26 January 1852 – 1 February 1852

Men have ever associated the verdure of evergreen trees — hemlocks, firs, spruces, etc. — with the moisture and coolness of mountains. Our word pine is from the Celtic “pin or pen, a rock or moun- tain,” from which is derived the name of this genus in many languages. Hence the name “Apennines” (Alpes pennines). “ Pinaster is Pliny’s name for the wild pine.” (All this from Lindley in Loudon.) But Pinus does not include hemlock or larch or fir. Foster’s success is in reaching such men as Hough- ton, Goodwin, Rice, McKean, Pratt, E. Hubbard, S. Barrett, and others, — Wilson, and even Dillingham; some of whom are men of sterling worth and probity, the salt of the earth, and confessedly the very best of our citizens, though the Church may have called them infidels. They were only more faithful than the rest. They did not go off at half-cock. I do not know more honest or trustworthy men than Rice, Pratt, Barrett, McKean, etc. Frost and Anger [?] might preach for- ever; they would never reach these men. Houghton never realized before that the design of any preacher was to do good to men. In this movement of the waters, the sectarians and formalists are left floating on chips and slivers of doctrine. In preaching to the men whom I have named they make the mistake of preaching or writing on the letter and not the meaning of the letter, the creed and not the life. When a truer man comes, the assembly see the difference at last between his life and the life of his predecessors, and the doctrines of the latter properly pass for wind. ‘They say of the former, “ He hits the nail on the head.”” Every shade and degree of hypocrisy will affect the tone of the voice, and the audience will laugh. ‘The rumseller likes Foster better than Manning, though he is strenuously opposed to his traffic, because he is frank and manly with him and not all things to all men. Those men I have named repre- sent the healthy mind of the generation, who have ears to hear. ‘The man may be proud who satisfies them. A tree seen against other trees is a mere dark mass, but against the sky it has parts, has symmetry and ex- pression. Whatever wit has been produced on the spur of the moment will bear to be reconsidered and reformed with phlegm. The arrow had best not be loosely shot. The most transient and passing remark must be reconsid- ered by the writer, made sure and warranted, as if the earth had rested on its axle to back it, and all the nat- ural forces lay behind it. The writer must direct his sentences as carefully and leisurely as the marksman his rifle, who shoots sitting and with a rest, with patent sights and conical balls beside. He must not merely seem to speak the truth. He must really speak it. If you foresee that a part of your essay will topple down after the lapse of time, throw it down now yourself.! The thousand fine points and tops of the trees delight me; they are the plumes and standards and bayonets of a host that march to victory over the earth. The trees are handsome towards the heavens as well as up their boles; they are good for other things than boards and shingles.

The peculiarity of a work of genius is the absence of the speaker from his speech. He is but the medium. You behold a perfect work, but you do not behold the worker. I read its page, but it is as free from any man that can be remembered as an impass- able desert. I think that the one word which will explain the Shakespeare miracle is “ unconsciousness.” If he had known his own comparative eminence, he would not have failed to publish it incessantly, though Bacon did not. ‘here probably has been no more conscious age than the present. Mill road south of Ministerial Swamp, 3 p. M. As I stand under the hill beyond J. Hosmer’s and look over the plains westward toward Acton and see the farmhouses nearly half a mile apart, few and soli- tary, in these great fields between these stretching woods, out of the world, where the children have to go far to school; the still, stagnant, heart-eating, life-ever- lasting, and gone-to-seed country, so far from the post- office where the weekly paper comes, wherein the new- married wife cannot live for loneliness, and the young man has to depend upon his horse for society; see young J. Hosmer’s house, whither he returns with his wife in despair after living in the city, —I standing in Tarbell’s road, which he alone cannot break out, — the world in winter for most walkers reduced to a sled track winding far through the drifts, all springs sealed up and no digressions; where the old man thinks he may possibly afford to rust it out, not having long to live, but the young man pines to get nearer the post-office and the Lyceum, is restless and resolves to go to California, because the depot is a mile off (he hears the rattle of the cars at a distance and thinks the world is going by and leaving him); where rab- bits and partridges multiply, and muskrats are more numerous than ever, and none of the farmer’s sons are willing to be farmers, and the apple trees are de- cayed, and the cellar-holes are more numerous than the houses, and the rails are covered with lichens, and the old maids wish to sell out and move into the village, and have waited twenty years in vain for this purpose and never finished but one room in the house, never plas- tered nor painted, inside or out, lands which the Indian was long since dispossessed [of], and now the farms are run out, and what were forests are grain-fields, what were grain-fields, pastures; dwellings which only those Arnolds of the wilderness, those coureurs de bois, the baker and the butcher visit, to which at least the latter penetrates for the annual calf, — and as he returns the cow lows after; — whither the villager never penetrates, but in huckleberry time, perchance, and if he does not, who does? — where some men’s breaths smell of rum, having smuggled in a jugful to alleviate their misery and solitude; where the owls give a regular serenade;—TI say, standing there and seeing these things, I cannot realize that this is that hopeful young America which is famous throughout the world for its activity and enterprise, and this is the most thickly settled and Yankee part of it. What must be the condition of the old world! The sphagnum must by this time have concealed it from the eye. In new countries men are scattered broadcast; they do not wait for roads to place their houses on, but roads seek out the houses, and each man is a prince in his principality and depends on himself. Perchance when the virgin soil is exhausted, a reaction takes place, and men concentrate in villages again, become social and commercial, and leave the steady and moderate few to work the country’s mines. The snow has been slowly melting, without rain or mist, the last two or three days. It has settled very much, though the eaves have not been heard to run by me. In going across lots, I walk in the woods, where the snow is not so deep, part having been caught in the trees and dissipated in the air, and a part melted by the warmth of the wood and the reflection. The poison sumach, with its stems hanging down on every side, is a very agreeable object now, seen against the snow. I do not know but thoughts written down thus in a journal might be printed in the same form with greater advantage than if the related ones were brought to- gether into separate essays. ‘They are now allied to life, and are seen by the reader not to be far-fetched. It is more simple, less artful. I feel that in the other case I should have no proper frame for my sketches. Mere facts and names and dates communicate more than we suspect. Whether the flower looks better in the nosegay than in the meadow where it grew and we had to wet our feet to get it! Is the scholastic air any advantage ?

Perhaps I can never find so good a setting for my thoughts as I shall thus have taken them out of. The crystal never sparkles more brightly than in the cavern. ‘The world have always loved best the fable with the moral. The children could read the fable alone, the grown-up read both. The truth so told has the best advantages of the most abstract statement, for it is not the less universally applicable. Where else will you ever find the true cement for your thoughts? How will you ever rivet them together without leaving the marks of the file? Yet Plutarch did not so; Mon- taigne did not so. Men have written travels in this form, but perhaps no man’s daily life has been rich enough to be journalized. Our life should be so active and progressive as to be a journey. Our meals should all be of journey-cake and hasty pudding. We should be more alert, see the sun rise, not keep fashionable hours, enter a house, our own house, as a khan, a caravansary. At noon I did not dine; I ate my journey-cake. I quenched my thirst at a spring or a brook. As I sat at the table, the hospitality was so perfect and the repast so sumptu- ous that I seemed to be breaking my fast upon a bank in the midst of an arduous journey, that the water seemed to be a living spring, the napkins grass, the conversation free as the winds; and the servants that waited on us were our simple desires. Cut off from Pilpay and sop the moral alone at the bottom, would that content you? There will be no more rambling through the aisles of the wood, with occasional vistas through which you see the pond. In those days when how to get my living honestly, with freedom left for my proper pursuits, was a ques- tion which vexed me even more than it does now, I used to see a large box by the railroad, six feet long by three wide, in which the workmen locked up their tools at night; and it suggested to me that every man who was hard pushed might get him such a one for a dollar, and, having bored a few auger-holes in it, to admit the air at least, get into it when it rained and at night, and shut the lid and hook it, and so have free- dom in his mind, and in his soul be free. This did not seem the worst alternative, nor by any means a despic- able resource. You could sit up as late as you pleased; and, whenever you got up in the morming, you would not have any creditor dogging you for rent. I should not be in a bad box. Many a man is harassed to death to pay the rent of a larger and more luxurious box, who would not have frozen to death in such a box as this. I should not be in so bad a box as many a man Is in now.’ If you mean by hard times, times, not when there is no bread, but when there is no cake, I have no sym- pathy with you. Economy is a subject that admits of being treated with levity, but it is not a subject that can be so dis- posed of.? “Why don’t you put on your overalls?” “Why, these are overalls and underalls, being all I have got. These are over all I have got.” They showed me Johnny Riordan to-day, with one thickness of ragged cloth over his little shirt for all this cold weather, with shoes with large holes in the toes, into which the snow got, as he said, without an outer garment, to walk a mile to school every day over the bleakest of causeways, —the clothes with countless patches, which hailed from, claimed descent from, were originally identical with, pantaloons of mine, which set as if his mother had fitted them to a tea-ketile first. This little mass of humanity, this tender gobbet for the fates, cast into a cold world with a torn lichen leaf wrapped about him, — Oh, I should rather hear that America’s first-born were all slain than that his little fingers and toes should feel cold while I am warm. Is man so cheap that he cannot be clothed but with a mat, a rag, that we should bestow on him our cold victuals? Are there any fellow-creatures to whom we abandon our rags, to whom we give our old clothes and shoes when they will not fend the weather from ourselves? Let the mature rich wear the rags and in- sufficient clothing; let the infant poor wear the purple and fine linen. I shudder when I think of the fate of innocency. Our charitable institutions are an insult to humanity. A charity which dispenses the crumbs that fall from its overloaded tables, which are left after its feasts! * “They showed me little Johnny Riordan the other day, as bright a boy of five years as ever trod our paths, whom you could not see for five minutes without loving and honoring him. He lives in what they call the shanty in the woods. He had on, in the middle of January of the coldest winter we have had for twenty years, one thickness only of ragged cloth sewed on to his pantaloons over his little shirt, and shoes with large holes in the toes, into which the snow got, as he was obliged to confess, he who had trodden five winters under his feet! Thus clad he walked a mile to school every day, over the bleakest of railroad causeways, where I know by experience the grown man would frequently freeze his ears or nose if they were not well protected, — for his parents have no thermometer, — all to get learning and warmth and there sit at