HENRY DAVID THOREAU: The Man Himself (Biographies, Memoirs, Autobiographical Books & Personal Letters). Генри Дэвид Торо. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Генри Дэвид Торо
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about the streets, and chaffer with this man and that to secure it a living. It is as indifferent and easy meanwhile as a poor man's dog, and making acquaintance with its kind. It will cut its own channel like a mountain stream, and by the longest ridge is not kept from the sea at last. I have found all things thus far, persons and inanimate matter, elements and seasons, strangely adapted to my resources. No matter what imprudent haste in my career; I am permitted to be rash. Gulfs are bridged in a twinkling, as if some unseen baggage-train carried pontoons for my convenience, and while from the heights I scan the tempting but unexplored Pacific Ocean of Futurity, the ship is being carried over the mountains piecemeal on the backs of mules and lamas, whose keel shall plough its waves, and bear me to the Indies. Day would not dawn if it were not for

      THE INWARD MORNING

      Packed in my mind lie all the clothes

       Which outward nature wears,

       And in its fashion's hourly change

       It all things else repairs.

       In vain I look for change abroad,

       And can no difference find,

       Till some new ray of peace uncalled

       Illumes my inmost mind.

       What is it gilds the trees and clouds,

       And paints the heavens so gay,

       But yonder fast-abiding light

       With its unchanging ray?

       Lo, when the sun streams through the wood,

       Upon a winter's morn,

       Where'er his silent beams intrude,

       The murky night is gone.

       How could the patient pine have known

       The morning breeze would come,

       Or humble flowers anticipate

       The insect's noonday hum,—

       Till the new light with morning cheer

       From far streamed through the aisles,

       And nimbly told the forest trees

       For many stretching miles?

       I've heard within my inmost soul

       Such cheerful morning news,

       In the horizon of my mind

       Have seen such orient hues,

       As in the twilight of the dawn,

       When the first birds awake,

       Are heard within some silent wood,

       Where they the small twigs break,

       Or in the eastern skies are seen,

       Before the sun appears,

       The harbingers of summer heats

       Which from afar he bears.

      Whole weeks and months of my summer life slide away in thin volumes like mist and smoke, till at length, some warm morning, perchance, I see a sheet of mist blown down the brook to the swamp, and I float as high above the fields with it. I can recall to mind the stillest summer hours, in which the grasshopper sings over the mulleins, and there is a valor in that time the bare memory of which is armor that can laugh at any blow of fortune. For our lifetime the strains of a harp are heard to swell and die alternately, and death is but "the pause when the blast is recollecting itself."

      We lay awake a long while, listening to the murmurs of the brook, in the angle formed by whose bank with the river our tent was pitched, and there was a sort of human interest in its story, which ceases not in freshet or in drought the livelong summer, and the profounder lapse of the river was quite drowned by its din. But the rill, whose

      "Silver sands and pebbles sing

       Eternal ditties with the spring,"

      is silenced by the first frosts of winter, while mightier streams, on whose bottom the sun never shines, clogged with sunken rocks and the ruins of forests, from whose surface comes up no murmur, are strangers to the icy fetters which bind fast a thousand contributary rills.

      I dreamed this night of an event which had occurred long before. It was a difference with a Friend, which had not ceased to give me pain, though I had no cause to blame myself. But in my dream ideal justice was at length done me for his suspicions, and I received that compensation which I had never obtained in my waking hours. I was unspeakably soothed and rejoiced, even after I awoke, because in dreams we never deceive ourselves, nor are deceived, and this seemed to have the authority of a final judgment.

      We bless and curse ourselves. Some dreams are divine, as well as some waking thoughts. Donne sings of one

      "Who dreamt devoutlier than most use to pray."

      Dreams are the touchstones of our characters. We are scarcely less afflicted when we remember some unworthiness in our conduct in a dream, than if it had been actual, and the intensity of our grief, which is our atonement, measures the degree by which this is separated from an actual unworthiness. For in dreams we but act a part which must have been learned and rehearsed in our waking hours, and no doubt could discover some waking consent thereto. If this meanness had not its foundation in us, why are we grieved at it? In dreams we see ourselves naked and acting out our real characters, even more clearly than we see others awake. But an unwavering and commanding virtue would compel even its most fantastic and faintest dreams to respect its ever-wakeful authority; as we are accustomed to say carelessly, we should never have dreamed of such a thing. Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.

      "And, more to lulle him in his slumber soft,

       A trickling streame from high rock tumbling downe,

       And ever-drizzling raine upon the loft,

       Mixt with a murmuring winde, much like the sowne

       Of swarming bees, did cast him in a swowne.

       No other noyse, nor people's troublous cryes,

       As still are wont t' annoy the walled towne,

       Might there be heard; but careless Quiet lyes

       Wrapt in eternall silence farre from enemyes."

      Thursday

       Table of Contents

      "He trode the unplanted forest floor, whereon

       The all-seeing sun for ages hath not shone,

       Where feeds the moose, and walks the surly bear,

       And up the tall mast runs the woodpecker.

      * * * *

      Where darkness found him he lay glad at night;

       There the red morning touched him with its light.

      * * * *

      Go where he will, the wise man is at home,

       His hearth the earth,—his hall the azure dome;

       Where his clear spirit leads him, there's his road,

       By God's own light illumined and foreshowed."

       — Emerson.

      When we awoke this morning, we heard the faint, deliberate, and ominous sound of rain-drops on our cotton roof. The rain had pattered all night, and now the whole country wept, the drops falling in the river, and on the alders, and in the pastures, and instead of any bow in the heavens, there was the trill of the hair-bird all the morning. The cheery faith of this little bird atoned for the silence of the whole woodland choir beside. When we first stepped abroad, a flock of sheep, led by their rams, came rushing down a ravine in our rear, with heedless haste and unreserved frisking, as if unobserved by man, from some higher pasture where they had spent the night, to taste the herbage by the river-side; but when their leaders caught sight