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12 - Walden - Henry David Thoreau · The Philosophy Insights Collection

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Chapter seven, The bean field. Meanwhile, my beans, the length of
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whose rose added together was seven miles, already planted, were impatient to be
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hoed, for the earliest had grown considerably before the latest were in the ground.
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Indeed, they were not easily to be put off. What was the
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meaning of this, so steady and self respecting, this small herculean labor I
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knew not I came to love my rose, my beans, though so many
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more than I wanted. They attached me to the earth, and so I
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got strength like Antaeus. But why should I raise them? Only Heaven knows.
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This was my curious labor all summer to make this portion of the earth's
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surface, which had yielded only sank foil, blackberries, John Swart and the
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like before, for sweet, wild fruits and pleasant flowers produce instead this pulse.
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What shall I learn of beans or beans of me? I cherish them,
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I hoe them early and late. I have an eye to them,
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And this is my day's work. It is a fine broad leaf to look
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on. My auxiliaries are the dews and rains which water this dry soil.
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And what fertility is in the soil itself, which for the most part is
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lean and a feat. My enemies are worms, cool days, and most
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of all woodchucks. The last have nibbled for me a quarter of an acre
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clean. But what right had I to oust Johnswart and the rest and break
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up their ancient herb garden. Soon, however, the remaining beans will be
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too tough for them, and go forward to meet new foes. When I
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was four years old, as I well remember, I was brought from Boston
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to this my native town, through these very woods in this field, to
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the pond. It is one of the oldest scenes stamped on my memory.
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And now to night my flute has waked the echoes over that very water.
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The pines still stand here, older than I, or if some have fallen,
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I have cooked my supper with their stumps, And a new growth is
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rising all around, preparing another aspect for new infant eyes. Almost the same
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John Swartz springs from the same perennial root in this pasture, and even I
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have at length helped to clothe that fabulous landscape of my infant dreams. And
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one of the results of my presence and influence is seen in these bean leaves,
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corn blades, and potato vines I planted about two acres and a half
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of upland. And as it was only about fifteen years since the land was
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cleared, and I myself had got out two or three cords of stumps,
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I did not give it any manure. But in the course of the summer
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it appeared, by the arrow heads which I turned up in the hoeing,
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that an extinct nation had anciently dwelled here and planted corn and beans. Ere
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white men came to clear the land, and so to some extent had exhausted
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the soil for this very crop. Before yet any wood chuck or squirrel had
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run across the road, or the sun had got above the shrub oaks.
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While all the dew was on. Though the farmers warned me against it,
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I would advise you to do all your work, if possible, while the
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dew is on. I began to level the ranks of haughty weeds in my
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bean field and throw dust upon their heads. Early in the morning, I
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worked barefooted, dabbling like a plastic artist in the dewy and crumbling sand.
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But later in the day the sun blistered my feet. There the sun lighted
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me to hoe beans, pacing slowly backward and forward over that yellow gravelly upland
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between the long green rose fifteen rods, the one end terminating in a shrub
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oak copse, where I could rest in the shade, the other in a
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BlackBerry field, where the green berries deepened their tints. By the time I
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had made another bout removing the weeds, putting fresh soil about the bean stems,
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and encouraging this weed which I had sown, making the yellow soil express
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its summer thought in bean leaves and blossoms rather than in wormwood and piper and
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millet grass, making the earth say beans instead of grass. This was my
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daily work. As I had little aid from horses or cattle, or hired
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men or boys, or improved implements of husbandry, I was much slower and
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became much more intimate with my beans than usual. But labor of the hands,
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even when pursued to the verge of drudgery, is perhaps never the worst
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form of idleness. It has a constant and imperishable moral, and to the
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scholar it yields a classic result. A very agricola laboreosus was I to travelers
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bound westward through Lincoln and Wayland, to nobody knows where they sitting at their
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ease in gigs, with elbows on knees and reins loosely hanging in festoons.
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I the home, staying laborious, native of the soil. But soon my
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homestead was out of their sight, and thought it was the only open and
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cultivated field for a great distance on either side of the road. So they
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made the most of it. And sometimes the man in the field heard more
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of traveler's gossip and comment than was meant for his ear. Beans so late,
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peas so late. For I continued to plant when others had begun to
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hoe. The ministerial husbandman had not suspected it. Corn, my boy,
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for fodder, Corn for fodder? Does he live there? Asks the black
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bonnet of the gray coat, And the hard featured farmer reins up his grateful
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dobbin to inquire what you were doing where he sees no manure in the furrow,
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and recommends a little chip dirt or any little waste stuff, or it
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may be ashes or plaster. But here were two acres and a half of
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furrows, and only a hoe for cart and two hands to draw it.
