THE PONDS |
SOMETIMES,
having had a surfeit of human society and gossip, and worn out all my
village friends, I rambled still farther westward than I habitually
dwell, into yet more unfrequented parts of the town, "to fresh
woods and pastures new," or, while the sun was setting, made my
supper of huckleberries and blueberries on Fair Haven Hill, and laid
up a store for several days. The fruits do not yield their true
flavor to the purchaser of them, nor to him who raises them for the
market. There is but one way to obtain it, yet few take that way. If
you would know the flavor of huckleberries, ask the cowboy or the
partridge. It is a vulgar error to suppose that you have tasted
huckleberries who never plucked them. A huckleberry never reaches
Boston; they have not been known there since they grew on her three
hills. The ambrosial and essential part of the fruit is lost with the
bloom which is rubbed off in the market cart, and they become mere
provender. As long as Eternal justice reigns, not one innocent
huckleberry can be transported thither from the country's
hills.
Occasionally, after my hoeing was done for the day, I
joined some impatient companion who had been fishing on the pond
since morning, as silent and motionless as a duck or a floating leaf,
and, after practising various kinds of philosophy, had concluded
commonly, by the time I arrived, that he belonged to the ancient sect
of Coenobites. There was one older man, an excellent fisher and
skilled in all kinds of woodcraft, who was pleased to look upon my
house as a building erected for the convenience of fishermen; and I
was equally pleased when he sat in my doorway to arrange his lines.
Once in a while we sat together on the pond, he at one end of the
boat, and I at the other; but not many words passed between us, for
he had grown deaf in his later years, but he occasionally hummed a
psalm, which harmonized well enough with my philosophy. Our
intercourse was thus altogether one of unbroken harmony, far more
pleasing to remember than if it had been carried on by speech. When,
as was commonly the case, I had none to commune with, I used to raise
the echoes by striking with a paddle on the side of my boat, filling
the surrounding woods with circling and dilating sound, stirring them
up as the keeper of a menagerie his wild beasts, until I elicited a
growl from every wooded vale and hillside.
In warm evenings I
frequently sat in the boat playing the flute, and saw the perch,
which I seem to have charmed, hovering around me, and the moon
travelling over the ribbed bottom, which was strewed with the wrecks
of the forest. Formerly I had come to this pond adventurously, from
time to time, in dark summer nights, with a companion, and, making a
fire close to the water's edge, which we thought attracted the
fishes, we caught pouts with a bunch of worms strung on a thread, and
when we had done, far in the night, threw the burning brands high
into the air like skyrockets, which, coming down into the pond, were
quenched with a loud hissing, and we were suddenly groping in total
darkness. Through this, whistling a tune, we took our way to the
haunts of men again. But now I had made my home by the
shore.
Sometimes, after staying in a village parlor till the
family had all retired, I have returned to the woods, and, partly
with a view to the next day's dinner, spent the hours of midnight
fishing from a boat by moonlight, serenaded by owls and foxes, and
hearing, from time to time, the creaking note of some unknown bird
close at hand. These experiences were very memorable and valuable to
me- anchored in forty feet of water, and twenty or thirty rods from
the shore, surrounded sometimes by thousands of small perch and
shiners, dimpling the surface with their tails in the moonlight, and
communicating by a long flaxen line with mysterious nocturnal fishes
which had their dwelling forty feet below, or sometimes dragging
sixty feet of line about the pond as I drifted in the gentle night
breeze, now and then feeling a slight vibration along it, indicative
of some life prowling about its extremity, of dull uncertain
blundering purpose there, and slow to make up its mind. At length you
slowly raise, pulling hand over hand, some horned pout squeaking and
squirming to the upper air. It was very queer, especially in dark
nights, when your thoughts had wandered to vast and cosmogonal themes
in other spheres, to feel this faint jerk, which came to interrupt
your dreams and link you to Nature again. It seemed as if I might
next cast my line upward into the air, as well as downward into this
element, which was scarcely more dense. Thus I caught two fishes as
it were with one hook.
