Walden

Chapter 13

Light-winged Smoke, Icarian bird,

Melting thy pinions in thy upward flight,

Lark without song, and messenger of dawn,

Circling above the hamlets as thy nest;

Or else, departing dream, and shadowy form

Of midnight vision, gathering up thy skirts;

By night star-veiling, and by day

Darkening the light and blotting out the sun;

Go thou my incense upward from this hearth,

And ask the gods to pardon this clear flame.

Hard green wood just cut, though I used but little of that,

answered my purpose better than any other. I sometimes left a good

fire when I went to take a walk in a winter afternoon; and when I

returned, three or four hours afterward, it would be still alive and

glowing. My house was not empty though I was gone. It was as if I

had left a cheerful housekeeper behind. It was I and Fire that

lived there; and commonly my housekeeper proved trustworthy. One

day, however, as I was splitting wood, I thought that I would just

look in at the window and see if the house was not on fire; it was

the only time I remember to have been particularly anxious on this

score; so I looked and saw that a spark had caught my bed, and I

went in and extinguished it when it had burned a place as big as my

hand. But my house occupied so sunny and sheltered a position, and

its roof was so low, that I could afford to let the fire go out in

the middle of almost any winter day.

The moles nested in my cellar, nibbling every third potato, and

making a snug bed even there of some hair left after plastering and

of brown paper; for even the wildest animals love comfort and warmth

as well as man, and they survive the winter only because they are so

careful to secure them. Some of my friends spoke as if I was coming

to the woods on purpose to freeze myself. The animal merely makes a

bed, which he warms with his body, in a sheltered place; but man,

having discovered fire, boxes up some air in a spacious apartment,

and warms that, instead of robbing himself, makes that his bed, in

which he can move about divested of more cumbrous clothing, maintain

a kind of summer in the midst of winter, and by means of windows

even admit the light, and with a lamp lengthen out the day. Thus he

goes a step or two beyond instinct, and saves a little time for the

fine arts. Though, when I had been exposed to the rudest blasts a

long time, my whole body began to grow torpid, when I reached the

genial atmosphere of my house I soon recovered my faculties and

prolonged my life. But the most luxuriously housed has little to

boast of in this respect, nor need we trouble ourselves to speculate

how the human race may be at last destroyed. It would be easy to

cut their threads any time with a little sharper blast from the

north. We go on dating from Cold Fridays and Great Snows; but a

little colder Friday, or greater snow would put a period to man's

existence on the globe.

The next winter I used a small cooking-stove for economy, since

I did not own the forest; but it did not keep fire so well as the

open fireplace. Cooking was then, for the most part, no longer a

poetic, but merely a chemic process. It will soon be forgotten, in

these days of stoves, that we used to roast potatoes in the ashes,

after the Indian fashion. The stove not only took up room and

scented the house, but it concealed the fire, and I felt as if I had

lost a companion. You can always see a face in the fire. The

laborer, looking into it at evening, purifies his thoughts of the

dross and earthiness which they have accumulated during the day.

But I could no longer sit and look into the fire, and the pertinent

words of a poet recurred to me with new force.--

"Never, bright flame, may be denied to me

Thy dear, life imaging, close sympathy.

What but my hopes shot upward e'er so bright?

What but my fortunes sunk so low in night?

Why art thou banished from our hearth and hall,

Thou who art welcomed and beloved by all?

Was thy existence then too fanciful

For our life's common light, who are so dull?

Did thy bright gleam mysterious converse hold

With our congenial souls? secrets too bold?

Well, we are safe and strong, for now we sit

Beside a hearth where no dim shadows flit,

Where nothing cheers nor saddens, but a fire

Warms feet and hands -- nor does to more aspire;

By whose compact utilitarian heap

The present may sit down and go to sleep,

Nor fear the ghosts who from the dim past walked,

And with us by the unequal light of the old wood fire talked."