Lesson One
Excursions. By Henry D. Thoreau.
NOTE: This is an excerpt. For the full document, see Excursions
in The Evolution of the Conservation
Movement, 1850-1920.
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WALKING.
[1862.]
I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness,
as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil,-to regard man as
an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of
society. I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an emphatic
one, for there are enough champions of civilization: the minister and the
school-committee, and every one of you will take care of that.
I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who
understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks,-who had a genius,
so to speak, for sauntering : which word is beautifully derived
"from idle people who moved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and
asked charity, under pretence of going la Sainte Terre," to the
Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, "There goes a Sainte-Terrer," a
Saunterer,-a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks,
as
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they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do
go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however,
would derive the word from sans terre, without land or a home, which,
therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but
equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering.
He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of
all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the
meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest
course to the sea. But I prefer the first, which, indeed, is the most probable
derivation. For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter
the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands
of the Infidels.
It is true, we are but faint-hearted crusaders, even the walkers, nowadays,
who undertake no persevering, never-ending enterprises. Our expeditions
are but tours, and come round again at evening to the old hearth-side from
which we set out. Half the walk is but retracing our steps. We should go
forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure,
never to return,-prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics
to our desolate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father
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and mother, and brother and sister; and wife and child and friends,
and never see them again,-if you have paid your debts, and made your will,
and settled all your affairs, and are a free man, then you are ready for
a walk.
To come down to my own experience, my companion and I, for I sometimes
have a companion, take pleasure in fancying ourselves knights of a new,
or rather an old, order,-not Equestrians or Chevaliers, not Ritters or
riders, but Walkers, a still more ancient and honorable class, I trust.
The chivalric and heroic spirit which once belonged to the Rider seems
now to reside in, or perchance to have subsided into, the Walker,-not the
Knight, but Walker Errant. He is a sort of fourth estate, outside of church
and State and People.
We have felt that we almost alone hereabouts practiced this noble art;
though, to tell the truth, at least, if their own assertions are to be
received, most of my townsmen would fain walk sometimes, as I do, but they
cannot. No wealth can buy the requisite leisure, freedom, and independence,
which are the capital in this profession. It comes only by the grace of
God. It requires a direct dispensation from Heaven to become a walker.
You must be born into the family of the Walkers. Ambulator nascitur,
non fit. Some of my townsmen, it is true, can remember and
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have described to me some walks which they took ten years ago, in which
they were so blessed as to lose themselves for half an hour in the woods;
but I know very well that they have confined themselves to the highways
ever since, whatever pretensions they may make to belong to this select
class. No doubt they were elevated for a moment as by the reminiscence
of a previous state of existence, when even they were foresters and outlaws.
"When he came to grene wode,
In a mery morayuge,
There he herde the notes small
Of byrdes mery syngynge.
"It is ferre gone, sayd Robyn,
That I was last here;
Me lyste a lytell for to ahote
At the donne dere."
I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four
hours a day at least,-and it is commonly more than that,-sauntering through
the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly
engagements. You may safely say, A penny for your thoughts, or a thousand
pounds. When sometimes I am reminded that the mechanics and shopkeepers
stay in their shops not only all the forenoon, but all the afternoon too,
sitting with crossed legs, so many of them,-as if the legs were made to
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sit upon, and not to stand or walk upon,-I think that they deserve
some credit for not having all committed suicide long ago.
I, who cannot stay in my chamber for a single day without acquiring
some rust, and when sometimes I have stolen forth for a walk at the eleventh
hour of four o'clock in the afternoon, too late to redeem the day, when
the shades of night were already beginning to be mingled with the daylight,
have felt as if I had committed some sin to be atoned for,-I confess that
I am astonished at the power of endurance, to say nothing of the moral
insensibility, of my neighbors who confine themselves to shops and offices
the whole day for weeks and months, ay, and years almost together. I know
not what manner of stuff they are of,-sitting there now at three o'clock
in the afternoon, as if it were three o'clock in the morning. Bonaparte
may talk of the three-o'clock-in-the-morning courage, but it is nothing
to the courage which can sit down cheerfully at this hour in the afternoon
over against one's self whom you have know all the morning, to starve out
a garrison to whom you are bound by such strong ties of sympathy. I wonder
that about this time, or say between four and five o'clock in the afternoon,
too late for the morning papers and too early for the evening ones, there
is not a general explosion
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heard up and down the street, scattering a legion of antiquated and
house-bred notions and whims to the four winds for an airing-and so the
evil cure itself.
How womankind, who are confined to the house still more than men, stand
it I do not know; but I have ground to suspect that most of them do not
stand it at all. When, early in a summer afternoon, we have been
shaking the dust of the village from the skirts of our garments, making
haste past those houses with purely Doric or Gothic fronts, which have
such an air of repose about them, my companion whispers that probably about
these times their occupants are all gone to bed. Then it is that I appreciate
the beauty and the glory of architecture, which itself never turns in,
but forever stands out and erect, keeping watch over the slumberers.
No doubt temperament, and, above all, age, have a good deal to do with
it. As a man grows older, his ability to sit still and follow indoor occupations
increases. He grows vespertinal in his habits as the evening of life approaches,
till at last he comes forth only just before sundown, and gets all the
walk that he requires in half an hour.
But the waking of which I speak has nothing in it akin to taking exercise,
as it is called, as
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the sick take medicine at stated hours,-as the swinging of dumb-bells
or chairs; but is itself the enterprise and adventure of the day. If you
would get exercise, go in search of the springs of life. Think of a man's
swinging dumb-bells for his health, when those springs are bubbling up
in far-off pastures unsought by him!
Moreover, you must walk like a camel, which is said to be the only beast
which ruminates when walking. When a traveller asked Wordsworth's servant
to show him her master's study, she answered, "Here is his library, but
his study is out of doors."
Living much out of doors, in the sun and wind, will no doubt produce
a certain roughness of character,-will cause a thicker cuticle to grow
over some of the finer qualities of our nature, as on the face and hands,
or as severe manual labor robs the hands of some of their delicacy of touch.
So staying in the house, on the other hand, may produce a softness and
smoothness, not to say thinness of skin, accompanied by an increased sensibility
to certain impressions. Perhaps we should be more susceptible to some influences
important to our intellectual and moral growth, if the sun had shone and
the wind blown on us a little less; and no doubt it is a nice matter to
proportion rightly the thick and the skin. But methinks that is a scurf
that
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will fall off fast enough,-that the natural remedy is to be found in
the proportion which the night bears to the day, the winter to the summer,
thought to experience. There will be so much the more air and sunshine
in our thoughts. The callous palms of the laborer are conversant with finer
tissues of self-respect and heroism, whose touch thrills the heart, than
the languid finger of idleness. That is mere sentimentality that lies abed
by day and thinks itself white, far from the tan and callus of experience.