The scenery of Walden is on a humble
scale, and, though very beautiful, does not approach to grandeur, nor
can it much concern one who has not long frequented it or lived by
its shore; yet this pond is so remarkable for its depth and purity as
to merit a particular description. It is a clear and deep green well,
half a mile long and a mile and three quarters in circumference, and
contains about sixty-one and a half acres; a perennial spring in the
midst of pine and oak woods, without any visible inlet or outlet
except by the clouds and evaporation. The surrounding hills rise
abruptly from the water to the height of forty to eighty feet, though
on the southeast and east they attain to about one hundred and one
hundred and fifty feet respectively, within a quarter and a third of
a mile. They are exclusively woodland. All our Concord waters have
two colors at least; one when viewed at a distance, and another, more
proper, close at hand. The first depends more on the light, and
follows the sky. In clear weather, in summer, they appear blue at a
little distance, especially if agitated, and at a great distance all
appear alike. In stormy weather they are sometimes of a dark
slate-color. The sea, however, is said to be blue one day and green
another without any perceptible change in the atmosphere. I have seen
our river, when, the landscape being covered with snow, both water
and ice were almost as green as grass. Some consider blue "to be
the color of pure water, whether liquid or solid." But, looking
directly down into our waters from a boat, they are seen to be of
very different colors. Walden is blue at one time and green at
another, even from the same point of view. Lying between the earth
and the heavens, it partakes of the color of both. Viewed from a
hilltop it reflects the color of the sky; but near at hand it is of a
yellowish tint next the shore where you can see the sand, then a
light green, which gradually deepens to a uniform dark green in the
body of the pond. In some lights, viewed even from a hilltop, it is
of a vivid green next the shore. Some have referred this to the
reflection of the verdure; but it is equally green there against the
railroad sandbank, and in the spring, before the leaves are expanded,
and it may be simply the result of the prevailing blue mixed with the
yellow of the sand. Such is the color of its iris. This is that
portion, also, where in the spring, the ice being warmed by the heat
of the sun reflected from the bottom, and also transmitted through
the earth, melts first and forms a narrow canal about the still
frozen middle. Like the rest of our waters, when much agitated, in
clear weather, so that the surface of the waves may reflect the sky
at the right angle, or because there is more light mixed with it, it
appears at a little distance of a darker blue than the sky itself;
and at such a time, being on its surface, and looking with divided
vision, so as to see the reflection, I have discerned a matchless and
indescribable light blue, such as watered or changeable silks and
sword blades suggest, more cerulean than the sky itself, alternating
with the original dark green on the opposite sides of the waves,
which last appeared but muddy in comparison. It is a vitreous
greenish blue, as I remember it, like those patches of the winter sky
seen through cloud vistas in the west before sundown. Yet a single
glass of its water held up to the light is as colorless as an equal
quantity of air. It is well known that a large plate of glass will
have a green tint, owing, as the makers say, to its "body,"
but a small piece of the same will be colorless. How large a body of
Walden water would be required to reflect a green tint I have never
proved. The water of our river is black or a very dark brown to one
looking directly down on it, and, like that of most ponds, imparts to
the body of one bathing in it a yellowish tinge; but this water is of
such crystalline purity that the body of the bather appears of an
alabaster whiteness, still more unnatural, which, as the limbs are
magnified and distorted withal, produces a monstrous effect, making
fit studies for a Michael Angelo.
The water is so transparent
that the bottom can easily be discerned at the depth of twenty-five
or thirty feet. Paddling over it, you may see, many feet beneath the
surface, the schools of perch and shiners, perhaps only an inch long,
yet the former easily distinguished by their transverse bars, and you
think that they must be ascetic fish that find a subsistence there.
Once, in the winter, many years ago, when I had been cutting holes
through the ice in order to catch pickerel, as I stepped ashore I
tossed my axe back on to the ice, but, as if some evil genius had
directed it, it slid four or five rods directly into one of the
holes, where the water was twenty-five feet deep. Out of curiosity, I
lay down on the ice and looked through the hole, until I saw the axe
a little on one side, standing on its head, with its helve erect and
gently swaying to and fro with the pulse of the pond; and there it
might have stood erect and swaying till in the course of time the
handle rotted off, if I had not disturbed it. Making another hole
directly over it with an ice chisel which I had, and cutting down the
longest birch which I could find in the neighborhood with my knife, I
made a slip-noose, which I attached to its end, and, letting it down
carefully, passed it over the knob of the handle, and drew it by a
line along the birch, and so pulled the axe out again.
The
shore is composed of a belt of smooth rounded white stones like
paving-stones, excepting one or two short sand beaches, and is so
steep that in many places a single leap will carry you into water
over your head; and were it not for its remarkable transparency, that
would be the last to be seen of its bottom till it rose on the
opposite side. Some think it is bottomless. It is nowhere muddy, and
a casual observer would say that there were no weeds at all in it;
and of noticeable plants, except in the little meadows recently
overflowed, which do not properly belong to it, a closer scrutiny
does not detect a flag nor a bulrush, nor even a lily, yellow or
white, but only a few small heart-leaves and potamogetons, and
perhaps a water-target or two; all which however a bather might not
perceive; and these plants are clean and bright like the element they
grow in. The stones extend a rod or two into the water, and then the
bottom is pure sand, except in the deepest parts, where there is
usually a little sediment, probably from the decay of the leaves
which have been wafted on to it so many successive falls, and a
bright green weed is brought up on anchors even in midwinter.
We
have one other pond just like this, White Pond, in Nine Acre Corner,
about two and a half miles westerly; but, though I am acquainted with
most of the ponds within a dozen miles of this centre I do not know a
third of this pure and well-like character. Successive nations
perchance have drank at, admired, and fathomed it, and passed away,
and still its water is green and pellucid as ever. Not an
intermitting spring! Perhaps on that spring morning when Adam and Eve
were driven out of Eden Walden Pond was already in existence, and
even then breaking up in a gentle spring rain accompanied with mist
and a southerly wind, and covered with myriads of ducks and geese,
which had not heard of the fall, when still such pure lakes sufficed
them. Even then it had commenced to rise and fall, and had clarified
its waters and colored them of the hue they now wear, and obtained a
patent of Heaven to be the only Walden Pond in the world and
distiller of celestial dews. Who knows in how many unremembered
nations' literatures this has been the Castalian Fountain? or what
nymphs presided over it in the Golden Age? It is a gem of the first
water which Concord wears in her coronet.
