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"In truth, our village has become a butt
For one of those fleet railroad shafts, and o'er
Walden& 84
Our peaceful plain its soothing sound is--Concord."
The Fitchburg Railroad touches the pond about a hundred rods south of where I dwell. I
usually go to the village along its causeway, and am, as it were, related to society by this
link. The men on the freight trains, who go over the whole length of the road, bow to me
as to an old acquaintance, they pass me so often, and apparently they take me for an
employee; and so I am. I too would fain be a track-repairer somewhere in the orbit of the
earth.
The whistle of the locomotive penetrates my woods summer and winter, sounding like
the scream of a hawk sailing over some farmer's yard, informing me that many restless
city merchants are arriving within the circle of the town, or adventurous country traders
from the other side. As they come under one horizon, they shout their warning to get off
the track to the other, heard sometimes through the circles of two towns. Here come your
groceries, country; your rations, countrymen! Nor is there any man so independent on his
farm that he can say them nay. And here's your pay for them! screams the countryman's
whistle; timber like long battering-rams going twenty miles an hour against the city's
walls, and chairs enough to seat all the weary and heavy-laden that dwell within them.
With such huge and lumbering civility the country hands a chair to the city. All the
Indian huckleberry hills are stripped, all the cranberry meadows are raked into the city.
Up comes the cotton, down goes the woven cloth; up comes the silk, down goes the
woollen; up come the books, but down goes the wit that writes them.
When I meet the engine with its train of cars moving off with planetary motion--or,
rather, like a comet, for the beholder knows not if with that velocity and with that
direction it will ever revisit this system, since its orbit does not look like a returning
curve--with its steam cloud like a banner streaming behind in golden and silver wreaths,
like many a downy cloud which I have seen, high in the heavens, unfolding its masses to
the light--as if this traveling demigod, this cloud--compeller, would ere long take the
sunset sky for the livery of his train; when I hear the iron horse make the bills echo with
his snort like thunder, shaking the earth with his feet, and breathing fire and smoke from
his nostrils (what kind of winged horse or fiery dragon they will put into the new
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Mythology I don't know), it seems as if the earth had got a race now worthy to inhabit it.
If all were as it seems, and men made the elements their servants for noble ends! If the
cloud that hangs over the engine were the perspiration of heroic deeds, or as beneficent as
that which floats over the farmer's fields, then the elements and Nature herself would
cheerfully accompany men on their errands and be their escort.
I watch the passage of the morning cars with the same feeling that I do the rising of the
sun, which is hardly more regular. Their train of clouds stretching far behind and rising
higher and higher, going to heaven while the cars are going to Boston, conceals the sun
for a minute and casts my distant field into the shade, a celestial train beside which the
petty train of cars which bugs the earth is but the barb of the spear. The stabler of the iron
horse was up early this winter morning by the light of the stars amid the mountains, to
fodder and harness his steed. Fire, too, was awakened thus early to put the vital beat in
him and get him off. If the enterprise were as innocent as it is early! If the snow lies deep,
they strap on his snowshoes, and, with the giant plow, plow a furrow from the mountains
to the seaboard, in which the cars, like a following drill-barrow, sprinkle all the restless
men and floating merchandise in the country for seed. All day the fire-steed flies over the
country, stopping only that his master may rest, and I am awakened by his tramp and
defiant snort at midnight, when in some remote glen in the woods he fronts the elements
incased in ice and snow; and he will reach his stall only with the morning star, to start
once more on his travels without rest or slumber. Or perchance, at evening, I hear him in
his stable blowing off the superfluous energy of the day, that he may calm his nerves and
cool his liver and brain for a few hours of iron slumber. If the enterprise were as heroic
and commanding as it is protracted and unwearied!
Far through unfrequented woods on the confines of towns, where once only the hunter
penetrated by day, in the darkest night dart these bright saloons without the knowledge of
their inhabitants; this moment stopping at some brilliant station-house in town or city,
where a social crowd is gathered, the next in the Dismal Swamp, scaring the owl and fox.
The startings and arrivals of the cars are now the epochs in the village day. They go and
come with such regularity and precision, and their whistle can be heard so far, that the
farmers set their clocks by them, and thus one well-conducted institution regulates a
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whole country. Have not men improved somewhat in punctuality since the railroad was
invented? Do they not talk and think faster in the depot than they did in the stage-office?
There is something electrifying in the atmosphere of the former place. I have been
astonished at the miracles it has wrought; that some of my neighbors, who, I should have
prophesied, once for all, would never get to Boston by so prompt a conveyance, are on
hand when the bell rings. To do things "railroad fashion" is now the byword; and it is
worth the while to be warned so often and so sincerely by any power to get off its track.
There is no stopping to read the riot act, no firing over the heads of the mob, in this case.
We have constructed a fate, an Atropos, that never turns aside. (Let that be the name of
your engine.) Men are advertised that at a certain hour and minute these bolts will be shot
toward particular points of the compass; yet it interferes with no man's business, and the
children go to school on the other track. We live the steadier for it. We are all educated
thus to be sons of Tell. The air is full of invisible bolts. Every path but your own is the
path of fate. Keep on your own track, then.
What recommends commerce to me is its enterprise and bravery. It does not clasp its
hands and pray to Jupiter. I see these men every day go about their business with more or
less courage and content, doing more even than they suspect, and perchance better
employed than they could have consciously devised. I am less affected by their heroism
who stood up for half an hour in the front line at Buena Vista, than by the steady and
cheerful valor of the men who inhabit the snowplow for their winter quarters; who have
not merely the three-o'-clock-in-the-morning courage, which Bonaparte thought was the
rarest, but whose courage does not go to rest so early, who go to sleep only when the
storm sleeps or the sinews of their iron steed are frozen. On this morning of the Great
Snow, perchance, which is still raging and chilling men's blood, I bear the muffled tone
of their engine bell from out the fog bank of their chilled breath, which announces that
the cars are coming, without long delay, notwithstanding the veto of a New England
northeast snow-storm, and I behold the plowmen covered with snow and rime, their
heads peering, above the mould-board which is turning down other than daisies and the
nests of field mice, like bowlders of the Sierra Nevada, that occupy an outside place in
the universe.
Walden& 87
Commerce is unexpectedly confident and serene, alert, adventurous, and unwearied. It is
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