the head of his bench. These clothes, with countless patches, which had for vehicle —-O shame! shame ! — pantaloons that had been mine, they whispered to me, set as if his mother had fitted them to a tea-kettle first. “T glimpsed him the other morning taking his last step from his last snow-drift on to the schoolhouse door-step, floundering still; saw not his face nor his profile, only his mien, but saw clearly in imagination his ‘old-worthy’ face behind the sober visor of his cap, and he revived to my mind the grave nobility and magnanimity of ancient heroes. He never was drawn in a willow wagon, but progresses by his own brave steps. Has not the world waited for such a generation? Here he con- descends to his a-b-c without one smile, who has the lore of worlds uncounted in his brain. He speaks not of the adventures of the cause- way. What was the bravery of Leonidas and his three hundred boys at the pass of Thermopyle to this infant’s? They dared but to die; he dares to live, and takes his reward of merit, perchance, without relaxing his face into a smile, that does not reward a thousandth part of his merits, that overlooks his unseen and unrewardable merits, — Little Johnny Riordan, who faces cold and routs it like a Persian army, who, yet innocent, carries in his knees the strength of a thou- sand Indras. Not to be so tenderly nurtured as you and I forsooth? All day he plays with his coevals and equals, and then they go to their several homes. | “T am the little Irish boy, That lives in the shanty. I am five years old to-day, And shall soon be one and twenty. “At recess I play With little Billy Gray, And when school is done, Then away I run. ‘And if I meet the cars, I get on the other track, And then I know, whatever comes, I need n’t look back. These warmer days the woodchopper finds that the wood cuts easier than when it had the frost in its sap- wood, though it does not split so readily. Thus every change in the weather has its influence on him, and is appreciated by him in a peculiar way. The woodcutter and his practices and experiences are more to be at- tended to; his accidents, perhaps more than any other’s, should mark the epochs in the winter day. Now that the Indian is gone, he stands nearest to nature. Who has written the history of his day? How far still is the writer of books from the man, his old playmate it may “Having carried off the palm in the intellectual contest with the children of luxury, how bravely he contemplates his destiny: — “T shall grow up And be a great man, And shovel all day As hard as I can. “This tender gobbet for the fates, cast into a cold world, with a torn lichen leaf wrapped about him! I would rather hear that Amer- ica’s first-born were all slain than that his little fingers and toes should feel cold while I am warm. Is man so cheap that he cannot be clothed but with a mat or a rag? that we should abandon to him our worn- out clothes or our cold victuals? Infancy pleads with equal eloquence from all platforms. Rather let the mature rich wear the rags and insufficient clothing, the infant poor and rich, if any, wear the costly furs, the purple and fine linen. Our charitable institutions are an in- sult to humanity, — a charity which dispenses the crumbs that fall from its overloaded tables! whose waste and whose example helped to produce that poverty! “While the charitable waddle about cased in furs and finery, this boy, lively as a cricket, passes them on his way to school. I see that, for the present, the child is happy, is not puny, and has all the won- ders of nature for his toys. Have I not faith that his tenderness will in some way be cherished and protected, as the buds of spring in the remotest wintry dell no less than in the garden and summer-house?”’] be, who chops in the woods! There are ages between them. Homer refers to the progress of the woodcutter’s work, to mark the time of day on the plains of Troy, and the inference from such passages commonly is that he lived in a more primitive state of society than the present. But I think that this is a mistake. Like proves like in all ages, and the fact that I myself should take pleasure in referring to just such simple and peaceful labors which are always proceeding, that the contrast itself always attracts the civilized poet to what is rudest and most primitive in his contemporaries, all this rather proves a certain interval between the poet and the chop- per whose labor he refers to, than an unusual nearness to him, on the principle that familiarity breeds contempt. Homer is to be subjected to a very different kind of criticism from any he has received. That reader who most fully appreciates the poet, and derives the greatest pleasure from his works, himself lives in circumstances most like those of the poet him- self. About Brister’s Spring the ferns, which have been covered with snow, and the grass are still quite green. The skunk-cabbage in the water is already pushed up, and I find the pinkish head of flowers within its spathe bigger than a pea. It is remarkable that no pains is taken to teach chil- dren to distinguish colors. Iam myself uncertain about the names of many.

