SOUNDS |
BUT WHILE we are confined to books, though the
most select and classic, and read only particular written languages,
which are themselves but dialects and provincial, we are in danger of
forgetting the language which all things and events speak without
metaphor, which alone is copious and standard. Much is published, but
little printed. The rays which stream through the shutter will be no
longer remembered when the shutter is wholly removed. No method nor
discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert.
What is a course of history or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how
well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of
life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be
seen? Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer? Read your
fate, see what is before you, and walk on into futurity.
I did
not read books the first summer; I hoed beans. Nay, I often did
better than this. There were times when I could not afford to
sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the
head or hands. I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes, in a
summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny
doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines
and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness,
while the birds sing around or flitted noiseless through the house,
until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some
traveller's wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse
of time. I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they
were far better than any work of the hands would have been. They were
not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual
allowance. I realized what the Orientals mean by contemplation and
the forsaking of works. For the most part, I minded not how the hours
went. The day advanced as if to light some work of mine; it was
morning, and lo, now it is evening, and nothing memorable is
accomplished. Instead of singing like the birds, I silently smiled at
my incessant good fortune. As the sparrow had its trill, sitting on
the hickory before my door, so had I my chuckle or suppressed warble
which he might hear out of my nest. My days were not days of the
week, bearing the stamp of any heathen deity, nor were they minced
into hours and fretted by the ticking of a clock; for I lived like
the Puri Indians, of whom it is said that "for yesterday, today,
and tomorrow they have only one word, and they express the variety of
meaning by pointing backward for yesterday forward for tomorrow, and
overhead for the passing day." This was sheer idleness to my
fellow-townsmen, no doubt; but if the birds and flowers had tried me
by their standard, I should not have been found wanting. A man must
find his occasions in himself, it is true. The natural day is very
calm, and will hardly reprove his indolence.
I had this
advantage, at least, in my mode of life, over those who were obliged
to look abroad for amusement, to society and the theatre, that my
life itself was become my amusement and never ceased to be novel. It
was a drama of many scenes and without an end. If we were always,
indeed, getting our living, and regulating our lives according to the
last and best mode we had learned, we should never be troubled with
ennui. Follow your genius closely enough, and it will not fail to
show you a fresh prospect every hour. Housework was a pleasant
pastime. When my floor was dirty, I rose early, and, setting all my
furniture out of doors on the grass, bed and bedstead making but one
budget, dashed water on the floor, and sprinkled white sand from the
pond on it, and then with a broom scrubbed it clean and white; and by
the time the villagers had broken their fast the morning sun had
dried my house sufficiently to allow me to move in again, and my
meditations were almost uninterupted. It was pleasant to see my whole
household effects out on the grass, making a little pile like a
gypsy's pack, and my three-legged table, from which I did not remove
the books and pen and ink, standing amid the pines and hickories.
They seemed glad to get out themselves, and as if unwilling to be
brought in. I was sometimes tempted to stretch an awning over them
and take my seat there. It was worth the while to see the sun shine
on these things, and hear the free wind blow on them; so much more
interesting most familiar objects look out of doors than in the
house. A bird sits on the next bough, life-everlasting grows under
the table, and blackberry vines run round its legs; pine cones,
chestnut burs, and strawberry leaves are strewn about. It looked as
if this was the way these forms came to be transferred to our
furniture, to tables, chairs, and bedsteads- because they once stood
in their midst.
My house was on the side of a hill,
immediately on the edge of the larger wood, in the midst of a young
forest of pitch pines and hickories, and half a dozen rods from the
pond, to which a narrow footpath led down the hill. In my front yard
grew the strawberry, blackberry, and life-everlasting, johnswort and
goldenrod, shrub oaks and sand cherry, blueberry and groundnut. Near
the end of May, the sand cherry (Cerasus pumila) adorned the sides of
the path with its delicate flowers arranged in umbels cylindrically
about its short stems, which last, in the fall, weighed down with
goodsized and handsome cherries, fell over in wreaths like rays on
every side. I tasted them out of compliment to Nature, though they
were scarcely palatable. The sumach (Rhus glabra) grew luxuriantly
about the house, pushing up through the embankment which I had made,
and growing five or six feet the first season. Its broad pinnate
tropical leaf was pleasant though strange to look on. The large buds,
suddenly pushing out late in the spring from dry sticks which had
seemed to be dead, developed themselves as by magic into graceful
green and tender boughs, an inch in diameter; and sometimes, as I sat
at my window, so heedlessly did they grow and tax their weak joints,
I heard a fresh and tender bough suddenly fall like a fan to the
ground, when there was not a breath of air stirring, broken off by
its own weight. In August, the large masses of berries, which, when
in flower, had attracted many wild bees, gradually assumed their
bright velvety crimson hue, and by their weight again bent down and
broke the tender limbs.
