The Old World, with its vast deserts and its arid and elevated steppes and table-lands, contrasted with the New World with its humid and fertile valleys and savannas and prairies and its boundless primitive forests, is like the exhausted Indian corn lands contrasted with the peat meadows. America requires some of the sand of the Old World to be carted on to her rich but as yet unassimilated meadows.
For a week past the elm buds have been swollen. The willow catkins have put out. The ice still remains in Walden, though it will not bear. Mather Howard saw a large meadow near his house which had risen up but was prevented from floating away by the bushes.
Walking in the woods, it may be, some afternoon, the shadow of the wings of a thought flits across the landscape of my mind, and I am reminded how little eventful are our lives. What have been all these wars and rumors of wars, and modern discoveries and improvements so-called? A mere irritation in the skin. But this shadow which is so soon past, and whose substance is not detected, suggests that there are events of importance whose interval is to us a true historic period.
It was quite a discovery when I first came upon this brawling mountain stream in Concord woods. Rising out of an obscure meadow in the woods, for some fifty or sixty rods of its course it is a brawling mountain stream in our quiet Concord woods, as much obstructed by rocks - rocks out of all proportion to its tiny stream - as a brook can well be. And the rocks are bared throughout the wood on either side, as if a torrent had anciently swept through here; so unlike the after character of the stream. Who would have thought that, on tracing it up from where it empties into the larger Mill Brook in the open peat meadows, it would conduct him to such a headlong and impetuous youth. Perchance it should be called a “force”. It suggests what various moods may attach to the same character. Ah, if I but knew that some minds which flow so muddily in the lowland portion of their course, when they cross the highways, tumbled thus impetuously and musically, mixed themselves with the air in foam, but a little way back in the woods! that these dark and muddy pools, where only the pout and the leech are to be found, issued from pure trout streams higher up! that the man’s thoughts ever flowed as sparkling mountain water, that trout there loved to glance through his dimples, where the witch-hazel hangs over his stream!
The muskrat-houses appear now for the most part to be finished. Some, it is true, are still rising. They line the river all the way. Some are as big as small haycocks. The river is still quite low, though a foot or more higher than when I was last on it. There is quite a wind, and the sky is full of flitting clouds, so that sky and water are quite unlike that warm, bright, transparent day when I last sailed on the river, when the surface was of such oily smoothness. You could not now study the river bottom for the black waves and the streaks of foam. When the sun shines brightest to-day, its pyramidal-shaped sheen (when for a short time we are looking up-stream, for we row) is dazzling and blinding. It is pleasant to hear the sound of the waves and feel the surging of the boat, - an inspiriting sound, as if you were bound on adventures. It is delightful to be tossed about in such a harmless storm, and see the waves look so angry and black. We see objects on shore - trees, etc., - much better from the boat, - from a low point of view. It brings them against the sky, into a novel point of view at least. The otherwise low on the meadows, as well as the hills, is conspicuous. I perceive that the bulrushes are nibbled along the shore, as if they had been cut by a scythe, yet in such positions as no mower could have reached, even outside the flags. Probably the muskrat was the mower, - for his houses.
In the psychological world there are phenomena analogous to what zoologists call alternate reproduction, in which it requires several generations unlike each other to evolve the perfect animal. Some men’s lives are but an aspiration, a yearning toward a higher state, and they are wholly misapprehended, until they are referred to, or traced through, all their metamorphoses. We cannot pronounce upon a man’s intellectual and moral state until we foresee what metamorphosis it is preparing him for.
By the side of J. P. Brown’s grain-field I picked up some white oak acorns in the path by the wood-side, which I found to be unexpectedly sweet and palatable, the bitterness being scarcely perceptible. To my taste they are quite as good as chestnuts. No wonder the first men lived on acorns. Such as these are no mean food, such as they are represented to be. Their sweetness is like the sweetness of bread, and to have discovered this palatableness in this neglected nut, the whole world is to me the sweeter for it. I am related again to the first men. What can be handsomer, wear better to the eye, than the color of the acorn, like the leaves on which they fall polished, or varnished? To find that acorns are edible, - it is a greater addition to one’s stock of life than would be imagined. I should be at least equally pleased if I were to find that the grass tasted sweet and nutritious. It increases the number of my friends; it diminishes the number of my foes. How easily at this season I could feed myself in the woods! There is mast for me too, as well as for the pigeon and the squirrel. This Dodonean fruit.
Minott is, perhaps, the most poetical farmer - who most realizes to me the poetry of the farmer’s life - that it I know. He does nothing with haste and drudgery, but as if he loved it. He makes the most of his labor, and takes infinite satisfaction in every part of it. He is not looking forward to the sale of his crops or any pecuniary profit, but he is paid by the constant satisfaction which his labor yields him. He has not too much land to trouble him, - too much work to do, - no hired man nor boy, - but simply to amuse himself and live. He cares not so much to raise a large crop as to do his work well. He knows every pin and nail in his barn. If another linter is to be floored, he lets no hired man rob him of that amusement, but he goes slowly to the woods and, at his leisure, selects a pitch pine tree, cuts it, and hauls it or gets it hauled to the mill; and so he knows the history of his barn floor.
Walden plainly can never be spoiled by the woodchopper, for, do what you will to the shore, there will still remain this crystal well. The intense brilliancy of the red-ripe maples scattered here and there in the midst of the green oaks and hickories on its hilly shore is quite charming. They are unexpectedly and incredibly brilliant, especially on the western shore and close to the water’s edge, where, alternating with yellow birches and poplars and green oaks, they remind me of a line of soldiers redcoats and riflemen in green mixed together.
Hugh Miller, in his “Old Red Sandstone,” speaking of “the consistency of style which obtains among the ichthyolites of this formation” and the “microscopic beauty of these ancient fishes,” says: “The artist who sculptured the cherry stone consigned it to a cabinet, and placed a microscope beside it; the microscopic beauty of these ancient fish was consigned to the twilight depths of a primeval ocean. There is a feeling which at times grows upon the painter and the statuary, as if the perception and love of the beautiful had been sublimed into a kind of moral sense. Art comes to be pursued for its own sake; the exquisite conception in the mind, or the elegant and elaborate model, becomes all in all to the worker, and the dread of criticism or the appetite of praise almost nothing. And thus, through the influence of a power somewhat akin to conscience, but whose province is not the just and the good, but the fair, the refined, the exquisite, have works prosecuted in solitude, and never intended for the world, been found fraught with loveliness.” The hesitation with which this is said - to say nothing of its simplicity - betrays a latent infidelity more fatal far than that of the “Vestiges of Creation,” which in another work this author endeavors to correct. He describes that as an exception which is in fact the rule. The supposed want of harmony between “the perception and love of the beautiful” and a delicate moral sense betrays what kind of beauty the writer has been conversant with. He speaks of his work becoming all in all to the worker, his rising above the dread of criticism and the appetite of praise, as if these were the very rare exceptions in a great artist’s life, and not the very definition of it.
