I think that I love society as much as most, and am ready enough
to fasten myself like a bloodsucker for the time to any full-blooded
man that comes in my way. I am naturally no hermit, but might
possibly sit out the sturdiest frequenter of the bar-room, if my
business called me thither.
I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for
friendship, three for society. When visitors came in larger and
unexpected numbers there was but the third chair for them all, but
they generally economized the room by standing up. It is surprising
how many great men and women a small house will contain. I have had
twenty-five or thirty souls, with their bodies, at once under my
roof, and yet we often parted without being aware that we had come
very near to one another. Many of our houses, both public and
private, with their almost innumerable apartments, their huge halls
and their cellars for the storage of wines and other munitions of
peace, appear to be extravagantly large for their inhabitants. They
are so vast and magnificent that the latter seem to be only vermin
which infest them. I am surprised when the herald blows his summons
before some Tremont or Astor or Middlesex House, to see come
creeping out over the piazza for all inhabitants a ridiculous mouse,
which soon again slinks into some hole in the pavement.
One inconvenience I sometimes experienced in so small a house,
the difficulty of getting to a sufficient distance from my guest
when we began to utter the big thoughts in big words. You want room
for your thoughts to get into sailing trim and run a course or two
before they make their port. The bullet of your thought must have
overcome its lateral and ricochet motion and fallen into its last
and steady course before it reaches the ear of the hearer, else it
may plow out again through the side of his head. Also, our
sentences wanted room to unfold and form their columns in the
interval. Individuals, like nations, must have suitable broad and
natural boundaries, even a considerable neutral ground, between
them. I have found it a singular luxury to talk across the pond to
a companion on the opposite side. In my house we were so near that
we could not begin to hear -- we could not speak low enough to be
heard; as when you throw two stones into calm water so near that
they break each others undulations. If we are merely loquacious
and loud talkers, then we can afford to stand very near together,
cheek by jowl, and feel each others breath; but if we speak
reservedly and thoughtfully, we want to be farther apart, that all
animal heat and moisture may have a chance to evaporate. If we
would enjoy the most intimate society with that in each of us which
is without, or above, being spoken to, we must not only be silent,
but commonly so far apart bodily that we cannot possibly hear each
others voice in any case. Referred to this standard, speech is for
the convenience of those who are hard of hearing; but there are many
fine things which we cannot say if we have to shout. As the
conversation began to assume a loftier and grander tone, we
gradually shoved our chairs farther apart till they touched the wall
in opposite corners, and then commonly there was not room enough.
My "best" room, however, my withdrawing room, always ready for
company, on whose carpet the sun rarely fell, was the pine wood
behind my house. Thither in summer days, when distinguished guests
came, I took them, and a priceless domestic swept the floor and
dusted the furniture and kept the things in order.
If one guest came he sometimes partook of my frugal meal, and it
was no interruption to conversation to be stirring a hasty-pudding,
or watching the rising and maturing of a loaf of bread in the ashes,
in the meanwhile. But if twenty came and sat in my house there was
nothing said about dinner, though there might be bread enough for
two, more than if eating were a forsaken habit; but we naturally
practised abstinence; and this was never felt to be an offence
against hospitality, but the most proper and considerate course.
The waste and decay of physical life, which so often needs repair,
seemed miraculously retarded in such a case, and the vital vigor
stood its ground. I could entertain thus a thousand as well as
twenty; and if any ever went away disappointed or hungry from my
house when they found me at home, they may depend upon it that I
sympathized with them at least. So easy is it, though many
housekeepers doubt it, to establish new and better customs in the
place of the old. You need not rest your reputation on the dinners
you give. For my own part, I was never so effectually deterred from
frequenting a mans house, by any kind of Cerberus whatever, as by
the parade one made about dining me, which I took to be a very
polite and roundabout hint never to trouble him so again. I think I
shall never revisit those scenes. I should be proud to have for the
motto of my cabin those lines of Spenser which one of my visitors
inscribed on a yellow walnut leaf for a card:--
"Arrived there, the little house they fill,
Ne looke for entertainment where none was;
Rest is their feast, and all things at their will:
The noblest mind the best contentment has."
