Walden

Chapter 4

"In truth, our village has become a butt

For one of those fleet railroad shafts, and o'er

Our peaceful plain its soothing sound is -- Concord."

The Fitchburg Railroad touches the pond about a hundred rods

south of where I dwell. I usually go to the village along its

causeway, and am, as it were, related to society by this link. The

men on the freight trains, who go over the whole length of the road,

bow to me as to an old acquaintance, they pass me so often, and

apparently they take me for an employee; and so I am. I too would

fain be a track-repairer somewhere in the orbit of the earth.

The whistle of the locomotive penetrates my woods summer and

winter, sounding like the scream of a hawk sailing over some

farmer's yard, informing me that many restless city merchants are

arriving within the circle of the town, or adventurous country

traders from the other side. As they come under one horizon, they

shout their warning to get off the track to the other, heard

sometimes through the circles of two towns. Here come your

groceries, country; your rations, countrymen! Nor is there any man

so independent on his farm that he can say them nay. And here's

your pay for them! screams the countryman's whistle; timber like

long battering-rams going twenty miles an hour against the city's

walls, and chairs enough to seat all the weary and heavy-laden that

dwell within them. With such huge and lumbering civility the

country hands a chair to the city. All the Indian huckleberry hills

are stripped, all the cranberry meadows are raked into the city. Up

comes the cotton, down goes the woven cloth; up comes the silk, down

goes the woollen; up come the books, but down goes the wit that

writes them.

When I meet the engine with its train of cars moving off with

planetary motion -- or, rather, like a comet, for the beholder knows

not if with that velocity and with that direction it will ever

revisit this system, since its orbit does not look like a returning

curve -- with its steam cloud like a banner streaming behind in

golden and silver wreaths, like many a downy cloud which I have

seen, high in the heavens, unfolding its masses to the light -- as

if this traveling demigod, this cloud-compeller, would ere long take

the sunset sky for the livery of his train; when I hear the iron

horse make the hills echo with his snort like thunder, shaking the

earth with his feet, and breathing fire and smoke from his nostrils

(what kind of winged horse or fiery dragon they will put into the

new Mythology I don't know), it seems as if the earth had got a race

now worthy to inhabit it. If all were as it seems, and men made the

elements their servants for noble ends! If the cloud that hangs

over the engine were the perspiration of heroic deeds, or as

beneficent as that which floats over the farmer's fields, then the

elements and Nature herself would cheerfully accompany men on their

errands and be their escort.

I watch the passage of the morning cars with the same feeling

that I do the rising of the sun, which is hardly more regular.

Their train of clouds stretching far behind and rising higher and

higher, going to heaven while the cars are going to Boston, conceals

the sun for a minute and casts my distant field into the shade, a

celestial train beside which the petty train of cars which hugs the

earth is but the barb of the spear. The stabler of the iron horse

was up early this winter morning by the light of the stars amid the

mountains, to fodder and harness his steed. Fire, too, was awakened

thus early to put the vital heat in him and get him off. If the

enterprise were as innocent as it is early! If the snow lies deep,

they strap on his snowshoes, and, with the giant plow, plow a furrow

from the mountains to the seaboard, in which the cars, like a

following drill-barrow, sprinkle all the restless men and floating

merchandise in the country for seed. All day the fire-steed flies

over the country, stopping only that his master may rest, and I am

awakened by his tramp and defiant snort at midnight, when in some

remote glen in the woods he fronts the elements incased in ice and

snow; and he will reach his stall only with the morning star, to

start once more on his travels without rest or slumber. Or

perchance, at evening, I hear him in his stable blowing off the

superfluous energy of the day, that he may calm his nerves and cool

his liver and brain for a few hours of iron slumber. If the

enterprise were as heroic and commanding as it is protracted and

unwearied!

Far through unfrequented woods on the confines of towns, where

once only the hunter penetrated by day, in the darkest night dart

these bright saloons without the knowledge of their inhabitants;

this moment stopping at some brilliant station-house in town or

city, where a social crowd is gathered, the next in the Dismal

Swamp, scaring the owl and fox. The startings and arrivals of the

cars are now the epochs in the village day. They go and come with

such regularity and precision, and their whistle can be heard so

far, that the farmers set their clocks by them, and thus one

well-conducted institution regulates a whole country. Have not men

improved somewhat in punctuality since the railroad was invented?