As I sit at my window this summer
afternoon, hawks are circling about my clearing; the tantivy of wild
pigeons, flying by two and threes athwart my view, or perching
restless on the white pine boughs behind my house, gives a voice to
the air; a fish hawk dimples the glassy surface of the pond and
brings up a fish; a mink steals out of the marsh before my door and
seizes a frog by the shore; the sedge is bending under the weight of
the reed-birds flitting hither and thither; and for the last
half-hour I have heard the rattle of railroad cars, now dying away
and then reviving like the beat of a partridge, conveying travellers
from Boston to the country. For I did not live so out of the world as
that boy who, as I hear, was put out to a farmer in the east part of
the town, but ere long ran away and came home again, quite down at
the heel and homesick. He had never seen such a dull and
out-of-the-way place; the folks were all gone off; why, you couldn't
even hear the whistle! I doubt if there is such a place in
Massachusetts now:
"In
truth, our village has become a butt
For one of those fleet
railroad shafts, and o'er
Our peaceful plain its soothing sound
is- Concord."
The Fitchburg Railroad touches the pond
about a hundred rods south of where I dwell. I usually go to the
village along its causeway, and am, as it were, related to society by
this link. The men on the freight trains, who go over the whole
length of the road, bow to me as to an old acquaintance, they pass me
so often, and apparently they take me for an employee; and so I am. I
too would fain be a track-repairer somewhere in the orbit of the
earth.
The whistle of the locomotive penetrates my woods
summer and winter, sounding like the scream of a hawk sailing over
some farmer's yard, informing me that many restless city merchants
are arriving within the circle of the town, or adventurous country
traders from the other side. As they come under one horizon, they
shout their warning to get off the track to the other, heard
sometimes through the circles of two towns. Here come your groceries,
country; your rations, countrymen! Nor is there any man so
independent on his farm that he can say them nay. And here's your pay
for them! screams the countryman's whistle; timber like long
battering-rams going twenty miles an hour against the city's walls,
and chairs enough to seat all the weary and heavy-laden that dwell
within them. With such huge and lumbering civility the country hands
a chair to the city. All the Indian huckleberry hills are stripped,
all the cranberry meadows are raked into the city. Up comes the
cotton, down goes the woven cloth; up comes the silk, down goes the
woollen; up come the books, but down goes the wit that writes
them.
When I meet the engine with its train of cars moving off
with planetary motion- or, rather, like a comet, for the beholder
knows not if with that velocity and with that direction it will ever
revisit this system, since its orbit does not look like a returning
curve- with its steam cloud like a banner streaming behind in golden
and silver wreaths, like many a downy cloud which I have seen, high
in the heavens, unfolding its masses to the light- as if this
traveling demigod, this cloud- compeller, would ere long take the
sunset sky for the livery of his train; when I hear the iron horse
make the bills 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 bugs 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 beat in him and get him off. If
the enterprise were as innocent as it is early! If the snow lies
deep, they strap on his snowshoes, and, with the giant plow, plow a
furrow from the mountains to the seaboard, in which the cars, like a
following drill-barrow, sprinkle all the restless men and floating
merchandise in the country for seed. All day the fire-steed flies
over the country, stopping only that his master may rest, and I am
awakened by his tramp and defiant snort at midnight, when in some
remote glen in the woods he fronts the elements incased in ice and
snow; and he will reach his stall only with the morning star, to
start once more on his travels without rest or slumber. Or perchance,
at evening, I hear him in his stable blowing off the superfluous
energy of the day, that he may calm his nerves and cool his liver and
brain for a few hours of iron slumber. If the enterprise were as
heroic and commanding as it is protracted and unwearied!
