
probably, are not to be distinguished from those of our ancestors.

By the words, necessary of life, I mean whatever, of all that man
obtains by his own exertions, has been from the first, or from long use
has become, so important to human life that few, if any, whether from
savageness, or poverty, or philosophy, ever attempt to do without it. To
many creatures there is in this sense but one necessary of life, Food.
To the bison of the prairie it is a few inches of palatable grass,
with water to drink; unless he seeks the Shelter of the forest or the
mountain's shadow. None of the brute creation requires more than Food
and Shelter. The necessaries of life for man in this climate may,
accurately enough, be distributed under the several heads of Food,
Shelter, Clothing, and Fuel; for not till we have secured these are
we prepared to entertain the true problems of life with freedom and a
prospect of success. Man has invented, not only houses, but clothes and
cooked food; and possibly from the accidental discovery of the warmth of
fire, and the consequent use of it, at first a luxury, arose the present
necessity to sit by it. We observe cats and dogs acquiring the same
second nature. By proper Shelter and Clothing we legitimately retain
our own internal heat; but with an excess of these, or of Fuel, that
is, with an external heat greater than our own internal, may not
cookery properly be said to begin? Darwin, the naturalist, says of the
inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego, that while his own party, who were well
clothed and sitting close to a fire, were far from too warm, these naked
savages, who were farther off, were observed, to his great surprise, "to
be streaming with perspiration at undergoing such a roasting." So, we
are told, the New Hollander goes naked with impunity, while the European
shivers in his clothes. Is it impossible to combine the hardiness of
these savages with the intellectualness of the civilized man? According
to Liebig, man's body is a stove, and food the fuel which keeps up the
internal combustion in the lungs. In cold weather we eat more, in warm
less. The animal heat is the result of a slow combustion, and disease
and death take place when this is too rapid; or for want of fuel, or
from some defect in the draught, the fire goes out. Of course the vital
heat is not to be confounded with fire; but so much for analogy. It
appears, therefore, from the above list, that the expression, animal
life, is nearly synonymous with the expression, animal heat; for while
Food may be regarded as the Fuel which keeps up the fire within us--and
Fuel serves only to prepare that Food or to increase the warmth of our
bodies by addition from without--Shelter and Clothing also serve only to
retain the heat thus generated and absorbed.

The grand necessity, then, for our bodies, is to keep warm, to keep
the vital heat in us. What pains we accordingly take, not only with
our Food, and Clothing, and Shelter, but with our beds, which are our
night-clothes, robbing the nests and breasts of birds to prepare this
shelter within a shelter, as the mole has its bed of grass and leaves at
the end of its burrow! The poor man is wont to complain that this is a
cold world; and to cold, no less physical than social, we refer directly
a great part of our ails. The summer, in some climates, makes possible
to man a sort of Elysian life. Fuel, except to cook his Food, is
then unnecessary; the sun is his fire, and many of the fruits are
sufficiently cooked by its rays; while Food generally is more various,
and more easily obtained, and Clothing and Shelter are wholly or half
unnecessary. At the present day, and in this country, as I find by
my own experience, a few implements, a knife, an axe, a spade, a
wheelbarrow, etc., and for the studious, lamplight, stationery, and
access to a few books, rank next to necessaries, and can all be obtained
at a trifling cost. Yet some, not wise, go to the other side of the
globe, to barbarous and unhealthy regions, and devote themselves to
trade for ten or twenty years, in order that they may live--that is,
keep comfortably warm--and die in New England at last. The luxuriously
rich are not simply kept comfortably warm, but unnaturally hot; as I
implied before, they are cooked, of course a la mode.

Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are
not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation
of mankind. With respect to luxuries and comforts, the wisest have
ever lived a more simple and meagre life than the poor. The ancient
philosophers, Chinese, Hindoo, Persian, and Greek, were a class than
which none has been poorer in outward riches, none so rich in inward. We
know not much about them. It is remarkable that we know so much of them
as we do. The same is true of the more modern reformers and benefactors
of their race. None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life
but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty.
Of a life of luxury the fruit is luxury, whether in agriculture, or
commerce, or literature, or art. There are nowadays professors of
philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because
it was once admirable to live. To be a philosopher is not merely to have
subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as
to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence,
magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not
only theoretically, but practically. The success of great scholars and
thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly.
They make shift to live merely by conformity, practically as their
fathers did, and are in no sense the progenitors of a noble race of men.
But why do men degenerate ever? What makes families run out? What is the
nature of the luxury which enervates and destroys nations? Are we sure
that there is none of it in our own lives? The philosopher is in
advance of his age even in the outward form of his life. He is not fed,
sheltered, clothed, warmed, like his contemporaries. How can a man be a
philosopher and not maintain his vital heat by better methods than other
men?

When a man is warmed by the several modes which I have described, what
does he want next? Surely not more warmth of the same kind, as more and
richer food, larger and more splendid houses, finer and more abundant
clothing, more numerous, incessant, and hotter fires, and the like.
When he has obtained those things which are necessary to life, there is
another alternative than to obtain the superfluities; and that is, to
adventure on life now, his vacation from humbler toil having commenced.
The soil, it appears, is suited to the seed, for it has sent its radicle
downward, and it may now send its shoot upward also with confidence. Why
has man rooted himself thus firmly in the earth, but that he may rise in
the same proportion into the heavens above?--for the nobler plants are
valued for the fruit they bear at last in the air and light, far from
the ground, and are not treated like the humbler esculents, which,
though they may be biennials, are cultivated only till they have
perfected their root, and often cut down at top for this purpose, so
that most would not know them in their flowering season.

I do not mean to prescribe rules to strong and valiant natures, who will
mind their own affairs whether in heaven or hell, and perchance build
more magnificently and spend more lavishly than the richest, without
ever impoverishing themselves, not knowing how they live--if, indeed,
there are any such, as has been dreamed; nor to those who find their
encouragement and inspiration in precisely the present condition of
things, and cherish it with the fondness and enthusiasm of lovers--and,
to some extent, I reckon myself in this number; I do not speak to those
who are well employed, in whatever circumstances, and they know whether
they are well employed or not;--but mainly to the mass of men who are
discontented, and idly complaining of the hardness of their lot or of
the times, when they might improve them. There are some who complain
most energetically and inconsolably of any, because they are, as they
say, doing their duty. I also have in my mind that seemingly wealthy,
but most terribly impoverished class of all, who have accumulated dross,
but know not how to use it, or get rid of it, and thus have forged their
own golden or silver fetters.

If I should attempt to tell how I have desired to spend my life in years
past, it would probably surprise those of my readers who are somewhat
acquainted with its actual history; it would certainly astonish those
who know nothing about it. I will only hint at some of the enterprises
which I have cherished.

In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to
improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the
meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the
present moment; to toe that line. You will pardon some obscurities,
for there are more secrets in my trade than in most men's, and yet not
voluntarily kept, but inseparable from its very nature. I would gladly
tell all that I know about it, and never paint "No Admittance" on my
gate.

I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle dove, and am still
on their trail. Many are the travellers I have spoken concerning them,
describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met one
or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even
seen the dove disappear behind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious to
recover them as if they had lost them themselves.

To anticipate, not the sunrise and the dawn merely, but, if possible,
Nature herself! How many mornings, summer and winter, before yet any
neighbor was stirring about his business, have I been about mine! No
doubt, many of my townsmen have met me returning from this enterprise,
farmers starting for Boston in the twilight, or woodchoppers going
to their work. It is true, I never assisted the sun materially in his
rising, but, doubt not, it was of the last importance only to be present
at it.

So many autumn, ay, and winter days, spent outside the town, trying to
hear what was in the wind, to hear and carry it express! I well-nigh
sunk all my capital in it, and lost my own breath into the bargain,
running in the face of it. If it had concerned either of the political
parties, depend upon it, it would have appeared in the Gazette with the
earliest intelligence. At other times watching from the observatory of
some cliff or tree, to telegraph any new arrival; or waiting at evening
on the hill-tops for the sky to fall, that I might catch something,
though I never caught much, and that, manna-wise, would dissolve again
in the sun.

For a long time I was reporter to a journal, of no very wide
circulation, whose editor has never yet seen fit to print the bulk of my
contributions, and, as is too common with writers, I got only my labor
for my pains. However, in this case my pains were their own reward.

For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snow-storms and
rain-storms, and did my duty faithfully; surveyor, if not of highways,
then of forest paths and all across-lot routes, keeping them open, and
ravines bridged and passable at all seasons, where the public heel had
testified to their utility.

I have looked after the wild stock of the town, which give a faithful
herdsman a good deal of trouble by leaping fences; and I have had an
eye to the unfrequented nooks and corners of the farm; though I did
not always know whether Jonas or Solomon worked in a particular
field to-day; that was none of my business. I have watered the red
huckleberry, the sand cherry and the nettle-tree, the red pine and
the black ash, the white grape and the yellow violet, which might have
withered else in dry seasons.

In short, I went on thus for a long time (I may say it without
boasting), faithfully minding my business, till it became more and more
evident that my townsmen would not after all admit me into the list of
town officers, nor make my place a sinecure with a moderate allowance.
My accounts, which I can swear to have kept faithfully, I have, indeed,
never got audited, still less accepted, still less paid and settled.
However, I have not set my heart on that.

Not long since, a strolling Indian went to sell baskets at the house
of a well-known lawyer in my neighborhood. "Do you wish to buy any
baskets?" he asked. "No, we do not want any," was the reply. "What!"
exclaimed the Indian as he went out the gate, "do you mean to starve
us?" Having seen his industrious white neighbors so well off--that
the lawyer had only to weave arguments, and, by some magic, wealth and
standing followed--he had said to himself: I will go into business; I
will weave baskets; it is a thing which I can do. Thinking that when he
had made the baskets he would have done his part, and then it would be
the white man's to buy them. He had not discovered that it was necessary
for him to make it worth the other's while to buy them, or at least make
him think that it was so, or to make something else which it would be
worth his while to buy. I too had woven a kind of basket of a delicate
texture, but I had not made it worth any one's while to buy them. Yet
not the less, in my case, did I think it worth my while to weave them,
and instead of studying how to make it worth men's while to buy my
baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them.
The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind. Why
should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the others?

Finding that my fellow-citizens were not likely to offer me any room in
the court house, or any curacy or living anywhere else, but I must shift
for myself, I turned my face more exclusively than ever to the woods,
where I was better known. I determined to go into business at once, and
not wait to acquire the usual capital, using such slender means as I had
already got. My purpose in going to Walden Pond was not to live cheaply
nor to live dearly there, but to transact some private business with the
fewest obstacles; to be hindered from accomplishing which for want of a
little common sense, a little enterprise and business talent, appeared
not so sad as foolish.

I have always endeavored to acquire strict business habits; they are
indispensable to every man. If your trade is with the Celestial Empire,
then some small counting house on the coast, in some Salem harbor, will
be fixture enough. You will export such articles as the country affords,
purely native products, much ice and pine timber and a little granite,
always in native bottoms. These will be good ventures. To oversee all
the details yourself in person; to be at once pilot and captain, and
owner and underwriter; to buy and sell and keep the accounts; to
read every letter received, and write or read every letter sent; to
superintend the discharge of imports night and day; to be upon many
parts of the coast almost at the same time--often the richest freight
will be discharged upon a Jersey shore;--to be your own telegraph,
unweariedly sweeping the horizon, speaking all passing vessels bound
coastwise; to keep up a steady despatch of commodities, for the supply
of such a distant and exorbitant market; to keep yourself informed of
the state of the markets, prospects of war and peace everywhere, and
anticipate the tendencies of trade and civilization--taking advantage
of the results of all exploring expeditions, using new passages and all
improvements in navigation;--charts to be studied, the position of reefs
and new lights and buoys to be ascertained, and ever, and ever, the
logarithmic tables to be corrected, for by the error of some calculator
the vessel often splits upon a rock that should have reached a friendly
pier--there is the untold fate of La Prouse;--universal science to
be kept pace with, studying the lives of all great discoverers and
navigators, great adventurers and merchants, from Hanno and the
Phoenicians down to our day; in fine, account of stock to be taken from
time to time, to know how you stand. It is a labor to task the faculties
of a man--such problems of profit and loss, of interest, of tare and
tret, and gauging of all kinds in it, as demand a universal knowledge.

I have thought that Walden Pond would be a good place for business,
not solely on account of the railroad and the ice trade; it offers
advantages which it may not be good policy to divulge; it is a good port
and a good foundation. No Neva marshes to be filled; though you must
everywhere build on piles of your own driving. It is said that a
flood-tide, with a westerly wind, and ice in the Neva, would sweep St.
Petersburg from the face of the earth.

As this business was to be entered into without the usual capital, it
may not be easy to conjecture where those means, that will still be
indispensable to every such undertaking, were to be obtained. As for
Clothing, to come at once to the practical part of the question, perhaps
we are led oftener by the love of novelty and a regard for the opinions
of men, in procuring it, than by a true utility. Let him who has work to
do recollect that the object of clothing is, first, to retain the vital
heat, and secondly, in this state of society, to cover nakedness, and
he may judge how much of any necessary or important work may be
accomplished without adding to his wardrobe. Kings and queens who wear
a suit but once, though made by some tailor or dressmaker to their
majesties, cannot know the comfort of wearing a suit that fits. They are
no better than wooden horses to hang the clean clothes on. Every day our
garments become more assimilated to ourselves, receiving the impress of
the wearer's character, until we hesitate to lay them aside without such
delay and medical appliances and some such solemnity even as our bodies.
No man ever stood the lower in my estimation for having a patch in his
clothes; yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety, commonly, to have
fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes, than to have a
sound conscience. But even if the rent is not mended, perhaps the worst
vice betrayed is improvidence. I sometimes try my acquaintances by such
tests as this--Who could wear a patch, or two extra seams only, over
the knee? Most behave as if they believed that their prospects for life
would be ruined if they should do it. It would be easier for them to
hobble to town with a broken leg than with a broken pantaloon. Often if
an accident happens to a gentleman's legs, they can be mended; but if a
similar accident happens to the legs of his pantaloons, there is no help
for it; for he considers, not what is truly respectable, but what is
respected. We know but few men, a great many coats and breeches. Dress
a scarecrow in your last shift, you standing shiftless by, who would not
soonest salute the scarecrow? Passing a cornfield the other day, close
by a hat and coat on a stake, I recognized the owner of the farm. He was
only a little more weather-beaten than when I saw him last. I have
heard of a dog that barked at every stranger who approached his master's
premises with clothes on, but was easily quieted by a naked thief. It is
an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank
if they were divested of their clothes. Could you, in such a case,
tell surely of any company of civilized men which belonged to the most
respected class? When Madam Pfeiffer, in her adventurous travels round
the world, from east to west, had got so near home as Asiatic Russia,
she says that she felt the necessity of wearing other than a travelling
dress, when she went to meet the authorities, for she "was now in a
civilized country, where... people are judged of by their clothes." Even
in our democratic New England towns the accidental possession of wealth,
and its manifestation in dress and equipage alone, obtain for the
possessor almost universal respect. But they yield such respect,
numerous as they are, are so far heathen, and need to have a missionary
sent to them. Beside, clothes introduced sewing, a kind of work which
you may call endless; a woman's dress, at least, is never done.

A man who has at length found something to do will not need to get a new
suit to do it in; for him the old will do, that has lain dusty in the
garret for an indeterminate period. Old shoes will serve a hero longer
than they have served his valet--if a hero ever has a valet--bare feet
are older than shoes, and he can make them do. Only they who go to
soires and legislative balls must have new coats, coats to change as
often as the man changes in them. But if my jacket and trousers, my hat
and shoes, are fit to worship God in, they will do; will they not? Who
ever saw his old clothes--his old coat, actually worn out, resolved into
its primitive elements, so that it was not a deed of charity to bestow
it on some poor boy, by him perchance to be bestowed on some poorer
still, or shall we say richer, who could do with less? I say, beware of
all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of
clothes. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to
fit? If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes.
All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather
something to be. Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however
ragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted, so enterprised or
sailed in some way, that we feel like new men in the old, and that to
retain it would be like keeping new wine in old bottles. Our moulting
season, like that of the fowls, must be a crisis in our lives. The loon
retires to solitary ponds to spend it. Thus also the snake casts its
slough, and the caterpillar its wormy coat, by an internal industry
and expansion; for clothes are but our outmost cuticle and mortal
coil. Otherwise we shall be found sailing under false colors, and be
inevitably cashiered at last by our own opinion, as well as that of
mankind.

We don garment after garment, as if we grew like exogenous plants by
addition without. Our outside and often thin and fanciful clothes are
our epidermis, or false skin, which partakes not of our life, and may be
stripped off here and there without fatal injury; our thicker garments,
constantly worn, are our cellular integument, or cortex; but our shirts
are our liber, or true bark, which cannot be removed without girdling
and so destroying the man. I believe that all races at some seasons wear
something equivalent to the shirt. It is desirable that a man be clad
so simply that he can lay his hands on himself in the dark, and that he
live in all respects so compactly and preparedly that, if an enemy
take the town, he can, like the old philosopher, walk out the gate
empty-handed without anxiety. While one thick garment is, for most
purposes, as good as three thin ones, and cheap clothing can be obtained
at prices really to suit customers; while a thick coat can be bought for
five dollars, which will last as many years, thick pantaloons for two
dollars, cowhide boots for a dollar and a half a pair, a summer hat for
a quarter of a dollar, and a winter cap for sixty-two and a half cents,
or a better be made at home at a nominal cost, where is he so poor that,
clad in such a suit, of his own earning, there will not be found wise
men to do him reverence?

When I ask for a garment of a particular form, my tailoress tells me
gravely, "They do not make them so now," not emphasizing the "They" at
all, as if she quoted an authority as impersonal as the Fates, and I
find it difficult to get made what I want, simply because she cannot
believe that I mean what I say, that I am so rash. When I hear this
oracular sentence, I am for a moment absorbed in thought, emphasizing to
myself each word separately that I may come at the meaning of it, that I
may find out by what degree of consanguinity They are related to me, and
what authority they may have in an affair which affects me so nearly;
and, finally, I am inclined to answer her with equal mystery, and
without any more emphasis of the "they"--"It is true, they did not make
them so recently, but they do now." Of what use this measuring of me if
she does not measure my character, but only the breadth of my shoulders,
as it were a peg to bang the coat on? We worship not the Graces, nor the
Parcae, but Fashion. She spins and weaves and cuts with full authority.
The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveller's cap, and all the monkeys
in America do the same. I sometimes despair of getting anything quite
simple and honest done in this world by the help of men. They would
have to be passed through a powerful press first, to squeeze their old
notions out of them, so that they would not soon get upon their legs
again; and then there would be some one in the company with a maggot in
his head, hatched from an egg deposited there nobody knows when, for
not even fire kills these things, and you would have lost your labor.
Nevertheless, we will not forget that some Egyptian wheat was handed
down to us by a mummy.

On the whole, I think that it cannot be maintained that dressing has in
this or any country risen to the dignity of an art. At present men make
shift to wear what they can get. Like shipwrecked sailors, they put on
what they can find on the beach, and at a little distance, whether of
space or time, laugh at each other's masquerade. Every generation laughs
at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new. We are amused at
beholding the costume of Henry VIII, or Queen Elizabeth, as much as if
it was that of the King and Queen of the Cannibal Islands. All costume
off a man is pitiful or grotesque. It is only the serious eye peering
from and the sincere life passed within it which restrain laughter and
consecrate the costume of any people. Let Harlequin be taken with a fit
of the colic and his trappings will have to serve that mood too. When
the soldier is hit by a cannonball, rags are as becoming as purple.

The childish and savage taste of men and women for new patterns keeps
how many shaking and squinting through kaleidoscopes that they may
discover the particular figure which this generation requires today. The
manufacturers have learned that this taste is merely whimsical. Of two
patterns which differ only by a few threads more or less of a particular
color, the one will be sold readily, the other lie on the shelf, though
it frequently happens that after the lapse of a season the latter
becomes the most fashionable. Comparatively, tattooing is not the
hideous custom which it is called. It is not barbarous merely because
the printing is skin-deep and unalterable.

I cannot believe that our factory system is the best mode by which men
may get clothing. The condition of the operatives is becoming every day
more like that of the English; and it cannot be wondered at, since,
as far as I have heard or observed, the principal object is, not
that mankind may be well and honestly clad, but, unquestionably, that
corporations may be enriched. In the long run men hit only what they aim
at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim
at something high.

As for a Shelter, I will not deny that this is now a necessary of
life, though there are instances of men having done without it for
long periods in colder countries than this. Samuel Laing says that "the
Laplander in his skin dress, and in a skin bag which he puts over his
head and shoulders, will sleep night after night on the snow... in a
degree of cold which would extinguish the life of one exposed to it in
any woollen clothing." He had seen them asleep thus. Yet he adds, "They
are not hardier than other people." But, probably, man did not live long
on the earth without discovering the convenience which there is in a
house, the domestic comforts, which phrase may have originally signified
the satisfactions of the house more than of the family; though these
must be extremely partial and occasional in those climates where the
house is associated in our thoughts with winter or the rainy season
chiefly, and two thirds of the year, except for a parasol, is
unnecessary. In our climate, in the summer, it was formerly almost
solely a covering at night. In the Indian gazettes a wigwam was the
symbol of a day's march, and a row of them cut or painted on the bark of
a tree signified that so many times they had camped. Man was not made
so large limbed and robust but that he must seek to narrow his world
and wall in a space such as fitted him. He was at first bare and out of
doors; but though this was pleasant enough in serene and warm weather,
by daylight, the rainy season and the winter, to say nothing of the
torrid sun, would perhaps have nipped his race in the bud if he had not
made haste to clothe himself with the shelter of a house. Adam and Eve,
according to the fable, wore the bower before other clothes. Man wanted
a home, a place of warmth, or comfort, first of warmth, then the warmth
of the affections.

