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Chapter 16:
Spring

The opening of large tracts by the ice-cutters commonly causes a

pond to break up earlier; for the water, agitated by the wind, even

in cold weather, wears away the surrounding ice. But such was not

the effect on Walden that year, for she had soon got a thick new

garment to take the place of the old. This pond never breaks up so

soon as the others in this neighborhood, on account both of its

greater depth and its having no stream passing through it to melt or

wear away the ice. I never knew it to open in the course of a

winter, not excepting that of '52-3, which gave the ponds so severe

a trial. It commonly opens about the first of April, a week or ten

days later than Flint's Pond and Fair Haven, beginning to melt on

the north side and in the shallower parts where it began to freeze.

It indicates better than any water hereabouts the absolute progress

of the season, being least affected by transient changes of

temperature. A severe cold of a few days duration in March may very

much retard the opening of the former ponds, while the temperature

of Walden increases almost uninterruptedly. A thermometer thrust

into the middle of Walden on the 6th of March, 1847, stood at 32x,

or freezing point; near the shore at 33x; in the middle of Flint's

Pond, the same day, at 32+x; at a dozen rods from the shore, in

shallow water, under ice a foot thick, at 36x. This difference of

three and a half degrees between the temperature of the deep water

and the shallow in the latter pond, and the fact that a great

proportion of it is comparatively shallow, show why it should break

up so much sooner than Walden. The ice in the shallowest part was

at this time several inches thinner than in the middle. In

midwinter the middle had been the warmest and the ice thinnest

there. So, also, every one who has waded about the shores of the

pond in summer must have perceived how much warmer the water is

close to the shore, where only three or four inches deep, than a

little distance out, and on the surface where it is deep, than near

the bottom. In spring the sun not only exerts an influence through

the increased temperature of the air and earth, but its heat passes

through ice a foot or more thick, and is reflected from the bottom

in shallow water, and so also warms the water and melts the under

side of the ice, at the same time that it is melting it more

directly above, making it uneven, and causing the air bubbles which

it contains to extend themselves upward and downward until it is

completely honeycombed, and at last disappears suddenly in a single

spring rain. Ice has its grain as well as wood, and when a cake

begins to rot or "comb," that is, assume the appearance of

honeycomb, whatever may be its position, the air cells are at right

angles with what was the water surface. Where there is a rock or a

log rising near to the surface the ice over it is much thinner, and

is frequently quite dissolved by this reflected heat; and I have

been told that in the experiment at Cambridge to freeze water in a

shallow wooden pond, though the cold air circulated underneath, and

so had access to both sides, the reflection of the sun from the

bottom more than counterbalanced this advantage. When a warm rain

in the middle of the winter melts off the snow-ice from Walden, and

leaves a hard dark or transparent ice on the middle, there will be a

strip of rotten though thicker white ice, a rod or more wide, about

the shores, created by this reflected heat. Also, as I have said,

the bubbles themselves within the ice operate as burning-glasses to

melt the ice beneath.

The phenomena of the year take place every day in a pond on a

small scale. Every morning, generally speaking, the shallow water

is being warmed more rapidly than the deep, though it may not be

made so warm after all, and every evening it is being cooled more

rapidly until the morning. The day is an epitome of the year. The

night is the winter, the morning and evening are the spring and

fall, and the noon is the summer. The cracking and booming of the

ice indicate a change of temperature. One pleasant morning after a

cold night, February 24th, 1850, having gone to Flint's Pond to

spend the day, I noticed with surprise, that when I struck the ice

with the head of my axe, it resounded like a gong for many rods

around, or as if I had struck on a tight drum-head. The pond began

to boom about an hour after sunrise, when it felt the influence of

the sun's rays slanted upon it from over the hills; it stretched

itself and yawned like a waking man with a gradually increasing

tumult, which was kept up three or four hours. It took a short

siesta at noon, and boomed once more toward night, as the sun was

withdrawing his influence. In the right stage of the weather a pond

fires its evening gun with great regularity. But in the middle of

the day, being full of cracks, and the air also being less elastic,

it had completely lost its resonance, and probably fishes and

muskrats could not then have been stunned by a blow on it. The

fishermen say that the "thundering of the pond" scares the fishes

and prevents their biting. The pond does not thunder every evening,

and I cannot tell surely when to expect its thundering; but though I

may perceive no difference in the weather, it does. Who would have

suspected so large and cold and thick-skinned a thing to be so

sensitive? Yet it has its law to which it thunders obedience when

it should as surely as the buds expand in the spring. The earth is

all alive and covered with papillae. The largest pond is as

sensitive to atmospheric changes as the globule of mercury in its

tube.

