Lingua-EN-Ngram

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     Nor ask our pity
     With a wet eye.
     A sound estate they ever mend
     To every asker readily lend;
     To the ocean wealth,
     To the meadow health,
     To Time his length,
     To the rocks strength,
     To the stars light,
     To the weary night,
     To the busy day,
     To the idle play;
     And so their good cheer never ends,
     For all are their debtors, and all their friends.

Concord River is remarkable for the gentleness of its current,
which is scarcely perceptible, and some have referred to its
influence the proverbial moderation of the inhabitants of
Concord, as exhibited in the Revolution, and on later occasions.
It has been proposed, that the town should adopt for its coat of
arms a field verdant, with the Concord circling nine times round.

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sand-bar at its mouth, see how this river was devoted from the
first to the service of manufactures.  Issuing from the iron
region of Franconia, and flowing through still uncut forests, by
inexhaustible ledges of granite, with Squam, and Winnipiseogee,
and Newfound, and Massabesic Lakes for its mill-ponds, it falls
over a succession of natural dams, where it has been offering its
_privileges_ in vain for ages, until at last the Yankee race came
to _improve_ them.  Standing at its mouth, look up its sparkling
stream to its source,--a silver cascade which falls all the way
from the White Mountains to the sea,--and behold a city on each
successive plateau, a busy colony of human beaver around every
fall.  Not to mention Newburyport and Haverhill, see Lawrence,
and Lowell, and Nashua, and Manchester, and Concord, gleaming one
above the other.  When at length it has escaped from under the
last of the factories, it has a level and unmolested passage to
the sea, a mere _waste water_, as it were, bearing little with it
but its fame; its pleasant course revealed by the morning fog
which hangs over it, and the sails of the few small vessels which
transact the commerce of Haverhill and Newburyport.  But its real
vessels are railroad cars, and its true and main stream, flowing
by an iron channel farther south, may be traced by a long line of

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           The night is neir gone."

One of us took the boat over to the opposite shore, which was
flat and accessible, a quarter of a mile distant, to empty it of
water and wash out the clay, while the other kindled a fire and
got breakfast ready.  At an early hour we were again on our way,
rowing through the fog as before, the river already awake, and a
million crisped waves come forth to meet the sun when he should
show himself.  The countrymen, recruited by their day of rest,
were already stirring, and had begun to cross the ferry on the
business of the week.  This ferry was as busy as a beaver dam,
and all the world seemed anxious to get across the Merrimack
River at this particular point, waiting to get set over,--children
 with their two cents done up in paper, jail-birds broke loose
and constable with warrant, travellers from distant lands to
distant lands, men and women to whom the Merrimack River was a
bar.  There stands a gig in the gray morning, in the mist, the
impatient traveller pacing the wet shore with whip in hand, and
shouting through the fog after the regardless Charon and his
retreating ark, as if he might throw that passenger overboard and
return forthwith for himself; he will compensate him.  He is to

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     Whate'er transpired hath since morn,
     How wags the world by brier and brake
     From hence to Athabasca Lake;--

or half awake and half asleep, dreaming of a star which glimmered
through our cotton roof.  Perhaps at midnight one was awakened by
a cricket shrilly singing on his shoulder, or by a hunting spider
in his eye, and was lulled asleep again by some streamlet purling
its way along at the bottom of a wooded and rocky ravine in our
neighborhood.  It was pleasant to lie with our heads so low in
the grass, and hear what a tinkling ever-busy laboratory it was.
A thousand little artisans beat on their anvils all night long.

Far in the night as we were falling asleep on the bank of the
Merrimack, we heard some tyro beating a drum incessantly, in
preparation for a country muster, as we learned, and we thought
of the line,--

     "When the drum beat at dead of night."

