5 January 1857 – 11 January 1857

A cold, cutting northwest wind.

Still colder and perhaps windier. The river is now for the most part covered with snow again, which has blown from the meadows and been held by the water which has oozed out. I slump through snow into that water for twenty rods together, which is not frozen though the thermometer says —8°. I think that the bright-yellow wood of the barberry, which I have occasion to break in my surveying, is the most interesting and remarkable for its color of any. When I get home after that slumping walk on the river, I find that the slush has balled and frozen on my boots two or three inches thick, and can only be thawed off by the fire, it is so solid. I frequently have occasion in surveying to note the position or bearing of the edge of a wood, which I de- scribe as edge of wood. In such a way apparently the name Edgewood originated. Beatton, the old Scotch storekeeper, used to say of one Deacon (Joe?) Brown, a grandfather of the milkman, who used to dine at his house on Sundays and praise his wife’s dinners but yet prevented her being admitted to the church, that his was like a ‘‘ coo’s (cow’s) tongue, rough one side and smooth the other.” A man asked me the other night whether such and such persons were not as happy as anybody, being conscious, as I perceived, of much unhappiness himself and not aspiring to much more than an animal content. “Why!” said I, speaking to his condition, “the stones are happy, Concord River is happy, and I am happy too. When I took up a fragment of a walnut-shell this morning, I saw by its very grain and composition, its form and color, etc., that it was made for happiness. The most brutish and inanimate objects that are made suggest an everlasting and thorough satisfaction; they are the homes of content. Wood, earth, mould, etc., exist for joy. Do you think that Concord River would have continued to flow these millions of years by Clamshell Hill and round Hunt’s Island, if it had not been happy, — if it had been miserable in its channel, tired of ex- istence, and cursing its maker and the hour that it sprang ?” Though there is an extremely cold, cutting northwest wind, against which I see many travellers turning their backs, and so advancing, I hear and see an unusual number of merry little tree sparrows about the few weeds that are to be seen. They look very chipper, flitting restlessly about and jerking their long tails.

