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Chapter 8:
The Ponds

Sometimes, having had a surfeit of human society and gossip, and

worn out all my village friends, I rambled still farther westward

than I habitually dwell, into yet more unfrequented parts of the

town, "to fresh woods and pastures new," or, while the sun was

setting, made my supper of huckleberries and blueberries on Fair

Haven Hill, and laid up a store for several days. The fruits do not

yield their true flavor to the purchaser of them, nor to him who

raises them for the market. There is but one way to obtain it, yet

few take that way. If you would know the flavor of huckleberries,

ask the cowboy or the partridge. It is a vulgar error to suppose

that you have tasted huckleberries who never plucked them. A

huckleberry never reaches Boston; they have not been known there

since they grew on her three hills. The ambrosial and essential

part of the fruit is lost with the bloom which is rubbed off in the

market cart, and they become mere provender. As long as Eternal

Justice reigns, not one innocent huckleberry can be transported

thither from the country's hills.

Occasionally, after my hoeing was done for the day, I joined

some impatient companion who had been fishing on the pond since

morning, as silent and motionless as a duck or a floating leaf, and,

after practising various kinds of philosophy, had concluded

commonly, by the time I arrived, that he belonged to the ancient

sect of Coenobites. There was one older man, an excellent fisher

and skilled in all kinds of woodcraft, who was pleased to look upon

my house as a building erected for the convenience of fishermen; and

I was equally pleased when he sat in my doorway to arrange his

lines. Once in a while we sat together on the pond, he at one end

of the boat, and I at the other; but not many words passed between

us, for he had grown deaf in his later years, but he occasionally

hummed a psalm, which harmonized well enough with my philosophy.

Our intercourse was thus altogether one of unbroken harmony, far

more pleasing to remember than if it had been carried on by speech.

When, as was commonly the case, I had none to commune with, I used

to raise the echoes by striking with a paddle on the side of my

boat, filling the surrounding woods with circling and dilating

sound, stirring them up as the keeper of a menagerie his wild

beasts, until I elicited a growl from every wooded vale and

hillside.

In warm evenings I frequently sat in the boat playing the flute,

and saw the perch, which I seem to have charmed, hovering around me,

and the moon travelling over the ribbed bottom, which was strewed

with the wrecks of the forest. Formerly I had come to this pond

adventurously, from time to time, in dark summer nights, with a

companion, and, making a fire close to the water's edge, which we

thought attracted the fishes, we caught pouts with a bunch of worms

strung on a thread, and when we had done, far in the night, threw

the burning brands high into the air like skyrockets, which, coming

down into the pond, were quenched with a loud hissing, and we were

suddenly groping in total darkness. Through this, whistling a tune,

we took our way to the haunts of men again. But now I had made my

home by the shore.

Sometimes, after staying in a village parlor till the family had

all retired, I have returned to the woods, and, partly with a view

to the next day's dinner, spent the hours of midnight fishing from a

boat by moonlight, serenaded by owls and foxes, and hearing, from

time to time, the creaking note of some unknown bird close at hand.

These experiences were very memorable and valuable to me—anchored

in forty feet of water, and twenty or thirty rods from the shore,

surrounded sometimes by thousands of small perch and shiners,

dimpling the surface with their tails in the moonlight, and

communicating by a long flaxen line with mysterious nocturnal fishes

which had their dwelling forty feet below, or sometimes dragging

sixty feet of line about the pond as I drifted in the gentle night

breeze, now and then feeling a slight vibration along it, indicative

of some life prowling about its extremity, of dull uncertain

blundering purpose there, and slow to make up its mind. At length

you slowly raise, pulling hand over hand, some horned pout squeaking

and squirming to the upper air. It was very queer, especially in

dark nights, when your thoughts had wandered to vast and cosmogonal

themes in other spheres, to feel this faint jerk, which came to

interrupt your dreams and link you to Nature again. It seemed as if

I might next cast my line upward into the air, as well as downward

into this element, which was scarcely more dense. Thus I caught two

fishes as it were with one hook.

The scenery of Walden is on a humble scale, and, though very

beautiful, does not approach to grandeur, nor can it much concern

one who has not long frequented it or lived by its shore; yet this

pond is so remarkable for its depth and purity as to merit a

particular description. It is a clear and deep green well, half a

mile long and a mile and three quarters in circumference, and

contains about sixty-one and a half acres; a perennial spring in the

midst of pine and oak woods, without any visible inlet or outlet

except by the clouds and evaporation. The surrounding hills rise

abruptly from the water to the height of forty to eighty feet,

though on the southeast and east they attain to about one hundred

and one hundred and fifty feet respectively, within a quarter and a

third of a mile. They are exclusively woodland. All our Concord

waters have two colors at least; one when viewed at a distance, and

another, more proper, close at hand. The first depends more on the

light, and follows the sky. In clear weather, in summer, they

appear blue at a little distance, especially if agitated, and at a

great distance all appear alike. In stormy weather they are

sometimes of a dark slate-color. The sea, however, is said to be

blue one day and green another without any perceptible change in the

atmosphere. I have seen our river, when, the landscape being

covered with snow, both water and ice were almost as green as grass.

