The First and Last Journeys of Thoreau, Volume 1/Chapter 2
II
WALKS AND MEDITATIONS
IN NEW YORK
From May 10 to the last week in November, 1843, Thoreau had his home with William Emerson, the elder brother of his Concord friend, at Castleton on Staten Island, where he taught the sons of the family in the mornings, and had much time to himself afterwards. His rambles about the island and his descriptions of the views from its high points were utilized by him in The Week; and his studies in Ossian and Chaucer which appear in that volume were mostly made at Staten Island in the autumn of 1843. He says in the "Wednesday" chapter, relating incidents of his life four years later than the actual Merrimac voyage:
"From an old ruined fort on Staten Island I have loved to watch all day some vessel whose name I had read in the morning through the telegraph-glass, when she first came upon the coast. . . . On Sundays I beheld from some interior hill the long procession of vessels getting to sea,—reaching from the city wharves through the Narrows and past the Hook, quite to the ocean stream." Writing to Emerson, August 7, he adds: "I study the aspects of commerce at its Narrows here, where it passes in review before me; and this seems to be beginning at the right end to understand this Babylon of New York." But he was more interested in literature.
Thus he writes:
The poet is he that hath fat enough, like bears and marmots, to suck his claws o' winters. He feeds on his own marrow. He hybernates in this world till spring breaks. He records a moment of pure life. Who can see these cities and say that there is any life in them? I walked through New York yesterday, and met no real and living person. I love to think of dormice and all the tribe of dormant creatures, who have such a superfluity of life, while man is pining; enveloped in thick folds of life impervious to winter. I love to think, as I walk over the snowy plain, of those happy dreamers that lie in the sod. The poet is a sort of dormouse; early in the autumn he goes into winter-quarters till the sun shall fetch the year about. But most men lead a starved existence, like hawks that would fain keep on the wing and trust to pick up a sparrow now and then.
I hate museums; there is nothing so weighs upon the spirits. They are catacombs of Nature. They are preserved death. One green bud of spring, one willow-catkin, one faint trill from some migrating sparrow, might set the world on its legs again. I know not whether I muse most at the bodies stuffed with cotton and sawdust, or those stuffed with bowels and fleshy fibre outside the cases. The life that is in a single green weed is of more worth than all this death. They are very much like the written history of the world, and I read Rollin and Ferguson with the same feeling.
It is one great and rare merit of the old tragedy that it says something. The words slide away very fast, but toward some conclusion. It has to do with things and not words; and the reader feels as if he were advancing. It does not seem to make much odds what the author has to say at this distance of time, if he only deliver himself of it in a downright and manly way. We like Marlowe because he is so plain-spoken and direct, and does not waste the time.
I think that the mythological system, interwoven as it is so mysteriously and perfectly with the astronomical, points to a time when a grander and mightier genius inhabited the earth than now. There is a grandeur and perfection about this scheme which match with the architecture of the heavens themselves.
We have never conceived how many natural phenomena would be revealed to a simpler and more natural life. Rain, wind, sunshine, day and night, would be very different to experience if we were always true. We cannot deceive the ground under our feet. We never try. But we do not treat each other with the same sincerity. How much more wretched would the life of man be if there was the same formality and reserve between him and his intercourse with Nature that there is in human society!
It is a strange world we live in, with this incessant dream of friendship and love; where is any? Genius cannot do without these; it pines and withers. I believe that the office of music is to remind us continually of the reality and necessity of the fine elements of love and friendship. One mood always forgets another, and till we have loved we have not imagined the heights of love. Love is an incessant inspiration. By the dews of love the arid desert of life is made as fragrant and blooming as a paradise.
The world waits yet to see man act greatly and divinely upon man. What are social influences as yet? The poor human flower would hold up its drooping head at once, if this sun should shine on it. That is the dyspepsia with which all men ail.
In purer, more intellectual moods we translate our gross experiences into fine moralities. Sometimes we would fain see events as merely material,—wooden, rigid, dead; but again we are reminded that we actually inform them with better life, by which they live; that they are the slaves and creatures of our conduct. When dull and sensual, I believe they are corn-stalks good for cattle,—neither more nor less. The laws of Nature are science; but, in an enlightened moment, they are morality and modes of divine life. In a medium intellectual state they are æsthetics. What makes us think that time has lapsed is that we have relapsed.
Strictly speaking, there can be no criticism of poetry other than a separating of that which is poetry from that which is not,—a detecting of falsehood. From the remotest antiquity we detect in the literature of all nations, here and there, words of a loftier tone and purport than are required to transact the daily business of life. As Scott says, they float down the sea of time like the fragments of a parted wreck,—sounds which echo up among the stars rather than through the valleys of earth; and yet are heard plainly enough, to remind men of other spheres of life and activity. Perhaps I may say that I have never had a deeper and more memorable experience of life in its great serenity, than when listening to the trill of a tree-sparrow among the huckleberry bushes after a shower. It is a communication to which a man must attend in solitude and silence, and may never be able to tell to his brother. The least sensual life is that experienced through pure senses. We sometimes hear, and the dignity of that sense is asserted.
I am winding up my music-box; and, as I pause, meanwhile the strains burst forth like a pent-up fountain of the middle ages. Music is strangely allied to the past. Every era has its strain. It awakens and colors my memories.