One attraction in coming to the woods to live was that I should

have leisure and opportunity to see the Spring come in. The ice in

the pond at length begins to be honeycombed, and I can set my heel

in it as I walk. Fogs and rains and warmer suns are gradually

melting the snow; the days have grown sensibly longer; and I see how

I shall get through the winter without adding to my wood-pile, for

large fires are no longer necessary. I am on the alert for the

first signs of spring, to hear the chance note of some arriving

bird, or the striped squirrel's chirp, for his stores must be now

nearly exhausted, or see the woodchuck venture out of his winter

quarters. On the 13th of March, after I had heard the bluebird,

song sparrow, and red-wing, the ice was still nearly a foot thick.

As the weather grew warmer it was not sensibly worn away by the

water, nor broken up and floated off as in rivers, but, though it

was completely melted for half a rod in width about the shore, the

middle was merely honeycombed and saturated with water, so that you

could put your foot through it when six inches thick; but by the

next day evening, perhaps, after a warm rain followed by fog, it

would have wholly disappeared, all gone off with the fog, spirited

away. One year I went across the middle only five days before it

disappeared entirely. In 1845 Walden was first completely open on

the 1st of April; in '46, the 25th of March; in '47, the 8th of

April; in '51, the 28th of March; in '52, the 18th of April; in '53,

the 23d of March; in '54, about the 7th of April.

Every incident connected with the breaking up of the rivers and

ponds and the settling of the weather is particularly interesting to

us who live in a climate of so great extremes. When the warmer days

come, they who dwell near the river hear the ice crack at night with

a startling whoop as loud as artillery, as if its icy fetters were

rent from end to end, and within a few days see it rapidly going

out. So the alligator comes out of the mud with quakings of the

earth. One old man, who has been a close observer of Nature, and

seems as thoroughly wise in regard to all her operations as if she

had been put upon the stocks when he was a boy, and he had helped to

lay her keel—who has come to his growth, and can hardly acquire

more of natural lore if he should live to the age of Methuselah—

told me—and I was surprised to hear him express wonder at any of

Nature's operations, for I thought that there were no secrets

between them—that one spring day he took his gun and boat, and

thought that he would have a little sport with the ducks. There was

ice still on the meadows, but it was all gone out of the river, and

he dropped down without obstruction from Sudbury, where he lived, to

Fair Haven Pond, which he found, unexpectedly, covered for the most

part with a firm field of ice. It was a warm day, and he was

surprised to see so great a body of ice remaining. Not seeing any

ducks, he hid his boat on the north or back side of an island in the

pond, and then concealed himself in the bushes on the south side, to

await them. The ice was melted for three or four rods from the

shore, and there was a smooth and warm sheet of water, with a muddy

bottom, such as the ducks love, within, and he thought it likely

that some would be along pretty soon. After he had lain still there

about an hour he heard a low and seemingly very distant sound, but

singularly grand and impressive, unlike anything he had ever heard,

gradually swelling and increasing as if it would have a universal

and memorable ending, a sullen rush and roar, which seemed to him

all at once like the sound of a vast body of fowl coming in to

settle there, and, seizing his gun, he started up in haste and

excited; but he found, to his surprise, that the whole body of the

ice had started while he lay there, and drifted in to the shore, and

the sound he had heard was made by its edge grating on the shore—

at first gently nibbled and crumbled off, but at length heaving up

and scattering its wrecks along the island to a considerable height

before it came to a standstill.

At length the sun's rays have attained the right angle, and warm

winds blow up mist and rain and melt the snowbanks, and the sun,

dispersing the mist, smiles on a checkered landscape of russet and

white smoking with incense, through which the traveller picks his

way from islet to islet, cheered by the music of a thousand tinkling

rills and rivulets whose veins are filled with the blood of winter

which they are bearing off.

