No More Learning

Nothing can rightly compel a simple and
brave man to a vulgar sadness. While I enjoy the friendship of
the seasons, I trust that nothing can make life a burden to me.
The gentle rain which waters my beans and keeps me in the
house to-day is not drear and melancholy, but good for me too.
Though it prevents my hoeing them, it is of far more worth than
my hoeing. If it should continue so long as to cause the seeds
to rot in the ground and destroy the potatoes in the low lands,
it would still be good for the grass on the uplands; and being
good for the grass, it would be good for me. Sometimes, when
I compare myself with other men, it seems as if I were more
favored by the gods than they, beyond any deserts that I am
conscious of; as if I had a warrant and surety at their hands


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HENRY D. THOREAU
which my fellows have not, and were especially guided and
guarded. I do not flatter myself; but if it be possible, they flat-
ter me. I have never felt lonesome, or in the least oppressed by
a sense of solitude, but once; and that was a few weeks after
I came to the woods, when for an hour I doubted if the near
neighborhood of man was not essential to a serene and healthy
life. To be alone was something unpleasant. But I was at the
same time conscious of a slight insanity in my mood, and seemed
to foresee my recovery. In the midst of a gentle rain, while
these thoughts prevailed, I was suddenly sensible of such sweet
and beneficent society in Nature, in the very pattering of the
drops, and in every sound and sight around my house, an infinite
and unaccountable friendliness all at once like an atmosphere
sustaining me, as made the fancied advantages of human neigh-
borhood insignificant, and I have never thought of them since.
Every little pine needle expanded and swelled with sympathy
and befriended me. I was so distinctly made aware of the
presence of something kindred to me, even in scenes which we
are accustomed to call wild and dreary, and also that the nearest
of blood to me and humanest was not a person nor a villager,
that I thought no place could ever be strange to me again. —
"Mourning untimely consumes the sad;
Few are their days in the land of the living,
Beautiful daughter of Toscar. "
Some of my pleasantest hours were during the long rain-
storms in the spring or fall, which confined me to the house for
the afternoon as well as the forenoon, soothed by their ceaseless
roar and pelting; when an early twilight ushered in a long even-
ing, in which many thoughts had time to take root and unfold
themselves. In those driving northeast rains which tried the
village houses so, when the maids stood ready with mop and pail
in front entries to keep the deluge out, I sat behind my door in
my little house, which was all entry, and thoroughly enjoyed its
protection. In one heavy thunder-shower the lightning struck a
large pitch-pine across the pond, making a very conspicuous and
perfectly regular spiral groove from top to bottom, an inch or
more deep and four or five inches wide, as you would groove a
walking-stick. I passed it again the other day, and was struck
with awe on looking up and beholding that mark, now more dis-
tinct than ever, where a terrific and resistless bolt came down out


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HENRY D. THOREAU
14887
of the harmless sky eight years ago.
Men frequently say to me,
"I should think you would feel lonesome down there and want to
be nearer to folks,- rainy and snowy days and nights especially. "
I am tempted to reply to such,-This whole earth which we
inhabit is but a point in space. How far apart, think you, dwell
the two most distant inhabitants of yonder star, the breadth of
whose disk cannot be appreciated by our instruments? Why
should I feel lonely? is not our planet in the Milky Way? This
which you put seems to me not to be the most important ques-
tion. What sort of space is that which separates a man from
his fellows and makes him solitary? I have found that no exer-
tion of the legs can bring two minds much nearer to one another.
What do we want most to dwell near to? Not to many men,
surely, the depot, the post-office, the bar-room, the meeting-
house, the schoolhouse, the grocery, Beacon Hill, or the Five
Points, where men most congregate,- but to the perennial source
of our life, whence in all our experience we have found that to
issue, as the willow stands near the water and sends out its roots
in that direction. This will vary with different natures, but this
is the place where a wise man will dig his cellar. -I one even-
ing overtook one of my townsmen, who has accumulated what is
called "a handsome property,"-though I never got a fair view
of it, on the Walden road, driving a pair of cattle to market,
who inquired of me how I could bring my mind to give up so
many of the comforts of life. I answered that I was very sure
I liked it passably well; I was not joking. And so I went home
to my bed, and left him to pick his way through the darkness
and the mud to Brighton,-or Bright-town,-which place he
would reach some time in the morning.
Any prospect of awakening or coming to life, to a dead man
makes indifferent all times and places. The place where that
may occur is always the same, and indescribably pleasant to all
our senses. For the most part we allow only outlying and trans-
ient circumstances to make our occasions. They are in fact the
cause of our distraction. Nearest to all things is that power
which fashions their being. Next to us the grandest laws are
continually being executed. Next to us is not the workman
whom we have hired, with whom we love so well to talk, but
the workman whose work we are.
-
"How vast and profound is the influence of the subtile pow-
ers of Heaven and of Earth!


