13.
House-Warming
In October I went a-graping to the
river meadows, and loaded myself with clusters more precious for their
beauty and fragrance than for food. There, too, I admired, though I did
not gather, the cranberries, small waxen gems, pendants of the meadow grass,
pearly and red, which the farmer plucks with an ugly rake, leaving the
smooth meadow in a snarl, heedlessly measuring them by the bushel and the
dollar only, and sells the spoils of the meads to Boston and New York;
destined to be jammed, to satisfy the tastes of lovers of Nature there.
So butchers rake the tongues of bison out of the prairie grass, regardless
of the torn and drooping plant. The barberry's brilliant fruit was likewise
food for my eyes merely; but I collected a small store of wild apples for
coddling, which the proprietor and travellers had overlooked. When chestnuts
were ripe I laid up half a bushel for winter. It was very exciting at that
season to roam the then boundless chestnut woods of Lincoln--they now sleep
their long sleep under the railroad--with a bag on my shoulder, and a stick
to open burs with in my hand, for I did not always wait for the frost,
amid the rustling of leaves and the loud reproofs of the red squirrels
and the jays, whose half-consumed nuts I sometimes stole, for the burs
which they had selected were sure to contain sound ones. Occasionally I
climbed and shook the trees. They grew also behind my house, and one large
tree, which almost overshadowed it, was, when in flower, a bouquet which
scented the whole neighborhood, but the squirrels and the jays got most
of its fruit; the last coming in flocks early in the morning and picking
the nuts out of the burs before they fell, I relinquished these trees to
them and visited the more distant woods composed wholly of chestnut. These
nuts, as far as they went, were a good substitute for bread. Many other
substitutes might, perhaps, be found. Digging one day for fishworms, I
discovered the ground-nut (Apios tuberosa) on its string, the potato
of the aborigines, a sort of fabulous fruit, which I had begun to doubt
if I had ever dug and eaten in childhood, as I had told, and had not dreamed
it. I had often since seen its crumpled red velvety blossom supported by
the stems of other plants without knowing it to be the same. Cultivation
has well-nigh exterminated it. It has a sweetish taste, much like that
of a frost-bitten potato, and I found it better boiled than roasted. This
tuber seemed like a faint promise of Nature to rear her own children and
feed them simply here at some future period. In these days of fatted cattle
and waving grain-fields this humble root, which was once the totem
of an Indian tribe, is quite forgotten, or known only by its flowering
vine; but let wild Nature reign here once more, and the tender and luxurious
English grains will probably disappear before a myriad of foes, and without
the care of man the crow may carry back even the last seed of corn to the
great cornfield of the Indian's God in the southwest, whence he is said
to have brought it; but the now almost exterminated ground-nut will perhaps
revive and flourish in spite of frosts and wildness, prove itself indigenous,
and resume its ancient importance and dignity as the diet of the hunter
tribe. Some Indian Ceres or Minerva
(1) must have been the inventor and bestower
of it; and when the reign of poetry commences here, its leaves and string
of nuts may be represented on our works of art.
Already, by the first of September, I had seen two
or three small maples turned scarlet across the pond, beneath where the
white stems of three aspens diverged, at the point of a promontory, next
the water. Ah, many a tale their color told! And gradually from week to
week the character of each tree came out, and it admired itself reflected
in the smooth mirror of the lake. Each morning the manager of this gallery
substituted some new picture, distinguished by more brilliant or harmonious
coloring, for the old upon the walls.
The wasps came by thousands to my lodge in October,
as to winter quarters, and settled on my windows within and on the walls
overhead, sometimes deterring visitors from entering. Each morning, when
they were numbed with cold, I swept some of them out, but I did not trouble
myself much to get rid of them; I even felt complimented by their regarding
my house as a desirable shelter. They never molested me seriously, though
they bedded with me; and they gradually disappeared, into what crevices
I do not know, avoiding winter and unspeakable cold.