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There being an aversion to other carts and horses and chip dirt far away fellow
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travelers as they rattled by, compared it aloud with the fields which they had
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passed, so that I came to know how I stood in the agricultural world.
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This was one field not in mister Coleman's report. And by the way,
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who estimates the value of the crop which nature yields in the still wilder
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fields unimproved by man? The crop of English hay is carefully weighed, the
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moisture calculated, the silicates and the potash. But in all dells and pond
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holes, in the woods and pastures and swamps, grows a rich and various
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crop only unreaped by man. Mine was, as it were, the connecting
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link between wild and cultivated fields. As some states are civilized and others half
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civilized, and others savage or barbarous. So my field was, though not
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in a bad sense, a half cultivated field. They were beans, cheerfully
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returning to their wild and primitive state that I cultivated, and my hoe played
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the wrongs de vache for them near at hand. Upon the topmost spray of
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a birch sings the brown Thrasher, or red Mavis, as some love to
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call him. All the morning glad of your society that would find out another
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farmer's field if yours were not here. While you are planting the sea,
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he cries, drop it, drop it, cover it up, cover it
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up, pull it up, pull it up, pull it up. But
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this was not corn, and so it was safe from such enemies as he.
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You may wonder what his rigmarole, his amateur paganini performances on one string
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or on twenty have to do with your planting, and yet prefer it to
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leeched ashes or plaster. It was a cheap sort of top dressing in which
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I had entire faith. As I drew a still fresher soil about the rose
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with my hoe, I disturbed the ashes of unchronicled nations who in primeval years
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lived under these heavens, and their small implements of war and hunting were brought
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to the light of this modern day. They lay mingled with other natural stones,
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some of which bore the marks of having been burned by Indian fires and
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some by the sun, and also bits of pottery and glass brought hither by
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the recent cultivators of the soil. When my hoe tinkled against the stones,
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that music echoed to the woods in the sky, and was an accompaniment to
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my labor, which yielded an instant and immeasurable crop. It was no longer
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beans that I hoed, nor I that hoed beans. And I remembered with
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as much pity as pride, if I remembered it all my acquaintances who had
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gone to the city to attend the oratorios. The night hawk circled overhead in
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the sunny afternoons, for I sometimes made a day of it, like a
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moat in the eye or in heaven's eye, falling from time to time with
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a swoop and a sound, as if the heavens were rent torn at last
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to very rags and taps. And yet a seamless cope remained, small imps
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that fill the air and lay their eggs on the ground, on bare sand
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or rocks, on the tops of hills, where few have found them,
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graceful and slender, like ripples caught up from the pond, as leaves are
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raised by the wind to float in the heavens. Such kindredship is in nature.
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The hawk is aerial brother of the wave, which he sails over and
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surveys those his perfect air inflated wings answering to the elemental, unfledged pinions of
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the sea. Or sometimes I watched a pair of hen hawks circling high in
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the sky, alternately soaring and descending, approaching and leaving one another, as
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if they were the embodiment of my own thoughts. Or I was attracted by
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the passage of wild pigeons from this wood to that with a slight, quivering,
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winnowing sound and carrier haste. Or from under a rotten stump my hoe
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turned up a sluggish, portentous, an outlandish spotted salamander, a trace of
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Egypt in the Nile, yet our contemporary. When I paused to lean on
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my hoe, these sounds and sights I heard and saw anywhere in the row
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a part of the inexhaustible entertainment which the country offers on gala days. The
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town fires its great guns, which echo like pop guns to these woods,
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and some waifs of martial music occasionally penetrate thus far to me away there in
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my bean field, at the other of the town, the big guns sounded
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as if a puff ball had burst. And when there was a military turnout
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of which I was ignorant, I have sometimes had a vague sense all the
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day of some sort of itching and disease in the horizon, as if some
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eruption would break out there soon, either scarlatina or cancer rash, until at
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length some more favorable puff of wind making haste over the fields and up the
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Wayland road brought me information of these trainers. It seemed by the distant hum,
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as if somebody's bees had swarmed, and that the neighbors, according to
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Virgil's advice, by a faint tintinabulum, upon the most sonorous of their domestic
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utensils, were endeavoring to call them down into the hive again. And when
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the sound died quite away, and the hum had ceased, and the most
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favorable breezes told no tale, I knew that they had got the last drone
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of them all safely into the Middlesex hive, and that now their mines were
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bent on the honey with which it was smeared. I felt proud to know
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that the liberties of Massachusetts and of our fatherland were in such safe keeping.