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HENRY D. THOREAU
"We seek to perceive them, and we do not see them; we
seek to hear them, and we do not hear them; identified with the
substance of things, they cannot be separated from them.
"They cause that in all the universe men purify and sanctify
their hearts, and clothe themselves in their holiday garments to
offer sacrifices and oblations to their ancestors. It is an ocean
of subtile intelligences. They are everywhere, above us, on our
left, on our right; they environ us on all sides. "
We are the subjects of an experiment which is not a little
interesting to me. Can we not do without the society of our
gossips a little while under these circumstances, - have our own
thoughts to cheer us? Confucius says truly, "Virtue does not
remain as an abandoned orphan: it must of necessity have
neighbors. "
With thinking, we may be beside ourselves in a sane sense.
By a conscious effort of the mind we can stand aloof from
actions and their consequences; and all things, good and bad, go
by us like a torrent. We are not wholly involved in Nature. I
may be either the driftwood in the stream, or Indra in the sky
looking down on it. I may be affected by a theatrical exhibi-
tion; on the other hand, I may not be affected by an actual event
which appears to concern me much more. I only know myself as
a human entity, -the scene, so to speak, of thoughts and affec
tions; and am sensible of a certain doubleness by which I can
stand as remote from myself as from another. However intense
my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a
part of me, which as it were is not a part of me, but spectator,
sharing no experience but taking note of it; and that is no more.
I than it is you. When the play-it may be the tragedy — of
life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction,
a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned. This
doubleness may easily make us poor neighbors and friends some-
times.
I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time.
To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and
dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion
that was
so companionable as solitude. We are for the most
part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we
stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always
alone, let him be where he will. Solitude is not measured by
the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows.


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HENRY D. THOREAU
14889
The really diligent student in one of the crowded hives of Cam-
bridge College is as solitary as a dervis in the desert. The
farmer can work alone in the field or the woods all day, hoeing
or chopping, and not feel lonesome, because he is employed; but
when he comes home at night he cannot sit down in a room
alone, at the mercy of his thoughts, but must be where he can
«< see the folks," and recreate, and as he thinks remunerate, himself
for his day's solitude: and hence he wonders how the student
can sit alone in the house all night and most of the day without
ennui and "the blues"; but he does not realize that the student,
though in the house, is still at work in his field, and chopping
in his woods, as the farmer in his, and in turn seeks the same
recreation and society that the latter does, though it may be a
more condensed form of it.
Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short inter-
vals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each
other. We meat at meals three times a day, and give each other
a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are. We have had
to agree on a certain set of rules, called etiquette and polite-
ness, to make this frequent meeting tolerable and that we need.
not come to open war. We meet at the post-office, and at the
sociable, and about the fireside every night; we live thick and
are in each other's way, and stumble over one another: and I
think that we thus lose some respect for one another. Cer-
tainly less frequency would suffice for all important and hearty
communications. Consider the girls in a factory,- never alone,
hardly in their dreams. It would be better if there were but
one inhabitant to a square mile, as where I live. The value of a
man is not in his skin, that we should touch him.
I have heard of a man lost in the woods and dying of famine
and exhaustion at the foot of a tree, whose loneliness was relieved
by the grotesque visions with which, owing to bodily weakness,
his diseased imagination surrounded him, and which he believed
to be real. So also, owing to bodily and mental health and
strength, we may be continually cheered by a like but more
normal and natural society, and come to know that we are never
alone.
I have a great deal of company in my house; especially in
the morning, when nobody calls. Let me suggest a few compari-
sons, that some one may convey an idea of my situation. I am
no more lonely than the loon in the pond that laughs so loud, or


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HENRY D. THOREAU
than Walden Pond itself. What company has that lonely lake, I
pray? And yet it has not the blue devils, but the blue angels in
it, in the azure tint of its waters. The sun is alone, except
in thick weather, when there sometimes appear to be two, but
one is a mock sun. God is alone,- but the Devil, he is far from
being alone: he sees a great deal of company; he is legion. I
no more lonely than a single mullein or dandelion in a
pasture, or a bean leaf, or sorrel, or a horse-fly, or a humble-bee.
I am no more lonely than the Mill Brook, or a weathercock, or
the North Star, or the south wind, or an April shower, or a Jan-
uary thaw, or the first spider in a new house.
I have occasional visits in the long winter evenings, when the
snow falls fast and the wind howls in the wood, from an old set-
tler and original proprietor, who is reported to have dug Walden
Pond, and stoned it, and fringed it with pine woods; who tells
me stories of old time and of new eternity: and between us we
manage to pass a cheerful evening, with social mirth and pleasant
views of things, even without apples or cider,-a most wise and
humorous friend, whom I love much, who keeps himself more
secret than ever did Goffe or Whalley; and though he is thought
to be dead, none can show where he is buried. An elderly
dame too dwells in my neighborhood, invisible to most persons,
in whose odorous herb garden I love to stroll sometimes, gather-
ing simples and listening to her fables; -for she has a genius
of unequaled fertility, and her memory runs back farther than
mythology, and she can tell me the original of every fable, and
on what fact every one is founded-for the incidents occurred
when she was young. A ruddy and lusty old dame, who delights
in all weathers and seasons, and is likely to outlive all her
children yet.
The indescribable innocence and beneficence of Nature,- of
Isun and wind and rain, of summer and winter,- such health, such
cheer, they afford forever! and such sympathy have they ever
with our race, that all Nature would be affected, and the sun's
brightness fade, and the winds would sigh humanely, and the
clouds rain tears, and the woods shed their leaves and put on
mourning in midsummer, if any man should ever for a just cause
grieve.
Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I
not partly leaves and vegetable mold myself?
What is the pill which will keep us well, serene, contented?
Not my or thy great-grandfather's, but our great-grandmother


