SPRING |
THE OPENING of large tracts by the
ice-cutters commonly causes a pond to break up earlier; for the
water, agitated by the wind, even in cold weather, wears away the
surrounding ice. But such was not the effect on Walden that year, for
she had soon got a thick new garment to take the place of the old.
This pond never breaks up so soon as the others in this neighborhood,
on account both of its greater depth and its having no stream passing
through it to melt or wear away the ice. I never knew it to open in
the course of a winter, not excepting that Of '52-3, which gave the
ponds so severe a trial. It commonly opens about the first of April,
a week or ten days later than Flint's Pond and Fair Haven, beginning
to melt on the north side and in the shallower parts where it began
to freeze. It indicates better than any water hereabouts the absolute
progress of the season, being least affected by transient changes of
temperature. A severe cold of it few days duration in March may very
much retard the opening of the former ponds, while the temperature of
Walden increases almost uninterruptedly. A thermometer thrust into
the middle of Walden on the 6th of March, 1847, stood at 32', or
freezing point; near the shore at 33'; in the middle of Flint's Pond,
the same day, at 32 1/2'; at a dozen rods from the shore, in shallow
water, under ice a foot thick, at 36'. This difference of three and
it half degrees between the temperature of the deep water and the
shallow in the latter pond, and the fact that a great proportion of
it is comparatively shallow, show why it should break up so much
sooner than Walden. The ice in the shallowest part was at this time
several inches thinner than in the middle. In midwinter the middle
had been the warmest and the ice thinnest there. So, also, every one
who has waded about the shores of the pond in summer must have
perceived how much warmer the water is close to the shore, where only
three or four inches deep, than a little distance out, and on the
surface where it is deep, than near the bottom. In spring the sun not
only exerts an influence through the increased temperature of the air
and earth, but its heat passes through ice a foot or more thick, and
is reflected from the bottom in shallow water, and so also warms the
water and melts the under side of the ice, at the same time that it
is melting it more directly above, making it uneven, and causing the
air bubbles which it contains to extend themselves upward and
downward until it is completely honeycombed, and at last disappears
suddenly in a single spring rain. Ice has its grain as well as wood,
and when a cake begins to rot or "comb," that is, assume
the appearance of honeycomb, whatever may be its position, the air
cells are at right angles with what was the water surface. Where
there is a rock or a log rising near to the surface the ice over it
is much thinner, and is frequently quite dissolved by this reflected
heat; and I have been told that in the experiment at Cambridge to
freeze water in a shallow wooden pond, though the cold air circulated
underneath, and so had access to both sides, the reflection of the
sun from the bottom more than counterbalanced this advantage. When a
warm rain in the middle of the winter melts off the snow ice from
Walden, and leaves a hard dark or transparent ice on the middle,
there will be a strip of rotten though thicker white ice, a rod or
more wide, about the shores, created by this reflected heat. Also, as
I have said, the bubbles themselves within the ice operate as
burning-glasses to melt the ice beneath.
The phenomena of the
year take place every day in a pond on a small scale. Every morning,
generally speaking, the shallow water is being warmed more rapidly
than the deep, though it may not be made so warm after all, and every
evening it is being cooled more rapidly until the morning, The day is
an epitome of the year. The night is the winter, the morning and
evening are the spring and fall, and the noon is the summer. The
cracking and booming of the ice indicate a change of temperature. One
pleasant morning after a cold night, February 24th, 1850, having gone
to Flint's Pond to spend the day, I noticed with surprise, that when
I struck the ice with the head of my axe, it resounded like a gong
for many rods around, or as if I had struck on a tight drum-head. The
pond began to boom about an hour after sunrise, when it felt the
influence of the sun's rays slanted upon it from over the hills; it
stretched itself and yawned like a waking man with a gradually
increasing tumult, which was kept up three or four hours. It took a
short siesta at noon, and boomed once more toward night, as the sun
was withdrawing his influence. In the right stage of the weather a
pond fires its evening gun with great regularity. But in the middle
of the day, being full of cracks, and the air also being less
elastic, it had completely lost its resonance, and probably fishes
and muskrats could not then have been stunned by a blow on it. The
fishermen say that the "thundering of the pond" scares the
fishes and prevents their biting. The pond does not thunder every
evening, and I cannot tell surely when to expect its thundering; but
though I may perceive no difference in the weather, it does. Who
would have suspected so large and cold and thick-skinned a thing to
be so sensitive? Yet it has its law to which it thunders obedience
when it should as surely as the buds expand in the spring. The earth
is all alive and covered with papillae. The largest pond is as
sensitive to atmospheric changes as the globule of mercury in its
tube.
