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WALDEN

and

ON THE DUTY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

by Henry David Thoreau

When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived

alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had

built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts,

and earned my living by the labor of my hands only. I lived there two

years and two months. At present I am a sojourner in civilized life

again.

I should not obtrude my affairs so much on the notice of my readers if

very particular inquiries had not been made by my townsmen concerning

my mode of life, which some would call impertinent, though they do not

appear to me at all impertinent, but, considering the circumstances,

very natural and pertinent. Some have asked what I got to eat; if I did

not feel lonesome; if I was not afraid; and the like. Others have been

curious to learn what portion of my income I devoted to charitable

purposes; and some, who have large families, how many poor children I

maintained. I will therefore ask those of my readers who feel no

particular interest in me to pardon me if I undertake to answer some of

these questions in this book. In most books, the _I_, or first person,

is omitted; in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism,

is the main difference. We commonly do not remember that it is, after

all, always the first person that is speaking. I should not talk so

much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.

Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my

experience. Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first or

last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what

he has heard of other men’s lives; some such account as he would send

to his kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, it

must have been in a distant land to me. Perhaps these pages are more

particularly addressed to poor students. As for the rest of my readers,

they will accept such portions as apply to them. I trust that none will

stretch the seams in putting on the coat, for it may do good service to

him whom it fits.

I would fain say something, not so much concerning the Chinese and

Sandwich Islanders as you who read these pages, who are said to live in

New England; something about your condition, especially your outward

condition or circumstances in this world, in this town, what it is,

whether it is necessary that it be as bad as it is, whether it cannot

be improved as well as not. I have travelled a good deal in Concord;

and everywhere, in shops, and offices, and fields, the inhabitants have

appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways. What

I have heard of Brahmins sitting exposed to four fires and looking in

the face of the sun; or hanging suspended, with their heads downward,

over flames; or looking at the heavens over their shoulders “until it

becomes impossible for them to resume their natural position, while

from the twist of the neck nothing but liquids can pass into the

stomach;” or dwelling, chained for life, at the foot of a tree; or

measuring with their bodies, like caterpillars, the breadth of vast

empires; or standing on one leg on the tops of pillars,—even these

forms of conscious penance are hardly more incredible and astonishing

than the scenes which I daily witness. The twelve labors of Hercules

were trifling in comparison with those which my neighbors have

undertaken; for they were only twelve, and had an end; but I could

never see that these men slew or captured any monster or finished any

labor. They have no friend Iolas to burn with a hot iron the root of

the hydra’s head, but as soon as one head is crushed, two spring up.

I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited

farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more

easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the

open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with

clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in. Who made them

serfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is

condemned to eat only his peck of dirt? Why should they begin digging

their graves as soon as they are born? They have got to live a man’s

life, pushing all these things before them, and get on as well as they

can. How many a poor immortal soul have I met well nigh crushed and

smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing

before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never

cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and

wood-lot! The portionless, who struggle with no such unnecessary

inherited encumbrances, find it labor enough to subdue and cultivate a

few cubic feet of flesh.

But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon

plowed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called

necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up

treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through

and steal. It is a fool’s life, as they will find when they get to the

end of it, if not before. It is said that Deucalion and Pyrrha created

men by throwing stones over their heads behind them:—

Inde genus durum sumus, experiensque laborum,

Et documenta damus quâ simus origine nati.

Or, as Raleigh rhymes it in his sonorous way,—

“From thence our kind hard-hearted is, enduring pain and care,

Approving that our bodies of a stony nature are.”

So much for a blind obedience to a blundering oracle, throwing the

stones over their heads behind them, and not seeing where they fell.

Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere

ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and

superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be

plucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and

tremble too much for that. Actually, the laboring man has not leisure

for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the

manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the

market. He has no time to be anything but a machine. How can he

remember well his ignorance—which his growth requires—who has so often

to use his knowledge? We should feed and clothe him gratuitously

sometimes, and recruit him with our cordials, before we judge of him.

The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be

preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat

ourselves nor one another thus tenderly.

Some of you, we all know, are poor, find it hard to live, are

sometimes, as it were, gasping for breath. I have no doubt that some of

you who read this book are unable to pay for all the dinners which you

have actually eaten, or for the coats and shoes which are fast wearing

or are already worn out, and have come to this page to spend borrowed

or stolen time, robbing your creditors of an hour. It is very evident

what mean and sneaking lives many of you live, for my sight has been

whetted by experience; always on the limits, trying to get into

business and trying to get out of debt, a very ancient slough, called

by the Latins _æs alienum_, another’s brass, for some of their coins

were made of brass; still living, and dying, and buried by this other’s

brass; always promising to pay, promising to pay, tomorrow, and dying

today, insolvent; seeking to curry favor, to get custom, by how many

modes, only not state-prison offences; lying, flattering, voting,

contracting yourselves into a nutshell of civility or dilating into an

atmosphere of thin and vaporous generosity, that you may persuade your

neighbor to let you make his shoes, or his hat, or his coat, or his

carriage, or import his groceries for him; making yourselves sick, that

you may lay up something against a sick day, something to be tucked

away in an old chest, or in a stocking behind the plastering, or, more

safely, in the brick bank; no matter where, no matter how much or how

little.

I sometimes wonder that we can be so frivolous, I may almost say, as to

attend to the gross but somewhat foreign form of servitude called Negro

Slavery, there are so many keen and subtle masters that enslave both

north and south. It is hard to have a southern overseer; it is worse to

have a northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of

yourself. Talk of a divinity in man! Look at the teamster on the

highway, wending to market by day or night; does any divinity stir

within him? His highest duty to fodder and water his horses! What is

his destiny to him compared with the shipping interests? Does not he

drive for Squire Make-a-stir? How godlike, how immortal, is he? See how

he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being

immortal nor divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of

himself, a fame won by his own deeds. Public opinion is a weak tyrant

compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself,

that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.

Self-emancipation even in the West Indian provinces of the fancy and

imagination,—what Wilberforce is there to bring that about? Think,

also, of the ladies of the land weaving toilet cushions against the

last day, not to betray too green an interest in their fates! As if you

could kill time without injuring eternity.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called

resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go

into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the

bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is

concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of

mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is

a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.

When we consider what, to use the words of the catechism, is the chief

end of man, and what are the true necessaries and means of life, it

appears as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode of living

because they preferred it to any other. Yet they honestly think there

is no choice left. But alert and healthy natures remember that the sun

rose clear. It is never too late to give up our prejudices. No way of

thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. What

everybody echoes or in silence passes by as true to-day may turn out to

be falsehood to-morrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted

for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilizing rain on their fields. What

old people say you cannot do you try and find that you can. Old deeds

for old people, and new deeds for new. Old people did not know enough

once, perchance, to fetch fresh fuel to keep the fire a-going; new

people put a little dry wood under a pot, and are whirled round the

globe with the speed of birds, in a way to kill old people, as the

phrase is. Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an

instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost.

One may almost doubt if the wisest man has learned any thing of

absolute value by living. Practically, the old have no very important

advice to give the young, their own experience has been so partial, and

their lives have been such miserable failures, for private reasons, as

they must believe; and it may be that they have some faith left which

belies that experience, and they are only less young than they were. I

have lived some thirty years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the

first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors. They

have told me nothing, and probably cannot tell me any thing to the

purpose. Here is life, an experiment to a great extent untried by me;

but it does not avail me that they have tried it. If I have any

experience which I think valuable, I am sure to reflect that this my

Mentors said nothing about.

One farmer says to me, “You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for

it furnishes nothing to make bones with;” and so he religiously devotes

a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of

bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with

vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plough along in spite

of every obstacle. Some things are really necessaries of life in some

circles, the most helpless and diseased, which in others are luxuries

merely, and in others still are entirely unknown.

The whole ground of human life seems to some to have been gone over by

their predecessors, both the heights and the valleys, and all things to

have been cared for. According to Evelyn, “the wise Solomon prescribed

ordinances for the very distances of trees; and the Roman prætors have

decided how often you may go into your neighbor’s land to gather the

acorns which fall on it without trespass, and what share belongs to

that neighbor.” Hippocrates has even left directions how we should cut

our nails; that is, even with the ends of the fingers, neither shorter

nor longer. Undoubtedly the very tedium and ennui which presume to have

exhausted the variety and the joys of life are as old as Adam. But

man’s capacities have never been measured; nor are we to judge of what

he can do by any precedents, so little has been tried. Whatever have

been thy failures hitherto, “be not afflicted, my child, for who shall

assign to thee what thou hast left undone?”

We might try our lives by a thousand simple tests; as, for instance,

that the same sun which ripens my beans illumines at once a system of

earths like ours. If I had remembered this it would have prevented some

mistakes. This was not the light in which I hoed them. The stars are

the apexes of what wonderful triangles! What distant and different

beings in the various mansions of the universe are contemplating the

same one at the same moment! Nature and human life are as various as

our several constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to

another? Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through

each other’s eyes for an instant? We should live in all the ages of the

world in an hour; ay, in all the worlds of the ages. History, Poetry,

Mythology!—I know of no reading of another’s experience so startling

and informing as this would be.

The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to

be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good

behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well? You may say

the wisest thing you can, old man,—you who have lived seventy years,

not without honor of a kind,—I hear an irresistible voice which invites

me away from all that. One generation abandons the enterprises of

another like stranded vessels.

I think that we may safely trust a good deal more than we do. We may

waive just so much care of ourselves as we honestly bestow elsewhere.

Nature is as well adapted to our weakness as to our strength. The

incessant anxiety and strain of some is a well nigh incurable form of

disease. We are made to exaggerate the importance of what work we do;

and yet how much is not done by us! or, what if we had been taken sick?

How vigilant we are! determined not to live by faith if we can avoid

it; all the day long on the alert, at night we unwillingly say our

prayers and commit ourselves to uncertainties. So thoroughly and

sincerely are we compelled to live, reverencing our life, and denying

the possibility of change. This is the only way, we say; but there are

as many ways as there can be drawn radii from one centre. All change is

a miracle to contemplate; but it is a miracle which is taking place

every instant. Confucius said, “To know that we know what we know, and

that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.” When

one man has reduced a fact of the imagination to be a fact to his

understanding, I foresee that all men at length establish their lives

on that basis.

Let us consider for a moment what most of the trouble and anxiety which

I have referred to is about, and how much it is necessary that we be

troubled, or, at least, careful. It would be some advantage to live a

primitive and frontier life, though in the midst of an outward

civilization, if only to learn what are the gross necessaries of life

and what methods have been taken to obtain them; or even to look over

the old day-books of the merchants, to see what it was that men most

commonly bought at the stores, what they stored, that is, what are the

grossest groceries. For the improvements of ages have had but little

influence on the essential laws of man’s existence; as our skeletons,

probably, are not to be distinguished from those of our ancestors.