Yet perchance the
first who came to this well have left some trace of their footsteps.
I have been surprised to detect encircling the pond, even where a
thick wood has just been cut down on the shore, a narrow shelf-like
path in the steep hillside, alternately rising and falling,
approaching and receding from the water's edge, as old probably as
the race of man here, worn by the feet of aboriginal hunters, and
still from time to time unmittingly trodden by the present occupants
of the land. This is particularly distinct to one standing on the
middle of the pond in winter, just after a light snow has fallen,
appearing as a clear undulating white line, unobscured by weeds and
twigs, and very obvious a quarter of a mile off in many places where
in summer it is hardly distinguishable close at hand. The snow
reprints it, as it were, in clear white type alto-relievo. The
ornamented grounds of villas which will one day be built here may
still preserve some trace of this.
The pond rises and falls,
but whether regularly or not, and within what period, nobody knows,
though, as usual, many pretend to know. It is commonly higher in the
winter and lower in the summer, though not corresponding to the
general wet and dryness. I can remember when it was a foot or two
lower, and also when it was at least five feet higher, than when I
lived by it. There is a narrow sand-bar running into it, with very
deep water on one side, on which I helped boil a kettle of chowder,
some six rods from the main shore, about the year 1824, which it has
not been possible to do for twenty-five years; and, on the other
hand, my friends used to listen with incredulity when I told them,
that a few years later I was accustomed to fish from a boat in a
secluded cove in the woods, fifteen rods from the only shore they
knew, which place was long since converted into a meadow. But the
pond has risen steadily for two years, and now, in the summer of '52,
is just five feet higher than when I lived there, or as high as it
was thirty years ago, and fishing goes on again in the meadow. This
makes a difference of level, at the outside, of six or seven feet;
and yet the water shed by the surrounding hills is insignificant in
amount, and this overflow must be referred to causes which affect the
deep springs. This same summer the pond has begun to fall again. It
is remarkable that this fluctuation, whether periodical or not,
appears thus to require many years for its accomplishment. I have
observed one rise and a part of two falls, and I expect that a dozen
or fifteen years hence the water will again be as low as I have ever
known it. Flint's Pond, a mile eastward, allowing for the disturbance
occasioned by its inlets and outlets, and the smaller intermediate
ponds also, sympathize with Walden, and recently attained their
greatest height at the same time with the latter. The same is true,
as far as my observation goes, of White Pond.
This rise and
fall of Walden at long intervals serves this use at least; the water
standing at this great height for a year or more, though it makes it
difficult to walk round it, kills the shrubs and trees which have
sprung up about its edge since the last rise- pitch pines, birches,
alders, aspens, and others- and, falling again, leaves an
unobstructed shore; for, unlike many ponds and all waters which are
subject to a daily tide, its shore is cleanest when the water is
lowest. On the side of the pond next my house a row of pitch pines,
fifteen feet high, has been killed and tipped over as if by a lever,
and thus a stop put to their encroachments; and their size indicates
how many years have elapsed since the last rise to this height. By
this fluctuation the pond asserts its title to a shore, and thus the
shore is shorn, and the trees cannot hold it by right of possession.
These are the lips of the lake, on which no beard grows. It licks its
chaps from time to time. When the water is at its height, the alders,
willows, and maples send forth a mass of fibrous red roots several
feet long from all sides of their stems in the water, and to the
height of three or four feet from the ground, in the effort to
maintain themselves; and I have known the high blueberry bushes about
the shore, which commonly produce no fruit, bear an abundant crop
under these circumstances.
Some have been puzzled to tell how
the shore became so regularly paved. My townsmen have all heard the
tradition- the oldest people tell me that they heard it in their
youth- that anciently the Indians were holding a pow-wow upon a hill
here, which rose as high into the heavens as the pond now sinks deep
into the earth, and they used much profanity, as the story goes,
though this vice is one of which the Indians were never guilty, and
while they were thus engaged the hill shook and suddenly sank, and
only one old squaw, named Walden, escaped, and from her the pond was
named. It has been conjectured that when the hill shook these stones
rolled down its side and became the present shore. It is very
certain, at any rate, that once there was no pond here, and now there
is one; and this Indian fable does not in any respect conflict with
the account of that ancient settler whom I have mentioned, who
remembers so well when he first came here with his divining-rod, saw
a thin vapor rising from the sward, and the hazel pointed steadily
downward, and he concluded to dig a well here. As for the stones,
many still think that they are hardly to be accounted for by the
action of the waves on these hills; but I observe that the
surrounding hills are remarkably full of the same kind of stones, so
that they have been obliged to pile them up in walls on both sides of
the railroad cut nearest the pond; and, moreover, there are most
stones where the shore is most abrupt; so that, unfortunately, it is
no longer a mystery to me. I detect the paver. If the name was not
derived from that of some English locality- Saffron Walden, for
instance- one might suppose that it was called originally Walled-in
Pond.
