In the New Forest in Hampshire they had a chief officer called the Lord Warden and under him two distinct officers, one to preserve the venison of the forest, another to preserve its vert, i. e. woods, lawns, etc. Does not our Walden need such? The Lord Warden was a person of distinction, as the Duke of Gloucester.
Walden Wood was my forest walk.
The English forests are divided into “walks,” with a keeper presiding over each. My “walk” is ten miles from my house every way. Gilpin says,”It is a forest adage of ancient date, Non est inquirendum unde venit venison” i. e. whether stolen or not.
A pure brook is a very beautiful object to study minutely. It will bear the closest inspection, even to the fine air-bubbles, like minute globules of quicksilver, that lie on its bottom. The minute particles or spangles of golden mica in these sands, when the sun shines on them, remind one of the golden sands we read of. Everything is washed clean and bright, and the water is the best glass through which to see it….
I am surprised to find Walden completely open. When did it open? According to all accounts, it must have been between the 6th and 9th. Fair Haven must have opened entirely the 5th or 6th, and Walden very nearly at the same time. This proves how steadily it has been melting, notwithstanding the severe cold of the last half of March; i. e., it is less affected by transient heat or cold than most ponds.
The flowers have blossomed very suddenly this year as soon as the long cold spell was over, and almost all together.
As to which are the earliest flowers, it depends on the character of the season, and ground bare or not, meadows wet or dry, etc., etc., also on the variety of soils and localities within your reach.
Went to walk in the woods. When I had got half a mile or more away in the woods alone, and was sitting on a rock, was surprised to be joined by R.’s large Newfoundland dog Ranger, who had smelled me out and so tracked me.
The last two Tribunes I have not looked at- I have no time to read newspapers- If you chance to live & move and have your being in that thin stratum-in which the events which make the news transpire––thinner than the paper on which it is printed––then these things will fill the world for you–but if you soar above or dive below that plain—you cannot remember nor be reminded of them.
How unexpectedly dumb and poor and cold does Nature look, when, where we had expected to find a glassy lake reflecting the skies and trees in the spring,
we find only dull, white ice. Such I am, no doubt, to many friends.
It would be worth the while to tell why a swamp pleases us, what kinds please us, also what weather, etc., etc., – analyze our impressions.
Why the moaning of the storm gives me pleasure. Methinks it is because it puts to rout the trivialness of our fair-weather life and gives it at least a tragic interest. The sound has the effect of a pleasing challenge, to call forth our energy to resist the invaders of our life’s territory. It is musical and thrilling, as the sound of an enemy’s bugle. Our spirits revive like lichens in the storm. There is something worth living for when we are resisted, threatened. As at the last day we might be thrilled with the prospect of the grandeur of our destiny, so in these first days our destiny appears grander. What would the days, what would our life, be worth, if some nights were not dark as pitch, – of darkness tangible or that you can cut with a knife? How else could the light in the mind shine? How should we be conscious of the light of reason? If it were not for physical cold, how should we have discovered the warmth of the affections? I sometimes feel that I need to sit in a far-away cave through a three weeks’ storm, cold and wet, to give a tone to my system. The spring has its windy March to usher it in, with many soaking rains reaching into April. Methinks I would share every creature’s suffering for the sake of its experience and joy.
It is surprising and memorable and, I may add, valuable experience, to be lost in the woods, especially at night. Sometimes in a snowstorm, even by day, one will come out upon a well-known road and yet find it impossible to tell which way leads to the village. Though your reason tells you have travelled it one hundred times, yet no object looks familiar, but is as strange to you as if you were in Tartary. By night, of course, the perplexity is infinitely greater. We are constantly steering like pilots by certain well-known beacons and headlands, though we are not conscious of it, and if we go beyond our usual course we still preserve the bearing of some neighboring cape and not till we are completely lost or turned around, — for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost — do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature.
Every man must once more learn the points of the compass as often as he wakes, whether from sleep or from an abstraction. In fact, not till we are lost do we begin to realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.
From this hilltop I overlook, again bare of snow, putting on a warm, hazy spring face, this seemingly concave circle of earth, in the midst of which I was born and dwell, which in the northwest and southeast has a more distant blue rim to it, as it were of more costly manufacture.
On ascending the hill next his home, every man finds that he dwells in a shallow concavity whose sheltering walls are the convex surface of the earth, beyond which he cannot see. I see those familiar features, that large type, with which all my life is associated, unchanged.
Still cold & blustering– The ditches where I have seen salamanders last year before this are still frozen up. Was it not a sucker I saw dart along the brook beyond Jennie’s? I see where the squirrels have fed extensively on the acorns now exposed in the melting of the snow–
The ground is strewn with the freshly torn shells & nibbled meat in some places.
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