We could have assured him that his beat would be answered, and

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as they thus glided noiselessly from town to town, with all their
furniture about them, for their very homestead is a movable, they
could comment on the character of the inhabitants with greater
advantage and security to themselves than the traveller in a
coach, who would be unable to indulge in such broadsides of wit
and humor in so small a vessel for fear of the recoil.  They are
not subject to great exposure, like the lumberers of Maine, in
any weather, but inhale the healthfullest breezes, being slightly
encumbered with clothing, frequently with the head and feet bare.
When we met them at noon as they were leisurely descending the
stream, their busy commerce did not look like toil, but rather
like some ancient Oriental game still played on a large scale, as
the game of chess, for instance, handed down to this generation.
From morning till night, unless the wind is so fair that his
single sail will suffice without other labor than steering, the
boatman walks backwards and forwards on the side of his boat, now
stooping with his shoulder to the pole, then drawing it back
slowly to set it again, meanwhile moving steadily forward through
an endless valley and an everchanging scenery, now distinguishing
his course for a mile or two, and now shut in by a sudden turn of
the river in a small woodland lake.  All the phenomena which

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The routine which is in the sunshine and the finest days, as that
which has conquered and prevailed, commends itself to us by its
very antiquity and apparent solidity and necessity.  Our weakness
needs it, and our strength uses it.  We cannot draw on our boots
without bracing ourselves against it.  If there were but one
erect and solid standing tree in the woods, all creatures would
go to rub against it and make sure of their footing.  During the
many hours which we spend in this waking sleep, the hand stands
still on the face of the clock, and we grow like corn in the
night.  Men are as busy as the brooks or bees, and postpone
everything to their business; as carpenters discuss politics
between the strokes of the hammer while they are shingling a
roof.


This noontide was a fit occasion to make some pleasant harbor,
and there read the journal of some voyageur like ourselves, not
too moral nor inquisitive, and which would not disturb the noon;
or else some old classic, the very flower of all reading, which
we had postponed to such a season

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dreaming of!  They speak faintly, and do not obtrude themselves.
They have heard some news, which none, not even they themselves,
can impart.  It is a wealth they can bear about them which can be
expended in various ways.  What came they out to seek?

No word is oftener on the lips of men than Friendship, and indeed
no thought is more familiar to their aspirations.  All men are
dreaming of it, and its drama, which is always a tragedy, is
enacted daily.  It is the secret of the universe.  You may thread
the town, you may wander the country, and none shall ever speak
of it, yet thought is everywhere busy about it, and the idea of
what is possible in this respect affects our behavior toward all
new men and women, and a great many old ones.  Nevertheless, I
can remember only two or three essays on this subject in all
literature.  No wonder that the Mythology, and Arabian Nights,
and Shakespeare, and Scott's novels entertain us,--we are poets
and fablers and dramatists and novelists ourselves.  We are
continually acting a part in a more interesting drama than any
written.  We are dreaming that our Friends are our _Friends_ ,
and that we are our Friends' _Friends_.  Our actual Friends are
but distant relations of those to whom we are pledged.  We never

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the aid of this propitious wind, though we contrived to make one
long and judicious tack carry us nearly to the locks of the
canal.  We were here locked through at noon by our old friend,
the lover of the higher mathematics, who seemed glad to see us
safe back again through so many locks; but we did not stop to
consider any of his problems, though we could cheerfully have
spent a whole autumn in this way another time, and never have
asked what his religion was.  It is so rare to meet with a man
out-doors who cherishes a worthy thought in his mind, which is
independent of the labor of his hands.  Behind every man's
busy-ness there should be a level of undisturbed serenity and
industry, as within the reef encircling a coral isle there is
always an expanse of still water, where the depositions are going
on which will finally raise it above the surface.


The eye which can appreciate the naked and absolute beauty of a
scientific truth is far more rare than that which is attracted by
a moral one.  Few detect the morality in the former, or the
science in the latter.  Aristotle defined art to be <Lo'gos tou~
e'rgou a'neu hy'l_es>, _The principle of the work without the

etc/walden.txt  view on Meta::CPAN

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.

etc/walden.txt  view on Meta::CPAN

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.

etc/walden.txt  view on Meta::CPAN

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

etc/walden.txt  view on Meta::CPAN

  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

etc/walden.txt  view on Meta::CPAN

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,