The pond was my well ready dug. For four months in the
year its water is as cold as it is pure at all times; and I think
that it is then as good as any, if not the best, in the town. In the
winter, all water which is exposed to the air is colder than springs
and wells which are protected from it. The temperature of the pond
water which had stood in the room where I sat from five o'clock in
the afternoon till noon the next day, the sixth of March, 1846, the
thermometer having been up to 65' or 70' some of the time, owing
partly to the sun on the roof, was 42', or one degree colder than the
water of one of the coldest wells in the village just drawn. The
temperature of the Boiling Spring the same day was 45', or the
warmest of any water tried, though it is the coldest that I know of
in summer, when, beside, shallow and stagnant surface water is not
mingled with it. Moreover, in summer, Walden never becomes so warm as
most water which is exposed to the sun, on account of its depth. In
the warmest weather I usually placed a pailful in my cellar, where it
became cool in the night, and remained so during the day; though I
also resorted to a spring in the neighborhood. It was as good when a
week old as the day it was dipped, and had no taste of the pump.
Whoever camps for a week in summer by the shore of a pond, needs only
bury a pail of water a few feet deep in the shade of his camp to be
independent of the luxury of ice.
There have been caught in
Walden pickerel, one weighing seven pounds- to say nothing of another
which carried off a reel with great velocity, which the fisherman
safely set down at eight pounds because he did not see him- perch and
pouts, some of each weighing over two pounds, shiners, chivins or
roach (Leuciscus pulchellus), a very few breams, and a couple of
eels, one weighing four pounds- I am thus particular because the
weight of a fish is commonly its only title to fame, and these are
the only eels I have heard of here;- also, I have a faint
recollection of a little fish some five inches long, with silvery
sides and a greenish back, somewhat dace-like in its character, which
I mention here chiefly to link my facts to fable. Nevertheless, this
pond is not very fertile in fish. Its pickerel, though not abundant,
are its chief boast. I have seen at one time lying on the ice
pickerel of at least three different kinds: a long and shallow one,
steel-colored, most like those caught in the river; a bright golden
kind, with greenish reflections and remarkably deep, which is the
most common here; and another, golden-colored, and shaped like the
last, but peppered on the sides with small dark brown or black spots,
intermixed with a few faint blood-red ones, very much like a trout.
The specific name reticulatus would not apply to this; it should be
guttatus rather. These are all very firm fish, and weigh more than
their size promises. The shiners, pouts, and perch also, and indeed
all the fishes which inhabit this pond, are much cleaner, handsomer,
and firmer-fleshed than those in the river and most other ponds, as
the water is purer, and they can easily be distinguished from them.
Probably many ichthyologists would make new varieties of some of
them. There are also a clean race of frogs and tortoises, and a few
mussels in it; muskrats and minks leave their traces about it, and
occasionally a travelling mud-turtle visits it. Sometimes, when I
pushed off my boat in the morning, I disturbed a great mud-turtle
which had secreted himself under the boat in the night. Ducks and
geese frequent it in the spring and fall, the white-bellied swallows
(Hirundo bicolor) skim over it, and the peetweets (Totanus
macularius) "teeter" along its stony shores all summer. I
have sometimes disturbed a fish hawk sitting on a white pine over the
water; but I doubt if it is ever profaned by the wind of a gull, like
Fair Haven. At most, it tolerates one annual loon. These are all the
animals of consequence which frequent it now.
You may see from
a boat, in calm weather, near the sandy eastern, shore where the
water is eight or ten feet deep, and also in some other parts of the
pond, some circular heaps half a dozen feet in diameter by a foot in
height, consisting of small stones less than a hen's egg in size,
where all around is bare sand. At first you wonder if the Indians
could have formed them on the ice for any purpose, and so, when the
ice melted, they sank to the bottom; but they are too regular and
some of them plainly too fresh for that. They are similar to those
found in rivers; but as there are no suckers nor lampreys here, I
know not by what fish they could be made. Perhaps they are the nests
of the chivin. These lend a pleasing mystery to the bottom.
The
shore is irregular enough not to be monotonous. I have in my mind's
eye the western, indented with deep bays, the bolder northern, and
the beautifully scalloped southern shore, where successive capes
overlap each other and suggest unexplored coves between. The forest
has never so good a setting, nor is so distinctly beautiful, as when
seen from the middle of a small lake amid hills which rise from the
water's edge; for the water in which it is reflected not only makes
the best foreground in such a case, but, with its winding shore, the
most natural and agreeable boundary to it. There is no rawness nor
imperfection in its edge there, as where the axe has cleared a part,
or a cultivated field abuts on it. The trees have ample room to
expand on the water side, and each sends forth its most vigorous
branch in that direction. There Nature has woven a natural selvage,
and the eye rises by just gradations from the low shrubs of the shore
to the highest trees. There are few traces of man's hand to be seen.
The water laves the shore as it did a thousand years ago.
A
lake is the landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is
earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of
his own nature. The fluviatile trees next the shore are the slender
eyelashes which fringe it, and the wooded hills and cliffs around are
its overhanging brows.
Standing on the smooth sandy beach at
the east end of the pond, in a calm September afternoon, when a
slight haze makes the opposite shore-line indistinct, I have seen
whence came the expression, "the glassy surface of a lake."
