September 8, 2025 • 73 mins
14 - Chapter 9. Walden by Henry David Thoreau.
Walden, series of 18 essays by Henry David Thoreau, published in 1854. An important contribution to New England Transcendentalism, the book was a record of Thoreau’s experiment in simple living on the northern shore of Walden Pond in eastern Massachusetts (1845–47). Walden is viewed not only as a philosophical treatise on labour, leisure, self-reliance, and individualism but also as an influential piece of nature writing. It is considered Thoreau’s masterwork.
Walden, series of 18 essays by Henry David Thoreau, published in 1854. An important contribution to New England Transcendentalism, the book was a record of Thoreau’s experiment in simple living on the northern shore of Walden Pond in eastern Massachusetts (1845–47). Walden is viewed not only as a philosophical treatise on labour, leisure, self-reliance, and individualism but also as an influential piece of nature writing. It is considered Thoreau’s masterwork.
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o r G. This reading by Gordon mackenzie Walden by
Henry David, thora chapter nine. The ponds, sometimes having a
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surfeit of human society and gossip, and worn out all
my village friends, I rambled still farther westward than I habitually,
dwell into yet more unfrequented parts of the town, to
fresh woods and pastures new or while the sun was setting,
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made my supper of huckleberries and blueberries on fair Haven Hill,
and laid up a store for several days. The fruits
do not yield their true flavor to the purchaser of them,
nor to him who raises them for the market. There
is but one way to obtain it, yet few take
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that way. If you would know the flavor of huckleberries,
ask the cowboy or the partridge. It is a vulgar
error to suppose that you have tasted huckleberries who never
plucked them. A huckleberry never reaches Boston. They have not
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been known there since they grew on her three hills.
The ambrosial and essential part of the fruit is lost
with the bloom, which is rubbed off in the market cart,
or they become mere provender. As long as eternal justice reigns,
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not one innocent huckleberry can be transper ported thither from
the country's hills. Occasionally, after my hoeing was done for
the day, I joined some impatient companion who had been
fishing on the pond since morning, as silent and motionless
as a duck or a floating leaf, and after practicing
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various kinds of philosophy, had concluded commonly by the time
I arrived, that he belonged to the ancient sect of cenobites.
There was one older man, an excellent fisher and skilled
in all kinds of woodcraft, who was pleased to look
upon my house as a building erected for the convenience
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of fishermen, And I was equally pleased when he sat
in my doorway to arrange his lines. He at one
end of the boat and I at the other. But
not many words passed between us, for he had grown
deaf in his later years. But he occasionally hummed the psalm,
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which harmonized well enough with my philosophy. Our intercourse was
thus altogether one of unbroken harmony, far more pleasing to
remember than if it had been carried on by speech. When,
as was commonly the case, I had none to commune with,
I used to raise the echoes by striking with a
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paddle on the side of my boat, filling the surrounding
woods with circling and dilating sounds, stirring them up as
the keeper of a menagerie his wild beasts, until I
elicited a growl from every wooded vale and hillside. In
warm evenings, I frequently sat in the boat playing the flute,
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and saw the perch, which I seemed to have charmed,
hovering around me, and the moon traveling over the ribbed bottom,
which was strewn with the wrecks of the forest. Formerly,
I had come to this pond adventurously from time to time,
in dark summer nights, with a companion, and making a
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fire close to the water's edge, which we thought attracted
the fishes. We caught pouts with a bunch of worms
strung on a thread, and when we had done far
in the night, through the burning brands high into the
air like sky rockets, which coming down into the pond
were quenched with a loud hissing, and we were suddenly
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groping in total darkness. Through this whistling a tune, we
took our way to the haunts of men again. But
now I had made my home by the shore. Sometimes
after staying in a village parlor till the family had
all retired, I have returned to the woods, and, partly
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with a view to the next day's dinner, spent the
hours of midnight fishing from a boat by moonlight, serenaded
by owls and foxes, and hearing from time to time
the creaking note of some unknown bird close at hand.
These experiences were very memorable and valuable to me. Anchored
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in forty feet of water and twenty or thirty rods
from the shore, surrounded sometimes by thousands of small perch
and shiners, dimpling the surface with their tails in the moonlight,
and communicating by a long flaxen line with mysterious nocturnal
fishes which had their dwelling forty feet below, or sometimes
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dragging sixty feet of line about the pond. As I
drifted in the gentle night breeze, now and then, feeling
a slight vibration along it, indicative of some life prowling
about its extremity, of dull, uncertain blundering purpose there, and
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slow to make up its mind. At length, you slowly raise,
pulling hand over hand, some horned pout, squeaking and squirming
to the upper air. It was very queer, especially in
dark nights, when your thoughts had wandered to vast and
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cosmogonal themes in other spheres, to feel this faint jerk
which came to interrupt your dreams and link you to
nature again. It seemed as if I might next cast
my line upward into the air, as well as downward
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into this element, which was scarcely more dense. Thus I
caught two fishes, as it were, with one hook. The
scenery of Walden is on a humble scale, and though
very beautiful, does not approach to grandeur, nor can it
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much concern one who has not long frequented it or
lived by its shore. Yet this pond is so remarkable
for its depth and purity as to merit a particular description.
It is a clear and deep green well half a
mile long and a mile and three quarters in circumference,
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and contains about sixty one and a half acres a
perennial spring in the midst of pine and oak woods,
without any visible inlet or outlet except by the clouds
and evaporation. The surrounding hills rise abruptly from the water
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to the height of forty to eighty feet, though on
the southeast and east they attain to about one hundred
and one hundred fifty feet respectively. Within a quarter and
a third of a mile they are exclusively woodland. All
our Concord waters have two colors, at least one when
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viewed at a distance, and another more proper close at hand.
The first depends more on the light and follows the
sky in clear weather. In summer they appear blue at
a little distance, especially if agitated, and at a great
distance all appear alike. In stormy weather, they are sometimes
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a dark slate color. The sea, however, is said to
be blue one day in green another without any perceptible
change in the atmosphere. I have seen our river when
the landscape, being covered with snow, both water and ice
were almost as green as grass. Some consider blue to
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be the color of pure water, whether liquid or solid.
But looking directly down into our waters from a boat,
they are seen to be of very different colors. Walden
is blue at one time and green at another. Even
from the same point of view. Lying between the earth
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and the heavens, it partakes of the color of both.
Viewed from a hilltop, it reflects the color of the sky,
but near at hand it is of a yellowish tint
next the shore, where you can see the sand, then
a light green, which gradually deepens to a uniform dark
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green in the body of the pond. In some lights,
viewed even from a hilltop, it is of a vivid
green next to the shore. Some have referred this to
the reflection of the verdure, but it is equally green
there against the railroad's sand bank, and in the spring
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before the leaves are expanded, and it may be simply
the result of the prevailing blue mixed with the yellow
of the sand, such is the color of its iris.
This is that portion also where in the spring, the ice,
being warmed by the heat of the sun reflected from
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the bottom and also transmitted through the earth, melts first
and forms a narrow canal about the still frozen middle,
like the rest of our waters. When much agitated in
clear weather, so that the surface of the waves may
reflect the sky at the right angle, or because there
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is more light mixed with it, it appears at a
little distance of a darker blue than the sky itself.
Such a time, being on its surface and looking with
divided vision so as to see the reflection, I have
discerned a matchless and indescribable light blue such as watered
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or changeable silks and sword blades, suggest more cerulean than
the sky itself, alternating with the original dark green on
the opposite sides of the waves which last appeared, but
muddy in comparison, it is a vitreous greenish blue, as
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I remember it, like those patches of the winter sky
seen through cloud vistas in the west before sundown. Yet
a single glass of its water held up to the
light is as colorless as an equal quantity of air.
It is well known that a large plate of glass
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will have a green tea hint, owing as the makers say,
to its body, but a small piece of the same
will be colorless. How large a body of walled and
water would be required to reflect a green tint. I
have never proved the water of our river is black
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or a very dark brown to one looking directly down
on it, and, like that of most ponds, imparts to
the body of one bathing in it a yellowish tinge.
But this water is of such crystalline purity that the
body of the bather appears of an alabaster whiteness, still
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more unnatural, which, as the limbs are magnified and distorted
withal produces a monstrous effect, making fit studies for a
Michael Angelo. The water is so transparent that the bottom
can easily be discerned at the depth of twenty five
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or thirty feet. Paddling over it, you may see many
feet beneath the surface the schools of perch and shiners,
perhaps only an inch long, yet the former easily distinguished
by their transverse bars, and you think that they must
be ascetic fish that find a subsistence there. Once in
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the winter many years ago, when I had been cutting
holes through the ice in order to catch pickerel. As
I stepped ashore, I tossed my axe back on to
the ice, but as if some evil genius had directed it,
it slid four or five rods directly into one of
the holes, where the water was twenty five feet deep.
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Out of curiosity, I laid down on the ice, and
looked through the hole until I saw the axe a
little on one side, standing on its head with its
helve erect and gently swaying to and fro with the
pulse of the pond. And there it might have stood
erect and swaying till in the course of time the
handle rotted off, if I had not disturbed it, making
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another hole directly over it with an ice chisel which
I had, and cutting down the longest birch which I
could find in the neighborhood. With my knife, I made
a slip noose which I attached to its end, and,
letting it down, carefully passed it over the knob of
the handle, and drew it by a line along the birch,
and so pulled the axe out again. The shore is
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composed of a belt of smooth, rounded white stones like
paving stones, except one or two short sand beaches, and
is so steep that in many places a single leap
will carry you into water over your head, and were
it not for its remarkable transparency, that would be the
last to be seen of its bottom till it rows
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on the opposite side. Some think it is bottomless. It
is nowhere muddy and a casual observer would say that
there were no weeds at all in it, and of
noticeable plants, except in the little meadows recently overflowed, which
do not properly belong to it. A closer scrutiny does
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not detect a flag, nor a bulrush, nor even a
lily yellow or white, but only a few small heart
leaves and potamogitons, and perhaps a water target or two,
all which, however, a bay there might not perceive. And
these plants are clean and bright, like the element they
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grow in. The stones extend a rod or two into
the water, and then the bottom is pure sand, except
in the deepest part, where there is usually a little sediment,
probably from the decay of the leaves which have been
wafted on to it. So many successive falls and a
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bright green weed is brought up on anchors even in midwinter.
We have one other pond just like this white pond,
in nine acre Corner, about two and a half miles westerly.
But though I am acquainted with most of the ponds
within a dozen miles of this center, I do not
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know a third of this pure and well like character.
Successive nations, perchance, have drank at, admired and fathomed it,
and passed away. And still its water is green and pellucid,
as ever not an intermitting spring. Perhaps on that spring
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morning when Adam and Eve were driven out of Eden,
Walden Pond was already in existence, and even then in
breaking up in a gentle spring rain, accompanied with mist
and a southerly wind, and covered with myriads of ducks
and geese, which had not heard of the fall, when
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still such pure lakes sufficed them. Even then it had
commenced to rise and fall, and had clarified its waters
and colored them of the hue they now wear, and
obtained a patent of Heaven to be the only wolden
pond in the world, and distiller of celestial dews. Who
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knows in how many unremembered nations literatures this has been
the Castalian fountain, or what nymphs presided over it in
the golden age. It is a gem of the first
water which Concord wears and her coronet. Yet perchance the
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first who came to this well have left some trace
of their footsteps. I have been surprised to detect encircling
the pond, even where a thick wood has just been
cut down on the shore. A narrow shelf like path
in the steep hillside, alternately rising and falling, approaching and
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receding from the water's edge, as old, probably as the
race of man, here, worn by the feet of Aboriginal hunters,
and still from time to time unwittingly trodden by the
present occupants of the land. This is particularly distinct to
one standing on the middle of the pond in winter,
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just after a light snow has fallen, appearing as a clear,
undulating white line, unobscured by weeds and twigs, and very
obvious a quarter of a mile off in many places,
where in summer it is hardly distinguishable. Close at hand,
the snow reprints it as it were, in clear white
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type alto relievo. The ornamented grounds of villas which will
one day be built here may still preserve some trace
of this. The pond rises and falls, but whether regularly
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or not and within what period nobody knows, though as
usual many pretend to know. It is commonly higher in
winter and lower in the summer, though not corresponding to
the general wet and dryness. I can remember when it
was a foot or two lower, and also when it
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was at least five feet higher than when I lived
by it. There is a narrow sand bar running into it,
with very deep water on one side, on which I
helped boil a kettle of chowder some six rods from
the main shore about the year eighteen twenty four, which
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it has not been possible to do for twenty five years.
And on the other hand, my friends used to listen
with incredulity when I told them that a few years
later I was accustomed to fish from a boat in
a secluded cove in the woods fifteen rods from the
only shore they knew, which place was long since converted
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into a meadow. But the pond has risen steadily for
two years, and now, in the summer of fifty two,
is just five feet higher than when I lived there,
or as high as it was thirty years ago, and
fishing goes on again in the meadow. This makes a
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difference of level at the outside of six or seven feet,
and yet the water shed by the surrounding hill hills
is insignificant in amount, and this overflow must be referred
to causes which affect the deep springs. This same summer
the pond has begun to fall again. It is remarkable
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that this fluctuation, whether periodical or not, appears thus to
require many years for its accomplishment. I have observed one
rise and a part of two falls, and I expect
that a dozen or fifteen years hence the water will
again be as low as I have ever known. It
flints Pond a mile eastward, allowing for the disturbance occasioned
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by its inlets and outlets. And the smaller intermediate ponds
also sympathize with Walden and recently attained their greatest height
at the same time with the latter. The same is
true as far as my observation goes of White Pond.
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This rise and fall of Walden at long intervals serves
this use at least the water standing at this great
height for a year or more, though it makes it
difficult to walk round. It kills the shrubs and trees
which have sprung up about its edge since the last rise,
pitch pines, birches, alders, aspens and others, and falling again
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leaves an unobstructed shore. For unlike many ponds and all
waters which are subject to a daily tide, its shore
is cleanest when the water is lowest. On the side
of the pond next my house, a row of pitch
pines fifteen feet high has been killed and tipped over,
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as if by a lever, and thus a stop put
to their encroachments. And their size indicates how many years
have elapsed since the last rise to this height. By
this fluctuation, the pond asserts its title to a shore,
and thus the shore is shorn, and the trees cannot
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hold it by right of possession. These are the lips
of the lake on which no beard grows. It licks
its chaps. From time to time, when the weather is
at its height, the alders, willows and maples send forth
a mass of fibrous red roots several feet long, from
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all sides of their stems in the water, and to
the height of three or four feet from the ground,
in the effort to maintain themselves. And I have known
the high blueberry bushes about the shore, which commonly produce
no fruit, bear an abundant crop. Under these circumstances, some
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have been puzzled to tell how the shore became so
regularly paved. My townsmen have all heard the tradition the
oldest people tell me that they heard it in their
youth that anciently the Indians were holding a pow wow
upon a hill here which rose as high into the
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heavens as the pond now sinks deep into the earth,
and they used much profanity. As the story goes, though
this vice is one of which the Indians were never guilty.
And while they were thus engaged, the hill shook and
suddenly sank, and only one old squaw named Walden escaped,
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and from her the pond was named. It has been
conjectured that when the hill shook, these stones rolled down
its side and became the present shore. It is very certain,
at any rate, that once there was no pond here,
and now there is one. And this Indian fable does
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not in any respect conflict with the account of the
ancient settler whom I have mentioned, who remember so well
when he first came here with his divining rod, saw
a thin vapor rising from the sward, and the hazel
pointed steadily downward, and he concluded to dig a well here.
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As for the stones, many still think that they are
hardly to be accounted for by the action of the
waves on these hills. But I observe that the surrounding
hills are remarkably full of the same kind of stones,
so that they have been obliged to pile them up
in walls on both sides of the railroad cut nearest
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the pond. And moreover there are more stones where the
shore is most abrupt, so that, unfortunately it is no
longer a mystery to me I detect the paver. If
the name was not derived from that of some English locality,
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saffron Walden, for instance, one might suppose that it was
called originally walled in pond. The pond was my well,
ready dug for four months in the year. Its water
is as cold as it is pure at all times,
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and I think that it is then as good as any,
if not the best, in the town. In the winter,
all water which is exposed to the air is colder
than springs and wells which are protected from it. The
temperature of the pond water which had stood in the
room where I sat from five o'clock in the afternoon
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till noon the next day, the sixth of March eighteen
forty six, the thermometer having been up to sixty five
or seventy degrees, is some of the time owing partly
to the sun on the roof, was forty two degrees,
or one degree colder than the water of one of
the coldest wells in the village. Just drawn. The temperature
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of the boiling spring the same day was forty five degrees,
or the warmest of any water tried, though it is
the coldest that I know of in summer, when beside
shallow and stagnant surface water is not mingled with it. Moreover,
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in summer, Walden never becomes so warm as most water
which is exposed to the sun on account of its depth.
In the warmest weather, I usually placed a pailful in
my cellar, where it became cool in the night and
remained so during the day. Though I also resorted to
a spring in the neighborhood. It was as good when
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a week old as the day it was dipped, and
had no taste of the pump. Whoever camps for a
week in summer by the shore of a pond needs
only bury a pail of water a few feet deep
in the shade of his camp to be independent of
the luxury of ice. There have been caught in Walden
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pickerel one weighing seven pounds, To say nothing of another,
which carried off a reel with great velocity, which the
fisherman safely set down at eight pounds because he did
not see him. Perch and pouts, some of each weighing
over two pounds, shiners, chivins or roach, a very few breams,
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and a couple of eels, one weighing four pounds. I
am thus particular because the weight of a fish is
commonly its only title to fame, and these are the
only eels I have heard of here. Also I have
a faint recollection of a little fish, some five inches long,
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with silvery sides and a greenish back, somewhat dace like
in its character, which I mention here chiefly to link
my facts to fable. Nevertheless, this pond is not very
fertile in fish. Its pickerel, though not abundant, are its
chief boast. I have seen at one time lying on
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the ice pickerel of at least three different kinds, A
long and shallow one, steel colored, most like those caught
in the river. A bright golden kind with greenish reflections
and remarkably deep, which is the most common here, and
another golden colored and shaped like the last, but peppered
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on the sides, with small dark brown or black spots
intermixed with a few faint blood red ones, very much
like a trout. The specific name reticulatus would not apply
to this, It should be guttatus. Rather. These are all
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very firm fish, and way more than their size promises.
The shiners, pouts and perch also, and indeed all the
fishes which inhabit this pond are much cleaner, handsomer, and
firmer fleshed than those in the river and most other ponds,
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as the water is purer, and they can easily be
distinguished from them. Probably many ichthyologists would make new varieties
of some of them. There are also a certain race
of frogs and tortoises, and a few mussels in it.
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Muskrats and mink leave their traces about it, and occasionally
a traveling mud turtle visits it. Sometimes when I pushed
off my boat in the morning, I disturbed a great
mud turtle which had secreted himself under the boat in
the night. Ducks and geese frequent it in the spring
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and fall. The white bellied swallows Hirundo bicolor skim over it,
and the peat wheats Totanus macularius teeter along its stony
shores all summer. I have sometimes disturbed a fish hawk
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sitting on a white pine over the water, but I
doubt if it is ever profaned by the wind of
a gull. Like fair Haven, at most it tolerates one
annual loon. These are all the animals of consequence which
frequent it. Now. You may see from a boat in
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calm weather, near the sandy eastern shore, where the water
is eight or ten feet deep, and also in some
other parts of the pond, some circular heaps half a
dozen feet in diameter by a foot in height, consisting
of small stones less than a hen's egg in size,
where all around is bare sand. At first you wonder
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if the Indians could have formed them on the ice
for any purpose, and so when the ice melted they
sank to the bottom. But they are too regular, and
some of them plainly too fresh for that. They are
similar to those found in rivers. But as there are
no suckers nor lampreys here, I know not by what
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fish they could be made. Perhaps they are the nests
of the chiven. These lend a pleasing mystery to the bottom.
The shore is irregular enough not to be monotonous. I
have in my mind's eye the western indented with deep bays,
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the bolder northern, and the beautifully scalloped southern shore, where
successive capes overlap each other and suggest unexplored coves between.
The forest was never so good a setting, nor is
so distinctly beautiful, as when seen from the middle of
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a small lake amid hills which rise from the water's edge.
For the water in which it is reflected not only
makes the best foreground in such a case, but with
its winding shore the most natural and agreeable boundary to it.
There is no rawness nor imperfection in its edge there
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as where the axe has cleared a part or a
cultivated field of butts on it. The trees have ample
room to expand on the water side, and each sends
forth its most vigorous branch in that direction. There nature
has woven a natural selvage, and the eye rises by
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just gradations from the low shrubs of the shore to
the highest trees. There are few traces of man's hand
to be seen. The water LAVs the shore as it
did a thousand years ago. A lake is the landscape's
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most beautiful and expressive feature. It is Earth's eye, looking
into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.
The fluviatile trees next the shore are the slender eye
lashes which fringe it, and the wooded hills and cliffs
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around it are its overhanging brows. Standing on the smooth
sandy beach at the east end of the pond in
a calm September afternoon, when a slight haze makes the
opposite shore line indistinct, I have seen whence came the
expression the glassy surface of a lake. When you invert
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your head, it looks like a thread of finest gossamers
stretched across the valley and gleaming against the distant pine woods,
separating one stratum of the atmosphere from another. You would
think that you could walk dry under it to the
opposing hills, and that the swallows which skim over might
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perch on it. Indeed, they sometimes dive below this line,
as if it were by mistake, and are undeceived. As
you look over the pond westward, you are obliged to
employ both your hands to defend your eyes against the
reflected as well as the true sun, for they are
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equally bright, and if between the two you survey its
surface critically, it is literally as smooth as glass, except
where the skater insects, at equal intervals scatter over its
whole extent by their motions in the sun, produce the
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finest imaginable sparkle on it. Or perchance a duck plumes itself,
or as I have said, a swallow skims so low
as to touch it. It may be that in the
distance a fish describes an arc of three or four
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feet in the air, and there is one bright flash
where it emerges, and another where it strikes the water.
Sometimes the whole silvery arc is revealed, or here and
there perhaps is a thistle down floating on its surface,
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which the fishes dart at and so dimple it. Again.
It is like molten glass, cooled but not congealed, and
the few moats in it are pure and beautiful, like
the imperfections in glass. You may often detect a yet
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smoother and darker water, separated from the rest, as if
by an invisible cobweb boom of the water nymphs resting
on it. From a hilltop, you can see a fish
leap in almost any part for not a pickerel or
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shiner picks an insect from this smooth surface, but it
manifestly disturbs the equilibrium of the whole lake. It is
wonderful with what elaborateness this simple fact is advertised, This
pisene murder will out, and from my distant perch I
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distinguish the circling undulations. When they are half a dozen
rods in diameter. You can even detect a water bug
gyrinus ceaselessly progressing over the smooth surface a quarter of
a mile off, For they furrow the water slightly, making
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a conspicuous ripple bounded by two diverging lines. But the
skaters glide over it without rippling it perceptibly. When the
surface is considerably agitated, there are no skaters nor water
bugs on it. But apparently in calm days they leave
(38:57):
their havens and adventurously glide forth from the shore by
short impulses till they completely cover it. It is a
soothing employment on one of those fine days in the fall,
when all the warmth of the sun is fully appreciated,
to sit on a stump on such a height as this,
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overlooking the pond and study the dimpling circles, which are
incessantly inscribed on its otherwise invisible surface, amid the reflected
skies and trees. Over this great expanse, there is no disturbance,
but it is thus at once gently smoothed away and assaged,
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as when a vase of water is jarred. The trembling
circles seek the shore, and all is smooth again. Not
a fish can leap or an insect fall on the pond,
but it is thus reported in circling dimples, in lines
of beauty, as it were, the constant welling up of
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its fountain, the gentle pulsing of its life, the heaving
of its breast. The thrills of joy and thrills of
pain are indistinguishable. How peaceful the phenomena of the lake. Again,
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the works of man shine as in the spring ay.
Every leaf and twig, and stone and cobweb sparkles now
at mid afternoon, as when covered with dew in a
spring morning. Every motion of an oar or an insect
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produces a flash of light. And if an oar falls,
how sweet the echo In such a day in September
or October. Walden is a perfect forest mirror set round
with stones as precious to my eye as if fewer
(41:11):
or rarer. Nothing so fair, so pure, and at the
same time so large as a lake perchants, lies on
the surface of the earth sky water. It needs no fence.
Nations come and go without defiling it. It is a
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mirror which no stone can crack, whose quick silver will
never wear off, whose gilding nature continually repairs, no storms,
no dust can dim its surface, ever fresh, the mirror
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in which all impurity presented to it sinks, swept and
dusted by the sun's hazy brush. This the light dust cloth,
which retains no breath that is breathed on it, but
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sends its own to float as clouds high above its
surface and be reflected in its bosom. Still, a field
of water betrays the spirit that is in the air.
It is continually receiving new life and motion from above.
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It is intermediate in its nature between land and sky.
On land, only the grass and trees wave, but the
water itself is rippled by the wind. I see where
the breeze dashes across it, by the streaks or flakes
of light. It is remarkable that we can look down
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on its surface. We shall perhaps look down thus on
the surface of air at length and mark where a
still subtler spirit sweeps over it. The skaters and water
bugs finally disappear in the latter part of October, when
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the severe frosts have come, and then and in November,
usually in a calm day, there is absolutely nothing to
ripple the surface. One November afternoon, in the calm, at
the end of a rain storm of several days duration,
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when the sky was still completely overcast and the air
was full of mist, I observed that the pond was
remarkably smooth, so that it was difficult to distinguish its surface,
though it no longer reflected the bright tints of October,
but the somber November colors of the surrounding hills. Though
(44:20):
I passed over it as gently as possible, the slight
undulations produced by my boat extended almost as far as
I could see, and gave a ribed appearance to the reflections.
But as I was looking over the surface, I saw
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here and there at a distance a faint glimmer, as
if some skater insects which had escaped the frosts might
be collected there, or perchance, the surface, being so smoothed,
betrayed where a spring welled up from the bottom. Paddling
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gently to one of these places, I was surprised to
find myself surrounded by myriads of small perch about five
inches long, of a rich bronze color in the green water,
sporting there and constantly rising to the surface and dimpling it,
(45:25):
sometimes leaving bubbles on it. In such transparent and seemingly
bottomless water, reflecting the clouds, I seemed to be floating
through the air as in a balloon, and their swimming
impressed me as a kind of flight or hovering, as
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if they were a compact flock of birds, passing just
beneath my level on the right or left, their fins
like sails set all around them. There were many such
schools in the pond, apparently improving the short season before winter,
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would draw an icy shutter over their broad skylight, sometimes
giving to the surface an appearance as if a slight
breeze struck it, or a few rain drops fell there.
When I approached carelessly and alarmed them, they made a
sudden splash and rippling with their tails as if one
(46:31):
had struck the water with a bushy bough, and instantly
took refuge in the depths. At length, the wind rose,
the mist increased, and the waves began to run, and
the perch leaped much higher than before, half out of water,
(46:51):
a hundred black points three inches long at once above
the surface. Even as late as the fifth of December
one year, I saw some dimples on the surface, and,
thinking it was going to rain hard immediately, the air
being full of mist, I made haste to take my
(47:13):
place at the oars and row homeward. Already the rain
seemed rapidly increasing, though I felt none on my cheek,
and I anticipated a thorough soaking. But suddenly the dimples ceased,
for they were produced by the perch, which the noise
of my oars had seared into the depths, and I
(47:35):
saw their schools dimly disappearing. So I spent a dry
afternoon after all. An old man who used to frequent
this pond nearly sixty years ago, when it was dark
with surrounding forests, tells me that in those days he
sometimes saw it all alive with ducks and other water fowl,
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and that there were many eagles about it. He came
here a fishing and used an old log canoe, which
he found on the shore. It was made of two
white pine logs dug out and pinned together, and was
cut off square at the ends. It was very clumsy,
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but lasted a great many years before it became water
logged and perhaps sank to the bottom. He did not
know whose it was. It belonged to the pond. He
used to make a cable for his anchor of strips
of hickory bark tied together. An old man, a potter
(48:41):
who lived by the pond before the revolution, told him
once that there was an iron chest at the bottom,
and that he had seen it. Sometimes it would come
floating up to the shore, but when he went toward it,
it would go back into the deep water and disappear.
I was pleased to hear of the old log canoe,
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which took the place of an Indian one of the
same material but more graceful construction, which perchance had first
been a tree on the bank, and then as it were,
fell into the water to float there for a generation,
the most proper vessel for the lake. I remember that
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when I first looked into these depths, there were many
large trunks to be seen, in distinctly lying on the bottom,
which had either been blown over formerly or left on
the ice at the last cutting when wood was cheaper,
but now they have mostly disappeared. When I first paddled
(49:48):
a boat on Walden, it was completely surrounded by thick
and lofty pine and oak woods, and in some of
its coves grape vines had run over the trees next
the the water and formed bowers under which a boat
could pass. The hills which form its shores are so steep,
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and the woods on them then so high, that as
you look down from the west end, it had the
appearance of an amphitheater for some land of Sylvan spectacle.
I have spent many an hour, when I was younger,
floating over its surface as the zephyr willed, having paddled
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my boat to the middle, and lying on my back
across the seats in a summer forenoon, dreaming awake, until
I was aroused by the boat touching the sand, and
I arose to see what shore my fates had impelled
me to days when idleness was the most attractive and
(50:54):
productive industry. Many a forenoon have I stolen away, preferring
to spend thus the most valued part of the day,
For I was rich, if not in money in sunny
hours and summer days, and spent them lavishly. Nor do
(51:19):
I regret that I did not waste more of them
in the workshop or the teacher's desk. But since I
left those shores, the wood choppers have still further laid
them waste. And now for many a year there will
be no more rambling through the aisles of the wood,
with occasional vistas through which you see the water. My
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muse may be excused if she is silent. Henceforth, how
can you expect the birds to sing when their groves
are cut down? Now the trunks of trees on the bottom,
and the old log canoe and the dark surrounding woods
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are gone, And the villagers, who scarcely know where it lies,
instead of going to the pond to bathe or drink,
are thinking to bring its water, which should be as
sacred as the Ganges, at least to the village in
a pipe to wash their dishes with, to earn their
(52:28):
walden by the turning of a cock or the drawing
of a plug. That devilish iron horse, whose ear rending
neigh is heard throughout the town, has muddied the boiling
spring with his foot and here it is that has
browsed off all the woods on Walden Shore, that trojan
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horse with a thousand men in his belly, introduced by
mercenary Greeks. Where is the country's champion, the Moore of
Moore Hill, to meet him at the deep cut and
thrust an avenging lance between the ribs of the bloated pest. Nevertheless,
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of all the characters I have known, perhaps Walden wears
best and best preserves its purity. Many men have been
likened to it, but few deserve that honor. Though the
wood choppers have laid bare first this shore, and then
that when the Irish have built their sties by it,
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and the railroad has infringed on its border, and the
ice men have skimmed it once, it is itself unchanged,
the same water which my youthful eyes fell on. All
the change is in me. It has not acquired one
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permanent wrinkle after all its ripples. It is perennially young,
and I may stand and see a swallow dip apparently
to pick an insect from its surface, as of yore.
It struck me again to night, as if I had
(54:29):
not seen it almost daily for more than twenty years.
Why here is Walden, the same woodland lake that I
discovered so many years ago, where a forest was cut
down last winter. Another is springing up by its shore,
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as lustily as ever. The same thought is welling up
to its surface that was then. It is the same
liquid joy and happiness to itself and its maker. Aye,
And it may be to me it is the work
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of a brave man, surely in whom there was no guile.
He rounded this water with his hand, deepened and clarified
it in his thought, and in his will bequeathed it
to Concord. I see by its face that it is
(55:37):
visited by the same reflection, and I can almost say, Walden,
is it you? It is no dream of mine to
ornament a line. I cannot come nearer to God and
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Heaven than I live to Walden. Even I am its
stony shore and the breeze that passes o'er in the
hollow of my hand are its water and its sand,
and its deepest resort lies high in my thought. The
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cars never pause to look at it. Yet I fancy
that the engineers and firemen and brakemen, and those passengers
who have a season ticket and see it often are
better men for the sight. The engineer does not forget
at night, or his nature does not that he has
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held this vision of serenity and purity once at least
during the day, though seen, but once it helps to
wash out state stream and the engines soot. One proposes
that it be called God's drop. I have said that
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Walden has no visible inlet nor outlet. But it is
on the one hand, distantly and indirectly related to Flint's Pond,
which is more elevated by a chain of small ponds
coming from that quarter, and on the other directly and
manifestly to Concord River, which is lower by a similar
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chain of ponds through which in some other geological period
it may have flowed, And by a little digging, which
God forbid, it can be made to flow thither again.
If by living thus reserved an austere like a hermit
in the woods, so long it has acquired such wonderful purity,
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who would not regret rat that the comparatively impure waters
of Flint's Pond should be mingled with it, or itself
should ever go to waste its sweetness in the ocean's wave.
Flints or sandy Pond in Lincoln, our greatest lake and
(58:19):
inland Sea, lies about a mile east of Walden. It
is much larger, being said to contain one hundred and
ninety seven acres, and is more fertile in fish, but
it is comparatively shallow and not remarkably pure. A walk
through the woods thither was often my recreation. It was
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worth the while, if only to feel the wind blow
on your cheeks freely, and see the waves run, and
remember the life of mariners. I went a chestnutting there
in the fall, on windy days, when the nuts were
dropping into the water and were washed to my feet.
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And one day, as I crept along its sedgy shore,
the fresh spray blowing in my face, I came upon
the moldering wreck of a boat, the sides gone and
hardly more than the impression of its flat bottom left
amid the rushes. Yet its model was sharply defined, as
if it were a large, decayed pad with its veines.
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It was as impressive a wreck as one could imagine
on the sea shore, and had as good a moral.
It is by this time mere vegetable, mold and undistinguishable
pond shore, through which rushes and flags have pushed up.
I used to admire the ripple marks on the sandy
bottom at the north end of this pond, made firm
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and hard to the feet of the waiter by the
pressure of the water, and the rushes which grew in
indian file in weaving lines corresponding to these marks rank
behind rank, as if the waves had planted them. There Also,
I have found, in considerable quantities curious balls, composed apparently
(01:00:16):
of fine grass or roots of pipewort, perhaps from half
an inch to four inches in diameter, and perfectly spherical.
They wash back and forth in shallow water on a
sandy bottom, and are sometimes cast on the shore. They
are either solid grass or have a little sand in
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the middle. At first you would say that they were
formed by the action of the waves, like a pebble.
Yet the smallest are made of equally coarse materials half
an inch long, and they are produced only at one
season of the year. Moreover, the waves I suspect do
not so much can struct as wear down a material
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which has already acquired consistency. They preserve their form when
dry for an indefinite period. Flints pawned. Such is the
poverty of our nomenclature. What right had the unclean and
stupid farmer whose farm abutted on this sky water, whose
(01:01:26):
shores he has ruthlessly laid bare, to give his name
to it, some skin flint, who loved better the reflecting
surface of a dollar, or a bright scent in which
he could see his own brazen face, who regarded even
the wild ducks which settled in it as trespassers, his
(01:01:48):
fingers grown into crooked and bony talons from the long
habit of grasping harpy like. So it is not named
for me. I go not there to see him, nor
to hear of him, who never saw it, who never
bathed in it, who never loved it, who never protected it,
(01:02:14):
who never spoke a good word for it, nor thanked
God that he had made it. Rather, let it be
named from the fishes that swim in it, the wild
fowl or quadrupeds which frequent it, the wild flowers which
grow by its shore, or some wild man or child,
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the thread of whose history is interwoven with its own.
Not for him, who could show no title to it,
but the deed which a like minded neighbor or legislature
gave him. Him who thought only of its money value,
whose presence, perchance cursed all the shores, who exhaust did
(01:03:00):
the land around it, and would fain have exhausted the
waters within it, Who regretted only that it was not
English hay or cranberry meadow, There was nothing to redeem
it forsooth in his eyes, and would have drained and
sold it for the mud at its bottom. It did
(01:03:22):
not turn his mill, and it was no privilege to
him to behold it. I respect not his labors, his farm,
where everything has its price. Who would carry the landscape,
Who would carry his god to mark it if he
could get anything for him? Who goes to market for
(01:03:45):
his god? As it is on whose farm nothing grows free,
Whose fields bear no crops, whose meadows no flowers, whose
trees no fruits but dollars. Who loves not the beauty
of his fruits, whose fruits are not ripe for him
(01:04:10):
till they are turned to dollars. Give me the poverty
that enjoys true wealth. Farmers are respectable and interesting to
me in proportion as they are poor. Poor farmers. A
(01:04:31):
model farm where the house stands like a fungus in
a muck heap, chambers for men, horses, oxen, and swine,
cleansed and uncleansed, all contiguous to one another, stocked with men,
a great grease spot redolent of manures and buttermilk under
(01:04:56):
a high state of cultivation, being manured with them, the
hearts and brains of men, as if you were to
raise your potatoes in the church yard. Such is a
model farm. No. No, if the fairest features of the
(01:05:17):
landscape are to be named after men, let them be
the noblest and worthiest men alone. Let our lakes receive
as true names, at least as the Icarian Sea, where
still the shore a brave attempt resounds. Goose pond of
(01:05:41):
small extent is on my way to Flints fair Haven.
An expense of Concord River, said to contain some seventy acres,
is a mile southwest, and white Pond of about forty
acres is a mile and a half beyond fair Haven.
This is my lake country. These with Concord River are
(01:06:04):
my water privileges, and night and day, year in year out,
they grind such grist as I carry to them. Since
the woodcutters and the railroad I myself have profaned Walden,
perhaps the most attractive if not the most beautiful of
all our lakes. The gem of the Woods is White Pond,
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poor name for its commonness, whether derived from the remarkable
purity of its waters or the color of its sands.
In these as in other respects, however, it is a
lesser twin of Walden. They are so much alike that
you would say they must be connected. Underground, it has
(01:06:50):
the same stony shore, and its waters are of the
same hue as at Walden in sultry dog day weather.
Looking down through the woods on some of its bays,
which are not so deep, but that the reflection from
the bottom tinges them. Its waters are of a misty,
(01:07:10):
bluish green or glaucous color. Many years since I used
to go there to collect the sand by cart loads
to make sand paper with, and I have continued to
visit it ever since. One who frequents it proposes to
call it virid Lake. Perhaps it might be called yellow
(01:07:34):
Pine Lake from the following circumstance. About fifteen years ago,
you could see the top of a pitch pine of
the kind called yellow pine hereabouts, though it is not
a distinct species, projecting above the surface in deep water.
Many rods from the shore. It was even supposed by
(01:07:57):
some that the pond had sunk, and this was one
of the primitive forest that formerly stood there. I find
that even so long ago a seventeen ninety two in
a topographical description of the town of Concord by one
of its citizens in the Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society,
(01:08:18):
the author, after speaking of walden and white ponds, ads
in the middle of the latter may be seen, when
the water is very low, a tree which appears as
if it grew in the place where it now stands.
Although the roots are fifty feet below the surface of
the water. The top of this tree is broken off,
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and at the place measures fourteen inches in diameter. In
the spring of forty nine I talked with a man
who lives nearest the pond in Sudbury, who told me
that it was he who got out this tree ten
or fifteen years before. As near as he could remember,
it stood twelve or fifteen rods from the shore, where
(01:09:01):
the water was thirty or forty feet deep. It was
in the winter, and he had been getting out ice
in the forenoon, and had resolved it in the afternoon
with the aid of his neighbors. He would take out
the old yellow pine. He sawed a channel in the
ice toward the shore, and hauled it over and along
and out on to the ice with oxen. But before
(01:09:25):
he had gone far in his work he was surprised
to find that it was wrong end upward, with the
stumps of the branches pointing down, and the small end
firmly fastened in the sandy bottom. It was about a
foot in diameter at the big end, and he had
(01:09:46):
expected to get a good saw log, but it was
so rotten as to be fit only for fuel, if
for that he had some of it in his shed.
Then there were marks of an axe and of woodpeckers
on the butt He thought that it might have been
a dead tree on the shore, but was finally blown
over into the pond, and after the top had been
(01:10:08):
water logged, while the butt end was still dry and
light had drifted out and sunk wrong and up, his father,
eighty years old, could not remember when it was not there.
Several pretty large logs may still be seen lying on
the bottom, where owing to the undulation of the surface,
they look like huge water snakes in motion. This pond
(01:10:32):
has rarely been profaned by a boat, for there is
little in it to tempt a fisherman. Instead of the
white lily, which requires mud, or the common sweet flag,
the blue flag Iris versicolor grows thinly in the pure water,
rising from the stony bottom, all around the shore, where
(01:10:54):
it is visited by humming birds in June. And the color,
both of its bluish blades and its flowers, and especially
their reflections, is in singular harmony with the glaucous water.
White pond and Walden are great crystals on the surface
of the earth, lakes of light. If they were permanently
(01:11:19):
congealed and small enough to be clutched, they would perchance
be carried off by slaves, like precious stones to adorn
the heads of emperors. But being liquid and ample and
secured to us and our successors forever, we disregard them
(01:11:41):
and run after the diamond of Kochanoor. They are too
pure to have a market value. They contain no muck.
How much more beautiful than our lives. How much more
transparent then our characters are they we never learned meanness
(01:12:06):
of them? How much fairer than the pool before the
farmer's door, in which his ducks swim hither the clean
wild ducks come. Nature has no human inhabitant who appreciates her.
(01:12:28):
The birds, with their plumage and their notes, are in
harmony with the flowers. But what youth or maiden conspires
with the wild, luxuriant beauty of nature. She flourishes most alone,
far from the towns where they reside. Talk of Heaven, ye,
(01:12:55):
disgrace Earth. End of chapter nine.
This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in
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o r G. This reading by Gordon mackenzie Walden by
Henry David, thora chapter nine. The ponds, sometimes having a
(00:30):
surfeit of human society and gossip, and worn out all
my village friends, I rambled still farther westward than I habitually,
dwell into yet more unfrequented parts of the town, to
fresh woods and pastures new or while the sun was setting,
(00:50):
made my supper of huckleberries and blueberries on fair Haven Hill,
and laid up a store for several days. The fruits
do not yield their true flavor to the purchaser of them,
nor to him who raises them for the market. There
is but one way to obtain it, yet few take
(01:11):
that way. If you would know the flavor of huckleberries,
ask the cowboy or the partridge. It is a vulgar
error to suppose that you have tasted huckleberries who never
plucked them. A huckleberry never reaches Boston. They have not
(01:34):
been known there since they grew on her three hills.
The ambrosial and essential part of the fruit is lost
with the bloom, which is rubbed off in the market cart,
or they become mere provender. As long as eternal justice reigns,
(01:57):
not one innocent huckleberry can be transper ported thither from
the country's hills. Occasionally, after my hoeing was done for
the day, I joined some impatient companion who had been
fishing on the pond since morning, as silent and motionless
as a duck or a floating leaf, and after practicing
(02:19):
various kinds of philosophy, had concluded commonly by the time
I arrived, that he belonged to the ancient sect of cenobites.
There was one older man, an excellent fisher and skilled
in all kinds of woodcraft, who was pleased to look
upon my house as a building erected for the convenience
(02:40):
of fishermen, And I was equally pleased when he sat
in my doorway to arrange his lines. He at one
end of the boat and I at the other. But
not many words passed between us, for he had grown
deaf in his later years. But he occasionally hummed the psalm,
(03:01):
which harmonized well enough with my philosophy. Our intercourse was
thus altogether one of unbroken harmony, far more pleasing to
remember than if it had been carried on by speech. When,
as was commonly the case, I had none to commune with,
I used to raise the echoes by striking with a
(03:24):
paddle on the side of my boat, filling the surrounding
woods with circling and dilating sounds, stirring them up as
the keeper of a menagerie his wild beasts, until I
elicited a growl from every wooded vale and hillside. In
warm evenings, I frequently sat in the boat playing the flute,
(03:48):
and saw the perch, which I seemed to have charmed,
hovering around me, and the moon traveling over the ribbed bottom,
which was strewn with the wrecks of the forest. Formerly,
I had come to this pond adventurously from time to time,
in dark summer nights, with a companion, and making a
(04:12):
fire close to the water's edge, which we thought attracted
the fishes. We caught pouts with a bunch of worms
strung on a thread, and when we had done far
in the night, through the burning brands high into the
air like sky rockets, which coming down into the pond
were quenched with a loud hissing, and we were suddenly
(04:35):
groping in total darkness. Through this whistling a tune, we
took our way to the haunts of men again. But
now I had made my home by the shore. Sometimes
after staying in a village parlor till the family had
all retired, I have returned to the woods, and, partly
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with a view to the next day's dinner, spent the
hours of midnight fishing from a boat by moonlight, serenaded
by owls and foxes, and hearing from time to time
the creaking note of some unknown bird close at hand.
These experiences were very memorable and valuable to me. Anchored
(05:19):
in forty feet of water and twenty or thirty rods
from the shore, surrounded sometimes by thousands of small perch
and shiners, dimpling the surface with their tails in the moonlight,
and communicating by a long flaxen line with mysterious nocturnal
fishes which had their dwelling forty feet below, or sometimes
(05:44):
dragging sixty feet of line about the pond. As I
drifted in the gentle night breeze, now and then, feeling
a slight vibration along it, indicative of some life prowling
about its extremity, of dull, uncertain blundering purpose there, and
(06:05):
slow to make up its mind. At length, you slowly raise,
pulling hand over hand, some horned pout, squeaking and squirming
to the upper air. It was very queer, especially in
dark nights, when your thoughts had wandered to vast and
(06:28):
cosmogonal themes in other spheres, to feel this faint jerk
which came to interrupt your dreams and link you to
nature again. It seemed as if I might next cast
my line upward into the air, as well as downward
(06:48):
into this element, which was scarcely more dense. Thus I
caught two fishes, as it were, with one hook. The
scenery of Walden is on a humble scale, and though
very beautiful, does not approach to grandeur, nor can it
(07:10):
much concern one who has not long frequented it or
lived by its shore. Yet this pond is so remarkable
for its depth and purity as to merit a particular description.
It is a clear and deep green well half a
mile long and a mile and three quarters in circumference,
(07:33):
and contains about sixty one and a half acres a
perennial spring in the midst of pine and oak woods,
without any visible inlet or outlet except by the clouds
and evaporation. The surrounding hills rise abruptly from the water
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to the height of forty to eighty feet, though on
the southeast and east they attain to about one hundred
and one hundred fifty feet respectively. Within a quarter and
a third of a mile they are exclusively woodland. All
our Concord waters have two colors, at least one when
(08:16):
viewed at a distance, and another more proper close at hand.
The first depends more on the light and follows the
sky in clear weather. In summer they appear blue at
a little distance, especially if agitated, and at a great
distance all appear alike. In stormy weather, they are sometimes
(08:39):
a dark slate color. The sea, however, is said to
be blue one day in green another without any perceptible
change in the atmosphere. I have seen our river when
the landscape, being covered with snow, both water and ice
were almost as green as grass. Some consider blue to
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be the color of pure water, whether liquid or solid.
But looking directly down into our waters from a boat,
they are seen to be of very different colors. Walden
is blue at one time and green at another. Even
from the same point of view. Lying between the earth
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and the heavens, it partakes of the color of both.
Viewed from a hilltop, it reflects the color of the sky,
but near at hand it is of a yellowish tint
next the shore, where you can see the sand, then
a light green, which gradually deepens to a uniform dark
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green in the body of the pond. In some lights,
viewed even from a hilltop, it is of a vivid
green next to the shore. Some have referred this to
the reflection of the verdure, but it is equally green
there against the railroad's sand bank, and in the spring
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before the leaves are expanded, and it may be simply
the result of the prevailing blue mixed with the yellow
of the sand, such is the color of its iris.
This is that portion also where in the spring, the ice,
being warmed by the heat of the sun reflected from
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the bottom and also transmitted through the earth, melts first
and forms a narrow canal about the still frozen middle,
like the rest of our waters. When much agitated in
clear weather, so that the surface of the waves may
reflect the sky at the right angle, or because there
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is more light mixed with it, it appears at a
little distance of a darker blue than the sky itself.
Such a time, being on its surface and looking with
divided vision so as to see the reflection, I have
discerned a matchless and indescribable light blue such as watered
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or changeable silks and sword blades, suggest more cerulean than
the sky itself, alternating with the original dark green on
the opposite sides of the waves which last appeared, but
muddy in comparison, it is a vitreous greenish blue, as
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I remember it, like those patches of the winter sky
seen through cloud vistas in the west before sundown. Yet
a single glass of its water held up to the
light is as colorless as an equal quantity of air.
It is well known that a large plate of glass
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will have a green tea hint, owing as the makers say,
to its body, but a small piece of the same
will be colorless. How large a body of walled and
water would be required to reflect a green tint. I
have never proved the water of our river is black
(12:19):
or a very dark brown to one looking directly down
on it, and, like that of most ponds, imparts to
the body of one bathing in it a yellowish tinge.
But this water is of such crystalline purity that the
body of the bather appears of an alabaster whiteness, still
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more unnatural, which, as the limbs are magnified and distorted
withal produces a monstrous effect, making fit studies for a
Michael Angelo. The water is so transparent that the bottom
can easily be discerned at the depth of twenty five
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or thirty feet. Paddling over it, you may see many
feet beneath the surface the schools of perch and shiners,
perhaps only an inch long, yet the former easily distinguished
by their transverse bars, and you think that they must
be ascetic fish that find a subsistence there. Once in
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the winter many years ago, when I had been cutting
holes through the ice in order to catch pickerel. As
I stepped ashore, I tossed my axe back on to
the ice, but as if some evil genius had directed it,
it slid four or five rods directly into one of
the holes, where the water was twenty five feet deep.
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Out of curiosity, I laid down on the ice, and
looked through the hole until I saw the axe a
little on one side, standing on its head with its
helve erect and gently swaying to and fro with the
pulse of the pond. And there it might have stood
erect and swaying till in the course of time the
handle rotted off, if I had not disturbed it, making
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another hole directly over it with an ice chisel which
I had, and cutting down the longest birch which I
could find in the neighborhood. With my knife, I made
a slip noose which I attached to its end, and,
letting it down, carefully passed it over the knob of
the handle, and drew it by a line along the birch,
and so pulled the axe out again. The shore is
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composed of a belt of smooth, rounded white stones like
paving stones, except one or two short sand beaches, and
is so steep that in many places a single leap
will carry you into water over your head, and were
it not for its remarkable transparency, that would be the
last to be seen of its bottom till it rows
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on the opposite side. Some think it is bottomless. It
is nowhere muddy and a casual observer would say that
there were no weeds at all in it, and of
noticeable plants, except in the little meadows recently overflowed, which
do not properly belong to it. A closer scrutiny does
(15:22):
not detect a flag, nor a bulrush, nor even a
lily yellow or white, but only a few small heart
leaves and potamogitons, and perhaps a water target or two,
all which, however, a bay there might not perceive. And
these plants are clean and bright, like the element they
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grow in. The stones extend a rod or two into
the water, and then the bottom is pure sand, except
in the deepest part, where there is usually a little sediment,
probably from the decay of the leaves which have been
wafted on to it. So many successive falls and a
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bright green weed is brought up on anchors even in midwinter.
We have one other pond just like this white pond,
in nine acre Corner, about two and a half miles westerly.
But though I am acquainted with most of the ponds
within a dozen miles of this center, I do not
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know a third of this pure and well like character.