The first sparrow of spring! The year beginning with younger hope than ever. The first silvery warblings heard over the bare and dank fields, as if the last flakes of winter tinkled as they fell. What, then, are histories, chronologies, and all written revelations? Flakes of warm sunlight fall on the congealed fields. The brooks and rills sing carols and glees for the spring. The marsh-hawk already seeks the first stirring life that awakes. The sough of melting snow is heard in all dells, and on all the hillsides, and by the sunny river-banks; and the ice dissolves in the ponds. The earth sends forth, as it were, an inward heat; not yellow like the sun, but green is the color of her flames; and the grass flames up on the warm hill sides as her spring fire. Methinks the sight of the first sod of fresh grass in the spring would make the reformer reconsider his schemes; the faithless and despairing man revive. Grass is a symbol of perpetual growth,—its blade like a long green ribbon, streaming from the sod into the summer, checked indeed by the frost, but anon pushing on again, lifting its last year's spear of withered hay with the fresh life below. I have seen when early in spring the clumps of grass stood with their three inches of new green upholding their withered spears of the last autumn. It is as steady a growth as the rill which leaps out of the ground,—indeed it is almost identical with that; for in the vigorous fertile days of June when the rills are dry, the grass-blades are their only channels. And from year to year, the herds drink this green stream, and the mower cuts from the out-welling supply,—what the several needs require.
So the human life but dies down to the surface of Nature; but puts forth its green blade to eternity. When the ground is completely bare of snow, and a few warm days have dried its surface, it is pleasant to compare the faint tender signs of the infant year, just peeping forth, with the stately beauty of the withered vegetation which has withstood the winter. The various thistles which have not yet sown their seeds; the graceful reeds and rushes, whose winter is more gay and stately than their summer, as if not till then was their beauty ripe. I never tire of admiring their arching, drooping, and sheaf-like tops. It is like summer to our winter memories, and one of the forms which art loves to perpetuate,—wild oats perchance, and Life Everlasting, whose autumn has now arrived. These unexhausted granaries of the winter with their seeds entertain the earliest birds.
We are obliged to respect that custom which stamps the loaf of bread with the sheaf of wheat and the sickle. Men have come at length, after so many centuries, to regard these gifts properly. The gift of bread even to the poor is perhaps better received than any other! more religiously given and taken, and is not liable to be a stone. The manner in which men consider husbandry is marked, and worthy of the race. They have slowly learned thus much. Let the despairing race of men know that there is in Nature no sign of decay, but universal uninterrupted vigor. All waste and ruin has a speedy period. Who ever detected a wrinkle on her brow, or a weather seam, or a gray hair on her crown, or a rent in her garment? No one sees Nature who sees her not as young and fresh, without history. We may have such intercourse with her to-day, as we imagine to constitute the employment of gods. We live here to have intercourse with rivers, forests, mountains,—beasts and men. How few do we see conversing with these things!
We think the ancients were foolish who worshipped the sun. I would worship it forever if I had grace to do so. Observe how a New England farmer moves in the midst of Nature,—his potato and grain fields; and consider how poets have dreamed that the more religious shepherd lived; and ask which was the wiser, which made the highest use of Nature? As if the Earth were made to yield pumpkins mainly! Did you ever observe that the seasons were ripening another kind of fruit?
Men have a strange taste for death who prefer to go to a museum to behold the cast-off garments of life, rather than handle the life itself. Where is the proper herbarium, the cabinet of shells, the museum of skeletons, but in the meadow where the flowers bloomed, or by the seaside where the tide cast up the fish, or on the hills where the beast laid down his life? Where the skeleton of the traveller reposes in the grass,—there may it profitably be studied. What right has mortal man to parade any skeleton on its legs, when we see the gods have unloosed its sinews? what right to imitate heaven with his wires, or to stuff that body with sawdust, which Nature has decreed shall return to dust again?
All the fishes that swim in the ocean can hardly atone for the wrong done by stuffing and varnishing and encasing under glass the relics of one inhabitant of the deep. Go to Italy or Egypt if you would behold these things, where bones are the natural product of the soil which bears tombs and catacombs. Would you live in a dried specimen of a world,—a pickled world? Embalming is a sin against heaven and earth,—against heaven who has recalled the soul, and set free the servile elements; against earth, who is thus robbed of her dust.
I have had my right-perceiving senses so disturbed in these haunts, as for long to mistake a veritable living man, in the attitude of repose, musing, like myself, as the time and place require, for a stuffed specimen. So are men degraded in consequence.
There must be all degrees of life, from a stone—if we can find any starting-point— to God. There are very few fibres in the stone, very little organism. Sometimes we are conscious of the simple, but slow and insensate, life in which it lives. We are mere pudding-stone or scoriæ in the world. But suddenly we may be informed with new life, and pass through all the scales of being, up to the most complex and nearest to God,—furnished with countless nerves, and imbibing more and more of vital air or inspiration.
How suddenly and intently do all the eras which we call history awaken and glimmer in us,—all the dynasties that have passed away are still passing in our memory. There is room for Alexander to march, and for Hannibal to conquer. The grand three-act drama of past, present, and future, where does its scene lie but within the compass of this same private life which beats within its ribbed walls?
We may say that our knowledge is infinite, for we have never discovered its limits; and what we know of infinity is a part of our knowledge still.
History is the record of my experience. I can read only my own story, never a syllable of another man's.
Gleams of life and a wise serenity pass over us from time to time, like flakes of sunlight over the fields in cloudy weather. In some happier moment, when more sap flows in the withered stalk of my life, I recognize myself as a part of the hour, and Syria and India stretch away from my present as they do in history.
Daniel, the poet, does really sometimes deserve praise for his moderation, and you find him risen into poetry before you know it. Some strong sense appears in his epistles; but you have to remember so often in what age he wrote, and yet that Shakespeare was his contemporary. In his style, and what may be called the tricks of the trade, he is really in advance of his age,—much of it.