We may imagine a time when, in the infancy of the human race, some
enterprising mortal crept into a hollow in a rock for shelter. Every
child begins the world again, to some extent, and loves to stay
outdoors, even in wet and cold. It plays house, as well as horse, having
an instinct for it. Who does not remember the interest with which, when
young, he looked at shelving rocks, or any approach to a cave? It was
the natural yearning of that portion, any portion of our most primitive
ancestor which still survived in us. From the cave we have advanced to
roofs of palm leaves, of bark and boughs, of linen woven and stretched,
of grass and straw, of boards and shingles, of stones and tiles. At
last, we know not what it is to live in the open air, and our lives are
domestic in more senses than we think. From the hearth the field is a
great distance. It would be well, perhaps, if we were to spend more of
our days and nights without any obstruction between us and the celestial
bodies, if the poet did not speak so much from under a roof, or the
saint dwell there so long. Birds do not sing in caves, nor do doves
cherish their innocence in dovecots.

However, if one designs to construct a dwelling-house, it behooves him
to exercise a little Yankee shrewdness, lest after all he find himself
in a workhouse, a labyrinth without a clue, a museum, an almshouse, a
prison, or a splendid mausoleum instead. Consider first how slight a
shelter is absolutely necessary. I have seen Penobscot Indians, in this
town, living in tents of thin cotton cloth, while the snow was nearly a
foot deep around them, and I thought that they would be glad to have
it deeper to keep out the wind. Formerly, when how to get my living
honestly, with freedom left for my proper pursuits, was a question
which vexed me even more than it does now, for unfortunately I am become
somewhat callous, I used to see a large box by the railroad, six feet
long by three wide, in which the laborers locked up their tools at
night; and it suggested to me that every man who was hard pushed might
get such a one for a dollar, and, having bored a few auger holes in it,
to admit the air at least, get into it when it rained and at night, and
hook down the lid, and so have freedom in his love, and in his soul
be free. This did not appear the worst, nor by any means a despicable
alternative. You could sit up as late as you pleased, and, whenever you
got up, go abroad without any landlord or house-lord dogging you for
rent. Many a man is harassed to death to pay the rent of a larger and
more luxurious box who would not have frozen to death in such a box as
this. I am far from jesting. Economy is a subject which admits of being
treated with levity, but it cannot so be disposed of. A comfortable
house for a rude and hardy race, that lived mostly out of doors, was
once made here almost entirely of such materials as Nature furnished
ready to their hands. Gookin, who was superintendent of the Indians
subject to the Massachusetts Colony, writing in 1674, says, "The best
of their houses are covered very neatly, tight and warm, with barks of
trees, slipped from their bodies at those seasons when the sap is up,
and made into great flakes, with pressure of weighty timber, when they
are green.... The meaner sort are covered with mats which they make of
a kind of bulrush, and are also indifferently tight and warm, but not
so good as the former.... Some I have seen, sixty or a hundred feet
long and thirty feet broad.... I have often lodged in their wigwams, and
found them as warm as the best English houses." He adds that they were
commonly carpeted and lined within with well-wrought embroidered mats,
and were furnished with various utensils. The Indians had advanced so
far as to regulate the effect of the wind by a mat suspended over the
hole in the roof and moved by a string. Such a lodge was in the first
instance constructed in a day or two at most, and taken down and put up
in a few hours; and every family owned one, or its apartment in one.

In the savage state every family owns a shelter as good as the best, and
sufficient for its coarser and simpler wants; but I think that I speak
within bounds when I say that, though the birds of the air have their
nests, and the foxes their holes, and the savages their wigwams, in
modern civilized society not more than one half the families own a
shelter. In the large towns and cities, where civilization especially
prevails, the number of those who own a shelter is a very small fraction
of the whole. The rest pay an annual tax for this outside garment of
all, become indispensable summer and winter, which would buy a village
of Indian wigwams, but now helps to keep them poor as long as they live.
I do not mean to insist here on the disadvantage of hiring compared with
owning, but it is evident that the savage owns his shelter because it
costs so little, while the civilized man hires his commonly because he
cannot afford to own it; nor can he, in the long run, any better afford
to hire. But, answers one, by merely paying this tax, the poor civilized
man secures an abode which is a palace compared with the savage's. An
annual rent of from twenty-five to a hundred dollars (these are the
country rates) entitles him to the benefit of the improvements
of centuries, spacious apartments, clean paint and paper, Rumford
fire-place, back plastering, Venetian blinds, copper pump, spring lock,
a commodious cellar, and many other things. But how happens it that he
who is said to enjoy these things is so commonly a poor civilized
man, while the savage, who has them not, is rich as a savage? If it
is asserted that civilization is a real advance in the condition
of man--and I think that it is, though only the wise improve their
advantages--it must be shown that it has produced better dwellings
without making them more costly; and the cost of a thing is the amount
of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it,
immediately or in the long run. An average house in this neighborhood
costs perhaps eight hundred dollars, and to lay up this sum will take
from ten to fifteen years of the laborer's life, even if he is not
encumbered with a family--estimating the pecuniary value of every man's
labor at one dollar a day, for if some receive more, others receive
less;--so that he must have spent more than half his life commonly
before his wigwam will be earned. If we suppose him to pay a rent
instead, this is but a doubtful choice of evils. Would the savage have
been wise to exchange his wigwam for a palace on these terms?

It may be guessed that I reduce almost the whole advantage of holding
this superfluous property as a fund in store against the future, so
far as the individual is concerned, mainly to the defraying of
funeral expenses. But perhaps a man is not required to bury himself.
Nevertheless this points to an important distinction between the
civilized man and the savage; and, no doubt, they have designs on us for
our benefit, in making the life of a civilized people an institution, in
which the life of the individual is to a great extent absorbed, in order
to preserve and perfect that of the race. But I wish to show at what a
sacrifice this advantage is at present obtained, and to suggest that we
may possibly so live as to secure all the advantage without suffering
any of the disadvantage. What mean ye by saying that the poor ye have
always with you, or that the fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the
children's teeth are set on edge?

"As I live, saith the Lord God, ye shall not have occasion any more to
use this proverb in Israel.

"Behold all souls are mine; as the soul of the father, so also the soul
of the son is mine: the soul that sinneth, it shall die."

When I consider my neighbors, the farmers of Concord, who are at least
as well off as the other classes, I find that for the most part they
have been toiling twenty, thirty, or forty years, that they may become
the real owners of their farms, which commonly they have inherited with
encumbrances, or else bought with hired money--and we may regard one
third of that toil as the cost of their houses--but commonly they have
not paid for them yet. It is true, the encumbrances sometimes outweigh
the value of the farm, so that the farm itself becomes one great
encumbrance, and still a man is found to inherit it, being well
acquainted with it, as he says. On applying to the assessors, I am
surprised to learn that they cannot at once name a dozen in the town who
own their farms free and clear. If you would know the history of these
homesteads, inquire at the bank where they are mortgaged. The man who
has actually paid for his farm with labor on it is so rare that every
neighbor can point to him. I doubt if there are three such men in
Concord. What has been said of the merchants, that a very large
majority, even ninety-seven in a hundred, are sure to fail, is equally
true of the farmers. With regard to the merchants, however, one of them
says pertinently that a great part of their failures are not genuine
pecuniary failures, but merely failures to fulfil their engagements,
because it is inconvenient; that is, it is the moral character that
breaks down. But this puts an infinitely worse face on the matter, and
suggests, beside, that probably not even the other three succeed in
saving their souls, but are perchance bankrupt in a worse sense than
they who fail honestly. Bankruptcy and repudiation are the springboards
from which much of our civilization vaults and turns its somersets, but
the savage stands on the unelastic plank of famine. Yet the Middlesex
Cattle Show goes off here with eclat annually, as if all the joints of
the agricultural machine were suent.

The farmer is endeavoring to solve the problem of a livelihood by a
formula more complicated than the problem itself. To get his shoestrings
he speculates in herds of cattle. With consummate skill he has set his
trap with a hair spring to catch comfort and independence, and then, as
he turned away, got his own leg into it. This is the reason he is poor;
and for a similar reason we are all poor in respect to a thousand savage
comforts, though surrounded by luxuries. As Chapman sings,

             "The false society of men--
                --for earthly greatness
              All heavenly comforts rarefies to air."

And when the farmer has got his house, he may not be the richer but the
poorer for it, and it be the house that has got him. As I understand
it, that was a valid objection urged by Momus against the house which
Minerva made, that she "had not made it movable, by which means a bad
neighborhood might be avoided"; and it may still be urged, for our
houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather
than housed in them; and the bad neighborhood to be avoided is our own
scurvy selves. I know one or two families, at least, in this town, who,
for nearly a generation, have been wishing to sell their houses in
the outskirts and move into the village, but have not been able to
accomplish it, and only death will set them free.

Granted that the majority are able at last either to own or hire the
modern house with all its improvements. While civilization has been
improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to
inhabit them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create
noblemen and kings. And if the civilized man's pursuits are no worthier
than the savage's, if he is employed the greater part of his life in
obtaining gross necessaries and comforts merely, why should he have a
better dwelling than the former?

But how do the poor minority fare? Perhaps it will be found that just in
proportion as some have been placed in outward circumstances above the
savage, others have been degraded below him. The luxury of one class
is counterbalanced by the indigence of another. On the one side is the
palace, on the other are the almshouse and "silent poor." The myriads
who built the pyramids to be the tombs of the Pharaohs were fed on
garlic, and it may be were not decently buried themselves. The mason who
finishes the cornice of the palace returns at night perchance to a hut
not so good as a wigwam. It is a mistake to suppose that, in a country
where the usual evidences of civilization exist, the condition of a very
large body of the inhabitants may not be as degraded as that of savages.
I refer to the degraded poor, not now to the degraded rich. To know this
I should not need to look farther than to the shanties which everywhere
border our railroads, that last improvement in civilization; where I see
in my daily walks human beings living in sties, and all winter with an
open door, for the sake of light, without any visible, often imaginable,
wood-pile, and the forms of both old and young are permanently
contracted by the long habit of shrinking from cold and misery, and the
development of all their limbs and faculties is checked. It certainly
is fair to look at that class by whose labor the works which distinguish
this generation are accomplished. Such too, to a greater or less extent,
is the condition of the operatives of every denomination in England,
which is the great workhouse of the world. Or I could refer you to
Ireland, which is marked as one of the white or enlightened spots on the
map. Contrast the physical condition of the Irish with that of the North
American Indian, or the South Sea Islander, or any other savage race
before it was degraded by contact with the civilized man. Yet I have no
doubt that that people's rulers are as wise as the average of civilized
rulers. Their condition only proves what squalidness may consist with
civilization. I hardly need refer now to the laborers in our Southern
States who produce the staple exports of this country, and are
themselves a staple production of the South. But to confine myself to
those who are said to be in moderate circumstances.

Most men appear never to have considered what a house is, and are
actually though needlessly poor all their lives because they think that
they must have such a one as their neighbors have. As if one were
to wear any sort of coat which the tailor might cut out for him, or,
gradually leaving off palm-leaf hat or cap of woodchuck skin, complain
of hard times because he could not afford to buy him a crown! It is
possible to invent a house still more convenient and luxurious than we
have, which yet all would admit that man could not afford to pay for.
Shall we always study to obtain more of these things, and not sometimes
to be content with less? Shall the respectable citizen thus gravely
teach, by precept and example, the necessity of the young man's
providing a certain number of superfluous glow-shoes, and umbrellas, and
empty guest chambers for empty guests, before he dies? Why should not
our furniture be as simple as the Arab's or the Indian's? When I think
of the benefactors of the race, whom we have apotheosized as messengers
from heaven, bearers of divine gifts to man, I do not see in my mind any
retinue at their heels, any carload of fashionable furniture. Or what
if I were to allow--would it not be a singular allowance?--that our
furniture should be more complex than the Arab's, in proportion as we
are morally and intellectually his superiors! At present our houses are
cluttered and defiled with it, and a good housewife would sweep out
the greater part into the dust hole, and not leave her morning's work
undone. Morning work! By the blushes of Aurora and the music of Memnon,
what should be man's morning work in this world? I had three pieces of
limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to
be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still,
and threw them out the window in disgust. How, then, could I have a
furnished house? I would rather sit in the open air, for no dust gathers
on the grass, unless where man has broken ground.

It is the luxurious and dissipated who set the fashions which the herd
so diligently follow. The traveller who stops at the best houses, so
called, soon discovers this, for the publicans presume him to be a
Sardanapalus, and if he resigned himself to their tender mercies he
would soon be completely emasculated. I think that in the railroad car
we are inclined to spend more on luxury than on safety and convenience,
and it threatens without attaining these to become no better than a
modern drawing-room, with its divans, and ottomans, and sun-shades,
and a hundred other oriental things, which we are taking west with us,
invented for the ladies of the harem and the effeminate natives of the
Celestial Empire, which Jonathan should be ashamed to know the names
of. I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself than be
crowded on a velvet cushion. I would rather ride on earth in an ox
cart, with a free circulation, than go to heaven in the fancy car of an
excursion train and breathe a malaria all the way.

The very simplicity and nakedness of man's life in the primitive ages
imply this advantage, at least, that they left him still but a sojourner
in nature. When he was refreshed with food and sleep, he contemplated
his journey again. He dwelt, as it were, in a tent in this world, and
was either threading the valleys, or crossing the plains, or climbing
the mountain-tops. But lo! men have become the tools of their tools. The
man who independently plucked the fruits when he was hungry is become a
farmer; and he who stood under a tree for shelter, a housekeeper. We
now no longer camp as for a night, but have settled down on earth and
forgotten heaven. We have adopted Christianity merely as an improved
method of agriculture. We have built for this world a family mansion,
and for the next a family tomb. The best works of art are the expression
of man's struggle to free himself from this condition, but the effect
of our art is merely to make this low state comfortable and that higher
state to be forgotten. There is actually no place in this village for a
work of fine art, if any had come down to us, to stand, for our lives,
our houses and streets, furnish no proper pedestal for it. There is not
a nail to hang a picture on, nor a shelf to receive the bust of a hero
or a saint. When I consider how our houses are built and paid for, or
not paid for, and their internal economy managed and sustained, I wonder
that the floor does not give way under the visitor while he is admiring
the gewgaws upon the mantelpiece, and let him through into the cellar,
to some solid and honest though earthy foundation. I cannot but perceive
that this so-called rich and refined life is a thing jumped at, and I
do not get on in the enjoyment of the fine arts which adorn it, my
attention being wholly occupied with the jump; for I remember that the
greatest genuine leap, due to human muscles alone, on record, is that of
certain wandering Arabs, who are said to have cleared twenty-five feet
on level ground. Without factitious support, man is sure to come to
earth again beyond that distance. The first question which I am tempted
to put to the proprietor of such great impropriety is, Who bolsters
you? Are you one of the ninety-seven who fail, or the three who succeed?
Answer me these questions, and then perhaps I may look at your bawbles
and find them ornamental. The cart before the horse is neither beautiful
nor useful. Before we can adorn our houses with beautiful objects the
walls must be stripped, and our lives must be stripped, and beautiful
housekeeping and beautiful living be laid for a foundation: now, a taste
for the beautiful is most cultivated out of doors, where there is no
house and no housekeeper.

Old Johnson, in his "Wonder-Working Providence," speaking of the first
settlers of this town, with whom he was contemporary, tells us that
"they burrow themselves in the earth for their first shelter under some
hillside, and, casting the soil aloft upon timber, they make a smoky
fire against the earth, at the highest side." They did not "provide them
houses," says he, "till the earth, by the Lord's blessing, brought forth
bread to feed them," and the first year's crop was so light that
"they were forced to cut their bread very thin for a long season." The
secretary of the Province of New Netherland, writing in Dutch, in 1650,
for the information of those who wished to take up land there, states
more particularly that "those in New Netherland, and especially in New
England, who have no means to build farmhouses at first according to
their wishes, dig a square pit in the ground, cellar fashion, six or
seven feet deep, as long and as broad as they think proper, case the
earth inside with wood all round the wall, and line the wood with the
bark of trees or something else to prevent the caving in of the earth;
floor this cellar with plank, and wainscot it overhead for a ceiling,
raise a roof of spars clear up, and cover the spars with bark or green
sods, so that they can live dry and warm in these houses with their
entire families for two, three, and four years, it being understood that
partitions are run through those cellars which are adapted to the size
of the family. The wealthy and principal men in New England, in the
beginning of the colonies, commenced their first dwelling-houses in
this fashion for two reasons: firstly, in order not to waste time in
building, and not to want food the next season; secondly, in order not
to discourage poor laboring people whom they brought over in numbers
from Fatherland. In the course of three or four years, when the country
became adapted to agriculture, they built themselves handsome houses,
spending on them several thousands."

In this course which our ancestors took there was a show of prudence
at least, as if their principle were to satisfy the more pressing wants
first. But are the more pressing wants satisfied now? When I think of
acquiring for myself one of our luxurious dwellings, I am deterred, for,
so to speak, the country is not yet adapted to human culture, and we are
still forced to cut our spiritual bread far thinner than our forefathers
did their wheaten. Not that all architectural ornament is to be
neglected even in the rudest periods; but let our houses first be
lined with beauty, where they come in contact with our lives, like the
tenement of the shellfish, and not overlaid with it. But, alas! I have
been inside one or two of them, and know what they are lined with.

Though we are not so degenerate but that we might possibly live in a
cave or a wigwam or wear skins today, it certainly is better to accept
the advantages, though so dearly bought, which the invention and
industry of mankind offer. In such a neighborhood as this, boards and
shingles, lime and bricks, are cheaper and more easily obtained than
suitable caves, or whole logs, or bark in sufficient quantities, or
even well-tempered clay or flat stones. I speak understandingly on this
subject, for I have made myself acquainted with it both theoretically
and practically. With a little more wit we might use these materials so
as to become richer than the richest now are, and make our civilization
a blessing. The civilized man is a more experienced and wiser savage.
But to make haste to my own experiment.

Near the end of March, 1845, I borrowed an axe and went down to the
woods by Walden Pond, nearest to where I intended to build my house, and
began to cut down some tall, arrowy white pines, still in their youth,
for timber. It is difficult to begin without borrowing, but perhaps it
is the most generous course thus to permit your fellow-men to have an
interest in your enterprise. The owner of the axe, as he released his
hold on it, said that it was the apple of his eye; but I returned it
sharper than I received it. It was a pleasant hillside where I worked,
covered with pine woods, through which I looked out on the pond, and a
small open field in the woods where pines and hickories were springing
up. The ice in the pond was not yet dissolved, though there were some
open spaces, and it was all dark-colored and saturated with water. There
were some slight flurries of snow during the days that I worked there;
but for the most part when I came out on to the railroad, on my
way home, its yellow sand heap stretched away gleaming in the hazy
atmosphere, and the rails shone in the spring sun, and I heard the lark
and pewee and other birds already come to commence another year with us.
They were pleasant spring days, in which the winter of man's discontent
was thawing as well as the earth, and the life that had lain torpid
began to stretch itself. One day, when my axe had come off and I had cut
a green hickory for a wedge, driving it with a stone, and had placed the
whole to soak in a pond-hole in order to swell the wood, I saw a striped
snake run into the water, and he lay on the bottom, apparently without
inconvenience, as long as I stayed there, or more than a quarter of
an hour; perhaps because he had not yet fairly come out of the torpid
state. It appeared to me that for a like reason men remain in their
present low and primitive condition; but if they should feel the
influence of the spring of springs arousing them, they would of
necessity rise to a higher and more ethereal life. I had previously seen
the snakes in frosty mornings in my path with portions of their bodies
still numb and inflexible, waiting for the sun to thaw them. On the 1st
of April it rained and melted the ice, and in the early part of the day,
which was very foggy, I heard a stray goose groping about over the pond
and cackling as if lost, or like the spirit of the fog.

So I went on for some days cutting and hewing timber, and also studs
and rafters, all with my narrow axe, not having many communicable or
scholar-like thoughts, singing to myself,--

                  Men say they know many things;
                  But lo! they have taken wings--
                  The arts and sciences,
                  And a thousand appliances;
                  The wind that blows
                  Is all that any body knows.

I hewed the main timbers six inches square, most of the studs on two
sides only, and the rafters and floor timbers on one side, leaving
the rest of the bark on, so that they were just as straight and much
stronger than sawed ones. Each stick was carefully mortised or tenoned
by its stump, for I had borrowed other tools by this time. My days in
the woods were not very long ones; yet I usually carried my dinner of
bread and butter, and read the newspaper in which it was wrapped, at
noon, sitting amid the green pine boughs which I had cut off, and to my
bread was imparted some of their fragrance, for my hands were covered
with a thick coat of pitch. Before I had done I was more the friend than
the foe of the pine tree, though I had cut down some of them, having
become better acquainted with it. Sometimes a rambler in the wood was
attracted by the sound of my axe, and we chatted pleasantly over the
chips which I had made.

By the middle of April, for I made no haste in my work, but rather made
the most of it, my house was framed and ready for the raising. I had
already bought the shanty of James Collins, an Irishman who worked on
the Fitchburg Railroad, for boards. James Collins' shanty was considered
an uncommonly fine one. When I called to see it he was not at home. I
walked about the outside, at first unobserved from within, the window
was so deep and high. It was of small dimensions, with a peaked cottage
roof, and not much else to be seen, the dirt being raised five feet all
around as if it were a compost heap. The roof was the soundest part,
though a good deal warped and made brittle by the sun. Doorsill there
was none, but a perennial passage for the hens under the door board.
Mrs. C. came to the door and asked me to view it from the inside. The
hens were driven in by my approach. It was dark, and had a dirt floor
for the most part, dank, clammy, and aguish, only here a board and there
a board which would not bear removal. She lighted a lamp to show me the
inside of the roof and the walls, and also that the board floor extended
under the bed, warning me not to step into the cellar, a sort of dust
hole two feet deep. In her own words, they were "good boards overhead,
good boards all around, and a good window"--of two whole squares
originally, only the cat had passed out that way lately. There was a
stove, a bed, and a place to sit, an infant in the house where it
was born, a silk parasol, gilt-framed looking-glass, and a patent new
coffee-mill nailed to an oak sapling, all told. The bargain was soon
concluded, for James had in the meanwhile returned. I to pay four
dollars and twenty-five cents tonight, he to vacate at five tomorrow
morning, selling to nobody else meanwhile: I to take possession at
six. It were well, he said, to be there early, and anticipate certain
indistinct but wholly unjust claims on the score of ground rent and
fuel. This he assured me was the only encumbrance. At six I passed
him and his family on the road. One large bundle held their all--bed,
coffee-mill, looking-glass, hens--all but the cat; she took to the woods
and became a wild cat, and, as I learned afterward, trod in a trap set
for woodchucks, and so became a dead cat at last.

