12 January 1852 – 18 January 1852

Monday. C. says that he studied lichens a little while, but he found that if you pursued that study you must give up man. It was so thin, and there was so little of man in it! Why, the whole of it was n’t more than an inch thick. He went to hear Noggs [?] the other night. It was the poorest lecture he ever heard. Did n’t know why he did n’t come out. But then he found himself in a handsome hall well lighted and warmed, and thought it would be cheaper to spend the evening there than to go home. I sometimes think that I may go forth and walk hard and earnestly, and live a more substantial life and get a glorious experience; be much abroad in heat and cold, day and night; live more, expend more atmos- pheres, be weary often, etc., ete. But then swiftly the thought comes to me, Go not so far out of your way for a truer life; keep strictly onward in that path alone which your genius points out. Do the things which lie nearest to you, but which are difficult to do. Live a purer, a more thoughtful and laborious life, more true to your friends and neighbors, more noble and mag- nanimous, and that will be better than a wild walk. To live in relations of truth and sincerity with men is to dwell in a frontier country. What a wild and un- frequented wilderness that would be! What Saguenays of magnanimity that might be explored! Men talk about travelling this way or that, as if seeing were all . in the eyes, and a man could sufficiently report what he stood bodily before, when the seeing depends ever on the being. All report of travel is the report of vic- tory or defeat, of a contest with every event and phe- nomenon and how you came out of it. A blind man who possesses inward truth and consistency will see more than one who has faultless eyes but no serious and laborious astronomer to look through them. As if the eyes were the only part of a man that travelled ! Men convert their property into cash, ministers fall sick to obtain the assistance of their parishes, all chaffer with sea-captains, etc., as if the whole object were to get conveyed to some part of the world a pair of eyes merely. A telescope conveyed to and set up at the Cape of Good Hope at great expense, and only a Bushman to look through it. Nothing like a little internal activity called life — if it were only walking much in a day — to keep the eyes in good order; no such collyrium.

When I see the dead stems of the tansy, goldenrod, johnswort, asters, hardhack, etc., etc., rising above the snow by the roadside, sometimes in dense masses, which carry me back in imagination to their green summer life, I put faintly a question which I do not yet hear answered, Why stand they there? Why should the dead corn-stalks occupy the field longer than the green and living did? Many of them are granaries for the birds. It suggests that man is not an annual. He sees the annual plants wither. Nor does his sap cease to flow in the winter as does that of the trees, though, perhaps, even he may be slightly dormant at that season. It is to most a season to some extent of inactivity. He lays up his stores, and is perhaps a little chilled. On the approach of spring there is an increased flow of spirits, of blood, in his veins. Here is a dense mass of dry tansy stems, attached still to the same roots which sustained them in sum- mer, but what an interval between these and those. Here are no yellow disks; here are no green leaves; here is no strong odor to remind some of funerals. Here is a change as great as can well be imagined. Bare, brown, scentless stalks, with the dry heads still adhering. Color, scent, and flavor gone. We are related to all nature, animate and inanimate, and accordingly we share to some extent the nature of the dormant creatures. We all feel somewhat confined by the winter; the nights are longer, and we sleep more. We also wear more clothes. Yet the thought is not less active; perhaps it is more so. What an effect the sight of green grass in the winter has on us! as at the spring by the Corner road. Clouds are our mountains, and the child who had lived in a plain always and had never seen a mountain would find that he was prepared for the sight of them by his familiarity with clouds. This dark, dull veil which shuts out the sky makes a favorable light and a frame under which to view those sailing island clouds in the clearer west. I love to see now a cock of deep-reddish meadow- hay full of ferns and other meadow plants of the coarsest kind. My imagination supplies the green and the hum of bees. What a memento of summer such a haycock! To stand beside a haycock covered with snow in win- ter, through which the dry meadow plants peep out! And yet our hopes survive. The snow flowing over the walls and across the road looks like a mist before me. In some places the wind passing through the chinks of the walls appears to have burst or cut through old snow-heaps, and so carved out these fantastic forms.’ Standing on the hill on the Baker Farm to-day, the level shrub oak plain under Fair Haven appeared as if Walden and other smaller ponds, and perhaps Fair Haven, had anciently sunk down in it, and the Cliffs been pushed up, for the level is continued in many eases even over extensive hollows. The shrub oaks © here have lost their leaves, 7. e. the small scrubby kind on this hill. I can see at a distance above the level of . the snow a few bushes and grasses which mark’ the | edge of the river. They seem to write the word rivus there. That is all or most to indicate that there is a river there. It is betrayed by that thin sedgy and wil- lowy line or border marking the snow yonder. As usual, there was no blueness in the ruts and crev- ices in the snow to-day. What kind of atmosphere does this require? When I observed it the other day, it: was a rather moist air, some snow falling, the sky completely overcast, and the weather not very cold. It is one of the most interesting phenomena of the winter. I noticed to-night, about sundown, that the clouds in the eastern horizon were the deepest indigo-blue of any I ever saw. Commencing with a pale blue or slate in the west, the color deepened toward the east. The Governor, Boutwell (?), lectured before the Lyceum to-night. Quite democratic. ,He wore no badge of his office. I believe that not even his brass buttons were official, but, perchance, worn with some respect to his station. If he could have divested himself a little more completely in his tone and manner of a sense of the dignity which belonged to his office, it would have been better still.

We have heard a deal about English com- fort. But may you not trace these stories home to some wealthy Sardanapalus who was able to pay for obse- quious attendance and for every luxury? How far does it describe merely the tact and selfishness of the wealthy class? Ask the great mass of Englishmen and travel- lers, whose vote alone is conclusive, concerning the comfort they enjoyed in second and third class accom- modations in steamboats and railroads and eating and lodging houses. Lord Somebody-or-other may have made himself comfortable, but the very style of his living makes it necessary that the great majority of his countrymen should be uncomfortable. Are the second-class cars, the second-class accom- modations on board steamboats, etc., 2. e. the only class that can be compared with our own, remarkable for their comfort ? I do not know but the poet is he who generates poems. By continence he rises to creation on a higher level, a supernatural level. When King Olaf the Saint was about to fight with the bonders to recover his lost kingdom, his scalds, who stood about him, composed songs about the events which would soon be taking Thormod’s song concluded thus, — “One viking cheer ! — then, stead of words, We'll = with our death-dealing swords.” “These songs,” says the chronicler, “were immedi- ately got by heart by the army.” Surely the scald’s office was a significant and an honorable one then. “This night the king lay with his army around him on the field, — and lay long atwake in prayer to God, and slept but little. Towards morning a slumber fell on him, and when he awoke daylight was shooting up. The king thought it too early to awaken the army, and asked where Thormod the scald was. ‘Thormod was at hand, and asked what was the king’s pleasure. ‘Sing us a song,’ said the king. Thormod raised him- self up, and sang so loud that the whole army could hear him. He began to sing the old Biarkamal jcom- posed and sung by Biarke before an old battle].’ “Then the troops awoke, and when the song was ended the people thanked him for it; and it pleased many, as it was suitable to the time and occasion, and they called it the house-carle’s whet.” For the first time this winter I notice snow-fleas this afternoon in Walden Wood. Wherever I go they are to be seen, especially in the deepest ruts and foot-tracks. Their number is almost infinite. It is a rather warm and moist afternoon, and feels like rain. I suppose that some peculiarity in the weather has called them forth from the bark of the trees. It is good to see Minott’s hens pecking and scratch- ing the ground. What never-failing health they suggest! Even the sick hen is so naturally sick — like a green leaf turning to brown. No wonder men love to have hens about them and hear their creaking note. They are even laying eggs from time to time still — the un- despairing race! ; Minott was telling me