When Winslow, afterward governor of the Plymouth Colony, went
with a companion on a visit of ceremony to Massasoit on foot through
the woods, and arrived tired and hungry at his lodge, they were well
received by the king, but nothing was said about eating that day.
When the night arrived, to quote their own words -- "He laid us on
the bed with himself and his wife, they at the one end and we at the
other, it being only planks laid a foot from the ground and a thin
mat upon them. Two more of his chief men, for want of room, pressed
by and upon us; so that we were worse weary of our lodging than of
our journey." At one oclock the next day Massasoit "brought two
fishes that he had shot," about thrice as big as a bream. "These
being boiled, there were at least forty looked for a share in them;
the most eat of them. This meal only we had in two nights and a
day; and had not one of us bought a partridge, we had taken our
journey fasting." Fearing that they would be light-headed for want
of food and also sleep, owing to "the savages barbarous singing,
(for they use to sing themselves asleep,)" and that they might get
home while they had strength to travel, they departed. As for
lodging, it is true they were but poorly entertained, though what
they found an inconvenience was no doubt intended for an honor; but
as far as eating was concerned, I do not see how the Indians could
have done better. They had nothing to eat themselves, and they were
wiser than to think that apologies could supply the place of food to
their guests; so they drew their belts tighter and said nothing
about it. Another time when Winslow visited them, it being a season
of plenty with them, there was no deficiency in this respect.
As for men, they will hardly fail one anywhere. I had more
visitors while I lived in the woods than at any other period in my
life; I mean that I had some. I met several there under more
favorable circumstances than I could anywhere else. But fewer came
to see me on trivial business. In this respect, my company was
winnowed by my mere distance from town. I had withdrawn so far
within the great ocean of solitude, into which the rivers of society
empty, that for the most part, so far as my needs were concerned,
only the finest sediment was deposited around me. Beside, there
were wafted to me evidences of unexplored and uncultivated
continents on the other side.
Who should come to my lodge this morning but a true Homeric or
Paphlagonian man -- he had so suitable and poetic a name that I am
sorry I cannot print it here -- a Canadian, a woodchopper and
post-maker, who can hole fifty posts in a day, who made his last
supper on a woodchuck which his dog caught. He, too, has heard of
Homer, and, "if it were not for books," would "not know what to do
rainy days," though perhaps he has not read one wholly through for
many rainy seasons. Some priest who could pronounce the Greek
itself taught him to read his verse in the Testament in his native
parish far away; and now I must translate to him, while he holds the
book, Achilles reproof to Patroclus for his sad countenance. --
"Why are you in tears, Patroclus, like a young girl?"
"Or have you alone heard some news from Phthia?
They say that Menoetius lives yet, son of Actor,
And Peleus lives, son of AEacus, among the Myrmidons,
Either of whom having died, we should greatly grieve."
He says, "Thats good." He has a great bundle of white oak bark
under his arm for a sick man, gathered this Sunday morning. "I
suppose theres no harm in going after such a thing to-day," says
he. To him Homer was a great writer, though what his writing was
about he did not know. A more simple and natural man it would be
hard to find. Vice and disease, which cast such a sombre moral hue
over the world, seemed to have hardly any existance for him. He was
about twenty-eight years old, and had left Canada and his fathers
house a dozen years before to work in the States, and earn money to
buy a farm with at last, perhaps in his native country. He was cast
in the coarsest mould; a stout but sluggish body, yet gracefully
carried, with a thick sunburnt neck, dark bushy hair, and dull
sleepy blue eyes, which were occasionally lit up with expression.
He wore a flat gray cloth cap, a dingy wool-colored greatcoat, and
cowhide boots. He was a great consumer of meat, usually carrying
his dinner to his work a couple of miles past my house -- for he
chopped all summer -- in a tin pail; cold meats, often cold
woodchucks, and coffee in a stone bottle which dangled by a string
from his belt; and sometimes he offered me a drink. He came along
early, crossing my bean-field, though without anxiety or haste to
get to his work, such as Yankees exhibit. He wasnt a-going to hurt
himself. He didnt care if he only earned his board. Frequently he
would leave his dinner in the bushes, when his dog had caught a
woodchuck by the way, and go back a mile and a half to dress it and
leave it in the cellar of the house where he boarded, after
deliberating first for half an hour whether he could not sink it in
the pond safely till nightfall -- loving to dwell long upon these
themes. He would say, as he went by in the morning, "How thick the
pigeons are! If working every day were not my trade, I could get
all the meat I should want by hunting-pigeons, woodchucks, rabbits,
partridges -- by gosh! I could get all I should want for a week in
one day."
