HOUSE-WARMING |
IN OCTOBER I went a-graping to the river
meadows, and loaded myself with clusters more precious for their
beauty and fragrance than for food. There, too, I admired, though I
did not gather, the cranberries, small waxen gems, pendants of the
meadow grass, pearly and red, which the farmer plucks with an ugly
rake, leaving the smooth meadow in a snarl, heedlessly measuring them
by the bushel and the dollar only, and sells the spoils of the meads
to Boston and New York; destined to be jammed, to satisfy the tastes
of lovers of Nature there. So butchers rake the tongues of bison out
of the prairie grass, regardless of the torn and drooping plant. The
barberry's brilliant fruit was likewise food for my eyes merely; but
I collected a small store of wild apples for coddling, which the
proprietor and travellers had overlooked. When chestnuts were ripe I
laid up half a bushel for winter. It was very exciting at that season
to roam the then boundless chestnut woods of Lincoln- they now sleep
their long sleep under the railroad- with a bag on my shoulder, and a
stick to open burs with in my hand, for I did not always wait for the
frost, amid the rustling of leaves and the loud reproofs of the red
squirrels and the jays, whose half-consumed nuts I sometimes stole,
for the burs which they had selected were sure to contain sound ones.
Occasionally I climbed and shook the trees. They grew also behind my
house, and one large tree, which almost overshadowed it, was, when in
flower, a bouquet which scented the whole neighborhood, but the
squirrels and the jays got most of its fruit; the last coming in
flocks early in the morning and picking the nuts out of the burs
before they fell, I relinquished these trees to them and visited the
more distant woods composed wholly of chestnut. These nuts, as far as
they went, were a good substitute for bread. Many other substitutes
might, perhaps, be found. Digging one day for fishworms, I discovered
the groundnut (Apios tuberosa) on its string, the potato of the
aborigines, a sort of fabulous fruit, which I had begun to doubt if I
had ever dug and eaten in childhood, as I had told, and had not
dreamed it. I had often since seen its crumpled red velvety blossom
supported by the stems of other plants without knowing it to be the
same. Cultivation has well-nigh exterminated it. It has a sweetish
taste, much like that of a frost-bitten potato, and I found it better
boiled than roasted. This tuber seemed like a faint promise of Nature
to rear her own children and feed them simply here at some future
period. In these days of fatted cattle and waving grain-fields this
humble root, which was once the totem of an Indian tribe, is quite
forgotten, or known only by its flowering vine; but let wild Nature
reign here once more, and the tender and luxurious English grains
will probably disappear before a myriad of foes, and without the care
of man the crow may carry back even the last seed of corn to the
great cornfield of the Indian's God in the southwest, whence he is
said to have brought it; but the now almost exterminated ground-nut
will perhaps revive and flourish in spite of frosts and wildness,
prove itself indigenous, and resume its ancient importance and
dignity as the diet of the hunter tribe. Some Indian Ceres or Minerva
must have been the inventor and bestower of it; and when the reign of
poetry commences here, its leaves and string of nuts may be
represented on our works of art.
Already, by the first of
September, I had seen two or three small maples turned scarlet across
the pond, beneath where the white stems of three aspens diverged, at
the point of a promontory, next the water. Ah, many a tale their
color told! Arid gradually from week to week the character of each
tree came out, and it admired itself reflected in the smooth mirror
of the lake. Each morning the manager of this gallery substituted
some new picture, distinguished by more brilliant or harmonious
coloring, for the old upon the walls.
The wasps came by
thousands to my lodge in October, as to winter quarters, and settled
on my windows within and on the walls overhead, sometimes deterring
visitors from entering. Each morning, when they were numbed with
cold, I swept some of them out, but I did not trouble myself much to
get rid of them; I even felt complimented by their regarding my house
as a desirable shelter. They never molested me seriously, though they
bedded with me; and they gradually disappeared, into what crevices I
do not know, avoiding winter and unspeakable cold.
Like the
wasps, before I finally went into winter quarters in November, I used
to resort to the northeast side of Walden, which the sun, reflected
from the pitch pine woods and the stony shore, made the fireside of
the pond; it is so much pleasanter and wholesomer to be warmed by the
sun while you can be, than by an artificial fire. I thus warmed
myself by the still glowing embers which the summer, like a departed
hunter, had left.
When I came to build my chimney I studied
masonry. My bricks, being second-hand ones, required to be cleaned
with a trowel, so that I learned more than usual of the qualities of
bricks and trowels. The mortar on them was fifty years old, and was
said to be still growing harder; but this is one of those sayings
which men love to repeat whether they are true or not. Such sayings
themselves grow harder and adhere more firmly with age, and it would
take many blows with a trowel to clean an old wiseacre of them. Many
of the villages of Mesopotamia are built of secondhand bricks of a
very good quality, obtained from the ruins of Babylon, and the cement
on them is older and probably harder still. However that may be, I
was struck by the peculiar toughness of the steel which bore so many
violent blows without being worn out. As my bricks had been in a
chimney before, though I did not read the name of Nebuchadnezzar on
them, I picked out its many fireplace bricks as I could find, to save
work and waste, and I filled the spaces between the bricks about the
fireplace with stones from the pond shore, and also made my mortar
with the white sand from the same place. I lingered most about the
fireplace, as the most vital part of the house. Indeed, I worked so
deliberately, that though I commenced at the ground in the morning, a
course of bricks raised a few inches above the floor served for my
pillow at night; yet I did not get a stiff neck for it that I
remember; my stiff neck is of older date. I took a poet to board for
a fortnight about those times, which caused me to be put to it for
room. He brought his own knife, though I had two, and we used to
scour them by thrusting them into the earth. He shared with me the
labors of cooking. I was pleased to see my work rising so square and
solid by degrees, and reflected, that, if it proceeded slowly, it was
calculated to endure a long time. The chimney is to some extent an
independent structure, standing on the ground, and rising through the
house to the heavens; even after the house is burned it still stands
sometimes, and its importance and independence are apparent. This was
toward the end of summer. It was now November.
The north wind
had already begun to cool the pond, though it took many weeks of
steady blowing to accomplish it, it is so deep. When I began to have
a fire at evening, before I plastered my house, the chimney carried
smoke particularly well, because of the numerous chinks between the
boards. Yet I passed some cheerful evenings in that cool and airy
apartment, surrounded by the rough brown boards full of knots, and
rafters with the bark on high overhead. My house never pleased my eye
so much after it was plastered, though I was obliged to confess that
it was more comfortable. Should not every apartment in which man
dwells be lofty enough to create some obscurity overhead, where
flickering shadows may play at evening about the rafters? These forms
are more agreeable to the fancy and imagination than fresco paintings
or other the most expensive furniture. I now first began to inhabit
my house, I may say, when I began to use it for warmth as well as
shelter. I had got a couple of old fire-dogs to keep the wood from
the hearth, and it did me good to see the soot form on the back of
the chimney which I had built, and I poked the fire with more right
and more satisfaction than usual. My dwelling was small, and I could
hardly entertain an echo in it; but it seemed larger for being a
single apartment and remote from neighbors. All the attractions of a
house were concentrated in one room; it was kitchen, chamber, parlor,
and keeping-room; and whatever satisfaction parent or child, master
or servant, derive from living in a house, I enjoyed it all. Cato
says, the master of a family (patremfamilias) must have in his rustic
villa "cellam oleariam, vinariam, dolia multa, uti lubeat
caritatem expectare, et rei, et virtuti, et gloriae erit," that
is, "an oil and wine cellar, many casks, so that it may be
pleasant to expect hard times; it will be for his advantage, and
virtue, and glory." I had in my cellar a firkin of potatoes,
about two quarts of peas with the weevil in them, and on my shelf a
little rice, a jug of molasses, and of rye and Indian meal a peck
each.