When you invert your head, it looks like a thread of finest gossamer
stretched across the valley, and gleaming against the distant pine
woods, separating one stratum of the atmosphere from another. You
would think that you could walk dry under it to the opposite hills,
and that the swallows which skim over might perch on it. Indeed, they
sometimes dive below this line, as it were by mistake, and are
undeceived. As you look over the pond westward you are obliged to
employ both your hands to defend your eyes against the reflected as
well as the true sun, for they are equally bright; and if, between
the two, you survey its surface critically, it is literally as smooth
as glass, except where the skater insects, at equal intervals
scattered over its whole extent, by their motions in the sun produce
the finest imaginable sparkle on it, or, perchance, a duck plumes
itself, or, as I have said, a swallow skims so low as to touch it. It
may be that in the distance a fish describes an arc of three or four
feet in the air, and there is one bright flash where it emerges, and
another where it strikes the water; sometimes the whole silvery arc
is revealed; or here and there, perhaps, is a thistle-down floating
on its surface, which the fishes dart at and so dimple it again. It
is like molten glass cooled but not congealed, and the few motes in
it are pure and beautiful like the imperfections in glass. You may
often detect a yet smoother and darker water, separated from the rest
as if by an invisible cobweb, boom of the water nymphs, resting on
it. From a hilltop you can see a fish leap in almost any part; for
not a pickerel or shiner picks an insect from this smooth surface but
it manifestly disturbs the equilibrium of the whole lake. It is
wonderful with what elaborateness this simple fact is advertised-
this piscine murder will out- and from my distant perch I distinguish
the circling undulations when they are half a dozen rods in diameter.
You can even detect a water-bug (Gyrinus) ceaselessly progressing
over the smooth surface a quarter of a mile off; for they furrow the
water slightly, making a conspicuous ripple bounded by two diverging
lines, but the skaters glide over it without rippling it perceptibly.
When the surface is considerably agitated there are no skaters nor
water-bugs on it, but apparently, in calm days, they leave their
havens and adventurously glide forth from the shore by short impulses
till they completely cover it. It is a soothing employment, on one of
those fine days in the fall when all the warmth of the sun is fully
appreciated, to sit on a stump on such a height as this, overlooking
the pond, and study the dimpling circles which are incessantly
inscribed on its otherwise invisible surface amid the reflected skies
and trees. Over this great expanse there is no disturbance but it is
thus at once gently smoothed away and assuaged, as, when a vase of
water is jarred, the trembling circles seek the shore and all is
smooth again. Not a fish can leap or an insect fall on the pond but
it is thus reported in circling dimples, in lines of beauty, as it
were the constant welling up of its fountain, the gentle pulsing of
its life, the heaving of its breast. The thrills of joy and thrills
of pain are undistinguishable. How peaceful the phenomena of the
lake! Again the works of man shine as in the spring. Ay, every leaf
and twig and stone and cobweb sparkles now at mid-afternoon as when
covered with dew in a spring morning. Every motion of an oar or an
insect produces a flash of light; and if an oar falls, how sweet the
echo!
In such a day, in September or October, Walden is a
perfect forest mirror, set round with stones as precious to my eye as
if fewer or rarer. Nothing so fair, so pure, and at the same time so
large, as a lake, perchance, lies on the surface of the earth. Sky
water. It needs no fence. Nations come and go without defiling it. It
is a mirror which no stone can crack, whose quicksilver will never
wear off, whose gilding Nature continually repairs; no storms, no
dust, can dim its surface ever fresh;- a mirror in which all impurity
presented to it sinks, swept and dusted by the sun's hazy brush- this
the light dust-cloth- which retains no breath that is breathed on it,
but sends its own to float as clouds high above its surface, and he
reflected in its bosom still.
A field of water betrays the
spirit that is in the air. It is continually receiving new life and
motion from above. It is intermediate in its nature between land and
sky. On land only the grass and trees wave, but the water itself is
rippled by the wind. I see where the breeze dashes across it by the
streaks or flakes of light. It is remarkable that we can look down on
its surface. We shall, perhaps, look down thus on the surface of air
at length, and mark where a still subtler spirit sweeps over it.
The
skaters and water-bugs finally disappear in the latter part of
October, when the severe frosts have come; and then and in November,
usually, in a calm day, there is absolutely nothing to ripple the
surface. One November afternoon, in the calm at the end of a
rain-storm of several days' duration, when the sky was still
completely overcast and the air was full of mist, I observed that the
pond was remarkably smooth, so that it was difficult to distinguish
its surface; though it no longer reflected the bright tints of
October, but the sombre November colors of the surrounding hills.