When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and woods: what would become
of us, if we walked only in a garden or a mall? Even some sects of philosophers
have felt the necessity of importing the woods to themselves, since they
did not go to the woods. "They planted groves and walks of Platanes," where
they took subdiales ambulationes in porticos open to the air. Of
course it is of no use to direct our steps to the woods, if they do not
carry as thither. I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile
into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit. In my afternoon
walk I would fain forget all my morning occupations and my obligations
to society. But it sometimes happens that I cannot easily shake off the
village. The thought of some work will run in my head, and I am not where
my body is,-I am out of
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my senses. In my walks I would fain return to my senses. What business
have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the wood? I suspect
myself, and cannot help a shudder, when I find myself so implicated even
in what are called good works,-for this may sometimes happen.
My vicinity affords many good walks; and though for so many years I
have walked almost every day, and sometimes for several days together,
I have not yet exhausted them. An absolutely new prospect is a great happiness,
and I can still get this any afternoon. Two or three hours walking will
carry me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see. A single farmhouse
which I had not seen before is sometimes as good as the dominions of the
King of Dahomey. There is in fact a sort of harmony discoverable between
the capabilities of the landscape within a circle of ten miles radius,
or the limits of an afternoon walk, and the threescore years and ten of
human life. It will never become quite familiar to you.
Nowadays almost all man's improvements, so called, as the building of
houses, and the cutting down of the forest and of all large trees, simply
deform the landscape, and make it more and more tame and cheap. A people
who would begin by burning the fences and let the
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forest stand! I saw the fences half consumed, their ends lost in the
middle of the prairie, and some worldly miser with a surveyor looking after
his bounds, while heaven had taken place around him, and he did not see
the angels going to and fro, but was looking for an old post-hole in the
midst of paradise. I looked again, and saw him standing in the middle of
a boggy, stygian fen, surrounded by devils, and he had found his bounds
without a doubt, three little stones, where a stake had been driven, and
looking nearer, I saw that the Prince of Darkness was his surveyor.
I can easily walk ten, fifteen, twenty, any number of miles, commencing
at my own door, without going by any house, without crossing a road except
where the fox and the mink do: first along by the river, and then the brook,
and then the meadow and the wood-side. There are square miles in my vicinity
which have no inhabitant. From many a hill I can see civilization and the
abodes of man afar. The farmers and their works are scarcely more obvious
than woodchucks and their burrows. Man and his affairs, church and state
and school, trade and commerce, and manufacturers and agriculture, even
politics, the most alarming of them all,-I am pleased to see how little
space they occupy in the landscape. Politics is but a narrow
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field, and that still narrower highway yonder leads to it. I sometimes
direct the traveller thither. If you would go to the political world, follow
the great road,-follow that market-man, keep his dust in your eyes, and
it will lead you straight to it; for it, too, has its place merely, and
does not occupy all space. I pass from it as from a bean-field into the
forest, and it is forgotten. In one half-hour I can walk off to some portion
of the earth's surface where a man does not stand from one year's end to
another, and there, consequently, politics are not, for they are but as
the cigar-smoke of a man.
The village is the place to which the roads tend, a sort of expansion
of the highway, as a lake of a river. It is the body of which roads are
the arms and legs,-a trivial or quadrivial place, the thoroughfare and
ordinary of travellers. The word is from the Latin villa, which,
together with via, a way, or more anciently ved and vella,
Varro derives from veho, to carry, because the villa is the
place to and from which things are carried. They who got their living by
teaming were said vellaturam facere. Hence, too, apparently, the
Latin word vilis and our vile; also villain. This suggests
what kind of degeneracy villagers are liable to. They are wayworn by the
travel that goes by and over them, without travelling themselves.
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Some do not walk at all; others walk in the highways; a few walk across
lots. Roads are made for horses and men of business. I do not travel in
them much, comparatively, because I am not in a hurry to get to any tavern
or grocery or livery-stable or depot to which they lead. I am a good horse
to travel, but not from choice a roadster. The landscape-painter uses the
figures of men to mark a road. He would not make that use of my figure.
I walk out into a Nature such as the old prophets and poets, Menn, Moses,
Homer, Chaucer, walked in. You may name it America, but it is not America:
neither Americus Vespucius, nor Columbus, nor the rest were the discoverers
of it. There is a truer account of it in mythology than in any history
of America, so called, that I have seen.
However, there are a few old roads that may be trodden with profit,
as if they led somewhere now that they are nearly discontinued. There is
the Old Marlborough Road, which does not go to Marlborough now, methinks,
unless that is Marlborough where it carries me. I am the bolder to speak
of it here, because I presume that there are one or two such roads in every
town.
THE OLD MARLBOROUGH ROAD.
Where they once dug for money,
But never found any;
Where sometimes Martial Miles
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Singly files,
And Elijah Wood,
I fear for no good:
No other man,
Save Elisha Dugan,-
O man of wild habits,
Partridges and rabbits,
Who hast no cares
Only to set snares,
Who liv'st all alone,
Close to the bone,
And where life is sweetest
Constantly eatest.
When the spring stirs my blood
With the instinct to travel,
I can get enough gravel
On the Old Marlborough Road.
Nobody repairs it,
For nobody wears it;
It is a living way,
As the Christians say.
Not many there be
Who enter therein,
Only the guests of the
Irishman Quin.
What is it, what is it,
But a direction out there,
And the bare possibility
Of going somewhere?
Great guide-boards of stone,
But travellers none;
Cenotaphs of the towns
Named on their crowns.
It is worth going to see
Where you might be.
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What king
Did the thing,
I am still wondering;
Set up how or when,
By what selectmen,
Gourgas or Lee,
Clark or Darby?
They're a great endeavor
To be something forever;
Blank tablets of stone,
Where a traveller might groan,
And in one sentence
Grave all that is known;
Which another might read,
In his extreme need.
I know one or two
Lines that would do,
Literature that might stand
All over the land,
Which a man could remember
Till next December,
And read again in the spring,
After the thawing.
If with fancy unfurled
You leave your abode,
You may go round the world
By the Old Marlborough Road.
At present, in this vicinity, the best part of the land is not private
property; the landscape is not owned, and the walker enjoys comparative
freedom. But possibly the day will come when it will be partitioned off
into so-called pleasure-grounds, in which a few will take a
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narrow and exclusive pleasure only,-when fences shall be multiplied,
and man-traps and other engines invented to confine men to the public
road, and walking over the surface of God's earth shall be construed
to mean trespassing on some gentleman's grounds. To enjoy a thing exclusively
is commonly to exclude yourself from the true enjoyment of it. Let us improve
our opportunities, then, before the evil days come.