Few phenomena gave me more delight than to observe the forms

which thawing sand and clay assume in flowing down the sides of a

deep cut on the railroad through which I passed on my way to the

village, a phenomenon not very common on so large a scale, though

the number of freshly exposed banks of the right material must have

been greatly multiplied since railroads were invented. The material

was sand of every degree of fineness and of various rich colors,

commonly mixed with a little clay. When the frost comes out in the

spring, and even in a thawing day in the winter, the sand begins to

flow down the slopes like lava, sometimes bursting out through the

snow and overflowing it where no sand was to be seen before.

Innumerable little streams overlap and interlace one with another,

exhibiting a sort of hybrid product, which obeys half way the law of

currents, and half way that of vegetation. As it flows it takes the

forms of sappy leaves or vines, making heaps of pulpy sprays a foot

or more in depth, and resembling, as you look down on them, the

laciniated, lobed, and imbricated thalluses of some lichens; or you

are reminded of coral, of leopard's paws or birds' feet, of brains

or lungs or bowels, and excrements of all kinds. It is a truly

grotesque vegetation, whose forms and color we see imitated in

bronze, a sort of architectural foliage more ancient and typical

than acanthus, chiccory, ivy, vine, or any vegetable leaves;

destined perhaps, under some circumstances, to become a puzzle to

future geologists. The whole cut impressed me as if it were a cave

with its stalactites laid open to the light. The various shades of

the sand are singularly rich and agreeable, embracing the different

iron colors, brown, gray, yellowish, and reddish. When the flowing

mass reaches the drain at the foot of the bank it spreads out

flatter into strands, the separate streams losing their

semi-cylindrical form and gradually becoming more flat and broad,

running together as they are more moist, till they form an almost

flat sand, still variously and beautifully shaded, but in which you

can trace the original forms of vegetation; till at length, in the

water itself, they are converted into banks, like those formed off

the mouths of rivers, and the forms of vegetation are lost in the

ripple marks on the bottom.

The whole bank, which is from twenty to forty feet high, is

sometimes overlaid with a mass of this kind of foliage, or sandy

rupture, for a quarter of a mile on one or both sides, the produce

of one spring day. What makes this sand foliage remarkable is its

springing into existence thus suddenly. When I see on the one side

the inert bank—for the sun acts on one side first—and on the

other this luxuriant foliage, the creation of an hour, I am affected

as if in a peculiar sense I stood in the laboratory of the Artist

who made the world and me—had come to where he was still at work,

sporting on this bank, and with excess of energy strewing his fresh

designs about. I feel as if I were nearer to the vitals of the

globe, for this sandy overflow is something such a foliaceous mass

as the vitals of the animal body. You find thus in the very sands

an anticipation of the vegetable leaf. No wonder that the earth

expresses itself outwardly in leaves, it so labors with the idea

inwardly. The atoms have already learned this law, and are pregnant

by it. The overhanging leaf sees here its prototype. Internally,

whether in the globe or animal body, it is a moist thick lobe, a

word especially applicable to the liver and lungs and the leaves of

fat (jnai, labor, lapsus, to flow or slip downward, a lapsing;

jiais, globus, lobe, globe; also lap, flap, and many other words);

externally a dry thin leaf, even as the f and v are a pressed and

dried b. The radicals of lobe are lb, the soft mass of the b

(single lobed, or B, double lobed), with the liquid l behind it

pressing it forward. In globe, glb, the guttural g adds to the

meaning the capacity of the throat. The feathers and wings of birds

are still drier and thinner leaves. Thus, also, you pass from the

lumpish grub in the earth to the airy and fluttering butterfly. The

very globe continually transcends and translates itself, and becomes

winged in its orbit. Even ice begins with delicate crystal leaves,

as if it had flowed into moulds which the fronds of waterplants have

impressed on the watery mirror. The whole tree itself is but one

leaf, and rivers are still vaster leaves whose pulp is intervening

earth, and towns and cities are the ova of insects in their axils.

When the sun withdraws the sand ceases to flow, but in the

morning the streams will start once more and branch and branch again

into a myriad of others. You here see perchance how blood-vessels

are formed. If you look closely you observe that first there pushes

forward from the thawing mass a stream of softened sand with a

drop-like point, like the ball of the finger, feeling its way slowly

and blindly downward, until at last with more heat and moisture, as

the sun gets higher, the most fluid portion, in its effort to obey

the law to which the most inert also yields, separates from the

latter and forms for itself a meandering channel or artery within

that, in which is seen a little silvery stream glancing like

lightning from one stage of pulpy leaves or branches to another, and

ever and anon swallowed up in the sand. It is wonderful how rapidly

yet perfectly the sand organizes itself as it flows, using the best

material its mass affords to form the sharp edges of its channel.

