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more, others receive less;- so that he must have spent more than
half his life commonly before his wigwam will be earned. If we suppose
him to pay a rent instead, this is but a doubtful choice of evils.
Would the savage have been wise to exchange his wigwam for a palace on
these terms?

  It may be guessed that I reduce almost the whole advantage of
holding this superfluous property as a fund in store against the
future, so far as the individual is concerned, mainly to the defraying
of funeral expenses. But perhaps a man is not required to bury
himself. Nevertheless this points to an important distinction
between the civilized man and the savage; and, no doubt, they have
designs on us for our benefit, in making the life of a civilized
people an institution, in which the life of the individual is to a
great extent absorbed, in order to preserve and perfect that of the
race. But I wish to show at what a sacrifice this advantage is at
present obtained, and to suggest that we may possibly so live as to
secure all the advantage without suffering any of the disadvantage.
What mean ye by saying that the poor ye have always with you, or
that the fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth
are set on edge?

  "As I live, saith the Lord God, ye shall not have occasion any
more to use this proverb in Israel.

  "Behold all souls are mine; as the soul of the father, so also the
soul of the son is mine: the soul that sinneth, it shall die."

  When I consider my neighbors, the farmers of Concord, who are at
least as well off as the other classes, I find that for the most
part they have been toiling twenty, thirty, or forty years, that
they may become the real owners of their farms, which commonly they
have inherited with encumbrances, or else bought with hired money- and
we may regard one third of that toil as the cost of their houses-
but commonly they have not paid for them yet. It is true, the
encumbrances sometimes outweigh the value of the farm, so that the
farm itself becomes one great encumbrance, and still a man is found to
inherit it, being well acquainted with it, as he says. On applying
to the assessors, I am surprised to learn that they cannot at once
name a dozen in the town who own their farms free and clear. If you
would know the history of these homesteads, inquire at the bank
where they are mortgaged. The man who has actually paid for his farm
with labor on it is so rare that every neighbor can point to him. I
doubt if there are three such men in Concord. What has been said of
the merchants, that a very large majority, even ninety-seven in a
hundred, are sure to fail, is equally true of the farmers. With regard
to the merchants, however, one of them says pertinently that a great
part of their failures are not genuine pecuniary failures, but
merely failures to fulfil their engagements, because it is
inconvenient; that is, it is the moral character that breaks down. But
this puts an infinitely worse face on the matter, and suggests,
beside, that probably not even the other three succeed in saving their
souls, but are perchance bankrupt in a worse sense than they who
fail honestly. Bankruptcy and repudiation are the springboards from
which much of our civilization vaults and turns its somersets, but the
savage stands on the unelastic plank of famine. Yet the Middlesex
Cattle Show goes off here with eclat annually, as if all the joints of
the agricultural machine were suent.

  The farmer is endeavoring to solve the problem of a livelihood by
a formula more complicated than the problem itself. To get his
shoestrings he speculates in herds of cattle. With consummate skill he
has set his trap with a hair springe to catch comfort and
independence, and then, as he turned away, got his own leg into it.
This is the reason he is poor; and for a similar reason we are all
poor in respect to a thousand savage comforts, though surrounded by
luxuries. As Chapman sings,

        "The false society of men-

             -for earthly greatness

         All heavenly comforts rarefies to air."

  And when the farmer has got his house, he may not be the richer
but the poorer for it, and it be the house that has got him. As I
understand it, that was a valid objection urged by Momus against the
house which Minerva made, that she "had not made it movable, by
which means a bad neighborhood might be avoided"; and it may still
be urged, for our houses are such unwieldy property that we are
often imprisoned rather than housed in them; and the bad
neighborhood to be avoided is our own scurvy selves. I know one or two
families, at least, in this town, who, for nearly a generation, have
been wishing to sell their houses in the outskirts and move into the
village, but have not been able to accomplish it, and only death
will set them free.

