A wildness whose glance no civilization could endure.[149]
He who lives according to the highest law is in one sense lawless. That is an unfortunate discovery, certainly, that of a law which binds us where we did not know that we were bound. Live free, child of the mist! He for whom the law is made, who does not obey the law but whom the law obeys, reclines on pillows of down and is wafted at will whither he pleases, for man is superior to all laws, both of heaven and earth, when he takes his liberty.[150]
Wild as if we lived on the marrow of antelopes devoured raw.[151]
There would seem to be men in whose lives there have been no events of importance, more than in the beetle’s which crawls in our path.
March 19. The ice in the pond is now soft and will not bear a heavy stone thrown from the bank. It is melted for a rod from the shore. The ground has been bare of snow for some weeks, but yesterday we had a violent northeast snow-storm, which has drifted worse than any the past winter. The spring birds—ducks and geese, etc.—had come, but now the spring seems far off.
No good ever came of obeying a law which you had discovered.
March 23. For a week past the elm buds have been swollen. The willow catkins have put out. The ice still remains in Walden, though it will not bear. Mather Howard saw a large meadow near his house which had risen up but was prevented from floating away by the bushes.
March 27. Walden is two-thirds broken up. It will probably be quite open by to-morrow night.
March 30. Spring is already upon us. I see the tortoises, or rather I hear them drop from the bank into the brooks at my approach. The catkins of the alders have blossomed. The pads are springing at the bottom of the water. The pewee is heard, and the lark.
“It is only the squalid savages and degraded boschmen of creation that have their feeble teeth and tiny stings steeped in venom, and so made formidable,”—ants, centipedes, and mosquitoes, spiders, wasps, and scorpions.—Hugh Miller.