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Part I.
Part I.
Introductory Note
Henry David Thoreau was born at Concord, Massachusetts, July 12, 1817,
and died there May 6, 1862. He was one of the most markedly individual of that
group of philosophers and men of letters which has made the name of the little
Massachusetts town so notable in the intellectual history of America.
Thoreau came of a family of French descent, and was educated at Harvard.
"He was bred," says his friend Emerson, "to no profession; he never married;
he lived alone; he never went to church; he never voted; he refused to pay a
tax to the State; he ate no flesh, he drank no wine, he never knew the use of
tobacco; and, though a naturalist, he used neither trap nor gun." The
individualism which is implied in these facts was the most prominent
characteristic of this remarkable person. Holding that "a man is rich in
proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone," he found
that a small part of his time, devoted to making lead - pencils, carpentering,
and surveying, gave him enough for his simple needs, and left him free for the
rest of the year to observe nature, of think, and to write.
In 1845 Thoreau built himself a hut on the edge of Walden Pond, and for
over two years lived there in solitude, composing his "Week on the Concord and
Merrimac Rivers." During these years he kept a journal, from which he later
drew the volume called "Walden," and these are his only two books published
during his lifetime. From articles in magazines and manuscripts, some eight
more volumes have been compiled since his death.
Interesting as is the philosophy which permeates the work of this
solitary, his books have found readers rather on account of their minute and
sympathetic observation of nature and the beauty of their style. The following
essay on "Walking" represents all three elements; and in its charming
discursiveness, in the absence of any structure to hinder the writer`s pen
from wandering at will, and in the responsiveness which it exhibits to the
moods and suggestions of nature, it is a characteristic expression of its
author`s spirit.
Walking [1862]
I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as
contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil, - to regard man as an
inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society. I
wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an emphatic one, for there
are enough champions of civilization: the minister and the school committee
and every one of you will take care of that.
I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who
understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks, - who had a genius,
so to speak, for sauntering: which word is beautifully derived from "idle
people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity,
under pretence of going a la Sainte Terre," to the Holy Land, till the
children exclaimed, "There goes a Sainte - Terrer," a Saunterer, a Holy -
Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend,
are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers
in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word form
sans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will
mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is
the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time
may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is
no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously
seeking the shortest course to the sea. But I prefer the first, which, indeed,
is the most probable derivation. For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached
by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from
the hands of the Infidels.
It is true, we are but faint - hearted crusaders, even the walkers,
nowadays, who undertake no persevering, never - ending enterprises. Our
expeditions are but tours, and come round again at evening to the old hearth -
side from which we set out. Half the walk is but retracing our steps. We
should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying
adventure, never to return - prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as
relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father and mother,
and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them
again - if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your
affairs, and are a free man, then you are ready for a walk.
To come down to my own experience, my companion and I, for I sometimes
have a companion, take pleasure in fancying ourselves knights of a new, or
rather an old, order - not Equestrians or Chevaliers, not Ritters or riders,
but Walkers, a still more ancient and honourable class, I trust. The chivalric
and heroic spirit which once belonged to the Rider seems now to reside in, or
perchance to have subsided into, the Walker, - not the Knight, but Walker,
Errant. He is a sort of fourth estate, outside of Church and State and People.
We have felt that we almost alone hereabouts practised this noble art;
though, to tell the truth, at least, if their own assertions are to be
received, most of my townsmen would fain walk sometimes, as I do, but they
cannot. No wealth can buy the requisite leisure, freedom, and independence
which are the capital in this profession. It comes only by the grace of God.
It requires a direct dispensation from Heaven to become a walker. You must be
born into the family of the Walkers. Ambulator nascitur, non fit. Some of my
townsmen, it is true, can remember and have described to me some walks which
they took ten years ago, in which they were so blessed as to lose themselves
for half an hour in the woods; but I know very well that they have confined
themselves to the highway ever since, whatever pretensions they may make to
belong to this select class. No doubt they were elevated for a moment as by
the reminiscence of a previous state of existence, when even they were
foresters and outlaws.
"When he came to grene wode,
In a mery mornynge,
There he herde the notes small
Of byrdes mery syngynge.
"It is ferre gone, sayd Robyn,
That I was last here;
Me lyste a lytell for to shote
At the donne dere."