Like the wasps, before I finally went into winter
quarters in November, I used to resort to the northeast side of Walden,
which the sun, reflected from the pitch pine woods and the stony shore,
made the fireside of the pond; it is so much pleasanter and wholesomer
to be warmed by the sun while you can be, than by an artificial fire. I
thus warmed myself by the still glowing embers which the summer, like a
departed hunter, had left.
When I came to build my chimney I studied masonry.
My bricks, being second-hand ones, required to be cleaned with a trowel,
so that I learned more than usual of the qualities of bricks and trowels.
The mortar on them was fifty years old, and was said to be still growing
harder; but this is one of those sayings which men love to repeat whether
they are true or not. Such sayings themselves grow harder and adhere more
firmly with age, and it would take many blows with a trowel to clean an
old wiseacre of them. Many of the villages of Mesopotamia are built of
second-hand bricks of a very good quality, obtained from the ruins of Babylon,
and the cement on them is older and probably harder still. However that
may be, I was struck by the peculiar toughness of the steel which bore
so many violent blows without being worn out. As my
bricks had been in a chimney before, though I did not read the name of
Nebuchadnezzar (2) on them, I
picked out its many fireplace bricks as I could find, to save work and
waste, and I filled the spaces between the bricks about the fireplace with
stones from the pond shore, and also made my mortar with the white sand
from the same place. I lingered most about the fireplace, as the most vital
part of the house. Indeed, I worked so deliberately, that though I commenced
at the ground in the morning, a course of bricks raised a few inches above
the floor served for my pillow at night; yet I did not get a stiff neck
for it that I remember; my stiff neck is of older date. I
took a poet (3) to board for
a fortnight about those times, which caused me to be put to it for room.
He brought his own knife, though I had two, and we used to scour them by
thrusting them into the earth. He shared with me the labors of cooking.
I was pleased to see my work rising so square and solid by degrees, and
reflected, that, if it proceeded slowly, it was calculated to endure a
long time. The chimney is to some extent an independent structure, standing
on the ground, and rising through the house to the heavens; even after
the house is burned it still stands sometimes, and its importance and independence
are apparent. This was toward the end of summer. It was now November.
The north wind had already begun to cool the pond,
though it took many weeks of steady blowing to accomplish it, it is so
deep. When I began to have a fire at evening, before I plastered my house,
the chimney carried smoke particularly well, because of the numerous chinks
between the boards. Yet I passed some cheerful evenings in that cool and
airy apartment, surrounded by the rough brown boards full of knots, and
rafters with the bark on high overhead. My house never pleased my eye so
much after it was plastered, though I was obliged to confess that it was
more comfortable. Should not every apartment in which man dwells be lofty
enough to create some obscurity overhead, where flickering shadows may
play at evening about the rafters? These forms are more agreeable to the
fancy and imagination than fresco paintings or other the most expensive
furniture. I now first began to inhabit my house, I may say, when I began
to use it for warmth as well as shelter. I had got a couple of old fire-dogs
to keep the wood from the hearth, and it did me good to see the soot form
on the back of the chimney which I had built, and I poked the fire with
more right and more satisfaction than usual. My dwelling was small, and
I could hardly entertain an echo in it; but it seemed larger for being
a single apartment and remote from neighbors. All
the attractions of a house were concentrated in one room; it was kitchen,
chamber, parlor, and keeping-room;(4)
and whatever satisfaction parent or child, master or servant, derive from
living in a house, I enjoyed it all. Cato (5)
says, the master of a family (patremfamilias) must have in his rustic
villa "cellam oleariam, vinariam, dolia multa, uti lubeat caritatem expectare,
et rei, et virtuti, et gloriae erit," that is, "an oil and wine cellar,
many casks, so that it may be pleasant to expect hard times; it will be
for his advantage, and virtue, and glory." I had in my cellar a firkin
of potatoes, about two quarts of peas with the weevil in them, and on my
shelf a little rice, a jug of molasses, and of rye and Indian meal a peck
each.