He strikes us like a retired scholar who has a small vein of poesy, which he is ambitious to work. He would keep himself shut up in the house two whole months together, they say.
It is hard to read a contemporary poet critically; for we go within the shallowest verse and inform it with all the life and promise of this day. We are such a near and kind and knowing audience as he will never have again. We go within the fane of the temple and hear the faint music of the worshippers; but posterity will have to stand without and consider the vast proportions and grandeur of the building. It will be solidly and conspicuously great and beautiful, for the multitudes who pass at a distance, as well as for the few pilgrims who enter in to its shrine.
The poet will prevail and be popular inspite of his faults, and in spite of his beauties too; he will be careful only that you feel the hammer hit, without regarding the form of its head. No man is enough his own overseer to take cognizance of all the particulars which impress men in his actions. The impression will always proceed from a more general influence than he can ever dream of. We may count our steps, but we must not count our breaths. We must be careful not to mix consciousness with the vital functions.
May the gods deliver us from too critical an age,—when cross-eyed, near-sighted men are born, who, instead of looking out and bathing their eyes in the deep heaven, introvert them, and think to walk erect and not to stumble by watching their feet, and not by preserving pure hearts.
What an impulse was given, some time or other, to the principle of vegetation that now nothing can stay it! I understand why one said he thought he could write an epic to be called The Leaf. What is a leaf, and how much does it cover? In the veins and fibres of the leaf see the future tree,—the grove. It is the print of Nature's footstep,—this form. See how Nature works and produces leaves. It is her symbol, her standard, emblem, device; where she has been she leaves her patterns. Whether in ice or air, vegetable or coral, she works the same figure. Set away a jar in the dark, and mould-leaves make haste to grow over it; and "clothe the naked" is the omnipresent and everlasting law. Nature has only to breathe on the glass and the form of leaves appears. Nature loves these forms and has not tired of repeating them for how many centuries.
We often hear the expression "the natural life of man." We should rather say "the unnatural life of man." It is rare indeed to find a man who has not long ago departed out of Nature. We only have a transient glimpse of some solitary feature in a serener moment. If anything ails a man so that he does not perform his functions,—especially if his digestion be poor,—though he has considerable nervous strength still, what does he do? why he sets about reforming the world. If he has failed in all undertakings hitherto, learned that life is short and errare est humanum, what does he do? Why, he reforms the world. If he has committed some heinous sin and repented; that is, having done it, is now calling to mind that he has done it,—what does he do? Why, he sets about reforming the world. Do you hear? The world is going to be reformed,—formed again, made over,—formed rather, made for once.—Well, well, think away, old boy.—But wait till I've explained it.—So long gone unformed, or rather uninformed! Do you hear it, ye Patagonians, ye Tartars, ye Néz Percés? The world is going to be reformed or rather formed once for all,—presto! change! Methinks I hear the glad tidings already.
Publish it over the green prairies of the West, over the silent pampas of the South American continent, and the parched African deserts, and the wide-stretching Siberian versts; through the populous Indian and Chinese villages,—along the Indus, Ganges, and Hydaspes!
I have seen such a hollow, glazed life as on a painted floor,—which some couples lead; with their basement, parlor with folding doors, a few visitors cards and the latest Annual; such life only as there is in the shells on the mantelpiece. The very children cry with less inwardness and depth than they do in the cottage. There they do not live, it is there they reside. There is no hearth in the centre of that house. The atmosphere of the apartments is not yet peopled with the spirits of its inhabitants; but the voices sound hollow and echo, and we see only the paint and the paper.
Through all his vice and deformity the ineradicable health of man is seen. The superabundant mirth that will be seen in any All-Fools' Day, though the mob be composed of the lame, the blind, and the infirm, the poor and vicious; yet the innocent mirth will put a new face on the matter.
[Here follows a series of semi-comic epitaphs:]
EPITAPH ON PURSY
Traveller, this is no prison,
He is not dead, but risen.
Then is there need
To fill his grave;
And, truth to save,
That we should read,—
In Pursy's favor
Here lies the engraver.
This and the following lines appear to be Thoreau's own composition,—suggested, perhaps, by some collection of epitaphs he had found in one of the New York libraries, where he had been industriously reading Donne, Daniel, Quarles, Lovelace, etc., and was soon to read fragments of Ossianic poetry, on which he comments in The Week.
EPITAPH ON THE WORLD
Here lies the body of this world,
Whose soul, alas! to hell is hurled.
Its golden youth long since was past,
Its silver manhood went as fast,
And iron age drew on at last;
'Tis vain its character to tell,
The several fates which it befell.
What year it died, when 'twill arise,
We only know that here it lies.
Donne was not a poet, but a man of strong sense,—a sturdy English thinker, full of conceits and whimsicalities; hammering away at his subject, be it eulogy or epitaph, sonnet or satire, with the patience of a day-laborer, without the least taste, but with an occasional fine distinction and poetic utterance of a high order. He was rather Doctor Donne than the poet Donne. He gropes for the most part. His letters are perhaps best.
Lovelace is what his name expresses,—of slight material to make a poet's fame. His goings and comings are of no great account. His taste is not so much love of the good as fear of the bad, though, in one or two instances, he has written fearlessly and memorably.
Though I am old enough to have discovered that the dreams of youth are not to be realized in this state of existence, yet I think it would be the next greatest happiness always to be allowed to look under the eyelids of Time and contemplate the Perfect steadily, with the clear understanding that I do not attain to it.