Far
through unfrequented woods on the confines of towns, where once only
the hunter penetrated by day, in the darkest night dart these bright
saloons without the knowledge of their inhabitants; this moment
stopping at some brilliant station-house in town or city, where a
social crowd is gathered, the next in the Dismal Swamp, scaring the
owl and fox. The startings and arrivals of the cars are now the
epochs in the village day. They go and come with such regularity and
precision, and their whistle can be heard so far, that the farmers
set their clocks by them, and thus one well-conducted institution
regulates a whole country. Have not men improved somewhat in
punctuality since the railroad was invented? Do they not talk and
think faster in the depot than they did in the stage-office? There is
something electrifying in the atmosphere of the former place. I have
been astonished at the miracles it has wrought; that some of my
neighbors, who, I should have prophesied, once for all, would never
get to Boston by so prompt a conveyance, are on hand when the bell
rings. To do things "railroad fashion" is now the byword;
and it is worth the while to be warned so often and so sincerely by
any power to get off its track. There is no stopping to read the riot
act, no firing over the heads of the mob, in this case. We have
constructed a fate, an Atropos, that never turns aside. (Let that be
the name of your engine.) Men are advertised that at a certain hour
and minute these bolts will be shot toward particular points of the
compass; yet it interferes with no man's business, and the children
go to school on the other track. We live the steadier for it. We are
all educated thus to be sons of Tell. The air is full of invisible
bolts. Every path but your own is the path of fate. Keep on your own
track, then.
What recommends commerce to me is its enterprise
and bravery. It does not clasp its hands and pray to Jupiter. I see
these men every day go about their business with more or less courage
and content, doing more even than they suspect, and perchance better
employed than they could have consciously devised. I am less affected
by their heroism who stood up for half an hour in the front line at
Buena Vista, than by the steady and cheerful valor of the men who
inhabit the snowplow for their winter quarters; who have not merely
the three-o'-clock-in-the-morning courage, which Bonaparte thought
was the rarest, but whose courage does not go to rest so early, who
go to sleep only when the storm sleeps or the sinews of their iron
steed are frozen. On this morning of the Great Snow, perchance, which
is still raging and chilling men's blood, I bear the muffled tone of
their engine bell from out the fog bank of their chilled breath,
which announces that the cars are coming, without long delay,
notwithstanding the veto of a New England northeast snow-storm, and I
behold the plowmen covered with snow and rime, their heads peering,
above the mould-board which is turning down other than daisies and
the nests of field mice, like bowlders of the Sierra Nevada, that
occupy an outside place in the universe.
Commerce is
unexpectedly confident and serene, alert, adventurous, and unwearied.
It is very natural in its methods withal, far more so than many
fantastic enterprises and sentimental experiments, and hence its
singular success. I am refreshed and expanded when the freight train
rattles past me, and I smell the stores which go dispensing their
odors all the way from Long Wharf to Lake Champlain, reminding me of
foreign parts, of coral reefs, and Indian oceans, and tropical
climes, and the extent of the globe. I feel more like a citizen of
the world at the sight of the palm-leaf which will cover so many
flaxen New England heads the next summer, the Manilla hemp and
cocoanut husks, the old junk, gunny bags, scrap iron, and rusty
nails. This carload of torn sails is more legible and interesting now
than if they should be wrought into paper and printed books. Who can
write so graphically the history of the storms they have weathered as
these rents have done? They are proof-sheets which need no
correction. Here goes lumber from the Maine woods, which did not go
out to sea in the last freshet, risen four dollars on the thousand
because of what did go out or was split up; pine, spruce, cedar-
first, second, third, and fourth qualities, so lately all of one
quality, to wave over the bear, and moose, and caribou. Next rolls
Thomaston lime, a prime lot, which will get far among the hills
before it gets slacked. These rags in bales, of all hues and
qualities, the lowest condition to which cotton and linen descend,
the final result of dress- of patterns which are now no longer cried
up, unless it be in Milwaukee, as those splendid articles, English,
French, or American prints, ginghams, muslins, etc., gathered from
all quarters both of fashion and poverty, going to become paper of
one color or a few shades only, on which, forsooth, will be written
tales of real life, high and low, and founded on fact! This closed
car smells of salt fish, the strong New England and commercial scent,
reminding me of the Grand Banks and the fisheries. Who has not seen a
salt fish, thoroughly cured for this world, so that nothing can spoil
it, and putting, the perseverance of the saints to the blush? with
which you may sweep or pave the streets, and split your kindlings,
and the teamster shelter himself and his lading against sun, wind,
and rain behind it- and the trader, as a Concord trader once did,
bang 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
dunfish for a Saturday's dinner. Next Spanish hides, with the tails
still preserving their twist and the angle of elevation they had when
the oxen that wore them were careering over the pampas of the Spanish
Main- a type of all obstinacy, and evincing how almost hopeless and
incurable are all constitutional vices. I confess, that practically
speaking, when I have learned a man's real disposition, I have no
hopes of changing it for the better or worse in this state of
existence. As the Orientals say, "A cur's tail may be warmed,
and pressed, and bound round with ligatures, and after a twelve
years' labor bestowed upon it, still it will retain its natural
form." The only effectual cure for such inveteracies as these
tails exhibit is to make glue of them, which I believe is what is
usually done with them, and then they will stay put and stick. Here
is a hogshead of molasses or of brandy directed to John Smith,
Cuttingsville, Vermont, some trader among the Green Mountains, who
imports for the farmers near his clearing, and now perchance stands
over his bulkhead and thinks of the last arrivals on the coast, how
they may affect the price for him, telling his customers this moment,
as he has told them twenty times before this morning, that he expects
some by the next train of prime quality. It is advertised in the
Cuttingsville Times.
