Page:Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906) v7.djvu/32

 xiv CONTENTS boring Man—Sir Walter Raleigh—Calmness—The Perfume of the Earth—Unhealthiness of Morality—Music from a Music-Box—Raleigh's Faults—Man's Puny Fences—The Death of Friends—Chaucer the Poet of Gardens—Character and Genius—The History of Music—Chaucer's Way of Speaking of God—My Life—Dying a Transient Phenomenon—The Memory of Departed Friends—The Game of Love—A New Day—The Eye—Originality of Nature—Raleigh—The Most Attractive Sentences—Law and the Right—An Old Schoolmate—Carlyle's Writing—The Tracks of the Indian—The Stars and Man—Friendship—The Roominess of Nature—The Exuberance of Plain Speech—Action and Reflection—Common Sense in Very Old Books—Thoughts like Mountains—Insufficiency of Wisdom without Love—I am Time and the World—My Errand to Mankind—Two Little Hawks and a Great One—Flow in Books—Nature's Leniency toward the Vicious—Intercourse—A Fish Hawk—Poetry—Lydgate's "Story of Thebes"—Humor—Man's Destiny—The Economy of Nature.

CHAPTER VII. 1845-1846 (. 27-29) 361

The Beginning of the Life at Walden—A House in the Catskills—The Vital Facts of Life—Relics of the Indians—Auxiliaries and Enemies of the Bean-Field—Therien, the Canadian Woodchopper—A Visit from Railroad Men—Life of Primitive Man—Wild Mice—The Written and the Spoken Language—The Interest and Importance of the Classics—The Fragrance of an Apple—The Race of Man—The Mansions of the Air—Echo—"The Crescent and the Cross"—Carnac—The Heroic Books—Screech Owls—Bullfrogs—Nature and Art—Childhood Memories of Walden Pond—Truth—John Field, a Shiftless Irishman, and his Family—A Hard and Emphatic Life—Language—Plastering the House—Primitive Houses—The Cost of a House—The Romans and Nature—Jehovah and Jupiter—Some Greek Myths—Difficulty of Getting a Living and Keeping out of Debt—The Fox as an Imperfect Man—Reading suggested by Hallam's History of Literature—The Necessaries of Life—