What is it that makes it so hard sometimes to determine whither we will
walk? I believe that there is a subtile magnetism in Nature, which, if
we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright. It is not indifferent
to us which way we walk. There is a right way; but we are very liable from
heedlessness and stupidity to take the wrong one. We would fain take that
walk, never yet taken by us through this actual world, which is perfectly
symbolical of the path which we love to travel in the interior and ideal
world; and sometimes, no doubt, we find it difficult to choose our direction,
because it does not yet exist distinctly in our idea.
When I go out of the house for a walk, uncertain as yet whither I will
bend my steps, and submit myself to my instinct to decide for me, I find,
strange and whimsical as it may seem, that I finally and inevitably settle
southwest,
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toward some particular wood or meadow or deserted pasture or hill in
that direction. My needle is slow to settle,-varies a few degrees, and
does not always point due southwest, it is true, and it has good authority
for this variation, but it always settles between west and south-south-west.
The future lies that way to me, and the earth seems more unexhausted and
richer on that side. The outline which would bound my walks would be, not
a circle, but a parabola, or rather like one of those cometary orbits which
have been thought to be non-returning curves, in this case opening westward,
in which my house occupies the place of the sun. I turn round and round
irresolute sometimes for a quarter of an hour, until I decide, for a thousandth
time, that I will walk into the southwest or west. Eastward I go only by
force; but westward I go free. Thither no business leads me. It is hard
for me to believe that I shall find fair landscapes or sufficient wildness
and freedom behind the eastern horizon. I am not excited by the prospect
of a walk thither; but I believe that the forest which I see in the western
horizon stretches uninterruptedly toward the setting sun, and there are
no towns nor cities in it of enough consequence to disturb me. Let me live
where I will, on this side is the city, on that the wilderness, and ever
I am leaving the city more and
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more, and withdrawing into the wildness. I should not lay so much stress
on this fact, if I did not believe that something like this is the prevailing
tendency of my countrymen. I must walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe.
And that way the nation is moving, and I may say that mankind progress
from east to west. Within a few a years we have witnessed the phenomenon
of a southeastward migration, in the settlement of Australia; but this
affects us as a retrograde movement, and, judging from the moral and physical
character of the first generation of Australians, has not yet proved a
successful experiment. The eastern Tartars think that there is nothing
west beyond Thibet. "The world ends there," say they, "beyond there is
nothing but a shoreless sea." It is unmitigated East where they live.
We go eastward to realize history and study the work of art and literature,
retracing the steps of the race; we go westward as into the future, with
a spirit of enterprise and adventure. The Atlantic is a Lethean stream,
in our passage over which we have had an opportunity to forget the Old
World and its institutions. If we do not succeed this time, there is perhaps
one 1 more chance for the race left before it arrives on the banks of the
Styx; and that is in the Lethe of the Pacific, which is three times as
wide.
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I know not how significant it is, or how far it is an evidence of singularity,
that an individual should thus consent in his pettiest walk with the general
movement of the race; but I know that something skin to the migratory instinct
in birds and quadrupeds,-which, in some instances, is known to have affected
the squirrel tribe, impelling them to a general and mysterious movement,
in which they were seen, say some, crossing the broadest rivers, each on
its particular chip, with its tail raised for a sail, and bridging narrower
streams with their dead,-that something like the furor which affects
the domestic cattle in the spring, and which is referred to a worm in their
tails,-affects both nations and individuals, either perennially or from
time to time. Not a flock of wild geese cackles over our town, but it to
some extent unsettles the value of real estate here, and, if I were a broker,
I should probably take that disturbance into account.
"Than longen folk to gon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken strange strondes.
Every sunset which I witness inspires me with the desire to go to a West
as distant and as fair as that into which the sun goes down. He appears
to migrate westward daily, and tempt us to follow him. He is the Great
Western Pioneer whom the nations follow.
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We dream all night of those mountain-ridges in the horizon, though
they may be of vapor only, which were last gilded by his rays. The island
of Atlantis, and the islands and gardens of the Hesperides, a sort of terrestrial
paradise, appear to have been the Great West of the ancients, enveloped
in mystery and poetry. Who has not seen in imagination, when looking into
the sunset sky, the gardens of the Hesperides, and the foundation of all
those fables?
Columbus felt the westward tendency more strongly than any before. He
obeyed it, and found a New World for Castile and Leon. The herd of men
in those days scented fresh pastures from afar.
"And now the sun has stretched out all the hills,
And now was dropped into the western bay;
At last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue;
To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures now."
Where on the globe can there be found an area of equal extent with that
occupied by the bulk of our States, so fertile and so rich and varied in
its productions, and at the same time so habitable by the European, as
this is? Michaux, who knew but part of them, says that "that species of
large trees are much more numerous in North America than in Europe; in
the United States there are more than
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one hundred and forty species that exceed thirty feet in height; in
France there are but thirty that attain this size." Later botanists more
than confirm his observations. Humboldt came to America to realize his
youthful dreams of a tropical vegetation, and he beheld it in its greatest
perfection in the primitive forests of the Amazon, the most gigantic wilderness
on the earth, which he has so eloquently described. The geographer Guyot,
himself a European, goes farther,-farther than I am ready to follow him;
yet not when he says,- "As the plant is made for the animal, as the vegetable
world is made for the animal world, America is made for the man of the
Old World.....
The man of the Old World set out upon his way. Leaving the highlands
of Asia, he descends form station to station towards Europe. Each of his
steps is marked by a new civilization superior to the preceding, by a greater
power of development. Arrived at the Atlantic, he pauses on the shore of
this unknown ocean, the bounds of which he knows not, and turns upon his
footprints for an instant." When he has exhausted the rich soil of Europe,
and reinvigorated himself, "then recommences his adventurous career westward
as in the earliest ages." So far Guyot.
From this western impulse coming in contact
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with the barrier of the Atlantic sprang the commerce and enterprise
of modern times. The younger Michaux, in his "Travels West of the Alleghanies
in 1802," says that the common inquiry in the newly settled West was, "From
what part of the world have you come? As if these vast and fertile regions
would naturally be the place of meeting and common country of all the inhabitants
of the globe."
To use an obsolete Latin word, I might say, Ex Oriente lux ;
ex Occidente Frux. From the East light; from the West fruit.
Sir Francis Head, an English traveller and a Governor-General of Canada,
tells us that "in both the northern and southern hemispheres of the New
World, Nature has not only outlined her works on a larger scale, but has
painted the whole picture with brighter and more costly colors than she
used in delineating and in beautifying the Old World. .... The heavens
of America appear infinitely higher, the sky is bluer, the air is fresher,
the cold is intenser, the moon looks larger, the stars are brighter, the
thunder is louder, the lightning is vivider, the wind is stronger, the
rain is heavier, the mountains are higher, the rivers longer, the forests
bigger, the plains broader." This statement will do at least to set against
Buffon's account of this part of the world and its productions.
