It is often said that melody can be heard farther than noise, and the finest melody farther than the coarsest. I think there is truth in this, and that accordingly those strains of the piano which reach me here in my attic stir me so much more than the sounds which I should hear if I were below in the parlor, because they are so much purer and diviner melody.
They who sit farthest off from the noisy and bustling world are not at pains to distinguish what is sweet and musical, for that alone can reach them; that chiefly comes down to posterity.
Hard and steady and engrossing labor with the hands, especially out of doors, is invaluable to the literary man and serves him directly. Here I have been for six days surveying in the woods, and yet when I get home at evening, somewhat weary at last, and beginning to feel that I have nerves, I find myself more susceptible than usual to the finest influences, as music and poetry. The very air can intoxicate me, or the least sight or sound, as if my finer senses had acquired an appetite by their fast.
As I was riding to the Ministerial Lot this morning, about 8.30 a. m., I observed that the white clouds were disposed raywise in the west and also in the east, — as if the sun's rays had split and so arranged them? A striking symmetry in the heavens. What its law?
Mr. J. Hosmer tells me that one spring he saw a red squirrel gnaw the bark of a maple and then suck the juice, and this he repeated many times.
What is the bush where we dined in Poplar Hollow?
Hosmer:
- tells of finding a kind of apple, with an apple seed (?) to it, on scabish which had been injured or cut off.
- Thinks plowed ground more moist than grass ground.
- That there are more leaves on the ground on the north side of a hill than on the other sides, and that the trees thrive more there, perhaps because the winds cause the leaves to fall there.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 20, 1851
Hard and steady and engrossing labor with the hands, especially out of doors, is invaluable to the literary man. See November 18 1851 ("The chopper who works in the woods all day is more open in some respects to the impressions they are fitted to make than the naturalist who goes to see them. . . . The man who is bent upon his work is frequently in the best attitude to observe what is irrelevant to his work."); April 12, 1854 ("I observe that it is when I have been intently, and it may be laboriously, at work, and am somewhat listless or abandoned after it, reposing, that the muse visits me, and I see or hear beauty. It is from out the shadow of my toil that I look into the light."); April 30, 1856 (" You would fain devote yourself to the melody, but you will hear more of it if you devote yourself to your work.”)
Those strains of the piano which reach me here in my attic stir me so much more than the sounds which I should hear if I were below in the parlor See August 3, 1852 (" At the east window. — A temperate noon. I hear a cricket creak in the shade; also the sound of a distant piano. . . . At length the melody steals into my being. I know not when it began to occupy me. By some fortunate coincidence of thought or circumstance I am attuned to the universe, I am fitted to hear, my being moves in a sphere of melody, my fancy and imagination are excited to an inconceivable degree.”); January 27, 1857 ("Hear music below. It washes the dust off my life and everything I look at.") See also note to January 15, 1857 ("What is there in music that it should so stir our deeps?")
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, November 20
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau
"A book, each page written in its own season,
out-of-doors, in its own locality."
~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx © 2009-2022
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