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HENRY D. THOREAU
14891
Nature's universal, vegetable, botanic medicines, by which she
has kept herself young always, outlived so many old Parrs in her
day, and fed her health with their decaying fatness.
For my
panacea, instead of one of those quack vials of a mixture dipped
from Acheron and the Dead Sea, which come out of those long
shallow black schooner-looking wagons which we sometimes see
made to carry bottles, let me have a draught of undiluted morn-
ing air. Morning air! If men will not drink of this at the
fountain-head of the day, why, then we must even bottle up
some and sell it in the shops, for the benefit of those who have
lost their subscription ticket to morning-time in this world. But
remember, it will not keep quiet till noonday even in the coolest
cellar, but drive out the stopples long ere that, and follow west-
ward the steps of Aurora. I am no worshiper of Hygeia, who
was the daughter of that old herb-doctor Esculapius, and who is
represented on monuments holding a serpent in one hand, and
in the other a cup out of which the serpent sometimes drinks;
but rather of Hebe, cupbearer to Jupiter, who was the daughter
of Juno and wild lettuce, and who had the power of restoring
gods and men to the vigor of youth. She was probably the
only thoroughly sound-conditioned, healthy, and robust young
lady that ever walked the globe; and wherever she came it was
spring.
THE BEAN FIELD
From Walden. ' Copyright 1854, by Henry D. Thoreau; 1893, by Houghton,
Mifflin & Co.
M
EANWHILE my beans, the length of whose rows, added' to-
gether, was seven miles already planted, were impatient to
be hoed; for the earliest had grown considerably before
the latest were in the ground: indeed, they were not easily to
be put off. What was the meaning of this so steady and self-
respecting, this small Herculean labor, I knew not. I came to
love my rows, my beans, though so many more than I wanted.
They attached me to the earth, and so I got strength like
Antæus. But why should I raise them? Only Heaven knows.
This was my curious labor all summer,- to make this portion
of the earth's surface, which had yielded only cinquefoil, black-
berries, johnswort, and the like, before,-sweet wild fruits and


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14892
HENRY D. THOREAU
pleasant flowers,-produce instead this pulse. What shall I learn
of beans or beans of me? I cherish them, I hoe them, early and
late I have an eye to them; and this is my day's work. It is a
fine broad leaf to look on. My auxiliaries are the dews and
rains which water this dry soil, and what fertility is in the soil
itself, which for the most part is lean and effete. My enemies
are worms, cool days, and most of all woodchucks. The last have
nibbled for me a quarter of an acre clean. But what right had
I to oust johnswort and the rest, and break up their ancient herb
garden? Soon, however, the remaining beans will be too tough
for them, and go forward to meet new foes.
When I was four years old, as I well remember, I was brought
from Boston to this my native town, through these very woods
and this field, to the pond. It is one of the oldest scenes
stamped on my memory. And now to-night my flute has waked
the echoes over that very water. The pines still stand here older
than I; or if some have fallen, I have cooked my supper with
their stumps, and a new growth is rising all around, preparing
another aspect for new infant eyes. Almost the same johnswort
springs from the same perennial root in this pasture: and even
I have at length helped to clothe that fabulous landscape of
my infant dreams; and one of the results of my presence and
influence is seen in these bean leaves, corn blades, and potato
vines.
I planted about two acres and a half of upland; and as it
was only about fifteen years since the land was cleared, and I
myself had got out two or three cords of stumps, I did not give
it any manure; but in the course of the summer it appeared by
the arrow-heads which I turned up in hoeing, that an extinct
nation had anciently dwelt here and planted corn and beans ere
white men came to clear the land, and so, to some extent, had
exhausted the soil for this very crop.
Before yet any woodchuck or squirrel had run across the road,
or the sun had got above the shrub-oaks, while all the dew was
on, though the farmers warned me against it, I would advise
you to do all your work if possible while the dew is on,-I
began to level the ranks of haughty weeds in my bean-field and
throw dust upon their heads. Early in the morning I worked
barefooted, dabbling like a plastic artist in the dewy and crum-
bling sand; but later in the day the sun blistered my feet. There
the sun lighted me to hoe beans, pacing slowly backward and
―――


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HENRY D. THOREAU
14893
forward over that yellow gravelly upland, between the long green
rows, fifteen rods; the one end terminating in a shrub-oak copse
where I could rest in the shade, the other in a blackberry field
where the green berries deepened their tints by the time I
had made another bout. Removing the weeds, putting fresh soil
about the bean stems, and encouraging this weed which I had.
sown, making the yellow soil express its summer thought in bean
leaves and blossoms rather than in wormwood and piper and
millet grass, making the earth say beans instead of grass,—this
was my daily work. As I had little aid from horses or cattle,
or hired men or boys, or improved implements of husbandry,
I was much slower, and became much more intimate with my
beans, than usual. But labor of the hands, even when pursued to
the verge of drudgery, is perhaps never the worst form of idle-
ness. It has a constant and imperishable moral; and to the
scholar it yields a classic result. A very agricola laboriosus was
I to travelers bound westward through Lincoln and Wayland to
nobody knows where: they sitting at their ease in gigs, with
elbows on knees, and reins loosely hanging in festoons; I the
home-staying, laborious native of the soil. But soon my home-
stead was out of their sight and thought. It was the only open
and cultivated field for a great distance on either side of the
road, so they made the most of it; and sometimes the man in
the field heard more of travelers' gossip and comment than was
meant for his ear: "Beans so late! peas so late! "-for I con-
tinued to plant when others had begun to hoe,-the ministerial
husbandman had not suspected it. - "Corn, my boy, for fodder;
corn for fodder. "-" Does he live there? " asks the black bon-
net of the gray coat: and the hard-featured farmer reins up his
grateful dobbin to inquire what you are doing where he sees no
manure in the furrow; and recommends a little chip dirt, or any
little waste stuff, or it may be ashes or plaster. But here were
two acres and a half of furrows, and only a hoe for cart and two
hands to draw it, there being an aversion to other carts and
horses, and chip dirt far away. Fellow-travelers as they rattled
by compared it aloud with the fields which they had passed; so
that I came to know how I stood in the agricultural world. This
was one field not in Mr. Coleman's report. And by the way,
who estimates the value of the crop which Nature yields in the
still wilder fields unimproved by man? The crop of English hay
is carefully weighed, the moisture calculated, the silicates and the
-


