Public domain · 1854
Originally published 1854; public domain.
One of the sources behind Henry David Thoreau.
Economy
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…
90 passages
Reading
With a little more deliberation in the choice of their pursuits, all men would perhaps become essentially students and observers, for certainly their nature and…
8 passages
Sounds
But while we are confined to books, though the most select and classic, and read only particular written languages, which are themselves but dialects and provin…
17 passages
Solitude
This is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes delight through every pore. I go and come with a strange liberty in Nature, a part of…
12 passages
Visitors
I think that I love society as much as most, and am ready enough to fasten myself like a bloodsucker for the time to any full-blooded man that comes in my way. …
24 passages
The Village
After hoeing, or perhaps reading and writing, in the forenoon, I usually bathed again in the pond, swimming across one of its coves for a stint, and washed the …
4 passages
The Ponds
Sometimes, having had a surfeit of human society and gossip, and worn out all my village friends, I rambled still farther westward than I habitually dwell, into…
24 passages
Baker Farm
Sometimes I rambled to pine groves, standing like temples, or like fleets at sea, full-rigged, with wavy boughs, and rippling with light, so soft and green and …
7 passages
Higher Laws
As I came home through the woods with my string of fish, trailing my pole, it being now quite dark, I caught a glimpse of a woodchuck stealing across my path, a…
12 passages
Brute Neighbors
Sometimes I had a companion in my fishing, who came through the village to my house from the other side of the town, and the catching of the dinner was as much …
12 passages
House-Warming
In October I went a-graping to the river meadows, and loaded myself with clusters more precious for their beauty and fragrance than for food. There too I admire…
15 passages
Former Inhabitants and Winter Visitors
I weathered some merry snow storms, and spent some cheerful winter evenings by my fire-side, while the snow whirled wildly without, and even the hooting of the …
16 passages
Winter Animals
When the ponds were firmly frozen, they afforded not only new and shorter routes to many points, but new views from their surfaces of the familiar landscape aro…
11 passages
The Pond in Winter
After a still winter night I awoke with the impression that some question had been put to me, which I had been endeavoring in vain to answer in my sleep, as wha…
16 passages
Spring
The opening of large tracts by the ice-cutters commonly causes a pond to break up earlier; for the water, agitated by the wind, even in cold weather, wears away…
18 passages
Conclusion
To the sick the doctors wisely recommend a change of air and scenery. Thank Heaven, here is not all the world. The buck-eye does not grow in New England, and th…
41 passages