Such are the sources of rivers. In the silicious matter which the

water deposits is perhaps the bony system, and in the still finer

soil and organic matter the fleshy fibre or cellular tissue. What

is man but a mass of thawing clay? The ball of the human finger is

but a drop congealed. The fingers and toes flow to their extent

from the thawing mass of the body. Who knows what the human body

would expand and flow out to under a more genial heaven? Is not the

hand a spreading palm leaf with its lobes and veins? The ear may be

regarded, fancifully, as a lichen, umbilicaria, on the side of the

head, with its lobe or drop. The lip—labium, from labor (?)—

laps or lapses from the sides of the cavernous mouth. The nose is a

manifest congealed drop or stalactite. The chin is a still larger

drop, the confluent dripping of the face. The cheeks are a slide

from the brows into the valley of the face, opposed and diffused by

the cheek bones. Each rounded lobe of the vegetable leaf, too, is a

thick and now loitering drop, larger or smaller; the lobes are the

fingers of the leaf; and as many lobes as it has, in so many

directions it tends to flow, and more heat or other genial

influences would have caused it to flow yet farther.

Thus it seemed that this one hillside illustrated the principle

of all the operations of Nature. The Maker of this earth but

patented a leaf. What Champollion will decipher this hieroglyphic

for us, that we may turn over a new leaf at last? This phenomenon

is more exhilarating to me than the luxuriance and fertility of

vineyards. True, it is somewhat excrementitious in its character,

and there is no end to the heaps of liver, lights, and bowels, as if

the globe were turned wrong side outward; but this suggests at least

that Nature has some bowels, and there again is mother of humanity.

This is the frost coming out of the ground; this is Spring. It

precedes the green and flowery spring, as mythology precedes regular

poetry. I know of nothing more purgative of winter fumes and

indigestions. It convinces me that Earth is still in her

swaddling-clothes, and stretches forth baby fingers on every side.

Fresh curls spring from the baldest brow. There is nothing

inorganic. These foliaceous heaps lie along the bank like the slag

of a furnace, showing that Nature is "in full blast" within. The

earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum

like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and

antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree,

which precede flowers and fruit—not a fossil earth, but a living

earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and

vegetable life is merely parasitic. Its throes will heave our

exuviae from their graves. You may melt your metals and cast them

into the most beautiful moulds you can; they will never excite me

like the forms which this molten earth flows out into. And not only

it, but the institutions upon it are plastic like clay in the hands

of the potter.

Ere long, not only on these banks, but on every hill and plain

and in every hollow, the frost comes out of the ground like a

dormant quadruped from its burrow, and seeks the sea with music, or

migrates to other climes in clouds. Thaw with his gentle persuasion

is more powerful than Thor with his hammer. The one melts, the

other but breaks in pieces.

When the ground was partially bare of snow, and a few warm days

had dried its surface somewhat, it was pleasant to compare the first

tender signs of the infant year just peeping forth with the stately

beauty of the withered vegetation which had withstood the

winter—life-everlasting, goldenrods, pinweeds, and graceful wild

grasses, more obvious and interesting frequently than in summer

even, as if their beauty was not ripe till then; even cotton-grass,

cat-tails, mulleins, johnswort, hard-hack, meadow-sweet, and other

strong-stemmed plants, those unexhausted granaries which entertain

the earliest birds—decent weeds, at least, which widowed Nature

wears. I am particularly attracted by the arching and sheaf-like

top of the wool-grass; it brings back the summer to our winter

memories, and is among the forms which art loves to copy, and which,

in the vegetable kingdom, have the same relation to types already in

the mind of man that astronomy has. It is an antique style, older

than Greek or Egyptian. Many of the phenomena of Winter are

suggestive of an inexpressible tenderness and fragile delicacy. We

are accustomed to hear this king described as a rude and boisterous

tyrant; but with the gentleness of a lover he adorns the tresses of

Summer.