He was a skilful chopper, and indulged in some flourishes and
ornaments in his art. He cut his trees level and close to the
ground, that the sprouts which came up afterward might be more
vigorous and a sled might slide over the stumps; and instead of
leaving a whole tree to support his corded wood, he would pare it
away to a slender stake or splinter which you could break off with
your hand at last.
He interested me because he was so quiet and solitary and so
happy withal; a well of good humor and contentment which overflowed
at his eyes. His mirth was without alloy. Sometimes I saw him at
his work in the woods, felling trees, and he would greet me with a
laugh of inexpressible satisfaction, and a salutation in Canadian
French, though he spoke English as well. When I approached him he
would suspend his work, and with half-suppressed mirth lie along the
trunk of a pine which he had felled, and, peeling off the inner
bark, roll it up into a ball and chew it while he laughed and
talked. Such an exuberance of animal spirits had he that he
sometimes tumbled down and rolled on the ground with laughter at
anything which made him think and tickled him. Looking round upon
the trees he would exclaim -- "By George! I can enjoy myself well
enough here chopping; I want no better sport." Sometimes, when at
leisure, he amused himself all day in the woods with a pocket
pistol, firing salutes to himself at regular intervals as he walked.
In the winter he had a fire by which at noon he warmed his coffee in
a kettle; and as he sat on a log to eat his dinner the chickadees
would sometimes come round and alight on his arm and peck at the
potato in his fingers; and he said that he "liked to have the little
fellers about him."
In him the animal man chiefly was developed. In physical
endurance and contentment he was cousin to the pine and the rock. I
asked him once if he was not sometimes tired at night, after working
all day; and he answered, with a sincere and serious look,
"Gorrappit, I never was tired in my life." But the intellectual and
what is called spiritual man in him were slumbering as in an infant.
He had been instructed only in that innocent and ineffectual way in
which the Catholic priests teach the aborigines, by which the pupil
is never educated to the degree of consciousness, but only to the
degree of trust and reverence, and a child is not made a man, but
kept a child. When Nature made him, she gave him a strong body and
contentment for his portion, and propped him on every side with
reverence and reliance, that he might live out his threescore years
and ten a child. He was so genuine and unsophisticated that no
introduction would serve to introduce him, more than if you
introduced a woodchuck to your neighbor. He had got to find him out
as you did. He would not play any part. Men paid him wages for
work, and so helped to feed and clothe him; but he never exchanged
opinions with them. He was so simply and naturally humble -- if he
can be called humble who never aspires -- that humility was no
distinct quality in him, nor could he conceive of it. Wiser men
were demigods to him. If you told him that such a one was coming,
he did as if he thought that anything so grand would expect nothing
of himself, but take all the responsibility on itself, and let him
be forgotten still. He never heard the sound of praise. He
particularly reverenced the writer and the preacher. Their
performances were miracles. When I told him that I wrote
considerably, he thought for a long time that it was merely the
handwriting which I meant, for he could write a remarkably good hand
himself. I sometimes found the name of his native parish handsomely
written in the snow by the highway, with the proper French accent,
and knew that he had passed. I asked him if he ever wished to write
his thoughts. He said that he had read and written letters for
those who could not, but he never tried to write thoughts -- no, he
could not, he could not tell what to put first, it would kill him,
and then there was spelling to be attended to at the same time!
I heard that a distinguished wise man and reformer asked him if
he did not want the world to be changed; but he answered with a
chuckle of surprise in his Canadian accent, not knowing that the
question had ever been entertained before, "No, I like it well
enough." It would have suggested many things to a philosopher to
have dealings with him. To a stranger he appeared to know nothing
of things in general; yet I sometimes saw in him a man whom I had
not seen before, and I did not know whether he was as wise as
Shakespeare or as simply ignorant as a child, whether to suspect him
of a fine poetic consciousness or of stupidity. A townsman told me
that when he met him sauntering through the village in his small
close-fitting cap, and whistling to himself, he reminded him of a
prince in disguise.