Do they not talk and think faster in the depot than they did in the

stage-office? There is something electrifying in the atmosphere of

the former place. I have been astonished at the miracles it has

wrought; that some of my neighbors, who, I should have prophesied,

once for all, would never get to Boston by so prompt a conveyance,

are on hand when the bell rings. To do things "railroad fashion" is

now the byword; and it is worth the while to be warned so often and

so sincerely by any power to get off its track. There is no

stopping to read the riot act, no firing over the heads of the mob,

in this case. We have constructed a fate, an Atropos, that never

turns aside. (Let that be the name of your engine.) Men are

advertised that at a certain hour and minute these bolts will be

shot toward particular points of the compass; yet it interferes with

no man's business, and the children go to school on the other track.

We live the steadier for it. We are all educated thus to be sons of

Tell. The air is full of invisible bolts. Every path but your own

is the path of fate. Keep on your own track, then.

What recommends commerce to me is its enterprise and bravery.

It does not clasp its hands and pray to Jupiter. I see these men

every day go about their business with more or less courage and

content, doing more even than they suspect, and perchance better

employed than they could have consciously devised. I am less

affected by their heroism who stood up for half an hour in the front

line at Buena Vista, than by the steady and cheerful valor of the

men who inhabit the snowplow for their winter quarters; who have not

merely the three-o'-clock-in-the-morning courage, which Bonaparte

thought was the rarest, but whose courage does not go to rest so

early, who go to sleep only when the storm sleeps or the sinews of

their iron steed are frozen. On this morning of the Great Snow,

perchance, which is still raging and chilling men's blood, I bear

the muffled tone of their engine bell from out the fog bank of their

chilled breath, which announces that the cars are coming, without

long delay, notwithstanding the veto of a New England northeast

snow-storm, and I behold the plowmen covered with snow and rime,

their heads peering, above the mould-board which is turning down

other than daisies and the nests of field mice, like bowlders of the

Sierra Nevada, that occupy an outside place in the universe.

Commerce is unexpectedly confident and serene, alert,

adventurous, and unwearied. It is very natural in its methods

withal, far more so than many fantastic enterprises and sentimental

experiments, and hence its singular success. I am refreshed and

expanded when the freight train rattles past me, and I smell the

stores which go dispensing their odors all the way from Long Wharf

to Lake Champlain, reminding me of foreign parts, of coral reefs,

and Indian oceans, and tropical climes, and the extent of the globe.