By the words, _necessary of life_, I mean whatever, of all that man

obtains by his own exertions, has been from the first, or from long use

has become, so important to human life that few, if any, whether from

savageness, or poverty, or philosophy, ever attempt to do without it.

To many creatures there is in this sense but one necessary of life,

Food. To the bison of the prairie it is a few inches of palatable

grass, with water to drink; unless he seeks the Shelter of the forest

or the mountain’s shadow. None of the brute creation requires more than

Food and Shelter. The necessaries of life for man in this climate may,

accurately enough, be distributed under the several heads of Food,

Shelter, Clothing, and Fuel; for not till we have secured these are we

prepared to entertain the true problems of life with freedom and a

prospect of success. Man has invented, not only houses, but clothes and

cooked food; and possibly from the accidental discovery of the warmth

of fire, and the consequent use of it, at first a luxury, arose the

present necessity to sit by it. We observe cats and dogs acquiring the

same second nature. By proper Shelter and Clothing we legitimately

retain our own internal heat; but with an excess of these, or of Fuel,

that is, with an external heat greater than our own internal, may not

cookery properly be said to begin? Darwin, the naturalist, says of the

inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego, that while his own party, who were

well clothed and sitting close to a fire, were far from too warm, these

naked savages, who were farther off, were observed, to his great

surprise, “to be streaming with perspiration at undergoing such a

roasting.” So, we are told, the New Hollander goes naked with impunity,

while the European shivers in his clothes. Is it impossible to combine

the hardiness of these savages with the intellectualness of the

civilized man? According to Liebig, man’s body is a stove, and food the

fuel which keeps up the internal combustion in the lungs. In cold

weather we eat more, in warm less. The animal heat is the result of a

slow combustion, and disease and death take place when this is too

rapid; or for want of fuel, or from some defect in the draught, the

fire goes out. Of course the vital heat is not to be confounded with

fire; but so much for analogy. It appears, therefore, from the above

list, that the expression, _animal life_, is nearly synonymous with the

expression, _animal heat_; for while Food may be regarded as the Fuel

which keeps up the fire within us,—and Fuel serves only to prepare that

Food or to increase the warmth of our bodies by addition from

without,—Shelter and Clothing also serve only to retain the _heat_ thus

generated and absorbed.

The grand necessity, then, for our bodies, is to keep warm, to keep the

vital heat in us. What pains we accordingly take, not only with our

Food, and Clothing, and Shelter, but with our beds, which are our

night-clothes, robbing the nests and breasts of birds to prepare this

shelter within a shelter, as the mole has its bed of grass and leaves

at the end of its burrow! The poor man is wont to complain that this is

a cold world; and to cold, no less physical than social, we refer

directly a great part of our ails. The summer, in some climates, makes

possible to man a sort of Elysian life. Fuel, except to cook his Food,

is then unnecessary; the sun is his fire, and many of the fruits are

sufficiently cooked by its rays; while Food generally is more various,

and more easily obtained, and Clothing and Shelter are wholly or half

unnecessary. At the present day, and in this country, as I find by my

own experience, a few implements, a knife, an axe, a spade, a

wheelbarrow, &c., and for the studious, lamplight, stationery, and

access to a few books, rank next to necessaries, and can all be

obtained at a trifling cost. Yet some, not wise, go to the other side

of the globe, to barbarous and unhealthy regions, and devote themselves

to trade for ten or twenty years, in order that they may live,—that is,

keep comfortably warm,—and die in New England at last. The luxuriously

rich are not simply kept comfortably warm, but unnaturally hot; as I

implied before, they are cooked, of course _à la mode_.

Most of the luxuries, and many of the so called comforts of life, are

not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of

mankind. With respect to luxuries and comforts, the wisest have ever

lived a more simple and meagre life than the poor. The ancient

philosophers, Chinese, Hindoo, Persian, and Greek, were a class than

which none has been poorer in outward riches, none so rich in inward.

We know not much about them. It is remarkable that _we_ know so much of

them as we do. The same is true of the more modern reformers and

benefactors of their race. None can be an impartial or wise observer of

human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary

poverty. Of a life of luxury the fruit is luxury, whether in

agriculture, or commerce, or literature, or art. There are nowadays

professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to

profess because it was once admirable to live. To be a philosopher is

not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so

to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of

simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some

of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically. The

success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like

success, not kingly, not manly. They make shift to live merely by

conformity, practically as their fathers did, and are in no sense the

progenitors of a nobler race of men. But why do men degenerate ever?

What makes families run out? What is the nature of the luxury which

enervates and destroys nations? Are we sure that there is none of it in

our own lives? The philosopher is in advance of his age even in the

outward form of his life. He is not fed, sheltered, clothed, warmed,

like his contemporaries. How can a man be a philosopher and not

maintain his vital heat by better methods than other men?

When a man is warmed by the several modes which I have described, what

does he want next? Surely not more warmth of the same kind, as more and

richer food, larger and more splendid houses, finer and more abundant

clothing, more numerous incessant and hotter fires, and the like. When

he has obtained those things which are necessary to life, there is

another alternative than to obtain the superfluities; and that is, to

adventure on life now, his vacation from humbler toil having commenced.

The soil, it appears, is suited to the seed, for it has sent its

radicle downward, and it may now send its shoot upward also with

confidence. Why has man rooted himself thus firmly in the earth, but

that he may rise in the same proportion into the heavens above?—for the

nobler plants are valued for the fruit they bear at last in the air and

light, far from the ground, and are not treated like the humbler

esculents, which, though they may be biennials, are cultivated only

till they have perfected their root, and often cut down at top for this

purpose, so that most would not know them in their flowering season.

I do not mean to prescribe rules to strong and valiant natures, who

will mind their own affairs whether in heaven or hell, and perchance

build more magnificently and spend more lavishly than the richest,

without ever impoverishing themselves, not knowing how they live,—if,

indeed, there are any such, as has been dreamed; nor to those who find

their encouragement and inspiration in precisely the present condition

of things, and cherish it with the fondness and enthusiasm of

lovers,—and, to some extent, I reckon myself in this number; I do not

speak to those who are well employed, in whatever circumstances, and

they know whether they are well employed or not;—but mainly to the mass

of men who are discontented, and idly complaining of the hardness of

their lot or of the times, when they might improve them. There are some

who complain most energetically and inconsolably of any, because they

are, as they say, doing their duty. I also have in my mind that

seemingly wealthy, but most terribly impoverished class of all, who

have accumulated dross, but know not how to use it, or get rid of it,

and thus have forged their own golden or silver fetters.

If I should attempt to tell how I have desired to spend my life in

years past, it would probably surprise those of my readers who are

somewhat acquainted with its actual history; it would certainly

astonish those who know nothing about it. I will only hint at some of

the enterprises which I have cherished.

In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to

improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the

meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the

present moment; to toe that line. You will pardon some obscurities, for

there are more secrets in my trade than in most men’s, and yet not

voluntarily kept, but inseparable from its very nature. I would gladly

tell all that I know about it, and never paint “No Admittance” on my

gate.

I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still

on their trail. Many are the travellers I have spoken concerning them,

describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met one

or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even

seen the dove disappear behind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious to

recover them as if they had lost them themselves.

To anticipate, not the sunrise and the dawn merely, but, if possible,

Nature herself! How many mornings, summer and winter, before yet any

neighbor was stirring about his business, have I been about mine! No

doubt, many of my townsmen have met me returning from this enterprise,

farmers starting for Boston in the twilight, or woodchoppers going to

their work. It is true, I never assisted the sun materially in his

rising, but, doubt not, it was of the last importance only to be

present at it.

So many autumn, ay, and winter days, spent outside the town, trying to

hear what was in the wind, to hear and carry it express! I well-nigh

sunk all my capital in it, and lost my own breath into the bargain,

running in the face of it. If it had concerned either of the political

parties, depend upon it, it would have appeared in the Gazette with the

earliest intelligence. At other times watching from the observatory of

some cliff or tree, to telegraph any new arrival; or waiting at evening

on the hill-tops for the sky to fall, that I might catch something,

though I never caught much, and that, manna-wise, would dissolve again

in the sun.

For a long time I was reporter to a journal, of no very wide

circulation, whose editor has never yet seen fit to print the bulk of

my contributions, and, as is too common with writers, I got only my

labor for my pains. However, in this case my pains were their own

reward.

For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snow storms and rain

storms, and did my duty faithfully; surveyor, if not of highways, then

of forest paths and all across-lot routes, keeping them open, and

ravines bridged and passable at all seasons, where the public heel had

testified to their utility.

I have looked after the wild stock of the town, which give a faithful

herdsman a good deal of trouble by leaping fences; and I have had an

eye to the unfrequented nooks and corners of the farm; though I did not

always know whether Jonas or Solomon worked in a particular field

to-day; that was none of my business. I have watered the red

huckleberry, the sand cherry and the nettle tree, the red pine and the

black ash, the white grape and the yellow violet, which might have

withered else in dry seasons.

In short, I went on thus for a long time, I may say it without

boasting, faithfully minding my business, till it became more and more

evident that my townsmen would not after all admit me into the list of

town officers, nor make my place a sinecure with a moderate allowance.

My accounts, which I can swear to have kept faithfully, I have, indeed,

never got audited, still less accepted, still less paid and settled.

However, I have not set my heart on that.

Not long since, a strolling Indian went to sell baskets at the house of

a well-known lawyer in my neighborhood. “Do you wish to buy any

baskets?” he asked. “No, we do not want any,” was the reply. “What!”

exclaimed the Indian as he went out the gate, “do you mean to starve

us?” Having seen his industrious white neighbors so well off,—that the

lawyer had only to weave arguments, and by some magic, wealth and

standing followed, he had said to himself; I will go into business; I

will weave baskets; it is a thing which I can do. Thinking that when he

had made the baskets he would have done his part, and then it would be

the white man’s to buy them. He had not discovered that it was

necessary for him to make it worth the other’s while to buy them, or at

least make him think that it was so, or to make something else which it

would be worth his while to buy. I too had woven a kind of basket of a

delicate texture, but I had not made it worth any one’s while to buy

them. Yet not the less, in my case, did I think it worth my while to

weave them, and instead of studying how to make it worth men’s while to

buy my baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling

them. The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one

kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the

others?

