4. 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."(1)
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 (2)
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."(3)
The Fitchburg Railroad touches the pond
about a hundred rods (4) 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,(5)
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,(6)
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, were on hand when
the bell rang. 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,(7)
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.(8)
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,(9) 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 (10) 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,(11)
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 (12) 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 (13)
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
"be the mast
Of some great ammiral."(14)
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 (15) 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,(16)
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,(17)
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.(18) 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 double 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.
Notes
- more information
1. Ida Pfeiffer (1797-1858) Austrian
traveler and writer - back
2. six rods is 99 feet, or 33 yards
(somewhat less than the actual distance) - back
3. Ellery Channing (1818-1901),
from Walden Spring - back
4. 100 rods is 1,650 feet, or 530
yards, or .31 miles - back
5. seed planting machine - back
6. Virginia and North Carolina
coastal swamp - back
7. in Greek mythology, one of the
three Fates, who cuts the thread of life - back
8. legendary Swiss hero who shot
an apple off his son's head - back
9. Mexican War battle of 1847 -
back
10. Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821)
French general & emperor - back
11. from the port of Boston to
the western border of Vermont - back
12. town in Maine known for lime
deposits - back
13. North Atlantic fishing ground
off the coast of Newfoundland - back
14. John Milton (1608-1674) English
poet, from Paradise Lost - back
15. the lead sheep in a flock,
who wears a bell - back
16. hills in southern New Hampshire
- back
17. Ben Jonson (1573?-1637) English
dramatist - back
[ 홈 ] [ 위로 ] [ Walden - Chapter 1-A ] [ Walden - Chapter 1-B ] [ Walden - Chapter 1-C ] [ Walden - Chapter 1-D ] [ Walden - Chapter 1-E ] [ Walden - Chapter 2 ] [ Walden - Chapter 3 ] [ Walden - Chapter 4 ] [ Walden - Chapter 5 ] [ Walden - Chapter 6 ] [ Walden - Chapter 7 ] [ Walden - Chapter 8 ] [ Walden - Chapter 9-A ] [ Walden - Chapter 9-B ] [ Walden - Chapter 10 ] [ Walden - Chapter 11 ] [ Walden - Chapter 12 ] [ Walden - Chapter 13 ] [ Walden - Chapter 14 ] [ Walden - Chapter 15 ] [ Walden - Chapter 16 ] [ Walden - Chapter 17 ] [ Walden - Chapter 18 ] [ The Walden Express ]
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