We must be very active if we would be clean and live our own life, and not a languishing and scurvy one. The trees, which are stationary, are covered with parasites, especially those which have grown slowly. The air is filled with the fine sporules of countless mosses, algee, lichens, fungi, which settle and plant themselves on all quiet surfaces. Under the nails and between the joints of the fingers of the idle, flourish crops of mildew, algee, and fungi, and other vegetable sloths, though they may be invisible, —the lichens where life still exists, the fungi where decomposition has begun to take place. And the sluggard is soon covered with sphagnum. Algze take root in the corners of his eyes, and lichens cover the bulbs of his fingers and his head, etc., etc., the low- est forms of vegetable life. This is the definition of dirt. We fall a prey to others of nature’s tenants, who take possession of the unoccupied house. With the utmost inward activity we have to wash and comb ourselves beside, to get rid of the adhering seeds. Cleanliness is by activity not to give any quiet shelf for the seeds of parasitic plants to take root on. If he cuts pines, the woodchopper’s hands are covered with pitch. The names of plants are for the most part traced to Celtic and Arabian roots. The forcible writer does not go far for his themes. His ideas are not far-fetched. He derives inspiration from his chagrins and his satisfactions. His theme being ever an instant one, his own gravity assists him, gives impetus to what he says. He minds his busi- ness. He does not speculate while others drudge for him. I am often reminded that if I had bestowed on me the wealth of Croesus, my aims must still be the same and my means essentially the same. It still melts. I observed this afternoon that the ground where they are digging for some scales near the depot was frozen about nine inches where the snow has lain most and sixteen inches where the road was. I begin to see the tops ‘of the grasses and stubble in the fields, which deceive me as if it were the ground itself. That point where the sun goes down is the cynosure which attracts all eyes at sundown and half an hour before. What do all other parts of the horizon concern us? Our eyes follow the path of that great luminary. We watch for his rising, and: we observe his setting. He is a companion and fellow-traveller we all have. We pity him who has his cheerless dwelling elsewhere, even in the northwest or southwest, off the high road of nature. The snow is nearly gone from the railroad causeway. Few are the days when the telegraph harp rises into a pure, clear melody. Though the wind may blow strong or soft, in this or that direction, naught will you hear but a low hum or murmur, or even a buzzing sound; but at length, when some undistinguishable zephyr blows, when the conditions not easy to be detected arrive, it suddenly and unexpectedly rises into melody, as if a god had touched it, and fortunate is the walker who chances to be within hearing. So is it with the lyres of bards, and for the most part it is only a feeble and ineffectual hum that comes from them, which leads you to expect the melody you do not hear. When the gale is modified, when the favorable conditions occur, and the indescribable coincidence takes place, then there is music. Of a thousand buzzing strings, only one yields music. It is like the hum of the shaft, or other machinery, of a steamboat, which at length might be- come music in a divine hand. I feel greatly enriched by this telegraph. I have come to see the clay and sand in the Cut. A reddish tinge in the earth, stains. An Indian hue is sin- gularly agreeable, even exciting, to the eye. Here the whole bank is sliding. Even the color of the subsoil excites me, as if I were already getting near to life and vegetation. This clay is fecal in its color also. It runs off at bottom into mere shoals, shallows, vasa, vague sand-bars, like the mammoth leaves, — makes strands.! Perhaps those mother-o’-pearl clouds I described some time ago might be called rainbow flocks. The snow on the slope of the Cliffs is dotted with black specks, the seeds of the mullein which the wind has shaken out. When [I strike the dry stalks, the seeds fallin a shower and color the snow black like charcoal dust or powder. The green mosses on the rocks are evidently nour- ished and kept bright by the snows lying on them a part of the year. Day before yesterday, I saw the hunters out with a dozen dogs, but only two pussies, one white and one little gray one, did I see, for so many men and dogs, who seem to set all the village astir as if the fox’s trail led through it. And Stedman Buttrick, with whom I was walking, was excited as if in the heyday of his youth. Heard C. lecture to-night. It was a bushel of nuts. Perhaps the most original lecture I ever heard. Ever so unexpected, not to be foretold, and so sententious that you could not look at him and take his thought at the same time. You had to give your undivided attention to the thoughts, for you were not assisted by set phrases or modes of speech intervening. There was no sloping up or down to or from his points. It was all genius, no talent. It required more close attention, more abstrac- tion from surrounding circumstances, than any lecture I have heard. For, well as I know C., he more than any man disappoints my expectation. When I see him in the desk, hear him, I cannot realize that I ever saw him before. He will be strange, unexpected, to his best acquaintance. I cannot associate the lecturer with the companion of my walks. It was from so original and peculiar a point of view, yet just to himself in the main, that I doubt if three in the audience apprehended a tithe that he said. It was so hard to hear that doubtless few made the exertion. A thick succession of mountain passes and no intermediate slopes and plains. Other lectures, even the best, in which so much space is given to the elaborate development of a few ideas, seemed somewhat meagre in comparison. Yet it would be how much more glorious if talent were added to genius, if there [were] a just arrangement and development of the thoughts, and each step were not a leap, but he ran a space to take a yet higher leap! Most of the spectators sat in front of the performer, but here was one who, by accident, sat all the while on one side, and his report was peculiar and startling.

