THE POND IN WINTER文档格式.docx

1、 but day comes to reveal to us this greatwork, which extends from earth even into the plains of the ether. Then to my morning work. First I take an axe and pail and go insearch of water, if that be not a dream. After a cold and snowynight it needed a divining-rod to find it. Every winter the liquida

2、nd trembling surface of the pond, which was so sensitive to everybreath, and reflected every light and shadow, becomes solid to thedepth of a foot or a foot and a half, so that it will support theheaviest teams, and perchance the snow covers it to an equal depth,and it is not to be distinguished fro

3、m any level field. Like themarmots in the surrounding hills, it closes its eyelids and becomesdormant for three months or more. Standing on the snow-coveredplain, as if in a pasture amid the hills, I cut my way first througha foot of snow, and then a foot of ice, and open a window under myfeet, wher

4、e, kneeling to drink, I look down into the quiet parlor ofthe fishes, pervaded by a softened light as through a window ofground glass, with its bright sanded floor the same as in summer;there a perennial waveless serenity reigns as in the amber twilightsky, corresponding to the cool and even tempera

5、ment of theinhabitants. Heaven is under our feet is well as over our heads. Early in the morning, while all things are crisp with frost, mencome with fishing-reels and slender lunch, and let down their finelines through the snowy field to take pickerel and perch; wild men,who instinctively follow ot

6、her fashions and trust other authoritiesthan their townsmen, and by their goings and comings stitch townstogether in parts where else they would be ripped. They sit and eattheir luncheon in stout fear-naughts on the dry oak leaves on theshore, as wise in natural lore as the citizen is in artificial.

7、They never consulted with books, and know and can tell much lessthan they have done. The things which they practice are said notyet to be known. Here is one fishing for pickerel with grown perchfor bait. You look into his pail with wonder as into a summer pond,as if he kept summer locked up at home,

8、 or knew where she hadretreated. How, pray, did he get these in midwinter? Oh, he gotworms out of rotten logs since the ground froze, and so he caughtthem. His life itself passes deeper in nature than the studies ofthe naturalist penetrate; himself a subject for the naturalist. Thelatter raises the

9、moss and bark gently with his knife in search ofinsects; the former lays open logs to their core with his axe, andmoss and bark fly far and wide. He gets his living by barkingtrees. Such a man has some right to fish, and I love to see naturecarried out in him. The perch swallows the grub-worm, the p

10、ickerelswallows the perch, and the fisher-man swallows the pickerel; and soall the chinks in the scale of being are filled. When I strolled around the pond in misty weather I was sometimesamused by the primitive mode which some ruder fisherman had adopted.He would perhaps have placed alder branches

11、over the narrow holes inthe ice, which were four or five rods apart and an equal distancefrom the shore, and having fastened the end of the line to a stickto prevent its being pulled through, have passed the slack line overa twig of the alder, a foot or more above the ice, and tied a dryoak leaf to

12、it, which, being pulled down, would show when he had abite. These alders loomed through the mist at regular intervals asyou walked half way round the pond. Ah, the pickerel of Walden! when I see them lying on the ice, orin the well which the fisherman cuts in the ice, making a littlehole to admit th

13、e water, I am always surprised by their rare beauty,as if they were fabulous fishes, they are so foreign to the streets,even to the woods, foreign as Arabia to our Concord life. Theypossess a quite dazzling and transcendent beauty which separatesthem by a wide interval from the cadaverous cod and ha

14、ddock whosefame is trumpeted in our streets. They are not green like thepines, nor gray like the stones, nor blue like the sky; but theyhave, to my eyes, if possible, yet rarer colors, like flowers andprecious stones, as if they were the pearls, the animalized nucleior crystals of the Walden water.