## p. 14894 (#472) ##########################################

14894
HENRY D. THOREAU
potash; but in all dells and pond-holes in the woods and past-
ures and swamps grows a rich and various crop, only unreaped
by man. Mine was, as it were, the connecting link between
wild and cultivated fields: as some States are civilized, and oth-
ers half-civilized, and others savage or barbarous, so my field
was, though not in a bad sense, a half-cultivated field. They
were beans cheerfully returning to their wild and primitive state
that I cultivated, and my hoe played the 'Ranz des Vaches' for
them.
Near at hand, upon the topmost spray of a birch, sings
the brown thrasher or red mavis, as some love to call him—all
the morning, glad of your society, that would find out another
farmer's field if yours were not here. While you are planting
the seed, he cries, "Drop it, drop it,-cover it up, cover it up,
-pull it up, pull it up, pull it up. " But this was not corn, and
so it was safe from such enemies as he. You may wonder what
his rigmarole, his amateur Paganini performances on one string
or on twenty, have to do with your planting, and yet prefer it to
leached ashes or plaster. It was a cheap sort of top-dressing, in
which I had entire faith.
As I drew a still fresher soil about the rows with my hoe,
I disturbed the ashes of unchronicled nations who in primeval
years lived under these heavens, and their small implements of
war and hunting were brought to the light of this modern day.
They lay mingled with other natural stones, some of which bore
the marks of having been burned by Indian fires, and some by
the sun; and also bits of pottery and glass brought hither by the
recent cultivators of the soil. When my hoe tinkled against the
stones, that music echoed to the woods and the sky, and was an
accompaniment to my labor which yielded an instant and im-
measurable crop. It was no longer beans that I hoed, nor I that
hoed beans; and I remembered with as much pity as pride, if I
remembered at all, my acquaintances who had gone to the city
to attend the oratorios. The night-hawk circled overhead in the
sunny afternoons-for I sometimes made a day of it-like a
mote in the eye, or in Heaven's eye; falling from time to time
with a swoop and a sound as if the heavens were rent, torn at
last to very rags and tatters, and yet a seamless cope remained:
small imps that fill the air, and lay their eggs on the ground on
bare sand or rocks on the tops of hills, where few have found
them; graceful and slender, like ripples caught up from the pond,
―


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HENRY D. THOREAU
14895
as leaves are raised by the wind to float in the heavens; such
kindredship is in Nature. The hawk is aerial brother of the wave.
which he sails over and surveys, those his perfect air-inflated
wings answering to the elemental unfledged pinions of the sea.
Or sometimes I watched a pair of hen-hawks circling high in the
sky, alternately soaring and descending, approaching and leaving
one another, as if they were the embodiment of my own thoughts.
Or I was attracted by the passage of wild pigeons from this
wood to that, with a slight quivering winnowing sound and
carrier haste; or from under a rotten stump my hoe turned up a
sluggish, portentous, and outlandish spotted salamander, a trace
of Egypt and the Nile, yet our contemporary. When I paused
to lean on my hoe, these sounds and sights I heard and saw
anywhere in the row, a part of the inexhaustible entertainment
which the country offers.
On gala days the town fires its great guns, which echo like.
popguns to these woods; and some waifs of martial music occas-
ionally penetrate thus far. To me, away there in my bean-field
at the other end of the town, the big guns sounded as if a puff-
ball had burst: and when there was a military turnout of which
I was ignorant, I have sometimes had a vague sense all the day
of some sort of itching and disease in the horizon, as if some
eruption would break out there soon, either scarlatina or canker-
rash; until at length some more favorable puff of wind, making
haste over the fields and up the Wayland road, brought me
information of the "trainers. " It seemed by the distant hum as
if somebody's bees had swarmed; and that the neighbors, accord-
ing to Virgil's advice, by a faint tintinnabulum upon the most
sonorous of their domestic utensils, were endeavoring to call
them down into the hive again. And when the sound died quite
away, and the hum had ceased, and the most favorable breezes
told no tale, I knew that they had got the last drone of them all
safely into the Middlesex hive, and that now their minds were
bent on the honey with which it was smeared.
I felt proud to know that the liberties of Massachusetts and of
our fatherland were in such safe keeping; and as I turned to my
hoeing again I was filled with an inexpressible confidence, and
pursued my labor cheerfully with a calm trust in the future.
When there were several bands of musicians, it sounded as if
all the village was a vast bellows, and all the buildings expanded
and collapsed alternately with a din. But sometimes it was a


