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Henry David Thoreau
American Philosopher
1817-1862 A selection from
A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS
Narrated by Michael Kramer
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running time is 12 minutes
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While we sailed fleetly before the wind, with the river gurgling
under our stern, the thoughts of autumn coursed as steadily
through our minds, and we observed less what was passing on the
shore, than the dateless associations and impressions which the
season awakened, anticipating in some measure the progress of the
year.
I hearing get, who had but ears,
And sight, who had but eyes before,
I moments live, who lived but years,
And truth discern, who knew but learning's lore.
Sitting with our faces now up stream, we studied the landscape by
degrees, as one unrolls a map, rock, tree, house, hill, and
meadow, assuming new and varying positions as wind and water
shifted the scene, and there was variety enough for our
entertainment in the metamorphoses of the simplest objects.
Viewed from this side the scenery appeared new to us.
The most familiar sheet of water viewed from a new hill-top,
yields a novel and unexpected pleasure. When we have travelled a
few miles, we do not recognize the profiles even of the hills
which overlook our native village, and perhaps no man is quite
familiar with the horizon as seen from the hill nearest to his
house, and can recall its outline distinctly when in the valley.
We do not commonly know, beyond a short distance, which way the
hills range which take in our houses and farms in their sweep.
As if our birth had at first sundered things, and we had been
thrust up through into nature like a wedge, and not till the
wound heals and the scar disappears, do we begin to discover
where we are, and that nature is one and continuous everywhere.
It is an important epoch when a man who has always lived on the
east side of a mountain, and seen it in the west, travels round
and sees it in the east. Yet the universe is a sphere whose
centre is wherever there is intelligence. The sun is not so
central as a man. Upon an isolated hill-top, in an open country,
we seem to ourselves to be standing on the boss of an immense
shield, the immediate landscape being apparently depressed below
the more remote, and rising gradually to the horizon, which is
the rim of the shield, villas, steeples, forests, mountains, one
above another, till they are swallowed up in the heavens. The
most distant mountains in the horizon appear to rise directly
from the shore of that lake in the woods by which we chance to be
standing, while from the mountain-top, not only this, but a
thousand nearer and larger lakes, are equally unobserved.
Seen through this clear atmosphere, the works of the farmer, his
ploughing and reaping, had a beauty to our eyes which he never
saw. How fortunate were we who did not own an acre of these
shores, who had not renounced our title to the whole. One who
knew how to appropriate the true value of this world would be the
poorest man in it. The poor rich man! all he has is what he has
bought. What I see is mine. I am a large owner in the Merrimack
intervals.
Men dig and dive but cannot my wealth spend,
Who yet no partial store appropriate,
Who no armed ship into the Indies send,
To rob me of my orient estate.
He is the rich man, and enjoys the fruits of riches, who summer
and winter forever can find delight in his own thoughts. Buy a
farm! What have I to pay for a farm which a farmer will take?
When I visit again some haunt of my youth, I am glad to find that
nature wears so well. The landscape is indeed something real,
and solid, and sincere, and I have not put my foot through it
yet. There is a pleasant tract on the bank of the Concord,
called Conantum, which I have in my mind;—the old deserted
farm-house, the desolate pasture with its bleak cliff, the open
wood, the river-reach, the green meadow in the midst, and the
moss-grown wild-apple orchard,—places where one may have many
thoughts and not decide anything. It is a scene which I can not
only remember, as I might a vision, but when I will can bodily
revisit, and find it even so, unaccountable, yet unpretending in
its pleasant dreariness. When my thoughts are sensible of
change, I love to see and sit on rocks which I _have_ known, and
pry into their moss, and see unchangeableness so established. I
not yet gray on rocks forever gray, I no longer green under the
evergreens. There is something even in the lapse of time by
which time recovers itself.
