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But while we are confined to books, though the uages, which are theetting the language which all things and events speak without metaphor, which alone is copious and standard Much is published, but little printed The rays which streaer remembered when the shutter is wholly removed Noforever on the alert What is a course of history or philosophy, or poetry, no matter hoell selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, co always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer? Read your fate, see what is before you, and walk on into futurity

I did not read books the first summer; I hoed beans Nay, I often did better than this There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hands I love a broadtaken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sing around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at on on the distant highway, I was rerew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been They were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance I realized what the Orientalsof works For the most part, I ht so, and nothinglike the birds, I silently sood fortune As the sparrow had its trill, sitting on the hickory before ht hear out ofthe stamp of any heathen deity, nor were theyof a clock; for I lived like the Puri Indians, of whom it is said that "for yesterday, today, and tomorrow they have only one word, and they express the variety ofbackward for yesterday forward for to day" This was sheer idleness to my fellonsmen, no doubt; but if the birds and flowers had triedA man must find his occasions in himself, it is true The natural day is very calm, and will hardly reprove his indolence

I had this advantage, at least, in ed to look abroad for amusement, to society and the theatre, that my life itself was become my amusement and never ceased to be novel It was a drama of etting our living, and regulating our lives according to the last and best mode we had learned, we should never be troubled with ennui Follow your genius closely enough, and it will not fail to show you a fresh prospect every hour Houseas a pleasant pasti all rass, bed and bedstead et, dashed water on the floor, and sprinkled white sand from the pond on it, and then with a brooers had broken their fast thesun had dried ain, and my meditations were almost uninterupted It was pleasant to seea little pile like a gypsy&039;s pack, and ed table, fro aet out theht in I was so over them and take my seat there It orth the while to see the sun shine on these things, and hear the free wind blow on the most familiar objects look out of doors than in the house A bird sits on the next bough, life-everlasting grows under the table, and blackberry vines run round its legs; pine cones, chestnut burs, and strawberry leaves are strewn about It looked as if this was the way these forms came to be transferred to our furniture, to tables, chairs, and bedsteads -- because they once stood in their midst

My house was on the side of a hill, ier wood, in theforest of pitch pines and hickories, and half a dozen rods from the pond, to which a narrow footpath led down the hill In rew the strawberry, blackberry, and life-everlasting, johnswort and goldenrod, shrub oaks and sand cherry, blueberry and groundnut Near the end of May, the sand cherry (Cerasus pumila) adorned the sides of the path with its delicate flowers arranged in umbels cylindrically about its short steoodsized and handsome cherries, fell over in wreaths like rays on every side I tasted theh they were scarcely palatable The su up through the e five or six feet the first season Its broad pinnate tropical leaf was pleasant though strange to look on The large buds, suddenly pushing out late in the spring from dry sticks which had seeraceful green and tender boughs, an inch in diameter; and sorow and tax their weak joints, I heard a fresh and tender bough suddenly fall like a fan to the ground, when there was not a breath of air stirring, broken off by its oeight In August, the large masses of berries, which, when in flower, had attracted ht velvety criain bent down and broke the tender limbs

As I sit ataboutby two and threes athwart hs behind lassy surface of the pond and brings up a fish; aby the shore; the sedge is bending under the weight of the reed-birds flitting hither and thither; and for the last half-hour I have heard the rattle of railroad cars, now dying away and then reviving like the beat of a partridge, conveying travellers from Boston to the country For I did not live so out of the world as that boy who, as I hear, was put out to a far ran away and caain, quite down at the heel and homesick He had never seen such a dull and out-of-the-way place; the folks were all gone off; why, you couldn&039;t even hear the whistle! I doubt if there is such a place in Massachusetts now:--

"In truth, our village has become a butt

For one of those fleet railroad shafts, and o&039;er

Our peaceful plain its soothing sound is -- Concord"

The Fitchburg Railroad touches the pond about a hundred rods south of where I dwell I usually go to the village along its causeway, and am, as it were, related to society by this link The th of the road, bow to me as to an old acquaintance, they pass me so often, and apparently they take me for an employee; and so I am I too would fain be a track-repairer somewhere in the orbit of the earth

The whistle of the loco like the screawithin the circle of the town, or adventurous country traders from the other side As they coet off the track to the other, heard soroceries, country; your rations, countrymen! Nor is there any man so independent on his farm that he can say them nay And here&039;s your pay for the battering-raainst the city&039;s walls, and chairs enough to seat all the weary and heavy-laden that dithin the civility the country hands a chair to the city All the Indian huckleberry hills are stripped, all the cranberry oes the woven cloth; up cooes the woollen; up cooes the wit that writes theine with its train of carsoff with planetary motion -- or, rather, like a comet, for the beholder knows not if with that velocity and with that direction it will ever revisit this syste curve -- with its steaolden and silver wreaths, like h in the heavens, unfolding its od, this cloud-co take the sunset sky for the livery of his train; when I hear the iron horsethe earth with his feet, and breathing fire and sed horse or fiery dragon they will put into the new Mythology I don&039;t know), it seeot a race noorthy to inhabit it If all were as it seems, and men made the eles over the engine were the perspiration of heroic deeds, or as beneficent as that which floats over the farmer&039;s fields, then the elements and Nature herself would cheerfully accompany men on their errands and be their escort

I watch the passage of theof the sun, which is hardlyfar behind and rising higher and higher, going to heaven while the cars are going to Boston, conceals the sun for a minute and casts my distant field into the shade, a celestial train beside which the petty train of cars which hugs the earth is but the barb of the spear The stabler of the iron horse was up early this winter ht of the stars amid the mountains, to fodder and harness his steed Fire, too, akened thus early to put the vital heat in hiet him off If the enterprise were as innocent as it is early! If the snow lies deep, they strap on his snowshoes, and, with the giant plow, plow a furrow from thedrill-barrow, sprinkle all the restlessmerchandise in the country for seed All day the fire-steed flies over the country, stopping only that his master may rest, and I aht, when in solen in the woods he fronts the elements incased in ice and snow; and he will reach his stall only with thestar, to start once more on his travels without rest or slu, I hear hiy of the day, that he may calm his nerves and cool his liver and brain for a few hours of iron slu as it is protracted and unwearied!