One attraction in coming to the woods to live was that I
should have leisure and opportunity to see the Spring come in. The
ice in the pond at length begins to be honeycombed, and I can set my
heel in it as I walk. Fogs and rains and warmer suns are gradually
melting the snow; the days have grown sensibly longer; and I see how
I shall get through the winter without adding to my woodpile, for
large fires are no longer necessary. I am on the alert for the first
signs of spring, to hear the chance note of some arriving bird, or
the striped squirrel's chirp, for his stores must be now nearly
exhausted, or see the woodchuck venture out of his winter quarters.
On the 13th of March, after I had heard the bluebird, song sparrow,
and red-wing, the ice was still nearly a foot thick. As the weather
grew warmer it was not sensibly worn away by the water, nor broken up
and floated off as in rivers, but, though it was completely melted
for half a rod in width about the shore, the middle was merely
honeycombed and saturated with water, so that you could put your foot
through it when six inches thick; but by the next day evening,
perhaps, after a warm rain followed by fog, it would have wholly
disappeared, all gone off with the fog, spirited away. One year I
went across the middle only five days before it disappeared entirely.
In 1845 Walden was first completely open on the 1st of April; in '46,
the 25th of March; in '47, the 8th of April; in '51, the 28th of
March; in '52, the 18th of April; in '53, the 23d of March; in '54,
about the 7th of April.
Every incident connected with the
breaking up of the rivers and ponds and the settling of the weather
is particularly interesting to us who live in a climate of so great
extremes. When the warmer days come, they who dwell near the river
hear the ice crack at night with a startling whoop as loud as
artillery, as if its icy fetters were rent from end to end, and
within a few days see it rapidly going out. So the alligator comes
out of the mud with quakings of the earth. One old man, who has been
a close observer of Nature, and seems as thoroughly wise in regard to
all her operations as if she had been put upon the stocks when he was
a boy, and he had helped to lay her keel- who has come to his growth,
and can hardly acquire more of natural lore if he should live to the
age of Methuselah- told me- and I was surprised to hear him express
wonder at any of Nature's operations, for I thought that there were
no secrets between them- that one spring day he took his gun and
boat, and thought that he would have a little sport with the ducks.
There was ice still on the meadows, but it was all gone out of the
river, and he dropped down without obstruction from Sudbury, where he
lived, to Fair Haven Pond, which he found, unexpectedly, covered for
the most part with a firm field of ice. It was a warm day, and he was
surprised to see so great a body of ice remaining. Not seeing any
ducks, he hid his boat on the north or back side of an island in the
pond, and then concealed himself in the bushes on the south side, to
await them. The ice was melted for three or four rods from the shore,
and there was a smooth and warm sheet of water, with a muddy bottom,
such as the ducks love, within, and he thought it likely that some
would be along pretty soon. After he had lain still there about an
hour he heard a low and seemingly very distant sound, but singularly
grand and impressive, unlike anything he had ever heard, gradually
swelling and increasing as if it would have a universal and memorable
ending, a sullen rush and roar, which seemed to him all at once like
the sound of a vast body of fowl coming in to settle there, and,
seizing his gun, he started up in haste and excited; but he found, to
his surprise, that the whole body of the ice had started while he lay
there, and drifted in to the shore, and the sound he had heard was
made by its edge grating on the shore- at first gently nibbled and
crumbled off, but at length heaving up and scattering its wrecks
along the island to a considerable height before it came to a
standstill.
At length the sun's rays have attained the right
angle, and warm winds blow up mist and rain and melt the snowbanks,
and the sun, dispersing the mist, smiles on a checkered landscape of
russet and white smoking with incense, through which the traveller
picks his way from islet to islet, cheered by the music of a thousand
tinkling rills and rivulets whose veins are filled with the blood of
winter which they are bearing off.
