WALDEN Or Life In The Woods

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 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
difference in it.

It was a singular experience that long acquaintance which I
cultivated with beans, what with planting, and hoeing, and harvesting,
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 commonly 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 delicate organizations so ruthlessly,
and making such invidious distinctions with his hoe, levelling 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 Hector, 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 Pythagorean, so far as beans are
concerned, whether they mean porridge or voting, and exchanged them
for rice; but, perchance, as some 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 dissipation. Though I gave them no manure, and did not
hoe them all once, I hoed them unusualy well as far as I went, and was
paid for it in the end, "there being in truth," as Evelyn says, "no
compost or laetation whatsoever comparable to this continual motion,
repastination, and turning of the mould 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.

But to be more particular, for it is complained that Mr. Colman
has reported chiefly the expensive experiments of gentlemen farmers,
my outgoes were,

For a hoe.....................................$ 0.54

Plowing, harrowing, and furrowing............. 7.50 (Too much.)

Beans for seed................................ 3.12 1/2

Potatoes for seed............................. 1.33

Peas for seed................................. 0.40

Turnip seed................................... 0.06

White line for crow fence..................... 0.02

Horse cultivator and boy three hours.......... 1.00

Horse and cart to get crop.................... 0.75

-----

In all.......................................$ 14.72 1/2

My income was (patremfamilias vendacem, non emacem esse oportet),
from

Nine bushels and twelve quarts of beans sold..$ 16.94

Five bushels large potatoes................... 2.50

Nine bushels small potatoes................... 2.25

Grass......................................... 1.00

Stalks........................................ 0.75

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In all......................................$ 23.44

Leaving a pecuniary profit,

as I have elsewhere said, of..............$ 8.71 1/2

This is the result of my experience in raising beans: Plant the
common small white bush bean about the first of June, in rows three
feet by eighteen inches apart, being careful to select fresh round and
unmixed seed. First look out for worms, and supply vacancies by
planting anew. Then look out for woodchucks, if it is an exposed
place, for they will nibble off the earliest tender leaves almost
clean as they go; and again, when the young tendrils make their
appearance, they have notice of it, and will shear them off with
both buds and young pods, sitting erect like a squirrel. But above all
harvest as early as possible, if you would escape frosts and have a
fair and salable crop; you may save much loss by this means.

This further experience also I gained: I said to myself, I will
not plant beans and corn with so much industry another summer, but
such seeds, if the seed is not lost, as sincerity, truth,
simplicity, faith, innocence, and the like, and see if they will not
grow in this soil, even with less toil and manurance, and sustain
me, for surely it has not been exhausted for these crops. Alas! I said
this to myself; but now another summer is gone, and another, and
another, and I am obliged to say to you, Reader, that the seeds
which I planted, if indeed they were the seeds of those virtues,
were wormeaten or had lost their vitality, and so did not come up.
Commonly men will only be brave as their fathers were brave, or timid.
This generation is very sure to plant corn and beans each new year
precisely as the Indians did centuries ago and taught the first
settlers to do, as if there were a fate in it. I saw an old man the
other day, to my astonishment, making the holes with a hoe for the
seventieth time at least, and not for himself to lie down in! But
why should not the New Englander try new adventures, and not lay so
much stress on his grain, his potato and grass crop, and his orchards-
raise other crops than these? Why concern ourselves so much about
our beans for seed, and not be concerned at all about a new generation
of men? We should really be fed and cheered if when we met a man we
were sure to see that some of the qualities which I have named,
which we all prize more than those other productions, but which are
for the most part broadcast and floating in the air, had taken root
and grown in him. Here comes such a subtile and ineffable quality, for
instance, as truth or justice, though the slightest amount or new
variety of it, along the road. Our ambassadors should be instructed to
send home such seeds as these, and Congress help to distribute them
over all the land. We should never stand upon ceremony with sincerity.
We should never cheat and insult and banish one another by our
meanness, if there were present the kernel of worth and
friendliness. We should not meet thus in haste. Most men I do not meet
at all, for they seem not to have time; they are busy about their
beans. We would not deal with a man thus plodding ever, leaning on a
hoe or a spade as a staff between his work, not as a mushroom, but
partially risen out of the earth, something more than erect, like
swallows alighted and walking on the ground:

"And as he spake, his mings would now and then

Spread, as he meant to fly, then close again-"

so that we should suspect that we might be conversing with an angel.
Bread may not always nourish us; but it always does us good, it even
takes stiffness out of our joints, and makes us supple and buoyant,
when we knew not what ailed us, to recognize any generosity in man
or Nature, to share any unmixed and heroic joy.

Ancient poetry and mythology suggest, at least, that husbandry was
once a sacred art; but it is pursued with irreverent haste and
heedlessness by us, our object being to have large farms and large
crops merely. We have no festival, nor procession, nor ceremony, not
excepting our cattle-shows and so-called Thanksgivings, by which the
farmer expresses a sense of the sacredness of his calling, or is
reminded of its sacred origin. It is the premium and the feast which
tempt him. He sacrifices not to Ceres and the Terrestrial Jove, but to
the infernal Plutus rather. By avarice and selfishness, and a
grovelling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil
as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape
is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the
meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber. Cato says that
the profits of agriculture are particularly pious or just (maximeque
pius quaestus), and according to Varro the old Romans "called the same
earth Mother and Ceres, and thought that they who cultivated it led
a pious and useful life, and that they alone were left of the race
of King Saturn."

