...there is hope for a tree, if it is cut down, that it will sprout again, and that its shoots will not cease. Though its root gro...ws old in the earth, and its stump dies in the ground, yet at the scent of water it will bud and put forth branches like a young plant. But mortals die, and are laid low; humans expire, and where are they?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
At it in its familiar twang: "My friend, Cut your own throat. Cut your own throat. Now! Now!"... September twenty-second, Sir, the bough Cracks with the unpicked apples, and at dawn The small-mouth bass breaks water, gorged with spawn.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Its farmers tell me that thousands of acres are flooded now, since the dams have been erected, where they remember to have seen th...e white honeysuckle or clover growing once, and they could go dry with shoes only in summer. Now there is nothing but blue-joint and sedge and cut-grass there, standing in water all the year round. For a long time, they made the most of the driest season to get their hay,... but now it is not worth the getting when they can come at it, and they look sadly round to their wood-lots and upland as a last resource.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The horned pout (Pimelodus nebulosus), sometimes called Minister, from the peculiar squeaking noise it makes when drawn out of the... water, is a dull and blundering fellow, and, like the eel, vespertinal in his habits and fond of the mud. It bites deliberately, as if about its business.... They are extremely tenacious of life, opening and shutting their mouths for half an hour after their heads have been cut off; a bloodthirsty and bullying race of rangers, inhabiting the fertile river bottoms, with ever a lance in rest, and ready to do battle with their nearest neighbor.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There were many vessels, like gulls, skimming over the surface of the sea, now half concealed in its troughs, their dolphin- strik...ers plowing the water, now tossed on the top of the billows.... Some of these vessels lagged behind, while others steadily went ahead. We narrowly watched their rig and the cut of their jibs, and how they walked the water, for there was all the difference between them that there is between living creatures. But we wondered that they should be remembering Boston and New York and Liverpool, steering for them, out there; as if the sailor might forget his peddling business on such a grand highway. They had perchance brought oranges from the Western Isles; and were they carrying back the peel? We might as well transport our old traps across the ocean of eternity. Is that but another "trading flood," with its blessed isles? Is Heaven such a harbor as the Liverpool docks?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We have one other pond just like this, White Pond, in Nine Acre Corner, about two and a half miles westerly; but, though I am acqu...ainted with most of the ponds within a dozen miles of this centre, I do not know a third of this pure and well-like character. Successive nations perchance have drank at, admired, and fathomed it, and passed away, and still its water is green and pellucid as ever. Not an intermitting spring! Perhaps on that spring morning when Adam and Eve were driven out of Eden Walden Pond was already in existence, and even then breaking up in a gentle spring rain accompanied with mist and a southerly wind, and covered with myriads of ducks and geese, which had not heard of the fall, when still such pure lakes sufficed them. Even then it had commenced to rise and fall, and had clarified its waters and colored them of the hue they now wear, and obtained a patent of Heaven to be the only Walden Pond in the world and distiller of celestial dews. Who knows in how many unremembered nations' literatures this has been the Castalian Fountain? or what nymphs presided over it in the Golden Age? It is a gem of the first water which Concord wears in her coronet. Yet perchance the first who came to this well have left some trace of their footsteps. I have been surprised to detect encircling the pond, even where a thick wood has just been cut down on the shore, a narrow shelf-like path in the steep hillside, alternately rising and falling, approaching and receding from the water's edge, as old probably as the race of man here, worn by the feet of aboriginal hunters, and still from time to time unwittingly trodden by the present occupants of the land.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When I first paddled a boat on Walden, it was completely surrounded by thick and lofty pine and oak woods, and in some of its cove...s grape-vines had run over the trees next the water and formed bowers under which a boat could pass. The hills which form its shores are so steep, and the woods on them were then so high, that, as you looked down from the west end, it had the appearance of an amphitheatre for some kind of sylvan spectacle.... But since I left those shores the woodchoppers have still further laid them waste, and now for many a year there will be no more rambling through the aisles of the wood, with occasional vistas through which you see the water. My Muse may be excused if she is silent henceforth. How can you expect the birds to sing when their groves are cut down?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A pool is, for many of us in the West, a symbol not of affluence but of order, of control over the uncontrollable. A pool is water..., made available and useful, and is, as such, infinitely soothing to the western eye.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
the rusty Pump pumps over your sweating face the clear... Water, cold, so cold! you cup your hands And gulp from them the dailiness of life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »