September 8, 2025 • 39 mins
19 - Chapter 14. 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 Thorough, Chapter fourteen. Former inhabitants and winter visitors.
(00:30):
I weathered some merry snow storms and spent some cheerful
winter evenings by my fireside, while the snow whirled wildly
without and even the hooting of the owl was hushed.
For many weeks, I met no one in my walks,
but those who came occasionally to cut wood and sled
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it to the village. The elements, however, abetted me in
making a path through the deepest snow in the woods.
For when I had once gone through, the wind blew
the oak leaves into my tracks, where they lodged, and
by absorbing the rays of the sun, melted the snow,
and so not only made a bed for my feet,
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but in the night their dark line was my guide
for human society. I was obliged to conjure up the
former occupants of these woods within the memory of many
of my townsmen. The road near which my house stands
resounded with the laugh and gossip of inhabitants, and the
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woods which border it were notched and dotted here and
there with their little gardens and dwellings. Though it was
then much more shut in by the forest than now.
In some places within my own remembrance, the pines would
scrape both sides of a chaise at once, and women
and children who were compelled to go this way to
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Lincoln alone and on foot, did it with fear, and
often ran a good deal of the distance, though mainly
but a humble route to neighboring villages or for the
woodsman's team. It once amused the traveler more than now
by its variety, and lingered longer in his memory. Where
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now firm open fields stretched from the village to the woods.
It then ran through a maple swamp on a foundation
of logs, the remnants of which doubtless still under lie
the present dusty highway from the Stratton now the Almshouse
farm to Brister's Hill, east of my beenfield. Across the
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road lived Cato Ingraham, slave of Duncan Ingraham Esquire, gentlemen
of Concord Village, who built his slave a house and
gave him permission to live in walden Woods Cato but
not utasensus, but concordiensis. Some say that he was a
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guinea negro. There are a few who remember his little
patch among the walnuts, which he let grow up till
he should be old and need them. But a younger
and whiter speculator got them at last. He too, however,
occupies an equally narrow house. At present. Cato's half obliterated
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cellar hole still remains, though known to few, being concealed
from the traveler by a fringe of pines. It is
now filled with the smooth sumac Rus glabra, and one
of the earliest species of golden rod, Solidago stricta, grows
there luxuriantly. Here by the very corner of my field.
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Still nearer to town Zilah, a colored woman had her
little house where she spun linen for the townsfolk, making
the walden woods ring with her shrill singing, for she
had a loud and notable voice at length. In the
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War of eighteen twelve, her dwelling was set on fire
by English soldiers prisoners on parole when she was away,
and her cat and dog and hens were all burned
up together. She led a hard life and somewhat inhumane.
One old frequenter of these woods remembers that as he
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passed her house one noon, he heard her muttering to
herself over her gurgling pot. Ye are all bones bones,
I have seen bricks amid the oak copse. There down
the road on the right hand, on Brister's hill lived
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Brister Freeman, a handy Negro slave of Squire Cummings. Once
there where grow still the apple trees which Brister planted
and tended, large old trees now, but their fruit still
wild and siderish to my taste. Not long since I
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read his epitaph in the old Lincoln burying ground, a
little on one side, near the unmarked graves of some
British grenadiers who fell in the retreat from Concord, where
he is styled Scipio Brister Scipio Africanus. He had some
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title to be called a man of color, as if
he were discolored. It also told me, with staring emphasis
when he died, which was but an injury way of
informing me that he ever lived with him dwelt Fenda,
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his hospitable wife, who told fortunes yet pleasantly large round
and black blacker than any of the children of night,
such a dusky orb as never rose on Concord before
or since. Farther down the hill on the left, on
the old road in the woods are marks of some
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homestead of the Stratton family, whose orchard once covered all
the slope of Brister's Hill, but was long since killed
out by pitch pines, excepting a few stumps whose old
roots furnished still the wild stalks of many a thrifty
village tree. Nearer yet to town, you come to Breed's
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location on the other side of the way, just on
the edge of the wood ground, famous for the pranks
of a demon distinctly named in old mythology, who has
acted a prominent and astounding part in our New England life,
and deserves as much as any mythological character, to have
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his biography written one day, who first comes in the
guise of a friend or hired man, and then robs
and murders the whole family New England rum. But history
must not yet tell the tragedies enacted here. Let time
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intervene in some measure to assage and lend an azure
tint to them. Here the most indistinct and dubious tradition
says that once a tavern stood the well, the same
which tempered the traveler's beverage and refreshed his steed. Here
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then men saluted one another, and heard and told the news,
and went their ways again. Breed's hut was standing only
a dozen years ago, though it had long been unoccupied.
It was about the size of mine. It was set
on fire by mischievous boys one election night. If I
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do not mistake, I lived on the edge of the
village then, and had just lost myself over Davenance Gondebert
that winter that I labored with a lethargy, which, by
the way, I never knew whether to regard as a
family complaint, having an uncle who goes to sleep shaving
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himself and is obliged to sprout potatoes in a cellar
Sundays in order to keep awake and keep the Sabbath,
or as the consequence of my attempt to read Chalmer's
collection of English Poetry without skipping it fairly overcame my nervie.
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I had just sunk my head on this when the
bells rung fire, and in hot haste, the engines rolled
that way, led by a straggling troop of men and boys,
and I among the foremost, for I had leaped the brook.
We thought it was far south over the woods. We
who had run to fires before, barn shop or dwelling house,
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were all together. It's Baker's barn, cried one. It is
the Codman place, affirmed another. And then fresh sparks went
up above the wood, as if the roof fell in,
and we all shouted concord to the rescue. Wagons shot
past with furious speed and crushing loads, bearing, perchance among
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the rest the agent of the insurance company, who was
bound to go however far and ever and anon. The
engine bell tinkled behind, more slow and sure and rear
most of all, as it was afterward whispered came they
who set the fire and gave the alarm. Thus we
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kept on like true idealists, rejecting the evidence of our senses,
until at a turn in the road we heard the
crackling and actually felt the heat of the fire from
over the wall, and realized alas that we were there
the very nearness of the fire, but cooled our ardor
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at first we thought to throw a frog pond on
to it, but concluded to let it burn, and was
so far gone and so worthless. So we stood round
our engine, jostled one another, expressed our sentiments through speaking
trumpets or in lower tone, referred to the great conflagrations
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which the world has witnessed, including Bascombe's shop, and between
ourselves we thought that were we there in season, with
our tub and a full frog pawned by, we could
turn that threatened last and universal one into another flood.
We finally retreated, without doing any mischief, returned to sleep
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and Gondibert. But as for Gondibert, I would accept that
passage in the preface about wit being the soul's powder,
But most of mankind are strangers to wit, as Indians
are to powder. It chanced that I walked that way
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across the fields the following night, about the same hour,
and hearing a low moaning at this spot, I drew
near in the dark and discovered the only survivor of
the family that I know, the air of both its
virtues and its vices, who alone was interested in this burning,
lying on his stomach and looking over the cellar wall
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at the still smoldering cinders beneath, muttering to himself as
is wont He had been working far off in the
river meadows all day, and had improved the first moments
that he could call his own to visit the home
of his fathers and his youth. He gazed into the
cellar from all sides and points of view, by turns,
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always lying down to it, as if there was some
treasure which he remembered concealed between the stones, where there
was absolutely nothing but a heap of bricks and ashes.
The house being gone, he looked at what there was left.
He was soothed by the sympathy which my mere presence
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implied and showed me, as well as the darkness permitted
where the well was covered up, which, thank heaven, could
never be burned. And he groped long about the wall
to find the well sweep which his father had cut
and mounted, feeling for the iron hook or staple by
which a burden had been fastened to the heavy end,
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all that he could now cling to to convince me
that it was no common rider. I felt it, and
still remark it almost daily in my walks, for by
it hangs the history of a family. Once more. On
the left, where are seen the well and lilac bushes
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by the wall in the now open field lived Nutting
and le Grosse, But to return toward Lincoln farther in
the woods than any of these, where the road approaches
nearest to the pond, Wyman the potter squatted and furnished
his townsmen with earthenware, and left descendants to succeed him.
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Neither were they rich in worldly goods, holding the land
by sufferance while they lived, and there often the sheriff
came in vain to collect the taxes, and attached a
chip for form's sake, as I have read in his accounts,
there being nothing else that he could lay his hands on.
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One day in midsummer, when I was hoeing, a man
who was carrying a load of pottery to market, stopped
his horse against my field and inquired concerning Wyman the younger.
He had long ago bought a potter's wheel of him,
and wished to know what had become of him. I
had read of the potter's clay and wheel in scripture,
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but it had never occurred to me that the pots
we use were not such as had come down unbroken
from those days, or grown on trees like gourds. Somewhere
and I was pleased to hear that so fictile an
art was ever practiced in my neighborhood. The last inhabitant
of these woods before me was an irishman, Hugh Coil
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if I have spelt his with Coil enough, who occupied
Wyman's tenement. Colonel Coyle. He was called rumor said that
he had been a soldier at Waterloo. If he had lived,
I should have made him fight his battles over again.
His trade here was that of a ditcher. Napoleon went
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to Saint Helena, Coyle came to Walden Woods. All I
know of him is tragic. He was a man of manners,
like one who had seen the world, and was capable
of more civil speech than you could well attend to.
He wore a greatcoat in midsummer, being affected with the
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trembling delirium, and his face was the color of carmine.
He died in the road at the foot of Brister's
Hill shortly after I came to the woods, so that
I have not remembered him as a neighbor. Before his
house was pulled down when his comrades avoided it as
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an unlucky castle. I visited it. There lay his old
clothes curled up by use as if they were himself
upon his raised plank bed. His pipe lay broken on
the hearth, instead of a bowl broken at the fountain.
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The last could never have been the symbol of his death,
for he confessed to me that though he had heard
of Brister's spring, he had never seen it. And soiled cards,
kings of diamonds, spades, and hearts were scattered over the floor.
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One black chicken, which the administrator could not catch. Black
as night and as silent, not even croaking, awaited, Reynard
still went to roost in the apartment. In the rear
there was the dim outline of a garden which had
been planted but had never received its first hoeing owing
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to those terrible shaking fits. Though it was now harvest time,
it was overrun with roman wormwood and beggar ticks, which
last stuck to my clothes for all fruit. The skin
of a woodchuck was freshly stretched upon the back of
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the house, a trophy of his last waterloo. But no
warm cap or mittens. Would he want more now? Only
a dent in the earth marks the site of these dwellings,
with buried cellar stones and strawberries, raspberries, thimbleberries, hazel bushes,
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and sumacs growing in the sunny sward. There some pitch
pine or gnarled oak occupies what was the chimney nook
and a sweet scented black birch, perhaps waves where the
door stone was. Sometimes the well dent is visible where
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once a spring oozed now dry and tearless grass, or
it was covered deep, not to be discover'd till some
late day with a flat stone under the sod, when
the last of the race departed. What a sorrowful act
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must that be? The covering up of wells coincident with
the opening of wells of tears. These cellar dents, like
deserted fox burrows old holes, are all that is left
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where once where the stir and bustle of human life
and fate, free will foreknowledge absolute in some form and
dialect or other were by turns discussed. But all I
can learn of their conclusions amount to just this that
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Cato and Brister pull'd wool, which is about as edifying
as the history of more famous schools of philosophy, still
grows the vivacious lilac a generation after the door and
lintel and the sill are gone, unfolding its sweet scented
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flowers each spring, to be pluck'd by the musing traveler,
planted and tended once by children's hands in front yard plots,
now standing by wallsides in retired pastures, and giving place
to new rising forests, the last of that stirp soul
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survivor of that family. Little did the dusky children think
that the puny slip, with its two eyes only, which
they stuck in the ground in the shadow of the
house and daily watered, would root itself so and outlive them,
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and house itself in the rear that shaded it, and
grown man's garden and orchard, and tell their story faintly
to the lone wanderer a half century after they had
grown up and died, blossoming as fair and smelling as
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sweet as in that first spring. I mark its still tender, civil, cheerful,
lilac colors. But this small village germ of something more?
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Why did it fail while Concord keeps its ground. Were
there no natural advantages, no water privileges forsooth hai, the
deep walden pond and cool brister spring, privilege to drink
long and healthy drafts at these all unimproved by these men,
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but to dilute their glass they were universally a thirsty race.
Might not the basket stable, broom mat making, corn parching,
linen spinning, and pottery business have thrived here, making the
wilderness to blossom like the rose, and a numerous posterity
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have inherited the land of their fathers. The sterile soil
would at least have been proof against a low land degeneracy. Alas,
how little does the memory of these human inhabitants enhance
the beauty of the landscape. Again, perhaps nature will try
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with me for a first settler, and my house raised
last spring to be the oldest in the hamlet. I
am not aware that any man has ever built on
the spot which I occupy. Deliver me from a city
built on the site of a more ancient city, whose
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materials are ruins, whose gardens cemeteries. The soil is blanched
and accursed there, and before that becomes necessary, the earth
itself will be destroyed. With some reminiscences, I repeopled the
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woods and lulled myself to sleep. At this season, I
seldom had a visitor. When the snow lay deepest. No
wanderer ventured near my house for a week or fortnight
at a time. But there I lived as snug as
a meadow mouse, or as cattle and poultry, which are
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said to have survived for a long time buried in
drifts even without food, Or like that early settler's family
in the town of Sutton in this state, whose cottage
was completely covered by the great snow of seventeen seventeen
when he was absent, and an Indian founded only by
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the whole which the chimney's breath made in the drift,
and so relieved the family. But no friendly Indian concerned
himself about me, nor needed he, for the master of
the house was at home the great snow. How cheerful
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it is to hear of when the farmers could not
get to the woods and swamps with their teams, and
were obliged to cut down the shade trees before their houses,
and when the crust was harder, cut off the trees
in the swamps ten feet from the ground. As it
appeared the next spring in the deepest snows. The path
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which I used from the highway to my house, about
half a mile long, might have been represented by a
meandering dotted line with wide intervals between the dots. For
a week of even weather, I took exactly the same
number of steps and of the same length, coming and going,
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stepping deliberately and with the precision of a pair of
dividers in my own deep tracks. To such routine the
winter reduces us. Yet often they were filled with Heaven's
own blue. But no weather interfered fatally with my walks,
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or rather my going abroad. For I frequently tramped eight
or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an
appointment with a beech tree, or a yellow birch, or
an old acquaintance among the pines, when the ice and snow,
causing their limbs to droop and so sharpening their tops,
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had changed the pines into fir trees. Wading to the
tops of the highest hills when the snow was nearly
two feet deep on a level, and shaking down another
snow storm on my head at every step, or sometimes
creeping and floundering thither on my hands and knees. When
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the hunters had gone into winter quarters. One afternoon, I
amused myself by watching a barred owl Stryx nebulosa sitting
on one of the lower dead limbs of a white pine,
close to the trunk in broad daylight. I standing within
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a rod of him. He could hear me when I
moved and crunched the snow with my feet, but could
not plainly see me. When I made most noise. He
would stretch out his neck and erect his neck feathers
and open his eyes wide. But their lids soon fell again,
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and he began to nod. I too, felt a slumbrous
influence after watching him half an hour. As he sat
thus with his eyes half open, like a cat winged
brother of the cat, there was only a narrow slit
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left between their lids, by which be preserved a peninsular
relation to me. Thus, with half shut eyes, looking out
from the land of dreams, and endeavoring to realize me
vague object or mote that interrupts his visions at length,
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on some louder noise or my nearer approach, he would
grow uneasy and sluggishly turn about on his perch, as
if impatient at having his dreams disturbed. And when he
launched himself off and flapped through the pines, spreading his
wings to unexpected breadth, I could not hear the slightest
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sound from them. Thus guided amid the pine boughs rather
by a delicate sense of their neighborhood than by sight.
Feeling his twilight way, as it were, with his sensitive pinions,
he found a new perch where he might, in peace
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await the dawning of his day. As I walked over
the long causeway made for the railroad through the meadows,
I encountered many a blustering and nipping wind. For nowhere
has it freer play. And when the frost had smitten
me on one cheek heathen as I was, I turned
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it to the other also. Nor was it much better
by the carriage road from Bristers Hill, For I came
to town still like a friendly Indian, when the contents of
the broad open fields were all piled up between the
walls of the road, and half an hour sufficed to
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obliterate the tracks of the last traveler. And when I returned,
new drifts would have formed, through which I floundered. Where
the busy northwest wind had been depositing the powdery snow
round a sharp angle in the road, And not a
rabbit's track, nor even the fine print the small type
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of a meadow mouse was to be seen. Yet I
rarely failed to find, even in midwinter, some warm and
springly swamp, where the grass and the skunk cabbage still
put forth their perennial verdure, and some hardier bird occasionally
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awaited the return of spring, sometimes notwithstanding the snow. When
I returned from my walk at evening, I crossed the
deep tracks of a wood chopper leading from my door,
and found his pile of whitlings on the hearth, and
my house filled with the odor of his pipe. Or
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on a Sunday afternoon, if I chanced to be at home,
I heard the crunching of the snow made by the
step of a long headed farmer, whom, from far through
the woods sought my house to have a social crack.
One of the few of his vocation who are men
of their farms, who donned a frock instead of a
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professor's gown, and is as ready to extract the moral
out of church or state as to haul a load
of manure from his barn yard. We talked of rude
and simple times when men sat about large fires in cold,
bracing weather with clear heads, and when other dessert failed,
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we tried our teeth on many a nut which wise
squirrels have long since abandoned, for those which have the
thickest shells are commonly empty. The one who came from
farthest to my lodge, through deepest snows and most dismal tempests,
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was a poet, a farmer, a hunter, a soldier, a reporter.
Even a philosopher may be daunted, but nothing can deter
a poet, for he is actuated by pure love, who
can predict his comings and goings. His business calls him
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out at all hours, even when doctors sleep. We made
that small house ring with boisterous mirth and resound with
the murmur of much sober talk. Making amends then to
walden Vale, for the long silences, Broadway was still and deserted.
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In comparison, at suitable intervals, there were regular salutes of laughter,
which might have been referred indifferently to the last uttered
or the forthcoming jest. We made many a bran new
theory of life over a thin dish of gruel, which
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combined the advantages of conviviality with the clear headedness which
philosophy requires. I should not forget that during my last
winter at the pond, there was another welcome visitor, who
at one time came through the village through snow and
rain and darkness, till he saw my lamp through the trees,
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and shared with me some long winter evenings. One of
the last of the philosophers Connecticut gave him to the world.
He peddled first her wares, afterwards, as he declares his brains.
These he peddles, still prompting God and disgracing man, bearing
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for fruit his brain only like the nut its kernel.
I think that he must be the man of the
most faith of any alive. His words and attitude always
suppose a better state of things than other men are
acquainted with, and he will be the last man to
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be disappointed as the ages revolve. He has no venture
in the present, But though comparatively disregarded now, when his
day comes, laws unsuspected by most will take effect, and
masters of families and rulers will come to him for advice.
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How blind that cannot see serenity a true friend of man,
almost the only friend of human progress. An old mortality, say, rather,
an immortality with unwearied patience and faith, making plain the
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image engraven in men's bodies. The god of whom they are,
but defaced and leaning monuments. With his hospitable intellect, he
embraces children, beggars, insane and scholars, and entertains the thought
of all, adding to it commonly some breadth and elegance.
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I think that he should keep a caravanseri on the
world's highway, where philosophers of all nations might put up,
and on his sign should be printed entertainment for man,
but not for his beast. Enter ye that have leisure
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and a quiet mind, who earnestly seek the right road.
He is perhaps the sanest man, and has the fewest
crutchets of any I chance to know the same. Yesterday
and tomorrow of yore we had sauntered and talked, and
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effectually put the world behind us, for he was pledged
to no institution in it, free born in Jenus. Whichever
way we turned, it seemed that the heavens in the
earth had met together. Since he enhanced the beauty of
the landscape. A blue robed man whose fittest roof is
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the overarching sky, which reflects his serenity. I do not
see how he can, ever die. Nature cannot spare him.
Having each some shingles of thought well dried, we sat
and whittled them, trying our knives and admiring the clear,
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yellowish grain of the pumpkin pine. We waded so gently
and reverently, or we pulled together so smoothly, that the
fishes of thought were not scared from the stream, nor
feared any angler on the bank, but came and went grandly,
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like the clouds which float through the western sky, and
the mother o pearl flocks which sometimes form and dissolve.
There There we worked, revising mythology, rounding a fable here
and there, and building castles in the air, for which
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Earth offered no worthy foundation. Great looker, great expect to
converse with whom was a new England knights entertainment Ah.
Such discourse we had, hermit and philosopher, and the old
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settler I have spoken of we three. It expanded and
racked my little house. I should not dare to say
how many pounds weight there was above the atmospheric pressure
on every circular inch. It opened its seams so that
they had to be calked with much dulness thereafter to
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stop the consequent leak. But I had another of that
kind of oakum already picked. There was one other with
whom I had solid seasons, long to be remembered at
his house in the village, and who looked in upon
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me from time to time. But I had no more
for society there there too, as everywhere, I sometimes expected
the visitor who never comes. The Vishnu Purana says the
householder is to remain at eventide in his courtyard as
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long as it takes to milk a cow, or longer
if he pleases, to await the arrival of a guest.
I often performed this duty of hospitality, waited long enough
to milk a whole herd of cows, but did not
see the man approaching from the town end of Chapter fourteen,
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 Thorough, Chapter fourteen. Former inhabitants and winter visitors.
(00:30):
I weathered some merry snow storms and spent some cheerful
winter evenings by my fireside, while the snow whirled wildly
without and even the hooting of the owl was hushed.
For many weeks, I met no one in my walks,
but those who came occasionally to cut wood and sled
(00:51):
it to the village. The elements, however, abetted me in
making a path through the deepest snow in the woods.
For when I had once gone through, the wind blew
the oak leaves into my tracks, where they lodged, and
by absorbing the rays of the sun, melted the snow,
and so not only made a bed for my feet,
(01:14):
but in the night their dark line was my guide
for human society. I was obliged to conjure up the
former occupants of these woods within the memory of many
of my townsmen. The road near which my house stands
resounded with the laugh and gossip of inhabitants, and the
(01:36):
woods which border it were notched and dotted here and
there with their little gardens and dwellings. Though it was
then much more shut in by the forest than now.
In some places within my own remembrance, the pines would
scrape both sides of a chaise at once, and women
and children who were compelled to go this way to
(01:58):
Lincoln alone and on foot, did it with fear, and
often ran a good deal of the distance, though mainly
but a humble route to neighboring villages or for the
woodsman's team. It once amused the traveler more than now
by its variety, and lingered longer in his memory. Where
(02:21):
now firm open fields stretched from the village to the woods.
It then ran through a maple swamp on a foundation
of logs, the remnants of which doubtless still under lie
the present dusty highway from the Stratton now the Almshouse
farm to Brister's Hill, east of my beenfield. Across the
(02:47):
road lived Cato Ingraham, slave of Duncan Ingraham Esquire, gentlemen
of Concord Village, who built his slave a house and
gave him permission to live in walden Woods Cato but
not utasensus, but concordiensis. Some say that he was a
(03:09):
guinea negro. There are a few who remember his little
patch among the walnuts, which he let grow up till
he should be old and need them. But a younger
and whiter speculator got them at last. He too, however,
occupies an equally narrow house. At present. Cato's half obliterated
(03:33):
cellar hole still remains, though known to few, being concealed
from the traveler by a fringe of pines. It is
now filled with the smooth sumac Rus glabra, and one
of the earliest species of golden rod, Solidago stricta, grows
there luxuriantly. Here by the very corner of my field.
(03:57):
Still nearer to town Zilah, a colored woman had her
little house where she spun linen for the townsfolk, making
the walden woods ring with her shrill singing, for she
had a loud and notable voice at length. In the
(04:17):
War of eighteen twelve, her dwelling was set on fire
by English soldiers prisoners on parole when she was away,
and her cat and dog and hens were all burned
up together. She led a hard life and somewhat inhumane.
One old frequenter of these woods remembers that as he
(04:40):
passed her house one noon, he heard her muttering to
herself over her gurgling pot. Ye are all bones bones,
I have seen bricks amid the oak copse. There down
the road on the right hand, on Brister's hill lived
(05:02):
Brister Freeman, a handy Negro slave of Squire Cummings. Once
there where grow still the apple trees which Brister planted
and tended, large old trees now, but their fruit still
wild and siderish to my taste. Not long since I
(05:24):
read his epitaph in the old Lincoln burying ground, a
little on one side, near the unmarked graves of some
British grenadiers who fell in the retreat from Concord, where
he is styled Scipio Brister Scipio Africanus. He had some
(05:45):
title to be called a man of color, as if
he were discolored. It also told me, with staring emphasis
when he died, which was but an injury way of
informing me that he ever lived with him dwelt Fenda,
(06:06):
his hospitable wife, who told fortunes yet pleasantly large round
and black blacker than any of the children of night,
such a dusky orb as never rose on Concord before
or since. Farther down the hill on the left, on
the old road in the woods are marks of some
(06:29):
homestead of the Stratton family, whose orchard once covered all
the slope of Brister's Hill, but was long since killed
out by pitch pines, excepting a few stumps whose old
roots furnished still the wild stalks of many a thrifty
village tree. Nearer yet to town, you come to Breed's
(06:51):
location on the other side of the way, just on
the edge of the wood ground, famous for the pranks
of a demon distinctly named in old mythology, who has
acted a prominent and astounding part in our New England life,
and deserves as much as any mythological character, to have
(07:11):
his biography written one day, who first comes in the
guise of a friend or hired man, and then robs
and murders the whole family New England rum. But history
must not yet tell the tragedies enacted here. Let time
(07:32):
intervene in some measure to assage and lend an azure
tint to them. Here the most indistinct and dubious tradition
says that once a tavern stood the well, the same
which tempered the traveler's beverage and refreshed his steed. Here
(07:52):
then men saluted one another, and heard and told the news,
and went their ways again. Breed's hut was standing only
a dozen years ago, though it had long been unoccupied.
It was about the size of mine. It was set
on fire by mischievous boys one election night. If I
(08:15):
do not mistake, I lived on the edge of the
village then, and had just lost myself over Davenance Gondebert
that winter that I labored with a lethargy, which, by
the way, I never knew whether to regard as a
family complaint, having an uncle who goes to sleep shaving
(08:35):
himself and is obliged to sprout potatoes in a cellar
Sundays in order to keep awake and keep the Sabbath,
or as the consequence of my attempt to read Chalmer's
collection of English Poetry without skipping it fairly overcame my nervie.
(08:56):
I had just sunk my head on this when the
bells rung fire, and in hot haste, the engines rolled
that way, led by a straggling troop of men and boys,
and I among the foremost, for I had leaped the brook.
We thought it was far south over the woods. We
who had run to fires before, barn shop or dwelling house,
(09:20):
were all together. It's Baker's barn, cried one. It is
the Codman place, affirmed another. And then fresh sparks went
up above the wood, as if the roof fell in,
and we all shouted concord to the rescue. Wagons shot
past with furious speed and crushing loads, bearing, perchance among
(09:43):
the rest the agent of the insurance company, who was
bound to go however far and ever and anon. The
engine bell tinkled behind, more slow and sure and rear
most of all, as it was afterward whispered came they
who set the fire and gave the alarm. Thus we
(10:05):
kept on like true idealists, rejecting the evidence of our senses,
until at a turn in the road we heard the
crackling and actually felt the heat of the fire from
over the wall, and realized alas that we were there
the very nearness of the fire, but cooled our ardor
(10:28):
at first we thought to throw a frog pond on
to it, but concluded to let it burn, and was
so far gone and so worthless. So we stood round
our engine, jostled one another, expressed our sentiments through speaking
trumpets or in lower tone, referred to the great conflagrations
(10:48):
which the world has witnessed, including Bascombe's shop, and between
ourselves we thought that were we there in season, with
our tub and a full frog pawned by, we could
turn that threatened last and universal one into another flood.
We finally retreated, without doing any mischief, returned to sleep
(11:11):
and Gondibert. But as for Gondibert, I would accept that
passage in the preface about wit being the soul's powder,
But most of mankind are strangers to wit, as Indians
are to powder. It chanced that I walked that way
(11:32):
across the fields the following night, about the same hour,
and hearing a low moaning at this spot, I drew
near in the dark and discovered the only survivor of
the family that I know, the air of both its
virtues and its vices, who alone was interested in this burning,
lying on his stomach and looking over the cellar wall
(11:54):
at the still smoldering cinders beneath, muttering to himself as
is wont He had been working far off in the
river meadows all day, and had improved the first moments
that he could call his own to visit the home
of his fathers and his youth. He gazed into the
cellar from all sides and points of view, by turns,
(12:18):
always lying down to it, as if there was some
treasure which he remembered concealed between the stones, where there
was absolutely nothing but a heap of bricks and ashes.
The house being gone, he looked at what there was left.
He was soothed by the sympathy which my mere presence
(12:39):
implied and showed me, as well as the darkness permitted
where the well was covered up, which, thank heaven, could
never be burned. And he groped long about the wall
to find the well sweep which his father had cut
and mounted, feeling for the iron hook or staple by
which a burden had been fastened to the heavy end,
(13:03):
all that he could now cling to to convince me
that it was no common rider. I felt it, and
still remark it almost daily in my walks, for by
it hangs the history of a family. Once more. On
the left, where are seen the well and lilac bushes
(13:25):
by the wall in the now open field lived Nutting
and le Grosse, But to return toward Lincoln farther in
the woods than any of these, where the road approaches
nearest to the pond, Wyman the potter squatted and furnished
his townsmen with earthenware, and left descendants to succeed him.
(13:50):
Neither were they rich in worldly goods, holding the land
by sufferance while they lived, and there often the sheriff
came in vain to collect the taxes, and attached a
chip for form's sake, as I have read in his accounts,
there being nothing else that he could lay his hands on.
(14:12):
One day in midsummer, when I was hoeing, a man
who was carrying a load of pottery to market, stopped
his horse against my field and inquired concerning Wyman the younger.
He had long ago bought a potter's wheel of him,
and wished to know what had become of him. I
had read of the potter's clay and wheel in scripture,
(14:34):
but it had never occurred to me that the pots
we use were not such as had come down unbroken
from those days, or grown on trees like gourds. Somewhere
and I was pleased to hear that so fictile an
art was ever practiced in my neighborhood. The last inhabitant
of these woods before me was an irishman, Hugh Coil
(14:59):
if I have spelt his with Coil enough, who occupied
Wyman's tenement. Colonel Coyle. He was called rumor said that
he had been a soldier at Waterloo. If he had lived,
I should have made him fight his battles over again.
His trade here was that of a ditcher. Napoleon went
(15:22):
to Saint Helena, Coyle came to Walden Woods. All I
know of him is tragic. He was a man of manners,
like one who had seen the world, and was capable
of more civil speech than you could well attend to.
He wore a greatcoat in midsummer, being affected with the
(15:45):
trembling delirium, and his face was the color of carmine.
He died in the road at the foot of Brister's
Hill shortly after I came to the woods, so that
I have not remembered him as a neighbor. Before his
house was pulled down when his comrades avoided it as
(16:06):
an unlucky castle. I visited it. There lay his old
clothes curled up by use as if they were himself
upon his raised plank bed. His pipe lay broken on
the hearth, instead of a bowl broken at the fountain.
(16:28):
The last could never have been the symbol of his death,
for he confessed to me that though he had heard
of Brister's spring, he had never seen it. And soiled cards,
kings of diamonds, spades, and hearts were scattered over the floor.
(16:48):
One black chicken, which the administrator could not catch. Black
as night and as silent, not even croaking, awaited, Reynard
still went to roost in the apartment. In the rear
there was the dim outline of a garden which had
been planted but had never received its first hoeing owing
(17:10):
to those terrible shaking fits. Though it was now harvest time,
it was overrun with roman wormwood and beggar ticks, which
last stuck to my clothes for all fruit. The skin
of a woodchuck was freshly stretched upon the back of
(17:31):
the house, a trophy of his last waterloo. But no
warm cap or mittens. Would he want more now? Only
a dent in the earth marks the site of these dwellings,
with buried cellar stones and strawberries, raspberries, thimbleberries, hazel bushes,
(17:52):
and sumacs growing in the sunny sward. There some pitch
pine or gnarled oak occupies what was the chimney nook
and a sweet scented black birch, perhaps waves where the
door stone was. Sometimes the well dent is visible where
(18:13):
once a spring oozed now dry and tearless grass, or
it was covered deep, not to be discover'd till some
late day with a flat stone under the sod, when
the last of the race departed. What a sorrowful act
(18:34):
must that be? The covering up of wells coincident with
the opening of wells of tears. These cellar dents, like
deserted fox burrows old holes, are all that is left
(18:55):
where once where the stir and bustle of human life
and fate, free will foreknowledge absolute in some form and
dialect or other were by turns discussed. But all I
can learn of their conclusions amount to just this that
(19:19):
Cato and Brister pull'd wool, which is about as edifying
as the history of more famous schools of philosophy, still
grows the vivacious lilac a generation after the door and
lintel and the sill are gone, unfolding its sweet scented
(19:40):
flowers each spring, to be pluck'd by the musing traveler,
planted and tended once by children's hands in front yard plots,
now standing by wallsides in retired pastures, and giving place
to new rising forests, the last of that stirp soul
(20:04):
survivor of that family. Little did the dusky children think
that the puny slip, with its two eyes only, which
they stuck in the ground in the shadow of the
house and daily watered, would root itself so and outlive them,
(20:26):
and house itself in the rear that shaded it, and
grown man's garden and orchard, and tell their story faintly
to the lone wanderer a half century after they had
grown up and died, blossoming as fair and smelling as
(20:47):
sweet as in that first spring. I mark its still tender, civil, cheerful,
lilac colors. But this small village germ of something more?
(21:09):
Why did it fail while Concord keeps its ground. Were
there no natural advantages, no water privileges forsooth hai, the
deep walden pond and cool brister spring, privilege to drink
long and healthy drafts at these all unimproved by these men,
(21:32):
but to dilute their glass they were universally a thirsty race.
Might not the basket stable, broom mat making, corn parching,
linen spinning, and pottery business have thrived here, making the
wilderness to blossom like the rose, and a numerous posterity
(21:56):
have inherited the land of their fathers. The sterile soil
would at least have been proof against a low land degeneracy. Alas,
how little does the memory of these human inhabitants enhance
the beauty of the landscape. Again, perhaps nature will try
(22:23):
with me for a first settler, and my house raised
last spring to be the oldest in the hamlet. I
am not aware that any man has ever built on
the spot which I occupy. Deliver me from a city
built on the site of a more ancient city, whose
(22:46):
materials are ruins, whose gardens cemeteries. The soil is blanched
and accursed there, and before that becomes necessary, the earth
itself will be destroyed. With some reminiscences, I repeopled the
(23:07):
woods and lulled myself to sleep. At this season, I
seldom had a visitor. When the snow lay deepest. No
wanderer ventured near my house for a week or fortnight
at a time. But there I lived as snug as
a meadow mouse, or as cattle and poultry, which are
(23:30):
said to have survived for a long time buried in
drifts even without food, Or like that early settler's family
in the town of Sutton in this state, whose cottage
was completely covered by the great snow of seventeen seventeen
when he was absent, and an Indian founded only by
(23:51):
the whole which the chimney's breath made in the drift,
and so relieved the family. But no friendly Indian concerned
himself about me, nor needed he, for the master of
the house was at home the great snow. How cheerful
(24:14):
it is to hear of when the farmers could not
get to the woods and swamps with their teams, and
were obliged to cut down the shade trees before their houses,
and when the crust was harder, cut off the trees
in the swamps ten feet from the ground. As it
appeared the next spring in the deepest snows. The path
(24:38):
which I used from the highway to my house, about
half a mile long, might have been represented by a
meandering dotted line with wide intervals between the dots. For
a week of even weather, I took exactly the same
number of steps and of the same length, coming and going,
(25:00):
stepping deliberately and with the precision of a pair of
dividers in my own deep tracks. To such routine the
winter reduces us. Yet often they were filled with Heaven's
own blue. But no weather interfered fatally with my walks,
(25:20):
or rather my going abroad. For I frequently tramped eight
or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an
appointment with a beech tree, or a yellow birch, or
an old acquaintance among the pines, when the ice and snow,
causing their limbs to droop and so sharpening their tops,
(25:43):
had changed the pines into fir trees. Wading to the
tops of the highest hills when the snow was nearly
two feet deep on a level, and shaking down another
snow storm on my head at every step, or sometimes
creeping and floundering thither on my hands and knees. When
(26:06):
the hunters had gone into winter quarters. One afternoon, I
amused myself by watching a barred owl Stryx nebulosa sitting
on one of the lower dead limbs of a white pine,
close to the trunk in broad daylight. I standing within
(26:28):
a rod of him. He could hear me when I
moved and crunched the snow with my feet, but could
not plainly see me. When I made most noise. He
would stretch out his neck and erect his neck feathers
and open his eyes wide. But their lids soon fell again,
(26:50):
and he began to nod. I too, felt a slumbrous
influence after watching him half an hour. As he sat
thus with his eyes half open, like a cat winged
brother of the cat, there was only a narrow slit
(27:11):
left between their lids, by which be preserved a peninsular
relation to me. Thus, with half shut eyes, looking out
from the land of dreams, and endeavoring to realize me
vague object or mote that interrupts his visions at length,
(27:32):
on some louder noise or my nearer approach, he would
grow uneasy and sluggishly turn about on his perch, as
if impatient at having his dreams disturbed. And when he
launched himself off and flapped through the pines, spreading his
wings to unexpected breadth, I could not hear the slightest
(27:58):
sound from them. Thus guided amid the pine boughs rather
by a delicate sense of their neighborhood than by sight.
Feeling his twilight way, as it were, with his sensitive pinions,
he found a new perch where he might, in peace
(28:20):
await the dawning of his day. As I walked over
the long causeway made for the railroad through the meadows,
I encountered many a blustering and nipping wind. For nowhere
has it freer play. And when the frost had smitten
me on one cheek heathen as I was, I turned
(28:43):
it to the other also. Nor was it much better
by the carriage road from Bristers Hill, For I came
to town still like a friendly Indian, when the contents of
the broad open fields were all piled up between the
walls of the road, and half an hour sufficed to
(29:03):
obliterate the tracks of the last traveler. And when I returned,
new drifts would have formed, through which I floundered. Where
the busy northwest wind had been depositing the powdery snow
round a sharp angle in the road, And not a
rabbit's track, nor even the fine print the small type
(29:27):
of a meadow mouse was to be seen. Yet I
rarely failed to find, even in midwinter, some warm and
springly swamp, where the grass and the skunk cabbage still
put forth their perennial verdure, and some hardier bird occasionally
(29:48):
awaited the return of spring, sometimes notwithstanding the snow. When
I returned from my walk at evening, I crossed the
deep tracks of a wood chopper leading from my door,
and found his pile of whitlings on the hearth, and
my house filled with the odor of his pipe. Or
(30:12):
on a Sunday afternoon, if I chanced to be at home,
I heard the crunching of the snow made by the
step of a long headed farmer, whom, from far through
the woods sought my house to have a social crack.
One of the few of his vocation who are men
of their farms, who donned a frock instead of a
(30:35):
professor's gown, and is as ready to extract the moral
out of church or state as to haul a load
of manure from his barn yard. We talked of rude
and simple times when men sat about large fires in cold,
bracing weather with clear heads, and when other dessert failed,
(30:58):
we tried our teeth on many a nut which wise
squirrels have long since abandoned, for those which have the
thickest shells are commonly empty. The one who came from
farthest to my lodge, through deepest snows and most dismal tempests,
(31:19):
was a poet, a farmer, a hunter, a soldier, a reporter.
Even a philosopher may be daunted, but nothing can deter
a poet, for he is actuated by pure love, who
can predict his comings and goings. His business calls him
(31:43):
out at all hours, even when doctors sleep. We made
that small house ring with boisterous mirth and resound with
the murmur of much sober talk. Making amends then to
walden Vale, for the long silences, Broadway was still and deserted.
(32:05):
In comparison, at suitable intervals, there were regular salutes of laughter,
which might have been referred indifferently to the last uttered
or the forthcoming jest. We made many a bran new
theory of life over a thin dish of gruel, which
(32:27):
combined the advantages of conviviality with the clear headedness which
philosophy requires. I should not forget that during my last
winter at the pond, there was another welcome visitor, who
at one time came through the village through snow and
rain and darkness, till he saw my lamp through the trees,
(32:50):
and shared with me some long winter evenings. One of
the last of the philosophers Connecticut gave him to the world.
He peddled first her wares, afterwards, as he declares his brains.
These he peddles, still prompting God and disgracing man, bearing
(33:14):
for fruit his brain only like the nut its kernel.
I think that he must be the man of the
most faith of any alive. His words and attitude always
suppose a better state of things than other men are
acquainted with, and he will be the last man to
(33:35):
be disappointed as the ages revolve. He has no venture
in the present, But though comparatively disregarded now, when his
day comes, laws unsuspected by most will take effect, and
masters of families and rulers will come to him for advice.
(33:59):
How blind that cannot see serenity a true friend of man,
almost the only friend of human progress. An old mortality, say, rather,
an immortality with unwearied patience and faith, making plain the
(34:21):
image engraven in men's bodies. The god of whom they are,
but defaced and leaning monuments. With his hospitable intellect, he
embraces children, beggars, insane and scholars, and entertains the thought
of all, adding to it commonly some breadth and elegance.
(34:48):
I think that he should keep a caravanseri on the
world's highway, where philosophers of all nations might put up,
and on his sign should be printed entertainment for man,
but not for his beast. Enter ye that have leisure
(35:08):
and a quiet mind, who earnestly seek the right road.
He is perhaps the sanest man, and has the fewest
crutchets of any I chance to know the same. Yesterday
and tomorrow of yore we had sauntered and talked, and
(35:31):
effectually put the world behind us, for he was pledged
to no institution in it, free born in Jenus. Whichever
way we turned, it seemed that the heavens in the
earth had met together. Since he enhanced the beauty of
the landscape. A blue robed man whose fittest roof is
(35:58):
the overarching sky, which reflects his serenity. I do not
see how he can, ever die. Nature cannot spare him.
Having each some shingles of thought well dried, we sat
and whittled them, trying our knives and admiring the clear,
(36:20):
yellowish grain of the pumpkin pine. We waded so gently
and reverently, or we pulled together so smoothly, that the
fishes of thought were not scared from the stream, nor
feared any angler on the bank, but came and went grandly,
(36:42):
like the clouds which float through the western sky, and
the mother o pearl flocks which sometimes form and dissolve.
There There we worked, revising mythology, rounding a fable here
and there, and building castles in the air, for which
(37:06):
Earth offered no worthy foundation. Great looker, great expect to
converse with whom was a new England knights entertainment Ah.
Such discourse we had, hermit and philosopher, and the old
(37:32):
settler I have spoken of we three. It expanded and
racked my little house. I should not dare to say
how many pounds weight there was above the atmospheric pressure
on every circular inch. It opened its seams so that
they had to be calked with much dulness thereafter to
(37:55):
stop the consequent leak. But I had another of that
kind of oakum already picked. There was one other with
whom I had solid seasons, long to be remembered at
his house in the village, and who looked in upon
(38:16):
me from time to time. But I had no more
for society there there too, as everywhere, I sometimes expected
the visitor who never comes. The Vishnu Purana says the
householder is to remain at eventide in his courtyard as
(38:39):
long as it takes to milk a cow, or longer
if he pleases, to await the arrival of a guest.
I often performed this duty of hospitality, waited long enough
to milk a whole herd of cows, but did not
see the man approaching from the town end of Chapter fourteen,
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