I sometimes dream of a larger and more populous house,
standing in a golden age, of enduring materials, and without
gingerbread work, which shall still consist of only one room, a vast,
rude, substantial, primitive hall, without ceiling or plastering,
with bare rafters and purlins supporting a sort of lower heaven over
one's head-useful to keep off rain and snow, where the king and queen
posts stand out to receive your homage, when you have done reverence
to the prostrate Saturn of an older dynasty on stepping over the
sill; a cavernous house, wherein you must reach up a torch upon a
pole to see the roof; where some may live in the fireplace, some in
the recess of a window, and some on settles, some at one end of the
hall, some at another, and some aloft on rafters with the spiders, if
they choose; a house which you have got into when you have opened the
outside door, and the ceremony is over; where the weary traveller may
wash, and eat, and converse, and sleep, without further journey; such
a shelter as you would be glad to reach in a tempestuous night,
containing all the essentials of a house, and nothing for
house-keeping; where you can see all the treasures of the house at
one view, and everything hangs upon its peg, that a man should use;
at once kitchen, pantry, parlor, chamber, storehouse, and garret;
where you can see so necessary a thin, as a barrel or a ladder, so
convenient a thing as a cupboard, and hear the pot boil, and pay your
respects to the fire that cooks your dinner, and the oven that bakes
your bread, and the necessary furniture and utensils are the chief
ornaments; where the washing is not put out, nor the fire, nor the
mistress, and perhaps you are sometimes requested to move from off
the trapdoor, when the cook would descend into the cellar, and so
learn whether the ground is solid or hollow beneath you without
stamping. A house whose inside is as open and manifest as a bird's
nest, and you cannot go in at the front door and out at the back
without seeing some of its inhabitants; where to be a guest is to be
presented with the freedom of the house, and not to be carefully
excluded from seven eighths of it, shut up in a particular cell, and
told to make yourself at home therein solitary confinement. Nowadays
the host does not admit you to his hearth, but has got the mason to
build one for yourself somewhere in his alley, and hospitality is the
art of keeping you at the greatest distance. There is as much secrecy
about the cooking as if he had a design to poison you. I am aware
that I have been on many a man's premises, and might have been
legally ordered off, but I am not aware that I have been in many
men's houses. I might visit in my old clothes a king and queen who
lived simply in such a house as I have described, if I were going
their way; but backing out of a modern palace will be all that I
shall desire to learn, if ever I am caught in one.
It would
seem as if the very language of our parlors would lose all its nerve
and degenerate into palaver wholly, our lives pass at such remoteness
from its symbols, and its metaphors and tropes are necessarily so far
fetched, through slides and dumbwaiters, as it were; in other words,
the parlor is so far from the kitchen and workshop. The dinner even
is only the parable of a dinner, commonly. As if only the savage
dwelt near enough to Nature and Truth to borrow a trope from them.
How can the scholar, who dwells away in the North West Territory or
the Isle of Man, tell what is parliamentary in the kitchen?
However,
only one or two of my guests were ever bold enough to stay and eat a
hasty-pudding with me; but when they saw that crisis approaching they
beat a hasty retreat rather, as if it would shake the house to its
foundations. Nevertheless, it stood through a great many
hasty-puddings.
I did not plaster till it was freezing
weather. I brought over some whiter and cleaner sand for this purpose
from the opposite shore of the pond in a boat, a sort of conveyance
which would have tempted me to go much farther if necessary. My house
had in the meanwhile been shingled down to the ground on every side.
In lathing I was pleased to be able to send home each nail with a
single blow of the hammer, and it was my ambition to transfer the
plaster from the board to the wall neatly and rapidly. I remembered
the story of a conceited fellow, who, in fine clothes, was wont to
lounge about the village once, giving advice to workmen. Venturing
one day to substitute deeds for words, he turned up his cuffs, seized
a plasterer's board, and having loaded his trowel without mishap,
with a complacent look toward the lathing overhead, made a bold
gesture thitherward; and straightway, to his complete discomfiture,
received the whole contents in his ruffled bosom. I admired anew the
economy and convenience of plastering, which so effectually shuts out
the cold and takes a handsome finish, and I learned the various
casualties to which the plasterer is liable. I was surprised to see
how thirsty the bricks were which drank up all the moisture in my
plaster before I had smoothed it, and how many pailfuls of water it
takes to christen a new hearth. I had the previous winter made a
small quantity of lime by burning the shells of the Unio fluviatilis,
which our river affords, for the sake of the experiment; so that I
knew where my materials came from. I might have got good limestone
within a mile or two and burned it myself, if I had cared to do so.
The pond had in the meanwhile skimmed over in the shadiest
and shallowest coves, some days or even weeks before the general
freezing. The first ice is especially interesting and perfect, being
hard, dark, and transparent, and affords the best opportunity that
ever offers for examining the bottom where it is shallow; for you can
lie at your length on ice only an inch thick, like a skater insect on
the surface of the water, and study the bottom at your leisure, only
two or three inches distant, like a picture behind a glass, and the
water is necessarily always smooth then. There are many furrows in
the sand where some creature has travelled about and doubled on its
tracks; and, for wrecks, it is strewn with the cases of caddis-worms
made of minute grains of white quartz. Perhaps these have creased it,
for you find some of their cases in the furrows, though they are deep
and broad for them to make. But the ice itself is the object of most
interest, though you must improve the earliest opportunity to study
it. If you examine it closely the morning after it freezes, you find
that the greater part of the bubbles, which at first appeared to be
within it, are against its under surface, and that more are
continually rising from the bottom; while the ice is as yet
comparatively solid and dark, that is, you see the water through it.
These bubbles are from an eightieth to an eighth of an inch in
diameter, very clear and beautiful, and you see your face reflected
in them through the ice. There may be thirty or forty of them to a
square inch. There are also already within the ice narrow oblong
perpendicular bubbles about half an inch long, sharp cones with the
apex upward; or oftener, if the ice is quite fresh, minute spherical
bubbles one directly above another, like a string of beads. But these
within the ice are not so numerous nor obvious as those beneath. I
sometimes used to cast on stones to try the strength of the ice, and
those which broke through carried in air with them, which formed very
large and conspicuous white bubbles beneath. One day when I came to
the same place forty-eight hours afterward, I found that those large
bubbles were still perfect, though an inch more of ice had formed, as
I could see distinctly by the seam in the edge of a cake. But as the
last two days had been very warm, like an Indian summer, the ice was
not now transparent, showing the dark green color of the water, and
the bottom, but opaque and whitish or gray, and though twice as thick
was hardly stronger than before, for the air bubbles had greatly
expanded under this heat and run together, and lost their regularity;
they were no longer one directly over another, but often like silvery
coins poured from a bag, one overlapping another, or in thin flakes,
as if occupying slight cleavages. The beauty of the ice was gone, and
it was too late to study the bottom. Being curious to know what
position my great bubbles occupied with regard to the new ice, I
broke out a cake containing a middling sized one, and turned it
bottom upward. The new ice had formed around and under the bubble, so
that it was included between the two ices. It was wholly in the lower
ice, but close against the upper, and was flattish, or perhaps
slightly lenticular, with a rounded edge, a quarter of an inch deep
by four inches in diameter; and I was surprised to find that directly
under the bubble the ice was melted with great regularity in the form
of a saucer reversed, to the height of five eighths of an inch in the
middle, leaving a thin partition there between the water and the
bubble, hardly an eighth of an inch thick; and in many places the
small bubbles in this partition had burst out downward, and probably
there was no ice at all under the largest bubbles, which were a foot
in diameter. I inferred that the infinite number of minute bubbles
which I had first seen against the under surface of the ice were now
frozen in likewise, and that each, in its degree, had operated like a
burning-glass on the ice beneath to melt and rot it. These are the
little air-guns which contribute to make the ice crack and whoop.
At length the winter set in good earnest, just as I had
finished plastering, and the wind began to howl around the house as
if it had not had permission to do so till then. Night after night
the geese came lumbering in the dark with a clangor and a whistling
of wings, even after the ground was covered with snow, some to alight
in Walden, and some flying low over the woods toward Fair Haven,
bound for Mexico. Several times, when returning from the village at
ten or eleven o'clock at night, I heard the tread of a flock of
geese, or else ducks, on the dry leaves in the woods by a pond-hole
behind my dwelling, where they had come up to feed, and the faint
honk or quack of their leader as they hurried off. In 1845 Walden
froze entirely over for the first time on the night of the 22d of
December, Flint's and other shallower ponds and the river having been
frozen ten days or more; in '46, the 16th; in '49, about the 31st;
and in '50, about the 27th of December; in '52, the 5th of January;
in '53, the 31st of December. The snow had already covered the ground
since the 25th of November, and surrounded me suddenly with the
scenery of winter. I withdrew yet farther into my shell, and
endeavored to keep a bright fire both within my house and within my
breast. My employment out of doors now was to collect the dead wood
in the forest, bringing it in my hands or on my shoulders, or
sometimes trailing a dead pine tree under each arm to my shed. An old
forest fence which had seen its best days was a great haul for me. I
sacrificed it to Vulcan, for it was past serving the god Terminus.
How much more interesting an event is that man's supper who has just
been forth in the snow to hunt, nay, you might say, steal, the fuel
to cook it with! His bread and meat are sweet. There are enough
fagots and waste wood of all kinds in the forests of most of our
towns to support many fires, but which at present warm none, and,
some think, hinder the growth of the young wood. There was also the
driftwood of the pond. In the course of the summer I had discovered a
raft of pitch pine logs with the bark on, pinned together by the
Irish when the railroad was built. This I hauled up partly on the
shore. After soaking two years and then lying high six months it was
perfectly sound, though waterlogged past drying. I amused myself one
winter day with sliding this piecemeal across the pond, nearly half a
mile, skating behind with one end of a log fifteen feet long on my
shoulder, and the other on the ice; or I tied several logs together
with a birch withe, and then, with a longer birch or alder which had
a book at the end, dragged them across. Though completely waterlogged
and almost as heavy as lead, they not only burned long, but made a
very hot fire; nay, I thought that they burned better for the
soaking, as if the pitch, being confined by the water, burned longer,
as in a lamp.
Gilpin, in his account of the forest borderers
of England, says that "the encroachments of trespassers, and the
houses and fences thus raised on the borders of the forest,"
were "considered as great nuisances by the old forest law, and
were severely punished under the name of purprestures, as tending ad
terrorem ferarum- ad nocumentum forestae, etc.," to the
frightening of the game and the detriment of the forest. But I was
interested in the preservation of the venison and the vert more than
the hunters or woodchoppers, and as much as though I had been the
Lord Warden himself; and if any part was burned, though I burned it
myself by accident, I grieved with a grief that lasted longer and was
more inconsolable than that of the proprietors; nay, I grieved when
it was cut down by the proprietors themselves. I would that our
farmers when they cut down a forest felt some of that awe which the
old Romans did when they came to thin, or let in the light to, a
consecrated grove (lucum conlucare), that is, would believe that it
is sacred to some god. The Roman made an expiatory offering, and
prayed, Whatever god or goddess thou art to whom this grove is
sacred, be propitious to me, my family, and children, etc.
It
is remarkable what a value is still put upon wood even in this age
and in this new country, a value more permanent and universal than
that of gold. After all our discoveries and inventions no man will go
by a pile of wood. It is as precious to us as it was to our Saxon and
Norman ancestors. If they made their bows of it, we make our
gun-stocks of it. Michaux, more than thirty years ago, says that the
price of wood for fuel in New York and Philadelphia "nearly
equals, and sometimes exceeds, that of the best wood in Paris, though
this immense capital annually requires more than three hundred
thousand cords, and is surrounded to the distance of three hundred
miles by cultivated plains." In this town the price of wood
rises almost steadily, and the only question is, how much higher it
is to be this year than it was the last. Mechanics and tradesmen who
come in person to the forest on no other errand, are sure to attend
the wood auction, and even pay a high price for the privilege of
gleaning after the woodchopper. It is now many years that men have
resorted to the forest for fuel and the materials of the arts: the
New Englander and the New Hollander, the Parisian and the Celt, the
farmer and Robin Hood, Goody Blake and Harry Gill; in most parts of
the world the prince and the peasant, the scholar and the savage,
equally require still a few sticks from the forest to warm them and
cook their food. Neither could I do without them.
Every man
looks at his wood-pile with a kind of affection. I love to have mine
before my window, and the more chips the better to remind me of my
pleasing work. I had an old axe which nobody claimed, with which by
spells in winter days, on the sunny side of the house, I played about
the stumps which I had got out of my bean-field. As my driver
prophesied when I was plowing, they warmed me twice- once while I was
splitting them, and again when they were on the fire, so that no fuel
could give out more heat. As for the axe, I was advised to get the
village blacksmith to "jump" it; but I jumped him, and,
putting a hickory helve from the woods into it, made it do. If it was
dull, it was at least hung true.
A few pieces of fat pine were
a great treasure. It is interesting to remember how much of this food
for fire is still concealed in the bowels of the earth. In previous
years I had often gone prospecting over some bare hillside, where a
pitch pine wood had formerly stood, and got out the fat pine roots.