I took down this dwelling the same morning, drawing the nails, and
removed it to the pond-side by small cartloads, spreading the boards
on the grass there to bleach and warp back again in the sun. One early
thrush gave me a note or two as I drove along the woodland path. I
was informed treacherously by a young Patrick that neighbor Seeley,
an Irishman, in the intervals of the carting, transferred the still
tolerable, straight, and drivable nails, staples, and spikes to his
pocket, and then stood when I came back to pass the time of day, and
look freshly up, unconcerned, with spring thoughts, at the devastation;
there being a dearth of work, as he said. He was there to represent
spectatordom, and help make this seemingly insignificant event one with
the removal of the gods of Troy.

I dug my cellar in the side of a hill sloping to the south, where
a woodchuck had formerly dug his burrow, down through sumach and
blackberry roots, and the lowest stain of vegetation, six feet square
by seven deep, to a fine sand where potatoes would not freeze in any
winter. The sides were left shelving, and not stoned; but the sun having
never shone on them, the sand still keeps its place. It was but two
hours' work. I took particular pleasure in this breaking of ground,
for in almost all latitudes men dig into the earth for an equable
temperature. Under the most splendid house in the city is still to be
found the cellar where they store their roots as of old, and long after
the superstructure has disappeared posterity remark its dent in the
earth. The house is still but a sort of porch at the entrance of a
burrow.

At length, in the beginning of May, with the help of some of my
acquaintances, rather to improve so good an occasion for neighborliness
than from any necessity, I set up the frame of my house. No man was ever
more honored in the character of his raisers than I. They are destined,
I trust, to assist at the raising of loftier structures one day. I began
to occupy my house on the 4th of July, as soon as it was boarded and
roofed, for the boards were carefully feather-edged and lapped, so that
it was perfectly impervious to rain, but before boarding I laid the
foundation of a chimney at one end, bringing two cartloads of stones up
the hill from the pond in my arms. I built the chimney after my hoeing
in the fall, before a fire became necessary for warmth, doing my cooking
in the meanwhile out of doors on the ground, early in the morning: which
mode I still think is in some respects more convenient and agreeable
than the usual one. When it stormed before my bread was baked, I fixed
a few boards over the fire, and sat under them to watch my loaf, and
passed some pleasant hours in that way. In those days, when my hands
were much employed, I read but little, but the least scraps of paper
which lay on the ground, my holder, or tablecloth, afforded me as much
entertainment, in fact answered the same purpose as the Iliad.

It would be worth the while to build still more deliberately than I did,
considering, for instance, what foundation a door, a window, a cellar,
a garret, have in the nature of man, and perchance never raising any
superstructure until we found a better reason for it than our temporal
necessities even. There is some of the same fitness in a man's building
his own house that there is in a bird's building its own nest. Who
knows but if men constructed their dwellings with their own hands, and
provided food for themselves and families simply and honestly enough,
the poetic faculty would be universally developed, as birds universally
sing when they are so engaged? But alas! we do like cowbirds and
cuckoos, which lay their eggs in nests which other birds have built, and
cheer no traveller with their chattering and unmusical notes. Shall we
forever resign the pleasure of construction to the carpenter? What does
architecture amount to in the experience of the mass of men? I never
in all my walks came across a man engaged in so simple and natural an
occupation as building his house. We belong to the community. It is
not the tailor alone who is the ninth part of a man; it is as much the
preacher, and the merchant, and the farmer. Where is this division of
labor to end? and what object does it finally serve? No doubt another
may also think for me; but it is not therefore desirable that he should
do so to the exclusion of my thinking for myself.

True, there are architects so called in this country, and I have
heard of one at least possessed with the idea of making architectural
ornaments have a core of truth, a necessity, and hence a beauty, as if
it were a revelation to him. All very well perhaps from his point
of view, but only a little better than the common dilettantism. A
sentimental reformer in architecture, he began at the cornice, not
at the foundation. It was only how to put a core of truth within the
ornaments, that every sugarplum, in fact, might have an almond or
caraway seed in it--though I hold that almonds are most wholesome
without the sugar--and not how the inhabitant, the indweller, might
build truly within and without, and let the ornaments take care of
themselves. What reasonable man ever supposed that ornaments were
something outward and in the skin merely--that the tortoise got his
spotted shell, or the shell-fish its mother-o'-pearl tints, by such a
contract as the inhabitants of Broadway their Trinity Church? But a man
has no more to do with the style of architecture of his house than a
tortoise with that of its shell: nor need the soldier be so idle as to
try to paint the precise color of his virtue on his standard. The enemy
will find it out. He may turn pale when the trial comes. This man seemed
to me to lean over the cornice, and timidly whisper his half truth
to the rude occupants who really knew it better than he. What of
architectural beauty I now see, I know has gradually grown from within
outward, out of the necessities and character of the indweller, who is
the only builder--out of some unconscious truthfulness, and nobleness,
without ever a thought for the appearance and whatever additional beauty
of this kind is destined to be produced will be preceded by a like
unconscious beauty of life. The most interesting dwellings in this
country, as the painter knows, are the most unpretending, humble
log huts and cottages of the poor commonly; it is the life of the
inhabitants whose shells they are, and not any peculiarity in their
surfaces merely, which makes them picturesque; and equally interesting
will be the citizen's suburban box, when his life shall be as simple and
as agreeable to the imagination, and there is as little straining after
effect in the style of his dwelling. A great proportion of architectural
ornaments are literally hollow, and a September gale would strip them
off, like borrowed plumes, without injury to the substantials. They can
do without architecture who have no olives nor wines in the cellar. What
if an equal ado were made about the ornaments of style in literature,
and the architects of our bibles spent as much time about their cornices
as the architects of our churches do? So are made the belles-lettres and
the beaux-arts and their professors. Much it concerns a man, forsooth,
how a few sticks are slanted over him or under him, and what colors
are daubed upon his box. It would signify somewhat, if, in any earnest
sense, he slanted them and daubed it; but the spirit having departed out
of the tenant, it is of a piece with constructing his own coffin--the
architecture of the grave--and "carpenter" is but another name for
"coffin-maker." One man says, in his despair or indifference to life,
take up a handful of the earth at your feet, and paint your house that
color. Is he thinking of his last and narrow house? Toss up a copper for
it as well. What an abundance of leisure be must have! Why do you take
up a handful of dirt? Better paint your house your own complexion; let
it turn pale or blush for you. An enterprise to improve the style of
cottage architecture! When you have got my ornaments ready, I will wear
them.

Before winter I built a chimney, and shingled the sides of my house,
which were already impervious to rain, with imperfect and sappy shingles
made of the first slice of the log, whose edges I was obliged to
straighten with a plane.

I have thus a tight shingled and plastered house, ten feet wide by
fifteen long, and eight-feet posts, with a garret and a closet, a large
window on each side, two trap doors, one door at the end, and a brick
fireplace opposite. The exact cost of my house, paying the usual price
for such materials as I used, but not counting the work, all of which
was done by myself, was as follows; and I give the details because very
few are able to tell exactly what their houses cost, and fewer still, if
any, the separate cost of the various materials which compose them:--

    Boards.......................... $ 8.03+, mostly shanty boards.
    Refuse shingles for roof sides...  4.00
    Laths............................  1.25
    Two second-hand windows
       with glass....................  2.43
    One thousand old brick...........  4.00
    Two casks of lime................  2.40  That was high.
    Hair.............................  0.31  More than I needed.
    Mantle-tree iron.................  0.15
    Nails............................  3.90
    Hinges and screws................  0.14
    Latch............................  0.10
    Chalk............................  0.01
    Transportation...................  1.40  I carried a good part
                                     ------- on my back.
        In all...................... $28.12+

These are all the materials, excepting the timber, stones, and sand,
which I claimed by squatter's right. I have also a small woodshed
adjoining, made chiefly of the stuff which was left after building the
house.

I intend to build me a house which will surpass any on the main street
in Concord in grandeur and luxury, as soon as it pleases me as much and
will cost me no more than my present one.

I thus found that the student who wishes for a shelter can obtain one
for a lifetime at an expense not greater than the rent which he now pays
annually. If I seem to boast more than is becoming, my excuse is that
I brag for humanity rather than for myself; and my shortcomings and
inconsistencies do not affect the truth of my statement. Notwithstanding
much cant and hypocrisy--chaff which I find it difficult to separate
from my wheat, but for which I am as sorry as any man--I will breathe
freely and stretch myself in this respect, it is such a relief to both
the moral and physical system; and I am resolved that I will not through
humility become the devil's attorney. I will endeavor to speak a good
word for the truth. At Cambridge College the mere rent of a student's
room, which is only a little larger than my own, is thirty dollars each
year, though the corporation had the advantage of building thirty-two
side by side and under one roof, and the occupant suffers the
inconvenience of many and noisy neighbors, and perhaps a residence in
the fourth story. I cannot but think that if we had more true wisdom
in these respects, not only less education would be needed, because,
forsooth, more would already have been acquired, but the pecuniary
expense of getting an education would in a great measure vanish. Those
conveniences which the student requires at Cambridge or elsewhere cost
him or somebody else ten times as great a sacrifice of life as they
would with proper management on both sides. Those things for which
the most money is demanded are never the things which the student most
wants. Tuition, for instance, is an important item in the term bill,
while for the far more valuable education which he gets by associating
with the most cultivated of his contemporaries no charge is made. The
mode of founding a college is, commonly, to get up a subscription of
dollars and cents, and then, following blindly the principles of a
division of labor to its extreme--a principle which should never be
followed but with circumspection--to call in a contractor who makes this
a subject of speculation, and he employs Irishmen or other operatives
actually to lay the foundations, while the students that are to be
are said to be fitting themselves for it; and for these oversights
successive generations have to pay. I think that it would be better than
this, for the students, or those who desire to be benefited by it, even
to lay the foundation themselves. The student who secures his coveted
leisure and retirement by systematically shirking any labor necessary to
man obtains but an ignoble and unprofitable leisure, defrauding himself
of the experience which alone can make leisure fruitful. "But," says
one, "you do not mean that the students should go to work with their
hands instead of their heads?" I do not mean that exactly, but I mean
something which he might think a good deal like that; I mean that they
should not play life, or study it merely, while the community supports
them at this expensive game, but earnestly live it from beginning to
end. How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the
experiment of living? Methinks this would exercise their minds as much
as mathematics. If I wished a boy to know something about the arts and
sciences, for instance, I would not pursue the common course, which
is merely to send him into the neighborhood of some professor, where
anything is professed and practised but the art of life;--to survey the
world through a telescope or a microscope, and never with his natural
eye; to study chemistry, and not learn how his bread is made, or
mechanics, and not learn how it is earned; to discover new satellites to
Neptune, and not detect the motes in his eyes, or to what vagabond he
is a satellite himself; or to be devoured by the monsters that swarm all
around him, while contemplating the monsters in a drop of vinegar. Which
would have advanced the most at the end of a month--the boy who had made
his own jackknife from the ore which he had dug and smelted, reading
as much as would be necessary for this--or the boy who had attended
the lectures on metallurgy at the Institute in the meanwhile, and had
received a Rodgers' penknife from his father? Which would be most likely
to cut his fingers?... To my astonishment I was informed on leaving
college that I had studied navigation!--why, if I had taken one turn
down the harbor I should have known more about it. Even the poor student
studies and is taught only political economy, while that economy
of living which is synonymous with philosophy is not even sincerely
professed in our colleges. The consequence is, that while he is reading
Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Say, he runs his father in debt irretrievably.

As with our colleges, so with a hundred "modern improvements"; there
is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance. The
devil goes on exacting compound interest to the last for his early share
and numerous succeeding investments in them. Our inventions are wont to
be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They
are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already
but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York.
We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine
to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to
communicate. Either is in such a predicament as the man who was
earnest to be introduced to a distinguished deaf woman, but when he was
presented, and one end of her ear trumpet was put into his hand, had
nothing to say. As if the main object were to talk fast and not to talk
sensibly. We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old
World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that
will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the
Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough. After all, the man whose horse
trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages;
he is not an evangelist, nor does he come round eating locusts and wild
honey. I doubt if Flying Childers ever carried a peck of corn to mill.

One says to me, "I wonder that you do not lay up money; you love to
travel; you might take the cars and go to Fitchburg today and see the
country." But I am wiser than that. I have learned that the swiftest
traveller is he that goes afoot. I say to my friend, Suppose we try
who will get there first. The distance is thirty miles; the fare ninety
cents. That is almost a day's wages. I remember when wages were sixty
cents a day for laborers on this very road. Well, I start now on foot,
and get there before night; I have travelled at that rate by the week
together. You will in the meanwhile have earned your fare, and arrive
there some time tomorrow, or possibly this evening, if you are lucky
enough to get a job in season. Instead of going to Fitchburg, you will
be working here the greater part of the day. And so, if the railroad
reached round the world, I think that I should keep ahead of you; and
as for seeing the country and getting experience of that kind, I should
have to cut your acquaintance altogether.

Such is the universal law, which no man can ever outwit, and with regard
to the railroad even we may say it is as broad as it is long. To make
a railroad round the world available to all mankind is equivalent to
grading the whole surface of the planet. Men have an indistinct notion
that if they keep up this activity of joint stocks and spades long
enough all will at length ride somewhere, in next to no time, and for
nothing; but though a crowd rushes to the depot, and the conductor
shouts "All aboard!" when the smoke is blown away and the vapor
condensed, it will be perceived that a few are riding, but the rest are
run over--and it will be called, and will be, "A melancholy accident."
No doubt they can ride at last who shall have earned their fare, that
is, if they survive so long, but they will probably have lost their
elasticity and desire to travel by that time. This spending of the
best part of one's life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable
liberty during the least valuable part of it reminds me of the
Englishman who went to India to make a fortune first, in order that he
might return to England and live the life of a poet. He should have gone
up garret at once. "What!" exclaim a million Irishmen starting up from
all the shanties in the land, "is not this railroad which we have built
a good thing?" Yes, I answer, comparatively good, that is, you might
have done worse; but I wish, as you are brothers of mine, that you could
have spent your time better than digging in this dirt.

Before I finished my house, wishing to earn ten or twelve dollars by
some honest and agreeable method, in order to meet my unusual expenses,
I planted about two acres and a half of light and sandy soil near it
chiefly with beans, but also a small part with potatoes, corn, peas, and
turnips. The whole lot contains eleven acres, mostly growing up to pines
and hickories, and was sold the preceding season for eight dollars and
eight cents an acre. One farmer said that it was "good for nothing but
to raise cheeping squirrels on." I put no manure whatever on this
land, not being the owner, but merely a squatter, and not expecting to
cultivate so much again, and I did not quite hoe it all once. I got out
several cords of stumps in plowing, which supplied me with fuel for
a long time, and left small circles of virgin mould, easily
distinguishable through the summer by the greater luxuriance of the
beans there. The dead and for the most part unmerchantable wood behind
my house, and the driftwood from the pond, have supplied the remainder
of my fuel. I was obliged to hire a team and a man for the plowing,
though I held the plow myself. My farm outgoes for the first season
were, for implements, seed, work, etc., $14.72+. The seed corn was given
me. This never costs anything to speak of, unless you plant more than
enough. I got twelve bushels of beans, and eighteen bushels of potatoes,
beside some peas and sweet corn. The yellow corn and turnips were too
late to come to anything. My whole income from the farm was

                                       $ 23.44
      Deducting the outgoes............  14.72+
                                         -------
      There are left.................. $  8.71+

beside produce consumed and on hand at the time this estimate was made
of the value of $4.50--the amount on hand much more than balancing a
little grass which I did not raise. All things considered, that is,
considering the importance of a man's soul and of today, notwithstanding
the short time occupied by my experiment, nay, partly even because of
its transient character, I believe that that was doing better than any
farmer in Concord did that year.

The next year I did better still, for I spaded up all the land which I
required, about a third of an acre, and I learned from the experience
of both years, not being in the least awed by many celebrated works on
husbandry, Arthur Young among the rest, that if one would live simply
and eat only the crop which he raised, and raise no more than he ate,
and not exchange it for an insufficient quantity of more luxurious and
expensive things, he would need to cultivate only a few rods of ground,
and that it would be cheaper to spade up that than to use oxen to plow
it, and to select a fresh spot from time to time than to manure the old,
and he could do all his necessary farm work as it were with his left
hand at odd hours in the summer; and thus he would not be tied to an ox,
or horse, or cow, or pig, as at present. I desire to speak impartially
on this point, and as one not interested in the success or failure of
the present economical and social arrangements. I was more independent
than any farmer in Concord, for I was not anchored to a house or farm,
but could follow the bent of my genius, which is a very crooked one,
every moment. Beside being better off than they already, if my house had
been burned or my crops had failed, I should have been nearly as well
off as before.

I am wont to think that men are not so much the keepers of herds as
herds are the keepers of men, the former are so much the freer. Men and
oxen exchange work; but if we consider necessary work only, the oxen
will be seen to have greatly the advantage, their farm is so much the
larger. Man does some of his part of the exchange work in his six weeks
of haying, and it is no boy's play. Certainly no nation that lived
simply in all respects, that is, no nation of philosophers, would commit
so great a blunder as to use the labor of animals. True, there never was
and is not likely soon to be a nation of philosophers, nor am I certain
it is desirable that there should be. However, I should never have
broken a horse or bull and taken him to board for any work he might do
for me, for fear I should become a horseman or a herdsman merely; and if
society seems to be the gainer by so doing, are we certain that what is
one man's gain is not another's loss, and that the stable-boy has equal
cause with his master to be satisfied? Granted that some public works
would not have been constructed without this aid, and let man share the
glory of such with the ox and horse; does it follow that he could not
have accomplished works yet more worthy of himself in that case? When
men begin to do, not merely unnecessary or artistic, but luxurious and
idle work, with their assistance, it is inevitable that a few do all the
exchange work with the oxen, or, in other words, become the slaves of
the strongest. Man thus not only works for the animal within him, but,
for a symbol of this, he works for the animal without him. Though we
have many substantial houses of brick or stone, the prosperity of the
farmer is still measured by the degree to which the barn overshadows the
house. This town is said to have the largest houses for oxen, cows, and
horses hereabouts, and it is not behindhand in its public buildings; but
there are very few halls for free worship or free speech in this county.
It should not be by their architecture, but why not even by their power
of abstract thought, that nations should seek to commemorate themselves?
How much more admirable the Bhagvat-Geeta than all the ruins of the
East! Towers and temples are the luxury of princes. A simple and
independent mind does not toil at the bidding of any prince. Genius is
not a retainer to any emperor, nor is its material silver, or gold, or
marble, except to a trifling extent. To what end, pray, is so much stone
hammered? In Arcadia, when I was there, I did not see any hammering
stone. Nations are possessed with an insane ambition to perpetuate the
memory of themselves by the amount of hammered stone they leave. What if
equal pains were taken to smooth and polish their manners? One piece of
good sense would be more memorable than a monument as high as the moon.
I love better to see stones in place. The grandeur of Thebes was a
vulgar grandeur. More sensible is a rod of stone wall that bounds an
honest man's field than a hundred-gated Thebes that has wandered farther
from the true end of life. The religion and civilization which are
barbaric and heathenish build splendid temples; but what you might call
Christianity does not. Most of the stone a nation hammers goes toward
its tomb only. It buries itself alive. As for the Pyramids, there is
nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could
be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for
some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to
have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs. I might
possibly invent some excuse for them and him, but I have no time for it.
As for the religion and love of art of the builders, it is much the same
all the world over, whether the building be an Egyptian temple or the
United States Bank. It costs more than it comes to. The mainspring is
vanity, assisted by the love of garlic and bread and butter. Mr. Balcom,
a promising young architect, designs it on the back of his Vitruvius,
with hard pencil and ruler, and the job is let out to Dobson & Sons,
stonecutters. When the thirty centuries begin to look down on it,
mankind begin to look up at it. As for your high towers and monuments,
there was a crazy fellow once in this town who undertook to dig through
to China, and he got so far that, as he said, he heard the Chinese pots
and kettles rattle; but I think that I shall not go out of my way to
admire the hole which he made. Many are concerned about the monuments
of the West and the East--to know who built them. For my part, I should
like to know who in those days did not build them--who were above such
trifling. But to proceed with my statistics.

By surveying, carpentry, and day-labor of various other kinds in the
village in the meanwhile, for I have as many trades as fingers, I had
earned $13.34. The expense of food for eight months, namely, from July
4th to March 1st, the time when these estimates were made, though I
lived there more than two years--not counting potatoes, a little green
corn, and some peas, which I had raised, nor considering the value of
what was on hand at the last date--was

    Rice.................... $ 1.73 1/2
    Molasses.................  1.73     Cheapest form of the
                                         saccharine.
    Rye meal.................  1.04 3/4
    Indian meal..............  0.99 3/4  Cheaper than rye.
    Pork.....................  0.22
    All experiments which failed:
    Flour....................  0.88  Costs more than Indian meal,
                                      both money and trouble.
    Sugar....................  0.80
    Lard.....................  0.65
    Apples...................  0.25
    Dried apple..............  0.22
    Sweet potatoes...........  0.10
    One pumpkin..............  0.06
    One watermelon...........  0.02
    Salt.....................  0.03

Yes, I did eat $8.74, all told; but I should not thus unblushingly
publish my guilt, if I did not know that most of my readers were equally
guilty with myself, and that their deeds would look no better in print.
The next year I sometimes caught a mess of fish for my dinner, and
once I went so far as to slaughter a woodchuck which ravaged my
bean-field--effect his transmigration, as a Tartar would say--and devour
him, partly for experiment's sake; but though it afforded me a momentary
enjoyment, notwithstanding a musky flavor, I saw that the longest use
would not make that a good practice, however it might seem to have your
woodchucks ready dressed by the village butcher.

Clothing and some incidental expenses within the same dates, though
little can be inferred from this item, amounted to

                                            $ 8.40-3/4
    Oil and some household utensils........  2.00

So that all the pecuniary outgoes, excepting for washing and mending,
which for the most part were done out of the house, and their bills have
not yet been received--and these are all and more than all the ways by
which money necessarily goes out in this part of the world--were

    House................................. $ 28.12+
    Farm one year........................... 14.72+
    Food eight months.......................  8.74
    Clothing, etc., eight months............  8.40-3/4
    Oil, etc., eight months.................  2.00
                                           -----------
        In all............................ $ 61.99-3/4

I address myself now to those of my readers who have a living to get.
And to meet this I have for farm produce sold

                                            $ 23.44
    Earned by day-labor....................  13.34
                                           -------
        In all............................ $ 36.78,

which subtracted from the sum of the outgoes leaves a balance of $25.21
3/4 on the one side--this being very nearly the means with which I
started, and the measure of expenses to be incurred--and on the
other, beside the leisure and independence and health thus secured, a
comfortable house for me as long as I choose to occupy it.