Though music agitates only a few waves of air, yet it affords an ample field for the imagination. It is a solid ground and palpitating heaven. Science distinguishes its base and its air. There are few things so evanescent and intangible as music; it is like light and heat, in physics,—still mooted themes. In æsthetics music occupies the same mysterious place as light and electricity in physics. It seems vain to ask ourselves what music is. If we ponder the question, it is soon changed to, What are we? It is everything but itself. It adorns all things and remains hidden itself. It is unsuspectedly the light which colors all the landscape. It is, as it were, the most subtle ether, the most volatile gas. It is a sovereign electuary which enables us to see all things.
You must store up none of the life in your gift; it is as fatal as to husband your breath. We must live all our life.
What shall we make of the wonderful beauty of Nature, which enchants us all our youth, and is remembered till our death?—the love we bear to the least woody fibre, or earthly particle, or ray of light? Is not here the true anatomy, where we study our own elements and composition? Why should man love the sunflower, and the color of the walls and trees?
I believe that there is an ideal or real Nature, infinitely more perfect than the actual, as there is an ideal life of man; else where are the glorious summers which in vision sometimes visit my brain? When Nature ceases to be supernatural to a man, what will he do then? Of what worth is human life if its actions are no longer to have this sublime and unexplored scenery? Who will build a cottage and dwell in it with enthusiasm if not in the Elysian fields?
We must look to the West for the growth of a new literature, manners, architecture, etc. Already there is more language there, which is the growth of the soil, than here; good Greekish words there are in abundance,—good because necessary and expressive; "diggings," for instance. If you analyze a Greek word you will not get anything simpler, truer, more poetical; and many others, also, which now look so ram-slang-like and colloquial when printed, another generation will cherish and affect as genuine American and standard. Read some western stump-speech, and though it be untoward and rude enough, there will not fail to be some traits of genuine eloquence, and some original and forcible statement, which will remind you of the great orators of antiquity. I am inclined to read the stump-speeches of the West already rather than the Beauties of our Atlantic orators.
Here is an extract from the speech of a man named Strong, whom the reporter "understood to live somewhere over near the Mississippi, in the mining country. He had a pitcher of whiskey brought into the court room and set on the table before him, from which he drank long and frequently." It was a speech in defence of a member of the Legislative Council of the Territory (Wisconsin), who had shot a fellow-member in a dispute in the Council Chamber. This is a part of his address to the jury:
"Gentlemen of the Jury: I don't know what your religion is, nor I don't care. I hain't got much myself, though Jesus Christ was a mighty good man. Now, gentlemen, I am one of those kind of men who live pretty fast. I believe men generally live over about the same surface: some live long and narrow, and others live broad and short."
Adverting to an old gentleman, one of the witnesses, he says:
"I would not like to charge him with perjuring himself, because he and I were members of the Council together. We were tolerable good friends, though always quarrelling. He was always on one side; he was just like the handle of this pitcher," taking up the pitcher and pointing to the handle. "Here, gentlemen, this was him, and here," pointing to the nose of the pitcher, "this was the estimable Moses, and these were our relative positions. I believe we never got so near as to drink a glass of water together, but I'll drink his health now anyhow," catching up the pitcher, and pouring down a strangler of whiskey. "As for the murdered man," he said, "he is dead; there is no doubt of it; he is dead! dead! dead as a smelt; in the language of Tippecanoe and Tyler too, 'he is a gone coon.'" And before he concluded he reeled with intoxication. And the speech of the Secretary of the State which followed is said to have been "dignified, able, and suited to the occasion, as was, also, the closing argument for the prosecution."
Perhaps it is needless to add that the defendant was acquitted.
It is remarkable how language, as well as all things else, records only life and progress, never death and decay. We are obliged often to contradict ourselves to express these, as the tree requires the vital energy to push off its dead leaves. We have to say, for instance, "grows or waxes less."
So the poet only records the actions of the coward as well as those of the hero, and of the unjust as well as the just.
When Ossian personifies the sun and addresses him, it is unnecessary to suppose, as his editor does, that he believed the sun to be an "animated being," like the deer or lion. Wherein are we more believers in a God than the heathen, with their mysterious magic rites? as if one name were not as good as another. It is time to have done with these follies. I confess to more sympathy with the Druidical and Scandinavian, as handed down to us, than with the actual creeds of any church in Christendom. They have been reproached for worshipping the ghosts of their fathers rather than any unsubstantial forms; but do we not worship the ghosts of our fathers?
It is the characteristic of all religion and wisdom to substitute being for seeming, and to detect the anima or soul in everything. It is merely an evidence of inner faith when God is practically believed to be omnipresent. None of the heathen are too heathenish for me but those who hold no intercourse with their god. I love the vigorous faith of those heathen who sternly believed something. I say to these modern believers, "Don't interrupt those men's prayers." How much more do the moderns know about God and human life than the ancients? the English than the Chaldæans, or than the Tartars? Does English theology contain the recent discoveries?
Ossian feels and asserts the dignity of the bard. His province is to record the deeds of heroes.
I straightway seize the unfutile tales
And send them down in faithful verse.
An heroic deed is his star in the night. The simple, impressive majesty of human life as seen through his mists, is that Ossian we know and remember. Who has discovered any higher morality than this? any truer philosophy?—a simple, brave, persevering life adorned with heroic deeds.