Some consider blue "to be the color of pure water, whether liquid or

solid." But, looking directly down into our waters from a boat,

they are seen to be of very different colors. Walden is blue at one

time and green at another, even from the same point of view. Lying

between the earth and the heavens, it partakes of the color of both.

Viewed from a hilltop it reflects the color of the sky; but near at

hand it is of a yellowish tint next the shore where you can see the

sand, then a light green, which gradually deepens to a uniform dark

green in the body of the pond. In some lights, viewed even from a

hilltop, it is of a vivid green next the shore. Some have referred

this to the reflection of the verdure; but it is equally green there

against the railroad sandbank, and in the spring, before the leaves

are expanded, and it may be simply the result of the prevailing blue

mixed with the yellow of the sand. Such is the color of its iris.

This is that portion, also, where in the spring, the ice being

warmed by the heat of the sun reflected from the bottom, and also

transmitted through the earth, melts first and forms a narrow canal

about the still frozen middle. Like the rest of our waters, when

much agitated, in clear weather, so that the surface of the waves

may reflect the sky at the right angle, or because there is more

light mixed with it, it appears at a little distance of a darker

blue than the sky itself; and at such a time, being on its surface,

and looking with divided vision, so as to see the reflection, I have

discerned a matchless and indescribable light blue, such as watered

or changeable silks and sword blades suggest, more cerulean than the

sky itself, alternating with the original dark green on the opposite

sides of the waves, which last appeared but muddy in comparison. It

is a vitreous greenish blue, as I remember it, like those patches of

the winter sky seen through cloud vistas in the west before sundown.

Yet a single glass of its water held up to the light is as colorless

as an equal quantity of air. It is well known that a large plate of

glass will have a green tint, owing, as the makers say, to its

"body," but a small piece of the same will be colorless. How large

a body of Walden water would be required to reflect a green tint I

have never proved. The water of our river is black or a very dark

brown to one looking directly down on it, and, like that of most

ponds, imparts to the body of one bathing in it a yellowish tinge;

but this water is of such crystalline purity that the body of the

bather appears of an alabaster whiteness, still more unnatural,

which, as the limbs are magnified and distorted withal, produces a

monstrous effect, making fit studies for a Michael Angelo.

The water is so transparent that the bottom can easily be

discerned at the depth of twenty-five or thirty feet. Paddling over

it, you may see, many feet beneath the surface, the schools of perch

and shiners, perhaps only an inch long, yet the former easily

distinguished by their transverse bars, and you think that they must

be ascetic fish that find a subsistence there. Once, in the winter,

many years ago, when I had been cutting holes through the ice in

order to catch pickerel, as I stepped ashore I tossed my axe back on

to the ice, but, as if some evil genius had directed it, it slid

four or five rods directly into one of the holes, where the water

was twenty-five feet deep. Out of curiosity, I lay down on the ice

and looked through the hole, until I saw the axe a little on one

side, standing on its head, with its helve erect and gently swaying

to and fro with the pulse of the pond; and there it might have stood

erect and swaying till in the course of time the handle rotted off,

if I had not disturbed it. Making another hole directly over it

with an ice chisel which I had, and cutting down the longest birch

which I could find in the neighborhood with my knife, I made a

slip-noose, which I attached to its end, and, letting it down

carefully, passed it over the knob of the handle, and drew it by a

line along the birch, and so pulled the axe out again.

The shore is composed of a belt of smooth rounded white stones

like paving-stones, excepting one or two short sand beaches, and is

so steep that in many places a single leap will carry you into water

over your head; and were it not for its remarkable transparency,

that would be the last to be seen of its bottom till it rose on the

opposite side. Some think it is bottomless. It is nowhere muddy,

and a casual observer would say that there were no weeds at all in

it; and of noticeable plants, except in the little meadows recently

overflowed, which do not properly belong to it, a closer scrutiny

does not detect a flag nor a bulrush, nor even a lily, yellow or

white, but only a few small heart-leaves and potamogetons, and

perhaps a water-target or two; all which however a bather might not

perceive; and these plants are clean and bright like the element

they grow in. The stones extend a rod or two into the water, and

then the bottom is pure sand, except in the deepest parts, where

there is usually a little sediment, probably from the decay of the

leaves which have been wafted on to it so many successive falls, and

a bright green weed is brought up on anchors even in midwinter.

We have one other pond just like this, White Pond, in Nine Acre

Corner, about two and a half miles westerly; but, though I am

acquainted with most of the ponds within a dozen miles of this

centre I do not know a third of this pure and well-like character.

Successive nations perchance have drank at, admired, and fathomed

it, and passed away, and still its water is green and pellucid as

ever. Not an intermitting spring! Perhaps on that spring morning

when Adam and Eve were driven out of Eden Walden Pond was already in

existence, and even then breaking up in a gentle spring rain

accompanied with mist and a southerly wind, and covered with myriads

of ducks and geese, which had not heard of the fall, when still such

pure lakes sufficed them. Even then it had commenced to rise and

fall, and had clarified its waters and colored them of the hue they

now wear, and obtained a patent of Heaven to be the only Walden Pond

in the world and distiller of celestial dews. Who knows in how many

unremembered nations' literatures this has been the Castalian

Fountain? or what nymphs presided over it in the Golden Age? It is

a gem of the first water which Concord wears in her coronet.