I feel more like a citizen of the world at the sight of the

palm-leaf which will cover so many flaxen New England heads the next

summer, the Manilla hemp and cocoanut husks, the old junk, gunny

bags, scrap iron, and rusty nails. This carload of torn sails is

more legible and interesting now than if they should be wrought into

paper and printed books. Who can write so graphically the history

of the storms they have weathered as these rents have done? They

are proof-sheets which need no correction. Here goes lumber from

the Maine woods, which did not go out to sea in the last freshet,

risen four dollars on the thousand because of what did go out or was

split up; pine, spruce, cedar -- first, second, third, and fourth

qualities, so lately all of one quality, to wave over the bear, and

moose, and caribou. Next rolls Thomaston lime, a prime lot, which

will get far among the hills before it gets slacked. These rags in

bales, of all hues and qualities, the lowest condition to which

cotton and linen descend, the final result of dress -- of patterns

which are now no longer cried up, unless it be in Milwaukee, as

those splendid articles, English, French, or American prints,

ginghams, muslins, etc., gathered from all quarters both of fashion

and poverty, going to become paper of one color or a few shades

only, on which, forsooth, will be written tales of real life, high

and low, and founded on fact! This closed car smells of salt fish,

the strong New England and commercial scent, reminding me of the

Grand Banks and the fisheries. Who has not seen a salt fish,

thoroughly cured for this world, so that nothing can spoil it, and

putting, the perseverance of the saints to the blush? with which you

may sweep or pave the streets, and split your kindlings, and the

teamster shelter himself and his lading against sun, wind, and rain

behind it -- and the trader, as a Concord trader once did, hang it

up by his door for a sign when he commences business, until at last

his oldest customer cannot tell surely whether it be animal,

vegetable, or mineral, and yet it shall be as pure as a snowflake,

and if it be put into a pot and boiled, will come out an excellent

dun-fish for a Saturday's dinner. Next Spanish hides, with the

tails still preserving their twist and the angle of elevation they

had when the oxen that wore them were careering over the pampas of

the Spanish Main -- a type of all obstinacy, and evincing how almost

hopeless and incurable are all constitutional vices. I confess,

that practically speaking, when I have learned a man's real

disposition, I have no hopes of changing it for the better or worse

in this state of existence. As the Orientals say, "A cur's tail may

be warmed, and pressed, and bound round with ligatures, and after a

twelve years' labor bestowed upon it, still it will retain its

natural form." The only effectual cure for such inveteracies as

these tails exhibit is to make glue of them, which I believe is what

is usually done with them, and then they will stay put and stick.

Here is a hogshead of molasses or of brandy directed to John Smith,

Cuttingsville, Vermont, some trader among the Green Mountains, who

imports for the farmers near his clearing, and now perchance stands

over his bulkhead and thinks of the last arrivals on the coast, how

they may affect the price for him, telling his customers this

moment, as he has told them twenty times before this morning, that

he expects some by the next train of prime quality. It is

advertised in the Cuttingsville Times.

While these things go up other things come down. Warned by the

whizzing sound, I look up from my book and see some tall pine, hewn

on far northern hills, which has winged its way over the Green

Mountains and the Connecticut, shot like an arrow through the

township within ten minutes, and scarce another eye beholds it;

going

"to be the mast

Of some great ammiral."

And hark! here comes the cattle-train bearing the cattle of a

thousand hills, sheepcots, stables, and cow-yards in the air,

drovers with their sticks, and shepherd boys in the midst of their

flocks, all but the mountain pastures, whirled along like leaves

blown from the mountains by the September gales. The air is filled

with the bleating of calves and sheep, and the hustling of oxen, as

if a pastoral valley were going by. When the old bell-wether at the

head rattles his bell, the mountains do indeed skip like rams and

the little hills like lambs. A carload of drovers, too, in the

midst, on a level with their droves now, their vocation gone, but

still clinging to their useless sticks as their badge of office.

But their dogs, where are they? It is a stampede to them; they are

quite thrown out; they have lost the scent. Methinks I hear them

barking behind the Peterboro' Hills, or panting up the western slope

of the Green Mountains. They will not be in at the death. Their

vocation, too, is gone. Their fidelity and sagacity are below par

now. They will slink back to their kennels in disgrace, or

perchance run wild and strike a league with the wolf and the fox.

So is your pastoral life whirled past and away. But the bell rings,

and I must get off the track and let the cars go by;--

What's the railroad to me?

I never go to see

Where it ends.

It fills a few hollows,

And makes banks for the swallows,

It sets the sand a-blowing,

And the blackberries a-growing,

but I cross it like a cart-path in the woods. I will not have my

eyes put out and my ears spoiled by its smoke and steam and hissing.

Now that the cars are gone by and all the restless world with

them, and the fishes in the pond no longer feel their rumbling, I am

more alone than ever. For the rest of the long afternoon, perhaps,

my meditations are interrupted only by the faint rattle of a

carriage or team along the distant highway.

Sometimes, on Sundays, I heard the bells, the Lincoln, Acton,

Bedford, or Concord bell, when the wind was favorable, a faint,

sweet, and, as it were, natural melody, worth importing into the

wilderness. At a sufficient distance over the woods this sound

acquires a certain vibratory hum, as if the pine needles in the

horizon were the strings of a harp which it swept. All sound heard

at the greatest possible distance produces one and the same effect,

a vibration of the universal lyre, just as the intervening

atmosphere makes a distant ridge of earth interesting to our eyes by

the azure tint it imparts to it. There came to me in this case a

melody which the air had strained, and which had conversed with

every leaf and needle of the wood, that portion of the sound which

the elements had taken up and modulated and echoed from vale to

vale. The echo is, to some extent, an original sound, and therein

is the magic and charm of it. It is not merely a repetition of what

was worth repeating in the bell, but partly the voice of the wood;

the same trivial words and notes sung by a wood-nymph.