I sometimes dream of a larger and more populous house,
standing in a golden age, of enduring materials, and without gingerbread
work, which shall still consist of only one room, a vast, rude, substantial,
primitive hall, without ceiling or plastering, with bare rafters and purlins
supporting a sort of lower heaven over one's head--useful to keep off rain
and snow, where the king and queen posts stand out to receive your homage,
when you have done reverence to the prostrate Saturn (6)
of an older dynasty on stepping over the sill; a cavernous house, wherein
you must reach up a torch upon a pole to see the roof; where some may live
in the fireplace, some in the recess of a window, and some on settles,
some at one end of the hall, some at another, and some aloft on rafters
with the spiders, if they choose; a house which you have got into when
you have opened the outside door, and the ceremony is over; where the weary
traveller may wash, and eat, and converse, and sleep, without further journey;
such a shelter as you would be glad to reach in a tempestuous night, containing
all the essentials of a house, and nothing for house-keeping; where you
can see all the treasures of the house at one view, and everything hangs
upon its peg, that a man should use; at once kitchen, pantry, parlor, chamber,
storehouse, and garret; where you can see so necessary a thing, as a barrel
or a ladder, so convenient a thing as a cupboard, and hear the pot boil,
and pay your respects to the fire that cooks your dinner, and the oven
that bakes your bread, and the necessary furniture and utensils are the
chief
ornaments; where the washing is not put out, nor the fire, nor the mistress,
and perhaps you are sometimes requested to move from off the trap-door,
when the cook would descend into the cellar, and so learn whether the ground
is solid or hollow beneath you without stamping. A house whose inside is
as open and manifest as a bird's nest, and you cannot go in at the front
door and out at the back without seeing some of its inhabitants; where
to be a guest is to be presented with the freedom of the house, and not
to be carefully excluded from seven eighths of it, shut up in a particular
cell, and told to make yourself at home there--in solitary confinement.
Nowadays the host does not admit you to his hearth, but has got
the mason to build one for yourself somewhere in his alley, and hospitality
is the art of
keeping you at the greatest distance. There is as
much secrecy about the cooking as if he had a design to poison you. I am
aware that I have been on many a man's premises, and might have been legally
ordered off, but I am not aware that I have been in many men's houses.
I might visit in my old clothes a king and queen who lived simply in such
a house as I have described, if I were going their way; but backing out
of a modern palace will be all that I shall desire to learn, if ever I
am caught in one.
It would seem as if the very language
of our parlors would lose all its nerve and degenerate into parlaver
(7) wholly, our lives
pass at such remoteness from its symbols, and its metaphors and tropes
are necessarily so far fetched, through slides and dumb-waiters, as it
were; in other words, the parlor is so far from the kitchen and workshop.
The dinner even is only the parable of a dinner, commonly. As if only the
savage dwelt near enough to Nature and Truth to borrow a trope from them. How
can the scholar, who dwells away in the North West Territory
(8) or the Isle of Man,(9)
tell what is parliamentary in the kitchen?
However, only one or two of my guests were ever bold
enough to stay and eat a hasty-pudding with me; but when they saw that
crisis approaching they beat a hasty retreat rather, as if it would shake
the house to its foundations. Nevertheless, it stood through a great many
hasty-puddings.
I did not plaster till it was freezing weather. I
brought over some whiter and cleaner sand for this purpose from the opposite
shore of the pond in a boat, a sort of conveyance which would have tempted
me to go much farther if necessary. My house had in the meanwhile been
shingled down to the ground on every side. In lathing I was pleased to
be able to send home each nail with a single blow of the hammer, and it
was my ambition to transfer the plaster from the board to the wall neatly
and rapidly. I remembered the story of a conceited fellow, who, in fine
clothes, was wont to lounge about the village once, giving advice to workmen.