Friday. I feel as if 1 were gradually part- ing company with certain friends, just as I perceive fa- miliar objects successively disappear when I am leaving my native town in the cars. It is an encouraging piece of news, when I read in the Weekly Tribune, appended to an article on ‘‘ The Liquor Groceries’ which had appeared in the Daily, close as the moral to the fable or its operation to the medicine, that the worst of those establishments had re- fused to receive the Tribune, being offended by its dis- closures; showing that the arrow has already reached its mark before we distant readers have heard its whiz. One must not complain that his friend is cold, for heat is generated between them. I doubt if Emerson could trundle a wheelbarrow through the streets, because it would be out of character. One needs to have a comprehensive character. Channing’s lecture was full of wise, acute, and witty observations, yet most of the audience did not know but it was mere incoherent and reckless verbiage and nonsense. I lose my respect for people who do not know what is good and true. I know full well that readers and hearers, with the fewest exceptions, ask me for my second best. Lindley (apparently) in Loudon asks, when you have referred a plant to its class and order in the Lin- nan system, “What more has been acquired than the bare knowledge that the plant in question pos- sesses a certain number of stamens and styles? No possible notion can be formed of the relation it bears to other plants of the same nature, of the qualities it probably possesses, or of the structure of those parts not under examination, the fruit for example; and, finally, if it were wished to convey an idea of the plant to a stranger, no means would be in the possession of the Linnean botanist of doing so, except by stating that the plant belonged to Pentandria Monogynia, for example, which is stating nothing. But what would be the condition of the student of the natural affinities of plants in a similar case? It is true he would be obliged to consult more characters than the two uninfluential ones of Linnzeus — it would be necessary to ascertain if his subject was Vascular or Cellular; if Vascular, whether it was Monocotyledonous or Dicotyledonous; if Dicotyledonous, whether the leaves were opposite or alternate, stipulate or exstipulate, whether the flowers were monopetalous, polypetalous, or apetalous, the nature and station of the stamens, the condition of the ovarium, and so on. But when he has ascertained thus much, only let it be remembered, for a moment, how much he has gained indirectly as well as directly. Perhaps he has discovered that his plant belongs to Rubiacez; he will then have learned that all vegeta- bles with opposite entire stipulate leaves, and a mono- petalous superior corolla, are also Rubiaceous; if a fragment of the leaves and stem only of such a plant were afterwards submitted to him for examination, he would recognize its affinities, and remember that it was Rubiaceous, and being aware of that fact, he would be able safely to infer that its calyx and corolla would be of a particular nature, that if the roots afforded any color for dyeing, it would be red; that the medi- cinal properties of the bark, if any, would be tonic, astringent, and febrifugal, and that its seeds would be of the same nature as those of coffee, and finally, its geographical position would be tolerably certain to him.” No good introduction to the study of the natural system, but such a work expected from Lindley in 1829. But after all, where is the flower lore? for the first book, and not the last, should contain the poetry of flowers. ‘The natural system may tell us the value of a plant in medicine or the arts or for food, but neither it nor the Linnzan, to any great extent, tells us its chief value and significance to man, which in any measure accounts for its beauty, its flower-like pro- perties. ‘There will be pages about some fair flower’s qualities as food or medicine, but perhaps not a sen- tence about its significance to the eye, as if the cow- slip were better for greens than for yellows. Not about what children and all flower-lovers gather flowers for. Are they emissaries sent forth by the arts to pur- vey and explore for them? Not how good they are to wear on the bosom, or to smell, how much they are to the eye and the sentiments, not how much to the palate and the sensations, — flowers as flowers. Not addressed to the cook or the physician or the dyer merely, but to the lovers of flowers, young and old. The most poetical of books. It should have the beauty -, and the fragrance of flowers, some of their color. A keepsake! What a keepsake a manual of botany! In which is uttered, breathed, man’s love of flowers. It is dry as a hortus siccus. Flowers are pressed into the botanist’s service.’ Do nothing merely out of good resolutions. Disci- pline yourself only to yield to love; suffer yourself to be attracted. It is in vain to write on chosen themes. We must wait till they have kindled a flame in our minds. ‘There must be the copulating and generating force of love behind every effort destined to be success- ful. The cold resolve gives birth to, begets, nothing. The theme that seeks me, not Tit. The poet’s relation to his theme is the relation of lovers. It is no more to be courted. Obey, report. Though they are cutting off the woods at Walden, it is not all loss. It makes some new and unexpected prospects. We read books about logging in the Maine woods as if it were wholly strange to these parts. But I here witness almost exactly the same things, scenes that might be witnessed in Maine or New Hampshire: the logger’s team, his oxen on the ice chewing the cud, the long pine tree, stripped of its branches, chained upon his sled, resting on a stout cross-bar or log and trailing behind, the smoke of his fire curling up blue amid the trees, the sound of the axe and of the team- sters’ voices. A pretty forest scene, seeing oxen, so patient and stationary, good for pictures, standing on the ice, —a piece of still life. Oh, it is refreshing to see, to think of, these things after hearing of the dis- cussions and politics of the day! The smoke I saw was quite blue. As I stood on the partially cleared bank at the east end of the pond, I looked south over the side of the hill into a deep dell still wooded, and I saw, not more than thirty rods off, a chopper at his work. I was half a dozen rods distant from the stand- ing wood, and I saw him through a vista between two trees (it was now mainly an oak wood, the pine having