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PinkMonkey.com Digital Library - PinkMonkey.com-Walden by Henry David Thoreau


blindly downward, until at last with more heat and moisture, as the
sun gets higher, the most fluid portion, in its effort to obey the law to
which the most inert also yields, separates from the latter and forms
for itself a meandering channel or artery within that, in which is seen
a little silvery stream glancing like lightning from one stage of pulpy
leaves or branches to another, and ever and anon swallowed up in
the sand. It is wonderful how rapidly yet perfectly the sand

organizes itself as it flows, using the best material its mass affords to
form the sharp edges of its channel. Such are the sources of rivers. In
the silicious matter which the water deposits is perhaps the bony
system, and in the still finer soil and organic matter the fleshy fibre
or cellular tissue. What is man but a mass of thawing clay? The ball
of the human finger is but a drop congealed. The fingers and toes
flow to their extent from the thawing mass of the body. Who knows
what the human body would expand and flow out to under a more
genial heaven? Is not the hand a spreading palm leaf with its lobes
and veins? The ear may be regarded, fancifully, as a lichen,
Umbilicaria, on the side of the head, with its lobe or drop. The lip-
labium, from labor (?)- laps or lapses from the sides of the cavernous
mouth. The nose is a manifest congealed drop or stalactite. The chin
is a still larger drop, the confluent dripping of the face. The cheeks
are a slide from the brows into the valley of the face, opposed and
diffused by the cheek bones. Each rounded lobe of the vegetable
leaf, too, is a thick and now loitering drop, larger or smaller; the
lobes are the fingers of the leaf; and as many lobes as it has, in so
many directions it tends to flow, and more heat or other genial
influences would have caused it to flow yet farther.

Thus it seemed that this one hillside illustrated the principle of all the
operations of Nature. The Maker of this earth but patented a leaf.
What Champollion will decipher this hieroglyphic for us, that we
may turn over a new leaf at last? This phenomenon is more
exhilarating to me than the luxuriance and fertility of vineyards.
True, it is somewhat excrementitious in its character, and there is no
end to the heaps of liver, lights, and bowels, as if the globe were
turned wrong side outward; but this suggests at least that Nature has
some bowels, and there again is mother of humanity. This is the frost
coming out of the ground; this is Spring. It precedes the green and
flowery spring, as mythology precedes regular poetry. I know of
nothing more purgative of winter fumes and indigestions. It
convinces me that Earth is still in her swaddling-clothes, and
stretches forth baby fingers on every side. Fresh curls spring from
the baldest brow. There is nothing inorganic. These foliaceous heaps
lie along the bank like the slag of a furnace, showing that Nature is
"in full blast" within. The earth is not a mere fragment of dead
history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied
by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the
leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit-not a fossil earth,
but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal
and vegetable life is merely parasitic. Its throes will heave our
exuviae from their graves. You may melt your metals and cast them
into the most beautiful moulds you can; they will never excite me
like the forms which this molten earth flows out into. And not only
it, but the institutions upon it are plastic like clay in the hands of the
potter.

Ere long, not only on these banks, but on every hill and plain and in
every hollow, the frost comes out of the ground like a dormant
quadruped from its burrow, and seeks the sea with music, or
migrates to other climes in clouds. Thaw with his gentle persuasion
is more powerful than Thor with his hammer. The one melts, the
other but breaks in pieces.

When the ground was partially bare of snow, and a few warm days
had dried its surface somewhat, it was pleasant to compare the first
tender signs of the infant year just peeping forth with the stately
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PinkMonkey.com Digital Library - PinkMonkey.com-Walden by Henry David Thoreau



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