These statistics, however accidental and therefore uninstructive they
may appear, as they have a certain completeness, have a certain value
also. Nothing was given me of which I have not rendered some account.
It appears from the above estimate, that my food alone cost me in money
about twenty-seven cents a week. It was, for nearly two years after
this, rye and Indian meal without yeast, potatoes, rice, a very little
salt pork, molasses, and salt; and my drink, water. It was fit that I
should live on rice, mainly, who love so well the philosophy of India.
To meet the objections of some inveterate cavillers, I may as well
state, that if I dined out occasionally, as I always had done, and I
trust shall have opportunities to do again, it was frequently to the
detriment of my domestic arrangements. But the dining out, being, as
I have stated, a constant element, does not in the least affect a
comparative statement like this.

I learned from my two years' experience that it would cost incredibly
little trouble to obtain one's necessary food, even in this latitude;
that a man may use as simple a diet as the animals, and yet retain
health and strength. I have made a satisfactory dinner, satisfactory
on several accounts, simply off a dish of purslane (Portulaca oleracea)
which I gathered in my cornfield, boiled and salted. I give the Latin on
account of the savoriness of the trivial name. And pray what more can
a reasonable man desire, in peaceful times, in ordinary noons, than a
sufficient number of ears of green sweet corn boiled, with the addition
of salt? Even the little variety which I used was a yielding to the
demands of appetite, and not of health. Yet men have come to such a pass
that they frequently starve, not for want of necessaries, but for want
of luxuries; and I know a good woman who thinks that her son lost his
life because he took to drinking water only.

The reader will perceive that I am treating the subject rather from an
economic than a dietetic point of view, and he will not venture to put
my abstemiousness to the test unless he has a well-stocked larder.

Bread I at first made of pure Indian meal and salt, genuine hoe-cakes,
which I baked before my fire out of doors on a shingle or the end of a
stick of timber sawed off in building my house; but it was wont to get
smoked and to have a piny flavor, I tried flour also; but have at last
found a mixture of rye and Indian meal most convenient and agreeable. In
cold weather it was no little amusement to bake several small loaves of
this in succession, tending and turning them as carefully as an Egyptian
his hatching eggs. They were a real cereal fruit which I ripened, and
they had to my senses a fragrance like that of other noble fruits, which
I kept in as long as possible by wrapping them in cloths. I made a study
of the ancient and indispensable art of bread-making, consulting such
authorities as offered, going back to the primitive days and first
invention of the unleavened kind, when from the wildness of nuts and
meats men first reached the mildness and refinement of this diet, and
travelling gradually down in my studies through that accidental souring
of the dough which, it is supposed, taught the leavening process, and
through the various fermentations thereafter, till I came to "good,
sweet, wholesome bread," the staff of life. Leaven, which some deem the
soul of bread, the spiritus which fills its cellular tissue, which is
religiously preserved like the vestal fire--some precious bottleful,
I suppose, first brought over in the Mayflower, did the business for
America, and its influence is still rising, swelling, spreading, in
cerealian billows over the land--this seed I regularly and faithfully
procured from the village, till at length one morning I forgot the
rules, and scalded my yeast; by which accident I discovered that even
this was not indispensable--for my discoveries were not by the synthetic
but analytic process--and I have gladly omitted it since, though most
housewives earnestly assured me that safe and wholesome bread without
yeast might not be, and elderly people prophesied a speedy decay of the
vital forces. Yet I find it not to be an essential ingredient, and after
going without it for a year am still in the land of the living; and I
am glad to escape the trivialness of carrying a bottleful in my pocket,
which would sometimes pop and discharge its contents to my discomfiture.
It is simpler and more respectable to omit it. Man is an animal who
more than any other can adapt himself to all climates and circumstances.
Neither did I put any sal-soda, or other acid or alkali, into my bread.
It would seem that I made it according to the recipe which Marcus
Porcius Cato gave about two centuries before Christ. "Panem depsticium
sic facito. Manus mortariumque bene lavato. Farinam in mortarium
indito, aquae paulatim addito, subigitoque pulchre. Ubi bene subegeris,
defingito, coquitoque sub testu." Which I take to mean,--"Make kneaded
bread thus. Wash your hands and trough well. Put the meal into the
trough, add water gradually, and knead it thoroughly. When you have
kneaded it well, mould it, and bake it under a cover," that is, in a
baking kettle. Not a word about leaven. But I did not always use this
staff of life. At one time, owing to the emptiness of my purse, I saw
none of it for more than a month.

Every New Englander might easily raise all his own breadstuffs in this
land of rye and Indian corn, and not depend on distant and fluctuating
markets for them. Yet so far are we from simplicity and independence
that, in Concord, fresh and sweet meal is rarely sold in the shops, and
hominy and corn in a still coarser form are hardly used by any. For the
most part the farmer gives to his cattle and hogs the grain of his own
producing, and buys flour, which is at least no more wholesome, at a
greater cost, at the store. I saw that I could easily raise my bushel
or two of rye and Indian corn, for the former will grow on the poorest
land, and the latter does not require the best, and grind them in a
hand-mill, and so do without rice and pork; and if I must have some
concentrated sweet, I found by experiment that I could make a very good
molasses either of pumpkins or beets, and I knew that I needed only to
set out a few maples to obtain it more easily still, and while these
were growing I could use various substitutes beside those which I have
named. "For," as the Forefathers sang,--

       "we can make liquor to sweeten our lips
        Of pumpkins and parsnips and walnut-tree chips."

Finally, as for salt, that grossest of groceries, to obtain this might
be a fit occasion for a visit to the seashore, or, if I did without it
altogether, I should probably drink the less water. I do not learn that
the Indians ever troubled themselves to go after it.

Thus I could avoid all trade and barter, so far as my food was
concerned, and having a shelter already, it would only remain to get
clothing and fuel. The pantaloons which I now wear were woven in a
farmer's family--thank Heaven there is so much virtue still in man; for
I think the fall from the farmer to the operative as great and memorable
as that from the man to the farmer;--and in a new country, fuel is an
encumbrance. As for a habitat, if I were not permitted still to squat,
I might purchase one acre at the same price for which the land I
cultivated was sold--namely, eight dollars and eight cents. But as it
was, I considered that I enhanced the value of the land by squatting on
it.

There is a certain class of unbelievers who sometimes ask me such
questions as, if I think that I can live on vegetable food alone; and
to strike at the root of the matter at once--for the root is faith--I
am accustomed to answer such, that I can live on board nails. If they
cannot understand that, they cannot understand much that I have to say.
For my part, I am glad to bear of experiments of this kind being tried;
as that a young man tried for a fortnight to live on hard, raw corn on
the ear, using his teeth for all mortar. The squirrel tribe tried the
same and succeeded. The human race is interested in these experiments,
though a few old women who are incapacitated for them, or who own their
thirds in mills, may be alarmed.

My furniture, part of which I made myself--and the rest cost me nothing
of which I have not rendered an account--consisted of a bed, a table, a
desk, three chairs, a looking-glass three inches in diameter, a pair of
tongs and andirons, a kettle, a skillet, and a frying-pan, a dipper, a
wash-bowl, two knives and forks, three plates, one cup, one spoon, a jug
for oil, a jug for molasses, and a japanned lamp. None is so poor that
he need sit on a pumpkin. That is shiftlessness. There is a plenty of
such chairs as I like best in the village garrets to be had for taking
them away. Furniture! Thank God, I can sit and I can stand without the
aid of a furniture warehouse. What man but a philosopher would not
be ashamed to see his furniture packed in a cart and going up country
exposed to the light of heaven and the eyes of men, a beggarly account
of empty boxes? That is Spaulding's furniture. I could never tell from
inspecting such a load whether it belonged to a so-called rich man or a
poor one; the owner always seemed poverty-stricken. Indeed, the more
you have of such things the poorer you are. Each load looks as if it
contained the contents of a dozen shanties; and if one shanty is poor,
this is a dozen times as poor. Pray, for what do we move ever but to
get rid of our furniture, our exuvioe: at last to go from this world to
another newly furnished, and leave this to be burned? It is the same as
if all these traps were buckled to a man's belt, and he could not
move over the rough country where our lines are cast without dragging
them--dragging his trap. He was a lucky fox that left his tail in the
trap. The muskrat will gnaw his third leg off to be free. No wonder man
has lost his elasticity. How often he is at a dead set! "Sir, if I may
be so bold, what do you mean by a dead set?" If you are a seer, whenever
you meet a man you will see all that he owns, ay, and much that he
pretends to disown, behind him, even to his kitchen furniture and all
the trumpery which he saves and will not burn, and he will appear to be
harnessed to it and making what headway he can. I think that the man
is at a dead set who has got through a knot-hole or gateway where his
sledge load of furniture cannot follow him. I cannot but feel compassion
when I hear some trig, compact-looking man, seemingly free, all girded
and ready, speak of his "furniture," as whether it is insured or not.
"But what shall I do with my furniture?"--My gay butterfly is entangled
in a spider's web then. Even those who seem for a long while not to
have any, if you inquire more narrowly you will find have some stored
in somebody's barn. I look upon England today as an old gentleman who is
travelling with a great deal of baggage, trumpery which has accumulated
from long housekeeping, which he has not the courage to burn; great
trunk, little trunk, bandbox, and bundle. Throw away the first three at
least. It would surpass the powers of a well man nowadays to take up his
bed and walk, and I should certainly advise a sick one to lay down his
bed and run. When I have met an immigrant tottering under a bundle which
contained his all--looking like an enormous wen which had grown out of
the nape of his neck--I have pitied him, not because that was his all,
but because he had all that to carry. If I have got to drag my trap, I
will take care that it be a light one and do not nip me in a vital part.
But perchance it would be wisest never to put one's paw into it.

I would observe, by the way, that it costs me nothing for curtains, for
I have no gazers to shut out but the sun and moon, and I am willing that
they should look in. The moon will not sour milk nor taint meat of mine,
nor will the sun injure my furniture or fade my carpet; and if he is
sometimes too warm a friend, I find it still better economy to retreat
behind some curtain which nature has provided, than to add a single item
to the details of housekeeping. A lady once offered me a mat, but as
I had no room to spare within the house, nor time to spare within or
without to shake it, I declined it, preferring to wipe my feet on the
sod before my door. It is best to avoid the beginnings of evil.

Not long since I was present at the auction of a deacon's effects, for
his life had not been ineffectual:--

  "The evil that men do lives after them."

As usual, a great proportion was trumpery which had begun to accumulate
in his father's day. Among the rest was a dried tapeworm. And now, after
lying half a century in his garret and other dust holes, these things
were not burned; instead of a bonfire, or purifying destruction of
them, there was an auction, or increasing of them. The neighbors eagerly
collected to view them, bought them all, and carefully transported them
to their garrets and dust holes, to lie there till their estates are
settled, when they will start again. When a man dies he kicks the dust.

The customs of some savage nations might, perchance, be profitably
imitated by us, for they at least go through the semblance of casting
their slough annually; they have the idea of the thing, whether they
have the reality or not. Would it not be well if we were to celebrate
such a "busk," or "feast of first fruits," as Bartram describes to have
been the custom of the Mucclasse Indians? "When a town celebrates the
busk," says he, "having previously provided themselves with new clothes,
new pots, pans, and other household utensils and furniture, they collect
all their worn out clothes and other despicable things, sweep and
cleanse their houses, squares, and the whole town of their filth, which
with all the remaining grain and other old provisions they cast together
into one common heap, and consume it with fire. After having taken
medicine, and fasted for three days, all the fire in the town is
extinguished. During this fast they abstain from the gratification of
every appetite and passion whatever. A general amnesty is proclaimed;
all malefactors may return to their town."

"On the fourth morning, the high priest, by rubbing dry wood together,
produces new fire in the public square, from whence every habitation in
the town is supplied with the new and pure flame."

They then feast on the new corn and fruits, and dance and sing for three
days, "and the four following days they receive visits and rejoice with
their friends from neighboring towns who have in like manner purified
and prepared themselves."

The Mexicans also practised a similar purification at the end of every
fifty-two years, in the belief that it was time for the world to come to
an end.

I have scarcely heard of a truer sacrament, that is, as the dictionary
defines it, "outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace,"
than this, and I have no doubt that they were originally inspired
directly from Heaven to do thus, though they have no Biblical record of
the revelation.

For more than five years I maintained myself thus solely by the labor
of my hands, and I found that, by working about six weeks in a year, I
could meet all the expenses of living. The whole of my winters, as well
as most of my summers, I had free and clear for study. I have thoroughly
tried school-keeping, and found that my expenses were in proportion, or
rather out of proportion, to my income, for I was obliged to dress and
train, not to say think and believe, accordingly, and I lost my time
into the bargain. As I did not teach for the good of my fellow-men, but
simply for a livelihood, this was a failure. I have tried trade but I
found that it would take ten years to get under way in that, and that
then I should probably be on my way to the devil. I was actually afraid
that I might by that time be doing what is called a good business. When
formerly I was looking about to see what I could do for a living, some
sad experience in conforming to the wishes of friends being fresh in
my mind to tax my ingenuity, I thought often and seriously of picking
huckleberries; that surely I could do, and its small profits might
suffice--for my greatest skill has been to want but little--so little
capital it required, so little distraction from my wonted moods, I
foolishly thought. While my acquaintances went unhesitatingly into trade
or the professions, I contemplated this occupation as most like theirs;
ranging the hills all summer to pick the berries which came in my way,
and thereafter carelessly dispose of them; so, to keep the flocks of
Admetus. I also dreamed that I might gather the wild herbs, or carry
evergreens to such villagers as loved to be reminded of the woods, even
to the city, by hay-cart loads. But I have since learned that trade
curses everything it handles; and though you trade in messages from
heaven, the whole curse of trade attaches to the business.

As I preferred some things to others, and especially valued my freedom,
as I could fare hard and yet succeed well, I did not wish to spend
my time in earning rich carpets or other fine furniture, or delicate
cookery, or a house in the Grecian or the Gothic style just yet. If
there are any to whom it is no interruption to acquire these things,
and who know how to use them when acquired, I relinquish to them the
pursuit. Some are "industrious," and appear to love labor for its own
sake, or perhaps because it keeps them out of worse mischief; to such I
have at present nothing to say. Those who would not know what to do with
more leisure than they now enjoy, I might advise to work twice as
hard as they do--work till they pay for themselves, and get their free
papers. For myself I found that the occupation of a day-laborer was the
most independent of any, especially as it required only thirty or forty
days in a year to support one. The laborer's day ends with the going
down of the sun, and he is then free to devote himself to his chosen
pursuit, independent of his labor; but his employer, who speculates from
month to month, has no respite from one end of the year to the other.

In short, I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain
one's self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will
live simply and wisely; as the pursuits of the simpler nations are still
the sports of the more artificial. It is not necessary that a man should
earn his living by the sweat of his brow, unless he sweats easier than I
do.

One young man of my acquaintance, who has inherited some acres, told me
that he thought he should live as I did, if he had the means. I would
not have any one adopt my mode of living on any account; for, beside
that before he has fairly learned it I may have found out another for
myself, I desire that there may be as many different persons in the
world as possible; but I would have each one be very careful to find
out and pursue his own way, and not his father's or his mother's or his
neighbor's instead. The youth may build or plant or sail, only let him
not be hindered from doing that which he tells me he would like to do.
It is by a mathematical point only that we are wise, as the sailor or
the fugitive slave keeps the polestar in his eye; but that is sufficient
guidance for all our life. We may not arrive at our port within a
calculable period, but we would preserve the true course.

Undoubtedly, in this case, what is true for one is truer still for a
thousand, as a large house is not proportionally more expensive than a
small one, since one roof may cover, one cellar underlie, and one wall
separate several apartments. But for my part, I preferred the solitary
dwelling. Moreover, it will commonly be cheaper to build the whole
yourself than to convince another of the advantage of the common wall;
and when you have done this, the common partition, to be much cheaper,
must be a thin one, and that other may prove a bad neighbor, and also
not keep his side in repair. The only co-operation which is commonly
possible is exceedingly partial and superficial; and what little true
co-operation there is, is as if it were not, being a harmony inaudible
to men. If a man has faith, he will co-operate with equal faith
everywhere; if he has not faith, he will continue to live like the rest
of the world, whatever company he is joined to. To co-operate in the
highest as well as the lowest sense, means to get our living together. I
heard it proposed lately that two young men should travel together over
the world, the one without money, earning his means as he went, before
the mast and behind the plow, the other carrying a bill of exchange in
his pocket. It was easy to see that they could not long be companions or
co-operate, since one would not operate at all. They would part at
the first interesting crisis in their adventures. Above all, as I have
implied, the man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with
another must wait till that other is ready, and it may be a long time
before they get off.

But all this is very selfish, I have heard some of my townsmen say.
I confess that I have hitherto indulged very little in philanthropic
enterprises. I have made some sacrifices to a sense of duty, and among
others have sacrificed this pleasure also. There are those who have
used all their arts to persuade me to undertake the support of some
poor family in the town; and if I had nothing to do--for the devil finds
employment for the idle--I might try my hand at some such pastime as
that. However, when I have thought to indulge myself in this respect,
and lay their Heaven under an obligation by maintaining certain poor
persons in all respects as comfortably as I maintain myself, and have
even ventured so far as to make them the offer, they have one and all
unhesitatingly preferred to remain poor. While my townsmen and women are
devoted in so many ways to the good of their fellows, I trust that one
at least may be spared to other and less humane pursuits. You must have
a genius for charity as well as for anything else. As for Doing-good,
that is one of the professions which are full. Moreover, I have tried it
fairly, and, strange as it may seem, am satisfied that it does not agree
with my constitution. Probably I should not consciously and deliberately
forsake my particular calling to do the good which society demands of
me, to save the universe from annihilation; and I believe that a like
but infinitely greater steadfastness elsewhere is all that now preserves
it. But I would not stand between any man and his genius; and to him who
does this work, which I decline, with his whole heart and soul and life,
I would say, Persevere, even if the world call it doing evil, as it is
most likely they will.

I am far from supposing that my case is a peculiar one; no doubt many of
my readers would make a similar defence. At doing something--I will not
engage that my neighbors shall pronounce it good--I do not hesitate to
say that I should be a capital fellow to hire; but what that is, it is
for my employer to find out. What good I do, in the common sense of
that word, must be aside from my main path, and for the most part wholly
unintended. Men say, practically, Begin where you are and such as you
are, without aiming mainly to become of more worth, and with kindness
aforethought go about doing good. If I were to preach at all in this
strain, I should say rather, Set about being good. As if the sun should
stop when he had kindled his fires up to the splendor of a moon or
a star of the sixth magnitude, and go about like a Robin Goodfellow,
peeping in at every cottage window, inspiring lunatics, and tainting
meats, and making darkness visible, instead of steadily increasing his
genial heat and beneficence till he is of such brightness that no mortal
can look him in the face, and then, and in the meanwhile too, going
about the world in his own orbit, doing it good, or rather, as a truer
philosophy has discovered, the world going about him getting good. When
Phaeton, wishing to prove his heavenly birth by his beneficence, had the
sun's chariot but one day, and drove out of the beaten track, he burned
several blocks of houses in the lower streets of heaven, and scorched
the surface of the earth, and dried up every spring, and made the great
desert of Sahara, till at length Jupiter hurled him headlong to the
earth with a thunderbolt, and the sun, through grief at his death, did
not shine for a year.

There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted. It
is human, it is divine, carrion. If I knew for a certainty that a man
was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good,
I should run for my life, as from that dry and parching wind of the
African deserts called the simoom, which fills the mouth and nose and
ears and eyes with dust till you are suffocated, for fear that I should
get some of his good done to me--some of its virus mingled with my
blood. No--in this case I would rather suffer evil the natural way.
A man is not a good man to me because he will feed me if I should be
starving, or warm me if I should be freezing, or pull me out of a ditch
if I should ever fall into one. I can find you a Newfoundland dog that
will do as much. Philanthropy is not love for one's fellow-man in the
broadest sense. Howard was no doubt an exceedingly kind and worthy man
in his way, and has his reward; but, comparatively speaking, what are a
hundred Howards to us, if their philanthropy do not help us in our
best estate, when we are most worthy to be helped? I never heard of a
philanthropic meeting in which it was sincerely proposed to do any good
to me, or the like of me.

The Jesuits were quite balked by those Indians who, being burned at
the stake, suggested new modes of torture to their tormentors. Being
superior to physical suffering, it sometimes chanced that they were
superior to any consolation which the missionaries could offer; and the
law to do as you would be done by fell with less persuasiveness on the
ears of those who, for their part, did not care how they were done by,
who loved their enemies after a new fashion, and came very near freely
forgiving them all they did.

Be sure that you give the poor the aid they most need, though it be your
example which leaves them far behind. If you give money, spend yourself
with it, and do not merely abandon it to them. We make curious mistakes
sometimes. Often the poor man is not so cold and hungry as he is
dirty and ragged and gross. It is partly his taste, and not merely his
misfortune. If you give him money, he will perhaps buy more rags with
it. I was wont to pity the clumsy Irish laborers who cut ice on the
pond, in such mean and ragged clothes, while I shivered in my more tidy
and somewhat more fashionable garments, till, one bitter cold day, one
who had slipped into the water came to my house to warm him, and I saw
him strip off three pairs of pants and two pairs of stockings ere he got
down to the skin, though they were dirty and ragged enough, it is true,
and that he could afford to refuse the extra garments which I offered
him, he had so many intra ones. This ducking was the very thing he
needed. Then I began to pity myself, and I saw that it would be a
greater charity to bestow on me a flannel shirt than a whole slop-shop
on him. There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who
is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest
amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of
life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve. It is
the pious slave-breeder devoting the proceeds of every tenth slave to
buy a Sunday's liberty for the rest. Some show their kindness to the
poor by employing them in their kitchens. Would they not be kinder if
they employed themselves there? You boast of spending a tenth part of
your income in charity; maybe you should spend the nine tenths so, and
done with it. Society recovers only a tenth part of the property then.
Is this owing to the generosity of him in whose possession it is found,
or to the remissness of the officers of justice?