Few phenomena gave me more
delight than to observe the forms which thawing sand and clay assume
in flowing down the sides of a deep cut on the railroad through which
I passed on my way to the village, a phenomenon not very common on so
large a scale, though the number of freshly exposed banks of the
right material must have been greatly multiplied since railroads were
invented. The material was sand of every degree of fineness and of
various rich colors, commonly mixed with a little clay. When the
frost comes out in the spring, and even in a thawing day in the
winter, the sand begins to flow down the slopes like lava, sometimes
bursting out through the snow and overflowing it where no sand was to
be seen before. Innumerable little streams overlap and interlace one
with another, exhibiting a sort of hybrid product, which obeys half
way the law of currents, and half way that of vegetation. As it flows
it takes the forms of sappy leaves or vines, making heaps of pulpy
sprays a foot or more in depth, and resembling, as you look down on
them, the laciniated, lobed, and imbricated thalluses of some
lichens; or you are reminded of coral, of leopard's paws or birds'
feet, of brains or lungs or bowels, and excrements of all kinds. It
is a truly grotesque vegetation, whose forms and color we see
imitated in bronze, a sort of architectural foliage more ancient and
typical than acanthus, chiccory, ivy, vine, or any vegetable leaves;
destined perhaps, under some circumstances, to become a puzzle to
future geologists. The whole cut impressed me as if it were a cave
with its stalactites laid open to the light. The various shades of
the sand are singularly rich and agreeable, embracing the different
iron colors, brown, gray, yellowish, and reddish. When the flowing
mass reaches the drain at the foot of the bank it spreads out flatter
into strands, the separate streams losing their semicylindrical form
and gradually becoming more flat and broad, running together as they
are more moist, till they form an almost flat sand, still variously
and beautifully shaded, but in which you call trace the original
forms of vegetation; till at length, in the water itself, they are
converted into banks, like those formed off the mouths of rivers, and
the forms of vegetation are lost in the ripple- marks on the
bottom.
The whole bank, which is from twenty to forty feet
high, is sometimes overlaid with a mass of this kind of foliage, or
sandy rupture, for a quarter of a mile on one or both sides, the
produce of one spring day. What makes this sand foliage remarkable is
its springing into existence thus suddenly. When I see on the one
side the inert bank- for the sun acts on one side first- and on the
other this luxuriant foliage, the creation of an hour, I am affected
as if in a peculiar sense I stood in the laboratory of the Artist who
made the world and me- had come to where he was still at work,
sporting on this bank, and with excess of energy strewing his fresh
designs about. I feel as if I were nearer to the vitals of the globe,
for this sandy overflow is something such a foliaceous mass as the
vitals of the animal body. You find thus in the very sands an
anticipation of the vegetable leaf. No wonder that the earth
expresses itself outwardly in leaves, it so labors with the idea
inwardly. The atoms have already learned this law, and are pregnant
by it. The overhanging leaf sees here its prototype. Internally,
whether in the globe or animal body, it is a moist thick lobe, a word
especially applicable to the liver and lungs and the leaves of fat
(leibo, labor, lapsus, to flow or slip downward, a lapsing; lobos,
globus, lobe, globe; also lap, flap, and many other words);
externally a dry thin leaf, even as the f and v are a pressed and
dried b. The radicals of lobe are lb, the soft mass of the b
(single-lobed, or B, double-lobed), with the liquid l behind it
pressing it forward. In globe, glb, the guttural g adds to the
meaning the capacity of the throat. The feathers and wings of birds
are still drier and thinner leaves. Thus, also, you pass from the
lumpish grub in the earth to the airy and fluttering butterfly. The
very globe continually transcends and translates itself, and becomes
winged in its orbit. Even ice begins with delicate crystal leaves, as
if it had flowed into moulds which the fronds of waterplants have
impressed on the watery mirror. The whole tree itself is but one
leaf, and rivers are still vaster leaves whose pulp is intervening
earth, and towns and cities are the ova of insects in their
axils.
When the sun withdraws the sand ceases to flow, but in
the morning the streams will start once more and branch and branch
again into a myriad of others. You here see perchance how
blood-vessels are formed. If you look closely you observe that first
there pushes forward from the thawing mass a stream of softened sand
with a drop-like point, like the ball of the finger, feeling its way
slowly and blindly downward, until at last with more heat and
moisture, as the sun gets higher, the most fluid portion, in its
effort to obey the law to which the most inert also yields, separates
from the latter and forms for itself a meandering channel or artery
within that, in which is seen a little silvery stream glancing like
lightning from one stage of pulpy leaves or branches to another, and
ever and anon swallowed up in the sand. It is wonderful how rapidly
yet perfectly the sand organizes itself as it flows, using the best
material its mass affords to form the sharp edges of its channel.