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Linnus said long ago, "Nescio qu facies lta, glabra plantis Americanis:
I know not what there is of joyous and smooth in the aspect of American
plants;" and I think that in this country there are no, or at most very
few, African besti, beasts, as the Romans called them, and that
in this respect also it is peculiarly fitted for the habitation of man.
We are told that within three miles of the centre of the East-Indian city
of Singapore, some of the inhabitants are annually carried off by tigers;
but the traveller can lie down in the woods at night almost anywhere in
North America without fear of wild beasts.
These are encouraging testimonies. If the moon looks larger here than
in Europe, probably the sun looks larger also. If the heavens of America
appear infinitely higher, and the stars brighter, I trust that these facts
are symbolical of the height to which the philosophy and poetry and religion
of her inhabitants may one day soar. At length, perchance, the immaterial
heaven will appear as much higher to the American mind, and the intimations
that star it as much brighter. For I believe that climate does thus react
on man,-as there is something in the mountain-air that feeds the spirit
and inspires. Will not man grow to greater perfection intellectually as
well as physically under
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these influences? Or is it unimportant how many foggy days there are
in his life? I trust that we shall be more imaginative, that our thoughts
will be clearer, fresher, and more ethereal, as our sky,-our understanding
more comprehensive and broader, like our plains,-our intellect generally
on a grander scale, like our thunder and lightning, our rivers and mountains
and forests,-and our hearts shall even correspond in breadth and depth
and grandeur to our inland seas. Perchance there will appear to the traveller
something, he knows not what, of lta and glabra, of joyous
and serene, in our very faces. Else to what end does the world go on, and
why was America discovered?
To Americans I hardly need to say,-
"Westward the star of empire takes it way."
As a true patriot, I should be ashamed to think that Adam in paradise was
more favorably situated on the whole than the backwoodsman in this country.
Our sympathies in Massachusetts are not confined to New England; though
we may be estranged from the South, we sympathize with the West. There
is the home of the younger sons, as among the Scandinavians they took to
the sea for their inheritance. It is too late to
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be studying Hebrew; it is more important to understand even the slang
of to-day.
Some months ago I went to see a panorama of the Rhine. It was like a
dream of the Middle Ages. I floated down its historic stream in something
more than imagination, under bridges built by the Romans, and repaired
by later heroes, past cities and castles whose very names were music to
my ears, and each of which was the subject of a legend. There were Ehrenbreitstein
and Rolandseck and Coblentz, which I knew only in history. They were ruins
that interested me chiefly. There seemed to come up from its waters, and
its vine-clad hills and valleys a hushed music as of Crusaders departing
for the Holy Land. I floated along under the spell of enchantment, as if
I had been transported to an heroic age, and breathed an atmosphere of
chivalry.
Soon after, I went to see a panorama of the Mississippi, and as I worked
my way up the river in the light of to-day, and saw the steamboats wooding
up, counted the rising cities, gazed on the fresh ruins of Nauvoo, beheld
the Indians moving west across the stream, and, as before I had looked
up the Moselle now looked up the Ohio and the Missouri, and heard the legends
of Dubuque and of
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Wenona's Cliff,-still thinking more of the future than of the past
or present,-I saw that this was a Rhine stream of a different kind; that
the foundations of castles were yet to be laid, and the famous bridges
were yet to be thrown over the river; and I felt that this was the heroic
age itself, though we know it not, for the hero is commonly the simplest
and obscurest of men.
The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what
I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of
the World. Every tree sends its fibres forth in search of the Wild. The
cities import it at any price. Men plough and sail for it, From the forest
and wilderness come the tonics and barks which brace mankind. Our ancestors
were savages. The story of Romulus and Remus being suckled by a wolf is
not a meaningless fable. The founders of every State which has risen to
eminence have drawn their nourishment and vigor from a similar wild source.
It was because the children of the Empire were not suckled by the wolf
that they were conquered and displaced by the children of the Northern
forests who were.
I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which
the corn grows. We
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require an infusion of hemlock-spruce or arborvit in our tea. There
is a difference between eating and drinking for strength and from mere
gluttony. The Hottentots eagerly devour the marrow of the koodoo and other
antelopes raw, as a matter of course. Some of our Northern Indians eat
raw the marrow of the Arctic reindeer, as well as various other parts,
including the summits of the antlers, as long as they are soft. And herein,
perchance, they have stolen a march on the cooks of Paris. They get what
usually goes to feed the fire. This is probably better than stall-fed beef
and slaughter-house pork to make a man of. Give me a wildness whose glance
no civilization can endure,-as if we lived on the marrow of koodoos devoured
raw.
There are some intervals which border the strain of the wood-thrush,
to which I would migrate-wild lands where no settler has squatted; to which,
methinks, I am already acclimated.
The African hunter Cummings tells us that the skin of the eland, as
well as that of most other antelopes just killed, emits the most delicious
perfume of trees and grass. I would have every man so much like a wild
antelope, so much a part and parcel of Nature, that his very person should
thus sweetly advertise our
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senses of his presence, and remind us of those parts of Nature which
he most haunts. I feel no disposition to be satirical, when the trapper's
coat emits the odor of musquash even; it is a sweeter scent to me than
that which commonly exhales from the merchant's or the scholar's garments.
When I go into their wardrobes and handle their vestments, I am reminded
of no grassy plains and flowery meads which they have frequented, but of
dusty merchants exchanges and libraries rather.
A tanned skin is something more than respectable, and perhaps olive
is a fitter color than white for a man,-a denizen of the woods. "The pale
white man!" I do not wonder that the African pitied him. Darwin the naturalist
says, "A white man bathing by the side of a Tahitian was like a plant bleached
by the gardener's art, compared with a fine, dark green one, growing vigorously
in the open fields."
Ben Jonson exclaims,-
"How near to good is what is fair!"
So I would say,-
How near to good is what is wild!
Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued
to man, its presence refreshes him. One who pressed forward incessantly
and never rested from his labors,
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who grew fast and made infinite demands on life, would always find
himself in a new country or wilderness, and surrounded by the raw material
of life. He would be climbing over the prostrate stems of primitive forest-trees.
Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not
in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps. When, formerly,
I have analyzed my partiality for some farm which I had contemplated purchasing,
I have frequently found that I was attracted solely by a few square rods
of impermeable and unfathomable bog,-a natural sink in one corner of it.