The reserved strength of Ossian, and moral superiority to most poets of what is styled a barbarous era, appears in the fact that he can afford to pass over the details of the battle, leaving the heroism to be imagined from what has already been described of the character of the hero, while he hastens to hint at the result. Most heroic poets of a rude period delight mainly in the mere sound of blows and the flowing of blood. But Ossian has already described the result of the battle when he has painted the character of the heroes.
See an example in Callon and Colvala:
When I heard who the damsel was
Frequent dropped the warrior's tears.
I blessed the radiant beam of youth,
And bade the bard advance.
Dweller of the mountain cave,
Why should Ossian speak of the dead?
They are now forgot in their land,
And their tombs are seen no more, etc.;
or in Ca-Lodin:
We engaged, and the enemy won;
or in Croma:
We fought along the narrow vale;
The enemy fled; Romarr fell by my sword.
No poet has done such justice to the island of foggy fame.
What a contrast between the stern and desolate poetry of Ossian and that of Chaucer and the early English bards! The bard indeed seems to have lost much of his dignity and the sacredness of his profession. He does not impose upon us. He has lost all his sternness and bardic furor, and but conceives the deed which the other has prepared to perform. It is a step from the forest and crag to the fireside,—from the hut of the Gael or Stonehenge with its circles of stones to the house of the Englishman. No hero stands at the door, prepared to break forth into song or heroic actions, but a homely Englishman who has begun to cultivate the comforts of a roof; or a studious gentleman who practises the art of song. He possibly may not receive us. There is not room for all mankind about his hearth. He does not love all things, but a few.
I see there a yellow fireside blaze, and hear the crackling fuel, and expect such heroism as consists with a comfortable life.
In the oldest poems only the most simple and enduring features of humanity are seen; such essential parts of a man as Stonehenge exhibits of a temple. We see the circles of stone, and the upright shafts of the man; we cannot tell whether this was civilized or savage; truly it was neither. For these simple, necessary traits are before and after civilization and are superior to it. All the culture that had a beginning must in the world's history have an end. It is like the fashions of France; like the tricks taught to a few tame bears and monkeys. How wise we are! how ignorant the savage! we with our penknife with a hundred blades, he with his gnarled club. Ask his senses if they are not well fed, if his life is not well earned.
When we come to the pleasant English verse it seems as if the storm had all cleared away, and it were never to thunder and lighten any more. These stern events are traditionary.
We darkly behold (in the poetry of the obscurest eras) the forms of men,—such as can be seen afar through the mist,—no costume, no dialect, but for language you have a tongue itself. As for costume—we can dispense with that, the skins of beasts or bark of trees are always to be had,—what if the man is naked?
The figurative parts of Ossian are like Isaiah and the Psalms,—the same use is made of gaunt Nature. He uses but few and simple images; but they are drawn from such objects as are familiar to men in all ages. To the poet who can use them greatly in his song, and make them convey his thoughts, the elements and stars seem to be nearer and more friendly. And other men involuntarily relinquish to him somewhat of their claim on Nature. The sun and the sea and the mists are his more than ours.
Let two stand on the highway, and it shall be known that the sun belongs to one rather than to the other; the one will be found to claim, while the other simply retains, possession. The winds blow for one more than another; and on numerous occasions the uncertain or unworthy possessors silently relinquish their right in them. The most doubtful claimants have paid their money and taken a deed of their birthright, but the real owner is forever known to all men wherever he goes, and no one disputes his claim. For he cannot help using and deriving the profit, while to the dishonest possessor an estate is as idle as his parchment deed of it, and that is all he has purchased. Wherever the owner goes, inanimate things will fly to him and adhere.
What a fame was it that these Ossianic bards and heroes sought? To Fingal, Swaran says:
The hunter coming from the hills,
As he rests on a tomb, will say:
Here the mighties, Fingal and Swaran,
Joined battle, with their hundred bands.
Thus will the weary hunter speak
And our fame will abide forever.
In Pindar the same importance is attached to fame. Next to the performance of noble deeds is the renown which springs from them.
Ossian is like Homer and like the Indian. His duans are like the seasons of the year in northern latitudes.
Who are the inhabitants of London and New York but savages who have built cities, and forsaken for a season hunting and war? Who are the Blackfeet and the Tartars but citizens roaming the plains and dwelling in wigwams and tents?
When it comes to poetry, the most polished era finds nothing wanting or that offends its taste in the real poetry of the rudest.
I must confess I fear that the Muse has stooped in her flight when I come to the literature of civilized nations and eras. We then first hear of different ages of poetry; of Augustan and Elizabethan ages; but the poetry of runic monuments is for every age. The whole difference seems to be that the poet has come within doors. The old bard stood without. How different are Homer and Ossian from Dryden and Pope and Gray, and even Milton and Shakespeare! Hosts of warriors earnest for battle could not mistake nor dispense with the ancient bards. There was no danger of their being overlooked by their generations. They spoke but as they acted. Take one of our modern, well arranged poems, and expose it to the elements, as Stonehenge has been exposed. Let the rains beat on it and the winds shake it, and how will its timbers look at the end of a few centuries? I like to hear, when they dig beneath some mysterious flat stone far under the mould, of the few huge bones they find and the sword which modern men cannot wield.
When the stern old bard makes his heroes weep, they seem to weep from excess of very strength and not from weakness. It is the perspiration of a monument in the heat of summer; it is as a sacrifice—a libation—of fertile natures. We hardly know that tears have been shed. Only babes and heroes may weep.
Their pleasure and their sorrow are made of the same stuff as are the rain and the snow, the rainbow and the mist.
