Walden Study Text
Chapter 7: The Bean-field
MEANWHILE MY BEANS, the length of whose rows, added together, was seven miles
already planted, were impatient to be hoed, for the earliest had grown considerably
before the latest were in the ground; indeed they were not easily to be put off.
What was the meaning of this so steady and self-respecting, this small
labor, I knew not. I came to love my rows, my beans, though so many more than
I wanted. They attached me to the earth, and so I got strength like Antæus.
But why should I raise them? Only Heaven knows. This was my curious labor all
summer—to make this portion of the earth's surface, which had yielded only
cinquefoil, blackberries, johnswort, and the like, before, sweet wild fruits and
pleasant flowers, produce instead this pulse. What shall I learn of beans or beans
of me? I cherish them, I hoe them, early and late I have an eye to them; and this
is my day's work. It is a fine broad leaf to look on. My auxiliaries are the dews
and rains which water this dry soil, and what fertility is in the soil itself,
which for the most part is lean and effete. My enemies are worms, cool days, and
most of all woodchucks. The last have nibbled for me a quarter of an acre clean.
But to oust johnswort and the rest, and break up their ancient
herb garden? Soon, however, the remaining beans will be too tough for them, and
go forward to meet new foes.
When I was four years old, as I well remember, I was brought from Boston
to this my native town, through these very woods and this field, to the pond.
It is one of the oldest scenes stamped on my memory. And now to-night my flute
has waked the echoes over that very water. The pines still stand here older
than I; or, if some have fallen, I have cooked my supper with their stumps,
and a new growth is rising all around, preparing another aspect for new infant
eyes. Almost the same johnswort springs from the same perennial root in this
pasture, and even I have at length helped to clothe that fabulous landscape
of my infant dreams, and one of the results of my presence and influence is
seen in these bean leaves,
I planted about two acres and a half of upland; and as it was only about
fifteen years since the land was cleared, and I myself had got out two or three
cords of stumps, I did not give it any manure; but in the course of the summer
it appeared by the arrowheads which I turned up in hoeing, that an extinct nation
had anciently dwelt here and planted corn and beans ere white men came to clear
the land, and so, to some extent, had exhausted the soil for this very crop.
Before yet any woodchuck or squirrel had run across the road, or the sun
had got above the shrub oaks, while all the dew was on, though the farmers warned
me against it—I would advise you to —I began to level the ranks of haughty weeds in my bean-field
and throw dust upon their heads. Early in the morning I worked barefooted, dabbling
like a plastic artist in the dewy and crumbling sand, but later in the day the
sun blistered my feet. There the sun lighted me to hoe beans, pacing slowly
backward and forward over that yellow gravelly upland, between the long green
rows, fifteen rods, the one end terminating in a shrub oak copse where I could
rest in the shade, the other in a blackberry field where the green berries deepened
their tints by the time I had made another bout. Removing the weeds, putting
fresh soil about the bean stems, and encouraging
making the yellow soil express its summer thought in bean leaves and blossoms
rather than in wormwood and piper and millet grass, making the earth say beans
instead of grass—this was As I had little aid from horses
or cattle, or hired men or boys, or improved implements of husbandry, I was
much slower, and became much more intimate with my beans than usual. But labor
of the hands, even when pursued to the verge of drudgery, is perhaps never the
worst form of idleness. It has a constant and imperishable moral, and to the
scholar it yields a classic result. A very was I to
travellers bound westward through Lincoln and Wayland to nobody knows where;
they sitting at their ease in gigs, with elbows on knees, and reins loosely
hanging in festoons; I the home-staying, laborious native of the soil. But soon
my homestead was out of their sight and thought. It was the only open and cultivated
field for a great distance on either side of the road, so they made the most
of it; and sometimes the man in the field heard more of travellers' gossip and
comment than was meant for his ear: "Beans so late! peas so late!"—for
I continued to plant when others had begun to hoe—the ministerial husbandman
had not suspected it. "Corn, my boy, for fodder; corn for fodder."