At evening, the distant lowing of some cow in the horizon beyond

the woods sounded sweet and melodious, and at first I would mistake

it for the voices of certain minstrels by whom I was sometimes

serenaded, who might be straying over hill and dale; but soon I was

not unpleasantly disappointed when it was prolonged into the cheap

and natural music of the cow. I do not mean to be satirical, but to

express my appreciation of those youths' singing, when I state that

I perceived clearly that it was akin to the music of the cow, and

they were at length one articulation of Nature.

Regularly at half-past seven, in one part of the summer, after

the evening train had gone by, the whip-poor-wills chanted their

vespers for half an hour, sitting on a stump by my door, or upon the

ridge-pole of the house. They would begin to sing almost with as

much precision as a clock, within five minutes of a particular time,

referred to the setting of the sun, every evening. I had a rare

opportunity to become acquainted with their habits. Sometimes I

heard four or five at once in different parts of the wood, by

accident one a bar behind another, and so near me that I

distinguished not only the cluck after each note, but often that

singular buzzing sound like a fly in a spider's web, only

proportionally louder. Sometimes one would circle round and round

me in the woods a few feet distant as if tethered by a string, when

probably I was near its eggs. They sang at intervals throughout the

night, and were again as musical as ever just before and about dawn.

When other birds are still, the screech owls take up the strain,

like mourning women their ancient u-lu-lu. Their dismal scream is

truly Ben Jonsonian. Wise midnight hags! It is no honest and blunt

tu-whit tu-who of the poets, but, without jesting, a most solemn

graveyard ditty, the mutual consolations of suicide lovers

remembering the pangs and the delights of supernal love in the

infernal groves. Yet I love to hear their wailing, their doleful

responses, trilled along the woodside; reminding me sometimes of

music and singing birds; as if it were the dark and tearful side of

music, the regrets and sighs that would fain be sung. They are the

spirits, the low spirits and melancholy forebodings, of fallen souls

that once in human shape night-walked the earth and did the deeds of

darkness, now expiating their sins with their wailing hymns or

threnodies in the scenery of their transgressions. They give me a

new sense of the variety and capacity of that nature which is our

common dwelling. Oh-o-o-o-o that I never had been bor-r-r-r-n!

sighs one on this side of the pond, and circles with the

restlessness of despair to some new perch on the gray oaks. Then --

that I never had been bor-r-r-r-n! echoes another on the farther

side with tremulous sincerity, and -- bor-r-r-r-n! comes faintly

from far in the Lincoln woods.

I was also serenaded by a hooting owl. Near at hand you could

fancy it the most melancholy sound in Nature, as if she meant by

this to stereotype and make permanent in her choir the dying moans

of a human being -- some poor weak relic of mortality who has left

hope behind, and howls like an animal, yet with human sobs, on

entering the dark valley, made more awful by a certain gurgling

melodiousness -- I find myself beginning with the letters gl when I

try to imitate it -- expressive of a mind which has reached the

gelatinous, mildewy stage in the mortification of all healthy and

courageous thought. It reminded me of ghouls and idiots and insane

howlings. But now one answers from far woods in a strain made

really melodious by distance -- Hoo hoo hoo, hoorer hoo; and indeed

for the most part it suggested only pleasing associations, whether

heard by day or night, summer or winter.

I rejoice that there are owls. Let them do the idiotic and

maniacal hooting for men. It is a sound admirably suited to swamps

and twilight woods which no day illustrates, suggesting a vast and

undeveloped nature which men have not recognized. They represent

the stark twilight and unsatisfied thoughts which all have. All day

the sun has shone on the surface of some savage swamp, where the

single spruce stands hung with usnea lichens, and small hawks

circulate above, and the chickadee lisps amid the evergreens, and

the partridge and rabbit skulk beneath; but now a more dismal and

fitting day dawns, and a different race of creatures awakes to

express the meaning of Nature there.

