18 August 1851 – 24 August 1851

It plainly makes men sad to think. Hence pensiveness is akin to sadness. Some dogs, I have noticed, have a propensity to worry cows. They go off by themselves to distant pastures, and ever and anon, like four-legged devils, they worry the cows,—literally full of the devil. They are so full of the devil they know not what to do. I come to interfere between the cows and their tormentors. Ah, I grieve to see the devils escape so easily by their swift limbs, imps of mischief! They are the dog state of those boys who pull down hand-bills in the streets. Their next migration perchance will be into such dogs as these, ignoble fate! The dog, whose office it should be to guard the herd, turned its tormentor. Some courageous cow endeavoring in vain to toss the nimble devil. Those soldiers in the Champ de Mars at Montreal convinced me that I had arrived in a foreign country under a different government, where many are under the control of one. Such perfect drill could never be in a republic. Yet it had the effect on us as when the keeper shows his animals’ claws. It was the English leopard showing his claws. The royal something or other. I have no doubt that soldiers well drilled, as a class, are peculiarly destitute of originality and independence. The men were dressed above their condition; had the bearing of gentlemen without a corresponding intellectual culture. The Irish was a familiar element, but the Scotch a novel one. The St. Andrew’s Church was prominent, and sometimes I was reminded of Edinburgh,—indeed, much more than of London. Warburton remarked, soon after landing at Quebec, that everything was cheap in that country but men. My thought, when observing how the wooden pavements were sawed by hand in the streets, instead of by machinery, because labor was cheap, how cheap men are here! It is evident that a private man is not worth so much in Canada as in the United States, and if that is the bulk of a man’s property, i. e. the being private and peculiar, he had better stay here. An Englishman, methinks, not to speak of other nations, habitually regards himself merely as a constituent part of the English nation; he holds a recognized place as such; he is a member of the royal regiment of Englishmen. And he is proud of his nation. But an American cares very little about such, and greater freedom and independence are possible to him. He is nearer to the primitive condition of man. Government lets him alone, and he lets government alone. I often thought of the Tories and refugees who settled in Canada at [the time of] the Revolution. These English were to a considerable extent their descendants. Quebec began to be fortified in a more regular manner in 1690. The most modern fortifications have an air of antiquity about them; they have the aspect of ruins in better or worse repair,—ruins kept in repair from the day they were built, though they were completed yesterday,—because they are not in a true sense the work of this age. I couple them with the dismantled Spanish forts to be found in so many parts of the world. They carry me back to the Middle Ages, and the siege of Jerusalem, and St. Jean d’Acre, and the days of the Bucaniers. Such works are not consistent with the development of the intellect. Huge stone structures of all kinds, both by their creation and their influence, rather oppress the intellect than set it free. A little thought will dismantle them as fast as they are built. They are a bungling contrivance. It is an institution as rotten as the church. The sentinel with his musket beside a man with his umbrella is spectral. There is not sufficient reason for his existence. My friend there, with a bullet resting on half an ounce of powder, does he think that he needs that argument in conversing with me? Of what use this fortification, to look at it from the soldier’s point of view? General Wolfe sailed by it with impunity, and took the town of Quebec without experiencing any hindrance from its fortifications. How often do we have to read that the enemy occupied a position which commanded the old, and so the fort was evacuated! How impossible it is to give that soldier a good education, without first making him virtually a deserter. It is as if I were to come to a country village surrounded with palisadoes in the old Indian style,—interesting as a relic of antiquity and barbarism. A fortified town is a man cased in the heavy armor of antiquity, and a horse-load of broadswords and small-arms slung to him, endeavoring to go about his business. The idea seemed to be that some time the inhabitants of Canada might wish to govern themselves, and this was to hinder. But the inhabitants of California succeed well without any such establishment. There would be the same sense in a man’s wearing a breastplate all his days for fear somebody should fire a bullet at his vitals. The English in Canada seem to be everywhere prepared and preparing for war. In the United States they are prepared for anything; they may even be the aggressors. This is a ruin kept in a remarkably good repair. There are some eight hundred or a thousand men there to exhibit it. One regiment goes bare-legged to increase the attraction. If you wish to study the muscles of the leg about the knee, repair to Quebec.