Though I passed over it as gently as possible, the slight undulations
produced by my boat extended almost as far as I could see, and gave a
ribbed appearance to the reflections. But, as I was looking over the
surface, I saw here and there at a distance a faint glimmer, as if
some skater insects which had escaped the frosts might be collected
there, or, perchance, the surface, being so smooth, betrayed where a
spring welled up from the bottom. Paddling gently to one of these
places, I was surprised to find myself surrounded by myriads of small
perch, about five inches long, of a rich bronze color in the green
water, sporting there, and constantly rising to the surface and
dimpling it, sometimes leaving bubbles on it. In such transparent and
seemingly bottomless water, reflecting the clouds, I seemed to be
floating through the air as in a balloon, and their swimming
impressed me as a kind of flight or hovering, as if they were a
compact flock of birds passing just beneath my level on the right or
left, their fins, like sails, set all around them. There were many
such schools in the pond, apparently improving the short season
before winter would draw an icy shutter over their broad skylight,
sometimes giving to the surface an appearance as if a slight breeze
struck it, or a few rain-drops fell there. When I approached
carelessly and alarmed them, they made a sudden splash and rippling
with their tails, as if one had struck the water with a brushy bough,
and instantly took refuge in the depths. At length the wind rose, the
mist increased, and the waves began to run, and the perch leaped much
higher than before, half out of water, a hundred black points, three
inches long, at once above the surface. Even as late as the fifth of
December, one year, I saw some dimples on the surface, and thinking
it was going to rain hard immediately, the air being fun of mist, I
made haste to take my place at the oars and row homeward; already the
rain seemed rapidly increasing, though I felt none on my cheek, and I
anticipated a thorough soaking. But suddenly the dimples ceased, for
they were produced by the perch, which the noise of my oars had
seared into the depths, and I saw their schools dimly disappearing;
so I spent a dry afternoon after all.
An old man who used to
frequent this pond nearly sixty years ago, when it was dark with
surrounding forests, tells me that in those days he sometimes saw it
all alive with ducks and other water-fowl, and that there were many
eagles about it. He came here a-fishing, and used an old log canoe
which he found on the shore. It was made of two white pine logs dug
out and pinned together, and was cut off square at the ends. It was
very clumsy, but lasted a great many years before it became
water-logged and perhaps sank to the bottom. He did not know whose it
was; it belonged to the pond. He used to make a cable for his anchor
of strips of hickory bark tied together. An old man, a potter, who
lived by the pond before the Revolution, told him once that there was
an iron chest at the bottom, and that he had seen it. Sometimes it
would come floating up to the shore; but when you went toward it, it
would go back into deep water and disappear. I was pleased to hear of
the old log canoe, which took the place of an Indian one of the same
material but more graceful construction, which perchance had first
been a tree on the bank, and then, as it were, fell into the water,
to float there for a generation, the most proper vessel for the lake.
I remember that when I first looked into these depths there were many
large trunks to be seen indistinctly lying on the bottom, which had
either been blown over formerly, or left on the ice at the last
cutting, when wood was cheaper; but now they have mostly
disappeared.
When I first paddled a boat on Walden, it was
completely surrounded by thick and lofty pine and oak woods, and in
some of its coves grape-vines had run over the trees next the water
and formed bowers under which a boat could pass. The hills which form
its shores are so steep, and the woods on them were then so high,
that, as you looked down from the west end, it had the appearance of
an amphitheatre for some land of sylvan spectacle. I have spent many
an hour, when I was younger, floating over its surface as the zephyr
willed, having paddled my boat to the middle, and lying on my back
across the seats, in a summer forenoon, dreaming awake, until I was
aroused by the boat touching the sand, and I arose to see what shore
my fates had impelled me to; days when idleness was the most
attractive and productive industry. Many a forenoon have I stolen
away, preferring to spend thus the most valued part of the day; for I
was rich, if not in money, in sunny hours and summer days, and spent
them lavishly; nor do I regret that I did not waste more of them in
the workshop or the teacher's desk. But since I left those shores the
woodchoppers have still further laid them waste, and now for many a
year there will be no more rambling through the aisles of the wood,
with occasional vistas through which you see the water. My Muse may
be excused if she is silent henceforth. How can you expect the birds
to sing when their groves are cut down?
Now the trunks of
trees on the bottom, and the old log canoe, and the dark surrounding
woods, are gone, and the villagers, who scarcely know where it lies,
instead of going to the pond to bathe or drink, are thinking to bring
its water, which should be as sacred as the Ganges at least, to the
village in a pipe, to wash their dishes with!- to earn their Walden
by the turning of a cock or drawing of a plug! That devilish Iron
Horse, whose ear-rending neigh is heard throughout the town, has
muddied the Boiling Spring with his foot, and he it is that has
browsed off all the woods on Walden shore, that Trojan horse, with a
thousand men in his belly, introduced by mercenary Greeks! Where is
the country's champion, the Moore of Moore Hill, to meet him at the
Deep Cut and thrust an avenging lance between the ribs of the bloated
pest?
Nevertheless, of all the characters I have known,
perhaps Walden wears best, and best preserves its purity. Many men
have been likened to it, but few deserve that honor. Though the
woodchoppers have laid bare first this shore and then that, and the
Irish have built their sties by it, and the railroad has infringed on
its border, and the ice-men have skimmed it once, it is itself
unchanged, the same water which my youthful eyes fell on; all the
change is in me. It has not acquired one permanent wrinkle after all
its ripples. It is perennially young, and I may stand and see a
swallow dip apparently to pick an insect from its surface as of yore.