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14896
HENRY D. THOREAU
really noble and inspiring strain that reached these woods, and
the trumpet that sings of fame; and I felt as if I could spit a
Mexican with a good relish,- for why should we always stand
for trifles? —and looked round for a woodchuck or a skunk to
exercise my chivalry upon. These martial strains seemed as far
away as Palestine; and reminded me of a march of crusaders in
the horizon, with a slight tantivy and tremulous motion of the
elm-tree tops which overhang the village. This was one of the
great days; though the sky had from my clearing only the same
everlastingly great look that it wears daily, and I saw no differ-
ence in it.
It was a singular experience, that long acquaintance which I
cultivated with beans: what with planting, and hoeing, and har-
vesting, and threshing, and picking over and selling them - the
last was the hardest of all; I might add eating, for I did taste.
I was determined to know beans. When they were growing, I
used to hoe from five o'clock in the morning till noon, and com-
monly spent the rest of the day about other affairs. Consider
the intimate and curious acquaintance one makes with various
kinds of weeds, it will bear some iteration in the account, for
there was no little iteration in the labor: disturbing their deli-
cate organizations so ruthlessly, and making such invidious dis-
tinctions with his hoe, leveling whole ranks of one species and
sedulously cultivating another. That's Roman wormwood - that's
pigweed - that's sorrel - that's piper-grass: have at him, chop
him up, turn his roots upward to the sun, don't let him have a
fibre in the shade; if you do he'll turn himself t'other side up and
be as green as a leek in two days. A long war, not with cranes,
but with weeds,- those Trojans who had sun and rain and dews.
on their side. Daily the beans saw me come to their rescue
armed with a hoe, and thin the ranks of their enemies, filling up
the trenches with weedy dead. Many a lusty crest-waving Hec-
tor, that towered a whole foot above his crowding comrades, fell
before my weapon and rolled in the dust.
Those summer days which some of my contemporaries devoted
to the fine arts in Boston or Rome, and others to contemplation
in India, and others to trade in London or New York, I thus,
with the other farmers of New England, devoted to husbandry.
Not that I wanted beans to eat, for I am by nature a Pythago-
rean so far as beans are concerned,-whether they mean porridge
or voting,—and exchanged them for rice; but perchance, as some


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HENRY D. THOREAU
14897
must work in fields if only for the sake of tropes and expression,
to serve a parable-maker one day. It was on the whole a rare
amusement, which, continued too long, might have become a dissi-
pation. Though I gave them no manure, and did not hoe them
all once, I hoed them unusually well as far as I went, and was
paid for it in the end: "there being in truth," as Evelyn says,
"no compost or lætation whatsoever comparable to this continual
motion, repastination, and turning of the mold with the spade. "
"The earth," he adds elsewhere, "especially if fresh, has a
certain magnetism in it, by which it attracts the salt, power, or
virtue (call it either) which gives it life, and is the logic of all
the labor and stir we keep about it, to sustain us; all dungings
and other sordid temperings being but the vicars succedaneous
to this improvement. " Moreover, this being one of those "worn-
out and exhausted lay fields which enjoy their sabbath," had
perchance, as Sir Kenelm Digby thinks likely, attracted "vital
spirits" from the air. I harvested twelve bushels of beans.
WALKING
From 'Excursions. Copyright 1863 and 1866, by Ticknor & Fields; 1893, by
Houghton, Mifflin & Co.
I
WISH to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and
wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely
civil,- to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel
of Nature, rather than a member of society. I wish to make an
extreme statement, if so I may make an emphatic one: for there
are enough champions of civilization; the minister and the school
committee and every one of you will take care of that.
I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my
life who understood the art of Walking,- that is, of taking walks,
-who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering: which word is
beautifully derived "from idle people who roved about the coun-
try, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of
going à la Sainte Terre," -to the Holy Land,- till the children
exclaimed, "There goes a Sainte-Terrer,"-a Saunterer, a Holy-
Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks,
as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they
who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I
mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre,
XXV-932


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HENRY D. THOREAU
without land or a home; which therefore, in the good sense, will
mean having no particular home, but equally at home every-
where. For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who
sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of
all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant
than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seek-
ing the shortest course to the sea. But I prefer the first, which
indeed is the most probable derivation. For every walk is a sort
of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth
and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels.
It is true, we are but faint-hearted crusaders; even the walk-
ers nowadays, who undertake no persevering, never-ending enter-
prises. Our expeditions are but tours, and come round again at
evening to the old hearth-side from which we set out. Half
the walk is but retracing our steps. We should go forth on the
shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure,
never to return,- prepared to send back our embalmed hearts
only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are ready to
leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and
child and friends, and never see them again,—if you have paid
your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and
are a free man,- then you are ready for a walk.
To come down to my own experience, my companion and I—
for I sometimes have a companion- take pleasure in fancying
ourselves knights of a new, or rather an old, order; not Eques-
trians or Chevaliers, not Ritters or Riders, but Walkers,—a still
more ancient and honorable class, I trust. The chivalric and
heroic spirit which once belonged to the Rider seems now to
reside in, or perchance to have subsided into, the Walker,- not
the Knight, but Walker, Errant. He is a sort of fourth estate,
outside of Church and State and People.
We have felt that we almost alone hereabouts practiced this
noble art; though, to tell the truth,- at least if their own asser-
tions are to be received,—most of my townsmen would fain walk
sometimes, as I do, but they cannot. No wealth can buy the
requisite leisure, freedom, and independence which are the cap-
ital in this profession. It comes only by the grace of God. It
requires a direct dispensation from Heaven to become a Walker.
You must be born into the family of the Walkers. Ambulator
nascitur, non fit. Some of my townsmen, it is true, can remem-
ber and have described to me some walks which they took ten
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HENRY D. THOREAU
14899
years ago, in which they were so blessed as to lose themselves
for half an hour in the woods; but I know very well that they
have confined themselves to the highway ever since, whatever
pretensions they may make to belong to this select class. No
doubt they were elevated for a moment as by the reminiscence
of a previous state of existence, when even they were foresters
and outlaws.
"When he came to grene wode,
In a mery mornynge,
There he herde the notes small
Of byrdes mery syngyng.
―
"It is ferre gone, sayd Robyn,
That I was last here:
Me lyste a lytell for to shote
At the donne dere. "
I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless
I spend four hours a day at least-and it is commonly more
than that-sauntering through the woods and over the hills and
fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements.
You may
safely say, A penny for your thoughts, or a thousand pounds.
When sometimes I am reminded that the mechanics and shop-
keepers stay in their shops not only all the forenoon, but all the
afternoon too, sitting with crossed legs, so many of them,— as if
the legs were made to sit upon, and not to stand or walk upon,
-I think that they deserve some credit for not having all com-
mitted suicide long ago.
I, who cannot stay in my chamber for a single day without
acquiring some rust, and when sometimes I have stolen forth for
a walk at the eleventh hour, or four o'clock in the afternoon, too
late to redeem the day, when the shades of night were already
beginning to be mingled with the daylight, have felt as if I
had committed some sin to be atoned for,-I confess that I am
astonished at the power of endurance, to say nothing of the moral
insensibility, of my neighbors who confine themselves to shops
and offices the whole day for weeks and months-aye, and
years almost-together. I know not what manner of stuff they
are of, sitting there now at three o'clock in the afternoon, as
if it were three o'clock in the morning. Bonaparte may talk
of the three-o'clock-in-the-morning courage, but it is nothing to
the courage which can sit down cheerfully at this hour in the


