Page:Winter - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/367

Rh senses require the violent vibrations of an instrument to excite them, but sound and still youthful senses, not enervated by luxury, hear music in the wind and rain and running water. One would think, from reading the critics, that music was intermittent, as a spring in the desert, dependent on some Paganini or Mozart, or heard only when the Pierians or Euterpeans drive through the villages, but music is perpetual, and only hearing is intermittent. I hear it in the softened air of these warm February days which have broken the back of the winter.

Again and again I congratulate myself on my so-called poverty. I was almost disappointed yesterday to find thirty dollars in my desk which I did not know that I possessed, though now I should be sorry to lose them. The week that I go away to lecture is unspeakably cheapened. The preceding and succeeding days are a mere sloping down to and up from it. In the society of many men, or in the midst of what is called success, I find my life of no account, and my spirits rapidly fall. I would rather be the barrenest pasture lying fallow than cursed with the compliments of kings, than be the sulphurous and accursed desert where Babylon once stood. But when I hear only the rustling oak leaf, or the faint metallic cheep of the tree sparrow, for variety in my winter walk, my life becomes