Finding that my fellow-citizens were not likely to offer me any room in

the court house, or any curacy or living any where else, but I must

shift for myself, I turned my face more exclusively than ever to the

woods, where I was better known. I determined to go into business at

once, and not wait to acquire the usual capital, using such slender

means as I had already got. My purpose in going to Walden Pond was not

to live cheaply nor to live dearly there, but to transact some private

business with the fewest obstacles; to be hindered from accomplishing

which for want of a little common sense, a little enterprise and

business talent, appeared not so sad as foolish.

I have always endeavored to acquire strict business habits; they are

indispensable to every man. If your trade is with the Celestial Empire,

then some small counting house on the coast, in some Salem harbor, will

be fixture enough. You will export such articles as the country

affords, purely native products, much ice and pine timber and a little

granite, always in native bottoms. These will be good ventures. To

oversee all the details yourself in person; to be at once pilot and

captain, and owner and underwriter; to buy and sell and keep the

accounts; to read every letter received, and write or read every letter

sent; to superintend the discharge of imports night and day; to be upon

many parts of the coast almost at the same time;—often the richest

freight will be discharged upon a Jersey shore;—to be your own

telegraph, unweariedly sweeping the horizon, speaking all passing

vessels bound coastwise; to keep up a steady despatch of commodities,

for the supply of such a distant and exorbitant market; to keep

yourself informed of the state of the markets, prospects of war and

peace every where, and anticipate the tendencies of trade and

civilization,—taking advantage of the results of all exploring

expeditions, using new passages and all improvements in

navigation;—charts to be studied, the position of reefs and new lights

and buoys to be ascertained, and ever, and ever, the logarithmic tables

to be corrected, for by the error of some calculator the vessel often

splits upon a rock that should have reached a friendly pier,—there is

the untold fate of La Perouse;—universal science to be kept pace with,

studying the lives of all great discoverers and navigators, great

adventurers and merchants, from Hanno and the Phœnicians down to our

day; in fine, account of stock to be taken from time to time, to know

how you stand. It is a labor to task the faculties of a man,—such

problems of profit and loss, of interest, of tare and tret, and gauging

of all kinds in it, as demand a universal knowledge.

I have thought that Walden Pond would be a good place for business, not

solely on account of the railroad and the ice trade; it offers

advantages which it may not be good policy to divulge; it is a good

port and a good foundation. No Neva marshes to be filled; though you

must every where build on piles of your own driving. It is said that a

flood-tide, with a westerly wind, and ice in the Neva, would sweep St.

Petersburg from the face of the earth.

As this business was to be entered into without the usual capital, it

may not be easy to conjecture where those means, that will still be

indispensable to every such undertaking, were to be obtained. As for

Clothing, to come at once to the practical part of the question,

perhaps we are led oftener by the love of novelty, and a regard for the

opinions of men, in procuring it, than by a true utility. Let him who

has work to do recollect that the object of clothing is, first, to

retain the vital heat, and secondly, in this state of society, to cover

nakedness, and he may judge how much of any necessary or important work

may be accomplished without adding to his wardrobe. Kings and queens

who wear a suit but once, though made by some tailor or dressmaker to

their majesties, cannot know the comfort of wearing a suit that fits.

They are no better than wooden horses to hang the clean clothes on.

Every day our garments become more assimilated to ourselves, receiving

the impress of the wearer’s character, until we hesitate to lay them

aside, without such delay and medical appliances and some such

solemnity even as our bodies. No man ever stood the lower in my

estimation for having a patch in his clothes; yet I am sure that there

is greater anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean

and unpatched clothes, than to have a sound conscience. But even if the

rent is not mended, perhaps the worst vice betrayed is improvidence. I

sometimes try my acquaintances by such tests as this;—who could wear a

patch, or two extra seams only, over the knee? Most behave as if they

believed that their prospects for life would be ruined if they should

do it. It would be easier for them to hobble to town with a broken leg

than with a broken pantaloon. Often if an accident happens to a

gentleman’s legs, they can be mended; but if a similar accident happens

to the legs of his pantaloons, there is no help for it; for he

considers, not what is truly respectable, but what is respected. We

know but few men, a great many coats and breeches. Dress a scarecrow in

your last shift, you standing shiftless by, who would not soonest

salute the scarecrow? Passing a cornfield the other day, close by a hat

and coat on a stake, I recognized the owner of the farm. He was only a

little more weather-beaten than when I saw him last. I have heard of a

dog that barked at every stranger who approached his master’s premises

with clothes on, but was easily quieted by a naked thief. It is an

interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if

they were divested of their clothes. Could you, in such a case, tell

surely of any company of civilized men, which belonged to the most

respected class? When Madam Pfeiffer, in her adventurous travels round

the world, from east to west, had got so near home as Asiatic Russia,

she says that she felt the necessity of wearing other than a travelling

dress, when she went to meet the authorities, for she “was now in a

civilized country, where —— — people are judged of by their clothes.”

Even in our democratic New England towns the accidental possession of

wealth, and its manifestation in dress and equipage alone, obtain for

the possessor almost universal respect. But they yield such respect,

numerous as they are, are so far heathen, and need to have a missionary

sent to them. Beside, clothes introduced sewing, a kind of work which

you may call endless; a woman’s dress, at least, is never done.

A man who has at length found something to do will not need to get a

new suit to do it in; for him the old will do, that has lain dusty in

the garret for an indeterminate period. Old shoes will serve a hero

longer than they have served his valet,—if a hero ever has a

valet,—bare feet are older than shoes, and he can make them do. Only

they who go to soirées and legislative halls must have new coats, coats

to change as often as the man changes in them. But if my jacket and

trousers, my hat and shoes, are fit to worship God in, they will do;

will they not? Who ever saw his old clothes,—his old coat, actually

worn out, resolved into its primitive elements, so that it was not a

deed of charity to bestow it on some poor boy, by him perchance to be

bestowed on some poorer still, or shall we say richer, who could do

with less? I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes,

and not rather a new wearer of clothes. If there is not a new man, how

can the new clothes be made to fit? If you have any enterprise before

you, try it in your old clothes. All men want, not something to _do

with_, but something to _do_, or rather something to _be_. Perhaps we

should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until

we have so conducted, so enterprised or sailed in some way, that we

feel like new men in the old, and that to retain it would be like

keeping new wine in old bottles. Our moulting season, like that of the

fowls, must be a crisis in our lives. The loon retires to solitary

ponds to spend it. Thus also the snake casts its slough, and the

caterpillar its wormy coat, by an internal industry and expansion; for

clothes are but our outmost cuticle and mortal coil. Otherwise we shall

be found sailing under false colors, and be inevitably cashiered at

last by our own opinion, as well as that of mankind.

We don garment after garment, as if we grew like exogenous plants by

addition without. Our outside and often thin and fanciful clothes are

our epidermis, or false skin, which partakes not of our life, and may

be stripped off here and there without fatal injury; our thicker

garments, constantly worn, are our cellular integument, or cortex; but

our shirts are our liber or true bark, which cannot be removed without

girdling and so destroying the man. I believe that all races at some

seasons wear something equivalent to the shirt. It is desirable that a

man be clad so simply that he can lay his hands on himself in the dark,

and that he live in all respects so compactly and preparedly, that, if

an enemy take the town, he can, like the old philosopher, walk out the

gate empty-handed without anxiety. While one thick garment is, for most

purposes, as good as three thin ones, and cheap clothing can be

obtained at prices really to suit customers; while a thick coat can be

bought for five dollars, which will last as many years, thick

pantaloons for two dollars, cowhide boots for a dollar and a half a

pair, a summer hat for a quarter of a dollar, and a winter cap for

sixty-two and a half cents, or a better be made at home at a nominal

cost, where is he so poor that, clad in such a suit, of _his own

earning_, there will not be found wise men to do him reverence?

When I ask for a garment of a particular form, my tailoress tells me

gravely, “They do not make them so now,” not emphasizing the “They” at

all, as if she quoted an authority as impersonal as the Fates, and I

find it difficult to get made what I want, simply because she cannot

believe that I mean what I say, that I am so rash. When I hear this

oracular sentence, I am for a moment absorbed in thought, emphasizing

to myself each word separately that I may come at the meaning of it,

that I may find out by what degree of consanguinity _They_ are related

to _me_, and what authority they may have in an affair which affects me

so nearly; and, finally, I am inclined to answer her with equal

mystery, and without any more emphasis of the “they,”—“It is true, they

did not make them so recently, but they do now.” Of what use this

measuring of me if she does not measure my character, but only the

breadth of my shoulders, as it were a peg to hang the coat on? We

worship not the Graces, nor the Parcæ, but Fashion. She spins and

weaves and cuts with full authority. The head monkey at Paris puts on a

traveller’s cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same. I

sometimes despair of getting anything quite simple and honest done in

this world by the help of men. They would have to be passed through a

powerful press first, to squeeze their old notions out of them, so that

they would not soon get upon their legs again, and then there would be

some one in the company with a maggot in his head, hatched from an egg

deposited there nobody knows when, for not even fire kills these

things, and you would have lost your labor. Nevertheless, we will not

forget that some Egyptian wheat was handed down to us by a mummy.

On the whole, I think that it cannot be maintained that dressing has in

this or any country risen to the dignity of an art. At present men make

shift to wear what they can get. Like shipwrecked sailors, they put on

what they can find on the beach, and at a little distance, whether of

space or time, laugh at each other’s masquerade. Every generation

laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new. We are

amused at beholding the costume of Henry VIII., or Queen Elizabeth, as

much as if it was that of the King and Queen of the Cannibal Islands.

All costume off a man is pitiful or grotesque. It is only the serious

eye peering from and the sincere life passed within it, which restrain

laughter and consecrate the costume of any people. Let Harlequin be

taken with a fit of the colic and his trappings will have to serve that

mood too. When the soldier is hit by a cannon ball rags are as becoming

as purple.

The childish and savage taste of men and women for new patterns keeps

how many shaking and squinting through kaleidoscopes that they may

discover the particular figure which this generation requires today.

The manufacturers have learned that this taste is merely whimsical. Of

two patterns which differ only by a few threads more or less of a

particular color, the one will be sold readily, the other lie on the

shelf, though it frequently happens that after the lapse of a season

the latter becomes the most fashionable. Comparatively, tattooing is

not the hideous custom which it is called. It is not barbarous merely

because the printing is skin-deep and unalterable.

I cannot believe that our factory system is the best mode by which men

may get clothing. The condition of the operatives is becoming every day

more like that of the English; and it cannot be wondered at, since, as

far as I have heard or observed, the principal object is, not that

mankind may be well and honestly clad, but, unquestionably, that

corporations may be enriched. In the long run men hit only what they

aim at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better

aim at something high.