At the approach of spring the red squirrels got under my house,

two at a time, directly under my feet as I sat reading or writing,

and kept up the queerest chuckling and chirruping and vocal

pirouetting and gurgling sounds that ever were heard; and when I

stamped they only chirruped the louder, as if past all fear and

respect in their mad pranks, defying humanity to stop them. No, you

don't—chickaree—chickaree. They were wholly deaf to my

arguments, or failed to perceive their force, and fell into a strain

of invective that was irresistible.

The first sparrow of spring! The year beginning with younger

hope than ever! The faint silvery warblings heard over the

partially bare and moist fields from the bluebird, the song sparrow,

and the red-wing, as if the last flakes of winter tinkled as they

fell! What at such a time are histories, chronologies, traditions,

and all written revelations? The brooks sing carols and glees to

the spring. The marsh hawk, sailing low over the meadow, is already

seeking the first slimy life that awakes. The sinking sound of

melting snow is heard in all dells, and the ice dissolves apace in

the ponds. The grass flames up on the hillsides like a spring fire

—"et primitus oritur herba imbribus primoribus evocata"—as if

the earth sent forth an inward heat to greet the returning sun; not

yellow but green is the color of its flame;—the symbol of

perpetual youth, the grass-blade, like a long green ribbon, streams

from the sod into the summer, checked indeed by the frost, but anon

pushing on again, lifting its spear of last year's hay with the

fresh life below. It grows as steadily as the rill oozes out of the

ground. It is almost identical with that, for in the growing days

of June, when the rills are dry, the grass-blades are their

channels, and from year to year the herds drink at this perennial

green stream, and the mower draws from it betimes their winter

supply. So our human life but dies down to its root, and still puts

forth its green blade to eternity.

Walden is melting apace. There is a canal two rods wide along

the northerly and westerly sides, and wider still at the east end.

A great field of ice has cracked off from the main body. I hear a

song sparrow singing from the bushes on the shore—olit, olit,

olit—chip, chip, chip, che char—che wiss, wiss, wiss. He too

is helping to crack it. How handsome the great sweeping curves in

the edge of the ice, answering somewhat to those of the shore, but

more regular! It is unusually hard, owing to the recent severe but

transient cold, and all watered or waved like a palace floor. But

the wind slides eastward over its opaque surface in vain, till it

reaches the living surface beyond. It is glorious to behold this

ribbon of water sparkling in the sun, the bare face of the pond full

of glee and youth, as if it spoke the joy of the fishes within it,

and of the sands on its shore—a silvery sheen as from the scales

of a leuciscus, as it were all one active fish. Such is the

contrast between winter and spring. Walden was dead and is alive

again. But this spring it broke up more steadily, as I have said.

The change from storm and winter to serene and mild weather,

from dark and sluggish hours to bright and elastic ones, is a

memorable crisis which all things proclaim. It is seemingly

instantaneous at last. Suddenly an influx of light filled my house,

though the evening was at hand, and the clouds of winter still

overhung it, and the eaves were dripping with sleety rain. I looked

out the window, and lo! where yesterday was cold gray ice there lay

the transparent pond already calm and full of hope as in a summer

evening, reflecting a summer evening sky in its bosom, though none

was visible overhead, as if it had intelligence with some remote

horizon. I heard a robin in the distance, the first I had heard for

many a thousand years, methought, whose note I shall not forget for

many a thousand more—the same sweet and powerful song as of yore.

O the evening robin, at the end of a New England summer day! If I

could ever find the twig he sits upon! I mean he; I mean the twig.

This at least is not the Turdus migratorius. The pitch pines and

shrub oaks about my house, which had so long drooped, suddenly

resumed their several characters, looked brighter, greener, and more

erect and alive, as if effectually cleansed and restored by the

rain. I knew that it would not rain any more. You may tell by

looking at any twig of the forest, ay, at your very wood-pile,

whether its winter is past or not. As it grew darker, I was

startled by the honking of geese flying low over the woods, like

weary travellers getting in late from Southern lakes, and indulging

at last in unrestrained complaint and mutual consolation. Standing

at my door, I could bear the rush of their wings; when, driving

toward my house, they suddenly spied my light, and with hushed

clamor wheeled and settled in the pond. So I came in, and shut the

door, and passed my first spring night in the woods.