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14900
HENRY D. THOREAU
afternoon, over against one's self whom you have known all the
morning, to starve out a garrison to whom you are bound by
such strong ties of sympathy. I wonder that about this time-or
say between four and five o'clock in the afternoon, too late for
the morning papers and too early for the evening ones- there
is not a general explosion heard up and down the street, scatter-
ing a legion of antiquated and house-bred notions and whims to
the four winds for an airing-and so the evil cure itself.
How womankind, who are confined to the house still more
than men, stand it, I do not know; but I have ground to sus-
pect that most of them do not stand it at all. When, early in a
summer afternoon, we have been shaking the dust of the village
from the skirts of our garments, making haste past those houses
with purely Doric or Gothic fronts, which have such an air of
repose about them, my companion whispers that probably about
these times their occupants are all gone to bed. Then it is that
I appreciate the beauty and the glory of architecture, which
itself never turns in, but forever stands out and erect, keeping
watch over the slumberers.
No doubt temperament, and above all, age, have a good deal
to do with it. As a man grows older, his ability to sit still and
follow indoor occupations increases. He grows vespertinal in his
habits as the evening of life approaches; till at last he comes
forth only just before sundown, and gets all the walk that he
requires in half an hour.
But the walking of which I speak has nothing in it akin to
taking exercise, as it is called, as the sick take medicine at
stated hours, -as the swinging of dumb-bells or chairs; but is
itself the enterprise and adventure of the day. If you would get
exercise, go in search of the springs of life. Think of a man's
swinging dumb-bells for his health, when those springs are bub-
bling up in far-off pastures unsought by him!
Moreover, you must walk like a camel, which is said to be
the only beast which ruminates when walking. When a traveler
asked Wordsworth's servant to show him her master's study, she
answered, "Here is his library, but his study is out of doors. "
Living much out of doors, in the sun and wind, will no doubt
produce a certain roughness of character,-will cause a thicker
cuticle to grow over some of the finer qualities of our nature, as
on the face and hands, or as severe manual labor robs the hands
of some of their delicacy of touch. So staying in the house, on


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HENRY D. THOREAU
14901
the other hand, may produce a softness and smoothness, not to
say thinness, of skin, accompanied by an increased sensibility to
certain impressions. Perhaps we should be more susceptible to
some influences important to our intellectual and moral growth,
if the sun had shone and the wind blown on us a little less; and
no doubt it is a nice matter to proportion rightly the thick
and thin skin. But methinks that is a scurf that will fall off
fast enough; that the natural remedy is to be found in the pro-
portion which the night bears to the day, the winter to the
summer, thought to experience. There will be so much the more
air and sunshine in our thoughts. The callous palms of the
laborer are more conversant with the finer tissues of self-respect
and heroism, whose touch thrills the heart, than the languid fin-
gers of idleness. That is mere sentimentality that lies abed by
day and thinks itself white, far from the tan and callus of expe-
rience.
When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and woods: what
would become of us if we walked only in a garden or a mall?
Even some sects of philosophers have felt the necessity of im
porting the woods to themselves, since they did not go to the
woods. "They planted groves and walks of platanes," where
they took subdiales ambulationes in porticos open to the air. Of
course it is of no use to direct our steps to the woods, if they
do not carry us thither. I am alarmed when it happens that I
have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there
in spirit. In my afternoon walk I would fain forget all my
morning occupations and my obligations to society. But it some-
times happens that I cannot easily shake off the village. The
thought of some work will run in my head, and I am not where
my body is, I am out of my senses. In my walks I would fain
return to my senses. What business have I in the woods, if I
am thinking of something out of the woods? I suspect myself
and cannot help a shudder, when I find myself so implicated even
in what are called good works,- for this may sometimes happen.
My vicinity affords many good walks; and though for so
many years I have walked almost every day, and sometimes for
several days together, I have not yet exhausted them. An abso-
lutely new prospect is a great happiness, and I can still get
this any afternoon. Two or three hours' walking will carry me
to as strange a country as I expect ever to see. A single farm-
house which I had not seen before is sometimes as good as the