Philanthropy is almost the only virtue which is sufficiently appreciated
by mankind. Nay, it is greatly overrated; and it is our selfishness
which overrates it. A robust poor man, one sunny day here in Concord,
praised a fellow-townsman to me, because, as he said, he was kind to the
poor; meaning himself. The kind uncles and aunts of the race are more
esteemed than its true spiritual fathers and mothers. I once heard a
reverend lecturer on England, a man of learning and intelligence,
after enumerating her scientific, literary, and political worthies,
Shakespeare, Bacon, Cromwell, Milton, Newton, and others, speak next of
her Christian heroes, whom, as if his profession required it of him,
he elevated to a place far above all the rest, as the greatest of the
great. They were Penn, Howard, and Mrs. Fry. Every one must feel the
falsehood and cant of this. The last were not England's best men and
women; only, perhaps, her best philanthropists.

I would not subtract anything from the praise that is due to
philanthropy, but merely demand justice for all who by their lives
and works are a blessing to mankind. I do not value chiefly a man's
uprightness and benevolence, which are, as it were, his stem and leaves.
Those plants of whose greenness withered we make herb tea for the sick
serve but a humble use, and are most employed by quacks. I want the
flower and fruit of a man; that some fragrance be wafted over from him
to me, and some ripeness flavor our intercourse. His goodness must not
be a partial and transitory act, but a constant superfluity, which costs
him nothing and of which he is unconscious. This is a charity that hides
a multitude of sins. The philanthropist too often surrounds mankind with
the remembrance of his own castoff griefs as an atmosphere, and calls it
sympathy. We should impart our courage, and not our despair, our health
and ease, and not our disease, and take care that this does not spread
by contagion. From what southern plains comes up the voice of wailing?
Under what latitudes reside the heathen to whom we would send light? Who
is that intemperate and brutal man whom we would redeem? If anything ail
a man, so that he does not perform his functions, if he have a pain in
his bowels even--for that is the seat of sympathy--he forthwith sets
about reforming--the world. Being a microcosm himself, he discovers--and
it is a true discovery, and he is the man to make it--that the world has
been eating green apples; to his eyes, in fact, the globe itself is
a great green apple, which there is danger awful to think of that the
children of men will nibble before it is ripe; and straightway his
drastic philanthropy seeks out the Esquimau and the Patagonian, and
embraces the populous Indian and Chinese villages; and thus, by a few
years of philanthropic activity, the powers in the meanwhile using him
for their own ends, no doubt, he cures himself of his dyspepsia, the
globe acquires a faint blush on one or both of its cheeks, as if it were
beginning to be ripe, and life loses its crudity and is once more sweet
and wholesome to live. I never dreamed of any enormity greater than I
have committed. I never knew, and never shall know, a worse man than
myself.

I believe that what so saddens the reformer is not his sympathy with his
fellows in distress, but, though he be the holiest son of God, is
his private ail. Let this be righted, let the spring come to him, the
morning rise over his couch, and he will forsake his generous companions
without apology. My excuse for not lecturing against the use of
tobacco is, that I never chewed it, that is a penalty which reformed
tobacco-chewers have to pay; though there are things enough I have
chewed which I could lecture against. If you should ever be betrayed
into any of these philanthropies, do not let your left hand know what
your right hand does, for it is not worth knowing. Rescue the drowning
and tie your shoestrings. Take your time, and set about some free labor.

Our manners have been corrupted by communication with the saints. Our
hymn-books resound with a melodious cursing of God and enduring Him
forever. One would say that even the prophets and redeemers had rather
consoled the fears than confirmed the hopes of man. There is nowhere
recorded a simple and irrepressible satisfaction with the gift of
life, any memorable praise of God. All health and success does me good,
however far off and withdrawn it may appear; all disease and failure
helps to make me sad and does me evil, however much sympathy it may have
with me or I with it. If, then, we would indeed restore mankind by truly
Indian, botanic, magnetic, or natural means, let us first be as simple
and well as Nature ourselves, dispel the clouds which hang over our own
brows, and take up a little life into our pores. Do not stay to be an
overseer of the poor, but endeavor to become one of the worthies of the
world.

I read in the Gulistan, or Flower Garden, of Sheik Sadi of Shiraz, that
"they asked a wise man, saying: Of the many celebrated trees which the
Most High God has created lofty and umbrageous, they call none azad, or
free, excepting the cypress, which bears no fruit; what mystery is there
in this? He replied, Each has its appropriate produce, and appointed
season, during the continuance of which it is fresh and blooming, and
during their absence dry and withered; to neither of which states is the
cypress exposed, being always flourishing; and of this nature are the
azads, or religious independents.--Fix not thy heart on that which is
transitory; for the Dijlah, or Tigris, will continue to flow through
Bagdad after the race of caliphs is extinct: if thy hand has plenty, be
liberal as the date tree; but if it affords nothing to give away, be an
azad, or free man, like the cypress."

                        COMPLEMENTAL VERSES
                    The Pretensions of Poverty
          Thou dost presume too much, poor needy wretch,
          To claim a station in the firmament
          Because thy humble cottage, or thy tub,
          Nurses some lazy or pedantic virtue
          In the cheap sunshine or by shady springs,
          With roots and pot-herbs; where thy right hand,
          Tearing those humane passions from the mind,
          Upon whose stocks fair blooming virtues flourish,
          Degradeth nature, and benumbeth sense,
          And, Gorgon-like, turns active men to stone.
          We not require the dull society
          Of your necessitated temperance,
          Or that unnatural stupidity
          That knows nor joy nor sorrow; nor your forc'd
          Falsely exalted passive fortitude
          Above the active.  This low abject brood,
          That fix their seats in mediocrity,
          Become your servile minds; but we advance
          Such virtues only as admit excess,
          Brave, bounteous acts, regal magnificence,
          All-seeing prudence, magnanimity
          That knows no bound, and that heroic virtue
          For which antiquity hath left no name,
          But patterns only, such as Hercules,
          Achilles, Theseus.  Back to thy loath'd cell;
          And when thou seest the new enlightened sphere,
          Study to know but what those worthies were.
                                 T. CAREW




Where I Lived, and What I Lived For


At a certain season of our life we are accustomed to consider every spot
as the possible site of a house. I have thus surveyed the country on
every side within a dozen miles of where I live. In imagination I have
bought all the farms in succession, for all were to be bought, and I
knew their price. I walked over each farmer's premises, tasted his wild
apples, discoursed on husbandry with him, took his farm at his price, at
any price, mortgaging it to him in my mind; even put a higher price on
it--took everything but a deed of it--took his word for his deed, for I
dearly love to talk--cultivated it, and him too to some extent, I trust,
and withdrew when I had enjoyed it long enough, leaving him to carry it
on. This experience entitled me to be regarded as a sort of real-estate
broker by my friends. Wherever I sat, there I might live, and the
landscape radiated from me accordingly. What is a house but a sedes, a
seat?--better if a country seat. I discovered many a site for a house
not likely to be soon improved, which some might have thought too far
from the village, but to my eyes the village was too far from it. Well,
there I might live, I said; and there I did live, for an hour, a summer
and a winter life; saw how I could let the years run off, buffet the
winter through, and see the spring come in. The future inhabitants of
this region, wherever they may place their houses, may be sure that they
have been anticipated. An afternoon sufficed to lay out the land into
orchard, wood-lot, and pasture, and to decide what fine oaks or pines
should be left to stand before the door, and whence each blasted tree
could be seen to the best advantage; and then I let it lie, fallow,
perchance, for a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which
he can afford to let alone.

My imagination carried me so far that I even had the refusal of several
farms--the refusal was all I wanted--but I never got my fingers burned
by actual possession. The nearest that I came to actual possession was
when I bought the Hollowell place, and had begun to sort my seeds, and
collected materials with which to make a wheelbarrow to carry it on or
off with; but before the owner gave me a deed of it, his wife--every man
has such a wife--changed her mind and wished to keep it, and he offered
me ten dollars to release him. Now, to speak the truth, I had but ten
cents in the world, and it surpassed my arithmetic to tell, if I was
that man who had ten cents, or who had a farm, or ten dollars, or all
together. However, I let him keep the ten dollars and the farm too, for
I had carried it far enough; or rather, to be generous, I sold him the
farm for just what I gave for it, and, as he was not a rich man, made
him a present of ten dollars, and still had my ten cents, and seeds, and
materials for a wheelbarrow left. I found thus that I had been a rich
man without any damage to my poverty. But I retained the landscape, and
I have since annually carried off what it yielded without a wheelbarrow.
With respect to landscapes,

               "I am monarch of all I survey,
                My right there is none to dispute."

I have frequently seen a poet withdraw, having enjoyed the most valuable
part of a farm, while the crusty farmer supposed that he had got a few
wild apples only. Why, the owner does not know it for many years when
a poet has put his farm in rhyme, the most admirable kind of invisible
fence, has fairly impounded it, milked it, skimmed it, and got all the
cream, and left the farmer only the skimmed milk.

The real attractions of the Hollowell farm, to me, were: its complete
retirement, being, about two miles from the village, half a mile from
the nearest neighbor, and separated from the highway by a broad field;
its bounding on the river, which the owner said protected it by its fogs
from frosts in the spring, though that was nothing to me; the gray color
and ruinous state of the house and barn, and the dilapidated fences,
which put such an interval between me and the last occupant; the hollow
and lichen-covered apple trees, nawed by rabbits, showing what kind of
neighbors I should have; but above all, the recollection I had of it
from my earliest voyages up the river, when the house was concealed
behind a dense grove of red maples, through which I heard the house-dog
bark. I was in haste to buy it, before the proprietor finished getting
out some rocks, cutting down the hollow apple trees, and grubbing up
some young birches which had sprung up in the pasture, or, in short, had
made any more of his improvements. To enjoy these advantages I was ready
to carry it on; like Atlas, to take the world on my shoulders--I never
heard what compensation he received for that--and do all those things
which had no other motive or excuse but that I might pay for it and
be unmolested in my possession of it; for I knew all the while that it
would yield the most abundant crop of the kind I wanted, if I could only
afford to let it alone. But it turned out as I have said.

All that I could say, then, with respect to farming on a large scale--I
have always cultivated a garden--was, that I had had my seeds ready.
Many think that seeds improve with age. I have no doubt that time
discriminates between the good and the bad; and when at last I shall
plant, I shall be less likely to be disappointed. But I would say to my
fellows, once for all, As long as possible live free and uncommitted. It
makes but little difference whether you are committed to a farm or the
county jail.

Old Cato, whose "De Re Rustica" is my "Cultivator," says--and the only
translation I have seen makes sheer nonsense of the passage--"When you
think of getting a farm turn it thus in your mind, not to buy greedily;
nor spare your pains to look at it, and do not think it enough to go
round it once. The oftener you go there the more it will please you, if
it is good." I think I shall not buy greedily, but go round and round it
as long as I live, and be buried in it first, that it may please me the
more at last.

The present was my next experiment of this kind, which I purpose to
describe more at length, for convenience putting the experience of two
years into one. As I have said, I do not propose to write an ode
to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning,
standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up.

When first I took up my abode in the woods, that is, began to spend my
nights as well as days there, which, by accident, was on Independence
Day, or the Fourth of July, 1845, my house was not finished for winter,
but was merely a defence against the rain, without plastering or
chimney, the walls being of rough, weather-stained boards, with wide
chinks, which made it cool at night. The upright white hewn studs and
freshly planed door and window casings gave it a clean and airy look,
especially in the morning, when its timbers were saturated with dew, so
that I fancied that by noon some sweet gum would exude from them. To my
imagination it retained throughout the day more or less of this auroral
character, reminding me of a certain house on a mountain which I had
visited a year before. This was an airy and unplastered cabin, fit
to entertain a travelling god, and where a goddess might trail her
garments. The winds which passed over my dwelling were such as sweep
over the ridges of mountains, bearing the broken strains, or celestial
parts only, of terrestrial music. The morning wind forever blows, the
poem of creation is uninterrupted; but few are the ears that hear it.
Olympus is but the outside of the earth everywhere.

The only house I had been the owner of before, if I except a boat, was
a tent, which I used occasionally when making excursions in the summer,
and this is still rolled up in my garret; but the boat, after passing
from hand to hand, has gone down the stream of time. With this more
substantial shelter about me, I had made some progress toward
settling in the world. This frame, so slightly clad, was a sort of
crystallization around me, and reacted on the builder. It was suggestive
somewhat as a picture in outlines. I did not need to go outdoors to take
the air, for the atmosphere within had lost none of its freshness. It
was not so much within doors as behind a door where I sat, even in the
rainiest weather. The Harivansa says, "An abode without birds is like
a meat without seasoning." Such was not my abode, for I found myself
suddenly neighbor to the birds; not by having imprisoned one, but having
caged myself near them. I was not only nearer to some of those which
commonly frequent the garden and the orchard, but to those smaller and
more thrilling songsters of the forest which never, or rarely, serenade
a villager--the wood thrush, the veery, the scarlet tanager, the field
sparrow, the whip-poor-will, and many others.

I was seated by the shore of a small pond, about a mile and a half south
of the village of Concord and somewhat higher than it, in the midst of
an extensive wood between that town and Lincoln, and about two miles
south of that our only field known to fame, Concord Battle Ground; but
I was so low in the woods that the opposite shore, half a mile off, like
the rest, covered with wood, was my most distant horizon. For the first
week, whenever I looked out on the pond it impressed me like a tarn high
up on the side of a mountain, its bottom far above the surface of other
lakes, and, as the sun arose, I saw it throwing off its nightly clothing
of mist, and here and there, by degrees, its soft ripples or its smooth
reflecting surface was revealed, while the mists, like ghosts, were
stealthily withdrawing in every direction into the woods, as at the
breaking up of some nocturnal conventicle. The very dew seemed to
hang upon the trees later into the day than usual, as on the sides of
mountains.

This small lake was of most value as a neighbor in the intervals of a
gentle rain-storm in August, when, both air and water being perfectly
still, but the sky overcast, mid-afternoon had all the serenity of
evening, and the wood thrush sang around, and was heard from shore to
shore. A lake like this is never smoother than at such a time; and the
clear portion of the air above it being, shallow and darkened by clouds,
the water, full of light and reflections, becomes a lower heaven itself
so much the more important. From a hill-top near by, where the wood had
been recently cut off, there was a pleasing vista southward across
the pond, through a wide indentation in the hills which form the shore
there, where their opposite sides sloping toward each other suggested a
stream flowing out in that direction through a wooded valley, but stream
there was none. That way I looked between and over the near green
hills to some distant and higher ones in the horizon, tinged with blue.
Indeed, by standing on tiptoe I could catch a glimpse of some of
the peaks of the still bluer and more distant mountain ranges in the
northwest, those true-blue coins from heaven's own mint, and also of
some portion of the village. But in other directions, even from this
point, I could not see over or beyond the woods which surrounded me. It
is well to have some water in your neighborhood, to give buoyancy to and
float the earth. One value even of the smallest well is, that when you
look into it you see that earth is not continent but insular. This is
as important as that it keeps butter cool. When I looked across the
pond from this peak toward the Sudbury meadows, which in time of flood
I distinguished elevated perhaps by a mirage in their seething valley,
like a coin in a basin, all the earth beyond the pond appeared like
a thin crust insulated and floated even by this small sheet of
interverting water, and I was reminded that this on which I dwelt was
but dry land.

Though the view from my door was still more contracted, I did not
feel crowded or confined in the least. There was pasture enough for my
imagination. The low shrub oak plateau to which the opposite shore
arose stretched away toward the prairies of the West and the steppes of
Tartary, affording ample room for all the roving families of men.
"There are none happy in the world but beings who enjoy freely a
vast horizon"--said Damodara, when his herds required new and larger
pastures.

Both place and time were changed, and I dwelt nearer to those parts of
the universe and to those eras in history which had most attracted
me. Where I lived was as far off as many a region viewed nightly by
astronomers. We are wont to imagine rare and delectable places in some
remote and more celestial corner of the system, behind the constellation
of Cassiopeia's Chair, far from noise and disturbance. I discovered that
my house actually had its site in such a withdrawn, but forever new and
unprofaned, part of the universe. If it were worth the while to settle
in those parts near to the Pleiades or the Hyades, to Aldebaran or
Altair, then I was really there, or at an equal remoteness from the life
which I had left behind, dwindled and twinkling with as fine a ray to
my nearest neighbor, and to be seen only in moonless nights by him. Such
was that part of creation where I had squatted;

              "There was a shepherd that did live,
                  And held his thoughts as high
               As were the mounts whereon his flocks
                  Did hourly feed him by."

What should we think of the shepherd's life if his flocks always
wandered to higher pastures than his thoughts?

Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal
simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself. I have been as
sincere a worshipper of Aurora as the Greeks. I got up early and bathed
in the pond; that was a religious exercise, and one of the best things
which I did. They say that characters were engraven on the bathing tub
of King Tchingthang to this effect: "Renew thyself completely each
day; do it again, and again, and forever again." I can understand that.
Morning brings back the heroic ages. I was as much affected by the faint
hum of a mosquito making its invisible and unimaginable tour through
my apartment at earliest dawn, when I was sitting with door and windows
open, as I could be by any trumpet that ever sang of fame. It was
Homer's requiem; itself an Iliad and Odyssey in the air, singing its own
wrath and wanderings. There was something cosmical about it; a standing
advertisement, till forbidden, of the everlasting vigor and fertility of
the world. The morning, which is the most memorable season of the day,
is the awakening hour. Then there is least somnolence in us; and for an
hour, at least, some part of us awakes which slumbers all the rest of
the day and night. Little is to be expected of that day, if it can be
called a day, to which we are not awakened by our Genius, but by the
mechanical nudgings of some servitor, are not awakened by our own
newly acquired force and aspirations from within, accompanied by
the undulations of celestial music, instead of factory bells, and a
fragrance filling the air--to a higher life than we fell asleep from;
and thus the darkness bear its fruit, and prove itself to be good,
no less than the light. That man who does not believe that each day
contains an earlier, more sacred, and auroral hour than he has yet
profaned, has despaired of life, and is pursuing a descending and
darkening way. After a partial cessation of his sensuous life, the soul
of man, or its organs rather, are reinvigorated each day, and his Genius
tries again what noble life it can make. All memorable events, I should
say, transpire in morning time and in a morning atmosphere. The Vedas
say, "All intelligences awake with the morning." Poetry and art, and
the fairest and most memorable of the actions of men, date from such an
hour. All poets and heroes, like Memnon, are the children of Aurora, and
emit their music at sunrise. To him whose elastic and vigorous thought
keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning. It matters not
what the clocks say or the attitudes and labors of men. Morning is when
I am awake and there is a dawn in me. Moral reform is the effort to
throw off sleep. Why is it that men give so poor an account of their day
if they have not been slumbering? They are not such poor calculators.
If they had not been overcome with drowsiness, they would have performed
something. The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only
one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion,
only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake
is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How
could I have looked him in the face?

We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical
aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake
us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than
the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious
endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or
to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far
more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through
which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the
day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life,
even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated
and critical hour. If we refused, or rather used up, such paltry
information as we get, the oracles would distinctly inform us how this
might be done.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only
the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to
teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did
not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish
to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to
live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and
Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad
swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its
lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole
and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or
if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true
account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are
in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God,
and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here
to "glorify God and enjoy him forever."

Still we live meanly, like ants; though the fable tells us that we were
long ago changed into men; like pygmies we fight with cranes; it is
error upon error, and clout upon clout, and our best virtue has for its
occasion a superfluous and evitable wretchedness. Our life is frittered
away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten
fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest.
Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or
three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half
a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail. In the midst of
this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and
quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has
to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his
port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed
who succeeds. Simplify, simplify. Instead of three meals a day, if it
be necessary eat but one; instead of a hundred dishes, five; and reduce
other things in proportion. Our life is like a German Confederacy, made
up of petty states, with its boundary forever fluctuating, so that even
a German cannot tell you how it is bounded at any moment. The nation
itself, with all its so-called internal improvements, which, by the way
are all external and superficial, is just such an unwieldy and overgrown
establishment, cluttered with furniture and tripped up by its own traps,
ruined by luxury and heedless expense, by want of calculation and a
worthy aim, as the million households in the land; and the only cure for
it, as for them, is in a rigid economy, a stern and more than Spartan
simplicity of life and elevation of purpose. It lives too fast. Men
think that it is essential that the Nation have commerce, and export
ice, and talk through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles an hour,
without a doubt, whether they do or not; but whether we should live
like baboons or like men, is a little uncertain. If we do not get out
sleepers, and forge rails, and devote days and nights to the work,
but go to tinkering upon our lives to improve them, who will build
railroads? And if railroads are not built, how shall we get to heaven
in season? But if we stay at home and mind our business, who will want
railroads? We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us. Did you
ever think what those sleepers are that underlie the railroad? Each one
is a man, an Irishman, or a Yankee man. The rails are laid on them, and
they are covered with sand, and the cars run smoothly over them. They
are sound sleepers, I assure you. And every few years a new lot is laid
down and run over; so that, if some have the pleasure of riding on a
rail, others have the misfortune to be ridden upon. And when they run
over a man that is walking in his sleep, a supernumerary sleeper in the
wrong position, and wake him up, they suddenly stop the cars, and make
a hue and cry about it, as if this were an exception. I am glad to know
that it takes a gang of men for every five miles to keep the sleepers
down and level in their beds as it is, for this is a sign that they may
sometime get up again.

Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are determined
to be starved before we are hungry. Men say that a stitch in time saves
nine, and so they take a thousand stitches today to save nine tomorrow.
As for work, we haven't any of any consequence. We have the Saint Vitus'
dance, and cannot possibly keep our heads still. If I should only give
a few pulls at the parish bell-rope, as for a fire, that is, without
setting the bell, there is hardly a man on his farm in the outskirts of
Concord, notwithstanding that press of engagements which was his excuse
so many times this morning, nor a boy, nor a woman, I might almost say,
but would forsake all and follow that sound, not mainly to save property
from the flames, but, if we will confess the truth, much more to see
it burn, since burn it must, and we, be it known, did not set it on
fire--or to see it put out, and have a hand in it, if that is done as
handsomely; yes, even if it were the parish church itself. Hardly a man
takes a half-hour's nap after dinner, but when he wakes he holds up his
head and asks, "What's the news?" as if the rest of mankind had stood
his sentinels. Some give directions to be waked every half-hour,
doubtless for no other purpose; and then, to pay for it, they tell what
they have dreamed. After a night's sleep the news is as indispensable
as the breakfast. "Pray tell me anything new that has happened to a man
anywhere on this globe"--and he reads it over his coffee and rolls, that
a man has had his eyes gouged out this morning on the Wachito River;
never dreaming the while that he lives in the dark unfathomed mammoth
cave of this world, and has but the rudiment of an eye himself.

For my part, I could easily do without the post-office. I think that
there are very few important communications made through it. To speak
critically, I never received more than one or two letters in my life--I
wrote this some years ago--that were worth the postage. The penny-post
is, commonly, an institution through which you seriously offer a man
that penny for his thoughts which is so often safely offered in jest.
And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we
read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house
burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow
run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot
of grasshoppers in the winter--we never need read of another. One is
enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for
a myriad instances and applications? To a philosopher all news, as it
is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over
their tea. Yet not a few are greedy after this gossip. There was such
a rush, as I hear, the other day at one of the offices to learn the
foreign news by the last arrival, that several large squares of plate
glass belonging to the establishment were broken by the pressure--news
which I seriously think a ready wit might write a twelve-month, or
twelve years, beforehand with sufficient accuracy. As for Spain, for
instance, if you know how to throw in Don Carlos and the Infanta,
and Don Pedro and Seville and Granada, from time to time in the right
proportions--they may have changed the names a little since I saw the
papers--and serve up a bull-fight when other entertainments fail, it
will be true to the letter, and give us as good an idea of the exact
state or ruin of things in Spain as the most succinct and lucid reports
under this head in the newspapers: and as for England, almost the last
significant scrap of news from that quarter was the revolution of 1649;
and if you have learned the history of her crops for an average year,
you never need attend to that thing again, unless your speculations are
of a merely pecuniary character. If one may judge who rarely looks into
the newspapers, nothing new does ever happen in foreign parts, a French
revolution not excepted.

What news! how much more important to know what that is which was never
old! "Kieou-he-yu (great dignitary of the state of Wei) sent a man to
Khoung-tseu to know his news. Khoung-tseu caused the messenger to be
seated near him, and questioned him in these terms: What is your
master doing? The messenger answered with respect: My master desires
to diminish the number of his faults, but he cannot come to the end of
them. The messenger being gone, the philosopher remarked: What a worthy
messenger! What a worthy messenger!" The preacher, instead of vexing the
ears of drowsy farmers on their day of rest at the end of the week--for
Sunday is the fit conclusion of an ill-spent week, and not the fresh
and brave beginning of a new one--with this one other draggle-tail of
a sermon, should shout with thundering voice, "Pause! Avast! Why so
seeming fast, but deadly slow?"

Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is
fabulous. If men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow
themselves to be deluded, life, to compare it with such things as we
know, would be like a fairy tale and the Arabian Nights' Entertainments.
If we respected only what is inevitable and has a right to be, music and
poetry would resound along the streets. When we are unhurried and wise,
we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and
absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the
shadow of the reality. This is always exhilarating and sublime. By
closing the eyes and slumbering, and consenting to be deceived by
shows, men establish and confirm their daily life of routine and
habit everywhere, which still is built on purely illusory foundations.
Children, who play life, discern its true law and relations more clearly
than men, who fail to live it worthily, but who think that they are
wiser by experience, that is, by failure. I have read in a Hindoo book,
that "there was a king's son, who, being expelled in infancy from his
native city, was brought up by a forester, and, growing up to maturity
in that state, imagined himself to belong to the barbarous race with
which he lived. One of his father's ministers having discovered him,
revealed to him what he was, and the misconception of his character was
removed, and he knew himself to be a prince. So soul," continues the
Hindoo philosopher, "from the circumstances in which it is placed,
mistakes its own character, until the truth is revealed to it by some
holy teacher, and then it knows itself to be Brahme." I perceive that
we inhabitants of New England live this mean life that we do because our
vision does not penetrate the surface of things. We think that that is
which appears to be. If a man should walk through this town and see only
the reality, where, think you, would the "Mill-dam" go to? If he should
give us an account of the realities he beheld there, we should not
recognize the place in his description. Look at a meeting-house, or a
court-house, or a jail, or a shop, or a dwelling-house, and say what
that thing really is before a true gaze, and they would all go to pieces
in your account of them. Men esteem truth remote, in the outskirts of
the system, behind the farthest star, before Adam and after the last
man. In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. But all
these times and places and occasions are now and here. God himself
culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the
lapse of all the ages. And we are enabled to apprehend at all what is
sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of
the reality that surrounds us. The universe constantly and obediently
answers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is
laid for us. Let us spend our lives in conceiving then. The poet or
the artist never yet had so fair and noble a design but some of his
posterity at least could accomplish it.

Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off
the track by every nutshell and mosquito's wing that falls on the
rails. Let us rise early and fast, or break fast, gently and without
perturbation; let company come and let company go, let the bells ring
and the children cry--determined to make a day of it. Why should we
knock under and go with the stream? Let us not be upset and overwhelmed
in that terrible rapid and whirlpool called a dinner, situated in the
meridian shallows. Weather this danger and you are safe, for the rest of
the way is down hill. With unrelaxed nerves, with morning vigor, sail
by it, looking another way, tied to the mast like Ulysses. If the engine
whistles, let it whistle till it is hoarse for its pains. If the bell
rings, why should we run? We will consider what kind of music they are
like. Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward
through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and
delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through
Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through
Church and State, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we
come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and
say, This is, and no mistake; and then begin, having a point d'appui,
below freshet and frost and fire, a place where you might found a
wall or a state, or set a lamp-post safely, or perhaps a gauge, not
a Nilometer, but a Realometer, that future ages might know how deep a
freshet of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time. If you
stand right fronting and face to face to a fact, you will see the sun
glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a cimeter, and feel its
sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow, and so you will
happily conclude your mortal career. Be it life or death, we crave only
reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats
and feel cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our
business.

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I
drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin
current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in
the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know
not the first letter of the alphabet. I have always been regretting that
I was not as wise as the day I was born. The intellect is a cleaver; it
discerns and rifts its way into the secret of things. I do not wish to
be any more busy with my hands than is necessary. My head is hands and
feet. I feel all my best faculties concentrated in it. My instinct tells
me that my head is an organ for burrowing, as some creatures use their
snout and fore paws, and with it I would mine and burrow my way through
these hills. I think that the richest vein is somewhere hereabouts;
so by the divining-rod and thin rising vapors I judge; and here I will
begin to mine.




Reading

With a little more deliberation in the choice of their pursuits, all men
would perhaps become essentially students and observers, for certainly
their nature and destiny are interesting to all alike. In accumulating
property for ourselves or our posterity, in founding a family or a
state, or acquiring fame even, we are mortal; but in dealing with
truth we are immortal, and need fear no change nor accident. The oldest
Egyptian or Hindoo philosopher raised a corner of the veil from the
statue of the divinity; and still the trembling robe remains raised, and
I gaze upon as fresh a glory as he did, since it was I in him that was
then so bold, and it is he in me that now reviews the vision. No dust
has settled on that robe; no time has elapsed since that divinity was
revealed. That time which we really improve, or which is improvable, is
neither past, present, nor future.

My residence was more favorable, not only to thought, but to serious
reading, than a university; and though I was beyond the range of the
ordinary circulating library, I had more than ever come within the
influence of those books which circulate round the world, whose
sentences were first written on bark, and are now merely copied from
time to time on to linen paper. Says the poet Mr Udd, "Being seated, to
run through the region of the spiritual world; I have had this
advantage in books. To be intoxicated by a single glass of wine; I have
experienced this pleasure when I have drunk the liquor of the esoteric
doctrines." I kept Homer's Iliad on my table through the summer, though
I looked at his page only now and then. Incessant labor with my hands,
at first, for I had my house to finish and my beans to hoe at the same
time, made more study impossible. Yet I sustained myself by the prospect
of such reading in future. I read one or two shallow books of travel
in the intervals of my work, till that employment made me ashamed of
myself, and I asked where it was then that I lived.

The student may read Homer or AEschylus in the Greek without danger of
dissipation or luxuriousness, for it implies that he in some measure
emulate their heroes, and consecrate morning hours to their pages. The
heroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother tongue,
will always be in a language dead to degenerate times; and we must
laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a
larger sense than common use permits out of what wisdom and valor and
generosity we have. The modern cheap and fertile press, with all its
translations, has done little to bring us nearer to the heroic writers
of antiquity. They seem as solitary, and the letter in which they
are printed as rare and curious, as ever. It is worth the expense of
youthful days and costly hours, if you learn only some words of an
ancient language, which are raised out of the trivialness of the street,
to be perpetual suggestions and provocations. It is not in vain that the
farmer remembers and repeats the few Latin words which he has heard. Men
sometimes speak as if the study of the classics would at length make way
for more modern and practical studies; but the adventurous student will
always study classics, in whatever language they may be written and
however ancient they may be. For what are the classics but the noblest
recorded thoughts of man? They are the only oracles which are not
decayed, and there are such answers to the most modern inquiry in them
as Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might as well omit to study Nature
because she is old. To read well, that is, to read true books in a true
spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than
any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training
such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole
life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly
as they were written. It is not enough even to be able to speak the
language of that nation by which they are written, for there is a
memorable interval between the spoken and the written language, the
language heard and the language read. The one is commonly transitory,
a sound, a tongue, a dialect merely, almost brutish, and we learn
it unconsciously, like the brutes, of our mothers. The other is the
maturity and experience of that; if that is our mother tongue, this is
our father tongue, a reserved and select expression, too significant to
be heard by the ear, which we must be born again in order to speak. The
crowds of men who merely spoke the Greek and Latin tongues in the Middle
Ages were not entitled by the accident of birth to read the works of
genius written in those languages; for these were not written in
that Greek or Latin which they knew, but in the select language of
literature. They had not learned the nobler dialects of Greece and Rome,
but the very materials on which they were written were waste paper to
them, and they prized instead a cheap contemporary literature. But when
the several nations of Europe had acquired distinct though rude written
languages of their own, sufficient for the purposes of their rising
literatures, then first learning revived, and scholars were enabled to
discern from that remoteness the treasures of antiquity. What the Roman
and Grecian multitude could not hear, after the lapse of ages a few
scholars read, and a few scholars only are still reading it.

However much we may admire the orator's occasional bursts of eloquence,
the noblest written words are commonly as far behind or above the
fleeting spoken language as the firmament with its stars is behind
the clouds. There are the stars, and they who can may read them.
The astronomers forever comment on and observe them. They are not
exhalations like our daily colloquies and vaporous breath. What is
called eloquence in the forum is commonly found to be rhetoric in the
study. The orator yields to the inspiration of a transient occasion, and
speaks to the mob before him, to those who can hear him; but the writer,
whose more equable life is his occasion, and who would be distracted
by the event and the crowd which inspire the orator, speaks to the
intellect and health of mankind, to all in any age who can understand
him.

No wonder that Alexander carried the Iliad with him on his expeditions
in a precious casket. A written word is the choicest of relics. It is
something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any
other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may
be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually
breathed from all human lips;--not be represented on canvas or in marble
only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself. The symbol of
an ancient man's thought becomes a modern man's speech. Two thousand
summers have imparted to the monuments of Grecian literature, as to her
marbles, only a maturer golden and autumnal tint, for they have carried
their own serene and celestial atmosphere into all lands to protect them
against the corrosion of time. Books are the treasured wealth of the
world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations. Books, the
oldest and the best, stand naturally and rightfully on the shelves of
every cottage. They have no cause of their own to plead, but while they
enlighten and sustain the reader his common sense will not refuse
them. Their authors are a natural and irresistible aristocracy in
every society, and, more than kings or emperors, exert an influence on
mankind. When the illiterate and perhaps scornful trader has earned by
enterprise and industry his coveted leisure and independence, and is
admitted to the circles of wealth and fashion, he turns inevitably at
last to those still higher but yet inaccessible circles of intellect and
genius, and is sensible only of the imperfection of his culture and the
vanity and insufficiency of all his riches, and further proves his
good sense by the pains which he takes to secure for his children that
intellectual culture whose want he so keenly feels; and thus it is that
he becomes the founder of a family.

Those who have not learned to read the ancient classics in the language
in which they were written must have a very imperfect knowledge of the
history of the human race; for it is remarkable that no transcript of
them has ever been made into any modern tongue, unless our civilization
itself may be regarded as such a transcript. Homer has never yet been
printed in English, nor AEschylus, nor Virgil even--works as refined, as
solidly done, and as beautiful almost as the morning itself; for
later writers, say what we will of their genius, have rarely, if ever,
equalled the elaborate beauty and finish and the lifelong and heroic
literary labors of the ancients. They only talk of forgetting them who
never knew them. It will be soon enough to forget them when we have the
learning and the genius which will enable us to attend to and appreciate
them. That age will be rich indeed when those relics which we call
Classics, and the still older and more than classic but even less known
Scriptures of the nations, shall have still further accumulated, when
the Vaticans shall be filled with Vedas and Zendavestas and Bibles, with
Homers and Dantes and Shakespeares, and all the centuries to come shall
have successively deposited their trophies in the forum of the world. By
such a pile we may hope to scale heaven at last.

The works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind,
for only great poets can read them. They have only been read as the
multitude read the stars, at most astrologically, not astronomically.
Most men have learned to read to serve a paltry convenience, as they
have learned to cipher in order to keep accounts and not be cheated in
trade; but of reading as a noble intellectual exercise they know little
or nothing; yet this only is reading, in a high sense, not that which
lulls us as a luxury and suffers the nobler faculties to sleep the
while, but what we have to stand on tip-toe to read and devote our most
alert and wakeful hours to.

I think that having learned our letters we should read the best that is
in literature, and not be forever repeating our a-b-abs, and words of
one syllable, in the fourth or fifth classes, sitting on the lowest and
foremost form all our lives. Most men are satisfied if they read or hear
read, and perchance have been convicted by the wisdom of one good book,
the Bible, and for the rest of their lives vegetate and dissipate their
faculties in what is called easy reading. There is a work in several
volumes in our Circulating Library entitled "Little Reading," which I
thought referred to a town of that name which I had not been to. There
are those who, like cormorants and ostriches, can digest all sorts of
this, even after the fullest dinner of meats and vegetables, for they
suffer nothing to be wasted. If others are the machines to provide
this provender, they are the machines to read it. They read the nine
thousandth tale about Zebulon and Sophronia, and how they loved as none
had ever loved before, and neither did the course of their true love run
smooth--at any rate, how it did run and stumble, and get up again and
go on! how some poor unfortunate got up on to a steeple, who had better
never have gone up as far as the belfry; and then, having needlessly
got him up there, the happy novelist rings the bell for all the world to
come together and hear, O dear! how he did get down again! For my part,
I think that they had better metamorphose all such aspiring heroes of
universal noveldom into man weather-cocks, as they used to put heroes
among the constellations, and let them swing round there till they are
rusty, and not come down at all to bother honest men with their pranks.
The next time the novelist rings the bell I will not stir though the
meeting-house burn down. "The Skip of the Tip-Toe-Hop, a Romance of the
Middle Ages, by the celebrated author of `Tittle-Tol-Tan,' to appear
in monthly parts; a great rush; don't all come together." All this
they read with saucer eyes, and erect and primitive curiosity, and with
unwearied gizzard, whose corrugations even yet need no sharpening, just
as some little four-year-old bencher his two-cent gilt-covered
edition of Cinderella--without any improvement, that I can see, in the
pronunciation, or accent, or emphasis, or any more skill in extracting
or inserting the moral. The result is dulness of sight, a stagnation of
the vital circulations, and a general deliquium and sloughing off of all
the intellectual faculties. This sort of gingerbread is baked daily and
more sedulously than pure wheat or rye-and-Indian in almost every oven,
and finds a surer market.

The best books are not read even by those who are called good readers.
What does our Concord culture amount to? There is in this town, with a
very few exceptions, no taste for the best or for very good books even
in English literature, whose words all can read and spell. Even the
college-bred and so-called liberally educated men here and elsewhere
have really little or no acquaintance with the English classics; and
as for the recorded wisdom of mankind, the ancient classics and Bibles,
which are accessible to all who will know of them, there are the
feeblest efforts anywhere made to become acquainted with them. I know a
woodchopper, of middle age, who takes a French paper, not for news as he
says, for he is above that, but to "keep himself in practice," he being
a Canadian by birth; and when I ask him what he considers the best thing
he can do in this world, he says, beside this, to keep up and add to
his English. This is about as much as the college-bred generally do or
aspire to do, and they take an English paper for the purpose. One who
has just come from reading perhaps one of the best English books will
find how many with whom he can converse about it? Or suppose he comes
from reading a Greek or Latin classic in the original, whose praises are
familiar even to the so-called illiterate; he will find nobody at all
to speak to, but must keep silence about it. Indeed, there is hardly the
professor in our colleges, who, if he has mastered the difficulties of
the language, has proportionally mastered the difficulties of the wit
and poetry of a Greek poet, and has any sympathy to impart to the
alert and heroic reader; and as for the sacred Scriptures, or Bibles of
mankind, who in this town can tell me even their titles? Most men do not
know that any nation but the Hebrews have had a scripture. A man, any
man, will go considerably out of his way to pick up a silver dollar; but
here are golden words, which the wisest men of antiquity have uttered,
and whose worth the wise of every succeeding age have assured us
of;--and yet we learn to read only as far as Easy Reading, the primers
and class-books, and when we leave school, the "Little Reading," and
story-books, which are for boys and beginners; and our reading, our
conversation and thinking, are all on a very low level, worthy only of
pygmies and manikins.

I aspire to be acquainted with wiser men than this our Concord soil has
produced, whose names are hardly known here. Or shall I hear the name of
Plato and never read his book? As if Plato were my townsman and I never
saw him--my next neighbor and I never heard him speak or attended to
the wisdom of his words. But how actually is it? His Dialogues, which
contain what was immortal in him, lie on the next shelf, and yet I never
read them. We are underbred and low-lived and illiterate; and in this
respect I confess I do not make any very broad distinction between
the illiterateness of my townsman who cannot read at all and the
illiterateness of him who has learned to read only what is for
children and feeble intellects. We should be as good as the worthies of
antiquity, but partly by first knowing how good they were. We are a race
of tit-men, and soar but little higher in our intellectual flights than
the columns of the daily paper.

It is not all books that are as dull as their readers. There are
probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could
really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning or
the spring to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on the face of
things for us. How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the
reading of a book! The book exists for us, perchance, which will explain
our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we
may find somewhere uttered. These same questions that disturb and puzzle
and confound us have in their turn occurred to all the wise men; not one
has been omitted; and each has answered them, according to his ability,
by his words and his life. Moreover, with wisdom we shall learn
liberality. The solitary hired man on a farm in the outskirts of
Concord, who has had his second birth and peculiar religious experience,
and is driven as he believes into the silent gravity and exclusiveness
by his faith, may think it is not true; but Zoroaster, thousands of
years ago, travelled the same road and had the same experience; but
he, being wise, knew it to be universal, and treated his neighbors
accordingly, and is even said to have invented and established worship
among men. Let him humbly commune with Zoroaster then, and through the
liberalizing influence of all the worthies, with Jesus Christ himself,
and let "our church" go by the board.

We boast that we belong to the Nineteenth Century and are making the
most rapid strides of any nation. But consider how little this village
does for its own culture. I do not wish to flatter my townsmen, nor to
be flattered by them, for that will not advance either of us. We need
to be provoked--goaded like oxen, as we are, into a trot. We have a
comparatively decent system of common schools, schools for infants only;
but excepting the half-starved Lyceum in the winter, and latterly
the puny beginning of a library suggested by the State, no school for
ourselves. We spend more on almost any article of bodily aliment or
ailment than on our mental aliment. It is time that we had uncommon
schools, that we did not leave off our education when we begin to be men
and women. It is time that villages were universities, and their elder
inhabitants the fellows of universities, with leisure--if they are,
indeed, so well off--to pursue liberal studies the rest of their lives.
Shall the world be confined to one Paris or one Oxford forever? Cannot
students be boarded here and get a liberal education under the skies of
Concord? Can we not hire some Abelard to lecture to us? Alas! what with
foddering the cattle and tending the store, we are kept from school too
long, and our education is sadly neglected. In this country, the village
should in some respects take the place of the nobleman of Europe. It
should be the patron of the fine arts. It is rich enough. It wants only
the magnanimity and refinement. It can spend money enough on such things
as farmers and traders value, but it is thought Utopian to propose
spending money for things which more intelligent men know to be of
far more worth. This town has spent seventeen thousand dollars on a
town-house, thank fortune or politics, but probably it will not spend so
much on living wit, the true meat to put into that shell, in a hundred
years. The one hundred and twenty-five dollars annually subscribed for a
Lyceum in the winter is better spent than any other equal sum raised in
the town. If we live in the Nineteenth Century, why should we not enjoy
the advantages which the Nineteenth Century offers? Why should our life
be in any respect provincial? If we will read newspapers, why not
skip the gossip of Boston and take the best newspaper in the world at
once?--not be sucking the pap of "neutral family" papers, or browsing
"Olive Branches" here in New England. Let the reports of all the learned
societies come to us, and we will see if they know anything. Why
should we leave it to Harper & Brothers and Redding & Co. to select
our reading? As the nobleman of cultivated taste surrounds himself
with whatever conduces to his culture--genius--learning--wit--books--
paintings--statuary--music--philosophical instruments, and the like; so
let the village do--not stop short at a pedagogue, a parson, a sexton, a
parish library, and three selectmen, because our Pilgrim forefathers got
through a cold winter once on a bleak rock with these. To act
collectively is according to the spirit of our institutions; and I am
confident that, as our circumstances are more flourishing, our means are
greater than the nobleman's. New England can hire all the wise men in
the world to come and teach her, and board them round the while, and not
be provincial at all. That is the uncommon school we want. Instead of
noblemen, let us have noble villages of men. If it is necessary, omit
one bridge over the river, go round a little there, and throw one arch
at least over the darker gulf of ignorance which surrounds us.