His only books were an almanac and an arithmetic, in which last
he was considerably expert. The former was a sort of cyclopaedia to
him, which he supposed to contain an abstract of human knowledge, as
indeed it does to a considerable extent. I loved to sound him on
the various reforms of the day, and he never failed to look at them
in the most simple and practical light. He had never heard of such
things before. Could he do without factories? I asked. He had
worn the home-made Vermont gray, he said, and that was good. Could
he dispense with tea and coffee? Did this country afford any
beverage beside water? He had soaked hemlock leaves in water and
drank it, and thought that was better than water in warm weather.
When I asked him if he could do without money, he showed the
convenience of money in such a way as to suggest and coincide with
the most philosophical accounts of the origin of this institution,
and the very derivation of the word pecunia. If an ox were his
property, and he wished to get needles and thread at the store, he
thought it would be inconvenient and impossible soon to go on
mortgaging some portion of the creature each time to that amount.
He could defend many institutions better than any philosopher,
because, in describing them as they concerned him, he gave the true
reason for their prevalence, and speculation had not suggested to
him any other. At another time, hearing Platos definition of a man
-- a biped without feathers -- and that one exhibited a cock plucked
and called it Platos man, he thought it an important difference
that the knees bent the wrong way. He would sometimes exclaim, "How
I love to talk! By George, I could talk all day!" I asked him
once, when I had not seen him for many months, if he had got a new
idea this summer. "Good Lord" -- said he, "a man that has to work
as I do, if he does not forget the ideas he has had, he will do
well. May be the man you hoe with is inclined to race; then, by
gorry, your mind must be there; you think of weeds." He would
sometimes ask me first on such occasions, if I had made any
improvement. One winter day I asked him if he was always satisfied
with himself, wishing to suggest a substitute within him for the
priest without, and some higher motive for living. "Satisfied!"
said he; "some men are satisfied with one thing, and some with
another. One man, perhaps, if he has got enough, will be satisfied
to sit all day with his back to the fire and his belly to the table,
by George!" Yet I never, by any manoeuvring, could get him to take
the spiritual view of things; the highest that he appeared to
conceive of was a simple expediency, such as you might expect an
animal to appreciate; and this, practically, is true of most men.
If I suggested any improvement in his mode of life, he merely
answered, without expressing any regret, that it was too late. Yet
he thoroughly believed in honesty and the like virtues.
There was a certain positive originality, however slight, to be
detected in him, and I occasionally observed that he was thinking
for himself and expressing his own opinion, a phenomenon so rare
that I would any day walk ten miles to observe it, and it amounted
to the re-origination of many of the institutions of society.
Though he hesitated, and perhaps failed to express himself
distinctly, he always had a presentable thought behind. Yet his
thinking was so primitive and immersed in his animal life, that,
though more promising than a merely learned mans, it rarely ripened
to anything which can be reported. He suggested that there might be
men of genius in the lowest grades of life, however permanently
humble and illiterate, who take their own view always, or do not
pretend to see at all; who are as bottomless even as Walden Pond was
thought to be, though they may be dark and muddy.
Many a traveller came out of his way to see me and the inside of
my house, and, as an excuse for calling, asked for a glass of water.
I told them that I drank at the pond, and pointed thither, offering
to lend them a dipper. Far off as I lived, I was not exempted from
the annual visitation which occurs, methinks, about the first of
April, when everybody is on the move; and I had my share of good
luck, though there were some curious specimens among my visitors.
Half-witted men from the almshouse and elsewhere came to see me; but
I endeavored to make them exercise all the wit they had, and make
their confessions to me; in such cases making wit the theme of our
conversation; and so was compensated. Indeed, I found some of them
to be wiser than the so-called overseers of the poor and selectmen
of the town, and thought it was time that the tables were turned.
