Esquimaux, or in m
Esquimau - a member of a people inhabiting the Arctic (northern Canada or Greenland or Alaska or eastern Siberia); the Algonquians called them Eskimo (eaters of raw flesh') but they call themselves the Inuit (the people') Eskimo, Inuit.
When the ponds were firmly frozen, they afforded not only new and shorter routes to many points, but new views from their surfaces of the familiar landscape around them.
I picture him walking out into the middle of a frozen lake and doing a 360. His attention to detail is admirable; very observant human being, it's inspiring.
. I pursued with a paddle and he dived, but when he came up I was nearer than before. He dived again, but I miscalculated the direction he would take, and we were fifty rods apart when he came to the surface this time, for I had helped to widen the interval; and again he laughed long and loud, and with more reason than before. He manœuvred so cunningly that I could not get within half a dozen rods of him. Each time, when he came to the surface, turning his head this way and that, he cooly surveyed the water and the land, and apparently chose his course so that he might come up where there was the widest expanse of water and at the greatest distance from the boat. It was surprising how quickly he made up his mind and put his resol
This is so descriptive and amusing. I am finding that Thoreau must find several things about his new lifestyle amusing. He seems like he is having a little trouble with what I (and him) were unaware, the loon is a very smart bird. It also sounds like the loon is making fun of him, lol.
some on that, for the poor bird cannot be omnipresent; if he dive here he must come up there. But now the kind October wind rises, rustling the leaves and rippling the surface of the water, so that no loon can be heard or seen, though his foes sweep the pond with spy-glasses, and make the woods resound with their disc
I think Thoreau is amused watching the hunters.
ch, taken in homœopathic doses, was really as refreshing in its way as the rustle of leaves and the peepi
Homeopathy: the treatment of disease by minute doses of natural substances that in a healthy person would produce symptoms of disease
swimming across one of its coves for a stint, and washed the dust of labor from my person, or smoothed out the last wrinkle which
He was not satisfied with how long he got to swim, he wanted to swim longer
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 e
I love how poeticly he talks about how it's been so many years, but the same trees are still there, and the ones that aren't have also become a part of him. He makes you imagine that they are his company, and the process will surely repeat itself.
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;
Antaeus was a giant in Greek mythology, son of Posiedon and Gaea. He drew strength from his mother, earth, and was invisible when in contact with her.
the house. They would begin to sing almost with as much precision as a clock, within five minutes of a particular time, referred to the setting of the sun
I think its very cool that in his new environment, it is so calm, he is not distracted by much, so as to be able to pick up on the routines of other animals.
it. It is not merely a repetition of what was worth repeating in the bell, but partly the voice of the wood; the same trivial words and notes sung by a wo
He is saying that an echo is not only made by the original sound, but impossible without its environment (the woods).
All sound heard at the greatest possible distance produces one and the same effect, a vibration of the universal lyre, just as the intervening atmosphere makes a distant ridge of earth interesting to ou
Refering to far off sounds having one thing in common and comparing it to a universal stringed instrument, he finds it as interesting as a distant horizon.
when I hear the iron horse make the hills 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 Mythology I don’t know), it seems as if the earth had got a race now worthy to inha
I think he is talking about the railway in awe. It was so new and radical at the time.
doors than in the house. A bird sits on the next bough, life-everlasting grows under the table, and blackberry vines run round its legs; pine cones, chestnut burs, and strawberry leaves are strewn about. It looked as if this was the way these forms came to be transferred to our furniture, to tables
I like how he is describing how nature is somewhat "taking over the table, and it looks like it belongs there.
Finding that my fellow-citizens were not likely to offer me any room in the court house, or any curacy or living any where else, but I
This sounds to me like he wasn't very successful at the time he decided to go into the woods, and maybe feeling like he was tossed aside, maybe even a little bitter, and therefore ready to get away from society. Sounds like a typical case of stress.
discontented, and idly complaining of the hardness of their lot or of the times, when they might improve them.
He is speaking of people who are unhappy, yet do nothing to make themselves happy, and still have to audacity to gripe about it
eds. Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or
This one is so true and timeless. All that really matters is what we think of ourselves and that ultimately makes us who we are.
of him. The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one anot
I felt this to be a very powerful sentence. He's asking why we put so much stock and care into material things instead of each other, and our world.
Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by the
I feel that Thoreau is saying that a lot of people just "fall in line' in everyday life, and do what is expected of them, that they can't really enjoy or even entertain a different way of life and they don't even know what they are missing.