While these things go up other things
come down. Warned by the whizzing sound, I look up from my book and
see some tall pine, hewn on far northern hills, which has winged its
way over the Green Mountains and the Connecticut, shot like an arrow
through the township within ten minutes, and scarce another eye
beholds it; going
"to
be the mast
Of some great ammiral."
And hark! here comes the cattle-train
bearing the cattle of a thousand hills, sheepcots, stables, and
cow-yards in the air, drovers with their sticks, and shepherd boys in
the midst of their flocks, all but the mountain pastures, whirled
along like leaves blown from the mountains by the September gales.
The air is filled with the bleating of calves and sheep, and the
hustling of oxen, as if a pastoral valley were going by. When the old
bellwether at the head rattles his bell, the mountains do indeed skip
like rams and the little hills like lambs. A carload of drovers, too,
in the midst, on a level with their droves now, their vocation gone,
but still clinging to their useless sticks as their badge of office.
But their dogs, where are they? It is a stampede to them; they are
quite thrown out; they have lost the scent. Methinks I hear them
barking behind the Peterboro' Hills, or panting up the western slope
of the Green Mountains. They will not be in at the death. Their
vocation, too, is gone. Their fidelity and sagacity are below par
now. They will slink back to their kennels in disgrace, or perchance
run wild and strike a league with the wolf and the fox. So is your
pastoral life whirled past and away. But the bell rings, and I must
get off the track and let the cars go by;
What's the
railroad to me?
I never go to see
Where it ends.
It fills a
few hollows,
And makes banks for the swallows,
It sets the sand
a-blowing,
And the blackberries a-growing,
but I cross it
like a cart-path in the woods. I will not have my eyes put out and my
ears spoiled by its smoke and steam and hissing.
Now that the
cars are gone by and all the restless world with them, and the fishes
in the pond no longer feel their rumbling, I am more alone than ever.
For the rest of the long afternoon, perhaps, my meditations are
interrupted only by the faint rattle of a carriage or team along the
distant highway.
Sometimes, on Sundays, I heard the bells, the
Lincoln, Acton, Bedford, or Concord bell, when the wind was
favorable, a faint, sweet, and, as it were, natural melody, worth
importing into the wilderness. At a sufficient distance over the
woods this sound acquires a certain vibratory hum, as if the pine
needles in the horizon were the strings of a harp which it swept. All
sound heard at the greatest possible distance produces one and the
same effect, a vibration of the universal lyre, just as the
intervening atmosphere makes a distant ridge of earth interesting to
our eyes by the azure tint it imparts to it. There came to me in this
case a melody which the air had strained, and which had conversed
with every leaf and needle of the wood, that portion of the sound
which the elements had taken up and modulated and echoed from vale to
vale. The echo is, to some extent, an original sound, and therein is
the magic and charm of it. It is not merely a repetition of what was
worth repeating in the bell, but partly the voice of the wood; the
same trivial words and notes sung by a wood-nymph.
At evening,
the distant lowing of some cow in the horizon beyond the woods
sounded sweet and melodious, and at first I would mistake it for the
voices of certain minstrels by whom I was sometimes serenaded, who
might be straying over hill and dale; but soon I was not unpleasantly
disappointed when it was prolonged into the cheap and natural music
of the cow. I do not mean to be satirical, but to express my
appreciation of those youths' singing, when I state that I perceived
clearly that it was akin to the music of the cow, and they were at
length one articulation of Nature.
Regularly at half-past
seven, in one part of the summer, after the evening train had gone
by, the whip-poor-wills chanted their vespers for half an hour,
sitting on a stump by my door, or upon the ridge-pole of the house.