As we have said, it proved a cool as well as breezy day, and by
the time we reached Penichook Brook we were obliged to sit
muffled in our cloaks, while the wind and current carried us
along. We bounded swiftly over the rippling surface, far by many
cultivated lands and the ends of fences which divided innumerable
farms, with hardly a thought for the various lives which they
separated; now by long rows of alders or groves of pines or oaks,
and now by some homestead where the women and children stood
outside to gaze at us, till we had swept out of their sight, and
beyond the limit of their longest Saturday ramble. We glided
past the mouth of the Nashua, and not long after, of Salmon
Brook, without more pause than the wind.
Salmon Brook,
Penichook,
Ye sweet waters of my brain,
When shall I look,
Or cast the hook,
In your waves again?
Silver eels,
Wooden creels,
These the baits that still allure,
And dragon-fly
That floated by,
May they still endure?
The shadows chased one another swiftly over wood and meadow, and
their alternation harmonized with our mood. We could distinguish
the clouds which cast each one, though never so high in the
heavens. When a shadow flits across the landscape of the soul,
where is the substance? Probably, if we were wise enough, we
should see to what virtue we are indebted for any happier moment
we enjoy. No doubt we have earned it at some time; for the gifts
of Heaven are never quite gratuitous. The constant abrasion and
decay of our lives makes the soil of our future growth. The wood
which we now mature, when it becomes virgin mould, determines the
character of our second growth, whether that be oaks or pines.
Every man casts a shadow; not his body only, but his imperfectly
mingled spirit. This is his grief. Let him turn which way he
will, it falls opposite to the sun; short at noon, long at eve.
Did you never see it?—But, referred to the sun, it is widest at
its base, which is no greater than his own opacity. The divine
light is diffused almost entirely around us, and by means of the
refraction of light, or else by a certain self-luminousness, or,
as some will have it, transparency, if we preserve ourselves
untarnished, we are able to enlighten our shaded side. At any
rate, our darkest grief has that bronze color of the moon
eclipsed. There is no ill which may not be dissipated, like the
dark, if you let in a stronger light upon it. Shadows, referred
to the source of light, are pyramids whose bases are never
greater than those of the substances which cast them, but light
is a spherical congeries of pyramids, whose very apexes are the
sun itself, and hence the system shines with uninterrupted light.
But if the light we use is but a paltry and narrow taper, most
objects will cast a shadow wider than themselves.
The places where we had stopped or spent the night in our way up
the river, had already acquired a slight historical interest for
us; for many upward day's voyaging were unravelled in this rapid
downward passage. When one landed to stretch his limbs by
walking, he soon found himself falling behind his companion, and
was obliged to take advantage of the curves, and ford the brooks
and ravines in haste, to recover his ground. Already the banks
and the distant meadows wore a sober and deepened tinge, for the
September air had shorn them of their summer's pride.
"And what's a life? The flourishing array
Of the proud summer meadow, which to-day
Wears her green plush, and is to-morrow hay."
The air was really the "fine element" which the poets describe.
It had a finer and sharper grain, seen against the russet
pastures and meadows, than before, as if cleansed of the summer's
impurities.
Having passed the New Hampshire line and reached the Horseshoe
Interval in Tyngsborough, where there is a high and regular
second bank, we climbed up this in haste to get a nearer sight of
the autumnal flowers, asters, golden-rod, and yarrow, and
blue-curls, humble roadside blossoms,
and, lingering still, the harebell and the _Rhexia Virginica_.
The last, growing in patches of lively pink flowers on the edge
of the meadows, had almost too gay an appearance for the rest of
the landscape, like a pink ribbon on the bonnet of a Puritan
woman. Asters and golden-rods were the livery which nature wore
at present. The latter alone expressed all the ripeness of the
season, and shed their mellow lustre over the fields, as if the
now declining summer's sun had bequeathed its hues to them. It
is the floral solstice a little after midsummer, when the
particles of golden light, the sun-dust, have, as it were, fallen
like seeds on the earth, and produced these blossoms. On every
hillside, and in every valley, stood countless asters, coreopses,
tansies, golden-rods, and the whole race of yellow flowers, like
Brahminical devotees, turning steadily with their luminary from
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