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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