Yet perchance the first who came to this well have left some

trace of their footsteps. I have been surprised to detect

encircling the pond, even where a thick wood has just been cut down

on the shore, a narrow shelf-like path in the steep hillside,

alternately rising and falling, approaching and receding from the

water's edge, as old probably as the race of man here, worn by the

feet of aboriginal hunters, and still from time to time unwittingly

trodden by the present occupants of the land. This is particularly

distinct to one standing on the middle of the pond in winter, just

after a light snow has fallen, appearing as a clear undulating white

line, unobscured by weeds and twigs, and very obvious a quarter of a

mile off in many places where in summer it is hardly distinguishable

close at hand. The snow reprints it, as it were, in clear white

type alto-relievo. The ornamented grounds of villas which will one

day be built here may still preserve some trace of this.

The pond rises and falls, but whether regularly or not, and

within what period, nobody knows, though, as usual, many pretend to

know. It is commonly higher in the winter and lower in the summer,

though not corresponding to the general wet and dryness. I can

remember when it was a foot or two lower, and also when it was at

least five feet higher, than when I lived by it. There is a narrow

sand-bar running into it, with very deep water on one side, on which

I helped boil a kettle of chowder, some six rods from the main

shore, about the year 1824, which it has not been possible to do for

twenty-five years; and, on the other hand, my friends used to listen

with incredulity when I told them, that a few years later I was

accustomed to fish from a boat in a secluded cove in the woods,

fifteen rods from the only shore they knew, which place was long

since converted into a meadow. But the pond has risen steadily for

two years, and now, in the summer of '52, is just five feet higher

than when I lived there, or as high as it was thirty years ago, and

fishing goes on again in the meadow. This makes a difference of

level, at the outside, of six or seven feet; and yet the water shed

by the surrounding hills is insignificant in amount, and this

overflow must be referred to causes which affect the deep springs.

This same summer the pond has begun to fall again. It is remarkable

that this fluctuation, whether periodical or not, appears thus to

require many years for its accomplishment. I have observed one rise

and a part of two falls, and I expect that a dozen or fifteen years

hence the water will again be as low as I have ever known it.

Flint's Pond, a mile eastward, allowing for the disturbance

occasioned by its inlets and outlets, and the smaller intermediate

ponds also, sympathize with Walden, and recently attained their

greatest height at the same time with the latter. The same is true,

as far as my observation goes, of White Pond.

This rise and fall of Walden at long intervals serves this use

at least; the water standing at this great height for a year or

more, though it makes it difficult to walk round it, kills the

shrubs and trees which have sprung up about its edge since the last

rise—pitch pines, birches, alders, aspens, and others—and,

falling again, leaves an unobstructed shore; for, unlike many ponds

and all waters which are subject to a daily tide, its shore is

cleanest when the water is lowest. On the side of the pond next my

house a row of pitch pines, fifteen feet high, has been killed and

tipped over as if by a lever, and thus a stop put to their

encroachments; and their size indicates how many years have elapsed

since the last rise to this height. By this fluctuation the pond

asserts its title to a shore, and thus the shore is shorn, and the

trees cannot hold it by right of possession. These are the lips of

the lake, on which no beard grows. It licks its chaps from time to

time. When the water is at its height, the alders, willows, and

maples send forth a mass of fibrous red roots several feet long from

all sides of their stems in the water, and to the height of three or

four feet from the ground, in the effort to maintain themselves; and

I have known the high blueberry bushes about the shore, which

commonly produce no fruit, bear an abundant crop under these

circumstances.

Some have been puzzled to tell how the shore became so regularly

paved. My townsmen have all heard the tradition—the oldest

people tell me that they heard it in their youth—that anciently

the Indians were holding a pow-wow upon a hill here, which rose as

high into the heavens as the pond now sinks deep into the earth, and

they used much profanity, as the story goes, though this vice is one

of which the Indians were never guilty, and while they were thus

engaged the hill shook and suddenly sank, and only one old squaw,

named Walden, escaped, and from her the pond was named. It has been

conjectured that when the hill shook these stones rolled down its

side and became the present shore. It is very certain, at any rate,

that once there was no pond here, and now there is one; and this

Indian fable does not in any respect conflict with the account of

that ancient settler whom I have mentioned, who remembers so well

when he first came here with his divining-rod, saw a thin vapor

rising from the sward, and the hazel pointed steadily downward, and

he concluded to dig a well here. As for the stones, many still

think that they are hardly to be accounted for by the action of the

waves on these hills; but I observe that the surrounding hills are

remarkably full of the same kind of stones, so that they have been

obliged to pile them up in walls on both sides of the railroad cut

nearest the pond; and, moreover, there are most stones where the

shore is most abrupt; so that, unfortunately, it is no longer a

mystery to me. I detect the paver. If the name was not derived

from that of some English locality—Saffron Walden, for instance

—one might suppose that it was called originally Walled-in Pond.