15、They, of course, are Walden allover and all through; are themselves small Waldens in the animalkingdom, Waldenses. It is surprising that they are caught here -that in this deep and capacious spring, far beneath the rattlingteams and chaises and tinkling sleighs that travel the Walden road,this great

16、 gold and emerald fish swims. I never chanced to see itskind in any market; it would be the cynosure of all eyes there.Easily, with a few convulsive quirks, they give up their wateryghosts, like a mortal translated before his time to the thin air ofheaven. As I was desirous to recover the long lost

17、bottom of WaldenPond, I surveyed it carefully, before the ice broke up, early in46, with compass and chain and sounding line. There have been manystories told about the bottom, or rather no bottom, of this pond,which certainly had no foundation for themselves. It is remarkablehow long men will belie

18、ve in the bottomlessness of a pond withouttaking the trouble to sound it. I have visited two such BottomlessPonds in one walk in this neighborhood. Many have believed thatWalden reached quite through to the other side of the globe. Somewho have lain flat on the ice for a long time, looking down thro

19、ughthe illusive medium, perchance with watery eyes into the bargain,and driven to hasty conclusions by the fear of catching cold intheir breasts, have seen vast holes into which a load of hay mightbe driven, if there were anybody to drive it, the undoubted sourceof the Styx and entrance to the Infer

20、nal Regions from these parts.Others have gone down from the village with a fifty-six and awagon load of inch rope, but yet have failed to find any bottom; forwhile the was resting by the way, they were paying outthe rope in the vain attempt to fathom their truly immeasurablecapacity for marvellousne

21、ss. But I can assure my readers thatWalden has a reasonably tight bottom at a not unreasonable, thoughat an unusual, depth. I fathomed it easily with a cod-line and astone weighing about a pound and a half, and could tell accuratelywhen the stone left the bottom, by having to pull so much harderbefo

22、re the water got underneath to help me. The greatest depth wasexactly one hundred and two feet; to which may be added the fivefeet which it has risen since, making one hundred and seven. Thisis a remarkable depth for so small an area; yet not an inch of itcan be spared by the imagination. What if al

23、l ponds were shallow?Would it not react on the minds of men? I am thankful that thispond was made deep and pure for a symbol. While men believe in theinfinite some ponds will be thought to be bottomless. A factory-owner, hearing what depth I had found, thought that itcould not be true, for, judging

24、from his acquaintance with dams,sand would not lie at so steep an angle. But the deepest ponds arenot so deep in proportion to their area as most suppose, and, ifdrained, would not leave very remarkable valleys. They are not likecups between the hills; for this one, which is so unusually deep forits

25、 area, appears in a vertical section through its centre notdeeper than a shallow plate. Most ponds, emptied, would leave ameadow no more hollow than we frequently see. William Gilpin, whois so admirable in all that relates to landscapes, and usually socorrect, standing at the head of Loch Fyne, in S

26、cotland, which hedescribes as a bay of salt water, sixty or seventy fathoms deep,four miles in breadth, and about fifty miles long, surrounded bymountains, observes, If we could have seen it immediately after thediluvian crash, or whatever convulsion of nature occasioned it,before the waters gushed

27、in, what a horrid chasm must it haveappeared! So high as heaved the tumid hills, so low Down sunk a hollow bottom broad and deep, Capacious bed of waters.But if, using the shortest diameter of Loch Fyne, we apply theseproportions to Walden, which, as we have seen, appears already in avertical sectio

28、n only like a shallow plate, it will appear fourtimes as shallow. So much for the increased horrors of the chasm ofLoch Fyne when emptied. No doubt many a smiling valley with itsstretching cornfields occupies exactly such a horrid chasm, fromwhich the waters have receded, though it requires the insi

29、ght andthe far sight of the geologist to convince the unsuspectinginhabitants of this fact. Often an inquisitive eye may detect theshores of a primitive lake in the low horizon hills, and nosubsequent elevation of the plain have been necessary to concealtheir history. But it is easiest, as they who work on the highwaysknow, to find the hollows by the puddles after a shower. The amountof it is, the