Atlantis Online
March 29, 2024, 09:02:35 am
Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
News: Giant crater may lie under Antarctic ice
http://space.newscientist.com/article/dn9268
 
  Home Help Arcade Gallery Links Staff List Calendar Login Register  

WALDEN Or Life In The Woods

Pages: 1 2 3 [4] 5 6   Go Down
  Print  
Author Topic: WALDEN Or Life In The Woods  (Read 2297 times)
0 Members and 90 Guests are viewing this topic.
Mindwarp
Superhero Member
******
Posts: 1663



« Reply #45 on: March 23, 2009, 01:59:42 am »

White Pond and Walden are great crystals on the surface of the
earth, Lakes of Light. If they were permanently congealed, and small
enough to be clutched, they would, perchance, be carried off by
slaves, like precious stones, to adorn the heads of emperors; but
being liquid, and ample, and secured to us and our successors forever,
we disregard them, and run after the diamond of Kohinoor. They are too
pure to have a market value; they contain no muck. How much more
beautiful than our lives, how much more transparent than our
characters, are they! We never learned meanness of them. How much
fairer than the pool before the farmers door, in which his ducks swim!
Hither the clean wild ducks come. Nature has no human inhabitant who
appreciates her. The birds with their plumage and their notes are in
harmony with the flowers, but what youth or maiden conspires with
the wild luxuriant beauty of Nature? She flourishes most alone, far
from the towns where they reside. Talk of heaven! ye disgrace earth.

                            BAKER FARM.

  SOMETIMES I rambled to pine groves, standing like temples, or like
fleets at sea, full-rigged, with wavy boughs, and rippling with light,
so soft and green and shady that the Druids would have forsaken
their oaks to worship in them; or to the cedar wood beyond Flint's
Pond, where the trees, covered with hoary blue berries, spiring higher
and higher, are fit to stand before Valhalla, and the creeping juniper
covers the ground with wreaths full of fruit; or to swamps where the
usnea lichen hangs in festoons from the white spruce trees, and
toadstools, round tables of the swamp gods, cover the ground, and more
beautiful fungi adorn the stumps, like butterflies or shells,
vegetable winkles; where the swamp-pink and dogwood grow, the red
alder berry glows like eyes of imps, the waxwork grooves and crushes
the hardest woods in its folds, and the wild holly berries make the
beholder forget his home with their beauty, and he is dazzled and
tempted by nameless other wild forbidden fruits, too fair for mortal
taste. Instead of calling on some scholar, I paid many a visit to
particular trees, of kinds which are rare in this neighborhood,
standing far away in the middle of some pasture, or in the depths of a
wood or swamp, or on a hilltop; such as the black birch, of which we
have some handsome specimens two feet in diameter; its cousin, the
yellow birch, with its loose golden vest, perfumed like the first; the
beech, which has so neat a hole and beautifully lichen-painted,
perfect in all its details, of which, excepting scattered specimens, I
know but one small grove of sizable trees left in the township,
supposed by some to have been planted by the pigeons that were once
baited with beechnuts near by; it is worth the while to see the silver
grain sparkle when you split this wood; the bass; the hornbeam; the
Celtis occidentalis, or false elm, of which we have but one
well-grown; some taller mast of a pine, a shingle tree, or a more
perfect hemlock than usual, standing like a pagoda in the midst of the
woods; and many others I could mention. These were the shrines I
visited both summer and winter.

  Once it chanced that I stood in the very abutment of a rainbow's
arch, which filled the lower stratum of the atmosphere, tinging the
grass and leaves around, and dazzling me as if I looked through
colored crystal. It was a lake of rainbow light, in which, for a short
while, I lived like a dolphin. If it had lasted longer it might have
tinged my employments and life. As I walked on the railroad
causeway, I used to wonder at the halo of light around my shadow,
and would fain fancy myself one of the elect. One who visited me
declared that the shadows of some Irishmen before him had no halo
about them, that it was only natives that were so distinguished.
Benvenuto Cellini tells us in his memoirs, that, after a certain
terrible dream or vision which he had during his confinement in the
castle of St. Angelo a resplendent light appeared over the shadow of
his head at morning and evening, whether he was in Italy or France,
and it was particularly conspicuous when the grass was moist with dew.
This was probably the same phenomenon to which I have referred,
which is especially observed in the morning, but also at other
times, and even by moonlight. Though a constant one, it is not
commonly noticed, and, in the case of an excitable imagination like
Cellini's, it would be basis enough for superstition. Beside, he tells
us that he showed it to very few. But are they not indeed
distinguished who are conscious that they are regarded at all?

  I set out one afternoon to go a-fishing to Fair Haven, through the
woods, to eke out my scanty fare of vegetables. My way led through
Pleasant Meadow, an adjunct of the Baker Farm, that retreat of which a
poet has since sung, beginning,

        "Thy entry is a pleasant field,

        Which some mossy fruit trees yield

        Partly to a ruddy brook,

        By gliding musquash undertook,

        And mercurial trout,

        Darting about."

I thought of living there before I went to Walden. I "hooked" the
apples, leaped the brook, and scared the musquash and the trout. It
was one of those afternoons which seem indefinitely long before one,
in which many events may happen, a large portion of our natural
life, though it was already half spent when I started. By the way
there came up a shower, which compelled me to stand half an hour under
a pine, piling boughs over my head, and wearing my handkerchief for
a shed; and when at length I had made one cast over the
pickerelweed, standing up to my middle in water, I found myself
suddenly in the shadow of a cloud, and the thunder began to rumble
with such emphasis that I could do no more than listen to it. The gods
must be proud, thought I, with such forked flashes to rout a poor
unarmed fisherman. So I made haste for shelter to the nearest hut,
which stood half a mile from any road, but so much the nearer to the
pond, and had long been uninhabited:

        "And here a poet builded,

          In the completed years,

        For behold a trivial cabin

          That to destruction steers."
Report Spam   Logged
Pages: 1 2 3 [4] 5 6   Go Up
  Print  
 
Jump to:  

Powered by EzPortal
Bookmark this site! | Upgrade This Forum
SMF For Free - Create your own Forum
Powered by SMF | SMF © 2016, Simple Machines
Privacy Policy