As for a Shelter

, I will not deny that this is now a necessary of life,

though there are instances of men having done without it for long

periods in colder countries than this. Samuel Laing says that “the

Laplander in his skin dress, and in a skin bag which he puts over his

head and shoulders, will sleep night after night on the snow—in a

degree of cold which would extinguish the life of one exposed to it in

any woollen clothing.” He had seen them asleep thus. Yet he adds, “They

are not hardier than other people.” But, probably, man did not live

long on the earth without discovering the convenience which there is in

a house, the domestic comforts, which phrase may have originally

signified the satisfactions of the house more than of the family;

though these must be extremely partial and occasional in those climates

where the house is associated in our thoughts with winter or the rainy

season chiefly, and two thirds of the year, except for a parasol, is

unnecessary. In our climate, in the summer, it was formerly almost

solely a covering at night. In the Indian gazettes a wigwam was the

symbol of a day’s march, and a row of them cut or painted on the bark

of a tree signified that so many times they had camped. Man was not

made so large limbed and robust but that he must seek to narrow his

world, and wall in a space such as fitted him. He was at first bare and

out of doors; but though this was pleasant enough in serene and warm

weather, by daylight, the rainy season and the winter, to say nothing

of the torrid sun, would perhaps have nipped his race in the bud if he

had not made haste to clothe himself with the shelter of a house. Adam

and Eve, according to the fable, wore the bower before other clothes.

Man wanted a home, a place of warmth, or comfort, first of physical

warmth, then the warmth of the affections.

We may imagine a time when, in the infancy of the human race, some

enterprising mortal crept into a hollow in a rock for shelter. Every

child begins the world again, to some extent, and loves to stay out

doors, even in wet and cold. It plays house, as well as horse, having

an instinct for it. Who does not remember the interest with which when

young he looked at shelving rocks, or any approach to a cave? It was

the natural yearning of that portion of our most primitive ancestor

which still survived in us. From the cave we have advanced to roofs of

palm leaves, of bark and boughs, of linen woven and stretched, of grass

and straw, of boards and shingles, of stones and tiles. At last, we

know not what it is to live in the open air, and our lives are domestic

in more senses than we think. From the hearth to the field is a great

distance. It would be well perhaps if we were to spend more of our days

and nights without any obstruction between us and the celestial bodies,

if the poet did not speak so much from under a roof, or the saint dwell

there so long. Birds do not sing in caves, nor do doves cherish their

innocence in dovecots.

However, if one designs to construct a dwelling house, it behooves him

to exercise a little Yankee shrewdness, lest after all he find himself

in a workhouse, a labyrinth without a clue, a museum, an almshouse, a

prison, or a splendid mausoleum instead. Consider first how slight a

shelter is absolutely necessary. I have seen Penobscot Indians, in this

town, living in tents of thin cotton cloth, while the snow was nearly a

foot deep around them, and I thought that they would be glad to have it

deeper to keep out the wind. Formerly, when how to get my living

honestly, with freedom left for my proper pursuits, was a question

which vexed me even more than it does now, for unfortunately I am

become somewhat callous, I used to see a large box by the railroad, six

feet long by three wide, in which the laborers locked up their tools at

night, and it suggested to me that every man who was hard pushed might

get such a one for a dollar, and, having bored a few auger holes in it,

to admit the air at least, get into it when it rained and at night, and

hook down the lid, and so have freedom in his love, and in his soul be

free. This did not appear the worst, nor by any means a despicable

alternative. You could sit up as late as you pleased, and, whenever you

got up, go abroad without any landlord or house-lord dogging you for

rent. Many a man is harassed to death to pay the rent of a larger and

more luxurious box who would not have frozen to death in such a box as

this. I am far from jesting. Economy is a subject which admits of being

treated with levity, but it cannot so be disposed of. A comfortable

house for a rude and hardy race, that lived mostly out of doors, was

once made here almost entirely of such materials as Nature furnished

ready to their hands. Gookin, who was superintendent of the Indians

subject to the Massachusetts Colony, writing in 1674, says, “The best

of their houses are covered very neatly, tight and warm, with barks of

trees, slipped from their bodies at those seasons when the sap is up,

and made into great flakes, with pressure of weighty timber, when they

are green.... The meaner sort are covered with mats which they make of

a kind of bulrush, and are also indifferently tight and warm, but not

so good as the former.... Some I have seen, sixty or a hundred feet

long and thirty feet broad.... I have often lodged in their wigwams,

and found them as warm as the best English houses.” He adds, that they

were commonly carpeted and lined within with well-wrought embroidered

mats, and were furnished with various utensils. The Indians had

advanced so far as to regulate the effect of the wind by a mat

suspended over the hole in the roof and moved by a string. Such a lodge

was in the first instance constructed in a day or two at most, and

taken down and put up in a few hours; and every family owned one, or

its apartment in one.

In the savage state every family owns a shelter as good as the best,

and sufficient for its coarser and simpler wants; but I think that I

speak within bounds when I say that, though the birds of the air have

their nests, and the foxes their holes, and the savages their wigwams,

in modern civilized society not more than one half the families own a

shelter. In the large towns and cities, where civilization especially

prevails, the number of those who own a shelter is a very small

fraction of the whole. The rest pay an annual tax for this outside

garment of all, become indispensable summer and winter, which would buy

a village of Indian wigwams, but now helps to keep them poor as long as

they live. I do not mean to insist here on the disadvantage of hiring

compared with owning, but it is evident that the savage owns his

shelter because it costs so little, while the civilized man hires his

commonly because he cannot afford to own it; nor can he, in the long

run, any better afford to hire. But, answers one, by merely paying this

tax the poor civilized man secures an abode which is a palace compared

with the savage’s. An annual rent of from twenty-five to a hundred

dollars, these are the country rates, entitles him to the benefit of

the improvements of centuries, spacious apartments, clean paint and

paper, Rumford fireplace, back plastering, Venetian blinds, copper

pump, spring lock, a commodious cellar, and many other things. But how

happens it that he who is said to enjoy these things is so commonly a

_poor_ civilized man, while the savage, who has them not, is rich as a

savage? If it is asserted that civilization is a real advance in the

condition of man,—and I think that it is, though only the wise improve

their advantages,—it must be shown that it has produced better

dwellings without making them more costly; and the cost of a thing is

the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged

for it, immediately or in the long run. An average house in this

neighborhood costs perhaps eight hundred dollars, and to lay up this

sum will take from ten to fifteen years of the laborer’s life, even if

he is not encumbered with a family;—estimating the pecuniary value of

every man’s labor at one dollar a day, for if some receive 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 _éclat_ 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 spring 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 every where 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 the

white or enlightened spots on the map. Contrast the physical condition

of the Irish with that of the North American Indian, or the South Sea

Islander, or any other savage race before it was degraded by contact

with the civilized man. Yet I have no doubt that that people’s rulers

are as wise as the average of civilized rulers. Their condition only

proves what squalidness may consist with civilization. I hardly need

refer now to the laborers in our Southern States who produce the staple

exports of this country, and are themselves a staple production of the

South. But to confine myself to those who are said to be in _moderate_

circumstances.

Most men appear never to have considered what a house is, and are

actually though needlessly poor all their lives because they think that

they must have such a one as their neighbors have. As if one were to

wear any sort of coat which the tailor might cut out for him, or,

gradually leaving off palmleaf hat or cap of woodchuck skin, complain

of hard times because he could not afford to buy him a crown! It is

possible to invent a house still more convenient and luxurious than we

have, which yet all would admit that man could not afford to pay for.

Shall we always study to obtain more of these things, and not sometimes

to be content with less? Shall the respectable citizen thus gravely

teach, by precept and example, the necessity of the young man’s

providing a certain number of superfluous glow-shoes, and umbrellas,

and empty guest chambers for empty guests, before he dies? Why should

not our furniture be as simple as the Arab’s or the Indian’s? When I

think of the benefactors of the race, whom we have apotheosized as

messengers from heaven, bearers of divine gifts to man, I do not see in

my mind any retinue at their heels, any car-load of fashionable

furniture. Or what if I were to allow—would it not be a singular

allowance?—that our furniture should be more complex than the Arab’s,

in proportion as we are morally and intellectually his superiors! At

present our houses are cluttered and defiled with it, and a good

housewife would sweep out the greater part into the dust hole, and not

leave her morning’s work undone. Morning work! By the blushes of Aurora

and the music of Memnon, what should be man’s _morning work_ in this

world? I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified

to find that they required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my

mind was all undusted still, and I threw them out the window in

disgust. How, then, could I have a furnished house? I would rather sit

in the open air, for no dust gathers on the grass, unless where man has

broken ground.

It is the luxurious and dissipated who set the fashions which the herd

so diligently follow. The traveller who stops at the best houses, so

called, soon discovers this, for the publicans presume him to be a

Sardanapalus, and if he resigned himself to their tender mercies he

would soon be completely emasculated. I think that in the railroad car

we are inclined to spend more on luxury than on safety and convenience,

and it threatens without attaining these to become no better than a

modern drawing room, with its divans, and ottomans, and sun-shades, and

a hundred other oriental things, which we are taking west with us,

invented for the ladies of the harem and the effeminate natives of the

Celestial Empire, which Jonathan should be ashamed to know the names

of. I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself than be

crowded on a velvet cushion. I would rather ride on earth in an ox cart

with a free circulation, than go to heaven in the fancy car of an

excursion train and breathe a _malaria_ all the way.

The very simplicity and nakedness of man’s life in the primitive ages

imply this advantage at least, that they left him still but a sojourner

in nature. When he was refreshed with food and sleep he contemplated

his journey again. He dwelt, as it were, in a tent in this world, and

was either threading the valleys, or crossing the plains, or climbing

the mountain tops. But lo! men have become the tools of their tools.