"Does he live there?" asks the black bonnet of the gray coat; and
the hard-featured farmer reins up his grateful dobbin to inquire what you are
doing where he sees no manure in the furrow, and recommends a little chip dirt,
or any little waste stuff, or it may be ashes or plaster. But here were two
acres and a half of furrows, and only a hoe for cart and two hands to draw it—there
being an aversion to other carts and horses—and chip dirt far away. Fellow-travellers
as they rattled by compared it aloud with the fields which they had passed,
so that I came to know how I stood in the agricultural world. This was one field
not in And, by the way, who estimates the value of
the crop which nature yields in the still wilder fields unimproved by man? The
crop of English hay is carefully weighed, the moisture calculated, the silicates
and the potash; but in all dells and pond-holes in the woods and pastures and
swamps grows Mine was, as it were,
the connecting link between wild and cultivated fields; as some states are civilized,
and others half-civilized, and others savage or barbarous, so my field was,
though not in a bad sense, a half-cultivated field. They were beans cheerfully
returning to their wild and primitive state that I cultivated, and my hoe played
the for them.
Near at hand, upon the topmost spray of a birch, sings the brown thrasher—or
red mavis, as some love to call him—all the morning, glad of your society,
that would find out another farmer's field if yours were not here. While you
are planting the seed, he cries—"Drop it, drop it—cover it up,
cover it up—pull it up, pull it up, pull it up." But this was not
corn, and so it was safe from such enemies as he. You may wonder what his rigmarole,
his amateur Paganini performances on one string or on twenty, have to do
with your planting, and yet prefer it to leached ashes or plaster. It was a
cheap sort of top dressing in which I had entire faith.
As I drew a still fresher soil about the rows with my hoe, I disturbed
the ashes of unchronicled nations who in primeval years lived under these heavens,
and their small implements of war and hunting were brought to the light of this
modern day. They lay mingled with other natural stones, some of which bore the
marks of having been burned by Indian fires, and some by the sun, and also bits
of pottery and glass brought hither by the recent cultivators of the soil. When
my hoe tinkled against the stones, that music echoed to the woods and the sky,
and was an accompaniment to my labor which yielded an instant and immeasurable
crop. It was no longer beans that I hoed, nor I that hoed beans; and I remembered
with as much pity as pride, if I remembered at all, my acquaintances who had
gone to the city to attend the oratorios. The nighthawk circled overhead in
the sunny afternoons—for I sometimes made a day of it—like a mote
in the eye, or in heaven's eye, falling from time to time with a swoop and a
sound as if the heavens were rent, torn at last to very rags and tatters, and
yet a seamless cope remained; small imps that fill the air and lay their eggs
on the ground on bare sand or rocks on the tops of hills, where few have found
them; graceful and slender like ripples caught up from the pond, as leaves are
raised by the wind to float in the heavens; such kindredship is in nature. The
hawk is aerial brother of the wave which he sails over and surveys, those his
perfect air-inflated wings answering to the elemental unfledged pinions of the
sea. Or sometimes I watched a pair of hen-hawks circling high in the sky, alternately
soaring and descending, approaching, and leaving one another, as if they were
the embodiment of my own thoughts. Or I was attracted by the passage of wild
pigeons from this wood to that, with a slight quivering winnowing sound and
carrier haste; or from under a rotten stump my hoe turned up a sluggish portentous
and outlandish spotted salamander, a trace of Egypt and the Nile, yet our contemporary.
When I paused to lean on my hoe, these sounds and sights I heard and saw anywhere
in the row, a part of the inexhaustible entertainment which the country offers.
On gala days the town fires its great guns, which echo like popguns to
these woods, and some waifs of martial music occasionally penetrate thus far.
To me, away there in my bean-field at the other end of the town, the big guns
sounded as if a puffball had burst; and when there was a military turnout of
which I was ignorant, I have sometimes had a vague sense all the day of some
sort of itching and disease in the horizon, as if some eruption would break
out there soon, either or canker-rash, until at length some more
favorable puff of wind, making haste over the fields and up the Wayland road,
brought me information of the "trainers." It seemed by the distant
hum as if had swarmed, and that the neighbors, according to
Virgil's advice, by a faint tintinnabulum upon the most sonorous of their
domestic utensils, were endeavoring to call them down into the hive again. And
when the sound died quite away, and the hum had ceased, and the most favorable
breezes told no tale, I knew that they had got the last drone of them all safely
into the Middlesex hive, and that now their minds were bent on the honey with
which it was smeared.