Clematis Virginiana; calamint; Lycopus Europeus, water horehound. This is a world where there are flowers. Now, at 5 A. M., the fog, which in the west looks like a wreath of hard-rolled cotton-batting, is rapidly dispersing. The echo of the railroad whistle is heard the horizon round; the gravel train is starting out. The farmers are cradling oats in some places. For some days past I have noticed a red maple or two about the pond, though we have had no frost. The grass is very wet with dew this morning. The way in which men cling to old institutions after the life has departed out of them, and out of themselves, reminds me of those monkeys which cling by their tails,—aye, whose tails contract about the limbs, even the dead limbs, of the forest, and they hang suspended beyond the hunter’s reach long after they are dead. It is of no use to argue with such men. They have not an apprehensive intellect, but merely, as it were, a prehensile tail. Their intellect possesses merely the quality of a prehensile tail. The tail itself contracts around the dead limb even after they themselves are dead, and not till sensible corruption takes place do they fall. The black howling monkey, or caraya. According to Azara, it is extremely difficult to get at them, for “when mortally wounded they coil the tail round a branch, and hang by it with the head downwards for days after death, and until, in fact, decomposition begins to take effect.” The commenting naturalist says, “A singular peculiarity of this organ is to contract at its extremity of its own accord as soon as it is extended to its full length.” I relinquish argument, I wait for decomposition to take place, for the subject is dead; as I value the hide for the museum. They say, “Though you’ve got my soul, you sha’n’t have my carcass.”

2 P. M.—To Lee’s Bridge via Hubbard’s Wood, Potter’s field, Conantum, returning by Abel Minott’s house, Clematis Brook, Baker’s pine plain, and railroad. I hear a cricket in the Depot Field, walk a rod or two, and find the note proceeds from near a rock. Partly under a rock, between it and the roots of the grass, he lies concealed,—for I pull away the withered grass with my hands,—uttering his night-like creak, with a vibratory motion of his wings, and flattering himself that it is night, because he has shut out the day. He was a black fellow nearly an inch long, with two long, slender feelers. They plainly avoid the light and hide their heads in the grass. At any rate they regard this as the evening of the year. They are remarkably secret and unobserved, considering how much noise they make. Every milkman has heard them all his life; it is the sound that fills his ears as he drives along. But what one has ever got off his cart to go in search of one? I see smaller ones moving stealthily about, whose note I do not know. Who ever distinguished their various notes, which fill the crevices in each other’s song? It would be a curious ear, indeed, that distinguished the species of the crickets which it heard, and traced even the earth-song home, each part to its particular performer. I am afraid to be so knowing. They are shy as birds, these little bodies. Those nearest me continually cease their song as I walk, so that the singers are always a rod distant, and I cannot easily detect one. It is difficult, moreover, to judge correctly whence the sound proceeds. Perhaps this wariness is necessary to save them from insectivorous birds, which would otherwise speedily find out so loud a singer. They are somewhat protected by the universalness of the sound, each one’s song being merged and lost in the general concert, as if it were the creaking of earth’s axle. They are very numerous in oats and other grain, which conceals them and yet affords a clear passage. I never knew any drought or sickness so to prevail as to quench the song of the crickets; it fails not in its season, night or day. The Lobelia inflata, Indian-tobacco, meets me at every turn. At first I suspect some new bluish flower in the grass, but stooping see the inflated pods. Tasting one such herb convinces me that there are such things as drugs which may either kill or cure. The Rhexia Virginica is a showy flower at present. How copious and precise the botanical language to describe the leaves, as well as the other parts of a plant! Botany is worth studying if only for the precision of its terms,—to learn the value of words and of system. It is wonderful how much pains has been taken to describe a flower’s leaf, compared for instance with the care that is taken in describing a psychological fact. Suppose as much ingenuity (perhaps it would be needless) in making a language to express the sentiments! We are armed with language adequate to describe each leaf in the field, or at least to distinguish it from each other, but not to describe a human character. With equally wonderful indistinctness and confusion we describe men. The precision and copiousness of botanical language applied to the description of moral qualities! The neottia, or ladies’-tresses, behind Garfield’s house. The golden robin is now a rare bird to see. Here are the small, lively-tasting blackberries, so small they are not commonly eaten. The grasshoppers seem no drier than the grass. In Lee’s field are two kinds of plantain. Is the common one found there? The willow reach by Lee’s Bridge has been stripped for powder. None escapes. This morning, hearing a cart, I looked out and saw George Dugan going by with a horse-load of his willow toward Acton powder-mills, which I had seen in piles by the turnpike. Every traveller has just as particular an errand which I might likewise chance to be privy to. Now that I am at the extremity of my walk, I see a threatening cloud blowing up from the south, which however, methinks, will not compel me to make haste. Apios tuberosa, or Glycine Apios, ground-nut. The prenanthes now takes the place of the lactucas, which are gone to seed. In the dry ditch, near Abel Minott’s house that was, I see cardinal-flowers, with their red artillery, reminding me of soldiers,—red men, war, and bloodshed. Some are four and a half feet high. Thy sins shall be as scarlet. Is it my sins that I see? It shows how far a little color can go; for the flower is not large, yet it makes itself seen from afar, and so answers the purpose for which it was colored completely. It is remarkable for its intensely brilliant scarlet color. You are slow to concede to it a high rank among flowers, but ever and anon, as you turn your eyes away, it dazzles you and you pluck it. Scutellaria lateriflora, side-flowering skullcap, here. This brook deserves to be called Clematis Brook (though that name is too often applied), for the clematis is very abundant, running over the alders and other bushes on its brink. Where the brook issues from the pond, the nightshade grows profusely, spreading five or six feet each way, with its red berries now ripe. It grows, too, at the upper end of the pond. But if it is the button-bush that grows in the now low water, it should rather be called the Button-Bush Pond. Now the tall rush is in its prime on the shore here, and the clematis abounds by this pond also. I came out by the leafy-columned elm under Mt. Misery, where the trees stood up one above another, higher and higher, immeasurably far to my imagination, as on the side of a New Hampshire mountain. On the pitch pine plain, at first the pines are far apart, with a wiry grass between, and goldenrod and hardhack and St. John’s-wort and blackberry vines, each tree merely keeping down the grass for a space about itself, meditating to make a forest floor; and here and there younger pines are springing up. Further in, you come to moss-covered patches, dry, deep white moss, or almost bare mould, half covered with pine needles. Thus begins the future forest floor. The sites of the shanties that once stood by the railroad in Lincoln when the Irish built it, the still remaining hollow square mounds of earth which formed their embankments, are to me instead of barrows and druidical monuments and other ruins. It is a sufficient antiquity to me since they were built, their material being earth. Now the Canada thistle and the mullein crown their tops. I see the stones which made their simple chimneys still left one upon another at one end, which were surmounted with barrels to eke them out; and clean boiled beef bones and old shoes are strewn about. Otherwise it is a clean ruin, and nothing is left but a mound, as in the graveyard. Sium lineare, a kind of water-parsnip, whose blossom resembles the Cicuta maculata. The flowers of the blue vervain have now nearly reached the summit of their spikes. A traveller who looks at things with an impartial eye may see what the oldest inhabitant has not observed.