The pond was my well ready dug. For four months in the year its

water is as cold as it is pure at all times; and I think that it is

then as good as any, if not the best, in the town. In the winter,

all water which is exposed to the air is colder than springs and

wells which are protected from it. The temperature of the pond

water which had stood in the room where I sat from five o'clock in

the afternoon till noon the next day, the sixth of March, 1846, the

thermometer having been up to 65x or 70x some of the time, owing

partly to the sun on the roof, was 42x, or one degree colder than

the water of one of the coldest wells in the village just drawn.

The temperature of the Boiling Spring the same day was 45x, or the

warmest of any water tried, though it is the coldest that I know of

in summer, when, beside, shallow and stagnant surface water is not

mingled with it. Moreover, in summer, Walden never becomes so warm

as most water which is exposed to the sun, on account of its depth.

In the warmest weather I usually placed a pailful in my cellar,

where it became cool in the night, and remained so during the day;

though I also resorted to a spring in the neighborhood. It was as

good when a week old as the day it was dipped, and had no taste of

the pump. Whoever camps for a week in summer by the shore of a

pond, needs only bury a pail of water a few feet deep in the shade

of his camp to be independent of the luxury of ice.

There have been caught in Walden pickerel, one weighing seven

pounds—to say nothing of another which carried off a reel with

great velocity, which the fisherman safely set down at eight pounds

because he did not see him—perch and pouts, some of each weighing

over two pounds, shiners, chivins or roach (Leuciscus pulchellus), a

very few breams, and a couple of eels, one weighing four pounds—I

am thus particular because the weight of a fish is commonly its only

title to fame, and these are the only eels I have heard of here;—

also, I have a faint recollection of a little fish some five inches

long, with silvery sides and a greenish back, somewhat dace-like in

its character, which I mention here chiefly to link my facts to

fable. Nevertheless, this pond is not very fertile in fish. Its

pickerel, though not abundant, are its chief boast. I have seen at

one time lying on the ice pickerel of at least three different

kinds: a long and shallow one, steel-colored, most like those caught

in the river; a bright golden kind, with greenish reflections and

remarkably deep, which is the most common here; and another,

golden-colored, and shaped like the last, but peppered on the sides

with small dark brown or black spots, intermixed with a few faint

blood-red ones, very much like a trout. The specific name

reticulatus would not apply to this; it should be guttatus rather.

These are all very firm fish, and weigh more than their size

promises. The shiners, pouts, and perch also, and indeed all the

fishes which inhabit this pond, are much cleaner, handsomer, and

firmer-fleshed than those in the river and most other ponds, as the

water is purer, and they can easily be distinguished from them.

Probably many ichthyologists would make new varieties of some of

them. There are also a clean race of frogs and tortoises, and a few

mussels in it; muskrats and minks leave their traces about it, and

occasionally a travelling mud-turtle visits it. Sometimes, when I

pushed off my boat in the morning, I disturbed a great mud-turtle

which had secreted himself under the boat in the night. Ducks and

geese frequent it in the spring and fall, the white-bellied swallows

(Hirundo bicolor) skim over it, and the peetweets (Totanus

macularius) "teeter" along its stony shores all summer. I have

sometimes disturbed a fish hawk sitting on a white pine over the

water; but I doubt if it is ever profaned by the wind of a gull,

like Fair Haven. At most, it tolerates one annual loon. These are

all the animals of consequence which frequent it now.

You may see from a boat, in calm weather, near the sandy

eastern shore, where the water is eight or ten feet deep, and also

in some other parts of the pond, some circular heaps half a dozen

feet in diameter by a foot in height, consisting of small stones

less than a hen's egg in size, where all around is bare sand. At

first you wonder if the Indians could have formed them on the ice

for any purpose, and so, when the ice melted, they sank to the

bottom; but they are too regular and some of them plainly too fresh

for that. They are similar to those found in rivers; but as there

are no suckers nor lampreys here, I know not by what fish they could

be made. Perhaps they are the nests of the chivin. These lend a

pleasing mystery to the bottom.

The shore is irregular enough not to be monotonous. I have in

my mind's eye the western, indented with deep bays, the bolder

northern, and the beautifully scalloped southern shore, where

successive capes overlap each other and suggest unexplored coves

between. The forest has never so good a setting, nor is so

distinctly beautiful, as when seen from the middle of a small lake

amid hills which rise from the water's edge; for the water in which

it is reflected not only makes the best foreground in such a case,

but, with its winding shore, the most natural and agreeable boundary

to it. There is no rawness nor imperfection in its edge there, as

where the axe has cleared a part, or a cultivated field abuts on it.

The trees have ample room to expand on the water side, and each

sends forth its most vigorous branch in that direction. There

Nature has woven a natural selvage, and the eye rises by just

gradations from the low shrubs of the shore to the highest trees.

There are few traces of man's hand to be seen. The water laves the

shore as it did a thousand years ago.

A lake is the landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature.

It is earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the

depth of his own nature. The fluviatile trees next the shore are

the slender eyelashes which fringe it, and the wooded hills and

cliffs around are its overhanging brows.

Standing on the smooth sandy beach at the east end of the pond,

in a calm September afternoon, when a slight haze makes the opposite

shore-line indistinct, I have seen whence came the expression, "the

glassy surface of a lake." When you invert your head, it looks like

a thread of finest gossamer stretched across the valley, and

gleaming against the distant pine woods, separating one stratum of

the atmosphere from another. You would think that you could walk

dry under it to the opposite hills, and that the swallows which skim

over might perch on it. Indeed, they sometimes dive below this

line, as it were by mistake, and are undeceived. As you look over

the pond westward you are obliged to employ both your hands to

defend your eyes against the reflected as well as the true sun, for

they are equally bright; and if, between the two, you survey its

surface critically, it is literally as smooth as glass, except where

the skater insects, at equal intervals scattered over its whole

extent, by their motions in the sun produce the finest imaginable

sparkle on it, or, perchance, a duck plumes itself, or, as I have

said, a swallow skims so low as to touch it. It may be that in the

distance a fish describes an arc of three or four feet in the air,

and there is one bright flash where it emerges, and another where it

strikes the water; sometimes the whole silvery arc is revealed; or

here and there, perhaps, is a thistle-down floating on its surface,

which the fishes dart at and so dimple it again. It is like molten

glass cooled but not congealed, and the few motes in it are pure and

beautiful like the imperfections in glass. You may often detect a

yet smoother and darker water, separated from the rest as if by an

invisible cobweb, boom of the water nymphs, resting on it. From a

hilltop you can see a fish leap in almost any part; for not a

pickerel or shiner picks an insect from this smooth surface but it

manifestly disturbs the equilibrium of the whole lake. It is

wonderful with what elaborateness this simple fact is advertised—

this piscine murder will out—and from my distant perch I

distinguish the circling undulations when they are half a dozen rods

in diameter. You can even detect a water-bug (Gyrinus) ceaselessly

progressing over the smooth surface a quarter of a mile off; for

they furrow the water slightly, making a conspicuous ripple bounded

by two diverging lines, but the skaters glide over it without

rippling it perceptibly. When the surface is considerably agitated

there are no skaters nor water-bugs on it, but apparently, in calm

days, they leave their havens and adventurously glide forth from the

shore by short impulses till they completely cover it. It is a

soothing employment, on one of those fine days in the fall when all

the warmth of the sun is fully appreciated, to sit on a stump on

such a height as this, overlooking the pond, and study the dimpling

circles which are incessantly inscribed on its otherwise invisible

surface amid the reflected skies and trees. Over this great expanse

there is no disturbance but it is thus at once gently smoothed away

and assuaged, as, when a vase of water is jarred, the trembling

circles seek the shore and all is smooth again. Not a fish can leap

or an insect fall on the pond but it is thus reported in circling

dimples, in lines of beauty, as it were the constant welling up of

its fountain, the gentle pulsing of its life, the heaving of its

breast. The thrills of joy and thrills of pain are

undistinguishable. How peaceful the phenomena of the lake! Again

the works of man shine as in the spring. Ay, every leaf and twig

and stone and cobweb sparkles now at mid-afternoon as when covered

with dew in a spring morning. Every motion of an oar or an insect

produces a flash of light; and if an oar falls, how sweet the echo!

In such a day, in September or October, Walden is a perfect

forest mirror, set round with stones as precious to my eye as if

fewer or rarer. Nothing so fair, so pure, and at the same time so

large, as a lake, perchance, lies on the surface of the earth. Sky

water. It needs no fence. Nations come and go without defiling it.

It is a mirror which no stone can crack, whose quicksilver will

never wear off, whose gilding Nature continually repairs; no storms,

no dust, can dim its surface ever fresh;—a mirror in which all

impurity presented to it sinks, swept and dusted by the sun's hazy

brush—this the light dust-cloth—which retains no breath that

is breathed on it, but sends its own to float as clouds high above

its surface, and be reflected in its bosom still.

A field of water betrays the spirit that is in the air. It is

continually receiving new life and motion from above. It is

intermediate in its nature between land and sky. On land only the

grass and trees wave, but the water itself is rippled by the wind.

I see where the breeze dashes across it by the streaks or flakes of

light. It is remarkable that we can look down on its surface. We

shall, perhaps, look down thus on the surface of air at length, and

mark where a still subtler spirit sweeps over it.

The skaters and water-bugs finally disappear in the latter part

of October, when the severe frosts have come; and then and in

November, usually, in a calm day, there is absolutely nothing to

ripple the surface. One November afternoon, in the calm at the end

of a rain-storm of several days' duration, when the sky was still

completely overcast and the air was full of mist, I observed that

the pond was remarkably smooth, so that it was difficult to

distinguish its surface; though it no longer reflected the bright

tints of October, but the sombre November colors of the surrounding

hills. Though I passed over it as gently as possible, the slight

undulations produced by my boat extended almost as far as I could

see, and gave a ribbed appearance to the reflections. But, as I was

looking over the surface, I saw here and there at a distance a faint

glimmer, as if some skater insects which had escaped the frosts

might be collected there, or, perchance, the surface, being so

smooth, betrayed where a spring welled up from the bottom. Paddling

gently to one of these places, I was surprised to find myself

surrounded by myriads of small perch, about five inches long, of a

rich bronze color in the green water, sporting there, and constantly

rising to the surface and dimpling it, sometimes leaving bubbles on

it. In such transparent and seemingly bottomless water, reflecting

the clouds, I seemed to be floating through the air as in a balloon,

and their swimming impressed me as a kind of flight or hovering, as

if they were a compact flock of birds passing just beneath my level

on the right or left, their fins, like sails, set all around them.

There were many such schools in the pond, apparently improving the

short season before winter would draw an icy shutter over their

broad skylight, sometimes giving to the surface an appearance as if

a slight breeze struck it, or a few rain-drops fell there. When I

approached carelessly and alarmed them, they made a sudden splash

and rippling with their tails, as if one had struck the water with a

brushy bough, and instantly took refuge in the depths. At length

the wind rose, the mist increased, and the waves began to run, and

the perch leaped much higher than before, half out of water, a

hundred black points, three inches long, at once above the surface.

Even as late as the fifth of December, one year, I saw some dimples

on the surface, and thinking it was going to rain hard immediately,

the air being fun of mist, I made haste to take my place at the oars

and row homeward; already the rain seemed rapidly increasing, though

I felt none on my cheek, and I anticipated a thorough soaking. But

suddenly the dimples ceased, for they were produced by the perch,

which the noise of my oars had seared into the depths, and I saw

their schools dimly disappearing; so I spent a dry afternoon after

all.

An old man who used to frequent this pond nearly sixty years

ago, when it was dark with surrounding forests, tells me that in

those days he sometimes saw it all alive with ducks and other

water-fowl, and that there were many eagles about it. He came here

a-fishing, and used an old log canoe which he found on the shore.

It was made of two white pine logs dug out and pinned together, and

was cut off square at the ends. It was very clumsy, but lasted a

great many years before it became water-logged and perhaps sank to

the bottom. He did not know whose it was; it belonged to the pond.

He used to make a cable for his anchor of strips of hickory bark

tied together. An old man, a potter, who lived by the pond before

the Revolution, told him once that there was an iron chest at the

bottom, and that he had seen it. Sometimes it would come floating

up to the shore; but when you went toward it, it would go back into

deep water and disappear. I was pleased to hear of the old log

canoe, which took the place of an Indian one of the same material

but more graceful construction, which perchance had first been a

tree on the bank, and then, as it were, fell into the water, to

float there for a generation, the most proper vessel for the lake.

I remember that when I first looked into these depths there were

many large trunks to be seen indistinctly lying on the bottom, which

had either been blown over formerly, or left on the ice at the last

cutting, when wood was cheaper; but now they have mostly

disappeared.

When I first paddled a boat on Walden, it was completely

surrounded by thick and lofty pine and oak woods, and in some of its

coves grape-vines had run over the trees next the water and formed

bowers under which a boat could pass. The hills which form its

shores are so steep, and the woods on them were then so high, that,

as you looked down from the west end, it had the appearance of an

amphitheatre for some land of sylvan spectacle. I have spent many

an hour, when I was younger, floating over its surface as the zephyr

willed, having paddled my boat to the middle, and lying on my back

across the seats, in a summer forenoon, dreaming awake, until I was

aroused by the boat touching the sand, and I arose to see what shore

my fates had impelled me to; days when idleness was the most

attractive and productive industry. Many a forenoon have I stolen

away, preferring to spend thus the most valued part of the day; for

I was rich, if not in money, in sunny hours and summer days, and

spent them lavishly; nor do I regret that I did not waste more of

them in the workshop or the teacher's desk. But since I left those

shores the woodchoppers have still further laid them waste, and now

for many a year there will be no more rambling through the aisles of

the wood, with occasional vistas through which you see the water.

My Muse may be excused if she is silent henceforth. How can you

expect the birds to sing when their groves are cut down?

Now the trunks of trees on the bottom, and the old log canoe,

and the dark surrounding woods, are gone, and the villagers, who

scarcely know where it lies, instead of going to the pond to bathe

or drink, are thinking to bring its water, which should be as sacred

as the Ganges at least, to the village in a pipe, to wash their

dishes with!—to earn their Walden by the turning of a cock or

drawing of a plug! That devilish Iron Horse, whose ear-rending

neigh is heard throughout the town, has muddied the Boiling Spring

with his foot, and he it is that has browsed off all the woods on

Walden shore, that Trojan horse, with a thousand men in his belly,

introduced by mercenary Greeks! Where is the country's champion,

the Moore of Moore Hill, to meet him at the Deep Cut and thrust an

avenging lance between the ribs of the bloated pest?

Nevertheless, of all the characters I have known, perhaps Walden

wears best, and best preserves its purity. Many men have been

likened to it, but few deserve that honor. Though the woodchoppers

have laid bare first this shore and then that, and the Irish have

built their sties by it, and the railroad has infringed on its

border, and the ice-men have skimmed it once, it is itself

unchanged, the same water which my youthful eyes fell on; all the

change is in me. It has not acquired one permanent wrinkle after

all its ripples. It is perennially young, and I may stand and see a

swallow dip apparently to pick an insect from its surface as of

yore. It struck me again tonight, as if I had not seen it almost

daily for more than twenty years—Why, here is Walden, the same

woodland lake that I discovered so many years ago; where a forest

was cut down last winter another is springing up by its shore as

lustily as ever; the same thought is welling up to its surface that

was then; it is the same liquid joy and happiness to itself and its

Maker, ay, and it may be to me. It is the work of a brave man

surely, in whom there was no guile! He rounded this water with his

hand, deepened and clarified it in his thought, and in his will

bequeathed it to Concord. I see by its face that it is visited by

the same reflection; and I can almost say, Walden, is it you?

It is no dream of mine,

To ornament a line;

I cannot come nearer to God and Heaven

Than I live to Walden even.

I am its stony shore,

And the breeze that passes o'er;

In the hollow of my hand

Are its water and its sand,

And its deepest resort

Lies high in my thought.

The cars never pause to look at it; yet I fancy that the

engineers and firemen and brakemen, and those passengers who have a

season ticket and see it often, are better men for the sight. The

engineer does not forget at night, or his nature does not, that he

has beheld this vision of serenity and purity once at least during

the day. Though seen but once, it helps to wash out State Street

and the engine's soot. One proposes that it be called "God's Drop."

I have said that Walden has no visible inlet nor outlet, but it

is on the one hand distantly and indirectly related to Flint's Pond,

which is more elevated, by a chain of small ponds coming from that

quarter, and on the other directly and manifestly to Concord River,

which is lower, by a similar chain of ponds through which in some

other geological period it may have flowed, and by a little digging,

which God forbid, it can be made to flow thither again. If by

living thus reserved and austere, like a hermit in the woods, so

long, it has acquired such wonderful purity, who would not regret

that the comparatively impure waters of Flint's Pond should be

mingled with it, or itself should ever go to waste its sweetness in

the ocean wave?

Flint's, or Sandy Pond, in Lincoln, our greatest lake and inland

sea, lies about a mile east of Walden. It is much larger, being

said to contain one hundred and ninety-seven acres, and is more

fertile in fish; but it is comparatively shallow, and not remarkably

pure. A walk through the woods thither was often my recreation. It

was worth the while, if only to feel the wind blow on your cheek

freely, and see the waves run, and remember the life of mariners. I

went a-chestnutting there in the fall, on windy days, when the nuts

were dropping into the water and were washed to my feet; and one

day, as I crept along its sedgy shore, the fresh spray blowing in my

face, I came upon the mouldering wreck of a boat, the sides gone,

and hardly more than the impression of its flat bottom left amid the

rushes; yet its model was sharply defined, as if it were a large

decayed pad, with its veins. It was as impressive a wreck as one

could imagine on the seashore, and had as good a moral. It is by

this time mere vegetable mould and undistinguishable pond shore,

through which rushes and flags have pushed up. I used to admire the

ripple marks on the sandy bottom, at the north end of this pond,

made firm and hard to the feet of the wader by the pressure of the

water, and the rushes which grew in Indian file, in waving lines,

corresponding to these marks, rank behind rank, as if the waves had

planted them. There also I have found, in considerable quantities,

curious balls, composed apparently of fine grass or roots, of

pipewort perhaps, from half an inch to four inches in diameter, and

perfectly spherical. These wash back and forth in shallow water on

a sandy bottom, and are sometimes cast on the shore. They are

either solid grass, or have a little sand in the middle. At first

you would say that they were formed by the action of the waves, like

a pebble; yet the smallest are made of equally coarse materials,

half an inch long, and they are produced only at one season of the

year. Moreover, the waves, I suspect, do not so much construct as

wear down a material which has already acquired consistency. They

preserve their form when dry for an indefinite period.

Flint's Pond! Such is the poverty of our nomenclature. What

right had the unclean and stupid farmer, whose farm abutted on this

sky water, whose shores he has ruthlessly laid bare, to give his

name to it? Some skin-flint, who loved better the reflecting

surface of a dollar, or a bright cent, in which he could see his own

brazen face; who regarded even the wild ducks which settled in it as

trespassers; his fingers grown into crooked and bony talons from the

long habit of grasping harpy-like;—so it is not named for me. I

go not there to see him nor to hear of him; who never saw it, who

never bathed in it, who never loved it, who never protected it, who

never spoke a good word for it, nor thanked God that He had made it.

Rather let it be named from the fishes that swim in it, the wild

fowl or quadrupeds which frequent it, the wild flowers which grow by

its shores, or some wild man or child the thread of whose history is

interwoven with its own; not from him who could show no title to it

but the deed which a like-minded neighbor or legislature gave him—

him who thought only of its money value; whose presence perchance

cursed all the shores; who exhausted the land around it, and would

fain have exhausted the waters within it; who regretted only that it

was not English hay or cranberry meadow—there was nothing to

redeem it, forsooth, in his eyes—and would have drained and sold

it for the mud at its bottom. It did not turn his mill, and it was

no privilege to him to behold it. I respect not his labors, his

farm where everything has its price, who would carry the landscape,

who would carry his God, to market, if he could get anything for

him; who goes to market for his god as it is; on whose farm nothing

grows free, whose fields bear no crops, whose meadows no flowers,

whose trees no fruits, but dollars; who loves not the beauty of his

fruits, whose fruits are not ripe for him till they are turned to

dollars. Give me the poverty that enjoys true wealth. Farmers are

respectable and interesting to me in proportion as they are poor—

poor farmers. A model farm! where the house stands like a fungus in

a muckheap, chambers for men horses, oxen, and swine, cleansed and

uncleansed, all contiguous to one another! Stocked with men! A

great grease-spot, redolent of manures and buttermilk! Under a high

state of cultivation, being manured with the hearts and brains of

men! As if you were to raise your potatoes in the churchyard! Such

is a model farm.

