The Nature Books of Henry David Thoreau – 6 Titles in One Volume (Illustrated Edition). Henry David Thoreau

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">       For Virtue still adventures there,

       And freely breathes her native air.

      And ever, if you hearken well,

       You still may hear its vesper bell,

       And tread of high-souled men go by,

       Their thoughts conversing with the sky.

      According to Jamblichus, "Pythagoras did not procure for himself a thing of this kind through instruments or the voice, but employing a certain ineffable divinity, and which it is difficult to apprehend, he extended his ears and fixed his intellect in the sublime symphonies of the world, he alone hearing and understanding, as it appears, the universal harmony and consonance of the spheres, and the stars that are moved through them, and which produce a fuller and more intense melody than anything effected by mortal sounds."

      Travelling on foot very early one morning due east from here about twenty miles, from Caleb Harriman's tavern in Hampstead toward Haverhill, when I reached the railroad in Plaistow, I heard at some distance a faint music in the air like an Aeolian harp, which I immediately suspected to proceed from the cord of the telegraph vibrating in the just awakening morning wind, and applying my ear to one of the posts I was convinced that it was so. It was the telegraph harp singing its message through the country, its message sent not by men, but by gods. Perchance, like the statue of Memnon, it resounds only in the morning, when the first rays of the sun fall on it. It was like the first lyre or shell heard on the sea-shore,—that vibrating cord high in the air over the shores of earth. So have all things their higher and their lower uses. I heard a fairer news than the journals ever print. It told of things worthy to hear, and worthy of the electric fluid to carry the news of, not of the price of cotton and flour, but it hinted at the price of the world itself and of things which are priceless, of absolute truth and beauty.

      Still the drum rolled on, and stirred our blood to fresh extravagance that night. The clarion sound and clang of corselet and buckler were heard from many a hamlet of the soul, and many a knight was arming for the fight behind the encamped stars.

      "Before each van

       Prick forth the aery knights, and couch their spears

       Till thickest legions close; with feats of arms

       From either end of Heaven the welkin burns."

      ———————

      Away! away! away! away!

       Ye have not kept your secret well,

       I will abide that other day,

       Those other lands ye tell.

      Has time no leisure left for these,

       The acts that ye rehearse?

       Is not eternity a lease

       For better deeds than verse?

      'T is sweet to hear of heroes dead,

       To know them still alive,

       But sweeter if we earn their bread,

       And in us they survive.

      Our life should feed the springs of fame

       With a perennial wave.

       As ocean feeds the babbling founts

       Which find in it their grave.

      Ye skies drop gently round my breast,

       And be my corselet blue,

       Ye earth receive my lance in rest,

       My faithful charger you;

      Ye stars my spear-heads in the sky,

       My arrow-tips ye are;

       I see the routed foemen fly,

       My bright spears fixed are.

      Give me an angel for a foe,

       Fix now the place and time,

       And straight to meet him I will go

       Above the starry chime.

      And with our clashing bucklers' clang

       The heavenly spheres shall ring,

       While bright the northern lights shall hang

       Beside our tourneying.

      And if she lose her champion true,

       Tell Heaven not despair,

       For I will be her champion new,

       Her fame I will repair.

      There was a high wind this night, which we afterwards learned had been still more violent elsewhere, and had done much injury to the cornfields far and near; but we only heard it sigh from time to time, as if it had no license to shake the foundations of our tent; the pines murmured, the water rippled, and the tent rocked a little, but we only laid our ears closer to the ground, while the blast swept on to alarm other men, and long before sunrise we were ready to pursue our voyage as usual.

      Tuesday

       Table of Contents

      "On either side the river lie

       Long fields of barley and of rye,

       That clothe the wold and meet the sky;

       And through the fields the road runs by

       To many-towered Camelot." — Tennyson.

      Long before daylight we ranged abroad, hatchet in hand, in search of fuel, and made the yet slumbering and dreaming wood resound with our blows. Then with our fire we burned up a portion of the loitering night, while the kettle sang its homely strain to the morning star. We tramped about the shore, waked all the muskrats, and scared up the bittern and birds that were asleep upon their roosts; we hauled up and upset our boat and washed it and rinsed out the clay, talking aloud as if it were broad day, until at length, by three o'clock, we had completed our preparations and were ready to pursue our voyage as usual; so, shaking the clay from our feet, we pushed into the fog.

      Though we were enveloped in mist as usual, we trusted that there was a bright day behind it.

      Ply the oars! away! away!

       In each dew-drop of the morning

       Lies the promise of a day.

      Rivers from the sunrise flow,

       Springing with the dewy morn;

       Voyageurs 'gainst time do row,

       Idle noon nor sunset know,

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