It struck me again tonight, as if I had not seen it almost daily for
more than twenty years- Why, here is Walden, the same woodland lake
that I discovered so many years ago; where a forest was cut down last
winter another is springing up by its shore as lustily as ever; the
same thought is welling up to its surface that was then; it is the
same liquid joy and happiness to itself and its Maker, ay, and it may
be to me. It is the work of a brave man surely, in whom there was no
guile! He rounded this water with his hand, deepened and clarified it
in his thought, and in his will bequeathed it to Concord. I see by
its face that it is visited by the same reflection; and I can almost
say, Walden, is it you?
It is
no dream of mine,
To ornament a line;
I cannot come nearer to
God and Heaven
Than I live to Walden even.
I am its stony
shore,
And the breeze that passes o'er;
In the hollow of my
hand
Are its water and its sand,
And its deepest resort
Lies
high in my thought.
The cars never
pause to look at it; yet I fancy that the engineers and firemen and
brakemen, and those passengers who have a season ticket and see it
often, are better men for the sight. The engineer does not forget at
night, or his nature does not, that he has beheld this vision of
serenity and purity once at least during the day. Though seen but
once, it helps to wash out State Street and the engine's soot. One
proposes that it be called "God's Drop."
I have said
that Walden has no visible inlet nor outlet, but it is on the one
hand distantly and indirectly related to Flint's Pond, which is more
elevated, by a chain of small ponds coming from that quarter, and on
the other directly and manifestly to Concord River, which is lower,
by a similar chain of ponds through which in some other geological
period it may have flowed, and by a little digging, which God forbid,
it can be made to flow thither again. If by living thus reserved and
austere, like a hermit in the woods, so long, it has acquired such
wonderful purity, who would not regret that the comparatively impure
waters of Flint's Pond should be mingled with it, or itself should
ever go to waste its sweetness in the ocean wave?
Flint's, or
Sandy Pond, in Lincoln, our greatest lake and inland sea, lies about
a mile east of Walden. It is much larger, being said to contain one
hundred and ninety-seven acres, and is more fertile in fish; but it
is comparatively shallow, and not remarkably pure. A walk through the
woods thither was often my recreation. It was worth the while, if
only to feel the wind blow on your cheek freely, and see the waves
run, and remember the life of mariners. I went a- chestnutting there
in the fall, on windy days, when the nuts were dropping into the
water and were washed to my feet; and one day, as I crept along its
sedgy shore, the fresh spray blowing in my face, I came upon the
mouldering wreck of a boat, the sides gone, and hardly more than the
impression of its flat bottom left amid the rushes; yet its model was
sharply defined, as if it were a large decayed pad, with its veins.
It was as impressive a wreck as one could imagine on the seashore,
and had as good a moral. It is by this time mere vegetable mould and
undistinguishable pond shore, through which rushes and flags have
pushed up. I used to admire the ripple marks on the sandy bottom, at
the north end of this pond, made firm and hard to the feet of the
wader by the pressure of the water, and the rushes which grew in
Indian file, in waving lines, corresponding to these marks, rank
behind rank, as if the waves had planted them. There also I have
found, in considerable quantities, curious balls, composed apparently
of fine grass or roots, of pipewort perhaps, from half an inch to
four inches in diameter, and perfectly spherical. These wash back and
forth in shallow water on a sandy bottom, and are sometimes cast on
the shore. They are either solid grass, or have a little sand in the
middle. At first you would say that they were formed by the action of
the waves, like a pebble; yet the smallest are made of equally coarse
materials, half an inch long, and they are produced only at one
season of the year. Moreover, the waves, I suspect, do not so much
construct as wear down a material which has already acquired
consistency. They preserve their form when dry for an indefinite
period.
Flint's Pond! Such is the poverty of our nomenclature.
What right had the unclean and stupid farmer, whose farm abutted on
this sky water, whose shores he has ruthlessly laid bare, to give his
name to it? Some skin-flint, who loved better the reflecting surface
of a dollar, or a bright cent, in which he could see his own brazen
face; who regarded even the wild ducks which settled in it as
trespassers; his fingers grown into crooked and bony talons from the
lodge habit of grasping harpy-like;- so it is not named for me. I go
not there to see him nor to hear of him; who never saw it, who never
bathed in it, who never loved it, who never protected it, who never
spoke a good word for it, nor thanked God that He had made it. Rather
let it be named from the fishes that swim in it, the wild fowl or
quadrupeds which frequent it, the wild flowers which grow by its
shores, or some wild man or child the thread of whose history is
interwoven with its own; not from him who could show no title to it
but the deed which a like-minded neighbor or legislature gave him-
him who thought only of its money value; whose presence perchance
cursed all the shores; who exhausted the land around it, and would
fain have exhausted the waters within it; who regretted only that it
was not English hay or cranberry meadow- there was nothing to redeem
it, forsooth, in his eyes- and would have drained and sold it for the
mud at its bottom. It did not turn his mill, and it was no privilege
to him to behold it. I respect not his labors, his farm where
everything has its price, who would carry the landscape, who would
carry his God, to market, if he could get anything for him; who goes
to market for his god as it is; on whose farm nothing grows free,
whose fields bear no crops, whose meadows no flowers, whose trees no
fruits, but dollars; who loves not the beauty of his fruits, whose
fruits are not ripe for him till they are turned to dollars. Give me
the poverty that enjoys true wealth. Farmers are respectable and
interesting to me in proportion as they are poor- poor farmers. A
model farm! where the house stands like a fungus in a muckheap,
chambers for men horses, oxen, and swine, cleansed and uncleansed,
all contiguous to one another! Stocked with men! A great grease-
spot, redolent of manures and buttermilk! Under a high state of
cultivation, being manured with the hearts and brains of men! As if
you were to raise your potatoes in the churchyard! Such is a model
farm.