With respect to wit, I learned that there was not much difference
between the half and the whole. One day, in particular, an
inoffensive, simple-minded pauper, whom with others I had often seen
used as fencing stuff, standing or sitting on a bushel in the fields
to keep cattle and himself from straying, visited me, and expressed
a wish to live as I did. He told me, with the utmost simplicity and
truth, quite superior, or rather inferior, to anything that is
called humility, that he was "deficient in intellect." These were
his words. The Lord had made him so, yet he supposed the Lord cared
as much for him as for another. "I have always been so," said he,
"from my childhood; I never had much mind; I was not like other
children; I am weak in the head. It was the Lords will, I
suppose." And there he was to prove the truth of his words. He was
a metaphysical puzzle to me. I have rarely met a fellowman on such
promising ground -- it was so simple and sincere and so true all
that he said. And, true enough, in proportion as he appeared to
humble himself was he exalted. I did not know at first but it was
the result of a wise policy. It seemed that from such a basis of
truth and frankness as the poor weak-headed pauper had laid, our
intercourse might go forward to something better than the
intercourse of sages.
I had some guests from those not reckoned commonly among the
towns poor, but who should be; who are among the worlds poor, at
any rate; guests who appeal, not to your hospitality, but to your
hospitalality; who earnestly wish to be helped, and preface their
appeal with the information that they are resolved, for one thing,
never to help themselves. I require of a visitor that he be not
actually starving, though he may have the very best appetite in the
world, however he got it. Objects of charity are not guests. Men
who did not know when their visit had terminated, though I went
about my business again, answering them from greater and greater
remoteness. Men of almost every degree of wit called on me in the
migrating season. Some who had more wits than they knew what to do
with; runaway slaves with plantation manners, who listened from time
to time, like the fox in the fable, as if they heard the hounds
a-baying on their track, and looked at me beseechingly, as much as
to say, --
"O Christian, will you send me back?
One real runaway slave, among the rest, whom I helped to forward
toward the north star. Men of one idea, like a hen with one
chicken, and that a duckling; men of a thousand ideas, and unkempt
heads, like those hens which are made to take charge of a hundred
chickens, all in pursuit of one bug, a score of them lost in every
mornings dew -- and become frizzled and mangy in consequence; men
of ideas instead of legs, a sort of intellectual centipede that made
you crawl all over. One man proposed a book in which visitors
should write their names, as at the White Mountains; but, alas! I
have too good a memory to make that necessary.
I could not but notice some of the peculiarities of my visitors.
Girls and boys and young women generally seemed glad to be in the
woods. They looked in the pond and at the flowers, and improved
their time. Men of business, even farmers, thought only of solitude
and employment, and of the great distance at which I dwelt from
something or other; and though they said that they loved a ramble in
the woods occasionally, it was obvious that they did not. Restless
committed men, whose time was an taken up in getting a living or
keeping it; ministers who spoke of God as if they enjoyed a monopoly
of the subject, who could not bear all kinds of opinions; doctors,
lawyers, uneasy housekeepers who pried into my cupboard and bed when
I was out -- how came Mrs. -- to know that my sheets were not as
clean as hers? -- young men who had ceased to be young, and had
concluded that it was safest to follow the beaten track of the
professions -- all these generally said that it was not possible to
do so much good in my position. Ay! there was the rub. The old and
infirm and the timid, of whatever age or sex, thought most of
sickness, and sudden accident and death; to them life seemed full of
danger -- what danger is there if you dont think of any? -- and
they thought that a prudent man would carefully select the safest
position, where Dr. B. might be on hand at a moments warning. To
them the village was literally a community, a league for mutual
defence, and you would suppose that they would not go
a-huckleberrying without a medicine chest. The amount of it is, if
a man is alive, there is always danger that he may die, though the
danger must be allowed to be less in proportion as he is
dead-and-alive to begin with. A man sits as many risks as he runs.
Finally, there were the self-styled reformers, the greatest bores of
all, who thought that I was forever singing,--
This is the house that I built;
This is the man that lives in the house that I built;
but they did not know that the third line was,
These are the folks that worry the man
That lives in the house that I built.
I did not fear the hen-harriers, for I kept no chickens; but I
feared the men-harriers rather.
I had more cheering visitors than the last. Children come
a-berrying, railroad men taking a Sunday morning walk in clean
shirts, fishermen and hunters, poets and philosophers; in short, all
honest pilgrims, who came out to the woods for freedoms sake, and
really left the village behind, I was ready to greet with --
"Welcome, Englishmen! welcome, Englishmen!" for I had had
communication with that race.