That was the jewel which dazzled me. I derive more of my subsistence from
the swamps which surround my native town than from the cultivated gardens
in the village. There are no richer parterres to my eyes than the dense
beds of dwarf andromeda ( Cassandra calyculata ) which cover these
tender places on the earth's surface. Botany cannot go farther than tell
me the names of the shrubs which grow there.-the high-blueberry, panicled
andromeda, lamb-kill, azalea, and rhodora,-all standing in the quaking
sphagnum. I often think that I should like to have my house front on this
mass of dull red bushes, omitting other flower plots and border, transplanted
spruce and trim box, even gravelled
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walks,-to have this fertile spot under my windows, not a few imported
barrow-fulls of soil only to cover the sand which was thrown out in digging
the cellar. Why not put my house, my parlor, behind this plot, instead
of behind that meagre assemblage of curiosities, that poor apology for
a Nature and Art, which I call my front-yard? It is an effort to clear
up and make a decent appearance when the carpenter and mason have departed,
though done as much for the passer-by as the dweller within. The most tasteful
front-yard fence was never an agreeable object of study to me; the most
elaborate ornaments; acorn-tops, or what not, soon wearied and disgusted
me. Bring your sills up to the very edge of the swamp, then, (though it
may not be the best place for a dry cellar,) so that there be no access
on that side to citizens. Front-yards are not made to walk in, but, at
most, through, and you could go in the back way.
Yes, though you may think me perverse, if it were proposed to me to
dwell in the neighborhood of the most beautiful garde that ever human art
contrived, or else of a Dismal swamp, I should certainly decide for the
swamp. How vain, then, have been all your labors, citizens, for me!
My spirits infallibly rise in proportion to the outward dreariness.
Give me the ocean, the
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desert or the wilderness! In the desert, pure air and solitude compensate
for want of moisture and fertility. The traveller Burton says of it,-"You
morale improves; you become frank and cordial, hospitable and single-minded.
.... In the desert, spirituous liquors excite only disgust. There is a
keen enjoyment in a mere animal existence." They who have been travelling
long on the steppes of Tartary say,-"On rentering cultivated lands, the
agitation, perplexity, and turmoil of civilization oppressed and suffocated
us; the air seemed to fail us, and we felt every moment as if about to
die of asphyxia." When I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest wood,
the thickest and most interminable, and, to the citizen, most dismal swamp.
I enter a swamp as a sacred place,-a sanctum sanclorum. There is
the strength, the marrow of Nature. The wild-wood covers the virgin mould,-and
the same soil is good for men and for trees. A man's health requires as
many acres of meadow to his prospect as his farm does loads of muck. There
are the strong meats on which he feeds. A town is saved, not more by the
righteous men in it than by the woods and swamps that surround it. A township
where one primitive forest waves above, while another primitive forest
rots below,-such a town is fitted to raise not only corn
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and potatoes, but poets and philosophers for the coming ages. In such
a soil grew Homer and Confucius and the rest, and out of such a wilderness
comes the Reformer eating locusts and wild honey.
To preserve wild animals implies generally the creation of a forest
for them to dwell in or resort to. So it is with man. A hundred years ago
they sold bark in our streets peeled from our own woods. In the very aspect
of those primitive and rugged trees, there was, methinks, a tanning principle
which hardened and consolidated the fibres of men's thoughts. Ah! already
I shudder for these comparatively degenerate days of my native village,
when you cannot collect a load of bark of good thickness,-and we no longer
produce tar and turpentine.
The civilized nations-Greece, Rome, England-have been sustained by the
primitive forests which anciently rotted where they stand. They survive
as long as the soil is not exhausted. Alas for human culture! little is
to be expected of a nation, when the vegetable mould is exhausted, and
it is compelled to make manure of the bones of its fathers. There the poet
sustains himself merely by his own superfluous fat, and the philosopher
comes down on his marrow-bones.
It is said to be the task of the American "to work the virgin soil,"
and that "agriculture here
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already assumes proportions unknown everywhere else." I think that
the farmer displaces the Indian even because he redeems the meadow, and
so makes himself stronger and in some respects more natural. I was surveying
for a man the other day a single straight line one hundred and thirty-two
rods long, through a swamp, at whose entrance might have been written the
words which Dante read over the entrance to the infernal regions,-"Leave
all hope, ye that enter,"-that is, of ever getting out again; where at
one time I saw my employer actually up to his neck and swimming for his
life in his property, though it was still winter. He had another similar
swamp which I could not survey at all, because it was completely under
water, and nevertheless, with regard to a third swamp, which I did survey
from a distance, he remarked to me, true to his instincts, that he
would not part with it for any consideration, on account of the mud which
it contained. And that man intends to put a girdling ditch round the whole
in the course of forty months, and so redeem it by the magic of his spade.
I refer to him only as the type of a class.
The weapons with which we have gained our most important victories,
which should be handed down as heirlooms from father to son, are not the
sword and the lance, but the bushwhack,
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the turf-cutter, the spade, and the bog-hoe, rusted with the blood
of many a meadow, and begrimed with the dust of many a hard-fought field.
The very winds blew the Indian's cornfield into the meadow, and pointed
out the way which he had not the skill to follow. He had no better implement
with which to intrench himself in the land than a clam-shell. But the farmer
is armed with plough and spade.
In Literature it is only the wild that attracts us. Dulness is but another
name for tameness. It is the uncivilized free and wild thinking in "Hamlet"
and the "Iliad," in all the Scriptures and Mythologies, not learned in
the schools, that delights us. As the wild duck is more swift and beautiful
than the tame, so is the wild-the mallard-thought, which mid fulling dews
wings its way above the fens. A truly good book is something as natural,
and as unexpectedly and unaccountably fair and perfect, as a wild flower
discovered on the prairies of the West or in the jungles of the East. Genius
is a light which makes the darkness visible, like the lightning's flash,
which perchance shatters the temple of knowledge itself,-and not a taper
lighted at the hearth-stone of the race, which pales before the light of
common day.
English literature, from the days of the minstrels to the Lake Poets,-Chaucer
and Spenser
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and Milton, and even Shakspeare, included,-breathes no quite fresh
and in this sense wild strain. It is an essentially tame and civilized
literature, reflecting Greece and Rome. Her wilderness is a green wood,-her
wild man a Robin Hood. There is plenty of genial love of Nature, but not
so much of Nature herself. Her chronicles inform us when her wild animals,
but not when the wild man in her, became extinct.
The science of Humboldt is one thing, poetry is another thing. The poet
to-day, notwithstanding all the discoveries of science, and the accumulated
learning of mankind, enjoys no advantage over Homer.
Where is the literature which gives expression to Nature? He would be
a poet who could impress the winds and streams into his service, to speak
for him; who nailed words to their primitive senses, as farmers drive down
stakes in the spring, which the frost has heaved; who derived his words
as often as he used them,-transplanted them to his page with earth adhering
to their roots; whose words were so true and fresh and natural that they
would appear to expand like the buds at the approach of spring, though
they lay half-smothered between two musty leaves in a library,-ay, to bloom
and bear fruit there, after their kind, annually, for the faithful reader,
in sympathy with surrounding Nature.
