Life in the Woods

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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, bang 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 dunfish for a Saturday's dinner. Next Spanish hides, with the
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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 bellwether 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
Walden& 89
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.
Walden& 90
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 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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