Successive nations, perchance, have drank at, admired and fathomed it,
and passed away. And still its water is green and pellucid,
as ever not an intermitting spring. Perhaps on that spring
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morning when Adam and Eve were driven out of Eden,
Walden Pond was already in existence, and even then in
breaking up in a gentle spring rain, accompanied with mist
and a southerly wind, and covered with myriads of ducks
and geese, which had not heard of the fall, when
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still such pure lakes sufficed them. Even then it had
commenced to rise and fall, and had clarified its waters
and colored them of the hue they now wear, and
obtained a patent of Heaven to be the only wolden
pond in the world, and distiller of celestial dews. Who
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knows in how many unremembered nations literatures this has been
the Castalian fountain, or what nymphs presided over it in
the golden age. It is a gem of the first
water which Concord wears and her coronet. Yet perchance the
(18:00):
first who came to this well have left some trace
of their footsteps. I have been surprised to detect encircling
the pond, even where a thick wood has just been
cut down on the shore. A narrow shelf like path
in the steep hillside, alternately rising and falling, approaching and
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receding from the water's edge, as old, probably as the
race of man, here, worn by the feet of Aboriginal hunters,
and still from time to time unwittingly trodden by the
present occupants of the land. This is particularly distinct to
one standing on the middle of the pond in winter,
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just after a light snow has fallen, appearing as a clear,
undulating white line, unobscured by weeds and twigs, and very
obvious a quarter of a mile off in many places,
where in summer it is hardly distinguishable. Close at hand,
the snow reprints it as it were, in clear white
(19:08):
type alto relievo. The ornamented grounds of villas which will
one day be built here may still preserve some trace
of this. The pond rises and falls, but whether regularly
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or not and within what period nobody knows, though as
usual many pretend to know. It is commonly higher in
winter and lower in the summer, though not corresponding to
the general wet and dryness. I can remember when it
was a foot or two lower, and also when it
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was at least five feet higher than when I lived
by it. There is a narrow sand bar running into it,
with very deep water on one side, on which I
helped boil a kettle of chowder some six rods from
the main shore about the year eighteen twenty four, which
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it has not been possible to do for twenty five years.
And on the other hand, my friends used to listen
with incredulity when I told them that a few years
later I was accustomed to fish from a boat in
a secluded cove in the woods fifteen rods from the
only shore they knew, which place was long since converted
(20:31):
into a meadow. But the pond has risen steadily for
two years, and now, in the summer of fifty two,
is just five feet higher than when I lived there,
or as high as it was thirty years ago, and
fishing goes on again in the meadow. This makes a
(20:52):
difference of level at the outside of six or seven feet,
and yet the water shed by the surrounding hill hills
is insignificant in amount, and this overflow must be referred
to causes which affect the deep springs. This same summer
the pond has begun to fall again. It is remarkable
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that this fluctuation, whether periodical or not, appears thus to
require many years for its accomplishment. I have observed one
rise and a part of two falls, and I expect
that a dozen or fifteen years hence the water will
again be as low as I have ever known. It
flints Pond a mile eastward, allowing for the disturbance occasioned
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by its inlets and outlets. And the smaller intermediate ponds
also sympathize with Walden and recently attained their greatest height
at the same time with the latter. The same is
true as far as my observation goes of White Pond.
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This rise and fall of Walden at long intervals serves
this use at least the water standing at this great
height for a year or more, though it makes it
difficult to walk round. It kills the shrubs and trees
which have sprung up about its edge since the last rise,
pitch pines, birches, alders, aspens and others, and falling again
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leaves an unobstructed shore. For unlike many ponds and all
waters which are subject to a daily tide, its shore
is cleanest when the water is lowest. On the side
of the pond next my house, a row of pitch
pines fifteen feet high has been killed and tipped over,
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as if by a lever, and thus a stop put
to their encroachments. And their size indicates how many years
have elapsed since the last rise to this height. By
this fluctuation, the pond asserts its title to a shore,
and thus the shore is shorn, and the trees cannot
(23:09):
hold it by right of possession. These are the lips
of the lake on which no beard grows. It licks
its chaps. From time to time, when the weather is
at its height, the alders, willows and maples send forth
a mass of fibrous red roots several feet long, from
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all sides of their stems in the water, and to
the height of three or four feet from the ground,
in the effort to maintain themselves. And I have known
the high blueberry bushes about the shore, which commonly produce
no fruit, bear an abundant crop. Under these circumstances, some
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have been puzzled to tell how the shore became so
regularly paved. My townsmen have all heard the tradition the
oldest people tell me that they heard it in their
youth that anciently the Indians were holding a pow wow
upon a hill here which rose as high into the
(24:13):
heavens as the pond now sinks deep into the earth,
and they used much profanity. As the story goes, though
this vice is one of which the Indians were never guilty.
And while they were thus engaged, the hill shook and
suddenly sank, and only one old squaw named Walden escaped,
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and from her the pond was named. It has been
conjectured that when the hill shook, these stones rolled down
its side and became the present shore. It is very certain,
at any rate, that once there was no pond here,
and now there is one. And this Indian fable does
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not in any respect conflict with the account of the
ancient settler whom I have mentioned, who remember so well
when he first came here with his divining rod, saw
a thin vapor rising from the sward, and the hazel
pointed steadily downward, and he concluded to dig a well here.
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As for the stones, many still think that they are
hardly to be accounted for by the action of the
waves on these hills. But I observe that the surrounding
hills are remarkably full of the same kind of stones,
so that they have been obliged to pile them up
in walls on both sides of the railroad cut nearest
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the pond. And moreover there are more stones where the
shore is most abrupt, so that, unfortunately it is no
longer a mystery to me I detect the paver. If
the name was not derived from that of some English locality,
(26:01):
saffron Walden, for instance, one might suppose that it was
called originally walled in pond. The pond was my well,
ready dug for four months in the year. Its water
is as cold as it is pure at all times,
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and I think that it is then as good as any,
if not the best, in the town. In the winter,
all water which is exposed to the air is colder
than springs and wells which are protected from it. The
temperature of the pond water which had stood in the
room where I sat from five o'clock in the afternoon
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till noon the next day, the sixth of March eighteen
forty six, the thermometer having been up to sixty five
or seventy degrees, is some of the time owing partly
to the sun on the roof, was forty two degrees,
or one degree colder than the water of one of
the coldest wells in the village. Just drawn. The temperature
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of the boiling spring the same day was forty five degrees,
or the warmest of any water tried, though it is
the coldest that I know of in summer, when beside
shallow and stagnant surface water is not mingled with it. Moreover,
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in summer, Walden never becomes so warm as most water
which is exposed to the sun on account of its depth.
In the warmest weather, I usually placed a pailful in
my cellar, where it became cool in the night and
remained so during the day. Though I also resorted to
a spring in the neighborhood. It was as good when
(27:50):
a week old as the day it was dipped, and
had no taste of the pump. Whoever camps for a
week in summer by the shore of a pond needs
only bury a pail of water a few feet deep
in the shade of his camp to be independent of
the luxury of ice. There have been caught in Walden
(28:12):
pickerel one weighing seven pounds, To say nothing of another,
which carried off a reel with great velocity, which the
fisherman safely set down at eight pounds because he did
not see him. Perch and pouts, some of each weighing
over two pounds, shiners, chivins or roach, a very few breams,
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and a couple of eels, one weighing four pounds. I
am thus particular because the weight of a fish is
commonly its only title to fame, and these are the
only eels I have heard of here. Also I have
a faint recollection of a little fish, some five inches long,
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with silvery sides and a greenish back, somewhat dace like
in its character, which I mention here chiefly to link
my facts to fable. Nevertheless, this pond is not very
fertile in fish. Its pickerel, though not abundant, are its
chief boast. I have seen at one time lying on
(29:19):
the ice pickerel of at least three different kinds, A
long and shallow one, steel colored, most like those caught
in the river. A bright golden kind with greenish reflections
and remarkably deep, which is the most common here, and
another golden colored and shaped like the last, but peppered
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on the sides, with small dark brown or black spots
intermixed with a few faint blood red ones, very much
like a trout. The specific name reticulatus would not apply
to this, It should be guttatus. Rather. These are all
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very firm fish, and way more than their size promises.
The shiners, pouts and perch also, and indeed all the
fishes which inhabit this pond are much cleaner, handsomer, and
firmer fleshed than those in the river and most other ponds,
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as the water is purer, and they can easily be
distinguished from them. Probably many ichthyologists would make new varieties
of some of them. There are also a certain race
of frogs and tortoises, and a few mussels in it.
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Muskrats and mink leave their traces about it, and occasionally
a traveling mud turtle visits it. Sometimes when I pushed
off my boat in the morning, I disturbed a great
mud turtle which had secreted himself under the boat in
the night. Ducks and geese frequent it in the spring
(31:08):
and fall. The white bellied swallows Hirundo bicolor skim over it,
and the peat wheats Totanus macularius teeter along its stony
shores all summer. I have sometimes disturbed a fish hawk
(31:29):
sitting on a white pine over the water, but I
doubt if it is ever profaned by the wind of
a gull. Like fair Haven, at most it tolerates one
annual loon. These are all the animals of consequence which
frequent it. Now. You may see from a boat in
(31:51):
calm weather, near the sandy eastern shore, where the water
is eight or ten feet deep, and also in some
other parts of the pond, some circular heaps half a
dozen feet in diameter by a foot in height, consisting
of small stones less than a hen's egg in size,
where all around is bare sand. At first you wonder
(32:15):
if the Indians could have formed them on the ice
for any purpose, and so when the ice melted they
sank to the bottom. But they are too regular, and
some of them plainly too fresh for that. They are
similar to those found in rivers. But as there are
no suckers nor lampreys here, I know not by what
(32:37):
fish they could be made. Perhaps they are the nests
of the chiven. These lend a pleasing mystery to the bottom.
The shore is irregular enough not to be monotonous. I
have in my mind's eye the western indented with deep bays,
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the bolder northern, and the beautifully scalloped southern shore, where
successive capes overlap each other and suggest unexplored coves between.
The forest was never so good a setting, nor is
so distinctly beautiful, as when seen from the middle of
(33:18):
a small lake amid hills which rise from the water's edge.
For the water in which it is reflected not only
makes the best foreground in such a case, but with
its winding shore the most natural and agreeable boundary to it.
There is no rawness nor imperfection in its edge there
(33:41):
as where the axe has cleared a part or a
cultivated field of butts on it. The trees have ample
room to expand on the water side, and each sends
forth its most vigorous branch in that direction. There nature
has woven a natural selvage, and the eye rises by
(34:05):
just gradations from the low shrubs of the shore to
the highest trees. There are few traces of man's hand
to be seen. The water LAVs the shore as it
did a thousand years ago. A lake is the landscape's
(34:25):
most beautiful and expressive feature. It is Earth's eye, looking
into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.
The fluviatile trees next the shore are the slender eye
lashes which fringe it, and the wooded hills and cliffs
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around it are its overhanging brows. Standing on the smooth
sandy beach at the east end of the pond in
a calm September afternoon, when a slight haze makes the
opposite shore line indistinct, I have seen whence came the
expression the glassy surface of a lake. When you invert
(35:16):
your head, it looks like a thread of finest gossamers
stretched across the valley and gleaming against the distant pine woods,
separating one stratum of the atmosphere from another. You would
think that you could walk dry under it to the
opposing hills, and that the swallows which skim over might
(35:39):
perch on it. Indeed, they sometimes dive below this line,
as if it were by mistake, and are undeceived. As
you look over the pond westward, you are obliged to
employ both your hands to defend your eyes against the
reflected as well as the true sun, for they are
(36:03):
equally bright, and if between the two you survey its
surface critically, it is literally as smooth as glass, except
where the skater insects, at equal intervals scatter over its
whole extent by their motions in the sun, produce the
(36:24):
finest imaginable sparkle on it. Or perchance a duck plumes itself,
or as I have said, a swallow skims so low
as to touch it. It may be that in the
distance a fish describes an arc of three or four
(36:45):
feet in the air, and there is one bright flash
where it emerges, and another where it strikes the water.
Sometimes the whole silvery arc is revealed, or here and
there perhaps is a thistle down floating on its surface,
(37:06):
which the fishes dart at and so dimple it. Again.
It is like molten glass, cooled but not congealed, and
the few moats in it are pure and beautiful, like
the imperfections in glass. You may often detect a yet
(37:29):
smoother and darker water, separated from the rest, as if
by an invisible cobweb boom of the water nymphs resting
on it. From a hilltop, you can see a fish
leap in almost any part for not a pickerel or
(37:50):
shiner picks an insect from this smooth surface, but it
manifestly disturbs the equilibrium of the whole lake. It is
wonderful with what elaborateness this simple fact is advertised, This
pisene murder will out, and from my distant perch I
(38:14):
distinguish the circling undulations. When they are half a dozen
rods in diameter. You can even detect a water bug
gyrinus ceaselessly progressing over the smooth surface a quarter of
a mile off, For they furrow the water slightly, making
(38:36):
a conspicuous ripple bounded by two diverging lines. But the
skaters glide over it without rippling it perceptibly. When the
surface is considerably agitated, there are no skaters nor water
bugs on it. But apparently in calm days they leave
(38:57):
their havens and adventurously glide forth from the shore by
short impulses till they completely cover it. It is a
soothing employment on one of those fine days in the fall,
when all the warmth of the sun is fully appreciated,
to sit on a stump on such a height as this,
(39:19):
overlooking the pond and study the dimpling circles, which are
incessantly inscribed on its otherwise invisible surface, amid the reflected
skies and trees. Over this great expanse, there is no disturbance,
but it is thus at once gently smoothed away and assaged,
(39:44):
as when a vase of water is jarred. The trembling
circles seek the shore, and all is smooth again. Not
a fish can leap or an insect fall on the pond,
but it is thus reported in circling dimples, in lines
of beauty, as it were, the constant welling up of
(40:06):
its fountain, the gentle pulsing of its life, the heaving
of its breast. The thrills of joy and thrills of
pain are indistinguishable. How peaceful the phenomena of the lake. Again,
(40:26):
the works of man shine as in the spring ay.
Every leaf and twig, and stone and cobweb sparkles now
at mid afternoon, as when covered with dew in a
spring morning. Every motion of an oar or an insect
(40:47):
produces a flash of light. And if an oar falls,
how sweet the echo In such a day in September
or October. Walden is a perfect forest mirror set round
with stones as precious to my eye as if fewer
(41:11):
or rarer. Nothing so fair, so pure, and at the
same time so large as a lake perchants, lies on
the surface of the earth sky water. It needs no fence.
Nations come and go without defiling it. It is a
(41:36):
mirror which no stone can crack, whose quick silver will
never wear off, whose gilding nature continually repairs, no storms,
no dust can dim its surface, ever fresh, the mirror
(42:00):
in which all impurity presented to it sinks, swept and
dusted by the sun's hazy brush. This the light dust cloth,
which retains no breath that is breathed on it, but
(42:22):
sends its own to float as clouds high above its
surface and be reflected in its bosom. Still, a field
of water betrays the spirit that is in the air.
It is continually receiving new life and motion from above.
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It is intermediate in its nature between land and sky.
On land, only the grass and trees wave, but the
water itself is rippled by the wind. I see where
the breeze dashes across it, by the streaks or flakes
of light. It is remarkable that we can look down
(43:08):
on its surface. We shall perhaps look down thus on
the surface of air at length and mark where a
still subtler spirit sweeps over it. The skaters and water
bugs finally disappear in the latter part of October, when
(43:30):
the severe frosts have come, and then and in November,
usually in a calm day, there is absolutely nothing to
ripple the surface. One November afternoon, in the calm, at
the end of a rain storm of several days duration,
(43:53):
when the sky was still completely overcast and the air
was full of mist, I observed that the pond was
remarkably smooth, so that it was difficult to distinguish its surface,
though it no longer reflected the bright tints of October,
but the somber November colors of the surrounding hills. Though
(44:20):
I passed over it as gently as possible, the slight
undulations produced by my boat extended almost as far as
I could see, and gave a ribed appearance to the reflections.
But as I was looking over the surface, I saw
(44:41):
here and there at a distance a faint glimmer, as
if some skater insects which had escaped the frosts might
be collected there, or perchance, the surface, being so smoothed,
betrayed where a spring welled up from the bottom. Paddling
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gently to one of these places, I was surprised to
find myself surrounded by myriads of small perch about five
inches long, of a rich bronze color in the green water,
sporting there and constantly rising to the surface and dimpling it,
(45:25):
sometimes leaving bubbles on it. In such transparent and seemingly
bottomless water, reflecting the clouds, I seemed to be floating
through the air as in a balloon, and their swimming
impressed me as a kind of flight or hovering, as
(45:46):
if they were a compact flock of birds, passing just
beneath my level on the right or left, their fins
like sails set all around them. There were many such
schools in the pond, apparently improving the short season before winter,
(46:08):
would draw an icy shutter over their broad skylight, sometimes
giving to the surface an appearance as if a slight
breeze struck it, or a few rain drops fell there.
When I approached carelessly and alarmed them, they made a
sudden splash and rippling with their tails as if one
(46:31):
had struck the water with a bushy bough, and instantly
took refuge in the depths. At length, the wind rose,
the mist increased, and the waves began to run, and
the perch leaped much higher than before, half out of water,
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a hundred black points three inches long at once above
the surface. Even as late as the fifth of December
one year, I saw some dimples on the surface, and,
thinking it was going to rain hard immediately, the air
being full of mist, I made haste to take my
(47:13):
place at the oars and row homeward. Already the rain
seemed rapidly increasing, though I felt none on my cheek,
and I anticipated a thorough soaking. But suddenly the dimples ceased,
for they were produced by the perch, which the noise
of my oars had seared into the depths, and I
(47:35):
saw their schools dimly disappearing. So I spent a dry
afternoon after all. An old man who used to frequent
this pond nearly sixty years ago, when it was dark
with surrounding forests, tells me that in those days he
sometimes saw it all alive with ducks and other water fowl,
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and that there were many eagles about it. He came
here a fishing and used an old log canoe, which
he found on the shore. It was made of two
white pine logs dug out and pinned together, and was
cut off square at the ends. It was very clumsy,
(48:19):
but lasted a great many years before it became water
logged and perhaps sank to the bottom. He did not
know whose it was. It belonged to the pond. He
used to make a cable for his anchor of strips
of hickory bark tied together. An old man, a potter
(48:41):
who lived by the pond before the revolution, told him
once that there was an iron chest at the bottom,
and that he had seen it. Sometimes it would come
floating up to the shore, but when he went toward it,
it would go back into the deep water and disappear.
I was pleased to hear of the old log canoe,
(49:04):
which took the place of an Indian one of the
same material but more graceful construction, which perchance had first
been a tree on the bank, and then as it were,
fell into the water to float there for a generation,
the most proper vessel for the lake. I remember that
(49:26):
when I first looked into these depths, there were many
large trunks to be seen, in distinctly lying on the bottom,
which had either been blown over formerly or left on
the ice at the last cutting when wood was cheaper,
but now they have mostly disappeared. When I first paddled
(49:48):
a boat on Walden, it was completely surrounded by thick
and lofty pine and oak woods, and in some of
its coves grape vines had run over the trees next
the the water and formed bowers under which a boat
could pass. The hills which form its shores are so steep,
(50:09):
and the woods on them then so high, that as
you look down from the west end, it had the
appearance of an amphitheater for some land of Sylvan spectacle.
I have spent many an hour, when I was younger,
floating over its surface as the zephyr willed, having paddled
(50:31):
my boat to the middle, and lying on my back
across the seats in a summer forenoon, dreaming awake, until
I was aroused by the boat touching the sand, and
I arose to see what shore my fates had impelled
me to days when idleness was the most attractive and
(50:54):
productive industry. Many a forenoon have I stolen away, preferring
to spend thus the most valued part of the day,
For I was rich, if not in money in sunny
hours and summer days, and spent them lavishly. Nor do
(51:19):
I regret that I did not waste more of them
in the workshop or the teacher's desk. But since I
left those shores, the wood choppers have still further laid
them waste. And now for many a year there will
be no more rambling through the aisles of the wood,
with occasional vistas through which you see the water. My
(51:44):
muse may be excused if she is silent. Henceforth, how
can you expect the birds to sing when their groves
are cut down? Now the trunks of trees on the bottom,
and the old log canoe and the dark surrounding woods
(52:05):
are gone, And the villagers, who scarcely know where it lies,
instead of going to the pond to bathe or drink,
are thinking to bring its water, which should be as
sacred as the Ganges, at least to the village in
a pipe to wash their dishes with, to earn their
(52:28):
walden by the turning of a cock or the drawing
of a plug. That devilish iron horse, whose ear rending
neigh is heard throughout the town, has muddied the boiling
spring with his foot and here it is that has
browsed off all the woods on Walden Shore, that trojan
(52:53):
horse with a thousand men in his belly, introduced by
mercenary Greeks. Where is the country's champion, the Moore of
Moore Hill, to meet him at the deep cut and
thrust an avenging lance between the ribs of the bloated pest. Nevertheless,
(53:19):
of all the characters I have known, perhaps Walden wears
best and best preserves its purity. Many men have been
likened to it, but few deserve that honor. Though the
wood choppers have laid bare first this shore, and then
that when the Irish have built their sties by it,
(53:44):
and the railroad has infringed on its border, and the
ice men have skimmed it once, it is itself unchanged,
the same water which my youthful eyes fell on. All
the change is in me. It has not acquired one
(54:07):
permanent wrinkle after all its ripples. It is perennially young,
and I may stand and see a swallow dip apparently
to pick an insect from its surface, as of yore.
It struck me again to night, as if I had
(54:29):
not seen it almost daily for more than twenty years.
Why here is Walden, the same woodland lake that I
discovered so many years ago, where a forest was cut
down last winter. Another is springing up by its shore,
(54:50):
as lustily as ever. The same thought is welling up
to its surface that was then. It is the same
liquid joy and happiness to itself and its maker. Aye,
And it may be to me it is the work
(55:12):
of a brave man, surely in whom there was no guile.
He rounded this water with his hand, deepened and clarified
it in his thought, and in his will bequeathed it
to Concord. I see by its face that it is
(55:37):
visited by the same reflection, and I can almost say, Walden,
is it you? It is no dream of mine to
ornament a line. I cannot come nearer to God and
(55:57):
Heaven than I live to Walden. Even I am its
stony shore and the breeze that passes o'er in the
hollow of my hand are its water and its sand,
and its deepest resort lies high in my thought. The
(56:23):
cars never pause to look at it. Yet I fancy
that the engineers and firemen and brakemen, and those passengers
who have a season ticket and see it often are
better men for the sight. The engineer does not forget
at night, or his nature does not that he has
(56:45):
held this vision of serenity and purity once at least
during the day, though seen, but once it helps to
wash out state stream and the engines soot. One proposes
that it be called God's drop. I have said that
(57:10):
Walden has no visible inlet nor outlet. But it is
on the one hand, distantly and indirectly related to Flint's Pond,
which is more elevated by a chain of small ponds
coming from that quarter, and on the other directly and
manifestly to Concord River, which is lower by a similar
(57:33):
chain of ponds through which in some other geological period
it may have flowed, And by a little digging, which
God forbid, it can be made to flow thither again.
If by living thus reserved an austere like a hermit
in the woods, so long it has acquired such wonderful purity,
(57:58):
who would not regret rat that the comparatively impure waters
of Flint's Pond should be mingled with it, or itself
should ever go to waste its sweetness in the ocean's wave.
Flints or sandy Pond in Lincoln, our greatest lake and
(58:19):
inland Sea, lies about a mile east of Walden. It
is much larger, being said to contain one hundred and
ninety seven acres, and is more fertile in fish, but
it is comparatively shallow and not remarkably pure. A walk
through the woods thither was often my recreation. It was
(58:41):
worth the while, if only to feel the wind blow
on your cheeks freely, and see the waves run, and
remember the life of mariners. I went a chestnutting there
in the fall, on windy days, when the nuts were
dropping into the water and were washed to my feet.
(59:01):
And one day, as I crept along its sedgy shore,
the fresh spray blowing in my face, I came upon
the moldering wreck of a boat, the sides gone and
hardly more than the impression of its flat bottom left
amid the rushes. Yet its model was sharply defined, as
if it were a large, decayed pad with its veines.
(59:27):
It was as impressive a wreck as one could imagine
on the sea shore, and had as good a moral.
It is by this time mere vegetable, mold and undistinguishable
pond shore, through which rushes and flags have pushed up.
I used to admire the ripple marks on the sandy
bottom at the north end of this pond, made firm
(59:51):
and hard to the feet of the waiter by the
pressure of the water, and the rushes which grew in
indian file in weaving lines corresponding to these marks rank
behind rank, as if the waves had planted them. There Also,
I have found, in considerable quantities curious balls, composed apparently
(01:00:16):
of fine grass or roots of pipewort, perhaps from half
an inch to four inches in diameter, and perfectly spherical.
They wash back and forth in shallow water on a
sandy bottom, and are sometimes cast on the shore. They
are either solid grass or have a little sand in
(01:00:39):
the middle. At first you would say that they were
formed by the action of the waves, like a pebble.
Yet the smallest are made of equally coarse materials half
an inch long, and they are produced only at one
season of the year. Moreover, the waves I suspect do
not so much can struct as wear down a material
(01:01:02):
which has already acquired consistency. They preserve their form when
dry for an indefinite period. Flints pawned. Such is the
poverty of our nomenclature. What right had the unclean and
stupid farmer whose farm abutted on this sky water, whose
(01:01:26):
shores he has ruthlessly laid bare, to give his name
to it, some skin flint, who loved better the reflecting
surface of a dollar, or a bright scent in which
he could see his own brazen face, who regarded even
the wild ducks which settled in it as trespassers, his
(01:01:48):
fingers grown into crooked and bony talons from the long
habit of grasping harpy like. So it is not named
for me. I go not there to see him, nor
to hear of him, who never saw it, who never
bathed in it, who never loved it, who never protected it,
(01:02:14):
who never spoke a good word for it, nor thanked
God that he had made it. Rather, let it be
named from the fishes that swim in it, the wild
fowl or quadrupeds which frequent it, the wild flowers which
grow by its shore, or some wild man or child,
(01:02:37):
the thread of whose history is interwoven with its own.
Not for him, who could show no title to it,
but the deed which a like minded neighbor or legislature
gave him. Him who thought only of its money value,
whose presence, perchance cursed all the shores, who exhaust did
(01:03:00):
the land around it, and would fain have exhausted the
waters within it, Who regretted only that it was not
English hay or cranberry meadow, There was nothing to redeem
it forsooth in his eyes, and would have drained and
sold it for the mud at its bottom. It did
(01:03:22):
not turn his mill, and it was no privilege to
him to behold it. I respect not his labors, his farm,
where everything has its price. Who would carry the landscape,
Who would carry his god to mark it if he
could get anything for him? Who goes to market for
(01:03:45):
his god? As it is on whose farm nothing grows free,
Whose fields bear no crops, whose meadows no flowers, whose
trees no fruits but dollars. Who loves not the beauty
of his fruits, whose fruits are not ripe for him
(01:04:10):
till they are turned to dollars. Give me the poverty
that enjoys true wealth. Farmers are respectable and interesting to
me in proportion as they are poor. Poor farmers. A
(01:04:31):
model farm where the house stands like a fungus in
a muck heap, chambers for men, horses, oxen, and swine,
cleansed and uncleansed, all contiguous to one another, stocked with men,
a great grease spot redolent of manures and buttermilk under
(01:04:56):
a high state of cultivation, being manured with them, the
hearts and brains of men, as if you were to
raise your potatoes in the church yard. Such is a
model farm. No. No, if the fairest features of the
(01:05:17):
landscape are to be named after men, let them be
the noblest and worthiest men alone. Let our lakes receive
as true names, at least as the Icarian Sea, where
still the shore a brave attempt resounds. Goose pond of
(01:05:41):
small extent is on my way to Flints fair Haven.
An expense of Concord River, said to contain some seventy acres,
is a mile southwest, and white Pond of about forty
acres is a mile and a half beyond fair Haven.
This is my lake country. These with Concord River are
(01:06:04):
my water privileges, and night and day, year in year out,
they grind such grist as I carry to them. Since
the woodcutters and the railroad I myself have profaned Walden,
perhaps the most attractive if not the most beautiful of
all our lakes. The gem of the Woods is White Pond,
(01:06:29):
poor name for its commonness, whether derived from the remarkable
purity of its waters or the color of its sands.
In these as in other respects, however, it is a
lesser twin of Walden. They are so much alike that
you would say they must be connected. Underground, it has
(01:06:50):
the same stony shore, and its waters are of the
same hue as at Walden in sultry dog day weather.
Looking down through the woods on some of its bays,
which are not so deep, but that the reflection from
the bottom tinges them. Its waters are of a misty,
(01:07:10):
bluish green or glaucous color. Many years since I used
to go there to collect the sand by cart loads
to make sand paper with, and I have continued to
visit it ever since. One who frequents it proposes to
call it virid Lake. Perhaps it might be called yellow
(01:07:34):
Pine Lake from the following circumstance. About fifteen years ago,
you could see the top of a pitch pine of
the kind called yellow pine hereabouts, though it is not
a distinct species, projecting above the surface in deep water.
Many rods from the shore. It was even supposed by
(01:07:57):
some that the pond had sunk, and this was one
of the primitive forest that formerly stood there. I find
that even so long ago a seventeen ninety two in
a topographical description of the town of Concord by one
of its citizens in the Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society,
(01:08:18):
the author, after speaking of walden and white ponds, ads
in the middle of the latter may be seen, when
the water is very low, a tree which appears as
if it grew in the place where it now stands.
Although the roots are fifty feet below the surface of
the water. The top of this tree is broken off,
(01:08:40):
and at the place measures fourteen inches in diameter. In
the spring of forty nine I talked with a man
who lives nearest the pond in Sudbury, who told me
that it was he who got out this tree ten
or fifteen years before. As near as he could remember,
it stood twelve or fifteen rods from the shore, where
(01:09:01):
the water was thirty or forty feet deep. It was
in the winter, and he had been getting out ice
in the forenoon, and had resolved it in the afternoon
with the aid of his neighbors. He would take out
the old yellow pine. He sawed a channel in the
ice toward the shore, and hauled it over and along
and out on to the ice with oxen. But before
(01:09:25):
he had gone far in his work he was surprised
to find that it was wrong end upward, with the
stumps of the branches pointing down, and the small end
firmly fastened in the sandy bottom. It was about a
foot in diameter at the big end, and he had
(01:09:46):
expected to get a good saw log, but it was
so rotten as to be fit only for fuel, if
for that he had some of it in his shed.
Then there were marks of an axe and of woodpeckers
on the butt He thought that it might have been
a dead tree on the shore, but was finally blown
over into the pond, and after the top had been
(01:10:08):
water logged, while the butt end was still dry and
light had drifted out and sunk wrong and up, his father,
eighty years old, could not remember when it was not there.
Several pretty large logs may still be seen lying on
the bottom, where owing to the undulation of the surface,
they look like huge water snakes in motion. This pond
(01:10:32):
has rarely been profaned by a boat, for there is
little in it to tempt a fisherman. Instead of the
white lily, which requires mud, or the common sweet flag,
the blue flag Iris versicolor grows thinly in the pure water,
rising from the stony bottom, all around the shore, where
(01:10:54):
it is visited by humming birds in June. And the color,
both of its bluish blades and its flowers, and especially
their reflections, is in singular harmony with the glaucous water.
White pond and Walden are great crystals on the surface
of the earth, lakes of light. If they were permanently
(01:11:19):
congealed and small enough to be clutched, they would perchance
be carried off by slaves, like precious stones to adorn
the heads of emperors. But being liquid and ample and
secured to us and our successors forever, we disregard them
(01:11:41):
and run after the diamond of Kochanoor. They are too
pure to have a market value. They contain no muck.
How much more beautiful than our lives. How much more
transparent then our characters are they we never learned meanness
(01:12:06):
of them? How much fairer than the pool before the
farmer's door, in which his ducks swim hither the clean
wild ducks come. Nature has no human inhabitant who appreciates her.
(01:12:28):
The birds, with their plumage and their notes, are in
harmony with the flowers. But what youth or maiden conspires
with the wild, luxuriant beauty of nature. She flourishes most alone,
far from the towns where they reside. Talk of Heaven, ye,
(01:12:55):
disgrace Earth. End of chapter nine.
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