I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four
hours a day at least, - and it is commonly more than that, - sauntering
through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all
worldly engagements. You may safely say, A penny for your thoughts, or a
thousand pounds. When sometimes I am reminded that the mechanics and
shopkeepers stay in their shops not only all the forenoon, but all the
afternoon too, sitting with crossed legs, so many of them - as if the legs
were made to sit upon, and not to stand or walk upon - I think that they
deserve some credit for not having all committed suicide long ago.
I, who cannot stay in my chamber for a single day without acquiring some
rust, and when sometimes I have stolen forth for a walk at the eleventh hour
or four o`clock in the afternoon, too late to redeem the day, when the shades
of night were already beginning to be mingled with the daylight, have felt as
if I had committed some sin to be atoned for, - I confess that I am astonished
at the power of endurance, to say nothing of the moral insensibility, of my
neighbours who confine themselves to shops and offices the whole day for weeks
and months, ay, and years almost together. I know not what manner of stuff
they are of - sitting there now at three o`clock in the afternoon, as if it
were three o`clock in the morning. Bonaparte may talk of the three - o`clock -
in - the - morning courage, but it is nothing to the courage which can sit
down cheerfully at this hour in the afternoon over against one`s self whom you
have known all the morning, to starve out a garrison to whom you are bound by
such strong ties of sympathy. I wonder that about this time, or say between
four and five o`clock in the afternoon, too late for the morning papers and
too early for the evening ones, there is not a general explosion heard up and
down the street, scattering a legion of antiquated and housebred notions and
whims to the four winds for an airing - and so the evil cure itself.
How womankind, who are confined to the house still more than men, stand
it I do not know; but I have ground to suspect that most of them do not stand
it at all. When, early in a summer afternoon, we have been shaking the dust of
the village from the skirts of our garments, making haste past those houses
with purely Doric or Gothic fronts, which have such an air of repose about
them, my companion whispers that probably about these times their occupants
are all gone to bed. Then it is that I appreciate the beauty and the glory of
architecture, which itself never turns in, but forever stands out and erect,
keeping watch over the slumberers.
No doubt temperament, and, above all, age, have a good deal to do with
it. As a man grows older, his ability to sit still and follow indoor
occupations increases. He grows vespertinal in his habits as the evening of
life approaches, till at last he comes forth only just before sundown, and
gets all the walk that he requires in half an hour.
But the walking of which I speak has nothing in it akin to taking
exercise, as it is called, as the sick take medicine at stated hours - as the
swinging of dumb - bells or chairs; but is itself the enterprise and adventure
of the day. If you would get exercise, go in search of the springs of life.
Think of a man`s swinging dumb - bells for his health, when those springs are
bubbling up in far - off pastures unsought by him!
Moreover, you must walk like a camel, which is said to be the only beast
which ruminates when walking. When a traveller asked Wordsworth`s servant to
show him her master`s study, she answered, "Here is his library, but his study
is out of doors."
Living much out of doors, in the sun and wind, will no doubt produce a
certain roughness of character - will cause a thicker cuticle to grow over
some of the finer qualities of our nature, as on the face and hands, or as
severe manual labor robs the hands of some of their delicacy of touch. So
staying in the house, on the other hand, may produce a softness and
smoothness, not to say thinness of skin, accompanied by an increased
sensibility to certain impressions. Perhaps we should be more susceptible to
some influences important to our intellectual and moral growth, if the sun had
shone and the wind blown on us a little less; and no doubt it is a nice matter
to proportion rightly the thick and thin skin. But methinks that is a scurf
that will fall off fast enough - that the natural remedy is to be found in the
proportion which the night bears to the day, the winter to the summer, thought
to experience. There will be so much the more air and sunshine in our
thoughts. The callous palms of the laborer are conversant with finer tissues
of self - respect and heroism, whose touch thrills the heart, than the languid
fingers of idleness. That is mere sentimentality that lies abed by day and
thinks itself white, far from the tan and callus of experience.
When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and woods: what would become
of us if we walked only in a garden or a mall? Even some sects of philosophers
have felt the necessity of importing the woods to themselves, since they did
not go to the woods. "They planted groves and walks of Platanes," where they
took subdiales ambulationes in porticos open to the air. Of course it is of no
use to direct our steps to the woods, if they do not carry us thither. I am
alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily,
without getting there in spirit. In my afternoon walk I would fain forget all
my morning occupations and my obligations to society. But it sometimes happens
that I cannot easily shake off the village. The thought of some work will run
in my head and I am not where my body is - I am out of my senses. In my walks
I would fain return to my senses. What business have I in the woods, if I am
thinking of something out of the woods? I suspect myself, and cannot help a
shudder, when I find myself so implicated even in what are called good works -
for this may sometimes happen.