P. M.—To Walden down railroad and return over Cliffs. I should not be ashamed to have a shrub oak for my coat-of-arms. It is bitter cold, with a cutting northwest wind. The pond is now a plain snow-field, but there are no tracks of fishers on it. It is too cold for them. The surface of the snow there is finely waved and grained, giving it a sort of slaty fracture, the appearance which hard, dry blown snow assumes. All animate things are reduced to their lowest terms. This is the fifth day of cold, blowing weather. All tracks are concealed in an hour or two. Some have to make their paths two or three times over in a day. The fisherman is not here, for his lines would freeze in. I go through the woods toward the Cliffs along the side of the Well Meadow Field. There is nothing so sanative, so poetic, as a walk in the woods and fields even now, when I meet none abroad for pleasure. Nothing so inspires me and excites such serene and profitable thought. The objects are elevat- ing. In the street and in society I am almost invariably cheap and dissipated, my life is unspeakably mean. No amount of gold or respectability would in the least re- deem it, — dining with the Governor or a member of Congress!! But alone in distant woods or fields, in unpretending sprout-lands or pastures tracked by rab- bits, even in a bleak and, to most, cheerless day, like this, when a villager would be thinking of his inn, I come to myself, I once more feel myself grandly re- lated, and that cold and solitude are friends of mine. I suppose that this value, in my case, is equivalent to what others get by churchgoing and prayer. I come to my solitary woodland walk as the homesick go home. I thus dispose of the superfluous and see things as they are, grand and beautiful. I have told many that I walk every day about half the daylight, but I think they do not believe it. I wish to get the Concord, the Massa- chusetts, the America, out of my head and be sane a part of every day. If there are missionaries for the heathen, why not send them to me? I wish to know something; I wish to be made better. I wish to forget, a considerable part of every day, all mean, narrow, triv- ial men (and this requires usually to forego and forget all personal relations so long), and therefore I come out to these solitudes, where the problem of existence is sim- plified. I get away a mile or two from the town into the stillness and solitude of nature, with rocks, trees, weeds, snow about me. I enter some glade in the woods, perchance, where a few weeds and dry leaves alone lift themselves above the surface of the snow, and it is as if I had come to an open window. I see out and around myself. Our skylights are thus far away from the ordi- nary resorts of men. I am not satisfied with ordinary windows. I must have a true skylight. My true sky- light is on the outside of the village. I am not thus expanded, recreated, enlightened, when I meet a com- pany of men. It chances that the sociable, the town and county, or the farmers’ club does not prove a sky- light to me. I do not invariably find myself translated under those circumstances. They bore me. The man I meet with is not often so instructive as the silence he breaks. This stillness, solitude, wildness of nature is a kind of thoroughwort, or boneset, to my intellect. This is what I go out to seek. It is as if I always met in those places some grand, serene, immortal, infinitely encouraging, though invisible, companion, and walked with him. There at last my nerves are steadied, my senses and my mind do their office. I am aware that most of my neighbors would think it a hardship to be compelled to linger here one hour, especially this bleak day, and yet I receive this sweet and ineffable com- pensation for it. It is the most agreeable thing I do. Truly, my coins are uncurrent with them. I love and celebrate nature, even in detail, merely because I love the scenery of these interviews and trans- lations. I love to remember every creature that was at this club. I thus get off a certain social scurf and scali- ness. I do not consider the other animals brutes in the common sense. I am attracted toward them undoubt- edly because I never heard any nonsense from them. I have not convicted them of folly, or vanity, or pom- posity, or stupidity, in dealing with me. Their vices, at any rate, do not interfere with me. My fairies in- variably take to flight when a man appears upon the scene. In a caucus, a meeting-house, a lyceum, a club- room, there is nothing like it in my experience. But away out of the town, on Brown’s scrub oak lot, which was sold the other day for six dollars an acre, I have company such as England cannot buy, nor afford. This society is what I live, what I survey, for. I sub- scribe generously to thas —all that I have and am. There, in that Well Meadow Field, perhaps, I feel in my element again, as when a fish is put back into the water. I wash off all my chagrins. All things go smoothly as the axle of the universe. I can remember that when I was very young I used to have a dream night after night, over and over again, which might have been named Rough and Smooth. All existence, all satisfaction and dissatisfaction, all event was sym- bolized in this way. Now I seemed to be lying and tossing, perchance, on a horrible, a fatal rough surface, which must soon, indeed, put an end to my existence, though even in the dream I knew it to be the symbol merely of my misery; and then again, suddenly, I was lying on a delicious smooth surface, as of a summer sea, as of gossamer or down or softest plush, and life was such a luxury to live. My waking experience always has been and is such an alternate Rough and Smooth. In other words it is Insanity and Sanity. | Might I aspire-to praise the moderate nymph Na- ture! I must be like her, moderate.’ This snow which fell last Saturday so moist and heavy is now surprisingly dry and light and powdery. In the wood-path between the Well Meadow Field and the Cliff, it is all scored with the tracks of leaves that have scurried over it. Some might not suspect the cause of these fine and delicate traces, for the cause is no longer obvious. Here and there is but a leaf or two to be seen in the snow-covered path. The myriads which scampered here are now at rest perhaps far on one side. I have listened to the whispering of the dry leaves so long that whatever meaning it has for my ears, I think that I must have heard it. On the top of the Cliff.I am again exposed to the cutting wind. It has blown the hilltops almost bare, and the snow is packed in hard drifts, in long ridges or coarse folds, behind the walls there. Fine, dry snow, thus blown, will become hard enough to bear. Especially the flat rocks are bared, the snow having nothing to hold by. Going down path to the spring, I see where some fox (apparently) has passed down it, and though the rest of the broad path is else perfectly unspotted white, each track of the fox has proved a trap which has caught from three or four to eight or ten leaves each, snugly packed; and thus it is reprinted.

I find by hanging Smith’s thermometer on the same nail with ours that it stands 5° below ours. It was 18° at 3 p. M. by ours when I went out to walk. I picked up on the bare ice of the river, opposite the oak in Shattuck’s land, on a small space blown bare of snow, a fuzzy caterpillar, black at the two ends and red-brown in the middle, rolled into a ball or close ring, like a woodchuck. I pressed it hard between my fingers and found it frozen. I put it into my hat, and when I took it out in the evening, it soon began to stir and at length crawled about, but a portion of it was not quite flexible. It took some time for it to thaw. This is the fifth cold day, and it must have been frozen so long. It was more than an inch long. Miss Minott tells me that she does not think her bro- ther George has ever been to Boston more than once (though she tells me he says he has been twice),'! and certainly not since 1812. He was born in the Casey house, 2. e. the same in which C. lived, the second of three that stood beyond the old black house beyond Moore’s. Casey was a Guinea negro. Casey used to weep in his latter days when he thought of his wife and two children in Africa from whom he was kidnapped. Minott went only to the East Quarter schools. The house he now lives in is about sixty years old, was moved from beside Casey’s to where it now stands be- fore it was roofed. Minott says he has lived where he now does as much as sixty years. He has not been up in town for three years, on account of his rheumatism. Does nothing whatever in the house but read the news- papers and few old books they have, the Almanac espe- cially, and hold the cats, and very little indeed out of the house. Is just able to saw and split the wood.

Began snowing yesterday afternoon, and it is still snowing this forenoon. Mother remembers the Cold Friday very well. She lived in the house where I was born. The people in the kitchen — Jack Garrison, Esther, and a Hardy girl — drew up close to the fire, but the dishes which the Hardy girl was washing froze as fast as she washed them, close to the fire. They managed to keep warm in the parlor by their great fires. The other day a man came “just to get me to run a line in the woods.” ‘This is the usual request. “Do you know where one end of it is?” I asked. (It was the Stratton lot.) “No,” said he, “I don’t know either end; that is what I want to find.” “Do you know either of the next sides of the lot?” Thinking a moment, he an- swered, “No.” “ Well, do you know any one side of the whole lot, or any corner?” After a little hesitation he said that he did not. Here, then, was a wood-lot of half a dozen acres, well enough described in a deed dated 1777, courses and distances given, but he could not tell exactly in what part of the universe any particular part of it was, but he expected me to find out. This was what he understood by “running.” On the strength of this deed he had forbidden a man to chop wood somewhere. Frequently, when my employer does not know where his land lies, and has put into my hands an ancient and tattered piece of paper called his deed, which throws no light at all on the question, he turns away, saying, “IT want you to make it all right. Give me all that belongs to me.” In the deed of the Stratton wood-lot, dated 1777, there is no mention [of] any building on [it] to be con- veyed, so that probably there was only a cellar-hole there then, eighty years ago, as now. For so long, at least, it has been a mere dent in the earth there, to which, from time to time, dead horses or hogs were drawn from the village and cast in. These are our Ninevehs and Babylons. I approach such a cellar- hole as Layard the scene of his labors, and I do not fail to find there relics as interesting to me as his winged bulls. For some years past I have partially offered myself as a lecturer; have been advertised as such several years. Yet I have had but two or three invitations to lecture in a year, and some years none at all. I congratulate myself on having been permitted to stay at home thus, I am so much richer for it. I do not see what I should have got of much value, but money, by going about, but I do see what I should have lost. It seems to me that I have a longer and more liberal lease of life thus. I cannot afford to be telling my experience, especially to those who perhaps will take no interest in it. I wish to be getting experience. You might as well recommend to a bear to leave his hollow tree and run about all winter scratching at all the hollow trees in the woods. He would be leaner in the spring than if he had stayed at home and sucked his claws. As for the lecture-goers, it is none of their business what I think. I perceive that most make a great account of their relations, more or less personal and direct, to many men, coming before them as lecturers, writers, or public men. But all this is im- pertinent and unprofitable to me. I never yet recognized, nor was recognized by, a crowd of men. I was never assured of their existence, nor they of mine. There was wit and even poetry in the negro’s answer to the man who tried to persuade: him that the slaves would not be obliged to work in heaven. “Oh, you g’ way, Massa. I know better. If dere’s no work for cullud folks up dar, dey *Il make some fur ’em, and if dere ’s nuffin better to do, dey ’ll make ’em shub de clouds along. You can’t fool this chile, Massa.” I was describing the other day my success in solitary and distant woodland walking outside the town. I do not go there to get my dinner, but to get that suste- nance which dinners only preserve me to enjoy, with- out which dinners are a vain repetition. But how little men can help me in this! only by having a kindred experience. Of what use to tell them of my happiness ? Thus, if ever we have anything important to say, it might be introduced with the remark: “It is nothing to you, in particular. It is none of your business, I know.” That is what might be called going into good society. I never chanced to meet with any man so cheering and elevating and encouraging, so infinitely suggestive, as the stillness and solitude of the Well Meadow Field. Men even think me odd and perverse because I do not prefer their society to this nymph or wood-god rather. But I have tried them. I have sat down with a dozen of them together in a club, and instantly — they did not inspire me. One or another abused our ears with many words and a few thoughts which were not theirs. There was very little genuine goodness appar- ent. We are such hollow pretenders. I lost my time. But out there! Who shall criticise that companion? It is like the hone to the knife. I bathe in that climate and am cleansed of all social impurities. I become a witness with unprejudiced senses to the order of the universe. There is nothing petty or impertinent, none to say, “See what 4 great man I am!” There chiefly, and not in the society of the wits, am I cognizant of wit. Shall I prefer a part, an infinitely small fraction, to the whole? There I get my underpinnings laid and repaired, cemented, levelled. There is my country club. We dine at the sign of the Shrub Oak, the New Albion House.’ I demand of my companion some evidence that he has travelled further than the sources of the Nile, that he has seen something, that he has been out of town, out of the house. Not that he can tell a good story, but that he can keep a good silence. Has he attended to a silence more significant than any story? Did he ever get out of the road which all men and fools travel? You call yourself a great traveller, perhaps, but can you get beyond the influence of a certain class of ideas? I expect the time when there will be founded hospitals for the founders of hospitals.