  Granted that the majority are able at last either to own or hire the
modern house with all its improvements. While civilization has been
improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to
inhabit them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create
noblemen and kings. And if the civilized man's pursuits are no
worthier than the savage's, if he is employed the greater part of
his life in obtaining gross necessaries and comforts merely, why
should he have a better dwelling than the former?

  But how do the poor minority fare? Perhaps it will be found that
just in proportion as some have been placed in outward circumstances
above the savage, others have been degraded below him. The luxury of
one class is counterbalanced by the indigence of another. On the one
side is the palace, on the other are the almshouse and "silent
poor." The myriads who built the pyramids to be the tombs of the
Pharaohs were fed on garlic, and it may be were not decently buried
themselves. The mason who finishes the cornice of the palace returns
at night perchance to a hut not so good as a wigwam. It is a mistake
to suppose that, in a country where the usual evidences of
civilization exist, the condition of a very large body of the
inhabitants may not be as degraded as that of savages. I refer to
the degraded poor, not now to the degraded rich. To know this I should
not need to look farther than to the shanties which everywhere
border our railroads, that last improvement in civilization; where I
see in my daily walks human beings living in sties, and all winter
with an open door, for the sake of light, without any visible, often
imaginable, wood-pile, and the forms of both old and young are
permanently contracted by the long habit of shrinking from cold and
misery, and the development of all their limbs and faculties is
checked. It certainly is fair to look at that class by whose labor the
works which distinguish this generation are accomplished. Such too, to
a greater or less extent, is the condition of the operatives of
every denomination in England, which is the great workhouse of the
world. Or I could refer you to Ireland, which is marked as one of

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But if, using the shortest diameter of Loch Fyne, we apply these
proportions to Walden, which, as we have seen, appears already in a
vertical section only like a shallow plate, it will appear four
times as shallow. So much for the increased horrors of the chasm of
Loch Fyne when emptied. No doubt many a smiling valley with its
stretching cornfields occupies exactly such a "horrid chasm," from
which the waters have receded, though it requires the insight and
the far sight of the geologist to convince the unsuspecting
inhabitants of this fact. Often an inquisitive eye may detect the
shores of a primitive lake in the low horizon hills, and no subsequent
elevation of the plain have been necessary to conceal their history.
But it is easiest, as they who work on the highways know, to find
the hollows by the puddles after a shower. The amount of it is, the
imagination, give it the least license, dives deeper and soars
higher than Nature goes. So, probably, the depth of the ocean will
be found to be very inconsiderable compared with its breadth.

  As I sounded through the ice I could determine the shape of the
bottom with greater accuracy than is possible in surveying harbors
which do not freeze over, and I was surprised at its general
regularity. In the deepest part there are several acres more level
than almost any field which is exposed to the sun, wind, and plow.
In one instance, on a line arbitrarily chosen, the depth did not
vary more than one foot in thirty rods; and generally, near the
middle, I could calculate the variation for each one hundred feet in
any direction beforehand within three or four inches. Some are
accustomed to speak of deep and dangerous holes even in quiet sandy
ponds like this, but the effect of water under these circumstances
is to level all inequalities. The regularity of the bottom and its
conformity to the shores and the range of the neighboring hills were
so perfect that a distant promontory betrayed itself in the
soundings quite across the pond, and its direction could be determined
by observing the opposite shore. Cape becomes bar, and plain shoal,
and valley and gorge deep water and channel.

  When I had mapped the pond by the scale of ten rods to an inch,
and put down the soundings, more than a hundred in all, I observed
this remarkable coincidence. Having noticed that the number indicating
the greatest depth was apparently in the centre of the map, I laid a
rule on the map lengthwise, and then breadthwise, and found, to my
surprise, that the line of greatest length intersected the line of
greatest breadth exactly at the point of greatest depth,
notwithstanding that the middle is so nearly level, the outline of the
pond far from regular, and the extreme length and breadth were got
by measuring into the coves; and I said to myself, Who knows but
this hint would conduct to the deepest part of the ocean as well as of
a pond or puddle? Is not this the rule also for the height of
mountains, regarded as the opposite of valleys? We know that a hill is
not highest at its narrowest part.