been cut), and he appeared to me apparently half a mile distant, yet charmingly distinct, as in a picture of which the two trees were the frame. He was seen against the snow on the hillside beyond. I could dis- tinguish each part of his dress perfectly, and the axe with distinct outline as he raised it above his head, the black iron against the snow, and could hear every stroke distinctly. Yet I should have deemed it ridicu- lous to have called to him, he appeared so distant. He appeared with the same distinctness as objects seen through a pinhole in a card. This was the effect rather than by comparison of him, his size, with the nearer trees, between which I saw him and which made the canopied roof of the grove far above his head. It was, perhaps, one of those coincidences and effects which have made men painters. I could not behold him as an actual man; he was more ideal than in any picture I have seen. He refused to be seen as actual. Far in the hollow, yet somewhat enlightened, aisles of this wooded dell. Some scenes will thus present themselves as pic- ture. Those scenes which are picture, subjects for the pencil, are distinctly marked; they do not require the aid of genius to idealize them. They must be seen as ideal. 1852} THE POETRY OF THE JAKES 255 Nature allows of no universal secrets. The more care- fully a secret is kept on one side of the globe, the larger the type it is printed in on the other. Nothing is too pointed, too personal, too immodest, for her to blazon. The relations of sex, transferred to flowers, become the study of ladies in the drawing-room. While men wear fig leaves, she grows the Phallus umpudicus and P. caninus and other phallus-like fungi. The rhymes which I used to see on the walls of privies, scribbled by boys, I have lately seen, word for word the same; in spite [of] whitewash and brick walls and ad- monitions they survive. They are no doubt older than Orpheus, and have come down from an antiquity as remote as mythology or fable. So, too, no doubt cor- porations have ever struggled in vain to obtain clean- liness in those provinces. Filth and impurity are as old as cleanliness and purity. To correspond to man com- pletely, Nature is even perhaps unchaste herself. Or perchance man’s impurity begets a monster somewhere, to proclaim his sin. The poetry of the jakes, — it flows as perennially as the gutter. I am afraid to travel much or to famous places, lest it might completely dissipate the mind. ‘Then I am sure that what we observe at home, if we observe anything, is of more importance than what we observe abroad. The far-fetched is of the least value. What we observe in travelling are to some extent the accidents of the body, but [what] we observe when sitting at home are, in the same proportion, phenomena of the mind itself. A wakeful night will yield as much thought as a long journey. If I try thoughts by their quality, not their quantity, I may find that a restless night will yield more than the longest journey. J I live in an age when men have agreed to say “God” instead of “Jove.” It is remarkable that there is no man so coarse and insensible but he can be profane, can pronounce the word “God” with emphasis in the woods when any- thing happens to disturb, as a spoiled child loves to see what liberties he can presume to take. I am only as- tonished that B should think it any daring; that he . should believe in God so much. Then look round to see if the auditors appreciated his boldness.

We hear the sounds of screech owls in our nostrils, and the snoring of men is perhaps not to be distinguished from that of pigs. [sic] is too grand for me. He belongs to the no- bility and wears their cloak and manners; is attracted to Plato, not to Socrates, I fear partly because the lat- ter’s life and associates were too humble. I am a com- moner. ‘To me there is something devilish in manners. The best manners is nakedness of manners. I should value E.’s praise more, which is always so discriminating, if there were not some alloy of patronage and hence of flattery about [it]. In that respect he is like [sec]; they flatter you, but themselves more. Praise should be spoken as simply and naturally as a flower emits its fragrance. I am repeatedly astonished by the coolness and ob- ’ [The first dash (made in pencil) stands for a single initial care- fully scratched out; the second, for a full name, also erased.] tuse bigotry with which some will appropriate the New Testament in conversation with you. It is as if they were to appropriate the sun and stand between you and it, because they understood that you had walked once by moonlight, though that was in the reflected light of the sun, which you could not get directly. I have seen two persons conversing at a tea-table, both lovers of the New Testament, each in his own way, the one a lover of all kindred expression of truth also; and yet the other appropriated the New Testament wholly to herself, and took it for granted, with singular or rather lamentable blindness and obtuseness, that the former neither knew nor cared anything about it. Hor- ace Greeley found some fault with me to the world because I presumed to speak of the New Testament using my own words and thoughts, and challenged me to a controversy. The one thought I had was that it would give me real pleasure to know that he loved it as sincerely and enlightenedly as I did; but I felt that he did not care so much about it as I. Botanies, instead of being the poetry, are the prose, of flowers. I do not mean to underrate Linnzus’s admirable nomenclature, much of which is itself poetry. Moreover, if you [are] restricted in your range by poverty, if you cannot buy books and newspapers, you are but confined to the most significant and vital ex- periences, you are compelled to deal with the material which yields the most sugar and the most starch. You are defended from being a trifler. No man loses, even on a lower level, by magnanimity on a higher. Super- fluous wealth can buy superfluities only. Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul.’ Not the same things are great to all men. Many of the words which we write with capital letters are not so distinguished by those who live at a distance. That work of man’s must be vast indeed which, like the Pyramids, looks blue in the horizon, as mountains. Few works of man rise high enough, and with breadth enough, to be blued by the air between them and the spectator. In the East, women religiously conceal that they have faces; in the West, that they have legs. In both cases they make it evident that they have but little brains. I hear my friend say, “I have lost my faith in men; there are none true, magnanimous, holy,” etc., etc., meaning, all the while, that I do not possess those unattainable virtues; but, worm as I am, this is not wise in my friend, and I feel simply discouraged so far as my relation to him is concerned. We must have infinite faith in each other. If we have not, we must never let it leak out that we have not. He erects his want of faith as a barrier between us. When I hear grown man or woman say, “Once I had faith in men; now I have not,’”’ I am inclined to ask, “ Who are you whom the world has disappointed ? Have not you rather disappointed the world? There is the same ground for faith now that ever there was. It needs only a little love in you who complain so to ground it on.” For my own part, I am thankful that there are those who come so near being my friends that they can be estranged from me. I had faith before they would destroy the little I have. ‘The mason asks but a narrow shelf to spring his brick from; man requires only an infinitely narrower one to spring the arch of faith from. What can I do? There is one whom I would fain call my friend. I feel disposed to practice any virtue. I am at liberty to do so. But it chances that at pre- sent I feel no sympathy with, no warmth toward, him. I am capable of sympathy and of warmth. What can I do? The universal laws will work; I must condemn what is wrong in him as well as in another. I cannot act a part. I submit myself. Do what you will with us, O ye gods! See what a swift penalty you have to pay. If you say to your friend that he is less than an angel, he is your friend no longer. The only ledge I can spring the arch of friendship from is the ground of infinite faith. If you have lost any of your faith in me, you might as well have lost it all. How can you renounce and retain at the same time ? One woman whom | visit sometimes thinks I am con- ceited, and yet wonders that I do not visit her oftener. If I were sure she was right perhaps I should. Now this is a sad obstacle in the way of hearty communica- tions. As, naturally enough, we are not agreed on that point, our sympathy is lessened. Another with whom I converse a good deal allows that sometimes my ac- tions are better than my principles as expressed in conversation. I am not sure that I have any right to address to you the words I am about to write. The reason I have not visited you oftener and more earnestly is that I am offended by your pride, your sometime assumption of dignity, your manners, which come over me like waves of Lethe. I know that if I stood in that relation to you which you seem to ask, I should not be met. Perhaps I am wiser than you think. Do you never for an instant treat me as a thing, flatter me? You treat me with politeness, and I make myself scarce. We have not sympathy enough. We do not always apprehend each other. You talk to me often as if I were Mr. Tompkins of the firm of , retired merchant. If I had never thought of you as a friend, I could make much use of you as an acquaintance. I observed this afternoon, on the Turnpike, that where it drifts over the edge of a brook or a ditch, the snow being damp as it falls, what does not adhere to the sharp edge of the drift falls on the dead weeds and shrubs and forms a drapery like a napkin or a white table- cloth hanging down with folds and tassels or fringed border. Or perhaps the fresh snow merely rounds and whitens thus the old cores. It was hke looking from one side of a rich white counterpane or table-cloth where it hangs over the side of the bed or table. The value of the pitch pine in winter is that it holds the snow so finely. I see it now afar on the hillsides decking itself with it, its whited towers forming coverts where the rabbit and the gray squirrel lurk. It makes the most cheerful winter scenery beheld from the win- dow, you know so well the nature of the coverts and the sombre light it makes. The young oaks, with their red leaves, covering so many acres, are also an indis- pensable feature of the winter landscape, and the limbs of oak woods where some of the trees have been cut off.

When I hear that a friend on whom I re- lied has spoken of me, not with cold words perhaps, but even with a cold and indifferent tone, to another, ah! what treachery I feel it to be! —the sum of all crimes against humanity. My friend may cherish a thousand suspicions against me, and they may but re- present his faith and expectations, till he cherishes them so heartlessly that he can speak of them. If I have not succeeded in my friendships, it was because I demanded more of them and did not put up with what I could get; and I got no more partly because I gave so little. I must be dumb to those who, I have not faith, ap- preciate my actions, not knowing the springs of them. While we preach obedience to human laws and to that portion of the divine laws set forth in the New Testament, the natural laws of genius, of love and friendship, we do not preach nor insist upon. How many a seeming heartlessness is to be explained by the very abundance of the heart! How much of seem- ing recklessness, even selfishness, is to be explained by obedience to this code of the divine laws! It is evident that as buyers and sellers we obey a very different law from what we do as lovers and friends. The Hindoo is not to be tried in all things by the Christian standard, nor the Christian by the Hindoo. How much fidelity to law of a kind not commonly recognized, how much magnanimity even, may be thrown away on mankind! is like pearls cast before swine! The hero obeys his own law, the Christian his, the lover and friend theirs; they are to some extent different codes. What inces- sant tragedy between men when one silently obeys the code of friendship, the other the code of philanthropy, in their dealings with one another. As our constitutions, our geniuses, are different, so are our standards, and we are amenable to different codes. My neighbor asks me in vain to be good as he is good. I must be good as I am made to be good, whether I am heathen or Christian. Every man’s laws are hard enough to obey. The Christian falls as far short of obeying the heathen’s moral law as the heathen does. One of little faith looks for his rewards and punishments to the next world, and, despairing of this world, behaves accordingly in it; another thinks the present a worthy occasion and arena, sacrifices to it, and expects to hear sympathiz- ing voices. ‘The man who believes in another world and not in this is wont to put