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 a 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
32º, or freezing point; near the shore at 33º; in the middle of
Flint's
Pond, the same day, at 32º; at a dozen rods from the shore, in shallow
water, under ice a foot thick, at 36º. This difference of three and a
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 wood-pile, 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 semi-cylindrical 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 can 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
(γεἱβω,
labor, lapsus, to flow or slip downward, a lapsing;
λοβá½Ï‚,
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, hard-hack, meadow-sweet, 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 hear 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 Nabathæn
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, recreating 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 hill-side 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 phœbe 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 wings 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 hear 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.
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