## p. 14902 (#480) ##########################################

14902
HENRY D. THOREAU
dominions of the King of Dahomey. There is in fact a sort of
harmony discoverable between the capabilities of the landscape
within a circle of ten miles' radius, or the limits of an afternoon
walk, and the threescore years and ten of human life. It will
never become quite familiar to you.
Nowadays almost all man's improvements, so called,— as the
building of houses, and the cutting down of the forest and of all
large trees, simply deform the landscape, and make it more
and more tame and cheap. A people who would begin by burn-
ing the fences and let the forest stand! I saw the fences half
consumed, their ends lost in the middle of the prairie, and some
worldly miser with a surveyor looking after his bounds, while
heaven had taken place around him, and he did not see the
angels going to and fro, but was looking for an old post-hole in
the midst of Paradise. I looked again, and saw him standing in
the middle of a boggy Stygian fen, surrounded by devils; and he
had found his bounds without a doubt,- three little stones, where
a stake had been driven: and looking nearer, I saw that the
Prince of Darkness was his surveyor.
I can easily walk ten, fifteen, twenty, any number of miles,
commencing at my own door, without going by any house, with-
out crossing a road except where the fox and the mink do: first
along by the river, and then the brook, and then the meadow
and the woodside. There are square miles in my vicinity which
have no inhabitant. From many a hill I can see civilization and
the abodes of man afar. The farmers and their works are scarcely
more obvious than woodchucks and their burrows. Man and his
affairs, Church and State and school, trade and commerce, and
manufactures and agriculture,- even politics, the most alarming
of them all, I am pleased to see how little space they occupy in
the landscape. Politics is but a narrow field, and that still nar-
rower highway yonder leads to it. I sometimes direct the traveler
thither. If you would go to the political world, follow the great
road, follow that market-man, keep his dust in your eyes, and
it will lead you straight to it; for it too has its place merely,
and does not occupy all space. I pass from it as from a bean-
field into the forest, and it is forgotten. In one half-hour I can
walk off to some portion of the earth's surface where a man
does not stand from one year's end to another; and there, conse-
quently, politics are not, for they are but as the cigar-smoke of
a man.
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HENRY D. THOREAU
14903
The village is the place to which the roads tend; a sort of
expansion of the highway, as a lake of a river. It is the body,
of which roads are the arms and legs, a trivial or quadrivial
place, the thoroughfare and ordinary of travelers. The word is
from the Latin villa, which together with via, a way, or more
anciently ved and vella, Varro derives from veho, to carry, be-
cause the villa is the place to and from which things are carried.
They who got their living by teaming were said vellaturam
facere. Hence too the Latin word vilis and our vile; also villain.
This suggests what kind of degeneracy villagers are liable to.
They are wayworn by the travel that goes by and over them,
without traveling themselves.
Some do not walk at all; others walk in the highways; a few
walk across-lots. Roads are made for horses and men of busi-
ness. I do not travel in them much, comparatively, because I
am not in a hurry to get to any tavern or grocery or livery-
stable or depot to which they lead. I am a good horse to travel,
but not from choice a roadster. The landscape-painter uses the
figures of men to mark a road. He would not make that use of
my figure. I walk out into a Nature such as the old prophets
and poets, Menu, Moses, Homer, Chaucer, walked in.
You may
name it America, but it is not America: neither Americus Ves-
pucius, nor Columbus, nor the rest were the discoverers of it.
There is a truer account of it in mythology than in any history
of America, so called, that I have seen.
What is it that makes it so hard sometimes to determine
whither we will walk ? I believe that there is a subtle magnetism
in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us
aright. It is not indifferent to us which way we walk. There
is a right way; but we are very liable from heedlessness and
stupidity to take the wrong one. We would fain take that
walk, never yet taken by us through this actual world, which is
perfectly symbolical of the path which we love to travel in the
interior and ideal world; and sometimes, no doubt, we find it
difficult to choose our direction, because it does not yet exist
distinctly in our idea.
When I go out of the house for a walk, uncertain as yet
whither I will bend my steps, and submit myself to my instinct
to decide for me, I find, strange and whimsical as it may
seem, that I finally and inevitably settle southwest, toward some
particular wood or meadow or deserted pasture or hill in that


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14904
HENRY D. THOREAU
direction. My needle is slow to settle,-varies a few degrees,
and does not always point due southwest, it is true, and it has
good authority for this variation,- but it always settles between
west and south-southwest. The future lies that way to me, and
the earth seems more unexhausted and richer on that side. The
outline which would bound my walks would be, not a circle, but
a parabola, or rather like one of those cometary orbits which have
been thought to be non-returning curves, in this case opening
westward, in which my house occupies the place of the sun.
turn round and round irresolute sometimes for a quarter of an
hour, until I decide, for a thousandth time, that I will walk into
the southwest or west. Eastward I go only by force; but west-
ward I go free. Thither no business leads me. It is hard for
me to believe that I shall find fair landscapes or sufficient wild-
ness and freedom behind the eastern horizon. I am not excited
by the prospect of a walk thither; but I believe that the for-
est which I see in the western horizon stretches uninterruptedly
toward the setting sun, and there are no towns nor cities in it of
enough consequence to disturb me. Let me live where I will, on
this side is the city, on that the wilderness; and ever I am leav-
ing the city more and more, and withdrawing into the wilder-
ness. I should not lay so much stress on this fact, if I did not
believe that something like this is the prevailing tendency of my
countrymen. I must walk toward Oregon and not toward Europe.
And that way the nation is moving, and I may say that man-
kind progress from east to west. Within a few years we have
witnessed the phenomenon of a southeastward migration, in the
settlement of Australia; but this affects us as a retrograde move-
ment, and judging from the moral and physical character of the
first generation of Australians, has not yet proved a successful
experiment. The eastern Tartars think that there is nothing
west beyond Thibet. "The world ends there," say they; "beyond
there is nothing but a shoreless sea. " It is unmitigated East
where they live.
We go eastward to realize history and study the works of art
and literature, retracing the steps of the race; we go westward
as into the future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure.
The Atlantic is a Lethean stream, in our passage over which we
have had an opportunity to forget the Old World and its insti-
tutions. If we do not succeed this time, there is perhaps one
more chance for the race left before it arrives on the banks of