They would begin to sing almost with as much precision as a clock,
within five minutes of a particular time, referred to the setting of
the sun, every evening. I had a rare opportunity to become acquainted
with their habits. Sometimes I heard four or five at once in
different parts of the wood, by accident one a bar behind another,
and so near me that I distinguished not only the cluck after each
note, but often that singular buzzing sound like a fly in a spider's
web, only proportionally louder. Sometimes one would circle round and
round me in the woods a few feet distant as if tethered by a string,
when probably I was near its eggs. They sang at intervals throughout
the night, and were again as musical as ever just before and about
dawn.
When other birds are still, the screech owls take up the
strain, like mourning women their ancient u-lu-lu. Their dismal
scream is truly Ben Jonsonian. Wise midnight bags! It is no honest
and blunt tu-whit tu- who of the poets, but, without jesting, a most
solemn graveyard ditty, the mutual consolations of suicide lovers
remembering the pangs and the delights of supernal love in the
infernal groves. Yet I love to hear their wailing, their doleful
responses, trilled along the woodside; reminding me sometimes of
music and singing birds; as if it were the dark and tearful side of
music, the regrets and sighs that would fain be sung. They are the
spirits, the low spirits and melancholy forebodings, of fallen souls
that once in human shape night-walked the earth and did the deeds of
darkness, now expiating their sins with their wailing hymns or
threnodies in the scenery of their transgressions. They give me a new
sense of the variety and capacity of that nature which is our common
dwelling. Oh-o-o-o-o that I never had been bor-r-r-r-n! sighs one on
this side of the pond, and circles with the restlessness of despair
to some new perch on the gray oaks. Then- that I never had been
bor-r-r-r-n! echoes another on the farther side with tremulous
sincerity, and- bor-r-r-r-n! comes faintly from far in the Lincoln
woods.
I was also serenaded by a hooting owl. Near at hand you
could fancy it the most melancholy sound in Nature, as if she meant
by this to stereotype and make permanent in her choir the dying moans
of a human being- some poor weak relic of mortality who has left hope
behind, and howls like an animal, yet with human sobs, on entering
the dark valley, made more awful by a certain gurgling melodiousness-
I find myself beginning with the letters gl when I try to imitate it-
expressive of a mind which has reached the gelatinous, mildewy stage
in the mortification of all healthy and courageous thought. It
reminded me of ghouls and idiots and insane howlings. But now one
answers from far woods in a strain made really melodious by distance-
Hoo hoo hoo, hoorer hoo: and indeed for the most part it suggested
only pleasing associations, whether heard by day or night, summer or
winter.
I rejoice that there are owls. Let them do the idiotic
and maniacal hooting for men. It is a sound admirably suited to
swamps and twilight woods which no day illustrates, suggesting a vast
and undeveloped nature which men have not recognized. They represent
the stark twilight and unsatisfied thoughts which all have. All day
the sun has shone on the surface of some savage swamp, where the
single spruce stands hung with usnea lichens, and small hawks
circulate above, and the chickadee lisps amid the evergreens, and the
partridge and rabbit skulk beneath; but now a more dismal arid
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 meanwhile 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 mine 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 chum, nor the spinning-wheel, nor even the
singing of the kettle, nor the hissing of the urn, nor children
crying, to comfort one. An old-fashioned man would have lost his
senses or died of ennui before this. Not even rats in the wall, for
they were starved out, or rather were never baited in- only squirrels
on the roof and under the floor, a whip-poor-will on the ridge-pole,
a blue jay screaming beneath the window, a hare or woodchuck under
the house, a screech owl or a cat owl behind it, a flock of wild
geese or a laughing loon on the pond, and a fox to bark in the night.
Not even a lark or an oriole, those mild plantation birds, ever
visited my clearing. No cockerels to crow nor hens to cackle in the
yard. No yard! but unfenced nature reaching up to your very sills. A
young forest growing up under your meadows, and wild sumachs and
blackberry vines breaking through into your cellar; sturdy pitch
pines rubbing and creaking against the shingles for want of room,
their roots reaching quite under the house. Instead of a scuttle or a
blind blown off in the gale- a pine tree snapped off or torn up by
the roots behind your house for fuel. Instead of no path to the
front-yard gate in the Great Snow- no gate- no front-yard- and no
path to the civilized world. SOLITUDE
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visitors since Jan 8th 1999