Venturing one day to substitute deeds for words, he turned up his cuffs,
seized a plasterer's board, and having loaded his trowel without mishap,
with a complacent look toward the lathing overhead, made a bold gesture
thitherward; and straightway, to his complete discomfiture, received the
whole contents in his ruffled bosom. I admired anew the economy and convenience
of plastering, which so effectually shuts out the cold and takes a handsome
finish, and I learned the various casualties to which the plasterer is
liable. I was surprised to see how thirsty the bricks were which drank
up all the moisture in my plaster before I had smoothed it, and how many
pailfuls of water it takes to christen a new hearth. I
had the previous winter made a small quantity of lime by burning the shells
of the Unio fluviatilis,(10)
which our river affords, for the sake of the experiment;
so that I knew
where my materials came from. I might have got good limestone within a
mile or two and burned it myself, if I had cared to do so.
The pond had in the meanwhile skimmed over in the
shadiest and shallowest coves, some days or even weeks before the general
freezing. The first ice is especially interesting and perfect, being hard,
dark, and transparent, and affords the best opportunity that ever offers
for examining the bottom where it is shallow; for you can lie at your length
on ice only an inch thick, like a skater insect on the surface of the water,
and study the bottom at your leisure, only two or three inches distant,
like a picture behind a glass, and the water is necessarily always smooth
then. There are many furrows in the sand where some creature has travelled
about and doubled on its tracks; and, for wrecks, it is strewn with the
cases of caddis-worms made of minute grains of white quartz. Perhaps these
have creased it, for you find some of their cases in the furrows, though
they are deep and broad for them to make. But the ice itself is the object
of most interest, though you must improve the earliest opportunity to study
it. If you examine it closely the morning after it freezes, you find that
the greater part of the bubbles, which at first appeared to be within it,
are against its under surface, and that more are continually rising from
the bottom; while the ice is as yet comparatively solid and dark, that
is, you see the water through it. These bubbles are from an eightieth to
an eighth of an inch in diameter, very clear and beautiful, and you see
your face reflected in them through the ice. There may be thirty or forty
of them to a square inch. There are also already within the ice narrow
oblong perpendicular bubbles about half an inch long, sharp cones with
the apex upward; or oftener, if the ice is quite fresh, minute spherical
bubbles one directly above another, like a string of beads. But these within
the ice are not so numerous nor obvious as those beneath. I sometimes used
to cast on stones to try the strength of the ice, and those which broke
through carried in air with them, which formed very large and conspicuous
white bubbles beneath. One day when I came to the same place forty-eight
hours afterward, I found that those large bubbles were still perfect, though
an inch more of ice had formed, as I could see distinctly by the seam in
the edge of a cake. But as the last two days had been very warm, like an
Indian summer, the ice was not now transparent, showing the dark green
color of the water, and the bottom, but opaque and whitish or gray, and
though twice as thick was hardly stronger than before, for the air bubbles
had greatly expanded under this heat and run together, and lost their regularity;
they were no longer one directly over another, but often like silvery coins
poured from a bag, one overlapping another, or in thin flakes, as if occupying
slight cleavages. The beauty of the ice was gone, and it was too late to
study the bottom. Being curious to know what position my great bubbles
occupied with regard to the new ice, I broke out a cake containing a middling
sized one, and turned it bottom upward. The new ice had formed around and
under the bubble, so that it was included between the two ices. It was
wholly in the lower ice, but close against the upper, and was flattish,
or perhaps slightly lenticular, with a rounded edge, a quarter of an inch
deep by four inches in diameter; and I was surprised to find that directly
under the bubble the ice was melted with great regularity in the form of
a saucer reversed, to the height of five eighths of an inch in the middle,
leaving a thin partition there between the water and the bubble, hardly
an eighth of an inch thick; and in many places the small bubbles in this
partition had burst out downward, and probably there was no ice at all
under the largest bubbles, which were a foot in diameter. I inferred that
the infinite number of minute bubbles which I had first seen against the
under surface of the ice were now frozen in likewise, and that each, in
its degree, had operated like a burning-glass on the ice beneath to melt
and rot it. These are the little air-guns which contribute to make the
ice crack and whoop.
At length the winter set in good earnest, just as
I had finished plastering, and the wind began to howl around the house
as if it had not had permission to do so till then. Night after night the
geese came lumbering in the dark with a clangor and a whistling of wings,
even after the ground was covered with snow, some to alight in Walden,
and some flying low over the woods toward Fair Haven, bound for Mexico.