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HENRY D. THOREAU
14905
the Styx; and that is in the Lethe of the Pacific, which is three
times as wide.
I know not how significant it is, or how far it is an evidence
of singularity, that an individual should thus consent in his
pettiest walk with the general movement of the race; but I know
that something akin to the migratory instinct in birds and quad-
rupeds - which in some instances is known to have affected the
squirrel tribe, impelling them to a general and mysterious move-
ment, in which they were seen, say some, crossing the broadest
rivers, each on its particular chip, with its tail raised for a sail,
and bridging narrower streams with their dead—that something
like the furor which affects the domestic cattle in the spring,
and which is referred to a worm in their tails, affects both
nations and individuals, either perennially or from time to time.
Not a flock of wild geese cackles over our town, but it to some
extent unsettles the value of real estate here; and if I were a
broker, I should probably take that disturbance into account.
"Than longen folk to gon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken strange strondes. "
Every sunset which I witness inspires me with the desire to
go to a West as distant and as fair as that into which the sun
goes down.
He appears to migrate westward daily, and tempt
us to follow him. He is the Great Western Pioneer whom the
nations follow. We dream all night of those mountain-ridges in
the horizon, though they may be of vapor only, which were last
gilded by his rays. The island of Atlantis, and the islands and
gardens of the Hesperides, a sort of terrestrial paradise, appear
to have been the Great West of the ancients, enveloped in mys-
tery and poetry. Who has not seen in imagination, when look-
ing into the sunset sky, the gardens of the Hesperides, and the
foundation of all those fables?
Columbus felt the westward tendency more strongly than any
before. He obeyed it, and found a New World for Castile and
Leon. The herd of men in those days scented fresh pastures
from afar.
"And now the sun had stretched out all the hills,
And now was dropt into the western bay;
At last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue:
To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new. "


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HENRY D. THOREAU
I would not have every man nor every part of a man culti-
vated, any more than I would have every acre of earth culti-
vated: part will be tillage, but the greater part will be meadow
and forest; not only serving an immediate use, but preparing a
mold against a distant future, by the annual decay of the vege-
tation which it supports.
There are other letters for the child to learn than those which
Cadmus invented. The Spaniards have a good term to express
this wild and dusky knowledge: Gramática parda, tawny gram-
mar,—a kind of mother-wit derived from that same leopard to
which I have referred.
-
-
We have heard of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful
Knowledge. It is said that knowledge is power; and the like.
Methinks there is equal need of a Society for the Diffusion of
Useful Ignorance,-what we will call Beautiful Knowledge, a
knowledge useful in a higher sense; - for what is most of our
boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit that we know something,
which robs us of the advantage of our actual ignorance? What
we call knowledge is often our positive ignorance; ignorance our
negative knowledge. By long years of patient industry and read-
ing of the newspapers - for what are the libraries of science
but files of newspapers? — a man accumulates a myriad facts, lays
them up in his memory, and then when in some spring of his
life he saunters abroad into the Great Fields of thought, he as
it were goes to grass like a horse, and leaves all his harness be-
hind in the stable. I would say to the Society for the Diffusion
of Useful Knowledge, sometimes, Go to grass. You have eaten
hay long enough. The spring has come with its green crop.
The very cows are driven to their country pastures before the
end of May; though I have heard of one unnatural farmer who
kept his cow in the barn and fed her on hay all the year round.
So, frequently, the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowl-
edge treats its cattle.
A man's ignorance sometimes is not only useful, but beau-
tiful; while his knowledge, so called, is oftentimes worse than
useless, besides being ugly. Which is the best man to deal with:
he who knows nothing about a subject, and—what is extremely
rare - knows that he knows nothing, or he who really knows
something about it, but thinks that he knows all?
My desire for knowledge is intermittent; but my desire to
bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial


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HENRY D. THOREAU
14907
and constant. The highest that we can attain to is not Knowl-
edge, but Sympathy with Intelligence. I do not know that this
higher knowledge amounts to anything more definite than a novel.
and grand surprise on a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of
all that we called Knowledge before,— a discovery that there are
more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our
philosophy. It is the lighting-up of the mist by the sun. Man
cannot know in any higher sense than this, any more than he
can look serenely and with impunity in the face of the sun:
Ὡς τὶ νοῶν, οὐ κεῖνον νοήσεις,— «You will not perceive that, as per-
ceiving a particular thing," say the Chaldean Oracles.
There is something servile in the habit of seeking after a law
which we may obey. We may study the laws of matter at and
for our convenience, but a successful life knows no law. It is
an unfortunate discovery certainly, that of a law which binds.