Sounds


But while we are confined to books, though the most select and classic,
and read only particular written languages, which are themselves but
dialects and provincial, we are in danger of forgetting the language
which all things and events speak without metaphor, which alone is
copious and standard. Much is published, but little printed. The rays
which stream through the shutter will be no longer remembered when the
shutter is wholly removed. No method nor discipline can supersede the
necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history or
philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society,
or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of
looking always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student
merely, or a seer? Read your fate, see what is before you, and walk on
into futurity.

I did not read books the first summer; I hoed beans. Nay, I often did
better than this. There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice
the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or
hands. I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes, in a summer morning,
having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise
till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs,
in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sing around or
flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at
my west window, or the noise of some traveller's wagon on the distant
highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in those seasons
like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the
hands would have been. They were not time subtracted from my life, but
so much over and above my usual allowance. I realized what the Orientals
mean by contemplation and the forsaking of works. For the most part, I
minded not how the hours went. The day advanced as if to light some
work of mine; it was morning, and lo, now it is evening, and nothing
memorable is accomplished. Instead of singing like the birds, I silently
smiled at my incessant good fortune. As the sparrow had its trill,
sitting on the hickory before my door, so had I my chuckle or suppressed
warble which he might hear out of my nest. My days were not days of the
week, bearing the stamp of any heathen deity, nor were they minced into
hours and fretted by the ticking of a clock; for I lived like the Puri
Indians, of whom it is said that "for yesterday, today, and tomorrow
they have only one word, and they express the variety of meaning by
pointing backward for yesterday forward for tomorrow, and overhead for
the passing day." This was sheer idleness to my fellow-townsmen, no
doubt; but if the birds and flowers had tried me by their standard, I
should not have been found wanting. A man must find his occasions in
himself, it is true. The natural day is very calm, and will hardly
reprove his indolence.

I had this advantage, at least, in my mode of life, over those who were
obliged to look abroad for amusement, to society and the theatre, that
my life itself was become my amusement and never ceased to be novel.
It was a drama of many scenes and without an end. If we were always,
indeed, getting our living, and regulating our lives according to the
last and best mode we had learned, we should never be troubled with
ennui. Follow your genius closely enough, and it will not fail to show
you a fresh prospect every hour. Housework was a pleasant pastime. When
my floor was dirty, I rose early, and, setting all my furniture out of
doors on the grass, bed and bedstead making but one budget, dashed water
on the floor, and sprinkled white sand from the pond on it, and then
with a broom scrubbed it clean and white; and by the time the villagers
had broken their fast the morning sun had dried my house sufficiently to
allow me to move in again, and my meditations were almost uninterupted.
It was pleasant to see my whole household effects out on the grass,
making a little pile like a gypsy's pack, and my three-legged table,
from which I did not remove the books and pen and ink, standing amid the
pines and hickories. They seemed glad to get out themselves, and as if
unwilling to be brought in. I was sometimes tempted to stretch an awning
over them and take my seat there. It was worth the while to see the sun
shine on these things, and hear the free wind blow on them; so much more
interesting most familiar objects look out of doors than in the house. A
bird sits on the next bough, life-everlasting grows under the table,
and blackberry vines run round its legs; pine cones, chestnut burs, and
strawberry leaves are strewn about. It looked as if this was the way
these forms came to be transferred to our furniture, to tables, chairs,
and bedsteads--because they once stood in their midst.

My house was on the side of a hill, immediately on the edge of
the larger wood, in the midst of a young forest of pitch pines and
hickories, and half a dozen rods from the pond, to which a narrow
footpath led down the hill. In my front yard grew the strawberry,
blackberry, and life-everlasting, johnswort and goldenrod, shrub oaks
and sand cherry, blueberry and groundnut. Near the end of May, the sand
cherry (Cerasus pumila) adorned the sides of the path with its delicate
flowers arranged in umbels cylindrically about its short stems, which
last, in the fall, weighed down with goodsized and handsome cherries,
fell over in wreaths like rays on every side. I tasted them out of
compliment to Nature, though they were scarcely palatable. The sumach
(Rhus glabra) grew luxuriantly about the house, pushing up through the
embankment which I had made, and growing five or six feet the first
season. Its broad pinnate tropical leaf was pleasant though strange to
look on. The large buds, suddenly pushing out late in the spring from
dry sticks which had seemed to be dead, developed themselves as by
magic into graceful green and tender boughs, an inch in diameter; and
sometimes, as I sat at my window, so heedlessly did they grow and tax
their weak joints, I heard a fresh and tender bough suddenly fall like
a fan to the ground, when there was not a breath of air stirring, broken
off by its own weight. In August, the large masses of berries, which,
when in flower, had attracted many wild bees, gradually assumed their
bright velvety crimson hue, and by their weight again bent down and
broke the tender limbs.

As I sit at my window this summer afternoon, hawks are circling about my
clearing; the tantivy of wild pigeons, flying by two and threes athwart
my view, or perching restless on the white pine boughs behind my house,
gives a voice to the air; a fish hawk dimples the glassy surface of the
pond and brings up a fish; a mink steals out of the marsh before my door
and seizes a frog by the shore; the sedge is bending under the weight of
the reed-birds flitting hither and thither; and for the last half-hour I
have heard the rattle of railroad cars, now dying away and then reviving
like the beat of a partridge, conveying travellers from Boston to the
country. For I did not live so out of the world as that boy who, as I
hear, was put out to a farmer in the east part of the town, but ere long
ran away and came home again, quite down at the heel and homesick. He
had never seen such a dull and out-of-the-way place; the folks were all
gone off; why, you couldn't even hear the whistle! I doubt if there is
such a place in Massachusetts now:--

      "In truth, our village has become a butt
       For one of those fleet railroad shafts, and o'er
       Our peaceful plain its soothing sound is--Concord."


The Fitchburg Railroad touches the pond about a hundred rods south of
where I dwell. I usually go to the village along its causeway, and am,
as it were, related to society by this link. The men on the freight
trains, who go over the whole length of the road, bow to me as to an old
acquaintance, they pass me so often, and apparently they take me for an
employee; and so I am. I too would fain be a track-repairer somewhere in
the orbit of the earth.

The whistle of the locomotive penetrates my woods summer and winter,
sounding like the scream of a hawk sailing over some farmer's yard,
informing me that many restless city merchants are arriving within the
circle of the town, or adventurous country traders from the other side.
As they come under one horizon, they shout their warning to get off the
track to the other, heard sometimes through the circles of two towns.
Here come your groceries, country; your rations, countrymen! Nor is
there any man so independent on his farm that he can say them nay. And
here's your pay for them! screams the countryman's whistle; timber like
long battering-rams going twenty miles an hour against the city's walls,
and chairs enough to seat all the weary and heavy-laden that dwell
within them. With such huge and lumbering civility the country hands a
chair to the city. All the Indian huckleberry hills are stripped, all
the cranberry meadows are raked into the city. Up comes the cotton, down
goes the woven cloth; up comes the silk, down goes the woollen; up come
the books, but down goes the wit that writes them.

When I meet the engine with its train of cars moving off with planetary
motion--or, rather, like a comet, for the beholder knows not if with
that velocity and with that direction it will ever revisit this system,
since its orbit does not look like a returning curve--with its steam
cloud like a banner streaming behind in golden and silver wreaths, like
many a downy cloud which I have seen, high in the heavens, unfolding its
masses to the light--as if this traveling demigod, this cloud-compeller,
would ere long take the sunset sky for the livery of his train; when
I hear the iron horse make the hills echo with his snort like thunder,
shaking the earth with his feet, and breathing fire and smoke from his
nostrils (what kind of winged horse or fiery dragon they will put into
the new Mythology I don't know), it seems as if the earth had got a
race now worthy to inhabit it. If all were as it seems, and men made the
elements their servants for noble ends! If the cloud that hangs over the
engine were the perspiration of heroic deeds, or as beneficent as that
which floats over the farmer's fields, then the elements and Nature
herself would cheerfully accompany men on their errands and be their
escort.

I watch the passage of the morning cars with the same feeling that I
do the rising of the sun, which is hardly more regular. Their train
of clouds stretching far behind and rising higher and higher, going to
heaven while the cars are going to Boston, conceals the sun for a minute
and casts my distant field into the shade, a celestial train beside
which the petty train of cars which hugs the earth is but the barb
of the spear. The stabler of the iron horse was up early this winter
morning by the light of the stars amid the mountains, to fodder and
harness his steed. Fire, too, was awakened thus early to put the vital
heat in him and get him off. If the enterprise were as innocent as it is
early! If the snow lies deep, they strap on his snowshoes, and, with the
giant plow, plow a furrow from the mountains to the seaboard, in which
the cars, like a following drill-barrow, sprinkle all the restless men
and floating merchandise in the country for seed. All day the fire-steed
flies over the country, stopping only that his master may rest, and I am
awakened by his tramp and defiant snort at midnight, when in some remote
glen in the woods he fronts the elements incased in ice and snow; and he
will reach his stall only with the morning star, to start once more on
his travels without rest or slumber. Or perchance, at evening, I hear
him in his stable blowing off the superfluous energy of the day, that he
may calm his nerves and cool his liver and brain for a few hours of
iron slumber. If the enterprise were as heroic and commanding as it is
protracted and unwearied!

Far through unfrequented woods on the confines of towns, where once only
the hunter penetrated by day, in the darkest night dart these bright
saloons without the knowledge of their inhabitants; this moment stopping
at some brilliant station-house in town or city, where a social crowd
is gathered, the next in the Dismal Swamp, scaring the owl and fox. The
startings and arrivals of the cars are now the epochs in the village
day. They go and come with such regularity and precision, and their
whistle can be heard so far, that the farmers set their clocks by them,
and thus one well-conducted institution regulates a whole country.
Have not men improved somewhat in punctuality since the railroad was
invented? Do they not talk and think faster in the depot than they did
in the stage-office? There is something electrifying in the atmosphere
of the former place. I have been astonished at the miracles it has
wrought; that some of my neighbors, who, I should have prophesied, once
for all, would never get to Boston by so prompt a conveyance, are on
hand when the bell rings. To do things "railroad fashion" is now the
byword; and it is worth the while to be warned so often and so sincerely
by any power to get off its track. There is no stopping to read the
riot act, no firing over the heads of the mob, in this case. We have
constructed a fate, an Atropos, that never turns aside. (Let that be
the name of your engine.) Men are advertised that at a certain hour and
minute these bolts will be shot toward particular points of the compass;
yet it interferes with no man's business, and the children go to school
on the other track. We live the steadier for it. We are all educated
thus to be sons of Tell. The air is full of invisible bolts. Every path
but your own is the path of fate. Keep on your own track, then.

What recommends commerce to me is its enterprise and bravery. It does
not clasp its hands and pray to Jupiter. I see these men every day go
about their business with more or less courage and content, doing more
even than they suspect, and perchance better employed than they could
have consciously devised. I am less affected by their heroism who stood
up for half an hour in the front line at Buena Vista, than by the steady
and cheerful valor of the men who inhabit the snowplow for their winter
quarters; who have not merely the three-o'-clock-in-the-morning courage,
which Bonaparte thought was the rarest, but whose courage does not go to
rest so early, who go to sleep only when the storm sleeps or the sinews
of their iron steed are frozen. On this morning of the Great Snow,
perchance, which is still raging and chilling men's blood, I bear the
muffled tone of their engine bell from out the fog bank of their chilled
breath, which announces that the cars are coming, without long delay,
notwithstanding the veto of a New England northeast snow-storm, and
I behold the plowmen covered with snow and rime, their heads peering,
above the mould-board which is turning down other than daisies and the
nests of field mice, like bowlders of the Sierra Nevada, that occupy an
outside place in the universe.

Commerce is unexpectedly confident and serene, alert, adventurous, and
unwearied. It is very natural in its methods withal, far more so than
many fantastic enterprises and sentimental experiments, and hence its
singular success. I am refreshed and expanded when the freight train
rattles past me, and I smell the stores which go dispensing their odors
all the way from Long Wharf to Lake Champlain, reminding me of foreign
parts, of coral reefs, and Indian oceans, and tropical climes, and the
extent of the globe. I feel more like a citizen of the world at the
sight of the palm-leaf which will cover so many flaxen New England heads
the next summer, the Manilla hemp and cocoanut husks, the old junk,
gunny bags, scrap iron, and rusty nails. This carload of torn sails is
more legible and interesting now than if they should be wrought into
paper and printed books. Who can write so graphically the history of
the storms they have weathered as these rents have done? They are
proof-sheets which need no correction. Here goes lumber from the Maine
woods, which did not go out to sea in the last freshet, risen four
dollars on the thousand because of what did go out or was split up;
pine, spruce, cedar--first, second, third, and fourth qualities,
so lately all of one quality, to wave over the bear, and moose, and
caribou. Next rolls Thomaston lime, a prime lot, which will get far
among the hills before it gets slacked. These rags in bales, of all hues
and qualities, the lowest condition to which cotton and linen descend,
the final result of dress--of patterns which are now no longer cried up,
unless it be in Milwaukee, as those splendid articles, English, French,
or American prints, ginghams, muslins, etc., gathered from all quarters
both of fashion and poverty, going to become paper of one color or a
few shades only, on which, forsooth, will be written tales of real life,
high and low, and founded on fact! This closed car smells of salt fish,
the strong New England and commercial scent, reminding me of the Grand
Banks and the fisheries. Who has not seen a salt fish, thoroughly
cured for this world, so that nothing can spoil it, and putting, the
perseverance of the saints to the blush? with which you may sweep or
pave the streets, and split your kindlings, and the teamster shelter
himself and his lading against sun, wind, and rain behind it--and the
trader, as a Concord trader once did, hang it up by his door for a sign
when he commences business, until at last his oldest customer cannot
tell surely whether it be animal, vegetable, or mineral, and yet it
shall be as pure as a snowflake, and if it be put into a pot and boiled,
will come out an excellent dun-fish for a Saturday's dinner. Next
Spanish hides, with the tails still preserving their twist and the angle
of elevation they had when the oxen that wore them were careering over
the pampas of the Spanish Main--a type of all obstinacy, and evincing
how almost hopeless and incurable are all constitutional vices. I
confess, that practically speaking, when I have learned a man's real
disposition, I have no hopes of changing it for the better or worse
in this state of existence. As the Orientals say, "A cur's tail may be
warmed, and pressed, and bound round with ligatures, and after a twelve
years' labor bestowed upon it, still it will retain its natural form."
The only effectual cure for such inveteracies as these tails exhibit is
to make glue of them, which I believe is what is usually done with them,
and then they will stay put and stick. Here is a hogshead of molasses
or of brandy directed to John Smith, Cuttingsville, Vermont, some
trader among the Green Mountains, who imports for the farmers near his
clearing, and now perchance stands over his bulkhead and thinks of
the last arrivals on the coast, how they may affect the price for him,
telling his customers this moment, as he has told them twenty times
before this morning, that he expects some by the next train of prime
quality. It is advertised in the Cuttingsville Times.

While these things go up other things come down. Warned by the whizzing
sound, I look up from my book and see some tall pine, hewn on far
northern hills, which has winged its way over the Green Mountains and
the Connecticut, shot like an arrow through the township within ten
minutes, and scarce another eye beholds it; going

                     "to be the mast
                      Of some great ammiral."

And hark! here comes the cattle-train bearing the cattle of a thousand
hills, sheepcots, stables, and cow-yards in the air, drovers with their
sticks, and shepherd boys in the midst of their flocks, all but the
mountain pastures, whirled along like leaves blown from the mountains by
the September gales. The air is filled with the bleating of calves and
sheep, and the hustling of oxen, as if a pastoral valley were going by.
When the old bell-wether at the head rattles his bell, the mountains
do indeed skip like rams and the little hills like lambs. A carload
of drovers, too, in the midst, on a level with their droves now, their
vocation gone, but still clinging to their useless sticks as their badge
of office. But their dogs, where are they? It is a stampede to them;
they are quite thrown out; they have lost the scent. Methinks I hear
them barking behind the Peterboro' Hills, or panting up the western
slope of the Green Mountains. They will not be in at the death. Their
vocation, too, is gone. Their fidelity and sagacity are below par now.
They will slink back to their kennels in disgrace, or perchance run wild
and strike a league with the wolf and the fox. So is your pastoral life
whirled past and away. But the bell rings, and I must get off the track
and let the cars go by;--

                  What's the railroad to me?
                  I never go to see
                  Where it ends.
                  It fills a few hollows,
                  And makes banks for the swallows,
                  It sets the sand a-blowing,
                  And the blackberries a-growing,

but I cross it like a cart-path in the woods. I will not have my eyes
put out and my ears spoiled by its smoke and steam and hissing.

Now that the cars are gone by and all the restless world with them, and
the fishes in the pond no longer feel their rumbling, I am more alone
than ever. For the rest of the long afternoon, perhaps, my meditations
are interrupted only by the faint rattle of a carriage or team along the
distant highway.

Sometimes, on Sundays, I heard the bells, the Lincoln, Acton, Bedford,
or Concord bell, when the wind was favorable, a faint, sweet, and, as
it were, natural melody, worth importing into the wilderness. At
a sufficient distance over the woods this sound acquires a certain
vibratory hum, as if the pine needles in the horizon were the strings of
a harp which it swept. All sound heard at the greatest possible distance
produces one and the same effect, a vibration of the universal lyre,
just as the intervening atmosphere makes a distant ridge of earth
interesting to our eyes by the azure tint it imparts to it. There came
to me in this case a melody which the air had strained, and which had
conversed with every leaf and needle of the wood, that portion of the
sound which the elements had taken up and modulated and echoed from vale
to vale. The echo is, to some extent, an original sound, and therein
is the magic and charm of it. It is not merely a repetition of what was
worth repeating in the bell, but partly the voice of the wood; the same
trivial words and notes sung by a wood-nymph.

At evening, the distant lowing of some cow in the horizon beyond the
woods sounded sweet and melodious, and at first I would mistake it for
the voices of certain minstrels by whom I was sometimes serenaded, who
might be straying over hill and dale; but soon I was not unpleasantly
disappointed when it was prolonged into the cheap and natural music of
the cow. I do not mean to be satirical, but to express my appreciation
of those youths' singing, when I state that I perceived clearly that
it was akin to the music of the cow, and they were at length one
articulation of Nature.

Regularly at half-past seven, in one part of the summer, after the
evening train had gone by, the whip-poor-wills chanted their vespers for
half an hour, sitting on a stump by my door, or upon the ridge-pole of
the house. They would begin to sing almost with as much precision as a
clock, within five minutes of a particular time, referred to the setting
of the sun, every evening. I had a rare opportunity to become acquainted
with their habits. Sometimes I heard four or five at once in different
parts of the wood, by accident one a bar behind another, and so near me
that I distinguished not only the cluck after each note, but often that
singular buzzing sound like a fly in a spider's web, only proportionally
louder. Sometimes one would circle round and round me in the woods a few
feet distant as if tethered by a string, when probably I was near its
eggs. They sang at intervals throughout the night, and were again as
musical as ever just before and about dawn.

When other birds are still, the screech owls take up the strain, like
mourning women their ancient u-lu-lu. Their dismal scream is truly Ben
Jonsonian. Wise midnight hags! It is no honest and blunt tu-whit tu-who
of the poets, but, without jesting, a most solemn graveyard ditty, the
mutual consolations of suicide lovers remembering the pangs and the
delights of supernal love in the infernal groves. Yet I love to hear
their wailing, their doleful responses, trilled along the woodside;
reminding me sometimes of music and singing birds; as if it were the
dark and tearful side of music, the regrets and sighs that would fain be
sung. They are the spirits, the low spirits and melancholy forebodings,
of fallen souls that once in human shape night-walked the earth and did
the deeds of darkness, now expiating their sins with their wailing hymns
or threnodies in the scenery of their transgressions. They give me a
new sense of the variety and capacity of that nature which is our common
dwelling. Oh-o-o-o-o that I never had been bor-r-r-r-n! sighs one on
this side of the pond, and circles with the restlessness of despair
to some new perch on the gray oaks. Then--that I never had been
bor-r-r-r-n! echoes another on the farther side with tremulous
sincerity, and--bor-r-r-r-n! comes faintly from far in the Lincoln
woods.

I was also serenaded by a hooting owl. Near at hand you could fancy
it the most melancholy sound in Nature, as if she meant by this to
stereotype and make permanent in her choir the dying moans of a human
being--some poor weak relic of mortality who has left hope behind, and
howls like an animal, yet with human sobs, on entering the dark valley,
made more awful by a certain gurgling melodiousness--I find myself
beginning with the letters gl when I try to imitate it--expressive of
a mind which has reached the gelatinous, mildewy stage in the
mortification of all healthy and courageous thought. It reminded me
of ghouls and idiots and insane howlings. But now one answers from far
woods in a strain made really melodious by distance--Hoo hoo hoo,
hoorer hoo; and indeed for the most part it suggested only pleasing
associations, whether heard by day or night, summer or winter.

I rejoice that there are owls. Let them do the idiotic and maniacal
hooting for men. It is a sound admirably suited to swamps and twilight
woods which no day illustrates, suggesting a vast and undeveloped nature
which men have not recognized. They represent the stark twilight and
unsatisfied thoughts which all have. All day the sun has shone on the
surface of some savage swamp, where the single spruce stands hung with
usnea lichens, and small hawks circulate above, and the chickadee lisps
amid the evergreens, and the partridge and rabbit skulk beneath; but now
a more dismal and fitting day dawns, and a different race of creatures
awakes to express the meaning of Nature there.