Such are the sources of rivers. In the silicious matter which the
water deposits is perhaps the bony system, and in the still finer
soil and organic matter the fleshy fibre or cellular tissue. What is
man but a mass of thawing clay? The ball of the human finger is but a
drop congealed. The fingers and toes flow to their extent from the
thawing mass of the body. Who knows what the human body would expand
and flow out to under a more genial heaven? Is not the hand a
spreading palm leaf with its lobes and veins? The ear may be
regarded, fancifully, as a lichen, Umbilicaria, on the side of the
head, with its lobe or drop. The lip-labium, from labor (?)- laps or
lapses from the sides of the cavernous mouth. The nose is a manifest
congealed drop or stalactite. The chin is a still larger drop, the
confluent dripping of the face. The cheeks are a slide from the brows
into the valley of the face, opposed and diffused by the cheek bones.
Each rounded lobe of the vegetable leaf, too, is a thick and now
loitering drop, larger or smaller; the lobes are the fingers of the
leaf; and as many lobes as it has, in so many directions it tends to
flow, and more heat or other genial influences would have caused it
to flow yet farther.
Thus it seemed that this one hillside
illustrated the principle of all the operations of Nature. The Maker
of this earth but patented a leaf. What Champollion will decipher
this hieroglyphic for us, that we may turn over a new leaf at last?
This phenomenon is more exhilarating to me than the luxuriance and
fertility of vineyards. True, it is somewhat excrementitious in its
character, and there is no end to the heaps of liver, lights, and
bowels, as if the globe were turned wrong side outward; but this
suggests at least that Nature has some bowels, and there again is
mother of humanity. This is the frost coming out of the ground; this
is Spring. It precedes the green and flowery spring, as mythology
precedes regular poetry. I know of nothing more purgative of winter
fumes and indigestions. It convinces me that Earth is still in her
swaddling-clothes, and stretches forth baby fingers on every side.
Fresh curls spring from the baldest brow. There is nothing inorganic.
These foliaceous heaps lie along the bank like the slag of a furnace,
showing that Nature is "in full blast" within. The earth is
not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the
leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries
chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede
flowers and fruit- not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared
with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely
parasitic. Its throes will heave our exuviae from their graves. You
may melt your metals and cast them into the most beautiful moulds you
can; they will never excite me like the forms which this molten earth
flows out into. And not only it, but the institutions upon it are
plastic like clay in the hands of the potter.
Ere long, not
only on these banks, but on every hill and plain and in every hollow,
the frost comes out of the ground like a dormant quadruped from its
burrow, and seeks the sea with music, or migrates to other climes in
clouds. Thaw with his gentle persuasion is more powerful than Thor
with his hammer. The one melts, the other but breaks in pieces.
When
the ground was partially bare of snow, and a few warm days had dried
its surface somewhat, it was pleasant to compare the first tender
signs of the infant year just peeping forth with the stately beauty
of the withered vegetation which had withstood the winter-life-
everlasting, goldenrods, pinweeds, and graceful wild grasses, more
obvious and interesting frequently than in summer even, as if their
beauty was not ripe till then; even cotton-grass, cat-tails,
mulleins, johnswort, hardhack, meadowsweet, and other strong-stemmed
plants, those unexhausted granaries which entertain the earliest
birds- decent weeds, at least, which widowed Nature wears. I am
particularly attracted by the arching and sheaf- like top of the
wool-grass; it brings back the summer to our winter memories, and is
among the forms which art loves to copy, and which, in the vegetable
kingdom, have the same relation to types already in the mind of man
that astronomy has. It is an antique style, older than Greek or
Egyptian. Many of the phenomena of Winter are suggestive of an
inexpressible tenderness and fragile delicacy. We are accustomed to
hear this king described as a rude and boisterous tyrant; but with
the gentleness of a lover he adorns the tresses of Summer.