My vicinity affords many good walks; and though for so many years I have
walked almost every day, and sometimes for several days together, I have not
yet exhausted them. An absolutely new prospect is a great happiness, and I can
still get this any afternoon. Two or three hours` walking will carry me to as
strange a country as I expect ever to see. A single farmhouse which I had not
seen before is sometimes as good as the dominions of the King of Dahomey.
There is in fact a sort of harmony discoverable between the capabilities of
the landscape within a circle of ten miles` radius, or the limits of an
afternoon walk, and the threescore years and ten of human life. It will never
become quite familiar to you.
Nowadays almost all man`s improvements, so called, as the building of
houses, and the cutting down of the forest and of all large trees, simply
deform the landscape, and make it more and more tame and cheap. A people who
would begin by burning the fences and let the forest stand! I saw the fences
half consumed, their ends lost in the middle of the prairie, and some worldly
miser with a surveyor looking after his bounds, while heaven had taken place
around him, and he did not see the angels going to and fro, but was looking
for an old post - hole in the midst of paradise. I looked again, and saw him
standing in the middle of a boggy stygian fen, surrounded by devils, and he
had found his bounds without a doubt, three little stones, where a stake had
been driven, and looking nearer, I saw that the Prince of Darkness was his
surveyor.
I can easily walk ten, fifteen, twenty, any number of miles, commencing
at my own door, without going by any house, without crossing a road except
where the fox and the mink do: first along by the river, and then the brook,
and then the meadow and the wood - side. There are square miles in my vicinity
which have no inhabitant. From many a hill I can see civilisation and the
abodes of man afar. The farmers and their works are scarcely more obvious than
woodchucks and their burrows. Man and his affairs, church and state and
school, trade and commerce, and manufactures and agriculture, even politics,
the most alarming of them all, - I am pleased to see how little space they
occupy in the landscape. Politics is but a narrow field, and that still
narrower highway yonder leads to it. I sometimes direct the traveller thither.
If you would go to the political world, follow the great road - follow that
market - man, keep his dust in your eyes, and it will lead you straight to it;
for it, too, has its place merely, and does not occupy all space. I pass from
it as from a bean - field into the forest, and it is forgotten. In one half -
hour I can walk off to some portion of the earth`s surface where a man does
not stand from one year`s end to another, and there, consequently, politics
are not, for they are but as the cigar - smoke of a man.
The village is the place to which the roads tend, a sort of expansion of
the highway, as a lake of a river. It is the body of which roads are the arms
and legs - a trivial or quadrivial place, the thoroughfare and ordinary of
travellers. The word is from the Latin villa, which together with via, a way,
or more anciently ved and vella, Varro derives from veho, to carry, because
the villa is the place to and from which things are carried. They who got
their living by teaming were said vellaturam facere. Hence, too, apparently,
the Latin word vilis and our vile; also villain. This suggests what kind of
degeneracy villagers are liable to. They are wayworn by the travel that goes
by and over them, without travelling themselves.
Some do not walk at all; others walk in the highways; a few walk across
lots. Roads are made for horses and men of business. I do not travel in them
much, comparatively, because I am not in a hurry to get to any tavern or
grocery or livery - stable or depot to which they lead. I am a good horse to
travel, but not from choice a roadster. The landscape - painter uses the
figures of men to mark a road. He would not make that use of my figure. I walk
out into a Nature such as the old prophets and poets, Menu, Moses, Homer,
Chaucer, walked in. You may name it America, but it is not America: neither
Americus Vespucius, nor Columbus, nor the rest were the discoverers of it.
There is a truer account of it in mythology than in any history of America, so
called, that I have seen.
However, there are a few old roads that may be trodden with profit, as if
they led somewhere now that they are nearly discontinued. There is the Old
Marlborough Road, which does not go to Marlborough now, methinks, unless that
is Marlborough where it carries me. I am the bolder to speak of it here,
because I presume that there are one or two such roads in every town.
The Old Marlborough Road
Where they once dug for money,
Where sometimes Martial Miles
But never found any;
Singly files,
And Elijah Wood,
I fear for no good:
No other man,
Save Elisha Dugan, -
O man of wild habits,
Partridges and rabbits,
Who hast no cares
Only to set snares,
Who liv`st all alone,
Close to the bone,
And where life is sweetest
Constantly eatest.
When the spring stirs my blood
With the instinct to travel
I can get enough gravel
On the Old Marlborough Road.