Several times, when returning from the village at ten or eleven o'clock
at night, I heard the tread of a flock of geese, or else ducks, on the
dry leaves in the woods by a pond-hole behind my dwelling, where they had
come up to feed, and the faint honk or quack of their leader as they hurried
off. In 1845 Walden froze entirely over for the first time on the night
of the 22d of December, Flint's and other shallower ponds and the river
having been frozen ten days or more; in '46, the 16th; in '49, about the
31st; and in '50, about the 27th of December; in '52, the 5th of January;
in '53, the 31st of December. The snow had already covered the ground since
the 25th of November, and surrounded me suddenly with the scenery of winter.
I withdrew yet farther into my shell, and endeavored to keep a bright fire
both within my house and within my breast. My employment out of doors now
was to collect the dead wood in the forest, bringing it in my hands or
on my shoulders, or sometimes trailing a dead pine tree under each arm
to my shed. An old forest fence which had seen its best days was a great
haul for me. I sacrificed it to Vulcan, for it was
past serving the god Terminus.(11)
How much more interesting an event is that man's supper who has just been
forth in the snow to hunt, nay, you might say, steal, the fuel to cook
it with! His bread and meat are sweet. There are enough fagots and waste
wood of all kinds in the forests of most of our towns to support many fires,
but which at present warm none, and, some think, hinder the growth of the
young wood. There was also the driftwood of the pond. In the course of
the summer I had discovered a raft of pitch pine logs with the bark on,
pinned together by the Irish when the railroad was built. This I hauled
up partly on the shore. After soaking two years and then lying high six
months it was perfectly sound, though waterlogged past drying. I amused
myself one winter day with sliding this piecemeal across the pond, nearly
half a mile, skating behind with one end of a log fifteen feet long on
my shoulder, and the other on the ice; or I tied several logs together
with a birch withe, and then, with a longer birch or alder which had a
book at the end, dragged them across. Though completely waterlogged and
almost as heavy as lead, they not only burned long, but made a very hot
fire; nay, I thought that they burned better for the soaking, as if the
pitch, being confined by the water, burned longer, as in a lamp.
Gilpin,(12)
in his account of the forest borderers of England, says that "the encroachments
of trespassers, and the houses and fences thus raised on the borders of
the forest," were "considered as great nuisances by the old forest law,
and were severely punished under the name of purprestures, as tending
ad terrorem ferarum--ad nocumentum forestæ, etc.," to the frightening
of the game and the detriment of the forest. But I was interested in the
preservation of the venison and the vert more than the hunters or woodchoppers,
and as much as though I had been the Lord Warden himself; and if any part
was burned, though I burned it myself by accident, I grieved with a grief
that lasted longer and was more inconsolable than that of the proprietors;
nay, I grieved when it was cut down by the proprietors themselves. I would
that our farmers when they cut down a forest felt some of that awe which
the old Romans did when they came to thin, or let in the light to, a consecrated
grove (lucum conlucare), that is, would believe that it is sacred
to some god. The Roman made an expiatory offering, and prayed, Whatever
god or goddess thou art to whom this grove is sacred, be propitious to
me, my family, and children, etc.
It is remarkable what a value is still put upon wood
even in this age and in this new country, a value more permanent and universal
than that of gold. After all our discoveries and inventions no man will
go by a pile of wood. It is as precious to us as it was to our Saxon and
Norman ancestors. If they made their bows of it,
we make our gun-stocks of it. Michaux (13),
more than thirty years ago, says that the price of wood for fuel in New
York and Philadelphia "nearly equals, and sometimes exceeds, that of the
best wood in Paris, though this immense capital annually requires more
than three hundred thousand cords, and is surrounded to the distance of
three hundred miles by cultivated plains." In this town the price of wood
rises almost steadily, and the only question is, how much higher it is
to be this year than it was the last. Mechanics and tradesmen who come
in person to the forest on no other errand, are sure to attend the wood
auction, and even pay a high price for the privilege of gleaning after
the woodchopper. It is now many years that men have
resorted to the forest for fuel and the materials of the arts: the New
Englander and the New Hollander, the Parisian and the Celt, the farmer
and Robin Hood, Goody Blake and Harry Gill;(14)
in most parts of the world the prince and the peasant, the scholar and
the savage, equally require still a few sticks from the forest to warm
them and cook their food. Neither could I do without them.