At
the approach of spring the red squirrels got under my house, two at a
time, directly under my feet as I sat reading or writing, and kept up
the queerest chuckling and chirruping and vocal pirouetting and
gurgling sounds that ever were heard; and when I stamped they only
chirruped the louder, as if past all fear and respect in their mad
pranks, defying humanity to stop them. No, you don't- chickaree-
chickaree. They were wholly deaf to my arguments, or failed to
perceive their force, and fell into a strain of invective that was
irresistible.
The first sparrow of spring! The year beginning
with younger hope than ever! The faint silvery warblings heard over
the partially bare and moist fields from the bluebird, the song
sparrow, and the red-wing, as if the last flakes of winter tinkled as
they fell! What at such a time are histories, chronologies,
traditions, and all written revelations? The brooks sing carols and
glees to the spring. The marsh hawk, sailing low over the meadow, is
already seeking the first slimy life that awakes. The sinking sound
of melting snow is heard in all dells, and the ice dissolves apace in
the ponds. The grass flames up on the hillsides like a spring fire-
"et primitus oritur herba imbribus primoribus evocata"- as
if the earth sent forth an inward heat to greet the returning sun;
not yellow but green is the color of its flame;- the symbol of
perpetual youth, the grass-blade, like a long green ribbon, streams
from the sod into the summer, checked indeed by the frost, but anon
pushing on again, lifting its spear of last year's hay with the fresh
life below. It grows as steadily as the rill oozes out of the ground.
It is almost identical with that, for in the growing days of June,
when the rills are dry, the grass-blades are their channels, and from
year to year the herds drink at this perennial green stream, and the
mower draws from it betimes their winter supply. So our human life
but dies down to its root, and still puts forth its green blade to
eternity.
Walden is melting apace. There is a canal two rods
wide along the northerly and westerly sides, and wider still at the
east end. A great field of ice has cracked off from the main body. I
hear a song sparrow singing from the bushes on the shore- olit, olit,
olit- chip, chip, chip, che char- che wiss, wiss, wiss. He too is
helping to crack it. How handsome the great sweeping curves in the
edge of the ice, answering somewhat to those of the shore, but more
regular! It is unusually hard, owing to the recent severe but
transient cold, and all watered or waved like a palace floor. But the
wind slides eastward over its opaque surface in vain, till it reaches
the living surface beyond. It is glorious to behold this ribbon of
water sparkling in the sun, the bare face of the pond full of glee
and youth, as if it spoke the joy of the fishes within it, and of the
sands on its shore- a silvery sheen as from the scales of a
leuciscus, as it were all one active fish. Such is the contrast
between winter and spring. Walden was dead and is alive again. But
this spring it broke up more steadily, as I have said.
The
change from storm and winter to serene and mild weather, from dark
and sluggish hours to bright and elastic ones, is a memorable crisis
which all things proclaim. It is seemingly instantaneous at last.
Suddenly an influx of light filled my house, though the evening was
at hand, and the clouds of winter still overhung it, and the eaves
were dripping with sleety rain. I looked out the window, and lo!
where yesterday was cold gray ice there lay the transparent pond
already calm and full of hope as in a summer evening, reflecting a
summer evening sky in its bosom, though none was visible overhead, as
if it had intelligence with some remote horizon. I heard a robin in
the distance, the first I had heard for many a thousand years,
methought, whose note I shall not forget for many a thousand more-
the same sweet and powerful song as of yore. O the evening robin, at
the end of a New England summer day! If I could ever find the twig he
sits upon! I mean he; I mean the twig. This at least is not the
Turdus migratorius. The pitch pines and shrub oaks about my house,
which had so long drooped, suddenly resumed their several characters,
looked brighter, greener, and more erect and alive, as if effectually
cleansed and restored by the rain. I knew that it would not rain any
more. You may tell by looking at any twig of the forest, ay, at your
very wood-pile, whether its winter is past or not. As it grew darker,
I was startled by the honking of geese flying low over the woods,
like weary travellers getting in late from Southern lakes, and
indulging at last in unrestrained complaint and mutual consolation.
Standing at my door, I could bear the rush of their wings; when,
driving toward my house, they suddenly spied my light, and with
hushed clamor wheeled and settled in the pond. So I came in, and shut
the door, and passed my first spring night in the woods.