Far through unfrequented woods on the confines of tohere once only the hunter penetrated by day, in the darkest night dart these bright saloons without the knowledge of their inhabitants; thisat some brilliant station-house in town or city, where a social crowd is gathered, the next in the Diss and arrivals of the cars are now the epochs in the village day They go and coularity and precision, and their whistle can be heard so far, that the farmers set their clocks by theulates a whole country Have not men improved somewhat in punctuality since the railroad was invented? Do they not talk and think faster in the depot than they did in the stage-office? There is so in the atmosphere of the forht; that sohbors, who, I should have prophesied, once for all, would never get to Boston by so pros "railroad fashion" is now the byword; and it is worth the while to be warned so often and so sincerely by any power to get off its track There is no stopping to read the riot act, no firing over the heads of the mob, in this case We have constructed a fate, an Atropos, that never turns aside (Let that be the naine) Men are advertised that at a certain hour and minute these bolts will be shot toward particular points of the compass; yet it interferes with no o to school on the other track We live the steadier for it We are all educated thus to be sons of Tell The air is full of invisible bolts Every path but your own is the path of fate Keep on your own track, then

What recommends commerce to me is its enterprise and bravery It does not clasp its hands and pray to Jupiter I see these e and content, doing more even than they suspect, and perchance better employed than they could have consciously devised I am less affected by their heroism who stood up for half an hour in the front line at Buena Vista, than by the steady and cheerful valor of the men who inhabit the sno for their winter quarters; who have not e, which Bonaparte thought was the rarest, but whose courage does not go to rest so early, who go to sleep only when the storm sleeps or the sinews of their iron steed are frozen On thisand chilling ine bell fro bank of their chilled breath, which announces that the cars are co the veto of a New England northeast snow-storm, and I behold the plow, above thedown other than daisies and the nests of field mice, like bowlders of the Sierra Nevada, that occupy an outside place in the universe

Commerce is unexpectedly confident and serene, alert, adventurous, and unwearied It is very natural in its methods withal, far more so than many fantastic enterprises and sentiular success I aht train rattles pasttheir odors all the way fron parts, of coral reefs, and Indian oceans, and tropical clilobe I feel ht of the palland heads the next suunny bags, scrap iron, and rusty nails This carload of torn sails is ht into paper and printed books Who can write so graphically the history of the storms they have weathered as these rents have done? They are proof-sheets which need no correction Here goes luo out to sea in the last freshet, risen four dollars on the thousand because of what did go out or was split up; pine, spruce, cedar -- first, second, third, and fourth qualities, so lately all of one quality, to wave over the bear, and moose, and caribou Next rolls Tho the hills before it gets slacked These rags in bales, of all hues and qualities, the lowest condition to which cotton and linen descend, the final result of dress -- of patterns which are now no longer cried up, unless it be in Milwaukee, as those splendid articles, English, French, or Aathered fro to become paper of one color or a few shades only, on which, forsooth, will be written tales of real life, high and low, and founded on fact! This closed car sland and co me of the Grand Banks and the fisheries Who has not seen a salt fish, thoroughly cured for this world, so that nothing can spoil it, and putting, the perseverance of the saints to the blush? hich you s, and the teaainst sun, wind, and rain behind it -- and the trader, as a Concord trader once did, hang it up by his door for a sign when he commences business, until at last his oldest custoetable, or mineral, and yet it shall be as pure as a snowflake, and if it be put into a pot and boiled, will come out an excellent dun-fish for a Saturday&039;s dinner Next Spanish hides, with the tails still preserving their twist and the angle of elevation they had when the oxen that wore the over the pampas of the Spanish Main -- a type of all obstinacy, and evincing how almost hopeless and incurable are all constitutional vices I confess, that practically speaking, when I have learned ait for the better or worse in this state of existence As the Orientals say, "A cur&039;s tail atures, and after a twelve years&039; labor bestowed upon it, still it will retain its natural form" The only effectual cure for such inveteracies as these tails exhibit is to lue of them, which I believe is what is usually done with theshead of sville, Ver the Green Mountains, who i, and now perchance stands over his bulkhead and thinks of the last arrivals on the coast, how theyhis customers this , that he expects some by the next train of prisville Tio up other things co sound, I look up from my book and see soed its way over the Green Mountains and the Connecticut, shot like an arrow through the township within ten

"to be the reat ammiral"

And hark! here co the cattle of a thousand hills, sheepcots, stables, and cow-yards in the air, drovers with their sticks, and shepherd boys in the midst of their flocks, all but thelike leaves blown froales The air is filled with the bleating of calves and sheep, and the hustling of oxen, as if a pastoral valley were going by When the old bell-wether at the head rattles his bell, the mountains do indeed skip like rams and the little hills like lambs A carload of drovers, too, in the one, but still clinging to their useless sticks as their badge of office But their dogs, where are they? It is a stampede to them; they are quite thrown out; they have lost the scent Methinks I hear the up the western slope of the Green Mountains They will not be in at the death Their vocation, too, is gone Their fidelity and sagacity are below par now They will slink back to their kennels in disgrace, or perchance run wild and strike a league with the wolf and the fox So is your pastoral life whirled past and away But the bell rings, and I o by;--