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And as I turned to my hoeing again, I was filled with an inexpressible
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confidence, and pursued my labor cheerfully, with a calm trust, in the
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future, when there were several bands of musicians, it sounded as if all
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the village was a vast bellows, and all the buildings expanded and collapsed alternately
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with a din. But sometimes it was a really noble and inspiring strain that
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reached these woods, and the trumpet that sings of fame, and I felt
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as if I could spit a Mexican with a good relish, for why should
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we all we stand for trifles? And looked round for a woodchuck or a
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skunk to exercise my chivalry upon. These martial strains seemed as far away as
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Palestine, and reminded me of a march of crusaders in the horizon. With
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a slight, tantevy and tremulous motion of the elm tree tops which overhang the
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village. This was one of the great days. Though the sky had,
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from my clearing only the same everlastingly great look that it wears daily, and
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I saw no difference in it. It was a singular experience, that long
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acquaintance which I cultivated with beans, what with planting and hoeing and harvesting and
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threshing and picking over and selling them. The last was the hardest of all,
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I might add eating, for I did taste. I was determined to
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know beans when they were I used to hoe from five o'clock in the morning
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till noon, and commonly spent the rest of the day about other affairs.
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Consider the intimate and curious acquaintance one makes with various kinds of weeds. It
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will bear some iteration in the account, for there was no little iteration in
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the labor disturbing their delicate organizations so ruthlessly, and making such invidious distinctions with
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his hoe, leveling whole ranks of one species and sedulously cultivating another. That's
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roman wormwood, that's pigweed, that's sorrel, that's pipergrass. Have at him,
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chop him up, turn his roots upward to the sun. Don't let
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him have a fiber in the shade. If you do, he'll turn himself
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to other side up and be as green as a leak. In two days
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a long war, not with cranes, but with weeds. Those Trojans who
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had sun and rain and dews on their side daily the beans saw me come
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to their rescue, armed with a hoe, and thin the ranks of their
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enemies, filled up the trenches with weedy dead. Many, a lusty crest
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waving hector that towered a whole foot above his crowding comrades, fell before my
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weapon and rolled in the dust. Those summer days which some of my contemporaries
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devoted to the fine arts in Boston or Rome, in others to contemplation in
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India, and others to trade in London or New York, I thus with
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the other farmers of New England, devoted to husbandry. Naught that I wanted
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beans to eat, for I am by nature a Pythagorean, so far as
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beans are concern'd, whether they mean porridge or voting, and exchanged them for
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rice. But perchance, as some must work in fields, if only for
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the sake of tropes and expression, to serve a parable maker. One day,
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it was on the whole a rare amusement, which continued too long,
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might have become a dissipation. Though I gave them no manure, and did
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not hoe them all at once, I hoed them unusually well as far as
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I went, and was paid for it in the end, their being,
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in truth, as Evelyn says, no compost or latation whatsoever comparable to this
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continual motion repastination and turning of the mold with the spade. The earth he
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adds elsewhere, especially if fresh has a certain magnetism in it, by which
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it attracts the salt, power or virtue, call it either, which gives
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it life, and is the logic of all the labor and stir we keep
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about it to sustain us, all the dungings and other sordid temperings, being
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but the Vicar's succeedaneous to this improvement. Moreover, this being one of those
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worn out and exhausted lay fields which enjoy their sabbath, had perchance, as
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Sir Kenelm Digby thinks, likely, attracted vital spirits from the air. I
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harvested twelve bushels of beans. But to be more particular, for it is
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complained that mister Coleman has reported chiefly the expensive experiments of gentlemen farmers. My
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outgoes were for a hoe fifty four cents, plowing, harrowing and furrowing seven
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dollars and fifty cents too much, beans for seed three dollars and twelve cents,
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plus potatoes for seed one dollar and thirty three cents. Peas for seed
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forty cents turnip seed six cents, white line for crow, fence two cents,
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horse cultivator and boy three hours one dollar, horse and cart to get
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crop seventy five cents in all, fourteen dollars seventy two cents plus. My
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income was patrem familius vendesum non em massum s oportete from nine bushels and twelve
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quarts of being sold sixteen dollars ninety four cents. Five bushels large potatoes two
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dollars fifty cents, nine bushels small potatoes two dollars and twenty five cents grass
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one dollar stalks seventy five cents in all, twenty three dollars forty four cents,
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leaving a pecuniary profit as I have elsewhere said, of eight dollars seventy
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one cents plus. This is the result of my experience in raising beans.
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Plant the common small white bush bean about the first of June in rows three
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feet by eighteen inches apart, being careful to select fresh round and unmixed seed.
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First, look out for worms and supply vacancies by planting anew. Then
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look out for woodchucks if it is an exposed place, for they will nibble
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off the nearest tender leaves, almost clean as they go. And again when
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the young tendrils make their appearance, they have notice of it and will shear
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them off, with both buds and young pods sitting erect like a squirrel.