I felt proud to know that the liberties of Massachusetts and of our fatherland
were in such safe keeping; and as I turned to my hoeing again I was filled with
an inexpressible confidence, and pursued my labor cheerfully with a
When there were several bands of musicians, it sounded as if all the village
was a vast bellows and all the buildings expanded and collapsed alternately
with a din. But sometimes it was a really noble and inspiring strain that reached
these woods, and the trumpet that sings of fame, and I felt as if I could with a good relish—for why should we always stand for trifles?—and
looked round for a woodchuck or a skunk to exercise my chivalry upon. These
martial strains seemed as far away as Palestine, and reminded me of a march
of crusaders in the horizon, with a slight tantivy and tremulous motion of the
elm tree tops which overhang the village. This was one of the great days; though
the sky had from my clearing only the same everlastingly great look that it
wears daily, and I saw no difference in it.
It was a singular experience that long acquaintance which I cultivated
with beans, what with planting, and hoeing, and harvesting, and threshing, and
picking over and selling them—the last was the hardest of all—I might
add eating, for I did taste. When they were
growing, I used to hoe from five o'clock in the morning till noon, and commonly
spent the rest of the day about other affairs. Consider the intimate and curious
acquaintance one makes with various kinds of weeds—it will bear some iteration
in the account, for there was no little iteration in the labor—disturbing
their delicate organizations so ruthlessly, and making such invidious distinctions
with his hoe, levelling whole ranks of one species, and sedulously cultivating
another. That's Roman wormwood—that's pigweed—that's sorrel—that's
piper-grass—have at him, chop him up, turn his roots upward to the sun,
don't let him have a fibre in the shade, if you do he'll turn himself t' other
side up and be as green as a leek in two days. not with cranes,
but with weeds, those Trojans who had sun and rain and dews on their side. Daily
the beans saw me come to their rescue armed with a hoe, and thin the ranks of
their enemies, filling up the trenches with weedy dead. Many a lusty crest-waving
Hector , that towered a whole foot above his crowding comrades, fell before
my weapon and rolled in the dust.
Those summer days which some of my contemporaries devoted to the fine
arts in Boston or Rome, and others to contemplation in India, and others to
trade in London or New York, I thus, with the other farmers of New England,
devoted to husbandry. Not that I wanted beans to eat, for I am by nature a
so far as beans are concerned, whether they mean porridge or voting, and exchanged
them for rice; but, perchance, as some must work in fields if only for the sake
of tropes and expression, to serve a parable-maker one day. It was on the whole
a rare amusement, which, continued too long, might have become a dissipation.
Though I gave them no manure, and did not hoe them all once, I hoed them unusually
well as far as I went, and was paid for it in the end, "there being in
truth," as says, "no compost or laetation whatsoever comparable
to this continual motion, repastination, and turning of the mould with the spade."
"The earth," he adds elsewhere, "especially if fresh, has a certain
magnetism in it, by which it attracts the salt, power, or virtue (call it either)
which gives it life, and is the logic of all the labor and stir we keep about
it, to sustain us; all dungings and other sordid temperings being but the vicars
succedaneous to this improvement." Moreover, this being one of those "worn-out
and exhausted lay fields which enjoy their sabbath," had perchance, as
Sir Kenelm Digby thinks likely, attracted "vital spirits" from
the air. I harvested twelve bushels of beans.
But to be more particular, for it is complained that Mr. Coleman has reported
chiefly the expensive experiments of gentlemen farmers, my outgoes were,—
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For a hoe, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Plowing, harrowing, and furrowing,. . . . . . . . .
Beans for seed,. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Potatoes ". . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Peas " . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Turnip seed, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
White line for crow fence, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Horse cultivator and boy three hours, . . . . . . . .
Horse and cart to get crop, . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
In all, . . . . . . . . .
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$ 0 54
7 50 Too much.
3 12 1/2
1 33
0 40
0 06
0 .02
1 00
0 75
$14.72 1/2
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My income was, (),
from
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Nine bushels and twelve quarts of beans sold, . . . .
Five " large potatoes,. . . .
Nine " small "
Grass, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Stalks, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
In all, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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$16 94
2 50
2 25
1 00
0 75
$23 44
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Leaving a pecuniary profit, as I have elsewhere said, of $8.71 1/2.
This is the result of my experience in raising beans: Plant the common
small white bush bean about the first of June, in rows three feet by eighteen
inches apart, being careful to select fresh round and unmixed seed. First look
out for worms, and supply vacancies by planting anew. Then look out for woodchucks,
if it is an exposed place, for they will nibble off the earliest tender leaves
almost clean as they go; and again, when the young tendrils make their appearance,
they have notice of it, and will shear them off with both buds and young pods,
sitting erect like a squirrel. But above all harvest as early as possible, if
you would escape frosts and have a fair and salable crop; you may save much
loss by this means.