In the morning I watched the geese from the door through the

mist, sailing in the middle of the pond, fifty rods off, so large

and tumultuous that Walden appeared like an artificial pond for

their amusement. But when I stood on the shore they at once rose up

with a great flapping of wings at the signal of their commander, and

when they had got into rank circled about over my head, twenty-nine

of them, and then steered straight to Canada, with a regular honk

from the leader at intervals, trusting to break their fast in

muddier pools. A "plump" of ducks rose at the same time and took

the route to the north in the wake of their noisier cousins.

For a week I heard the circling, groping clangor of some

solitary goose in the foggy mornings, seeking its companion, and

still peopling the woods with the sound of a larger life than they

could sustain. In April the pigeons were seen again flying express

in small flocks, and in due time I heard the martins twittering over

my clearing, though it had not seemed that the township contained so

many that it could afford me any, and I fancied that they were

peculiarly of the ancient race that dwelt in hollow trees ere white

men came. In almost all climes the tortoise and the frog are among

the precursors and heralds of this season, and birds fly with song

and glancing plumage, and plants spring and bloom, and winds blow,

to correct this slight oscillation of the poles and preserve the

equilibrium of nature.

As every season seems best to us in its turn, so the coming in

of spring is like the creation of Cosmos out of Chaos and the

realization of the Golden Age.—

"Eurus ad Auroram Nabathaeaque regna recessit,

Persidaque, et radiis juga subdita matutinis."

"The East-Wind withdrew to Aurora and the Nabathean kingdom,

And the Persian, and the ridges placed under the morning rays.

. . . . . . .

Man was born. Whether that Artificer of things,

The origin of a better world, made him from the divine seed;

Or the earth, being recent and lately sundered from the high

Ether, retained some seeds of cognate heaven."

A single gentle rain makes the grass many shades greener. So

our prospects brighten on the influx of better thoughts. We should

be blessed if we lived in the present always, and took advantage of

every accident that befell us, like the grass which confesses the

influence of the slightest dew that falls on it; and did not spend

our time in atoning for the neglect of past opportunities, which we

call doing our duty. We loiter in winter while it is already

spring. In a pleasant spring morning all men's sins are forgiven.

Such a day is a truce to vice. While such a sun holds out to burn,

the vilest sinner may return. Through our own recovered innocence

we discern the innocence of our neighbors. You may have known your

neighbor yesterday for a thief, a drunkard, or a sensualist, and

merely pitied or despised him, and despaired of the world; but the

sun shines bright and warm this first spring morning, recreating the

world, and you meet him at some serene work, and see how it is

exhausted and debauched veins expand with still joy and bless the

new day, feel the spring influence with the innocence of infancy,

and all his faults are forgotten. There is not only an atmosphere

of good will about him, but even a savor of holiness groping for

expression, blindly and ineffectually perhaps, like a new-born

instinct, and for a short hour the south hill-side echoes to no

vulgar jest. You see some innocent fair shoots preparing to burst

from his gnarled rind and try another year's life, tender and fresh

as the youngest plant. Even he has entered into the joy of his

Lord. Why the jailer does not leave open his prison doors—why

the judge does not dismis his case—why the preacher does not

dismiss his congregation! It is because they do not obey the hint

which God gives them, nor accept the pardon which he freely offers

to all.

"A return to goodness produced each day in the tranquil and

beneficent breath of the morning, causes that in respect to the love

of virtue and the hatred of vice, one approaches a little the

primitive nature of man, as the sprouts of the forest which has been

felled. In like manner the evil which one does in the interval of a

day prevents the germs of virtues which began to spring up again

from developing themselves and destroys them.

"After the germs of virtue have thus been prevented many times

from developing themselves, then the beneficent breath of evening

does not suffice to preserve them. As soon as the breath of evening

does not suffice longer to preserve them, then the nature of man

does not differ much from that of the brute. Men seeing the nature

of this man like that of the brute, think that he has never

possessed the innate faculty of reason. Are those the true and

natural sentiments of man?"

"The Golden Age was first created, which without any avenger

Spontaneously without law cherished fidelity and rectitude.

Punishment and fear were not; nor were threatening words read

On suspended brass; nor did the suppliant crowd fear

The words of their judge; but were safe without an avenger.

Not yet the pine felled on its mountains had descended

To the liquid waves that it might see a foreign world,

And mortals knew no shores but their own.

. . . . . . .

There was eternal spring, and placid zephyrs with warm

Blasts soothed the flowers born without seed."