Every man looks at his wood-pile with a kind of affection.
I love to have mine before my window, and the more chips the better to
remind me of my pleasing work. I had an old axe which nobody claimed, with
which by spells in winter days, on the sunny side of the house, I played
about the stumps which I had got out of my bean-field. As my driver prophesied
when I was plowing, they warmed me twice--once while I was splitting them,
and again when they were on the fire, so that no fuel could give out more
heat. As for the axe, I was advised to get the village blacksmith to "jump"
it; but I jumped him, and, putting a hickory helve from the woods into
it, made it do. If it was dull, it was at least hung true.
A few pieces of fat pine were a great treasure. It
is interesting to remember how much of this food for fire is still concealed
in the bowels of the earth. In previous years I had often gone prospecting
over some bare hillside, where a pitch pine wood had formerly stood, and
got out the fat pine roots. They are almost indestructible. Stumps thirty
or forty years old, at least, will still be sound at the core, though the
sapwood has all become vegetable mould, as appears by the scales of the
thick bark forming a ring level with the earth four or five inches distant
from the heart. With axe and shovel you explore this mine, and follow the
marrowy store, yellow as beef tallow, or as if you had struck on a vein
of gold, deep into the earth. But commonly I kindled my fire with the dry
leaves of the forest, which I had stored up in my shed before the snow
came. Green hickory finely split makes the woodchopper's kindlings, when
he has a camp in the woods. Once in a while I got a little of this. When
the villagers were lighting their fires beyond the horizon, I too gave
notice to the various wild inhabitants of Walden vale, by a smoky streamer
from my chimney, that I was awake.--
Light-winged Smoke, Icarian bird,
Melting thy pinions in thy upward flight,
Lark without song, and messenger of dawn,
Circling above the hamlets as thy nest;
Or else, departing dream, and shadowy form
Of midnight vision, gathering up thy skirts;
By night star-veiling, and by day
Darkening the light and blotting out the sun;
Go thou my incense upward from this hearth,
And ask the gods to pardon this clear flame.(15)
Hard green wood just cut, though I used but little of
that, answered my purpose better than any other. I sometimes left a good
fire when I went to take a walk in a winter afternoon; and when I returned,
three or four hours afterward, it would be still alive and glowing. My
house was not empty though I was gone. It was as if I had left a cheerful
housekeeper behind. It was I and Fire that lived there; and commonly my
housekeeper proved trustworthy. One day, however, as I was splitting wood,
I thought that I would just look in at the window and see if the house
was not on fire; it was the only time I remember to have been particularly
anxious on this score; so I looked and saw that a spark had caught my bed,
and I went in and extinguished it when it had burned a place as big as
my hand. But my house occupied so sunny and sheltered a position, and its
roof was so low, that I could afford to let the fire go out in the middle
of almost any winter day.
The moles nested in my cellar, nibbling every third
potato, and making a snug bed even there of some hair left after plastering
and of brown paper; for even the wildest animals love comfort and warmth
as well as man, and they survive the winter only because they are so careful
to secure them. Some of my friends spoke as if I was coming to the woods
on purpose to freeze myself. The animal merely makes a bed, which he warms
with his body, in a sheltered place; but man, having discovered fire, boxes
up some air in a spacious apartment, and warms that, instead of robbing
himself, makes that his bed, in which he can move about divested of more
cumbrous clothing, maintain a kind of summer in the midst of winter, and
by means of windows even admit the light, and with a lamp lengthen out
the day. Thus he goes a step or two beyond instinct, and saves a little
time for the fine arts. Though, when I had been exposed to the rudest blasts
a long time, my whole body began to grow torpid, when I reached the genial
atmosphere of my house I soon recovered my faculties and prolonged my life.