Late in the evening I heard the distant rumbling of wagons over
bridges--a sound heard farther than almost any other at night--the
baying of dogs, and sometimes again the lowing of some disconsolate cow
in a distant barn-yard. In the mean-while all the shore rang with the
trump of bullfrogs, the sturdy spirits of ancient wine-bibbers and
wassailers, still unrepentant, trying to sing a catch in their Stygian
lake--if the Walden nymphs will pardon the comparison, for though there
are almost no weeds, there are frogs there--who would fain keep up the
hilarious rules of their old festal tables, though their voices have
waxed hoarse and solemnly grave, mocking at mirth, and the wine has lost
its flavor, and become only liquor to distend their paunches, and sweet
intoxication never comes to drown the memory of the past, but mere
saturation and waterloggedness and distention. The most aldermanic, with
his chin upon a heart-leaf, which serves for a napkin to his drooling
chaps, under this northern shore quaffs a deep draught of the
once scorned water, and passes round the cup with the ejaculation
tr-r-r-oonk, tr-r-r--oonk, tr-r-r-oonk! and straightway comes over the
water from some distant cove the same password repeated, where the
next in seniority and girth has gulped down to his mark; and when this
observance has made the circuit of the shores, then ejaculates the
master of ceremonies, with satisfaction, tr-r-r-oonk! and each in
his turn repeats the same down to the least distended, leakiest, and
flabbiest paunched, that there be no mistake; and then the howl goes
round again and again, until the sun disperses the morning mist, and
only the patriarch is not under the pond, but vainly bellowing troonk
from time to time, and pausing for a reply.

I am not sure that I ever heard the sound of cock-crowing from my
clearing, and I thought that it might be worth the while to keep a
cockerel for his music merely, as a singing bird. The note of this once
wild Indian pheasant is certainly the most remarkable of any bird's, and
if they could be naturalized without being domesticated, it would soon
become the most famous sound in our woods, surpassing the clangor of the
goose and the hooting of the owl; and then imagine the cackling of the
hens to fill the pauses when their lords' clarions rested! No wonder
that man added this bird to his tame stock--to say nothing of the eggs
and drumsticks. To walk in a winter morning in a wood where these birds
abounded, their native woods, and hear the wild cockerels crow on the
trees, clear and shrill for miles over the resounding earth, drowning
the feebler notes of other birds--think of it! It would put nations on
the alert. Who would not be early to rise, and rise earlier and earlier
every successive day of his life, till he became unspeakably healthy,
wealthy, and wise? This foreign bird's note is celebrated by the poets
of all countries along with the notes of their native songsters. All
climates agree with brave Chanticleer. He is more indigenous even than
the natives. His health is ever good, his lungs are sound, his spirits
never flag. Even the sailor on the Atlantic and Pacific is awakened by
his voice; but its shrill sound never roused me from my slumbers. I kept
neither dog, cat, cow, pig, nor hens, so that you would have said
there was a deficiency of domestic sounds; neither the churn, nor the
spinning-wheel, nor even the singing of the kettle, nor the hissing of
the urn, nor children crying, to comfort one. An old-fashioned man would
have lost his senses or died of ennui before this. Not even rats in the
wall, for they were starved out, or rather were never baited in--only
squirrels on the roof and under the floor, a whip-poor-will on the
ridge-pole, a blue jay screaming beneath the window, a hare or woodchuck
under the house, a screech owl or a cat owl behind it, a flock of wild
geese or a laughing loon on the pond, and a fox to bark in the night.
Not even a lark or an oriole, those mild plantation birds, ever visited
my clearing. No cockerels to crow nor hens to cackle in the yard. No
yard! but unfenced nature reaching up to your very sills. A young forest
growing up under your meadows, and wild sumachs and blackberry vines
breaking through into your cellar; sturdy pitch pines rubbing and
creaking against the shingles for want of room, their roots reaching
quite under the house. Instead of a scuttle or a blind blown off in the
gale--a pine tree snapped off or torn up by the roots behind your
house for fuel. Instead of no path to the front-yard gate in the Great
Snow--no gate--no front-yard--and no path to the civilized world.




Solitude


This is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, and
imbibes delight through every pore. I go and come with a strange liberty
in Nature, a part of herself. As I walk along the stony shore of the
pond in my shirt-sleeves, though it is cool as well as cloudy and windy,
and I see nothing special to attract me, all the elements are unusually
congenial to me. The bullfrogs trump to usher in the night, and the note
of the whip-poor-will is borne on the rippling wind from over the water.
Sympathy with the fluttering alder and poplar leaves almost takes away
my breath; yet, like the lake, my serenity is rippled but not ruffled.
These small waves raised by the evening wind are as remote from storm
as the smooth reflecting surface. Though it is now dark, the wind still
blows and roars in the wood, the waves still dash, and some creatures
lull the rest with their notes. The repose is never complete. The
wildest animals do not repose, but seek their prey now; the fox, and
skunk, and rabbit, now roam the fields and woods without fear. They are
Nature's watchmen--links which connect the days of animated life.

When I return to my house I find that visitors have been there and left
their cards, either a bunch of flowers, or a wreath of evergreen, or a
name in pencil on a yellow walnut leaf or a chip. They who come rarely
to the woods take some little piece of the forest into their hands
to play with by the way, which they leave, either intentionally or
accidentally. One has peeled a willow wand, woven it into a ring, and
dropped it on my table. I could always tell if visitors had called in
my absence, either by the bended twigs or grass, or the print of their
shoes, and generally of what sex or age or quality they were by some
slight trace left, as a flower dropped, or a bunch of grass plucked and
thrown away, even as far off as the railroad, half a mile distant, or by
the lingering odor of a cigar or pipe. Nay, I was frequently notified of
the passage of a traveller along the highway sixty rods off by the scent
of his pipe.

There is commonly sufficient space about us. Our horizon is never quite
at our elbows. The thick wood is not just at our door, nor the pond, but
somewhat is always clearing, familiar and worn by us, appropriated and
fenced in some way, and reclaimed from Nature. For what reason have I
this vast range and circuit, some square miles of unfrequented forest,
for my privacy, abandoned to me by men? My nearest neighbor is a mile
distant, and no house is visible from any place but the hill-tops within
half a mile of my own. I have my horizon bounded by woods all to myself;
a distant view of the railroad where it touches the pond on the one
hand, and of the fence which skirts the woodland road on the other. But
for the most part it is as solitary where I live as on the prairies. It
is as much Asia or Africa as New England. I have, as it were, my own sun
and moon and stars, and a little world all to myself. At night there was
never a traveller passed my house, or knocked at my door, more than if
I were the first or last man; unless it were in the spring, when at long
intervals some came from the village to fish for pouts--they plainly
fished much more in the Walden Pond of their own natures, and baited
their hooks with darkness--but they soon retreated, usually with light
baskets, and left "the world to darkness and to me," and the black
kernel of the night was never profaned by any human neighborhood. I
believe that men are generally still a little afraid of the dark,
though the witches are all hung, and Christianity and candles have been
introduced.

Yet I experienced sometimes that the most sweet and tender, the most
innocent and encouraging society may be found in any natural object,
even for the poor misanthrope and most melancholy man. There can be no
very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature and has
his senses still. There was never yet such a storm but it was AEolian
music to a healthy and innocent ear. Nothing can rightly compel a simple
and brave man to a vulgar sadness. While I enjoy the friendship of the
seasons I trust that nothing can make life a burden to me. The gentle
rain which waters my beans and keeps me in the house today is not drear
and melancholy, but good for me too. Though it prevents my hoeing them,
it is of far more worth than my hoeing. If it should continue so long as
to cause the seeds to rot in the ground and destroy the potatoes in the
low lands, it would still be good for the grass on the uplands, and,
being good for the grass, it would be good for me. Sometimes, when I
compare myself with other men, it seems as if I were more favored by the
gods than they, beyond any deserts that I am conscious of; as if I had
a warrant and surety at their hands which my fellows have not, and were
especially guided and guarded. I do not flatter myself, but if it be
possible they flatter me. I have never felt lonesome, or in the least
oppressed by a sense of solitude, but once, and that was a few weeks
after I came to the woods, when, for an hour, I doubted if the near
neighborhood of man was not essential to a serene and healthy life. To
be alone was something unpleasant. But I was at the same time conscious
of a slight insanity in my mood, and seemed to foresee my recovery.
In the midst of a gentle rain while these thoughts prevailed, I was
suddenly sensible of such sweet and beneficent society in Nature, in
the very pattering of the drops, and in every sound and sight around my
house, an infinite and unaccountable friendliness all at once like
an atmosphere sustaining me, as made the fancied advantages of human
neighborhood insignificant, and I have never thought of them since.
Every little pine needle expanded and swelled with sympathy and
befriended me. I was so distinctly made aware of the presence of
something kindred to me, even in scenes which we are accustomed to call
wild and dreary, and also that the nearest of blood to me and humanest
was not a person nor a villager, that I thought no place could ever be
strange to me again.

          "Mourning untimely consumes the sad;
           Few are their days in the land of the living,
           Beautiful daughter of Toscar."


Some of my pleasantest hours were during the long rain-storms in the
spring or fall, which confined me to the house for the afternoon as well
as the forenoon, soothed by their ceaseless roar and pelting; when an
early twilight ushered in a long evening in which many thoughts had time
to take root and unfold themselves. In those driving northeast rains
which tried the village houses so, when the maids stood ready with mop
and pail in front entries to keep the deluge out, I sat behind my door
in my little house, which was all entry, and thoroughly enjoyed its
protection. In one heavy thunder-shower the lightning struck a large
pitch pine across the pond, making a very conspicuous and perfectly
regular spiral groove from top to bottom, an inch or more deep, and four
or five inches wide, as you would groove a walking-stick. I passed it
again the other day, and was struck with awe on looking up and beholding
that mark, now more distinct than ever, where a terrific and resistless
bolt came down out of the harmless sky eight years ago. Men frequently
say to me, "I should think you would feel lonesome down there, and want
to be nearer to folks, rainy and snowy days and nights especially." I
am tempted to reply to such--This whole earth which we inhabit is but
a point in space. How far apart, think you, dwell the two most distant
inhabitants of yonder star, the breadth of whose disk cannot be
appreciated by our instruments? Why should I feel lonely? is not our
planet in the Milky Way? This which you put seems to me not to be the
most important question. What sort of space is that which separates
a man from his fellows and makes him solitary? I have found that no
exertion of the legs can bring two minds much nearer to one another.
What do we want most to dwell near to? Not to many men surely,
the depot, the post-office, the bar-room, the meeting-house, the
school-house, the grocery, Beacon Hill, or the Five Points, where men
most congregate, but to the perennial source of our life, whence in all
our experience we have found that to issue, as the willow stands near
the water and sends out its roots in that direction. This will vary with
different natures, but this is the place where a wise man will dig
his cellar.... I one evening overtook one of my townsmen, who has
accumulated what is called "a handsome property"--though I never got a
fair view of it--on the Walden road, driving a pair of cattle to market,
who inquired of me how I could bring my mind to give up so many of the
comforts of life. I answered that I was very sure I liked it passably
well; I was not joking. And so I went home to my bed, and left him
to pick his way through the darkness and the mud to Brighton--or
Bright-town--which place he would reach some time in the morning.

Any prospect of awakening or coming to life to a dead man makes
indifferent all times and places. The place where that may occur is
always the same, and indescribably pleasant to all our senses. For the
most part we allow only outlying and transient circumstances to make our
occasions. They are, in fact, the cause of our distraction. Nearest
to all things is that power which fashions their being. Next to us the
grandest laws are continually being executed. Next to us is not the
workman whom we have hired, with whom we love so well to talk, but the
workman whose work we are.

"How vast and profound is the influence of the subtile powers of Heaven
and of Earth!"

"We seek to perceive them, and we do not see them; we seek to hear them,
and we do not hear them; identified with the substance of things, they
cannot be separated from them."

"They cause that in all the universe men purify and sanctify their
hearts, and clothe themselves in their holiday garments to offer
sacrifices and oblations to their ancestors. It is an ocean of subtile
intelligences. They are everywhere, above us, on our left, on our right;
they environ us on all sides."

We are the subjects of an experiment which is not a little interesting
to me. Can we not do without the society of our gossips a little while
under these circumstances--have our own thoughts to cheer us? Confucius
says truly, "Virtue does not remain as an abandoned orphan; it must of
necessity have neighbors."

With thinking we may be beside ourselves in a sane sense. By a
conscious effort of the mind we can stand aloof from actions and their
consequences; and all things, good and bad, go by us like a torrent. We
are not wholly involved in Nature. I may be either the driftwood in the
stream, or Indra in the sky looking down on it. I may be affected by a
theatrical exhibition; on the other hand, I may not be affected by an
actual event which appears to concern me much more. I only know myself
as a human entity; the scene, so to speak, of thoughts and affections;
and am sensible of a certain doubleness by which I can stand as remote
from myself as from another. However intense my experience, I am
conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it
were, is not a part of me, but spectator, sharing no experience, but
taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play,
it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It
was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was
concerned. This doubleness may easily make us poor neighbors and friends
sometimes.

I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in
company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love
to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as
solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among
men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is
always alone, let him be where he will. Solitude is not measured by the
miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows. The really
diligent student in one of the crowded hives of Cambridge College is as
solitary as a dervish in the desert. The farmer can work alone in the
field or the woods all day, hoeing or chopping, and not feel lonesome,
because he is employed; but when he comes home at night he cannot sit
down in a room alone, at the mercy of his thoughts, but must be where he
can "see the folks," and recreate, and, as he thinks, remunerate himself
for his day's solitude; and hence he wonders how the student can sit
alone in the house all night and most of the day without ennui and "the
blues"; but he does not realize that the student, though in the house,
is still at work in his field, and chopping in his woods, as the farmer
in his, and in turn seeks the same recreation and society that the
latter does, though it may be a more condensed form of it.

Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not
having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at
meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that old
musty cheese that we are. We have had to agree on a certain set of
rules, called etiquette and politeness, to make this frequent meeting
tolerable and that we need not come to open war. We meet at the
post-office, and at the sociable, and about the fireside every night;
we live thick and are in each other's way, and stumble over one another,
and I think that we thus lose some respect for one another.
Certainly less frequency would suffice for all important and hearty
communications. Consider the girls in a factory--never alone, hardly in
their dreams. It would be better if there were but one inhabitant to
a square mile, as where I live. The value of a man is not in his skin,
that we should touch him.

I have heard of a man lost in the woods and dying of famine and
exhaustion at the foot of a tree, whose loneliness was relieved by the
grotesque visions with which, owing to bodily weakness, his diseased
imagination surrounded him, and which he believed to be real. So also,
owing to bodily and mental health and strength, we may be continually
cheered by a like but more normal and natural society, and come to know
that we are never alone.

I have a great deal of company in my house; especially in the morning,
when nobody calls. Let me suggest a few comparisons, that some one may
convey an idea of my situation. I am no more lonely than the loon in the
pond that laughs so loud, or than Walden Pond itself. What company has
that lonely lake, I pray? And yet it has not the blue devils, but the
blue angels in it, in the azure tint of its waters. The sun is alone,
except in thick weather, when there sometimes appear to be two, but one
is a mock sun. God is alone--but the devil, he is far from being alone;
he sees a great deal of company; he is legion. I am no more lonely than
a single mullein or dandelion in a pasture, or a bean leaf, or sorrel,
or a horse-fly, or a bumblebee. I am no more lonely than the Mill Brook,
or a weathercock, or the north star, or the south wind, or an April
shower, or a January thaw, or the first spider in a new house.

I have occasional visits in the long winter evenings, when the snow
falls fast and the wind howls in the wood, from an old settler and
original proprietor, who is reported to have dug Walden Pond, and stoned
it, and fringed it with pine woods; who tells me stories of old time
and of new eternity; and between us we manage to pass a cheerful evening
with social mirth and pleasant views of things, even without apples
or cider--a most wise and humorous friend, whom I love much, who keeps
himself more secret than ever did Goffe or Whalley; and though he is
thought to be dead, none can show where he is buried. An elderly dame,
too, dwells in my neighborhood, invisible to most persons, in whose
odorous herb garden I love to stroll sometimes, gathering simples and
listening to her fables; for she has a genius of unequalled fertility,
and her memory runs back farther than mythology, and she can tell me the
original of every fable, and on what fact every one is founded, for the
incidents occurred when she was young. A ruddy and lusty old dame, who
delights in all weathers and seasons, and is likely to outlive all her
children yet.

The indescribable innocence and beneficence of Nature--of sun and wind
and rain, of summer and winter--such health, such cheer, they afford
forever! and such sympathy have they ever with our race, that all Nature
would be affected, and the sun's brightness fade, and the winds would
sigh humanely, and the clouds rain tears, and the woods shed their
leaves and put on mourning in midsummer, if any man should ever for a
just cause grieve. Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I
not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?

What is the pill which will keep us well, serene, contented? Not my or
thy great-grandfather's, but our great-grandmother Nature's universal,
vegetable, botanic medicines, by which she has kept herself young
always, outlived so many old Parrs in her day, and fed her health with
their decaying fatness. For my panacea, instead of one of those quack
vials of a mixture dipped from Acheron and the Dead Sea, which come out
of those long shallow black-schooner looking wagons which we sometimes
see made to carry bottles, let me have a draught of undiluted morning
air. Morning air! If men will not drink of this at the fountainhead
of the day, why, then, we must even bottle up some and sell it in the
shops, for the benefit of those who have lost their subscription ticket
to morning time in this world. But remember, it will not keep quite till
noonday even in the coolest cellar, but drive out the stopples long
ere that and follow westward the steps of Aurora. I am no worshipper of
Hygeia, who was the daughter of that old herb-doctor AEsculapius, and
who is represented on monuments holding a serpent in one hand, and in
the other a cup out of which the serpent sometimes drinks; but rather
of Hebe, cup-bearer to Jupiter, who was the daughter of Juno and wild
lettuce, and who had the power of restoring gods and men to the vigor of
youth. She was probably the only thoroughly sound-conditioned, healthy,
and robust young lady that ever walked the globe, and wherever she came
it was spring.




Visitors


I think that I love society as much as most, and am ready enough to
fasten myself like a bloodsucker for the time to any full-blooded man
that comes in my way. I am naturally no hermit, but might possibly sit
out the sturdiest frequenter of the bar-room, if my business called me
thither.

I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship,
three for society. When visitors came in larger and unexpected
numbers there was but the third chair for them all, but they generally
economized the room by standing up. It is surprising how many great men
and women a small house will contain. I have had twenty-five or thirty
souls, with their bodies, at once under my roof, and yet we often parted
without being aware that we had come very near to one another. Many
of our houses, both public and private, with their almost innumerable
apartments, their huge halls and their cellars for the storage of wines
and other munitions of peace, appear to be extravagantly large for their
inhabitants. They are so vast and magnificent that the latter seem to be
only vermin which infest them. I am surprised when the herald blows his
summons before some Tremont or Astor or Middlesex House, to see come
creeping out over the piazza for all inhabitants a ridiculous mouse,
which soon again slinks into some hole in the pavement.

One inconvenience I sometimes experienced in so small a house, the
difficulty of getting to a sufficient distance from my guest when we
began to utter the big thoughts in big words. You want room for your
thoughts to get into sailing trim and run a course or two before they
make their port. The bullet of your thought must have overcome its
lateral and ricochet motion and fallen into its last and steady course
before it reaches the ear of the hearer, else it may plow out again
through the side of his head. Also, our sentences wanted room to unfold
and form their columns in the interval. Individuals, like nations, must
have suitable broad and natural boundaries, even a considerable neutral
ground, between them. I have found it a singular luxury to talk across
the pond to a companion on the opposite side. In my house we were so
near that we could not begin to hear--we could not speak low enough to
be heard; as when you throw two stones into calm water so near that they
break each other's undulations. If we are merely loquacious and loud
talkers, then we can afford to stand very near together, cheek by
jowl, and feel each other's breath; but if we speak reservedly and
thoughtfully, we want to be farther apart, that all animal heat and
moisture may have a chance to evaporate. If we would enjoy the most
intimate society with that in each of us which is without, or above,
being spoken to, we must not only be silent, but commonly so far apart
bodily that we cannot possibly hear each other's voice in any case.
Referred to this standard, speech is for the convenience of those who
are hard of hearing; but there are many fine things which we cannot say
if we have to shout. As the conversation began to assume a loftier and
grander tone, we gradually shoved our chairs farther apart till they
touched the wall in opposite corners, and then commonly there was not
room enough.

My "best" room, however, my withdrawing room, always ready for company,
on whose carpet the sun rarely fell, was the pine wood behind my house.
Thither in summer days, when distinguished guests came, I took them, and
a priceless domestic swept the floor and dusted the furniture and kept
the things in order.

If one guest came he sometimes partook of my frugal meal, and it was no
interruption to conversation to be stirring a hasty-pudding, or
watching the rising and maturing of a loaf of bread in the ashes, in the
meanwhile. But if twenty came and sat in my house there was nothing said
about dinner, though there might be bread enough for two, more than if
eating were a forsaken habit; but we naturally practised abstinence; and
this was never felt to be an offence against hospitality, but the most
proper and considerate course. The waste and decay of physical life,
which so often needs repair, seemed miraculously retarded in such a
case, and the vital vigor stood its ground. I could entertain thus a
thousand as well as twenty; and if any ever went away disappointed or
hungry from my house when they found me at home, they may depend upon
it that I sympathized with them at least. So easy is it, though many
housekeepers doubt it, to establish new and better customs in the place
of the old. You need not rest your reputation on the dinners you give.
For my own part, I was never so effectually deterred from frequenting a
man's house, by any kind of Cerberus whatever, as by the parade one made
about dining me, which I took to be a very polite and roundabout hint
never to trouble him so again. I think I shall never revisit those
scenes. I should be proud to have for the motto of my cabin those lines
of Spenser which one of my visitors inscribed on a yellow walnut leaf
for a card:--


       "Arrived there, the little house they fill,
           Ne looke for entertainment where none was;
        Rest is their feast, and all things at their will:
           The noblest mind the best contentment has."


When Winslow, afterward governor of the Plymouth Colony, went with a
companion on a visit of ceremony to Massasoit on foot through the woods,
and arrived tired and hungry at his lodge, they were well received by
the king, but nothing was said about eating that day. When the night
arrived, to quote their own words--"He laid us on the bed with himself
and his wife, they at the one end and we at the other, it being only
planks laid a foot from the ground and a thin mat upon them. Two more of
his chief men, for want of room, pressed by and upon us; so that we were
worse weary of our lodging than of our journey." At one o'clock the next
day Massasoit "brought two fishes that he had shot," about thrice as big
as a bream. "These being boiled, there were at least forty looked for a
share in them; the most eat of them. This meal only we had in two nights
and a day; and had not one of us bought a partridge, we had taken our
journey fasting." Fearing that they would be light-headed for want of
food and also sleep, owing to "the savages' barbarous singing, (for they
use to sing themselves asleep,)" and that they might get home while they