No, no; if the fairest features of the landscape are to be named

after men, let them be the noblest and worthiest men alone. Let our

lakes receive as true names at least as the Icarian Sea, where

"still the shore" a "brave attempt resounds."

Goose Pond, of small extent, is on my way to Flint's; Fair

Haven, an expansion of Concord River, said to contain some seventy

acres, is a mile southwest; and White Pond, of about forty acres, is

a mile and a half beyond Fair Haven. This is my lake country.

These, with Concord River, are my water privileges; and night and

day, year in year out, they grind such grist as I carry to them.

Since the wood-cutters, and the railroad, and I myself have

profaned Walden, perhaps the most attractive, if not the most

beautiful, of all our lakes, the gem of the woods, is White Pond;—

a poor name from its commonness, whether derived from the remarkable

purity of its waters or the color of its sands. In these as in

other respects, however, it is a lesser twin of Walden. They are so

much alike that you would say they must be connected under ground.

It has the same stony shore, and its waters are of the same hue. As

at Walden, in sultry dog-day weather, looking down through the woods

on some of its bays which are not so deep but that the reflection

from the bottom tinges them, its waters are of a misty bluish-green

or glaucous color. Many years since I used to go there to collect

the sand by cartloads, to make sandpaper with, and I have continued

to visit it ever since. One who frequents it proposes to call it

Virid Lake. Perhaps it might be called Yellow Pine Lake, from the

following circumstance. About fifteen years ago you could see the

top of a pitch pine, of the kind called yellow pine hereabouts,

though it is not a distinct species, projecting above the surface in

deep water, many rods from the shore. It was even supposed by some

that the pond had sunk, and this was one of the primitive forest

that formerly stood there. I find that even so long ago as 1792, in

a "Topographical Description of the Town of Concord," by one of its

citizens, in the Collections of the Massachusetts Historical

Society, the author, after speaking of Walden and White Ponds, adds,

"In the middle of the latter may be seen, when the water is very

low, a tree which appears as if it grew in the place where it now

stands, although the roots are fifty feet below the surface of the

water; the top of this tree is broken off, and at that place

measures fourteen inches in diameter." In the spring of '49 I

talked with the man who lives nearest the pond in Sudbury, who told

me that it was he who got out this tree ten or fifteen years before.

As near as he could remember, it stood twelve or fifteen rods from

the shore, where the water was thirty or forty feet deep. It was in

the winter, and he had been getting out ice in the forenoon, and had

resolved that in the afternoon, with the aid of his neighbors, he

would take out the old yellow pine. He sawed a channel in the ice

toward the shore, and hauled it over and along and out on to the ice

with oxen; but, before he had gone far in his work, he was surprised

to find that it was wrong end upward, with the stumps of the

branches pointing down, and the small end firmly fastened in the

sandy bottom. It was about a foot in diameter at the big end, and

he had expected to get a good saw-log, but it was so rotten as to be

fit only for fuel, if for that. He had some of it in his shed then.

There were marks of an axe and of woodpeckers on the butt. He

thought that it might have been a dead tree on the shore, but was

finally blown over into the pond, and after the top had become

water-logged, while the butt-end was still dry and light, had

drifted out and sunk wrong end up. His father, eighty years old,

could not remember when it was not there. Several pretty large logs

may still be seen lying on the bottom, where, owing to the

undulation of the surface, they look like huge water snakes in

motion.

This pond has rarely been profaned by a boat, for there is

little in it to tempt a fisherman. Instead of the white lily, which

requires mud, or the common sweet flag, the blue flag (Iris

versicolor) grows thinly in the pure water, rising from the stony

bottom all around the shore, where it is visited by hummingbirds in

June; and the color both of its bluish blades and its flowers and

especially their reflections, is in singular harmony with the

glaucous water.

White Pond and Walden are great crystals on the surface of the

earth, Lakes of Light. If they were permanently congealed, and

small enough to be clutched, they would, perchance, be carried off

by slaves, like precious stones, to adorn the heads of emperors; but

being liquid, and ample, and secured to us and our successors

forever, we disregard them, and run after the diamond of Kohinoor.

They are too pure to have a market value; they contain no muck. How

much more beautiful than our lives, how much more transparent than

our characters, are they! We never learned meanness of them. How

much fairer than the pool before the farmers door, in which his

ducks swim! Hither the clean wild ducks come. Nature has no human

inhabitant who appreciates her. The birds with their plumage and

their notes are in harmony with the flowers, but what youth or

maiden conspires with the wild luxuriant beauty of Nature? She

flourishes most alone, far from the towns where they reside. Talk

of heaven! ye disgrace earth.

Walden

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