To a great extent the feudal system still prevails there (in Canada), and I saw that I should be a bad citizen, that any man who thought for himself and was only reasonably independent would naturally be a rebel. You could not read or hear of their laws without seeing that it was a legislating for a few and not for all. That certainly is the best government where the inhabitants are least often reminded of the government. (Where a man cannot be a poet even without danger of being made poet-laureate! Where he cannot be healthily neglected, and grow up a man, and not an Englishman merely!) Where it is the most natural thing in the world for a government that does not understand you, to let you alone. Oh, what a government were there, my countrymen! It is a government, that English one,—and most other European ones,—that cannot afford to be forgotten, as you would naturally forget them, that cannot let you go alone, having learned to walk. It appears to me that a true Englishman can only speculate within bounds; he has to pay his respects to so many things that before he knows it he has paid all he is worth. The principal respect in which our government is more tolerable is in the fact that there is so much less of government with us. In the States it is only once in a dog’s age that a man need remember his government, but here he is reminded of it every day. Government parades itself before you. It is in no sense the servant but the master. What a faculty must that be which can paint the most barren landscape and humblest life in glorious colors! It is pure and invigorated senses reacting on a sound and strong imagination. Is not that the poet’s case? The intellect of most men is barren. They neither fertilize nor are fertilized. It is the marriage of the soul with Nature that makes the intellect fruitful, that gives birth to imagination. When we were dead and dry as the highway, some sense which has been healthily fed will put us in relation with Nature, in sympathy with her; some grains of fertilizing pollen, floating in the air, fall on us, and suddenly the sky is all one rainbow, is full of music and fragrance and flavor. The man of intellect only, the prosaic man, is a barren, staminiferous flower; the poet is a fertile and perfect flower. Men are such confirmed arithmeticians and slaves of business that I cannot easily find a blank-book that has not a red line or a blue one for the dollars and cents, or some such purpose. As is a man’s intellectual character, is not such his physical after all? Can you not infer from knowing the intellectual characters of two which is most tenacious of life, which would die the hardest and will live the longest, which is the toughest, which has most brute strength, which the most passive endurance? Methinks I could to some extent infer these things.

