The hills climb abruptly from the brink of Walden on all sides. The woods climb the hills and top their summits with half-century-old growth that yearly adds to its girth and stature.
Nor, one fancies, need these trees again fear the sweep of the woodchopper’s axe. The spirit of reverence for its shores, which through the one-time hermit of Walden has spread to us all, should prevent that. For now the pond is much as Thoreau remembered it had been in his boyhood, walled in by dense forests, a place of echoes. Your spoken word comes back to you from this shore and from that, refined and made more sonorous, as if the wood gods would fain teach you oratory and had taken your phrase into their own mouths and put it forth again as an example. To your ears it comes again sweetened with the gentle essences of juniper, birch and sassafras, rich with the melodies taught to bare boughs by winter winds. In the haze of the August noon these other shores are distant to the eye. The sight must swim a long way through the quivering air to reach one or the other. The hearing, thanks to the kindly offices of the wood gods, leaps the space at a bound.
The kingfisher seems as much a familiar of the place as the echoes. Like them he flies back and forth from shore to shore till you wonder whether he is trying to keep pace with them or whether he is the embodiment of one that does not need to be set going by a word but has volition of its own. The kingfisher’s voice hardly seems to belong at Walden, it is so harsh and unlovely. Even in this very school of sweet echoes it has learned neither modulation nor singing quality. Far different is the gentle peet-weet of the sandpipers which precede you along shore in scalloped flight. Something of the bright sweetness of the hedge hyssop strolls along the moist stones of the margin with them, as if the two became yearly more and more related. Each fall I think the olive-fuscous backs of these little birds get just a little more of a golden tinge from this continual neighboring with the equally gentle, friendly Gratiola aurea. If in return some fine summer the hedge hyssop should blossom into twittering song no one need be terribly surprised.
“Walden is Walden still, very much as Thoreau painted it.”
In contrast to the fearless rattle of the kingfisher as he echoed from shore to shore and to the twittering, friendly sandpipers who ran so fearlessly along the margin, was the single little green heron that has made the pond his abiding place for a while. There is but one, nor are there any signs that herons have nested about the pond this year, so I fancy this bird is a bachelor visitor seeking to reduce living to its lowest terms and finding on the Walden shore the simplicity and seclusion that is the spirit of the place. He is as taciturn and patient as any hermit could be. When his country seat on one shore is invaded he simply flies silently to another and there resumes that inward contemplation which is as characteristic of the bird as the rattling, vibrating flight is of the kingfisher. The little green heron was a recluse of the pond shore long before the first pioneer planted his cabin in Concord. His kin still cling to the place which is as lovely and lonely now as it was then.
At nightfall deep peace settles upon the little pond. The shores that were so distant to the eye in the noonday haze draw in friendlily toward one another, and the last light slips through the trees to westward and throws a coverlet of shadow over this sleepy child of the woods. In the growing dusk there is no mystery about the place. It is just a wee baby of a pond that is tired and has been put to bed. But as children often do when we think them asleep for the night the pond, as darkness gathered, seemed to dimple with wakeful laughter, to kick off the shadow quilt and dance with a new radiance of life. Gathering clouds of sultry August thunderstorms had gloomed the sky with the passing of the sun, and there was no star to give an answering twinkle, but the whole surface of the pond laughed up to the clouds in silvery light. It was as if all the mica-shine of all the granite ground together and sifted to make its unfathomed bottom had come to the surface, the infinitesimal flakes joining hands in a fairy dance to the tiny tune of the little evening winds. The pond was such a gentle little part of the vocal earth then that it did not seem as if it had ever been mysterious and informed with all the deep wisdom of the stars. Its surface was no bigger than the counterpane of a white crib on which danced the fairy dreams of the child that slumbered happily below.
Later someone lighted a fishing fire on the opposite shore, and with a flash the mystery of the place returned. The cove where it burned seemed infinitely far withdrawn, and about it stalked shadowy giants who were the fishermen. Their voices, coming in brief sentences and at long intervals, were as weird as their shadows and as unsubstantial, from that immense distance to which they seemed withdrawn. The whole was a mystery of the elder earth, as if man had fished here before the flood and came, a shade among the shadows, to try it again.
By and by the fishing fire ceased to flare and sank to a red glow of embers. The dense clouds, tempest-drawn toward distant skies, dropped southward. The moon rode out of them and all dignity and crystal beauty returned to the pond, no longer little but wide and deep and mysterious. Down the moon’s radiance a spirit of fire strode, walking the water along a path of golden light, right into Thoreau’s cove as I sat there on his shore. The pond was once again a well of crystal, now leading from the zenith to the nadir, and the white radiance of its spirit made mountain peaks of snow-white grandeur of the receding clouds. In the dark depths below these peaks flashed still the crimson scimitars of the lightning, but all about them and the pond shone a radiance of purity and serenity such as that in which we know Thoreau walked, day by day.