This further experience I said to myself, I will not plant
beans and corn with so much industry another summer, but such seeds, if the
seed is not lost, as sincerity, truth, simplicity, faith, innocence, and the
like, and see if they will not grow in this soil, even with less toil and manurance,
and sustain me, for surely it has not been exhausted for these crops. Alas!
I said this to myself; but now another summer is gone, and another, and another,
and I am obliged to say to you, Reader, that the seeds which I planted, if indeed
they were the seeds of those virtues, were wormeaten or had lost their vitality,
and so did not come up. Commonly men will only be brave as their fathers were
brave, or timid. This generation is very sure to plant corn and beans each new
year precisely as the Indians did centuries ago and taught the first settlers
to do, as if there were a fate in it. I saw an old man the other day, to my
astonishment, making the holes with a hoe for the seventieth time at least,
and not for himself to lie down in! But why should not the New Englander try
new adventures, and not lay so much stress on his grain, his potato and grass
crop, and his orchards—raise other crops than these? Why concern ourselves
so much about our beans for seed, and not be concerned at all about a new generation
of men? We should really be fed and cheered if when we met a man we were sure
to see that some of the qualities which I have named, which we all prize more
than those other productions, but which are for the most part broadcast and
floating in the air, had taken root and grown in him. Here comes such a subtile
and ineffable quality, for instance, as truth or justice, though the slightest
amount or new variety of it, along the road.Our ambassadors should be instructed
to send home such seeds as these, and help to distribute them
over all the land. We should never stand upon ceremony with sincerity. We should
never cheat and insult and banish one another by our meanness, if there were
present the kernel of worth and friendliness. We should not meet thus in haste.
Most men I do not meet at all, for they seem not to have time; they are busy
about their beans. We would not deal with a man thus plodding ever, leaning
on a hoe or a spade as a staff between his work, not as a mushroom, but partially
risen out of the earth, something more than erect, like swallows alighted and
walking on the ground:—
"And as he spake, his wings would now and then
Spread, as he meant to fly, then close again—"
so that we should suspect that we might be conversing with an angel. Bread may
not always nourish us; but it always does us good, it even takes stiffness out
of our joints, and makes us supple and buoyant, when we knew not what ailed
us, to recognize any generosity in man or Nature, to share any unmixed and heroic
joy.
Ancient poetry and mythology suggest, at least, that husbandry was once
a sacred art; but it is pursued with irreverent haste and heedlessness by us,
our object being to have large farms and large crops merely. We have no festival,
nor procession, nor ceremony, not excepting our cattle-shows and so-called Thanksgivings,
by which the farmer expresses a sense of the sacredness of his calling, or is
reminded of its sacred origin. It is the premium and the feast which tempt him.
He sacrifices not to Ceres and the Terrestrial Jove,(16) but to the infernal
Plutus rather. By avarice and selfishness, and a grovelling habit, from
which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of
acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded
with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a
robber. Cato says that the profits of agriculture are particularly pious
or just (maximeque pius quæstus), and according to Varro the old
Romans "called the same earth Mother and Ceres, and thought that they who
cultivated it led a pious and useful life, and that they alone were left of
the race of King Saturn."
We are wont to forget that the sun looks on our cultivated fields and
on the prairies and forests without distinction. They all reflect and absorb
his rays alike, and the former make but a small part of the glorious picture
which he beholds in his daily course. In his view the earth is all equally cultivated
like a garden. Therefore we should receive the benefit of his light and heat
with a corresponding trust and magnanimity. What though I value the seed of
these beans, and harvest that in the fall of the year? This broad field which
I have looked at so long looks not to me as the principal cultivator, but away
from me to influences more genial to it, which water and make it green. These
beans have results which are not harvested by me. Do they not grow for woodchucks
partly? The ear of wheat (in Latin spica, obsoletely speca, from spe, hope)
should not be the only hope of the husbandman; its kernel or grain (granum from
gerendo, bearing) is not all that it bears. How, then, can our harvest fail?
Shall I not rejoice also at the abundance of the weeds whose seeds are the granary
of the birds? It matters little comparatively whether the fields fill the farmer's
barns. The will cease from anxiety, as the squirrels manifest
no concern whether the woods will bear chestnuts this year or not, and finish
his labor with every day, relinquishing all claim to the produce of his fields,
and sacrificing in his mind not only his first but his last fruits also.
To Chapter VIII
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