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I do not know of any poetry to quote which adequately expresses this
yearning for the Wild. Approached from this side, the best poetry is tame.
I do not know where to find in any literature, ancient or modern, any account
which contents me of that Nature with which even I am acquainted. You will
perceive that I demand something which no Augustan nor Elizabethan age,
which no culture, in short, can give. Mythology comes nearer to
it than anything. How much more fertile a Nature, at least, has Grecian
mythology its root in than English literature! Mythology is the crop which
the Old World bore before its soil was exhausted, before the fancy and
imagination were affected with blight; and which it still bears, wherever
its pristine vigor is unabated. All other literatures endure only as the
elms which overshadow our houses; but this is like the great dragon-tree
of the Western Isles, as old as mankind, and, whether that does or not,
will endure as long; for the decay of other literatures makes the soil
in which it thrives.
The West is preparing to add its fables to those of the East. The valleys
of the Ganges, the Nile, and the Rhine, having yielded their crop, it remains
to be seen what the valleys of the Amazon, the Plate, the Orinoco, the
St. Lawrence, and the Mississippi will produce. Perchance,
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when, in the course of ages, American liberty has become a fiction
of the past,-as it is to some extent a fiction of the present,-the poets
of the world will be inspired by American mythology.
The wildest dreams of wild men, even, are not the less true, though
they may not recommend themselves to the sense which is most common among
Englishmen and Americans today. It is not every truth that recommends itself
to the common sense. Nature has a place for the wild clematis as well as
for the cabbage. Some expressions of truth are reminiscent,-others merely
sensible, as the phrase is,-others prophetic. Some forms of disease,
even, may prophesy forms of health. The geologist has discovered that the
figures of serpents, griffins, flying dragons, and other fanciful embellishments
of heraldry, have their prototypes in the forms of fossil species which
were extinct before man was created, and hence "indicate a faint and shadowy
knowledge of a previous state of organic existence." The Hindoos dreamed
that the earth rested on an elephant, and the elephant on a tortoise, and
the tortoise on a serpent; and though it may be an unimportant coincidence,
it will not be out of place here to state, that a fossil tortoise has lately
been discovered in Asia large enough to support an elephant.
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I confess that I am partial to these wild fancies, which transcend
the order of time and development. They are the sublimest recreation of
the intellect. The partridge loves peas, but not those that go with her
into the pot.
In short, all good things are wild and free. There is something in a
strain of music, whether produced by an instrument or by the human voice,-take
the sound of a bugle in a summer night, for instance,-which by its wildness,
to speak without satire, reminds me of the cries emitted by wild beasts
in their native forests. It is so much of their wilderness as I can understand.
Give me for my friends and neighbors wild men, not tame ones. The wilderness
of the savage is but a faint symbol of the awful ferity with which good
men and lovers meet.
I love even to see the domestic animals reassert their native rights,-any
evidence that they have not wholly lost their original wild habits and
vigor; as when my neighbor's cow breaks out of her pasture early in the
spring and boldly swims the river, a cold, gray tide, twenty-five or thirty
rods wide, swollen by the melted snow. It is the buffalo crossing the Mississippi.
The exploit confers some dignity on the herd in my eyes,-already dignified.
The seeds of instinct are preserved under the thick hides of cattle and
horses, like seeds in the bowels of the earth, an indefinite period.
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Any sportiveness in cattle is unexpected. I saw one day a herd of a
dozen bullocks and cows running about and frisking in unwieldly sport,
like huge rats, even like kittens. They shook their heads, raised their
tails, and rushed up and down a hill, and I perceived by their horns, as
well as by their activity, their relation to the deer tribe. But, alas!
a sudden loud Whoa! would have damped their ardor at once, reduced
them from venison to beef, and stiffened their sides and sinews like the
locomotive. Who but the Evil One has cried," Whoa!" to man kind? Indeed,
the life of cattle, like that of many men, is but a sort of locomotiveness;
they move a side at a time, and man, by machinery, is meeting the horse
and the ox half-away. Whatever part the whip has touched is thenceforth
palsied. Who would ever think of a side of any of the supple cat
tribe, as we speak of a side of beef?
I rejoice that horse and steers have to be broken before they can be
made the slaves of men, and that men themselves have some wild oats still
left to sow before they become submissive members of society. Undoubtedly,
all men are not equally fit subjects for civilization; and because the
majority, like dogs and sheep, are tame by inherited disposition, this
is no reason why the others should have their natures broken
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that they may be reduced to the same level. Men are in the main alike,
but they were made several in order that they might be various. If a low
use is to be served, one man will do nearly or quite as well as another;
if a high one, individual exccllence is to be regarded. Any man can stop
a hole to keep the wind away, but no other man could serve so rare a use
as the author of this illustration did. Confucius says,-"The skins of the
tiger and the leopard, when they are tanned, are as the skins of the dog
and the sheep tanned." But it is not the part of a true culture to tame
tigers, any more than it is to make sheep ferocious; and tanning their
skins for shoes is not the best use to which they can be put.
When looking over a list of men's names in a foreign language, as of
military officers, or of authors who have written on a particular subject,
I am reminded once more that there is nothing in a name. The same Menschikoff,
for instance, has nothing in it to my ears more human than a whisker, and
it may belong to a rat. As the names of the Poles and Russians are to us,
so are ours to them. It is as if they had been named by the child's rigmarole,-
Icry wiery ickery van, tittle-to-tan . I see in my mind a herd of
wild creatures swarming over the earth, and to each
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the herdsman has affixed some barbarous sound in his own dialect. The
names of men are of course as cheap and meaningless as Bose and
Tray, the names of dogs.
Methinks it would be some advantage to philosophy, if men were named
merely in the gross, as they are known. It would be necessary only to know
the genus and perhaps the race or variety, to know the individual. We are
not prepared to believe that every private soldier in a Roman army had
a name of his own,-because we have not supposed that he had a character
of his own. At present our only true names are nicknames. I knew a boy
who, from his peculiar energy, was called "Buster" by his playmates, and
this rightly supplanted his Christian name. Some travellers tell us that
an Indian had no name given him at first, but earned it, and his name was
his fame; and among some tribes he acquired a new name with every new exploit.
It is pitiful when a man bears a name for convenience merely, who has earned
neither name nor fame.