We are wont to forget that the sun looks on our cultivated fields
and on the prairies and forests without distinction. They all
reflect and absorb his rays alike, and the former make but a small
part of the glorious picture which he beholds in his daily course.
In his view the earth is all equally cultivated like a garden.
Therefore we should receive the benefit of his light and beat with a
corresponding trust and magnanimity. What though I value the seed of
these beans, and harvest that in the fall of the year? This broad
field which I have looked at so long looks not to me as the
principal cultivator, but away from me to influences more genial to
it, which water and make it green. These beans have results which
are not harvested by me. Do they not grow for woodchucks partly? The
ear of wheat (in Latin spica, obsoletely speca, from spe, hope) should
not be the only hope of the husbandman; its kernel or grain (granum
from gerendo, bearing) is not all that it bears. How, then, can our
harvest fail? Shall I not rejoice also at the abundance of the weeds
whose seeds are the granary of the birds? It matters little
comparatively whether the fields fill the farmer's barns. The true
husbandman will cease from anxiety, as the squirrels manifest no
concern whether the woods will bear chestnuts this year or not, and
finish his labor with every day, relinquishing all claim to the
produce of his fields, and sacrificing in his mind not only his
first but his last fruits also.
VILLAGE

THE VILLAGE.

AFTER HOEING, or perhaps reading and writing, in the forenoon, I
usually bathed again in the pond, swimming across one of its coves for
a stint, and washed the dust of labor from my person, or smoothed
out the last wrinkle which study had made, and for the afternoon was
absolutely free. Every day or two I strolled to the village to hear
some of the gossip which is incessantly going on there, circulating
either from mouth to mouth, or from newspaper to newspaper, and which,
taken in homeopathic doses, was really as refreshing in its way as the
rustle of leaves and the peeping of frogs. As I walked in the woods to
see the birds and squirrels, so I walked in the village to see the men
and boys; instead of the wind among the pines I heard the carts
rattle. In one direction from my house there was a colony of
muskrats in the river meadows; under the grove of elms and buttonwoods
in the other horizon was a village of busy men, as curious to me as if
they had been prairie-dogs, each sitting at the mouth of its burrow,
or running over to a neighbor's to gossip. I went there frequently
to observe their habits. The village appeared to me a great news room;
and on one side, to support it, as once at Redding & Company's on
State Street, they kept nuts and raisins, or salt and meal and other
groceries. Some have such a vast appetite for the former commodity,
that is, the news, and such sound digestive organs, that they can
sit forever in public avenues without stirring, and let it simmer
and whisper through them like the Etesian winds, or as if inhaling
ether, it only producing numbness and insensibility to pain- otherwise
it would often be painful to bear- without affecting the
consciousness. I hardly ever failed, when I rambled through the
village, to see a row of such worthies, either sitting on a ladder
sunning themselves, with their bodies inclined forward and their
eyes glancing along the line this way and that, from time to time,
with a voluptuous expression, or else leaning against a barn with
their hands in their pockets, like caryatides, as if to prop it up.
They, being commonly out of doors, heard whatever was in the wind.
These are the coarsest mills, in which all gossip is first rudely
digested or cracked up before it is emptied into finer and more
delicate hoppers within doors. I observed that the vitals of the
village were the grocery, the bar-room, the post-office, and the bank;
and, as a necessary part of the machinery, they kept a bell, a big
gun, and a fire-engine, at convenient places; and the houses were so
arranged as to make the most of mankind, in lanes and fronting one
another, so that every traveller had to run the gauntlet, and every
man, woman, and child might get a lick at him. Of course, those who
were stationed nearest to the head of the line, where they could
most see and be seen, and have the first blow at him, paid the highest
prices for their places; and the few straggling inhabitants in the
outskirts, where long gaps in the line began to occur, and the
traveller could get over walls or turn aside into cow-paths, and so
escape, paid a very slight ground or window tax. Signs were hung out
on all sides to allure him; some to catch him by the appetite, as
the tavern and victualling cellar; some by the fancy, as the dry goods
store and the jeweller's; and others by the hair or the feet or the
skirts, as the barber, the shoe-maker, or the tailor. Besides, there
was a still more terrible standing invitation to call at every one
of these houses, and company expected about these times. For the
most part I escaped wonderfully from these dangers, either by
proceeding at once boldly and without deliberation to the goal, as
is recommended to those who run the gauntlet, or by keeping my
thoughts on high things, like Orpheus, who, "loudly singing the
praises of the gods to his lyre, drowned the voices of the Sirens, and
kept out of danger." Sometimes I bolted suddenly, and nobody could
tell my whereabouts, for I did not stand much about gracefulness,
and never hesitated at a gap in a fence. I was even accustomed to make
an irruption into some houses, where I was well entertained, and after
learning the kernels and very last sieveful of news- what had
subsided, the prospects of war and peace, and whether the world was
likely to hold together much longer- I was let out through the rear
avenues, and so escaped to the woods again.