I found last winter that it was expected by my townsmen that I would give some account of Canada because I had visited it, and because many of them had, and so felt interested in the subject,—visited it as the bullet visits the wall at which it is fired, and from which it rebounds as quickly, and flattened (somewhat damaged, perchance)! Yes, a certain man contracted to take fifteen hundred live Yankees through Canada, at a certain rate and within a certain time. It did not matter to him what the commodity was, if only it would pack well and were delivered to him according to agreement at the right place and time and rightly ticketed, so much in bulk, wet or dry, on deck or in the hold, at the option of the carrier how to stow the cargo and not always right side up. In the meanwhile, it was understood that the freight was not to be willfully and intentionally debarred from seeing the country if it had eyes. It was understood that there would be a country to be seen on either side, though that was a secret advantage which the contractors seemed not to be aware of. I fear that I have not got much to say, not having seen much, for the very rapidity of the motion had a tendency to keep my eyelids closed. What I got by going to Canada was a cold, and not till I get a fever, which I never had, shall I know how to appreciate it. It is the fault of some excellent writers—De Quincey’s first impressions on seeing London suggest it to me—that they express themselves with too great fullness and detail. They give the most faithful, natural, and lifelike account of their sensations, mental and physical, but they lack moderation and sententiousness. They do not affect us by an ineffectual earnestness and a reserve of meaning, like a stutterer; they say all they mean. Their sentences are not concentrated and nutty. Sentences which suggest far more than they say, which have an atmosphere about them, which do not merely report an old, but make a new, impression; sentences which suggest as many things and are as durable as a Roman aqueduct; to frame these, that is the art of writing. Sentences which are expensive, towards which so many volumes, so much life, went; which lie like boulders on the page, up and down or across; which contain the seed of other sentences, not mere repetition, but creation; which a man might sell his grounds and castles to build. If De Quincey had suggested each of his pages in a sentence and passed on, it would have been far more excellent writing. His style is nowhere kinked and knotted up into something hard and significant, which you could swallow like a diamond, without digesting.

To Walden to bathe at 5.30 A. M. Traces of the heavy rains in the night. The sand and gravel are beaten hard by them. Three or four showers in succession. But the grass is not so wet as after an ordinary dew. The Verbena hastata at the pond has reached the top of its spike, a little in advance of what I noticed yesterday; only one or two flowers are adhering. At the commencement of my walk I saw no traces of fog, but after detected fogs over particular meadows and high up some brooks’ valleys, and far in the Deep Cut the wood fog. First muskmelon this morning. I rarely pass the shanty in the woods, where human beings are lodged, literally, no better than pigs in a sty,—little children, a grown man and his wife, and an aged grandmother living this squalid life, squatting on the ground,—but I wonder if it can be indeed true that little Julia Riordan calls this place home, comes here to rest at night and for her daily food,—in whom ladies and gentlemen in the village take an interest. Of what significance are charity and almshouses? That there they live unmolested! in one sense so many degrees below the almshouse! beneath charity! It is admirable,—Nature against almshouses. A certain wealth of nature, not poverty, it suggests. Not to identify health and contentment, aye, and independence, with the possession of this world’s goods! It is not wise to waste compassion on them. As I go through the Deep Cut, I hear one or two early humblebees, come out on the damp sandy bank, whose low hum sounds like distant horns from far in the horizon over the woods. It was long before I detected the bees that made it, so far away and musical it sounded, like the shepherds in some distant eastern vale greeting the king of day. The farmers now carry—those who have got them—their early potatoes and onions to market, starting away early in the morning or at midnight. I see them returning in the afternoon with the empty barrels. Perchance the copious rain of last night will trouble those who had not been so provident as to get their hay from the Great Meadows, where it is often lost.

Mollugo verticillata, carpet-weed, flat, whorl-leaved weed in gardens, with small white flowers. Portulaca oleracea, purslane, with its yellow blossoms. Chelone glabra. I have seen the small mulleins as big as a ninepence in the fields for a day or two. The weather is warmer again after a week or more of cool days. There is greater average warmth, but not such intolerable heats as in July. The nights especially are more equably warm now, even when the day has been comparatively rather cool. There are few days now, fewer than in July, when you cannot lie at your length on the grass. You have now forgotten winter and its fashions, and have learned new summer fashions. Your life may be out-of-doors now mainly. [Illustration] Rattlesnake grass is ripe. The pods of the Asclepias pulchra stand up pointedly like slender vases on a salver,— an open salver truly! Those of the Asclepias Syriaca hang down. The interregnum in the blossoming of flowers being well over, many small flowers blossom now in the low grounds, having just reached their summer. It is now dry enough, and they feel the heat their tenderness required. The autumnal flowers,—goldenrods, asters, and johnswort,—though they have made demonstrations, have not yet commenced to reign. The tansy is already getting stale; it is perhaps the first conspicuous yellow flower that passes from the stage. In Hubbard’s Swamp, where the blueberries, dangleberries, and especially the pyrus or choke-berries were so abundant last summer, there is now perhaps not one (unless a blueberry) to be found. Where the choke-berries held on all last winter, the black and the red. The common skullcap (Scutellaria galericulata), quite a handsome and middling-large blue flower. Lobelia pallida still. Pointed cleavers or clivers (Galium asprellum). Is that the naked viburnum, so common, with its white, red, then purple berries, in Hubbard’s meadow? Did I find the dwarf tree-primrose in Hubbard’s meadow to-day? Stachys aspera, hedge-nettle or woundwort, a rather handsome purplish flower. The capsules of the Iris versicolor, or blue flag, are now ready for humming [?]. Elderberries are ripe.