I will not allow mere names to make distinctions for me, but still see
men in herds for all them. A familiar name cannot make a man less strange
to me. It may be given to a savage who retains in secret his own wild title
earned in the woods. We have a wild savage in us,
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and a savage name is perchance somewhere recorded as ours. I see that
my neighbor, who bears the familiar epithet William, or Edwin, takes it
off with his jacket. It does not adhere to him when asleep or in anger,
or aroused by any passion or inspiration. I seem to hear pronounced by
some of his kin at such a time his original wild name in some jaw-breaking
or else melodious tongue.
Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all
around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard;
and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture
which is exclusively an interaction of man on man,-a sort of breeding in
and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization
destined to have a speedy limit.
In society, in the best institutions of men, it is easy to detect a
certain precocity. When we should still be growing children, we are already
little men. Give me a culture which imports much muck from the meadows,
and deepens the soil,-not that which trusts to heating manures, and improved
implements and modes of culture only!
Many a poor sore-eyed student that I have heard of would grow faster,
both intellectually
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and physically, if, instead of sitting up so very late, he honestly
slumbered a fool's allowance.
There may be an excess even of informing light. Nipce, a Frenchman,
discovered "actinism," that power in the sun's rays which produces a chemical
effect,-that granite rocks, and stone structures, and statues of metal,
"are all alike destructively acted upon during the hours of sunshine, and,
but for provisions of Nature no less wonderful, would soon perish under
the delicate touch of the most subtile of the agencies of the universe."
But he observed that "those bodies which underwent this change during the
daylight possessed the power of restoring themselves to their original
conditions during the hours of night, when this excitement was nolonger
influencing them." Hence it has been inferred that "the hours of darkness
are as necessary to the inorganic creation as we know night and sleep are
to the organic kingdom." Not even does the moon shine every night, but
gives place to darkness.
I would not have every man nor every part of a man cultivated, any more
than I would have every acre of earth cultivated: part will be tillage,
but the greater part will be meadow and forest, not only serving an immediate
use, but preparing a mould against a distant future, by the annual decay
of the vegetation which it supports.
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There are other letters for the child to learn than those which Cadmus
invented. The Spaniards have a good term to express this wild and dusky
knowledge,- Gramtica parda, tawny grammar,-a kind of mother-wit
derived from that same leopard to which I have referred.
We have heard of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. It
is said that knowledge is power; and the like. Methinks there is equal
need of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Ignorance, what we will call
Beautiful Knowledge, a knowledge useful in a higher sense: for what is
most of our boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit that we know something,
which robs us of the advantage of our actual ignorance? What we call knowledge
is often our positive ignorance; ignorance our negative knowledge. By long
years of patient industry and reading of the newspapers,-for what are the
libraries of science but files of newspapers-?a man accumulates a myriad
facts, lays them up in his memory, and then when in some spring of his
life he saunters abroad into the Great Fields of thought, he, as it were,
goes to grass like a horse, and leaves all his harness behind in the stable.
I would say to the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, sometimes,-Go
to grass. You have eaten hay long enough. The spring has come with its
green crop. The very cows
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are driven to their country pastures before the end of May; though
I have heard of one unnatural farmer who kept his cow in the barn and fed
her on hay all the year round. So, frequently, the Society for the Diffusion
of Useful Knowledge treats its cattle.
A man's ignorance sometimes is not only useful, but beautiful,-while
his knowledge, so called, is oftentimes worse than useless, besides being
ugly. Which is the best man to deal with,-he who knows nothing about a
subject, and, what is extremely rare, knows that he knows nothing, or he
who really knows something about it, but thinks that he knows all?
My desire for knowledge is intermittent; but my desire to bathe my head
in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant. The highest
that we can attain to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence.
I do not know that this higher knowledge amounts to anything more definite
than a novel and grand surprise on a sudden revelation of the insufficiency
of all that we called Knowledge before,-a discovery that there are more
things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy. It is
the lighting up of the mist of the sun. Man cannot know in any higher
sense than this, any more than he can look serenely and with impunity in
the face of sun:
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-"You will not perceive that, as perceiving a particular thing," say
the Chaldean Oracles.
There is something servile in the habit of seeking after a law which
wer may obey. We may study the laws of matter at and for our convenience,
but a successful life knows no law. It is an unfortunate discovery certainly,
that of a law which binds us where we did not know before that we were
bound. Live free, child of the mist,-and with respect to knowledge we are
all children of the mist. The man who takes the liberty to live is superior
to all the laws, by virtue of his relation to the law-maker. "That is active
duty," says the Vishnu Purana, "which is not for our bondage; that is knowledge
which is for our liberation; all other duty is good only unto weariness;
all other knowledge is only the cleverness of an artist."
It is remarkable how few events or crises there are in our histories;
how little exercised we have been in our minds; how few experiences we
have had. I would fain be assured that I am going apace and rankly, though
my very growth disturb this dull equanimity,-though it be with struggle
through long, dark, muggy nights or seasons of gloom. It would be well,
if all our lives were a divine tragedy
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even, instead of this trivial comedy or force. Dante, Bunyan, and others,
appear to have been exercised in their minds more than we: they were subjected
to a kind of culture such as our district schools and colleges do not contemplate.
Even Mahomet, though many may scream at his name, had a good deal more
to live for, ay, and to die for, than they have commonly.
When, at rare intervals, some thought visits one, as perchance he is
walking on a railroad, then indeed the cars go by without his hearing them.
But soon, by some inexorable law, our life goes by and the cars return.
"Gentle breeze, that wanderest unseen,
And bendest the thistles round Loira of storms,
Traveller of the windy glens,
Why hast thou left my ear so soon?"
While almost all men feel an attraction drawing them to society, few are
attracted strongly to Nature. In their relation to Nature men appear to
me for the most part, notwithstanding their arts, lower than the animals.
It is not often a beautiful relation, as in the case of the animals. How
little appreciation of the beauty of the landscape there is among us! We
have to be told that the Greeks called the world , Beauty, or Order, but
we do not see clearly why they did so, and we esteem it at best only a
curious philological fact.
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For my part, I feel that with regard to Nature I live a sort of border
life, on the confines of a world into which I make occasional and transional
and transient forays only, and my patriotism and allegiance to the State
into whose territories I seem to retreat are those of a mosstrooper. Unto
a life which I call natural I would gladly follow even a will-of-the-wisp
through bogs and sloughs unimaginable, but no moon nor fire-fly has shown
me the causeway to it. Nature is a personality so vast and universal that
we have never seen one of her features. The walker in the familiar fields
which stretch around my native town sometimes finds himself in another
land than is described in their owners deeds, as it were in some far-away
field on the confines of the actual Concord, where her jurisdiction ceases,
and the idea which the word Concord suggests ceases to be suggested. These
farms which I have myself surveyed, these bounds which I have set up, appear
dimly still as through a mist; but they have no chemistry to fix them;
they fade from the surface of the glass; and the picture which the painter
painted stands out dimly from beneath. The world with which we are commonly
acquainted leaves no trace, and it will have no anniversary.