Pastoral poetry belongs to a highly civilized and refined era. It is the pasture as seen from the hall window—the shepherd of the manor. Its sheep are never actually shorn nor die of the rot. The towering, misty imagination of the poet has descended into the plain and become a lowlander, and keeps flocks and herds. Between the hunting of men and boars and the feeding of sheep is a long interval. Really the shepherd's pipe is no wax-compacted reed, but made of pipe-clay, and nothing but smoke issues from it. Nowadays the sheep take care of themselves for the most part.
The older and grander poems are characterized by the few elements which distinguish the life they describe. Man stands on the moor between the stars and the earth,—shrunk to the mere bones and sinews. It is the uncompounded, everlasting life which does not depart with the flesh. The civilized and the uncivilized eras chronicle but the fluctuating condition; the summer or winter lean upon the past estate of man.
Our summer of English poesy, which, like the Greek and Latin before it, seems now well advanced toward its fall, is laden with the fruit and foliage of that season, with all the bright tints of autumn; but the winter of age will scatter its myriad clustering and shading leaves, with their autumnal tints, and leave only the desolate and fibrous boughs to sustain the snow and rime, and creak in the winter's wind.
Man simply lives out his years by the vigor of his constitution. He survives storms and the spear of his foes, and performs a few heroic deeds, and then the cairns answer questions of him. The Scandinavian is not encumbered with modern fashions, but stands free and alert, a naked warrior. Civilization does not much more than dress men. It puts rings on the fingers and watches in the side-pocket.
What do inventors invent for the naked feet and hands? They often only mend the gloves and the shoes which they wear. They make cloth of a finer texture, but they do not toughen the skin.
So when the ancient bards come to narrative and description, they describe character only, not costume, which may change. They knew how to threaten; their threats might have deterred a man. Now there are no such things as vengeance and terror.
When I remember the tumultuous popular joy of our cattle-show mobs, how they rushed hither and thither, with license and without license, with appetite for the huge delights of the day; now hastening with boisterous speed after the inspired negro, from whose larynx there issued a strain which made the very streets vibrate and curl like a banner, and the sky throb and palpitate with sympathy; as if the melodies of all Congo and the Guinea Coast had irrupted into our streets; now to see the procession of a hundred yoke of oxen, all as august and grave as Osiris; now to gaze at the droves of neat cattle, and milch cows, all as unspotted and πότνια as Isis or Io,—I cannot help thinking of the feast of Adonis at Sestos and Abydos.
Such as had no loves at all,—
Went lovers home from this great festival.
So enriched and reinforced did men go home from this our fair.
My life is far among those clouds yonder, as if they hung over the land where I would fain dwell. I see its atmosphere through the distant boughs of the elms.
The grandeur of the similes is another feature which characterizes great poetry. The poet seems to speak a gigantic and universal language. Its images and pictures ever occupy much space in the landscape as if they could only be seen from mountains and plains with a wide horizon, or across arms of the sea. They were not slight and transient like the stains on a whitewashed wall. Oivana says to the spirit of her father, "gray-haired Torkil of Torne," seen in the skies:
Thou glidest away like receding ships.
So when the hosts of Fingal and Starne joined battle, the bard thus describes the approach of the enemy,—
With murmurs loud like rivers far,
The race of Torne hither moved.
Ossian expresses his wonder simply. His wonder is as simple and strictly said as his life is single and of few elements.
When his hero dies he allows us a short misty glance into futurity, yet into as clear and unclouded a life as his first. When in Carbodia, MacRoine is slain,—
The hero fell lifeless, etc.
There are but few objects to distract these heroes' sight. Their life is as uncluttered as the course of the stars, which they gaze after.
The wrathful kings on cairns apart, etc.
Through the grim nights and the cloudy days, with stern hope, the bard and warrior wait but for one heroic deed. The earth is a vast arena,—a sand plain or heath for heroic actions. The bard is sufficiently great and true to himself to make his thought take place of everything else. There is for the time no other philosophy, no other poetry.
The philosophy of Ossian is contained in the opening of the third duan of Ca-Lodin,—
Whence have sprung the things that are, etc.
The only vicious and immoral is an unsuccessful and ignoble warrior. He dies and is forgotten,—
Strangers come to build a tower, etc.
Again the philosophy of life and the simple forcible statement of the thought,—
Why shouldst thou build a hall of pomp,
Son of many-winged time? etc.
The size and grandeur of the machinery is again illustrated by,—
A thousand orators inclined,
To hear the lay of Fingal.
Even Ossian, the hero-bard, seems to regret the strength of his race,—
How beauteous, mighty man, was thy mind, etc.
The Death of the Sun combines many of the peculiarities of Ossian.
Their tears remind us of a weeping sinew. Crodar, blind and old, receives Ossian, son of Fingal, who comes to aid him in war,—
My eyes have failed, etc.,
says he. Here are more of Ossian's natural and vigorous similes. Cudulin is fighting,—
As rills that gush, etc.
And again Cudulin retires from fight,—
Dragging his spear behind, etc.
When a hero dies the bard utters a short biblical sentence, which will serve for epitaph or biography,—
The weak will find, etc.
And so of Fillan's tears. He weeps like a hero,—
Fillan was no veteran in war, etc.
The ancient blinded heroes passed the remainder of their days listening to the lays of the bards, and feeling the weapons which laid their enemies low.
The reward of the hero is to be remembered,—
A generation comes like a rapid flood, etc.
They move by vast strides,—
Islands dart out of our way,
And hide them behind our fleet.
When the hero falls, it is still in the midst of peaceful Nature,—
Stretched across a purling rill, etc.
I have heard a painter, who complained of the difficulty of separating the reflection in still water truly, advised to make ripples where he did not want reflections!
These studies and meditations close thus, after Thoreau's return to Concord:
I believe that no law of mechanics, which is observed and obeyed from day to day, is better established in the experience of men than this,—that love never fails to be repaid in its own coin; that just as high as the waters rise in one vessel just so high they will rise in every other into which there is communication, either direct or under ground or from above the stars. Our love is, besides, some such independent fluid element in respect to our vessels, which still obeys only its own, and not our laws, by any means, without regard to the narrow limits to which we would confine it.
Nor is the least object too small for the greatest love to be bestowed upon.
[From a later Manuscript.]
The end of a celestial marriage, however, as I dream, is not the propagation of the species, but it is the end for which the species is continued,—the maturation of the species. The species is not continued for the sake of continuance. Even by a terrestrial marriage man serves himself mainly, though the ends of nature are being served through him. Nature provides many seeds and generations because of many failures. The only excuse for reproduction is improvement. Nature abhors repetition. The ultimate fruit of a tree is not a seed, but much more a flower, or rather a truly flourishing tree. If the earth began with spring it will end with summer.
The feminine is the mother of the masculine, and the latter still draws nourishment from the breast of the former. The tenderness and affection of woman, her mild prophetic eye, her finer instincts, exert an influence on man from which he is never weaned. So that in this sense the Umbilical cord is never cut, though the apron-string may be. Her oracular nature still broods over man. His wisdom, compared with her fertile and dewy instinct, is like the lightning which issues from the bosom of the cloud.
Woman is a nature older than I, and commanding from me a vast amount of veneration, like Nature. She is my mother at the same time that she is my sister, so that she is at any rate an elder sister. I cannot imagine a woman no older than I. Methinks that I am younger than aught that I associate with. The youngest child is more than my coeval.
My most intimate acquaintance with woman has been a sisterly relation, or at most a catholic virgin-mother relation,—not that it has always been free from the suspicion of a lower sympathy. She has exerted the influence of a goddess over me; cultivating my gentler humane nature; cultivating and preserving purity, innocence, truth.
We lose our friends when we cease to be friends, not when they die; then they depart; then we are sad and go into mourning for them. Death is no separation compared with that which takes place when we cease to have confidence in those with whom we have walked in confidence. When we cease to love one whom we had loved; when we know him no more; when we look for him and cannot find him,—how completely is he departed! No things can be farther asunder than friends estranged; our courses inevitably diverge, and we feel the fibres being rent. What can restore him to life for me? This miracle was never performed. Shall I never see him more? What fate has driven a wedge between us? Friends estranged are buried alive to one another; we miss them from their accustomed place. Let us endeavor, then, to save the lives of our friends as long as we can. Two were not made to stand in company always. Where are they who were once our friends, but are so no longer? Where are we whose friend is dead? are we in this world?
If you would know what it is to be separated from those we love, think not of death, but of estrangement. Whom we have once seen we shall never see again; whom we have never seen we shall see anon. Friends meet and part as when two pilgrims, who have walked together many days in sweet society, sharing the adventures of the road, with mutual aid and entertainment, reach a point where their courses diverge, and linger there awhile. And then, bidding each other farewell, one takes this road and the other that; and as they withdraw, they mutually turn to wave a last adieu, and watch each other's retreating figures, until at last they are concealed from one another by a bend in the road; and the sun goes down behind the mountains. And they are sorry to part, leaving each alone; but their duty calls them different ways. And one climbs upon a rock that he may see his late fellow-traveller a little longer, and yearns that they should once more communicate freely with each other their thoughts and feelings.
When our companion fails us we transfer our love instantaneously to a worthy object,—as the sunlight which gilds the walls and fences, when these are removed falls instantaneously on the mountains and domes and spires in the horizon. . . . Actually I have no friend. I am very distant from all actual persons,—and yet my experience of friendship is so real and engrossing that I sometimes find myself speaking aloud to the ideal friend.
A friend in need is not a friend indeed,—for all the world are our friends then. What we need is a friend. He is not our friend who visits us only when we are sick, but he whose preventive visits keep us well,—who never lets us need. . . . I delight to come to my bearing, not walk in procession with pomp and parade, but to walk with the builder of the universe; not to live in this restless, nervous, bustling, trivial nineteenth century, but to stand or sit thoughtfully while it goes by.
We hesitate to call our friends our brothers and our sisters; for the name attaches but to a part of them; for they are more than half ideal. It would be taking names in vain. We are not aware of the uses to which we put each other.
If I valued my friends less, I should visit them oftener. There are few to whom Friendship is a sufficiently sacred relation. Most are prepared for a vulgar quarrel and truce. I cherish so many fancies about it, and so religiously, that I never get to speech on the subject. I have been grieved at the readiness with which my friend could say that I was offended. I had tenderly cherished the flower of our friendship till one day my friend treated it as a weed. It did not survive the shock, but drooped and withered from that hour. A friend avoids the subject of Friendship in conversation. It is a very sacred relation, which is not liable to a vulgar difference. He whom we associate with our daily affairs is our acquaintance. He whom we associate with our social joys is what the world commonly calls our friend. He whom we associate with our Elysium is beloved by us.
I have a friend whom I heartily love, whom I would always treat tenderly; who indeed is so transfigured to me that I dare not identify my ideal with the actual. The fit time has never come for that. If I could believe that my friend would tenderly and wisely enough sustain the declaration of my love, I should make him privy to my dreams. But I fear that some more terrestrial cousin may be introduced; that if ideals can thus commingle, actuals will begin to obtrude themselves. I am afraid to contrast my dreams so rudely with the actual day,—to tell them by daylight. I was never so near my friend when he was bodily present as when he was absent. And yet I am indirectly accused by this friend of coldness and disingenuousness, when I cannot speak for warmth and sincerity.
"Ask and ye shall receive;" but asking is not merely the form of asking: we must ask as purely and undesignedly as we would that another should give.
My so-called friend comes near being my greatest enemy; for, when he deceives me more than any, he betrays as an enemy has no opportunity of doing.
There is no kind of cheating, no dishonesty, so fatal to all society as the disposition to get more than you give; to get the whole of your friend while you give him but a part of yourself; to meet him with designs upon him who comes without designs; to make a conscious use of that relation whose fruit surpasses utility, and inspires to unconscious nobleness. That man is not my friend who for any reason withholds from me what I bestow on him.
One man wishes me to be the friend of his whim. I'll be the inveterate, relentless foe of it whenever it comes in my way. One wishes me to prove to him that I am his friend, and then he says he will be mine. How can I prove it to him in such a case? how can I prove what is not true?
I am more reinforced when I renounce entirely a hesitating and unreliable friendship than when I surround myself with such allies. My friend died long ago; why follow a body to the graveyard? why toll the bell to-day? his knell has died away. There still remain his clothes; shall we have a third service when they are decayed?
When we separate finally and completely from one who has been our friend, we separate with content, without grief, as gently and naturally as night passes into day. But grief and pain take place when the separation is partial and transient, when there is a lingering sympathy.
From this high discourse of Love, Marriage, and Friendship, the exact date of which in its final form cannot well be determined, but probably just before the publication of The Week in 1849, we pass now to an essay in a lighter mood, which Thoreau himself, in the Manuscript before me, entitles,—
CONVERSATION[1]
Talking is very singular. Men and women get together and then talk. They cannot even stay long together without talking, according to the rules of polite society. Not that they communicate what they have to say, or do anything natural or important to be done; but by common consent they fall to using the invention of speech, and make a conversation good or bad; they say things, first this one and then that one. They express their opinions,—nor must long periods of silence occur.
Sometimes they go over many thousand miles of land and water for this purpose. Occasionally I have seen a hundred men and women at once, where conversations were advertised, so wholly given over to talk that they seemed to forget that they had other organs than tongues and ears; as if they could eject themselves like bits of packthread from the tip of the tongue. It is very much as if the trees next me, when I went into the wood,—the trees having heard of this, all set their leaves a-rustling, as if I only came to hear that; and I said to myself, "I shall not be able to tell when the wind blows." Whereupon they stopt,—but the aspen has rustled ever since.
A man may be an object of interest to me though his tongue be plucked out by the root. I am very much molested by those who require that I should talk; they who cannot live near me with pleasure unless I I do not live near, but at the antipodes of. I may have a good deal still, without having anything to say. Indeed, I have not much, my friends,—at least not much to speak of. By a well-directed silence I have sometimes seen threatening and troublesome persons routed,—unconsciously and innocently, no doubt. You sit musing, as if you were in broad nature again; they cannot stand it; their position becomes more and more uncomfortable every moment. So much humanity over against one without any disguise,—not even the disguise of speech! With a little silence, things take shape as they should.
Sometimes I have listened so attentively to the whole expression and utterance of a man, with such absorbed interest, that I did not hear one word he was saying,—and saying, too, with the more vivacity, observing my attention. And after all he thought I did not hear him! The fact was I heard him from all his mouths, and half his purport was open to me; as if my ears were sieves and strained his words of all their meaning,—letting fall the husks. And I heard, through him, him that spoke to him, and listened at the same keyhole with himself, cheek by jowl with him.
Not only must men talk, but for the most part must talk about talk; and scholars even about books, or dead and buried talk. Some times my friend expects a few periods from me; and is he exorbitant? He thinks he has delivered his opinions, and now it is my turn,—but I made no bargain. He thinks he has said a good thing; but I don't see the difference; he looks just as he did before. Well, if he has, it is no loss, I suppose,—he has plenty more.
Then I have seen very near and intimate, very old friends, introduced by very old strangers, with liberty given to talk,—for they did not happen to be present at each other's christening. The stranger, who knows only the countersign, says, "Jonas"—"Eldrad," giving those names which will make a title good in a court of law. (We may presume that God does not know the Christian names of men.) Then Jonas, like a ready soldier, makes a remark,—a benediction on the weather, it may be; and Eldrad swiftly responds and unburdens his breast; and so the action is begun. They bless God and Nature many times gratuitously, and part mutually well pleased, leaving their cards. They did not happen to be present at each other's christening; but better late than never.
There is good society, and there is bad.
This is plainly a fragment, and, from the handwriting, belongs to the early period of Thoreau's literary life. He notes in a late Journal that he wrote an essay on Sound and Silence in December, 1838; and during the next three years he returned now and then to the same subject. Thus in February, 1841, when he was not quite twenty-four years old, he says: "I have been breaking silence these twenty-three years, and have hardly made a rent in it. Silence has no end; speech is but the beginning of it." This seems like part of that series of paradoxes of which this fragmentary essay is another part. In his later writing, as will be noticed, particularly in his last journey, now to be recorded, the paradox has almost disappeared.
- ↑ We are indebted to Mr. John P. Woodbury for the privilege of printing this little essay, which seems to have eluded all editors of Thoreau up to the present year, when parts of it came out in the Atlantic. What we here print is the original form.