Late in the evening I heard the distant rumbling of wagons over

bridges -- a sound heard farther than almost any other at night --

the baying of dogs, and sometimes again the lowing of some

disconsolate cow in a distant barn-yard. In the mean-while all the

shore rang with the trump of bullfrogs, the sturdy spirits of

ancient wine-bibbers and wassailers, still unrepentant, trying to

sing a catch in their Stygian lake -- if the Walden nymphs will

pardon the comparison, for though there are almost no weeds, there

are frogs there -- who would fain keep up the hilarious rules of

their old festal tables, though their voices have waxed hoarse and

solemnly grave, mocking at mirth, and the wine has lost its flavor,

and become only liquor to distend their paunches, and sweet

intoxication never comes to drown the memory of the past, but mere

saturation and waterloggedness and distention. The most aldermanic,

with his chin upon a heart-leaf, which serves for a napkin to his

drooling chaps, under this northern shore quaffs a deep draught of

the once scorned water, and passes round the cup with the

ejaculation tr-r-r-oonk, tr-r-r--oonk, tr-r-r-oonk! and straightway

comes over the water from some distant cove the same password

repeated, where the next in seniority and girth has gulped down to

his mark; and when this observance has made the circuit of the

shores, then ejaculates the master of ceremonies, with satisfaction,

tr-r-r-oonk! and each in his turn repeats the same down to the least

distended, leakiest, and flabbiest paunched, that there be no

mistake; and then the howl goes round again and again, until the sun

disperses the morning mist, and only the patriarch is not under the

pond, but vainly bellowing troonk from time to time, and pausing for

a reply.

I am not sure that I ever heard the sound of c**k-crowing from

my clearing, and I thought that it might be worth the while to keep

a cockerel for his music merely, as a singing bird. The note of

this once wild Indian pheasant is certainly the most remarkable of

any bird's, and if they could be naturalized without being

domesticated, it would soon become the most famous sound in our

woods, surpassing the clangor of the goose and the hooting of the

owl; and then imagine the cackling of the hens to fill the pauses

when their lords' clarions rested! No wonder that man added this

bird to his tame stock -- to say nothing of the eggs and drumsticks.

To walk in a winter morning in a wood where these birds abounded,

their native woods, and hear the wild cockerels crow on the trees,

clear and shrill for miles over the resounding earth, drowning the

feebler notes of other birds -- think of it! It would put nations

on the alert. Who would not be early to rise, and rise earlier and

earlier every successive day of his life, till he became unspeakably

healthy, wealthy, and wise? This foreign bird's note is celebrated

by the poets of all countries along with the notes of their native

songsters. All climates agree with brave Chanticleer. He is more

indigenous even than the natives. His health is ever good, his

lungs are sound, his spirits never flag. Even the sailor on the

Atlantic and Pacific is awakened by his voice; but its shrill sound

never roused me from my slumbers. I kept neither dog, cat, cow,

pig, nor hens, so that you would have said there was a deficiency of

domestic sounds; neither the churn, nor the spinning-wheel, nor even

the singing of the kettle, nor the hissing of the urn, nor children

crying, to comfort one. An old-fashioned man would have lost his

senses or died of ennui before this. Not even rats in the wall, for

they were starved out, or rather were never baited in -- only

squirrels on the roof and under the floor, a whip-poor-will on the

ridge-pole, a blue jay screaming beneath the window, a hare or

woodchuck under the house, a screech owl or a cat owl behind it, a

flock of wild geese or a laughing loon on the pond, and a fox to

bark in the night. Not even a lark or an oriole, those mild

plantation birds, ever visited my clearing. No cockerels to crow

nor hens to cackle in the yard. No yard! but unfenced nature

reaching up to your very sills. A young forest growing up under

your meadows, and wild sumachs and blackberry vines breaking through

into your cellar; sturdy pitch pines rubbing and creaking against

the shingles for want of room, their roots reaching quite under the

house. Instead of a scuttle or a blind blown off in the gale -- a

pine tree snapped off or torn up by the roots behind your house for

fuel. Instead of no path to the front-yard gate in the Great Snow

-- no gate -- no front-yard -- and no path to the civilized world.