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But above all, harvest as early as possible. If you would escape frosts
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and have a fair and salable crop, you may save much loss. By
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this means. This further experience also I gained. I said to myself,
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I will not plant beans and corn with so much industry another summer, but
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such seeds if the seed is not lost as sincerity, truth, simplicity,
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faith, innocence, and the like. And see if they will not grow
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in this soil even with less toil and manurance and sustain me. For surely
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it has not been exhausted for these crops. Alas I said this to myself.
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But now another summer is gone, and another and another, And I
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am obliged to say to you reader, that the seeds which I planted,
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if indeed they were the seeds of those virtues, were worm eaten or had
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lost their vitality, and so did not come up. Commonly, men will
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only be brave as their fathers were brave or timid. This generation is very
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sure to plant corn and beans each new year, precisely as the Indians did
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centuries ago, and taught the first settlers to do, as if there were
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a fate in it. I saw an old man the other day, to
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my astonishment, making the holes with a hoe for the seventieth time at least,
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and not for himself to lie down in. But why should not the
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new Englander try new adventures and not lay so much stress on his grain,
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his potato and grasp crop, and his orchards raise other crops than these?
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Why concern ourselves so much about our beans for seed, and not be concerned
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at all about a new generation of men? We should really be fed and
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cheered if when we met a man we were sure to see that some of
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the qualities which I have named, which we all prize more than those other
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productions, but which are for the most part broadcast and floating in the air,
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had taken root and grown in him. Here comes such a subtle and
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ineffable quality, for instance, as truth or justice, though the slightest amount
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or new variety of it along the road. Our ambassadors should be instructed to
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send home such seeds as these, and Congress help to distribute them over all
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the land. We should never stand upon ceremony with sincerity. We should never
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cheat and insult and banish one another by our meanness. If there were present
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the kernel of worth and friendliness, we should not meet thus in haste.
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Most men I do not meet at all, for they seem not to have
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time. They are busy about their beans. We would not deal with a
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man thus plotting, ever, leaning on a hoe or a spade as a
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staff between his work, not as a mushroom, but partially risen out of
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the earth, something more than erect, like swallows, alighted and walking on
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the ground. And as he spake, his wings would now and then spread
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as he meant to fly, then close again, so that we should suspect
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that we might be conversing with an angel. Bread may not always nourish us,
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but it always does us good. It even takes stiffness out of our
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joints, and makes us supple and buoyant. When we knew not what ailed
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us to recognize any generosity in man or nature, to share any unmixed and
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heroic joy. Ancient poetry and mythology suggested least that husbandry was once a sacred
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art, but it is pursued with irreverent haste and heedlessness by us, our
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object being to have large farms and large crops. Merely we have no festival,
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no procession, no ceremony, not accepting our cattle shows and so called
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thanksgivings by which the farmer expresses a sense of the sacredness of his calling,
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or is reminded of its sacred origin. It is the premium and the feast
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which tempt him. He sacrifices not to Ceres and the terrestrial Jove, but
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to the infernal Plutus. Rather by avarice and selfishness, and a groveling habit,
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from which none of us is free of regarding the soil as property or
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the means of acquiring property. Chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is
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degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of LIFs. He knows
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nature, but as a robber. Cato says that the prophets of agriculture are
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particularly pious or just maximic. Pius questus, And according to Vero, the
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old Romans called the same earth mother and Cerres, and thought that they who
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cultivate it led a pious and useful life, and that they alone were left
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of the race of King Saturn. We are wont to forget that the Sun
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looks on our cultivated fields and on the prairies and forests without distinction. They
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all reflect and absorb his rays alike, and the former make but a small
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part of the glorious picture which he beholds in his daily course. In his
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view, the earth is all equally cultivated, like a garden. Therefore we
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should receive the benefit of his light and heat with a corresponding trust and magnanimity.
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What though I value the seed of these beans and harvests that in the
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fall of the year, this broad field which I have looked at so long,
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looks not to me, as the principal cultivator, but away from me,
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to influences more genial to it, which water and make it green.
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These beans have results which are not harvested by me. Do they not grow
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for woodchucks partly the ear of wheat in Latin spica obsoletely speca from spay.
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Hope should not be the only hope of the husbandman. Its kernel or grain
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granum from gerendo bearing is not all that it bears? How then can our
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harvest fail? Shall I not rejoice also at the abundance of the weeds,
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whose seeds are the granary of the birds. It matters little comparatively whether the
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fields fill the farmer's barns. The true husbandman will cease from anxiety as the
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squirrels manifest no concern whether the woods will bear chestnuts this year or not,
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and finish his labor with every day, relinquishing all claim to the produce of
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his fields, and sacrificing in his mind not only his first, but his
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last fruits also end of Chapter seven