Why was it made that man should be thrilled to his inmost being by the vibrating of a wire?

January 3, 2022

January 3. 

Oak-apples are a winter fruit. The leaves being gone, they are now conspicuous and shine in the sun. Some trees are quite full of them.
Do they not suggest that all vegetable fruit is but the albumen about young animal life? 

The ground has been bare for some days, and the weather warm.

The river has risen, and now the meadows are frozen so as to bear, a dark, thin, but rather opaque ice, as if covered with steam, -- and I see now travelling, sweeping, coursing over it, in long winrows, fine pellets of snow, like cotton, fine, round, and dry, which I do not detect in the air before they fall.

They lodge against a rail and make a small drift. So once more the skating will be spoiled.

A spirit sweeps the string of the telegraph harp, and strains of music are drawn out endlessly like the wire itself.  We have no need to refer music and poetry to Greece for an origin now. What becomes of the story of a tortoise-shell on the seashore now? The world is young, and music is its infant voice.

I do not despair of such a world where you have only to stretch an ordinary wire from tree to tree to hear such strains drawn from it by New England breezes as make Greece and all antiquity seem poor in melody. Why was it made that man should be thrilled to his inmost being by the vibrating of a wire? 

Are not inspiration and ecstasy a more rapid vibration of the nerves swept by the in rushing excited spirit, whether zephyral or boreal in its character.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 3, 1852

Oak-apples are a winter fruit . . . Do they not suggest that all vegetable fruit is but the albumen about young animal life?  See September 4, 1854 ("Is not Art itself a gall? Nature is stung by God and the seed of man planted in her. The artist changes the direction of Nature and makes her grow according to his idea. If the gall was anticipated when the oak was made, so was the canoe when the birch was made. Genius stings Nature, and she grows according to its idea.")

Fne pellets of snow, like cotton, fine, round, and dry. See December 14, 1859 ("Snow-storms might be classified . . . Also there is the pellet or shot snow, which consists of little dry spherical pellets the size of robin-shot."); November 24, 1860 (“ The first spitting of snow. . .consisted almost entirely of pellets an eighth of an inch or less in diameter. These drove along almost horizontally, or curving upward like the outline of a breaker, before the strong and chilling wind . . . T he air was so filled with these snow pellets that for an hour we could not see a hill half a mile off”) See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Snow-storms might be classified.

The telegraph harp . . .t o hear such strains drawn from it by New England breezes as make Greece and all antiquity seem poor. September 22, 1851 ("How much the ancients would have made of it! To have a harp on so great a scale, girdling the very earth, and played on by the winds of every latitude and longitude,")

To read that the ancients stretched a wire round the earth, attaching it to the trees of the forest, by which they sent messages by one named Electricity, father of Lightning and Magnetism, swifter far than Mercury, the stern commands of war and news of peace , and that the winds caused this wire to vibrate so that it emitted a harp like and æolian music in all the lands through which it passed, as if to express the satisfaction of the gods in this invention . Yet this is fact, and we have yet attributed the invention to no god.

September 22, 1851. See also September 3, 1851 ("As I went under the new telegraph - wire , I heard it vibrating like a harp high overhead . It was as the sound of a far - off glorious life , a supernal life , which came down to us , and vibrated the lattice - work of this life of ours."); September 12, 1851 ("As I was entering the Deep Cut, the wind, which was conveying a message to me from heaven, dropped it on the wire of the telegraph which it vibrated as it passed."); September 23, 1851 ("The telegraph harp sounds strongly to-day, in the midst of the rain. I put my ear to the trees and I hear it working terribly within, and anon it swells into a clear tone, which seems to concentrate in the core of the tree, for all the sound seems to proceed from the wood. It is if you had entered some world - famous cathedral, resounding to some vast organ."); October 14, 1851 ("There was but little wind this morning, yet I heard the telegraph harp. It does not require a strong wind to wake its strings . . . A gentle but steady breeze will often call forth its finest strains");  December 29, 1851 ("The artist is at work in the Deep Cut . The telegraph harp sounds . "); January 18, 1852 (" While the snow is falling, the telegraph harp is resounding across the fields. "); March 12, 1852 ("The telegraph harp has spoken to me more distinctly and effectually than any man ever did.")

And what if all of animated nature

Be but organic Harps diversely framed,

That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps

Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,

At once the Soul of each, and God of all?

The Eolian Harp 

BY SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, January 3

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 ©  2009-2023