The man who independently plucked the fruits when he was hungry is

become a farmer; and he who stood under a tree for shelter, a

housekeeper. We now no longer camp as for a night, but have settled

down on earth and forgotten heaven. We have adopted Christianity merely

as an improved method of _agri_-culture. We have built for this world a

family mansion, and for the next a family tomb. The best works of art

are the expression of man’s struggle to free himself from this

condition, but the effect of our art is merely to make this low state

comfortable and that higher state to be forgotten. There is actually no

place in this village for a work of _fine_ art, if any had come down to

us, to stand, for our lives, our houses and streets, furnish no proper

pedestal for it. There is not a nail to hang a picture on, nor a shelf

to receive the bust of a hero or a saint. When I consider how our

houses are built and paid for, or not paid for, and their internal

economy managed and sustained, I wonder that the floor does not give

way under the visitor while he is admiring the gewgaws upon the

mantel-piece, and let him through into the cellar, to some solid and

honest though earthy foundation. I cannot but perceive that this so

called rich and refined life is a thing jumped at, and I do not get on

in the enjoyment of the _fine_ arts which adorn it, my attention being

wholly occupied with the jump; for I remember that the greatest genuine

leap, due to human muscles alone, on record, is that of certain

wandering Arabs, who are said to have cleared twenty-five feet on level

ground. Without factitious support, man is sure to come to earth again

beyond that distance. The first question which I am tempted to put to

the proprietor of such great impropriety is, Who bolsters you? Are you

one of the ninety-seven who fail, or of the three who succeed? Answer

me these questions, and then perhaps I may look at your bawbles and

find them ornamental. The cart before the horse is neither beautiful

nor useful. Before we can adorn our houses with beautiful objects the

walls must be stripped, and our lives must be stripped, and beautiful

housekeeping and beautiful living be laid for a foundation: now, a

taste for the beautiful is most cultivated out of doors, where there is

no house and no housekeeper.

Old Johnson, in his “Wonder-Working Providence,” speaking of the first

settlers of this town, with whom he was contemporary, tells us that

“they burrow themselves in the earth for their first shelter under some

hillside, and, casting the soil aloft upon timber, they make a smoky

fire against the earth, at the highest side.” They did not “provide

them houses,” says he, “till the earth, by the Lord’s blessing, brought

forth bread to feed them,” and the first year’s crop was so light that

“they were forced to cut their bread very thin for a long season.” The

secretary of the Province of New Netherland, writing in Dutch, in 1650,

for the information of those who wished to take up land there, states

more particularly that “those in New Netherland, and especially in New

England, who have no means to build farmhouses at first according to

their wishes, dig a square pit in the ground, cellar fashion, six or

seven feet deep, as long and as broad as they think proper, case the

earth inside with wood all round the wall, and line the wood with the

bark of trees or something else to prevent the caving in of the earth;

floor this cellar with plank, and wainscot it overhead for a ceiling,

raise a roof of spars clear up, and cover the spars with bark or green

sods, so that they can live dry and warm in these houses with their

entire families for two, three, and four years, it being understood

that partitions are run through those cellars which are adapted to the

size of the family. The wealthy and principal men in New England, in

the beginning of the colonies, commenced their first dwelling houses in

this fashion for two reasons; firstly, in order not to waste time in

building, and not to want food the next season; secondly, in order not

to discourage poor laboring people whom they brought over in numbers

from Fatherland. In the course of three or four years, when the country

became adapted to agriculture, they built themselves handsome houses,

spending on them several thousands.”

In this course which our ancestors took there was a show of prudence at

least, as if their principle were to satisfy the more pressing wants

first. But are the more pressing wants satisfied now? When I think of

acquiring for myself one of our luxurious dwellings, I am deterred,

for, so to speak, the country is not yet adapted to _human_ culture,

and we are still forced to cut our _spiritual_ bread far thinner than

our forefathers did their wheaten. Not that all architectural ornament

is to be neglected even in the rudest periods; but let our houses first

be lined with beauty, where they come in contact with our lives, like

the tenement of the shellfish, and not overlaid with it. But, alas! I

have been inside one or two of them, and know what they are lined with.

Though we are not so degenerate but that we might possibly live in a

cave or a wigwam or wear skins today, it certainly is better to accept

the advantages, though so dearly bought, which the invention and

industry of mankind offer. In such a neighborhood as this, boards and

shingles, lime and bricks, are cheaper and more easily obtained than

suitable caves, or whole logs, or bark in sufficient quantities, or

even well-tempered clay or flat stones. I speak understandingly on this

subject, for I have made myself acquainted with it both theoretically

and practically. With a little more wit we might use these materials so

as to become richer than the richest now are, and make our civilization

a blessing. The civilized man is a more experienced and wiser savage.

But to make haste to my own experiment.

Near the end of March, 1845, I borrowed an axe and went down to the

woods by Walden Pond, nearest to where I intended to build my house,

and began to cut down some tall, arrowy white pines, still in their

youth, for timber. It is difficult to begin without borrowing, but

perhaps it is the most generous course thus to permit your fellow-men

to have an interest in your enterprise. The owner of the axe, as he

released his hold on it, said that it was the apple of his eye; but I

returned it sharper than I received it. It was a pleasant hillside

where I worked, covered with pine woods, through which I looked out on

the pond, and a small open field in the woods where pines and hickories

were springing up. The ice in the pond was not yet dissolved, though

there were some open spaces, and it was all dark colored and saturated

with water. There were some slight flurries of snow during the days

that I worked there; but for the most part when I came out on to the

railroad, on my way home, its yellow sand heap stretched away gleaming

in the hazy atmosphere, and the rails shone in the spring sun, and I

heard the lark and pewee and other birds already come to commence

another year with us. They were pleasant spring days, in which the

winter of man’s discontent was thawing as well as the earth, and the

life that had lain torpid began to stretch itself. One day, when my axe

had come off and I had cut a green hickory for a wedge, driving it with

a stone, and had placed the whole to soak in a pond hole in order to

swell the wood, I saw a striped snake run into the water, and he lay on

the bottom, apparently without inconvenience, as long as I stayed

there, or more than a quarter of an hour; perhaps because he had not

yet fairly come out of the torpid state. It appeared to me that for a

like reason men remain in their present low and primitive condition;

but if they should feel the influence of the spring of springs arousing

them, they would of necessity rise to a higher and more ethereal life.

I had previously seen the snakes in frosty mornings in my path with

portions of their bodies still numb and inflexible, waiting for the sun

to thaw them. On the 1st of April it rained and melted the ice, and in

the early part of the day, which was very foggy, I heard a stray goose

groping about over the pond and cackling as if lost, or like the spirit

of the fog.

So I went on for some days cutting and hewing timber, and also studs

and rafters, all with my narrow axe, not having many communicable or

scholar-like thoughts, singing to myself,—

Men say they know many things;

But lo! they have taken wings,—

The arts and sciences,

And a thousand appliances;

The wind that blows

Is all that any body knows.

I hewed the main timbers six inches square, most of the studs on two

sides only, and the rafters and floor timbers on one side, leaving the

rest of the bark on, so that they were just as straight and much

stronger than sawed ones. Each stick was carefully mortised or tenoned

by its stump, for I had borrowed other tools by this time. My days in

the woods were not very long ones; yet I usually carried my dinner of

bread and butter, and read the newspaper in which it was wrapped, at

noon, sitting amid the green pine boughs which I had cut off, and to my

bread was imparted some of their fragrance, for my hands were covered

with a thick coat of pitch. Before I had done I was more the friend

than the foe of the pine tree, though I had cut down some of them,

having become better acquainted with it. Sometimes a rambler in the

wood was attracted by the sound of my axe, and we chatted pleasantly

over the chips which I had made.

By the middle of April, for I made no haste in my work, but rather made

the most of it, my house was framed and ready for the raising. I had

already bought the shanty of James Collins, an Irishman who worked on

the Fitchburg Railroad, for boards. James Collins’ shanty was

considered an uncommonly fine one. When I called to see it he was not

at home. I walked about the outside, at first unobserved from within,

the window was so deep and high. It was of small dimensions, with a

peaked cottage roof, and not much else to be seen, the dirt being

raised five feet all around as if it were a compost heap. The roof was

the soundest part, though a good deal warped and made brittle by the

sun. Door-sill there was none, but a perennial passage for the hens

under the door board. Mrs. C. came to the door and asked me to view it

from the inside. The hens were driven in by my approach. It was dark,

and had a dirt floor for the most part, dank, clammy, and aguish, only

here a board and there a board which would not bear removal. She

lighted a lamp to show me the inside of the roof and the walls, and

also that the board floor extended under the bed, warning me not to

step into the cellar, a sort of dust hole two feet deep. In her own

words, they were “good boards overhead, good boards all around, and a

good window,”—of two whole squares originally, only the cat had passed

out that way lately. There was a stove, a bed, and a place to sit, an

infant in the house where it was born, a silk parasol, gilt-framed

looking-glass, and a patent new coffee mill nailed to an oak sapling,

all told. The bargain was soon concluded, for James had in the

meanwhile returned. I to pay four dollars and twenty-five cents

to-night, he to vacate at five to-morrow morning, selling to nobody

else meanwhile: I to take possession at six. It were well, he said, to

be there early, and anticipate certain indistinct but wholly unjust

claims on the score of ground rent and fuel. This he assured me was the

only encumbrance. At six I passed him and his family on the road. One

large bundle held their all,—bed, coffee-mill, looking-glass, hens,—all

but the cat, she took to the woods and became a wild cat, and, as I

learned afterward, trod in a trap set for woodchucks, and so became a

dead cat at last.

I took down this dwelling the same morning, drawing the nails, and

removed it to the pond side by small cartloads, spreading the boards on

the grass there to bleach and warp back again in the sun. One early

thrush gave me a note or two as I drove along the woodland path. I was

informed treacherously by a young Patrick that neighbor Seeley, an

Irishman, in the intervals of the carting, transferred the still

tolerable, straight, and drivable nails, staples, and spikes to his

pocket, and then stood when I came back to pass the time of day, and

look freshly up, unconcerned, with spring thoughts, at the devastation;

there being a dearth of work, as he said. He was there to represent

spectatordom, and help make this seemingly insignificant event one with

the removal of the gods of Troy.

I dug my cellar in the side of a hill sloping to the south, where a

woodchuck had formerly dug his burrow, down through sumach and

blackberry roots, and the lowest stain of vegetation, six feet square

by seven deep, to a fine sand where potatoes would not freeze in any

winter. The sides were left shelving, and not stoned; but the sun

having never shone on them, the sand still keeps its place. It was but

two hours’ work. I took particular pleasure in this breaking of ground,

for in almost all latitudes men dig into the earth for an equable

temperature. Under the most splendid house in the city is still to be

found the cellar where they store their roots as of old, and long after

the superstructure has disappeared posterity remark its dent in the

earth. The house is still but a sort of porch at the entrance of a

burrow.

At length, in the beginning of May, with the help of some of my

acquaintances, rather to improve so good an occasion for neighborliness

than from any necessity, I set up the frame of my house. No man was

ever more honored in the character of his raisers than I. They are

destined, I trust, to assist at the raising of loftier structures one

day. I began to occupy my house on the 4th of July, as soon as it was

boarded and roofed, for the boards were carefully feather-edged and

lapped, so that it was perfectly impervious to rain; but before

boarding I laid the foundation of a chimney at one end, bringing two

cartloads of stones up the hill from the pond in my arms. I built the

chimney after my hoeing in the fall, before a fire became necessary for

warmth, doing my cooking in the mean while out of doors on the ground,

early in the morning: which mode I still think is in some respects more

convenient and agreeable than the usual one. When it stormed before my

bread was baked, I fixed a few boards over the fire, and sat under them

to watch my loaf, and passed some pleasant hours in that way. In those

days, when my hands were much employed, I read but little, but the

least scraps of paper which lay on the ground, my holder, or

tablecloth, afforded me as much entertainment, in fact answered the

same purpose as the Iliad.

It would be worth the while to build still more deliberately than I

did, considering, for instance, what foundation a door, a window, a

cellar, a garret, have in the nature of man, and perchance never

raising any superstructure until we found a better reason for it than

our temporal necessities even. There is some of the same fitness in a

man’s building his own house that there is in a bird’s building its own

nest. Who knows but if men constructed their dwellings with their own

hands, and provided food for themselves and families simply and

honestly enough, the poetic faculty would be universally developed, as

birds universally sing when they are so engaged? But alas! we do like

cowbirds and cuckoos, which lay their eggs in nests which other birds

have built, and cheer no traveller with their chattering and unmusical

notes. Shall we forever resign the pleasure of construction to the

carpenter? What does architecture amount to in the experience of the

mass of men? I never in all my walks came across a man engaged in so

simple and natural an occupation as building his house. We belong to

the community. It is not the tailor alone who is the ninth part of a

man; it is as much the preacher, and the merchant, and the farmer.

Where is this division of labor to end? and what object does it finally

serve? No doubt another _may_ also think for me; but it is not

therefore desirable that he should do so to the exclusion of my

thinking for myself.

True, there are architects so called in this country, and I have heard

of one at least possessed with the idea of making architectural

ornaments have a core of truth, a necessity, and hence a beauty, as if

it were a revelation to him. All very well perhaps from his point of

view, but only a little better than the common dilettantism. A

sentimental reformer in architecture, he began at the cornice, not at

the foundation. It was only how to put a core of truth within the

ornaments, that every sugar plum in fact might have an almond or

caraway seed in it,—though I hold that almonds are most wholesome

without the sugar,—and not how the inhabitant, the indweller, might

build truly within and without, and let the ornaments take care of

themselves. What reasonable man ever supposed that ornaments were

something outward and in the skin merely,—that the tortoise got his

spotted shell, or the shellfish its mother-o’-pearl tints, by such a

contract as the inhabitants of Broadway their Trinity Church? But a man

has no more to do with the style of architecture of his house than a

tortoise with that of its shell: nor need the soldier be so idle as to

try to paint the precise color of his virtue on his standard. The enemy

will find it out. He may turn pale when the trial comes. This man

seemed to me to lean over the cornice, and timidly whisper his half

truth to the rude occupants who really knew it better than he. What of

architectural beauty I now see, I know has gradually grown from within

outward, out of the necessities and character of the indweller, who is

the only builder,—out of some unconscious truthfulness, and nobleness,

without ever a thought for the appearance and whatever additional

beauty of this kind is destined to be produced will be preceded by a

like unconscious beauty of life. The most interesting dwellings in this

country, as the painter knows, are the most unpretending, humble log

huts and cottages of the poor commonly; it is the life of the

inhabitants whose shells they are, and not any peculiarity in their

surfaces merely, which makes them _picturesque;_ and equally

interesting will be the citizen’s suburban box, when his life shall be

as simple and as agreeable to the imagination, and there is as little

straining after effect in the style of his dwelling. A great proportion

of architectural ornaments are literally hollow, and a September gale

would strip them off, like borrowed plumes, without injury to the

substantials. They can do without _architecture_ who have no olives nor

wines in the cellar. What if an equal ado were made about the ornaments

of style in literature, and the architects of our bibles spent as much

time about their cornices as the architects of our churches do? So are

made the _belles-lettres_ and the _beaux-arts_ and their professors.

Much it concerns a man, forsooth, how a few sticks are slanted over him

or under him, and what colors are daubed upon his box. It would signify

somewhat, if, in any earnest sense, _he_ slanted them and daubed it;

but the spirit having departed out of the tenant, it is of a piece with

constructing his own coffin,—the architecture of the grave, and

“carpenter” is but another name for “coffin-maker.” One man says, in

his despair or indifference to life, take up a handful of the earth at

your feet, and paint your house that color. Is he thinking of his last

and narrow house? Toss up a copper for it as well. What an abundance of

leisure he must have! Why do you take up a handful of dirt? Better

paint your house your own complexion; let it turn pale or blush for

you. An enterprise to improve the style of cottage architecture! When

you have got my ornaments ready I will wear them.

Before winter I built a chimney, and shingled the sides of my house,

which were already impervious to rain, with imperfect and sappy

shingles made of the first slice of the log, whose edges I was obliged

to straighten with a plane.

I have thus a tight shingled and plastered house, ten feet wide by

fifteen long, and eight-feet posts, with a garret and a closet, a large

window on each side, two trap doors, one door at the end, and a brick

fireplace opposite. The exact cost of my house, paying the usual price

for such materials as I used, but not counting the work, all of which

was done by myself, was as follows; and I give the details because very

few are able to tell exactly what their houses cost, and fewer still,

if any, the separate cost of the various materials which compose them:—

Boards.......................... $ 8.03½, mostly shanty boards.

Refuse shingles for roof sides,.. 4.00

Laths,........................... 1.25

Two second-hand windows

with glass,................... 2.43

One thousand old brick,.......... 4.00

Two casks of lime,............... 2.40 That was high.

Hair,............................ 0.31 More than I needed.

Mantle-tree iron,................ 0.15

Nails,........................... 3.90

Hinges and screws,............... 0.14

Latch,........................... 0.10

Chalk,........................... 0.01

Transportation,.................. 1.40 I carried a good part

———— on my back.

In all,..................... $28.12½

These are all the materials excepting the timber stones and sand, which

I claimed by squatter’s right. I have also a small wood-shed adjoining,

made chiefly of the stuff which was left after building the house.

I intend to build me a house which will surpass any on the main street

in Concord in grandeur and luxury, as soon as it pleases me as much and

will cost me no more than my present one.

I thus found that the student who wishes for a shelter can obtain one

for a lifetime at an expense not greater than the rent which he now

pays annually. If I seem to boast more than is becoming, my excuse is

that I brag for humanity rather than for myself; and my shortcomings

and inconsistencies do not affect the truth of my statement.

Notwithstanding much cant and hypocrisy,—chaff which I find it

difficult to separate from my wheat, but for which I am as sorry as any

man,—I will breathe freely and stretch myself in this respect, it is

such a relief to both the moral and physical system; and I am resolved

that I will not through humility become the devil’s attorney. I will

endeavor to speak a good word for the truth. At Cambridge College the

mere rent of a student’s room, which is only a little larger than my

own, is thirty dollars each year, though the corporation had the

advantage of building thirty-two side by side and under one roof, and

the occupant suffers the inconvenience of many and noisy neighbors, and

perhaps a residence in the fourth story. I cannot but think that if we

had more true wisdom in these respects, not only less education would

be needed, because, forsooth, more would already have been acquired,

but the pecuniary expense of getting an education would in a great

measure vanish. Those conveniences which the student requires at

Cambridge or elsewhere cost him or somebody else ten times as great a

sacrifice of life as they would with proper management on both sides.

Those things for which the most money is demanded are never the things

which the student most wants. Tuition, for instance, is an important

item in the term bill, while for the far more valuable education which

he gets by associating with the most cultivated of his contemporaries

no charge is made. The mode of founding a college is, commonly, to get

up a subscription of dollars and cents, and then following blindly the

principles of a division of labor to its extreme, a principle which

should never be followed but with circumspection,—to call in a

contractor who makes this a subject of speculation, and he employs

Irishmen or other operatives actually to lay the foundations, while the

students that are to be are said to be fitting themselves for it; and

for these oversights successive generations have to pay. I think that

it would be _better than this_, for the students, or those who desire

to be benefited by it, even to lay the foundation themselves. The

student who secures his coveted leisure and retirement by

systematically shirking any labor necessary to man obtains but an

ignoble and unprofitable leisure, defrauding himself of the experience

which alone can make leisure fruitful. “But,” says one, “you do not

mean that the students should go to work with their hands instead of

their heads?” I do not mean that exactly, but I mean something which he

might think a good deal like that; I mean that they should not _play_

life, or _study_ it merely, while the community supports them at this

expensive game, but earnestly _live_ it from beginning to end. How

could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment

of living? Methinks this would exercise their minds as much as

mathematics. If I wished a boy to know something about the arts and

sciences, for instance, I would not pursue the common course, which is

merely to send him into the neighborhood of some professor, where any

thing is professed and practised but the art of life;—to survey the

world through a telescope or a microscope, and never with his natural

eye; to study chemistry, and not learn how his bread is made, or

mechanics, and not learn how it is earned; to discover new satellites

to Neptune, and not detect the motes in his eyes, or to what vagabond

he is a satellite himself; or to be devoured by the monsters that swarm

all around him, while contemplating the monsters in a drop of vinegar.

Which would have advanced the most at the end of a month,—the boy who

had made his own jackknife from the ore which he had dug and smelted,

reading as much as would be necessary for this,—or the boy who had

attended the lectures on metallurgy at the Institute in the mean while,

and had received a Rodgers’ penknife from his father? Which would be

most likely to cut his fingers?... To my astonishment I was informed on

leaving college that I had studied navigation!—why, if I had taken one

turn down the harbor I should have known more about it. Even the _poor_

student studies and is taught only _political_ economy, while that

economy of living which is synonymous with philosophy is not even

sincerely professed in our colleges. The consequence is, that while he

is reading Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Say, he runs his father in debt

irretrievably.

As with our colleges, so with a hundred “modern improvements”; there is

an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance. The

devil goes on exacting compound interest to the last for his early

share and numerous succeeding investments in them. Our inventions are

wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious

things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which

it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston

or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph

from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing

important to communicate. Either is in such a predicament as the man

who was earnest to be introduced to a distinguished deaf woman, but

when he was presented, and one end of her ear trumpet was put into his

hand, had nothing to say. As if the main object were to talk fast and

not to talk sensibly. We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and

bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the

first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear

will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough. After all,

the man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most

important messages; he is not an evangelist, nor does he come round

eating locusts and wild honey. I doubt if Flying Childers ever carried

a peck of corn to mill.