  Of five coves, three, or all which had been sounded, were observed
to have a bar quite across their mouths and deeper water within, so
that the bay tended to be an expansion of water within the land not
only horizontally but vertically, and to form a basin or independent
pond, the direction of the two capes showing the course of the bar.
Every harbor on the sea-coast, also, has its bar at its entrance. In
proportion as the mouth of the cove was wider compared with its
length, the water over the bar was deeper compared with that in the
basin. Given, then, the length and breadth of the cove, and the
character of the surrounding shore, and you have almost elements
enough to make out a formula for all cases.

  In order to see how nearly I could guess, with this experience, at
the deepest point in a pond, by observing the outlines of a surface
and the character of its shores alone, I made a plan of White Pond,
which contains about forty-one acres, and, like this, has no island in
it, nor any visible inlet or outlet; and as the line of greatest
breadth fell very near the line of least breadth, where two opposite
capes approached each other and two opposite bays receded, I
ventured to mark a point a short distance from the latter line, but
still on the line of greatest length, as the deepest. The deepest part
was found to be within one hundred feet of this, still farther in
the direction to which I had inclined, and was only one foot deeper,
namely, sixty feet. Of course, a stream running through, or an
island in the pond, would make the problem much more complicated.

  If we knew all the laws of Nature, we should need only one fact,
or the description of one actual phenomenon, to infer all the
particular results at that point. Now we know only a few laws, and our
result is vitiated, not, of course, by any confusion or irregularity
in Nature, but by our ignorance of essential elements in the
calculation. Our notions of law and harmony are commonly confined to
those instances which we detect; but the harmony which results from
a far greater number of seemingly conflicting, but really
concurring, laws, which we have not detected, is still more wonderful.
The particular laws are as our points of view, as, to the traveller, a
mountain outline varies with every step, and it has an infinite number
of profiles, though absolutely but one form. Even when cleft or
bored through it is not comprehended in its entireness.

  What I have observed of the pond is no less true in ethics. It is
the law of average. Such a rule of the two diameters not only guides
us toward the sun in the system and the heart in man, but draws
lines through the length and breadth of the aggregate of a man's
particular daily behaviors and waves of life into his coves and
inlets, and where they intersect will be the height or depth of his
character. Perhaps we need only to know how his shores trend and his
adjacent country or circumstances, to infer his depth and concealed
bottom. If he is surrounded by mountainous circumstances, an Achillean
shore, whose peaks overshadow and are reflected in his bosom, they
suggest a corresponding depth in him. But a low and smooth shore
proves him shallow on that side. In our bodies, a bold projecting brow
falls off to and indicates a corresponding depth of thought. Also
there is a bar across the entrance of our every cove, or particular
inclination; each is our harbor for a season, in which we are detained
and partially land-locked. These inclinations are not whimsical
usually, but their form, size, and direction are determined by the
promontories of the shore, the ancient axes of elevation. When this
bar is gradually increased by storms, tides, or currents, or there
is a subsidence of the waters, so that it reaches to the surface, that
which was at first but an inclination in the shore in which a
thought was harbored becomes an individual lake, cut off from the
ocean, wherein the thought secures its own conditions- changes,
perhaps, from salt to fresh, becomes a sweet sea, dead sea, or a
marsh. At the advent of each individual into this life, may we not
suppose that such a bar has risen to the surface somewhere? It is
true, we are such poor navigators that our thoughts, for the most
part, stand off and on upon a harborless coast, are conversant only
with the bights of the bays of poesy, or steer for the public ports of
entry, and go into the dry docks of science, where they merely refit
for this world, and no natural currents concur to individualize them.