to-day about his going across lots on snow-shoes. Why do they not use them now? He thinks the snows are not so deep. It is a good school the farmers’ sons go to these after- noons, loading and hauling great mill-logs bigger than any cannon, —a sort of battle in the forest. I think there must be an excitement derived from their labor such as they cannot tell. After reading of the life and battles of the Northmen in Snorro Sturleson’s Chroni- cle, these labors most remind me of that. Some of these logs are for pumps; most are for boards and timbers and spiles for bridges. I met one old pupil of mine stretched at his length upon a vast ballista, or battering-ram, of a log, while one yoke and loaded sled went on alone before and another followed behind. How they renew and wear out the paths through the woods! ‘They think I’m loafing. I think they are drudging for gain. But no doubt our employment is more alike than we suspect, and we are each serving the great Master’s ends more than our own. I have my work in the woods where I meet them, though my logs do not go to the same mill. I make a different use of skids. These men, too, who are sledding wood and sawing the logs into lengths in the woods, appear to me employed more after the old Northman fashion than the mechanics in their shops or the merchants behind their counters. ‘There are many more men now in the woods than in summer. The weather has been moderate for a fortnight. The overlapping snow-drifts by the path-sides remind me of some marble tombs and carving I have seen. I see where from time to time the teamster has laid his whip in them. He stains the spotless purity of the snow with his tobacco-juice. In an account of a Chinese funeral, it is said the friends who attended “observed no particular order in their march.” That seems a more natural and fitter way, more grief-like. ‘The ranks should be broken. What must be the state of morals in that country where custom requires the chief mourner to put on the out- ward signs of extreme grief when he does not feel it, to throw himself on the ground and sob and how] though not a tear is shed, and require the support of others as he walks! What refuge can there be for truth in such a country ?

I see that to some men their relation to mankind is all-important. It is fatal in their eyes to outrage the opinions and customs of their fellow-men. Failure and success are, therefore, never proved by them by absolute and universal tests. I feel myself not so vitally related to my fellow-men. I impinge on them but by a point on one side. It is not a Siamese- twin ligature that binds me to them. It is unsafe to defer so much to mankind and the opinions of society, for these are always and without exception heathenish and barbarous, seen from the heights of philosophy. A wise man sees as clearly the heathenism and bar- barity of his own countrymen as those of the nations to whom his countrymen send missionaries. The Eng- lishman and American are subject to equally many na- tional superstitions with the Hindoo and Chinese. My countrymen are to me foreigners. I have but little more sympathy with them than with the mob of India or of China. All nations are remiss in their duties and fall short of their standards. Madame Pfeiffer says of the Parsees, or Fire-Worshippers, in Bombay, who should all have been on hand on the esplanade to greet the first rays of the sun, that she found only a few here and there, and some did not make their appearance till 9 o’clock. I see no important difference between the assumed gravity and the bought funeral sermon of the parish clergyman and the howlings and strikings of the breast of the hired mourning women of the East. Bill Wheeler had two clumps for feet and progressed slowly, by short steps, having frozen his feet once, as I understood. Him I have been sure to meet once in five years, progressing into the town on his stubs, hold- ing the middle of the road as if he drove an invisible herd before him, especially on a military day, — out of what confines, whose hired man having been, I never knew, —in what remote barn having quartered all these years. He seemed to belong to a different caste from other men, and reminded me of both the Indian Pariah and martyr. I understood that somebody was found to give him his drink for the few chores he could do. His meat was never referred to, he had so sublimed his life. One day since this, not long ago, I saw in my walk a kind of shelter such as woodmen might use, in the woods by the Great Meadows, made of meadow- hay cast over a rude frame. Thrusting my head in at a hole, as I am wont to do in such cases, I found Bill Wheeler there curled up asleep on the hay, who, be- ing suddenly wakened from a