Lingua-Concordance

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the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities; if we
are alive, let us go about our business.

  Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I
drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin
current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper;
fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count
one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. I have always been
regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born. The intellect
is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the secret of things.
I do not wish to be any more busy with my hands than is necessary.
My head is hands and feet. I feel all my best faculties concentrated
in it. My instinct tells me that my head is an organ for burrowing, as
some creatures use their snout and fore paws, and with it I would mine
and burrow my way through these hills. I think that the richest vein
is somewhere hereabouts; so by the divining-rod and thin rising vapors
I judge; and here I will begin to mine.
READING

                             READING.

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which we all prize more than those other productions, but which are
for the most part broadcast and floating in the air, had taken root
and grown in him. Here comes such a subtile and ineffable quality, for
instance, as truth or justice, though the slightest amount or new
variety of it, along the road. Our ambassadors should be instructed to
send home such seeds as these, and Congress help to distribute them
over all the land. We should never stand upon ceremony with sincerity.
We should never cheat and insult and banish one another by our
meanness, if there were present the kernel of worth and
friendliness. We should not meet thus in haste. Most men I do not meet
at all, for they seem not to have time; they are busy about their
beans. We would not deal with a man thus plodding ever, leaning on a
hoe or a spade as a staff between his work, not as a mushroom, but
partially risen out of the earth, something more than erect, like
swallows alighted and walking on the ground:

        "And as he spake, his mings would now and then

        Spread, as he meant to fly, then close again-"

so that we should suspect that we might be conversing with an angel.

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out the last wrinkle which study had made, and for the afternoon was
absolutely free. Every day or two I strolled to the village to hear
some of the gossip which is incessantly going on there, circulating
either from mouth to mouth, or from newspaper to newspaper, and which,
taken in homeopathic doses, was really as refreshing in its way as the
rustle of leaves and the peeping of frogs. As I walked in the woods to
see the birds and squirrels, so I walked in the village to see the men
and boys; instead of the wind among the pines I heard the carts
rattle. In one direction from my house there was a colony of
muskrats in the river meadows; under the grove of elms and buttonwoods
in the other horizon was a village of busy men, as curious to me as if
they had been prairie-dogs, each sitting at the mouth of its burrow,
or running over to a neighbor's to gossip. I went there frequently
to observe their habits. The village appeared to me a great news room;
and on one side, to support it, as once at Redding & Company's on
State Street, they kept nuts and raisins, or salt and meal and other
groceries. Some have such a vast appetite for the former commodity,
that is, the news, and such sound digestive organs, that they can
sit forever in public avenues without stirring, and let it simmer
and whisper through them like the Etesian winds, or as if inhaling
ether, it only producing numbness and insensibility to pain- otherwise

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  As I walked over the long causeway made for the railroad through the
meadows, I encountered many a blustering and nipping wind, for nowhere
has it freer play; and when the frost had smitten me on one cheek,
heathen as I was, I turned to it the other also. Nor was it much
better by the carriage road from Brister's Hill. For I came to town
still, like a friendly Indian, when the contents of the broad open
fields were all piled up between the walls of the Walden road, and
half an hour sufficed to obliterate the tracks of the last
traveller. And when I returned new drifts would have formed, through
which I floundered, where the busy northwest wind had been
depositing the powdery snow round a sharp angle in the road, and not a
rabbit's track, nor even the fine print, the small type, of a meadow
mouse was to be seen. Yet I rarely failed to find, even in
midwinter, some warm and springly swamp where the grass and the
skunk-cabbage still put forth with perennial verdure, and some hardier
bird occasionally awaited the return of spring.

  Sometimes, notwithstanding the snow, when I returned from my walk at
evening I crossed the deep tracks of a woodchopper leading from my
door, and found his pile of whittlings on the hearth, and my house

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next day will have frozen blue. Perhaps the blue color of water and
ice is due to the light and air they contain, and the most transparent
is the bluest. Ice is an interesting subject for contemplation. They
told me that they had some in the ice-houses at Fresh Pond five
years old which was as good as ever. Why is it that a bucket of
water soon becomes putrid, but frozen remains sweet forever? It is
commonly said that this is the difference between the affections and
the intellect.

  Thus for sixteen days I saw from my window a hundred men at work
like busy husbandmen, with teams and horses and apparently all the
implements of farming, such a picture as we see on the first page of
the almanac; and as often as I looked out I was reminded of the
fable of the lark and the reapers, or the parable of the sower, and
the like; and now they are all gone, and in thirty days more,
probably, I shall look from the same window on the pure sea-green
Walden water there, reflecting the clouds and the trees, and sending
up its evaporations in solitude, and no traces will appear that a
man has ever stood there. Perhaps I shall hear a solitary loon laugh
as he dives and plumes himself, or shall see a lonely fisher in his
boat, like a floating leaf, beholding his form reflected in the waves,