Nobody repairs it,
For nobody wears it;
It is a living way,
As the Christians say.
Not many there be
Who enter therein,
Only the guests of the
Irishman Quin.
What is it, what is it,
But a direction out there,
And the bare possibility
Of going somewhere?
Great guide - boards of stone.
But travellers none;
Cenotaphs of the towns
Named on their crowns.
It is worth going to see
Where you might be.
What king
Did the thing,
I am still wondering;
Set up how or when,
By what selectmen,
Gourgas or Lee,
Clark or Darby?
They`re a great endeavor
To be something forever;
Blank tablets of stone,
Where a traveller might groan,
And in one sentence
Grave all that is known;
Which another might read,
In his extreme need.
I know one or two.
Lines that would do,
Literature that might stand
All over the land,
Which a man could remember
Till next December,
And read again in the Spring,
After the thawing.
If with fancy unfurled
You leave your abode,
You may go round the world
By the Old Marlborough Road.
At present, in this vicinity, the best part of the land is not private
property; the landscape is not owned, and the walker enjoys comparative
freedom. But possibly the day will come when it will be partitioned off into
so - called pleasure - grounds, in which a few will take a narrow and
exclusive pleasure only, - when fences shall be multiplied, and man - traps
and other engines invented to confine men to the public road, and walking over
the surface of God`s earth shall be construed to mean trespassing on some
gentleman`s grounds. To enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exclude
yourself from the true enjoyment of it. Let us improve our opportunities,
then, before the evil days come.
What is it that makes it so hard sometimes to determine whither we will
walk? I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which if we
unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright. It is not indifferent to us
which way we walk. There is a right way; but we are very liable from
heedlessness and stupidity to take the wrong one. We would fain take that
walk, never yet taken by us through this actual world, which is perfectly
symbolical of the path which we love to travel in the interior and ideal
world; and sometimes, no doubt, we find it difficult to choose our direction,
because it does not yet exist distinctly in our idea.
When I go out of the house for a walk, uncertain as yet whither I will
bend my steps, and submit myself to my instinct to decide for me, I find,
strange and whimsical as it may seem, that I finally and inevitably settle
southwest, toward some particular wood or meadow or deserted pasture or hill
in that direction. My needle is slow to settle, - varies a few degrees, and
does not always point due southwest, it is true, and it has good authority for
this variation, but it always settles between west and south - southwest. The
future lies that way to me, and the earth seems more unexhausted and richer on
that side. The outline which would bound my walks would be, not a circle, but
a parabola, or rather like one of those cometary orbits which have been
thought to be non - returning curves, in this case opening westward, in which
my house occupies the place of the sun. I turn round and round irresolute
sometimes for a quarter of an hour, until I decide, for a thousandth time,
that I will walk into the southwest or west. Eastward I go only by force; but
westward I go free. Thither no business leads me. It is hard for me to believe
that I shall find fair landscapes or sufficient wildness and freedom behind
the eastern horizon. I am not excited by the prospect of a walk thither; but I
believe that the forest which I see in the western horizon stretches
uninterruptedly toward the setting sun, and there are no towns nor cities in
it of enough consequence to disturb me. Let me live where I will, on this side
is the city, on that the wilderness, and ever I am leaving the city more and
more, and withdrawing into the wilderness. I should not lay so much stress on
this fact, if I did not believe that something like this is the prevailing
tendency of my countrymen. I must walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe.
And that way the nation is moving, and I may say that mankind progress from
east to west. Within a few years we have witnessed the phenomenon of a south -
eastward migration, in the settlement of Australia; but this affects us as a
retrograde movement, and, judging from the moral and physical character of the
first generation of Australians, has not yet proved a successful experiment.
The eastern Tartars think that there is nothing west beyond Thibet. "The world
ends there," say they; "beyond there is nothing but a shoreless sea." It is
unmitigated East where they live.
We go eastward to realise history and study the works of art and
literature, retracing the steps of the race; we go westward as into the
future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure. The Atlantic is a Lethean
stream, in our passage over which we have had an opportunity to forget the Old
World and its institutions. If we do not succeed this time, there is perhaps
one more chance for the race left before it arrives on the banks of the Styx;
and that is in the Lethe of the Pacific, which is three times as wide.