But the most luxuriously housed has little to boast of in this respect,
nor need we trouble ourselves to speculate how the human race may be at
last destroyed. It would be easy to cut their threads any time with a little
sharper blast from the north. We go on dating from Cold Fridays and Great
Snows; but a little colder Friday, or greater snow would put a period to
man's existence on the globe.
The next winter I used a small cooking-stove for
economy, since I did not own the forest; but it did not keep fire so well
as the open fireplace. Cooking was then, for the most part, no longer a
poetic, but merely a chemic process. It will soon be forgotten, in these
days of stoves, that we used to roast potatoes in the ashes, after the
Indian fashion. The stove not only took up room and scented the house,
but it concealed the fire, and I felt as if I had lost a companion. You
can always see a face in the fire. The laborer, looking into it at evening,
purifies his thoughts of the dross and earthiness which they have accumulated
during the day. But I could no longer sit and look
into the fire, and the pertinent words of a poet recurred to me with new
force.--
"Never, bright flame, may be denied to me
Thy dear, life imaging, close sympathy.
What but my hopes shot upward e'er so bright?
What but my fortunes sunk so low in night?
Why art thou banished from our hearth and hall,
Thou who art welcomed and beloved by all?
Was thy existence then too fanciful
For our life's common light, who are so dull?
Did thy bright gleam mysterious converse hold
With our congenial souls? secrets too bold?
Well, we are safe and strong, for now we sit
Beside a hearth where no dim shadows flit,
Where nothing cheers nor saddens, but a fire
Warms feet and hands--nor does to more aspire;
By whose compact utilitarian heap
The present may sit down and go to sleep,
Nor fear the ghosts who from the dim past walked,
And with us by the unequal light of the old wood fire talked."
Mrs. Hooper (16)
Mrs. Hooper (16)
Notes
1. in Roman mythology, goddesses
of culture & wisdom - back
2. Nebuchadnezzar (605-562 B.C.)
Babylonian king - back
3. Thoreau's friend Ellery Channing
- back
4. sitting room - back
5. Marcus Porcius Cato (234-149
B.C.) Roman agricultural author - back
6. in Roman mythology, a god overthrown
by Jupiter - back
7. parlor(room) with palaver(talk)
- parlor talk - back
8. area now occupied by Indiana,
Ohio, Michigan, Minnisota, Wisconin - back
9. island in the Irish Sea - back
10. a fresh-water mussel - back
11. in Roman mythology, the gods
of fire & boundries - back
12. William Gilpin (1724-1804)
English naturalist, Remarks on Forest Scenery - back
13. François André
Michaux (1777-1855) French naturalist,
North American Sylva - back
14. Goody Blake and Harry Gill,
poem by William Wordsworth (1770-1850) - back
15. poem by Thoreau - back
16. Ellen Sturgis Hooper (1812-1848)
American poet, from The Wood Fire - back
[ 홈 ] [ 위로 ] [ Walden - Chapter 1-A ] [ Walden - Chapter 1-B ] [ Walden - Chapter 1-C ] [ Walden - Chapter 1-D ] [ Walden - Chapter 1-E ] [ Walden - Chapter 2 ] [ Walden - Chapter 3 ] [ Walden - Chapter 4 ] [ Walden - Chapter 5 ] [ Walden - Chapter 6 ] [ Walden - Chapter 7 ] [ Walden - Chapter 8 ] [ Walden - Chapter 9-A ] [ Walden - Chapter 9-B ] [ Walden - Chapter 10 ] [ Walden - Chapter 11 ] [ Walden - Chapter 12 ] [ Walden - Chapter 13 ] [ Walden - Chapter 14 ] [ Walden - Chapter 15 ] [ Walden - Chapter 16 ] [ Walden - Chapter 17 ] [ Walden - Chapter 18 ] [ The Walden Express ]
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