sound sleep, rubbed his eyes and inquired if I‘found any game, thinking I was sporting. I came away reflecting much on that man’s life, — how he communicated with none; how now, perchance, he did chores for none; how low he lived, perhaps from a deep principle, that he might be some mighty philosopher, greater than Socrates or Diogenes, simplifying life, returning to nature, having turned his back on towns; how many things he had put off, — lux- uries, comforts, human society, even his feet, — wres- tling with his thoughts. I felt even as Diogenes when he saw the boy drinking out of his hands, and threw away his cup. Here was one who went alone, did no work, and had no relatives that I knew of, was not am- bitious that I could see, did not depend on the good opinion of men. Must he not see things with an im- partial eye, disinterested, as a toad observes the gar- dener? Perchance here is one of a sect of philosophers, the only one, so simple, so abstracted in thought and life from his contemporaries, that his wisdom is indeed foolishness to them. Who knows but in his solitary meadow-hay bunk he indulges, in thought, only in tri- umphant satires on men? Who knows but here is a superiority to literature and such things, unexpressed and inexpressible? Who has resolved to humble and mortify himself as never man was humbled and morti- fied. Whose very vividness of perception, clear know- ledge, and insight have made him dumb, leaving no common consciousness and ground of parlance with his kind, — or, rather, his unlike kindred! Whose news plainly is not my news nor yours. I was not sure for a moment but here was a philosopher who had left far behind him the philosophers of Greece and India, and I envied him his advantageous point of view. I was not to be deceived by a few stupid words, of course, and apparent besottedness. It was his position and career that I contemplated. 3 Channing has great respect for McKean, he stands on so low a level. Says he’s great for conversation. He never says anything, hardly answers a question, but keeps at work; never exaggerates, nor uses an ex- clamation, and does as he agrees to. He appears to have got his shoulder to the wheel of the universe. But the other day he went greater lengths with me, as he and Barry were sawing down a pine, both kneeling of necessity. I said it was wet work for the knees in the snow. He observed, looking up at me, “We pray with- out ceasing.” : But to return to Bill. I would have liked to know what view he took of life. A month or two after this, as I ‘heard, he was found dead among the brush over back of the hill, — so far decomposed that his coffin was car- ried to his body and it was put into it with pitchforks. I have my misgivings still that he may have died a Brahmin’s death, dwelling at the roots of trees at last, and been absorbed into the spirit of Brahm; though I have since been assured that he suffered from dis- appointed love, — was what is called love-cracked, — than which can there be any nobler suffering, any fairer death, for a human creature ? — that that made him to drink, froze his feet, and did all the rest for him. Why have not the world the benefit of his long trial ?

One day two young women — a Sunday — stopped at the door of my hut and asked for some water. I answered that I had no cold water but I would lend them a dipper.’ They never returned the dipper, and I had a right to suppose that they came to steal. They were a disgrace to their sex and to humanity. Pariahs of the moral world. Evil spirits that thirsted not for water but threw the dipper into the lake. Such as Dante saw. What the lake to them but liquid fire and bnim- stone? They will never know peace till they have re- turned the dipper. In all the worlds this is decreed. “Evergreens” would be a good title for some of my things, — or “Gill-go-over-the-Ground,” or “ Winter- green,” or “Checkerberry,” or “Usnea Lichens,”’ etc., etc. “Iter Canadense.”’ One day an inoffensive, simple-minded pauper from the almshouse, who, with others, I often saw used as fencing-stuff, standing or sitting on a bushel in the fields to keep cattle from straying, visited me, and expressed a wish to live as I did. He told me in the simplest manner (and therefore quite superior to anything that is called humility — it was too simple and truthful for that) that he was “deficient in intellect.’’ These were his words. The Lord had made him so, and yet he supposed that the Lord cared for him as much as for another. Said he: “I have always been so from my childhood; I never had much mind. It was the Lord’s will, Isuppose. I am weak in the head. I was not like other children.” I have rarely been so fortunate as to meet a fellow-man on such promising ground. It was so solemnly true all that he said.' The other day, the 14th, as I was passing the further Garfield house beyond Holden’s, with my pantaloons, as usual, tucked into my boots (there was no path be- yond Holden’s), I heard some persons in Garfield’s shed, but did not look round, and when I had got a rod or two beyond, I heard some one call out im- pudently from the shed, quite loud, something like “Holloa, mister! what do you think of the walking?” I turned round directly, and saw three men standing in the shed. I was resolved to discomfit them, — that they should prove their manhood, if they had any, and find something to say, though they had nothing be- fore, that they should make amends to the universe by feeling cheap. They should either say to my face and eye what they had said to my back, or they should feel the meanness of having to change their tone. So I called out, looking at one, “Do you wish to speak to me, sir?” No answer. So I stepped a little nearer and repeated the question, when one replied, “ Yes, sir.” So I advanced with alacrity up the path they had shovelled. In the meanwhile one ran into the house. I thought I had seen the nearest one [before]. He called me by name, faintly and with hesitation, and held out his hand half unconsciously, which I did not decline, and I inquired gravely if he wished to say any- thing to me. He could only wave me to the other and mutter, “ My brother.”” I approached him and repeated the question. He looked as if he were shrinking into a nutshell; a pitiable object he was. He looked away from me while he began to frame some business, some surveying, that he might wish to have done. I saw that he was drunk, that his brother was ashamed of him, and I turned my back on him in the outset of this indirect but drunken apology. When Madame Pfeiffer arrived in Asiatic Russia, she felt the necessity of wearing other than a travel- ling dress, when she went to meet the authorities, for, as she remarks, she “was now in a civilized country, where ... people are judged of by their clothes.” This is another barbarous trait.! It seemed that from such a basis as the poor weak- headed pauper had laid, — such a basis of truth and frankness, — an intercourse might go forward to some- thing better than the intercourse of sages. It was on the 4th of July * that I put a few articles of furniture into a hay-rigging, some of which I had made myself, and commenced housekeeping. There is the world-wide fact that, from the mass of men, the appearance of wealth, dress, and equipage alone command respect. They who yield it are the heathen who need to have missionaries sent to them; ‘ and they who cannot afford to live and travel but in this respectable way are, if possible, more pitiable still. In proportion as I have celestial thoughts, is the necessity for me to be out and behold the western sky before sunset these winter days. That is the symbol of the unclouded mind that knows neither winter nor summer. What is your thought hike? That is the hue, that the purity, and transparency, and distance from earthly taint of my inmost mind, for whatever we see without is a symbol of something within, and that which is farthest off is the symbol of what is deepest within. ‘The lover of contemplation, accordingly, will gaze much into the sky. Fair thoughts and a serene mind make fair days. The rainbow is the symbol of the triumph which succeeds to a grief that has tried us to our advantage, so that at last we can smile through our tears. It is the aspect with which we come out of the house of mourning. We have found our relief in tears. As the skies appear to a man, so is his mind. Some see only clouds there; some, prodigies and por- tents; some rarely look up at all; their heads, like the brutes’, are directed toward earth. Some behold there serenity, purity, beauty ineffable. The world run to see the panorama, when there is a panorama in the sky which few go out to see. | Methinks there might be a chapter, when I speak of hens in the thawy days and spring weather on the chips, called “ Chickweed” or “ Plantain.” To seagoing men the very mountains are but boats turned upside down, as the Northmen in Norway speak of the “keel-ridge of the country,” 7. e. the ridge of the mountains which divide the waters flowing east and west '—-as if they were a boat turned bottom up. Those western vistas through clouds to the sky show the clearest heavens, clearer and more elysian than if the whole sky is comparatively free from clouds, for then there is wont to be a vapor more generally dif- fused, especially near the horizon, which, in cloudy days, is absorbed, as it were, and collected into masses; and the vistas are clearer than the unobstructed cope of heaven. The endless variety in the forms and texture of the clouds!