I took a walk on Spaulding's Farm the other afternoon. I saw the setting
sun lighting up
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the opposite side of a stately pine wood. Its golden rays straggled
into the aisles of the wood as into some noble hall. I was impressed as
if some ancient and altogether admirable and shining family had settled
there in that part of the land called Concord, unknown, to me-to whom the
sun was servant,-who had not gone into society in the village,-who had
not been called on. I saw their park, their pleasure ground, beyond through
the wood, in Spaulding's cranberry-meadow. The pines furnished them with
gables as they grew. Their house was not obvious to vision; the trees grew
through it. I do not know whether I heard the sounds of a suppressed hilarity
or not. They seemed to recline on the sunbeams. They have sons and daughters.
They are quite well. The farmer's cart-path, which leads directly through
their hall, does not in the least put them out,-as the muddy bottom of
a pool is sometimes seen through the reflected skies. They never heard
of Spaulding, and do not know that he is their neighbor,-notwithstanding
I heard him whistle as he drove his team through the house. Nothing can
equal the serenity of their lives. Their coat of arms is simply a lichen.
I saw it painted on the pines and oaks. Their attics were in the tops of
the trees. They are of no politics. There was no noise of labor. I did
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not perceive that they were weaving or spinning. Yet I did detect,
when the wind lulled and hearing was done away, the finest imaginable sweet
musical hum,-as of a distant hive in May, which perchance was the sound
of their thinking. They had no idle thoughts, and no one without could
see their work, for their industry was not as in knots and excrescences
embayed.
But I find it difficult to remember them. They fade irrevocably out
of my mind even now while I speak and endeavor to recall them, and recollect
myself. It is only after a long and serious effort to recollect my best
thoughts that I become again aware of their cohabitancy. If it were not
for such families as this, I think I should move out of Concord.
We are accustomed to say in New England that few and fewer pigeons visit
us every year. Our forests furnish no mast for them. So, it would seem,
few and fewer thoughts visit each growing man from year to year, for the
grove in our minds is laid waste,-sold to feed unnecessary fires of ambition,
or sent to mill, and there is scarcely a twig left for them to perch on.
They no longer build nor breed with us. In some more genial season, perchance,
a faint shadow flits across the landscape of the mind,
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cast by the wings of some thought in its vernal or autumnal
migration, but, looking up, we are unable to detect the substance of the
thought itself. Our winged thoughts are turned to poultry. They no longer
soar, and they attain only to a Shanghai and Cochin-China grandeur. Those
gra-a-ate thoughts, those gra-a-ate men you hear of!
We hug the earth,-how rarely we mount! Methinks we might elevate ourselves
a little more. We might climb a tree, at least. I found my account in climbing
a tree once. It was a tall white pine, on the top of a hill; and though
I got well pitched, I was well paid for it, for I discovered new mountains
in the horizon which I had never seen before,-so much more of the earth
and the heavens. I might have walked about the foot of the tree for three-score
years and ten, and yet I certainly should never have seen them. But, above
all, I discovered around me,-it was near the end of June,-on the ends of
the topmost branches only, a few minute and delicate red cone-like blossoms,
the fertile flower of the white pine looking heavenward. I carried straightway
to the village the topmost spire, and showed it to stranger jurymen who
walked the streets,-for it was court-week,-and to farmers and lumber-dealers
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and wood-choppers and hunters, and not one had ever seen the like before,
but they wondered as at a star dropped down. Tell of ancient architects
finishing their works on the tops of columns as perfectly as on the lower
and more visible parts! Nature has from the first expanded the minute blossoms
of the forest only toward the heavens, above men's heads and unobserved
by them. We see only the flowers that are under our feet in the meadows.
The pines have developed their delicate blossoms on the highest twigs of
the wood every summer for ages, as well over the heads of Nature's red
children as of her white ones; yet scarcely a farmer or hunter in the land
has ever seen them.
Above all, we cannot afford not to live in the present. He is blessed
over all mortals who loses no moment of the passing life in remembering
the past. Unless our philosophy hears the cock crow in every barn-yard
within our horizon, it is belated. That sound commonly reminds us that
we are growing rusty and antique in our employments and habits of thought.
His philosophy comes down to a more recent time than ours. There is something
suggested by it that is a newer testament,-the gospel according to this
moment. He has not fallen astern; he has got up early, and kept up early,
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and to be where he is to be in season, in the foremost rank of time.
It is an expression of the health and soundness of Nature, a brag for all
the world,-healthiness as of a spring bust forth, a new fountain of the
Muses, to celebrate this last instant of time. Where he lives no fugitive
slave laws are passed. Who has not betrayed his master many times since
last he heard that note?
The merit of this bird's strain is in its freedom from all plaintiveness.
The singer can easily move us to tears or to laughter, but where is he
who can excite in us a pure morning joy? When, in doleful dumps, breaking
the awful stillness of our wooden sidewalk on a Sunday, or, perchance,
a watcher in the house of mourning, I hear a cockerel crow far or near,
I think to myself, "There is one of us well, at any rate,"-and with a sudden
gush return to my senses.
We had a remarkable sunset one day last November. I was walking in a
meadow, the source of a small brook, when the sun at last, just before
setting, after a cold gray day, reached a clear stratum in the horizon,
and the softest, brightest mourning sunlight fell on the dry grass and
on the stems of the trees in th opposite horizon, and on the leaves of
the shrub-oaks on
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the hill-side, while our shadows stretched long over the meadow eastward,
as if we were the only motes in its beams. It was such a light as we could
not have imagined a moment before, and the air also was so warm and serene
that nothing was wanting to make a paradise of that meadows. When we reflected
that this was not a solitary phenomenon, never to happen again, but that
it would happen forever and ever an infinite number of evenings, and cheer
and reassure the latest child that walked there, it was more glorious still.
The sun sets on some retired meadow, where no house is visible, with
all the glory and splendor that it lavishes on cities, and perchance, as
it has never set before,-where there is but a solitary marsh-hawk to have
his wings gilded by it, or only a musquash looks out from his cabin, and
there is some little bluck-veined brook in the midst of the marsh, just
beginning to meander, winding slowly round a decaying stump. We walked
in so pure and bright a light, gilding the withered grass and leaves, so
softly and serenely bright, I thought I had never bathed in such a golden
flood, without a ripple or a murmur to it. The west side of every wood
and rising ground gleamed like the boundary of Elysium, and the sun on
our backs seemed like a gentle herdsman driving us home at evening.
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So we saunter toward the Holy Land, till one day the sun shall shine more brightly
than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and
light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as warn and serene and
golden as on a bank-side in autumn.
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