One says to me, “I wonder that you do not lay up money; you love to

travel; you might take the cars and go to Fitchburg to-day and see the

country.” But I am wiser than that. I have learned that the swiftest

traveller is he that goes afoot. I say to my friend, Suppose we try who

will get there first. The distance is thirty miles; the fare ninety

cents. That is almost a day’s wages. I remember when wages were sixty

cents a day for laborers on this very road. Well, I start now on foot,

and get there before night; I have travelled at that rate by the week

together. You will in the mean while have earned your fare, and arrive

there some time to-morrow, or possibly this evening, if you are lucky

enough to get a job in season. Instead of going to Fitchburg, you will

be working here the greater part of the day. And so, if the railroad

reached round the world, I think that I should keep ahead of you; and

as for seeing the country and getting experience of that kind, I should

have to cut your acquaintance altogether.

Such is the universal law, which no man can ever outwit, and with

regard to the railroad even we may say it is as broad as it is long. To

make a railroad round the world available to all mankind is equivalent

to grading the whole surface of the planet. Men have an indistinct

notion that if they keep up this activity of joint stocks and spades

long enough all will at length ride somewhere, in next to no time, and

for nothing; but though a crowd rushes to the depot, and the conductor

shouts “All aboard!” when the smoke is blown away and the vapor

condensed, it will be perceived that a few are riding, but the rest are

run over,—and it will be called, and will be, “A melancholy accident.”

No doubt they can ride at last who shall have earned their fare, that

is, if they survive so long, but they will probably have lost their

elasticity and desire to travel by that time. This spending of the best

part of one’s life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable

liberty during the least valuable part of it, reminds me of the

Englishman who went to India to make a fortune first, in order that he

might return to England and live the life of a poet. He should have

gone up garret at once. “What!” exclaim a million Irishmen starting up

from all the shanties in the land, “is not this railroad which we have

built a good thing?” Yes, I answer, _comparatively_ good, that is, you

might have done worse; but I wish, as you are brothers of mine, that

you could have spent your time better than digging in this dirt.

Before I finished my house, wishing to earn ten or twelve dollars by

some honest and agreeable method, in order to meet my unusual expenses,

I planted about two acres and a half of light and sandy soil near it

chiefly with beans, but also a small part with potatoes, corn, peas,

and turnips. The whole lot contains eleven acres, mostly growing up to

pines and hickories, and was sold the preceding season for eight

dollars and eight cents an acre. One farmer said that it was “good for

nothing but to raise cheeping squirrels on.” I put no manure whatever

on this land, not being the owner, but merely a squatter, and not

expecting to cultivate so much again, and I did not quite hoe it all

once. I got out several cords of stumps in ploughing, which supplied me

with fuel for a long time, and left small circles of virgin mould,

easily distinguishable through the summer by the greater luxuriance of

the beans there. The dead and for the most part unmerchantable wood

behind my house, and the driftwood from the pond, have supplied the

remainder of my fuel. I was obliged to hire a team and a man for the

ploughing, though I held the plough myself. My farm outgoes for the

first season were, for implements, seed, work, &c., $14.72½. The seed

corn was given me. This never costs anything to speak of, unless you

plant more than enough. I got twelve bushels of beans, and eighteen

bushels of potatoes, beside some peas and sweet corn. The yellow corn

and turnips were too late to come to any thing. My whole income from

the farm was $ 23.44 Deducting the outgoes,........... 14.72½ There are left,................. $ 8.71½,

beside produce consumed and on hand at the time this estimate was made

of the value of $4.50,—the amount on hand much more than balancing a

little grass which I did not raise. All things considered, that is,

considering the importance of a man’s soul and of to-day,

notwithstanding the short time occupied by my experiment, nay, partly

even because of its transient character, I believe that that was doing

better than any farmer in Concord did that year.

The next year I did better still, for I spaded up all the land which I

required, about a third of an acre, and I learned from the experience

of both years, not being in the least awed by many celebrated works on

husbandry, Arthur Young among the rest, that if one would live simply

and eat only the crop which he raised, and raise no more than he ate,

and not exchange it for an insufficient quantity of more luxurious and

expensive things, he would need to cultivate only a few rods of ground,

and that it would be cheaper to spade up that than to use oxen to

plough it, and to select a fresh spot from time to time than to manure

the old, and he could do all his necessary farm work as it were with

his left hand at odd hours in the summer; and thus he would not be tied

to an ox, or horse, or cow, or pig, as at present. I desire to speak

impartially on this point, and as one not interested in the success or

failure of the present economical and social arrangements. I was more

independent than any farmer in Concord, for I was not anchored to a

house or farm, but could follow the bent of my genius, which is a very

crooked one, every moment. Beside being better off than they already,

if my house had been burned or my crops had failed, I should have been

nearly as well off as before.

I am wont to think that men are not so much the keepers of herds as

herds are the keepers of men, the former are so much the freer. Men and

oxen exchange work; but if we consider necessary work only, the oxen

will be seen to have greatly the advantage, their farm is so much the

larger. Man does some of his part of the exchange work in his six weeks

of haying, and it is no boy’s play. Certainly no nation that lived

simply in all respects, that is, no nation of philosophers, would

commit so great a blunder as to use the labor of animals. True, there

never was and is not likely soon to be a nation of philosophers, nor am

I certain it is desirable that there should be. However, _I_ should

never have broken a horse or bull and taken him to board for any work

he might do for me, for fear I should become a horse-man or a herds-man

merely; and if society seems to be the gainer by so doing, are we

certain that what is one man’s gain is not another’s loss, and that the

stable-boy has equal cause with his master to be satisfied? Granted

that some public works would not have been constructed without this

aid, and let man share the glory of such with the ox and horse; does it

follow that he could not have accomplished works yet more worthy of

himself in that case? When men begin to do, not merely unnecessary or

artistic, but luxurious and idle work, with their assistance, it is

inevitable that a few do all the exchange work with the oxen, or, in

other words, become the slaves of the strongest. Man thus not only

works for the animal within him, but, for a symbol of this, he works

for the animal without him. Though we have many substantial houses of

brick or stone, the prosperity of the farmer is still measured by the

degree to which the barn overshadows the house. This town is said to

have the largest houses for oxen, cows, and horses hereabouts, and it

is not behindhand in its public buildings; but there are very few halls

for free worship or free speech in this county. It should not be by

their architecture, but why not even by their power of abstract

thought, that nations should seek to commemorate themselves? How much

more admirable the Bhagvat-Geeta than all the ruins of the East! Towers

and temples are the luxury of princes. A simple and independent mind

does not toil at the bidding of any prince. Genius is not a retainer to

any emperor, nor is its material silver, or gold, or marble, except to

a trifling extent. To what end, pray, is so much stone hammered? In

Arcadia, when I was there, I did not see any hammering stone. Nations

are possessed with an insane ambition to perpetuate the memory of

themselves by the amount of hammered stone they leave. What if equal

pains were taken to smooth and polish their manners? One piece of good

sense would be more memorable than a monument as high as the moon. I

love better to see stones in place. The grandeur of Thebes was a vulgar

grandeur. More sensible is a rod of stone wall that bounds an honest

man’s field than a hundred-gated Thebes that has wandered farther from

the true end of life. The religion and civilization which are barbaric

and heathenish build splendid temples; but what you might call

Christianity does not. Most of the stone a nation hammers goes toward

its tomb only. It buries itself alive. As for the Pyramids, there is

nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could

be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for

some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have

drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs. I might

possibly invent some excuse for them and him, but I have no time for

it. As for the religion and love of art of the builders, it is much the

same all the world over, whether the building be an Egyptian temple or

the United States Bank. It costs more than it comes to. The mainspring

is vanity, assisted by the love of garlic and bread and butter. Mr.

Balcom, a promising young architect, designs it on the back of his

Vitruvius, with hard pencil and ruler, and the job is let out to Dobson

& Sons, stonecutters. When the thirty centuries begin to look down on

it, mankind begin to look up at it. As for your high towers and

monuments, there was a crazy fellow once in this town who undertook to

dig through to China, and he got so far that, as he said, he heard the

Chinese pots and kettles rattle; but I think that I shall not go out of

my way to admire the hole which he made. Many are concerned about the

monuments of the West and the East,—to know who built them. For my

part, I should like to know who in those days did not build them,—who

were above such trifling. But to proceed with my statistics.

By surveying, carpentry, and day-labor of various other kinds in the

village in the mean while, for I have as many trades as fingers, I had

earned $13.34. The expense of food for eight months, namely, from July

4th to March 1st, the time when these estimates were made, though I

lived there more than two years,—not counting potatoes, a little green

corn, and some peas, which I had raised, nor considering the value of

what was on hand at the last date, was

Rice,................... $ 1.73½

Molasses,................ 1.73 Cheapest form of the

saccharine.

Rye meal,................ 1.04¾

Indian meal,............. 0.99¾ Cheaper than rye.

Pork,.................... 0.22

All experiments which failed:

Flour,................... 0.88 Costs more than Indian meal,

both money and trouble.

Sugar,................... 0.80

Lard,.................... 0.65

Apples,.................. 0.25

Dried apple,............. 0.22

Sweet potatoes,.......... 0.10

One pumpkin,............. 0.06

One watermelon,.......... 0.02

Salt,.................... 0.03

Yes, I did eat $8.74, all told; but I should not thus unblushingly

publish my guilt, if I did not know that most of my readers were

equally guilty with myself, and that their deeds would look no better

in print. The next year I sometimes caught a mess of fish for my

dinner, and once I went so far as to slaughter a woodchuck which

ravaged my bean-field,—effect his transmigration, as a Tartar would

say,—and devour him, partly for experiment’s sake; but though it

afforded me a momentary enjoyment, notwithstanding a musky flavor, I

saw that the longest use would not make that a good practice, however

it might seem to have your woodchucks ready dressed by the village

butcher.

Clothing and some incidental expenses within the same dates, though

little can be inferred from this item, amounted to

$8.40¾

Oil and some household utensils,....... 2.00

So that all the pecuniary outgoes, excepting for washing and mending,

which for the most part were done out of the house, and their bills

have not yet been received,—and these are all and more than all the

ways by which money necessarily goes out in this part of the

world,—were

House,................................ $ 28.12½

Farm one year,.......................... 14.72½

Food eight months,...................... 8.74

Clothing, etc., eight months,........... 8.40¾

Oil, &c., eight months,................. 2.00

——————

In all,........................... $ 61.99¾

I address myself now to those of my readers who have a living to get.

And to meet this I have for farm produce sold

$23.44

Earned by day-labor,................... 13.34

——————

In all,............................ $36.78,

which subtracted from the sum of the outgoes leaves a balance of

$25.21¾ on the one side,—this being very nearly the means with which I

started, and the measure of expenses to be incurred,—and on the other,

beside the leisure and independence and health thus secured, a

comfortable house for me as long as I choose to occupy it.

These statistics, however accidental and therefore uninstructive they

may appear, as they have a certain completeness, have a certain value

also. Nothing was given me of which I have not rendered some account.

It appears from the above estimate, that my food alone cost me in money

about twenty-seven cents a week. It was, for nearly two years after

this, rye and Indian meal without yeast, potatoes, rice, a very little

salt pork, molasses, and salt, and my drink water. It was fit that I

should live on rice, mainly, who loved so well the philosophy of India.

To meet the objections of some inveterate cavillers, I may as well

state, that if I dined out occasionally, as I always had done, and I

trust shall have opportunities to do again, it was frequently to the

detriment of my domestic arrangements. But the dining out, being, as I

have stated, a constant element, does not in the least affect a

comparative statement like this.

I learned from my two years’ experience that it would cost incredibly

little trouble to obtain one’s necessary food, even in this latitude;

that a man may use as simple a diet as the animals, and yet retain

health and strength. I have made a satisfactory dinner, satisfactory on

several accounts, simply off a dish of purslane (_Portulaca oleracea_)

which I gathered in my cornfield, boiled and salted. I give the Latin

on account of the savoriness of the trivial name. And pray what more

can a reasonable man desire, in peaceful times, in ordinary noons, than

a sufficient number of ears of green sweet-corn boiled, with the

addition of salt? Even the little variety which I used was a yielding

to the demands of appetite, and not of health. Yet men have come to

such a pass that they frequently starve, not for want of necessaries,

but for want of luxuries; and I know a good woman who thinks that her

son lost his life because he took to drinking water only.

The reader will perceive that I am treating the subject rather from an

economic than a dietetic point of view, and he will not venture to put

my abstemiousness to the test unless he has a well-stocked larder.

Bread I at first made of pure Indian meal and salt, genuine hoe-cakes,

which I baked before my fire out of doors on a shingle or the end of a

stick of timber sawed off in building my house; but it was wont to get

smoked and to have a piny flavor. I tried flour also; but have at last

found a mixture of rye and Indian meal most convenient and agreeable.

In cold weather it was no little amusement to bake several small loaves

of this in succession, tending and turning them as carefully as an

Egyptian his hatching eggs. They were a real cereal fruit which I

ripened, and they had to my senses a fragrance like that of other noble

fruits, which I kept in as long as possible by wrapping them in cloths.

I made a study of the ancient and indispensable art of bread-making,

consulting such authorities as offered, going back to the primitive

days and first invention of the unleavened kind, when from the wildness

of nuts and meats men first reached the mildness and refinement of this

diet, and travelling gradually down in my studies through that

accidental souring of the dough which, it is supposed, taught the

leavening process, and through the various fermentations thereafter,

till I came to “good, sweet, wholesome bread,” the staff of life.

Leaven, which some deem the soul of bread, the _spiritus_ which fills

its cellular tissue, which is religiously preserved like the vestal

fire,—some precious bottle-full, I suppose, first brought over in the

Mayflower, did the business for America, and its influence is still

rising, swelling, spreading, in cerealian billows over the land,—this

seed I regularly and faithfully procured from the village, till at

length one morning I forgot the rules, and scalded my yeast; by which

accident I discovered that even this was not indispensable,—for my

discoveries were not by the synthetic but analytic process,—and I have

gladly omitted it since, though most housewives earnestly assured me

that safe and wholesome bread without yeast might not be, and elderly

people prophesied a speedy decay of the vital forces. Yet I find it not

to be an essential ingredient, and after going without it for a year am

still in the land of the living; and I am glad to escape the

trivialness of carrying a bottle-full in my pocket, which would

sometimes pop and discharge its contents to my discomfiture. It is

simpler and more respectable to omit it. Man is an animal who more than

any other can adapt himself to all climates and circumstances. Neither

did I put any sal soda, or other acid or alkali, into my bread. It

would seem that I made it according to the recipe which Marcus Porcius

Cato gave about two centuries before Christ. “Panem depsticium sic

facito. Manus mortariumque bene lavato. Farinam in mortarium indito,

aquæ paulatim addito, subigitoque pulchre. Ubi bene subegeris,

defingito, coquitoque sub testu.” Which I take to mean—“Make kneaded

bread thus. Wash your hands and trough well. Put the meal into the

trough, add water gradually, and knead it thoroughly. When you have

kneaded it well, mould it, and bake it under a cover,” that is, in a

baking-kettle. Not a word about leaven. But I did not always use this

staff of life. At one time, owing to the emptiness of my purse, I saw

none of it for more than a month.

Every New Englander might easily raise all his own breadstuffs in this

land of rye and Indian corn, and not depend on distant and fluctuating

markets for them. Yet so far are we from simplicity and independence

that, in Concord, fresh and sweet meal is rarely sold in the shops, and

hominy and corn in a still coarser form are hardly used by any. For the

most part the farmer gives to his cattle and hogs the grain of his own

producing, and buys flour, which is at least no more wholesome, at a

greater cost, at the store. I saw that I could easily raise my bushel

or two of rye and Indian corn, for the former will grow on the poorest

land, and the latter does not require the best, and grind them in a

hand-mill, and so do without rice and pork; and if I must have some

concentrated sweet, I found by experiment that I could make a very good

molasses either of pumpkins or beets, and I knew that I needed only to

set out a few maples to obtain it more easily still, and while these

were growing I could use various substitutes beside those which I have

named. “For,” as the Forefathers sang,—

“we can make liquor to sweeten our lips

Of pumpkins and parsnips and walnut-tree chips.”

Finally, as for salt, that grossest of groceries, to obtain this might

be a fit occasion for a visit to the seashore, or, if I did without it

altogether, I should probably drink the less water. I do not learn that

the Indians ever troubled themselves to go after it.

Thus I could avoid all trade and barter, so far as my food was

concerned, and having a shelter already, it would only remain to get

clothing and fuel. The pantaloons which I now wear were woven in a

farmer’s family,—thank Heaven there is so much virtue still in man; for

I think the fall from the farmer to the operative as great and

memorable as that from the man to the farmer;—and in a new country,

fuel is an encumbrance. As for a habitat, if I were not permitted still

to squat, I might purchase one acre at the same price for which the

land I cultivated was sold—namely, eight dollars and eight cents. But

as it was, I considered that I enhanced the value of the land by

squatting on it.

There is a certain class of unbelievers who sometimes ask me such

questions as, if I think that I can live on vegetable food alone; and

to strike at the root of the matter at once,—for the root is faith,—I

am accustomed to answer such, that I can live on board nails. If they

cannot understand that, they cannot understand much that I have to say.

For my part, I am glad to hear of experiments of this kind being tried;

as that a young man tried for a fortnight to live on hard, raw corn on

the ear, using his teeth for all mortar. The squirrel tribe tried the

same and succeeded. The human race is interested in these experiments,

though a few old women who are incapacitated for them, or who own their

thirds in mills, may be alarmed.

My furniture, part of which I made myself, and the rest cost me nothing

of which I have not rendered an account, consisted of a bed, a table, a

desk, three chairs, a looking-glass three inches in diameter, a pair of

tongs and andirons, a kettle, a skillet, and a frying-pan, a dipper, a

wash-bowl, two knives and forks, three plates, one cup, one spoon, a

jug for oil, a jug for molasses, and a japanned lamp. None is so poor

that he need sit on a pumpkin. That is shiftlessness. There is a plenty

of such chairs as I like best in the village garrets to be had for

taking them away. Furniture! Thank God, I can sit and I can stand

without the aid of a furniture warehouse. What man but a philosopher

would not be ashamed to see his furniture packed in a cart and going up

country exposed to the light of heaven and the eyes of men, a beggarly

account of empty boxes? That is Spaulding’s furniture. I could never

tell from inspecting such a load whether it belonged to a so called

rich man or a poor one; the owner always seemed poverty-stricken.

Indeed, the more you have of such things the poorer you are. Each load

looks as if it contained the contents of a dozen shanties; and if one

shanty is poor, this is a dozen times as poor. Pray, for what do we

_move_ ever but to get rid of our furniture, our _exuviæ_; at last to

go from this world to another newly furnished, and leave this to be

burned? It is the same as if all these traps were buckled to a man’s

belt, and he could not move over the rough country where our lines are

cast without dragging them,—dragging his trap. He was a lucky fox that

left his tail in the trap. The muskrat will gnaw his third leg off to

be free. No wonder man has lost his elasticity. How often he is at a

dead set! “Sir, if I may be so bold, what do you mean by a dead set?”

If you are a seer, whenever you meet a man you will see all that he

owns, ay, and much that he pretends to disown, behind him, even to his

kitchen furniture and all the trumpery which he saves and will not

burn, and he will appear to be harnessed to it and making what headway

he can. I think that the man is at a dead set who has got through a

knot hole or gateway where his sledge load of furniture cannot follow

him. I cannot but feel compassion when I hear some trig,

compact-looking man, seemingly free, all girded and ready, speak of his

“furniture,” as whether it is insured or not. “But what shall I do with

my furniture?” My gay butterfly is entangled in a spider’s web then.

Even those who seem for a long while not to have any, if you inquire

more narrowly you will find have some stored in somebody’s barn. I look

upon England to-day as an old gentleman who is travelling with a great

deal of baggage, trumpery which has accumulated from long housekeeping,

which he has not the courage to burn; great trunk, little trunk,

bandbox and bundle. Throw away the first three at least. It would

surpass the powers of a well man nowadays to take up his bed and walk,

and I should certainly advise a sick one to lay down his bed and run.

When I have met an immigrant tottering under a bundle which contained

his all—looking like an enormous wen which had grown out of the nape of

his neck—I have pitied him, not because that was his all, but because

he had all _that_ to carry. If I have got to drag my trap, I will take

care that it be a light one and do not nip me in a vital part. But

perchance it would be wisest never to put one’s paw into it.

I would observe, by the way, that it costs me nothing for curtains, for

I have no gazers to shut out but the sun and moon, and I am willing

that they should look in. The moon will not sour milk nor taint meat of

mine, nor will the sun injure my furniture or fade my carpet, and if he

is sometimes too warm a friend, I find it still better economy to

retreat behind some curtain which nature has provided, than to add a

single item to the details of housekeeping. A lady once offered me a

mat, but as I had no room to spare within the house, nor time to spare

within or without to shake it, I declined it, preferring to wipe my

feet on the sod before my door. It is best to avoid the beginnings of

evil.

Not long since I was present at the auction of a deacon’s effects, for

his life had not been ineffectual:—