— some fine, some coarse grained. I saw to- night overhead, stretching two thirds across the sky, what looked like the backbone, with portions of the ribs, of a fossil monster. Every form and creature is thus shadowed forth in vapor in the heavens. Saw a teamster coming up the Boston road this after- noon, sitting on his load, which was bags of corn or salt, apparently, behind two horses and beating his hands for warmth. He finally got off and walked be- hind, to make his blood circulate faster, and I saw that he was a large man. But when I came near him, I found that he was a monstrous man and dwarfed all whom he stood by, so that I did not know whether he was large or they were small. Yet, though he stood so high, he stooped considerably, more than anybody I think of, and he wore a flat glazed cap to conceal his height, and when he got into the village he sat down on his bags again. I heard him remark to a boy that it was a cold day, and it was; but I wondered that he should feel the cold so sensibly, for I thought it must take a long time to cool so large a body. I learned that it was Kimball of Littleton, that prob- ably he was not twenty. The family was not large. Wild, who took the census, said so, and that his sister said he could n’t do much, — health and strength not much. It troubled him that he was so large, for peo- ple looked at him. There is at once something mon- strous, in the bad sense, suggested by the sight of such aman. Great sizeisinhuman. Itis asif a man should be born with the earth attached to him. I saw him standing up on a sled, talking with the driver, while his own team went on ahead; and I supposed from their comparative height that his companion was sit- ting, but he proved to be standing. Such a man is so much less human; that is what may make him sad. Those old Northmen were not like so many men in these days, whom you can pass your hand through because they have not any backbone. When Asmund was going to kill Harek of Thiotté with a thin hatchet, King Magnus said, “‘ Rather take this axe of mine.’ It was thick, and made like a club. ‘Thou must know, Asmund,’ added he, ‘that there are hard bones in the old fellow.’” Asmund struck Harek on the head, and gave him his death-wound, but when he returned to the king’s house, it appeared that “the whole edge of the axe was turned with the blow.”

Sunday. E. Hosmer tells me that his daugh- ter, walking with Miss Mary Emerson to some meeting or lecture, — perhaps it was Mrs. Smith’s, — the latter was saying that she did not want to go, she did not think it was worth while to be running after such amuse- ments, etc., etc. Whereupon Miss Hosmer asked, ‘‘ What do you go for, then?” “None of your business,’ was the characteristic reply. Sometimes, when a woman was speaking where gentlemen were present, she put her hand on her and said, “Be still. I want to hear the men talk.” I still remember those wonderful sparkles at Pel- ham Pond. The very sportsmen in the distance, with their guns and dogs, presented some surfaces on which a sparkle could impinge, such. was the transparent, flashing air. It was a most exhilarating, intoxicating air, as when poets sing of the sparkling wine. I have seen some men in whom the usually posthu- mous decay appeared to have commenced. They im- pressed me as actually nothing alive; as if there was not salt enough in their composition to preserve them. I could not approach them without a smelling-bottle at my nose, — not till the Fates strengthened the pickle in which they were. While the snow is falling, the telegraph harp is re- sounding across the fields. As if the telegraph ap- proached so near an attribute of divinity that music naturally attended it. To-day, again, I saw some of the blue in the crevices of the snow. It is snowing, but not a moist snow. Per- haps the snow in the air, as well as on the ground, takes up the white rays and reflects the blue. There is no blue to be seen overhead, and it has as it were taken refuge in the chinks and crevices in the snow. What is like the peep or whistle of a bird in the midst of a winter storm ? The pines, some of them, seen through this fine driving snow, have a bluish hue. Barbarous as we esteem the Chinese, they have al- ready built their steamboat. Swiftly the arts spread in these days. Madame Pfeiffer visited the garden of a mandarin in Canton, “in which,” says she, “I was the more interested because it was the birthplace of the first Chinese steamboat, built by order of the man- darin and by Chinese workmen. The mandarin had gone through his studies in North America, where he remained for thirteen years.”” She was there after 1846.