No, no; if the fairest features of the landscape are to
be named after men, let them be the noblest and worthiest men alone.
Let our lakes receive as true names at least as the Icarian Sea,
where "still the shore" a "brave attempt resounds."
Goose Pond, of small extent, is on my way to Flint's; Fair
Haven, an expansion of Concord River, said to contain some seventy
acres, is a mile southwest; and White Pond, of about forty acres, is
a mile and a half beyond Fair Haven. This is my lake country. These,
with Concord River, are my water privileges; and night and day, year
in year out, they grind such grist as I carry to them.
Since
the wood-cutters, and the railroad, and I myself have profaned
Walden, perhaps the most attractive, if not the most beautiful, of
all our lakes, the gem of the woods, is White Pond;- a poor name from
its commonness, whether derived from the remarkable purity of its
waters or the color of its sands. In these as in other respects,
however, it is a lesser twin of Walden. They are so much alike that
you would say they must be connected under ground. It has the same
stony shore, and its waters are of the same hue. As at Walden, in
sultry dogday weather, looking down through the woods on some of its
bays which are not so deep but that the reflection from the bottom
tinges them, its waters are of a misty bluish-green or glaucous
color. Many years since I used to go there to collect the sand by
cartloads, to make sandpaper with, and I have continued to visit it
ever since. One who frequents it proposes to call it Virid Lake.
Perhaps it might be called Yellow Pine Lake, from the following
circumstance. About fifteen years ago you could see the top of a
pitch pine, of the kind called yellow pine hereabouts, though it is
not a distinct species, projecting above the surface in deep water,
many rods from the shore. It was even supposed by some that the pond
had sunk, and this was one of the primitive forest that formerly
stood there. I find that even so long ago as 1792, in a
"Topographical Description of the Town of Concord," by one
of its citizens, in the Collections of the Massachusetts Historical
Society, the author, after speaking of Walden and White Ponds, adds,
"In the middle of the latter may be seen, when the water is very
low, a tree which appears as if it grew in the place where it now
stands, although the roots are fifty feet below the surface of the
water; the top of this tree is broken off, and at that place measures
fourteen inches in diameter." In the spring of '49 I talked with
the man who lives nearest the pond in Sudbury, who told me that it
was he who got out this tree ten or fifteen years before. As near as
he could remember, it stood twelve or fifteen rods from the shore,
where the water was thirty or forty feet deep. It was in the winter,
and he had been getting out ice in the forenoon, and had resolved
that in the afternoon, with the aid of his neighbors, he would take
out the old yellow pine. He sawed a channel in the ice toward the
shore, and hauled it over and along and out on to the ice with oxen;
but, before he had gone far in his work, he was surprised to find
that it was wrong end upward, with the stumps of the branches
pointing down, and the small end firmly fastened in the sandy bottom.
It was about a foot in diameter at the big end, and he had expected
to get a good saw-log, but it was so rotten as to be fit only for
fuel, if for that. He had some of it in his shed then. There were
marks of an axe and of woodpeckers on the butt. He thought that it
might have been a dead tree on the shore, but was finally blown over
into the pond, and after the top had become water-logged, while the
butt-end was still dry and light, had drifted out and sunk wrong end
up. His father, eighty years old, could not remember when it was not
there. Several pretty large logs may still be seen lying on the
bottom, where, owing to the undulation of the surface, they look like
huge water snakes in motion.
This pond has rarely been
profaned by a boat, for there is little in it to tempt a fisherman.
Instead of the white lily, which requires mud, or the common sweet
flag, the blue flag (Iris versicolor) grows thinly in the pure water,
rising from the stony bottom all around the shore, where it is
visited by hummingbirds in June; and the color both of its bluish
blades and its flowers and especially their reflections, is in
singular harmony with the glaucous water.
White Pond and
Walden are great crystals on the surface of the earth, Lakes of
Light. If they were permanently congealed, and small enough to be
clutched, they would, perchance, be carried off by slaves, like
precious stones, to adorn the heads of emperors; but being liquid,
and ample, and secured to us and our successors forever, we disregard
them, and run after the diamond of Kohinoor. They are too pure to
have a market value; they contain no muck. How much more beautiful
than our lives, how much more transparent than our characters, are
they! We never learned meanness of them. How much fairer than the
pool before the farmers door, in which his ducks swim! Hither the
clean wild ducks come. Nature has no human inhabitant who appreciates
her. The birds with their plumage and their notes are in harmony with
the flowers, but what youth or maiden conspires with the wild
luxuriant beauty of Nature? She flourishes most alone, far from the
towns where they reside. Talk of heaven! ye disgrace earth.
Baker
Farm
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