I know not how significant it is, or how far it is an evidence of
singularity, that an individual should thus consent in his pettiest walk with
the general movement of the race; but I know that something akin to the
migratory instinct in birds and quadrupeds, - which, in some instances, is
known to have affected the squirrel tribe, impelling them to a general and
mysterious movement, in which they were seen, say some, crossing the broadest
rivers, each on its particular chip, with its tail raised for a sail, and
bridging narrower streams with their dead, - that something like the furor
which affects the domestic cattle in the spring, and which is referred to a
worm in their tails, - affects both nations and individuals, either
perennially or from time to time. Not a flock of wild geese cackles over our
town, but it to some extent unsettles the value of real estate here, and if I
were a broker I should probably take that disturbance into account.
"Than longen folk to gon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken strange strondes."
Every sunset which I witness inspires me with the desire to go to a West
as distant and as fair as that into which the sun goes down. He appears to
migrate westward daily, and tempts us to follow him. He is the Great Western
Pioneer whom the nations follow. We dream all night of those mountain - ridges
in the horizon, though they may be of vapor only, which were last gilded by
his rays. The island of Atlantis, and the islands and gardens of the
Hesperides, a sort of terrestrial paradise, appear to have been the Great West
of the ancients, enveloped in mystery and poetry. Who has not seen in
imagination, when looking into the sunset sky, the gardens of the Hesperides,
and the foundation of all those fables?
Columbus felt the westward tendency more strongly than any before. He
obeyed it, and found a New World for Castile and Leon. The herd of men in
those days scented fresh pastures from afar.
"And now the sun had stretched out all the hills,
And now was dropped into the western bay;
At last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue;
To - morrow to fresh woods and pastures new."
Where on the globe can there be found an area of equal extent with that
occupied by the bulk of our States, so fertile and so rich and varied in its
productions, and at the same time so habitable by the European, as this is?
Michaux, who knew but part of them, says that "the species of large trees are
much more numerous in North America than in Europe; in the United States there
are more than one hundred and forty species that exceed thirty feet in height;
in France there are but thirty that attain this size." Later botanists more
than confirm his observations. Humboldt came to America to realize his
youthful dreams of a tropical vegetation, and he beheld it in its greatest
perfection in the primitive forests of the Amazon, the most gigantic
wilderness on the earth, which he has so eloquently described. The geographer
Guyot, himself a European, goes farther - farther than I am ready to follow
him; yet not when he says: "As the plant is made for the animal, as the
vegetable world is made for the animal world, America is made for the man of
the Old World. . . . The man of the Old World sets out upon his way. Leaving
the highlands of Asia, he descends from station to station towards Europe.
Each of his steps is marked by a new civilization superior to the preceding,
by a greater power of development. Arrived at the Atlantic, he pauses on the
shore of this unknown ocean, the bounds of which he knows not, and turns upon
his footprints for an instant." When he has exhausted the rich soil of Europe,
and reinvigorated himself, "then recommences his adventurous career westward
as in the earliest ages." So far Guyot.
From this western impulse coming in contact with the barrier of the
Atlantic sprang the commerce and enterprise of modern times. The younger
Michaux, in his "Travels West of the Alleghanies in 1802," says that the
common inquiry in the newly settled West was, "From what part of the world
have you come?" As if these vast and fertile regions would naturally be the
place of meeting and common country of all the inhabitants of the globe."
To use an obsolete Latin word, I might say, Ex Oriente lux; ex Occidente
Frux. From the East light; from the West fruit.
Sir Francis Head, an English traveller and a Governor - General of
Canada, tells us that "in both the northern and southern hemispheres of the
New World, Nature has not only outlined her works on a larger scale, but has
painted the whole picture with brighter and more costly colors than she used
in delineating and in beautifying the Old World. . . . The heavens of America
appear infinitely higher, the sky is bluer, the air is fresher, the cold is
intenser, the moon looks larger, the stars are brighter, the thunder is
louder, the lightning is vivider, the wind is stronger, the rain is heavier,
the mountains are higher, the rivers longer, the forests bigger, the plains
broader." This statement will do at least to set against Buffon`s account of
this part of the world and its productions.
Linnaeus said long ago, "Nescio quae facies laeta, glabra plantis
Americanis: I know not what there is of joyous and smooth in the aspect of
American plants;" and I think that in this country there are no, or at most
very few, Africanae bestiae, African beasts, as the Romans called them, and
that in this respect also it is peculiarly fitted for the habitation of man.
We are told that within three miles of the centre of the East Indian city of
Singapore, some of the inhabitants are annually carried off by tigers; but the
traveller can lie down in the woods at night almost anywhere in North America
without fear of wild beasts.
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