They are almost indestructible. Stumps thirty or forty years old, at
least, will still be sound at the core, though the sapwood has all
become vegetable mould, as appears by the scales of the thick bark
forming a ring level with the earth four or five inches distant from
the heart. With axe and shovel you explore this mine, and follow the
marrowy store, yellow as beef tallow, or as if you had struck on a
vein of gold, deep into the earth. But commonly I kindled my fire
with the dry leaves of the forest, which I had stored up in my shed
before the snow came. Green hickory finely split makes the
woodchopper's kindlings, when he has a camp in the woods. Once in a
while I got a little of this. When the villagers were lighting their
fires beyond the horizon, I too gave notice to the various wild
inhabitants of Walden vale, by a smoky streamer from my chimney, that
I was awake.
Light-winged
Smoke, Icarian bird,
Melting thy pinions in thy upward
flight,
Lark without song, and messenger of dawn,
Circling
above the hamlets as thy nest;
Or else, departing dream, and
shadowy form
Of midnight vision, gathering up thy skirts;
By
night star-veiling, and by day
Darkening the light and blotting
out the sun;
Go thou my incense upward from this hearth,
And
ask the gods to pardon this clear flame.
Hard green wood
just cut, though I used but little of that, answered my purpose
better than any other. I sometimes left a good fire when I went to
take a walk in a winter afternoon; and when I returned, three or four
hours afterward, it would be still alive and glowing. My house was
not empty though I was gone. It was as if I had left a cheerful
housekeeper behind. It was I and Fire that lived there; and commonly
my housekeeper proved trustworthy. One day, however, as I was
splitting wood, I thought that I would just look in at the window and
see if the house was not on fire; it was the only time I remember to
have been particularly anxious on this score; so I looked and saw
that a spark had caught my bed, and I went in and extinguished it
when it had burned a place as big as my hand. But my house occupied
so sunny and sheltered a position, and its roof was so low, that I
could afford to let the fire go out in the middle of almost any
winter day.
The moles nested in my cellar, nibbling every
third potato, and making a snug bed even there of some hair left
after plastering and of brown paper; for even the wildest animals
love comfort and warmth as well as man, and they survive the winter
only because they are so careful to secure them. Some of my friends
spoke as if I was coming to the woods on purpose to freeze myself.
The animal merely makes a bed, which he warms with his body, in a
sheltered place; but man, having discovered fire, boxes up some air
in a spacious apartment, and warms that, instead of robbing himself,
makes that his bed, in which he can move about divested of more
cumbrous clothing, maintain a kind of summer in the midst of winter,
and by means of windows even admit the light, and with a lamp
lengthen out the day. Thus he goes a step or two beyond instinct, and
saves a little time for the fine arts. Though, when I had been
exposed to the rudest blasts a long time, my whole body began to grow
torpid, when I reached the genial atmosphere of my house I soon
recovered my faculties and prolonged my life. But the most
luxuriously housed has little to boast of in this respect, nor need
we trouble ourselves to speculate how the human race may be at last
destroyed. It would be easy to cut their threads any time with a
little sharper blast from the north. We go on dating from Cold
Fridays and Great Snows; but a little colder Friday, or greater snow
would put a period to man's existence on the globe.
The next
winter I used a small cooking-stove for economy, since I did not own
the forest; but it did not keep fire so well as the open fireplace.
Cooking was then, for the most part, no longer a poetic, but merely a
chemic process. It will soon be forgotten, in these days of stoves,
that we used to roast potatoes in the ashes, after the Indian
fashion. The stove not only took up room and scented the house, but
it concealed the fire, and I felt as if I had lost a companion. You
can always see a face in the fire. The laborer, looking into it at
evening, pulifies his thoughts of the dross and earthiness which they
have accumulated during the day. But I could no longer sit and look
into the fire, and the pertinent words of a poet recurred to me with
new force.
"Never,
bright flame, may be denied to me
Thy dear, life imaging, close
sympathy.
What but my hopes shot upward e'er so bright?
What
but my fortunes sunk so low in night?
Why art thou banished from
our hearth and hall,
Thou who art welcomed and beloved by all?
Was
thy existence then too fanciful
For our life's common light, who
are so dull?
Did thy bright gleam mysterious converse hold
With
our congenial souls? secrets too bold?
Well, we are safe and
strong, for now we sit
Beside a hearth where no dim shadows
flit,
Where nothing cheers nor saddens, but a fire
Warms feet
and hands- nor does to more aspire;
By whose compact utilitarian
heap
The present may sit down and go to sleep,
Nor fear the
ghosts who from the dim past walked,
And with us by the unequal
light of the old wood fire talked."
FORMER
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