On the 29th of April, as I was fishing from the bank of the

river near the Nine-Acre-Corner bridge, standing on the quaking

grass and willow roots, where the muskrats lurk, I heard a singular

rattling sound, somewhat like that of the sticks which boys play

with their fingers, when, looking up, I observed a very slight and

graceful hawk, like a nighthawk, alternately soaring like a ripple

and tumbling a rod or two over and over, showing the under side of

its wings, which gleamed like a satin ribbon in the sun, or like the

pearly inside of a shell. This sight reminded me of falconry and

what nobleness and poetry are associated with that sport. The

Merlin it seemed to me it might be called: but I care not for its

name. It was the most ethereal flight I had ever witnessed. It did

not simply flutter like a butterfly, nor soar like the larger hawks,

but it sported with proud reliance in the fields of air; mounting

again and again with its strange chuckle, it repeated its free and

beautiful fall, turning over and over like a kite, and then

recovering from its lofty tumbling, as if it had never set its foot

on terra firma. It appeared to have no companion in the universe—

sporting there alone—and to need none but the morning and the

ether with which it played. It was not lonely, but made all the

earth lonely beneath it. Where was the parent which hatched it, its

kindred, and its father in the heavens? The tenant of the air, it

seemed related to the earth but by an egg hatched some time in the

crevice of a crag;—or was its native nest made in the angle of a

cloud, woven of the rainbow's trimmings and the sunset sky, and

lined with some soft midsummer haze caught up from earth? Its eyry

now some cliffy cloud.

Beside this I got a rare mess of golden and silver and bright

cupreous fishes, which looked like a string of jewels. Ah! I have

penetrated to those meadows on the morning of many a first spring

day, jumping from hummock to hummock, from willow root to willow

root, when the wild river valley and the woods were bathed in so

pure and bright a light as would have waked the dead, if they had

been slumbering in their graves, as some suppose. There needs no

stronger proof of immortality. All things must live in such a

light. O Death, where was thy sting? O Grave, where was thy

victory, then?

Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the

unexplored forests and meadows which surround it. We need the tonic

of wildness—to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and

the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the

whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl

builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the

ground. At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn

all things, we require that all things be mysterious and

unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and

unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of

nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor,

vast and titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the

wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the

thunder-cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces

freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some

life pasturing freely where we never wander. We are cheered when we

observe the vulture feeding on the carrion which disgusts and

disheartens us, and deriving health and strength from the repast.

There was a dead horse in the hollow by the path to my house, which

compelled me sometimes to go out of my way, especially in the night

when the air was heavy, but the assurance it gave me of the strong

appetite and inviolable health of Nature was my compensation for

this. I love to see that Nature is so rife with life that myriads

can be afforded to be sacrificed and suffered to prey on one

another; that tender organizations can be so serenely squashed out

of existence like pulp—tadpoles which herons gobble up, and

tortoises and toads run over in the road; and that sometimes it has

rained flesh and blood! With the liability to accident, we must see

how little account is to be made of it. The impression made on a

wise man is that of universal innocence. Poison is not poisonous

after all, nor are any wounds fatal. Compassion is a very untenable

ground. It must be expeditious. Its pleadings will not bear to be

stereotyped.

Early in May, the oaks, hickories, maples, and other trees, just

putting out amidst the pine woods around the pond, imparted a

brightness like sunshine to the landscape, especially in cloudy

days, as if the sun were breaking through mists and shining faintly

on the hillsides here and there. On the third or fourth of May I

saw a loon in the pond, and during the first week of the month I

heard the whip-poor-will, the brown thrasher, the veery, the wood

pewee, the chewink, and other birds. I had heard the wood thrush

long before. The phoebe had already come once more and looked in at

my door and window, to see if my house was cavern-like enough for

her, sustaining herself on humming wings with clinched talons, as if

she held by the air, while she surveyed the premises. The

sulphur-like pollen of the pitch pine soon covered the pond and the

stones and rotten wood along the shore, so that you could have

collected a barrelful. This is the "sulphur showers" we bear of.

Even in Calidas' drama of Sacontala, we read of "rills dyed yellow

with the golden dust of the lotus." And so the seasons went rolling

on into summer, as one rambles into higher and higher grass.

Thus was my first year's life in the woods completed; and the

second year was similar to it. I finally left Walden September 6th,

1847.

Walden

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