In
the morning I watched the geese from the door through the mist,
sailing in the middle of the pond, fifty rods off, so large and
tumultuous that Walden appeared like an artificial pond for their
amusement. But when I stood on the shore they at once rose up with a
great flapping of wings at the signal of their commander, and when
they had got into rank circled about over my head, twenty-nine of
them, and then steered straight to Canada, with a regular honk from
the leader at intervals, trusting to break their fast in muddier
pools. A "plump" of ducks rose at the same time and took
the route to the north in the wake of their noisier cousins.
For
a week I heard the circling, groping clangor of some solitary goose
in the foggy mornings, seeking its companion, and still peopling the
woods with the sound of a larger life than they could sustain. In
April the pigeons were seen again flying express in small flocks, and
in due time I heard the martins twittering over my clearing, though
it had not seemed that the township contained so many that it could
afford me any, and I fancied that they were peculiarly of the ancient
race that dwelt in hollow trees ere white men came. In almost all
climes the tortoise and the frog are among the precursors and heralds
of this season, and birds fly with song and glancing plumage, and
plants spring and bloom, and winds blow, to correct this slight
oscillation of the poles and preserve the equilibrium of nature.
As
every season seems best to us in its turn, so the coming in of spring
is like the creation of Cosmos out of Chaos and the realization of
the Golden Age.
"Eurus
ad Auroram Nabathaeaque regna recessit,
Persidaque, et radiis juga
subdita matutinis."
"The East-Wind withdrew to Aurora
and the Nabathean kingdom,
And the Persian, and the ridges placed
under the morning rays.
Man was born. Whether that Artificer of
things,
The origin of a better world, made him from the divine
seed;
Or the earth, being recent and lately sundered from the
high
Ether, retained some seeds of cognate heaven."
A single gentle rain makes the grass many
shades greener. So our prospects brighten on the influx of better
thoughts. We should be blessed if we lived in the present always, and
took advantage of every accident that befell us, like the grass which
confesses the influence of the slightest dew that falls on it; and
did not spend our time in atoning for the neglect of past
opportunities, which we call doing our duty. We loiter in winter
while it is already spring. In a pleasant spring morning all men's
sins are forgiven. Such a day is a truce to vice. While such a sun
holds out to burn, the vilest sinner may return. Through our own
recovered innocence we discern the innocence of our neighbors. You
may have known your neighbor yesterday for a thief, a drunkard, or a
sensualist, and merely pitied or despised him, and despaired of the
world; but the sun shines bright and warm this first spring morning,
re-creating the world, and you meet him at some serene work, and see
how it is exhausted and debauched veins expand with still joy and
bless the new day, feel the spring influence with the innocence of
infancy, and all his faults are forgotten. There is not only an
atmosphere of good will about him, but even a savor of holiness
groping for expression, blindly and ineffectually perhaps, like a
new-born instinct, and for a short hour the south hillside echoes to
no vulgar jest. You see some innocent fair shoots preparing to burst
from his gnarled rind and try another year's life, tender and fresh
as the youngest plant. Even he has entered into the joy of his Lord.
Why the jailer does not leave open his prison doors- why the judge
does not dismis his case- why the preacher does not dismiss his
congregation! It is because they do not obey the hint which God gives
them, nor accept the pardon which he freely offers to all.
"A
return to goodness produced each day in the tranquil and beneficent
breath of the morning, causes that in respect to the love of virtue
and the hatred of vice, one approaches a little the primitive nature
of man, as the sprouts of the forest which has been felled. In like
manner the evil which one does in the interval of a day prevents the
germs of virtues which began to spring up again from developing
themselves and destroys them.
"After the germs of virtue
have thus been prevented many times from developing themselves, then
the beneficent breath of evening does not suffice to preserve them.
As soon as the breath of evening does not suffice longer to preserve
them, then the nature of man does not differ much from that of the
brute. Men seeing the nature of this man like that of the brute,
think that he has never possessed the innate faculty of reason. Are
those the true and natural sentiments of man?"
"The
Golden Age was first created, which without any avenger
Spontaneously
without law cherished fidelity and rectitude.
Punishment and fear
were not; nor were threatening words read
On suspended brass; nor
did the suppliant crowd fear
The words of their judge; but were
safe without an avenger.
Not yet the pine felled on its mountains
had descended
To the liquid waves that it might see a foreign
world,
And mortals knew no shores but their own.
There was
eternal spring, and placid zephyrs with warm
Blasts soothed the
flowers born without seed."