me off with Christianity. The present moment in which we talk is of a little less value to him than the next world. So we are said to hope in proportion as we do not realize. It is all hope deferred. But one grain of realization, of instant life, on which we stand, is equivalent to acres of .the leaf of hope hammered out to gild our prospect. The for- mer so qualifies the vision that it gilds all that we look upon with the foil of truth. We must meet the hero on heroic grounds. Some tribes inhabit the mountains; some dwell on the plain. We discourage one another. We obey different laws. Is not the midnight like Central Africa to most? Are we not tempted to explore it, to penetrate to the shores of its Lake Tchad, to discover the sources of its Nile, perchance in the Mountains of the Moon? Who knows what fertility, what beauty in the animal and vege- table kingdom, are there to be found,’ what primeval simplicity and reflection of the truth among its dusky inhabitants ? We illuminate only the first hours of the night. The light behind the face of the clock on the State-House in Philadelphia extinguished at 11 o’clock p. M. with punctuality, to save oil. Those hours are resigned to a few watchmen in the cities, watching for the disgrace of humanity. Shall we never have watch- men on the country’s hills, of another sort, watching for the glory of God? Watch on city walls for a foe, not on country hills for a friend! In the Mountains of the Moon, in the Central Africa of the night, — there is where all Niles hide their heads. The expeditions up the Niles extend but to the Cata- racts, past the ruins of Thebes, or perchance to the mouth of the White Nile; but it is the Black Nile that concerns us.” Of some of the great rivers, like the Nile and the Orinoco (?), men still only conjecture the sources. , Shall we put our heads out the chamber window and ask the watchmen, the city police, to tell us of the night, — what its signs of gladness are? Are these the [Exeursions, p. 323; Riv. 397.] ? [Ibid.} questions we shall put to the watchmen? Who, then, shall we put them to? Or is there none who can answer them ? Each thing is attracted to each, and running to coa- lesce like drops of water. The fingers incline to be webbed and run together. When I hold mine up to the light and bring them near together, such are the laws of light that, just before they touch, a web appears to grow on them and unite them. So of objects seen through imperfections in glass. It depends upon how a man has spent his day, whether he has any right to be in his bed. So spend some hours that you may have a right to sleep in the sunshine. My friends! my friends! it does not cheer me to see them. They but express their want of faith in me or in mankind; their coldest, cruelest thought comes clothed in polite and easy-spoken words at last. I am silent to their invitations, because I do not feel invited, and we have no reasons to give for what we do not do. One says, “Love me out of this mire;”’ the other says, “Come out of it and be lovely.”’ One speaks with scorn of the scorners. In the winter the botanist can study lichens. The recent rush to California and the attitude of the world, even of its philosophers and prophets, in rela- tion to it appears to me to reflect the greatest disgrace on mankind. That so many are ready to get their liv- ing by the lottery of gold-digging without contributing any value to society, and that the great majority who stay at home justify them in this both by precept and example! It matches the infatuation of the Hindoos who have cast themselves under the car of Juggernaut. I know of no more startling development of the morality of trade and all the modes of getting a living than the rush to California affords. Of what significance the philosophy, or poetry, or religion of a world that will rush to the lottery of California gold-digging on the receipt of the first news, to live by luck, to get the means of commanding the labor of others less lucky, 1. €. of slaveholding, without contributing any value to society? And that is called enterprise, and the devil is only a little more enterprising! The philosophy and poetry and religion of such a mankind are not worth the dust of a puffball. The hog that roots his own liv- ing, and so makes manure, would be ashamed of such company. If I could command the wealth of all the worlds by lifting my finger, I would not pay such a price for it. It makes God to be a moneyed gentleman who scatters a handful of pennies in order to see mankind scramble for them. Going to California. It is only three thousand miles nearer to hell. Iwill resign my life sooner than live by luck. The world’s raffle. A sub- sistence in the domains of nature a thing to be raffled for! No wonder that they gamble there. I never heard that they did anything else there. What a comment, what a satire, on our institutions! The conclusion will be that mankind will hang itself upon a tree. And who would interfere to cut it down. And have all the pre- cepts in all the bibles taught men only this? and is the last and most admirable ‘invention of the Yankee race only an improved: muck-rake ? — patented too! If one came hither to sell lottery tickets, bringing satis- factory credentials, and the prizes were seats in heaven, this world would buy them with a rush. Did God direct us so to get our living, digging where we never planted, — and He would perchance reward us with lumps of gold?? It is a text, oh! for the Jonahs of this generation, and yet the pulpits are as silent as immortal Greece [ ?], silent, some of them, because the preacher is gone to California himself. The gold of California is a touchstone which has betrayed the rottenness, the baseness, of mankind. Satan, from one of his elevations, showed mankind the kingdom of California, and they entered into a compact with him at once. God gave a man.a certificate of righteousness which . entitled him to food and raiment, but the rest were discontented and envied him. But at last news came that one had discovered a depository of like certificates, intended also for the righteous in’ times to. come, and a cry went up from all lands, and sinners rushed thither from all parts and appropriated them. | God gave the nghteous man a ceiftificate entitling him to food and raiment, but the unrighteous man found a facsimile of the same in God’s: coffers, and appropriated it, and obtained food and raiment like the former.® There are some things which God may afford to smile at; man cannot. * [Cape Cod, and Miscellanies, p. 464; Misc., Riv. 264.]