On the 29th of
April, as I was fishing from the bank of the river near the
Nine-Acre-Corner bridge, standing on the quaking grass and willow
roots, where the muskrats lurk, I heard a singular rattling sound,
somewhat like that of the sticks which boys play with their fingers,
when, looking up, I observed a very slight and graceful hawk, like a
nighthawk, alternately soaring like a ripple and tumbling a rod or
two over and over, showing the under side of its wings, which gleamed
like a satin ribbon in the sun, or like the pearly inside of a shell.
This sight reminded me of falconry and what nobleness and poetry are
associated with that sport. The merlin it seemed to me it might be
called: but I care not for its name. It was the most ethereal flight
I had ever witnessed. It did not simply flutter like a butterfly, nor
soar like the larger hawks, but it sported with proud reliance in the
fields of air; mounting again and again with its strange chuckle, it
repeated its free and beautiful fall, turning over and over like a
kite, and then recovering from its lofty tumbling, as if it had never
set its foot on terra firma. It appeared to have no companion in the
universe-sporting there alone- and to need none but the morning and
the ether with which it played. It was not lonely, but made all the
earth lonely beneath it. Where was the parent which hatched it, its
kindred, and its father in the heavens? The tenant of the air, it
seemed related to the earth but by an egg hatched some time in the
crevice of a crag;- or was its native nest made in the angle of a
cloud, woven of the rainbow's trimmings and the sunset sky, and lined
with some soft midsummer haze caught up from earth? Its eyry now some
cliffy cloud.
Beside this I got a rare mess of golden and
silver and bright cupreous fishes, which looked like a string of
jewels. Ah! I have penetrated to those meadows on the morning of many
a first spring day, jumping from hummock to hummock, from willow root
to willow root, when the wild river valley and the woods were bathed
in so pure and bright a light as would have waked the dead, if they
had been slumbering in their graves, as some suppose. There needs no
stronger proof of immortality. All things must live in such a light.
O Death, where was thy sting? O Grave, where was thy victory,
then?
Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the
unexplored forests and meadows which surround it. We need the tonic
of wildness- to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the
meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the
whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds
her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground. At
the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we
require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and
sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because
unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature. We must be
refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic
features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its
living and its decaying trees, the thunder-cloud, and the rain which
lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own
limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never
wander. We are cheered when we observe the vulture feeding on the
carrion which disgusts and disheartens us, and deriving health and
strength from the repast. There was a dead horse in the hollow by the
path to my house, which compelled me sometimes to go out of my way,
especially in the night when the air was heavy, but the assurance it
gave me of the strong appetite and inviolable health of Nature was my
compensation for this. I love to see that Nature is so rife with life
that myriads can be afforded to be sacrificed and suffered to prey on
one another; that tender organizations can be so serenely squashed
out of existence like pulp-tadpoles which herons gobble up, and
tortoises and toads run over in the road; and that sometimes it has
rained flesh and blood! With the liability to accident, we must see
how little account is to be made of it. The impression made on a wise
man is that of universal innocence. Poison is not poisonous after
all, nor are any wounds fatal. Compassion is a very untenable ground.
It must be expeditious. Its pleadings will not bear to be
stereotyped.
Early in May, the oaks, hickories, maples, and
other trees, just putting out amidst the pine woods around the pond,
imparted a brightness like sunshine to the landscape, especially in
cloudy days, as if the sun were breaking through mists and shining
faintly on the hillsides here and there. On the third or fourth of
May I saw a loon in the pond, and during the first week of the month
I heard the whip-poor-will, the brown thrasher, the veery, the wood
pewee, the chewink, and other birds. I had heard the wood thrush long
before. The phoebe had already come once more and looked in at my
door and window, to see if my house was cavern-like enough for her,
sustaining herself on humming winds with clinched talons, as if she
held by the air, while she surveyed the premises. The sulphur-like
pollen of the pitch pine soon covered the pond and the stones and
rotten wood along the shore, so that you could have collected a
barrelful. This is the "sulphur showers" we bear of. Even
in Calidas' drama of Sacontala, we read of "rills dyed yellow
with the golden dust of the lotus." And so the seasons went
rolling on into summer, as one rambles into higher and higher
grass.
Thus was my first year's life in the woods completed;
and the second year was similar to it. I finally left Walden
September 6th, 1847. CONCLUSION
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