his side of the pond, and circles with the restlessness of despair
to some new perch on the gray oaks. Then--that I never had been
bor-r-r-r-n! echoes another on the farther side with tremulous
sincerity, and--bor-r-r-r-n! comes faintly from far in the Lincoln
woods.

I was also serenaded by a hooting owl. Near at hand you could fancy
it the most melancholy sound in Nature, as if she meant by this to
stereotype and make permanent in her choir the dying moans of a human
being--some poor weak relic of mortality who has left hope behind, and
howls like an animal, yet with human sobs, on entering the dark valley,
made more awful by a certain gurgling melodiousness--I find myself
beginning with the letters gl when I try to imitate it--expressive of
a mind which has reached the gelatinous, mildewy stage in the
mortification of all healthy and courageous thought. It reminded me
of ghouls and idiots and insane howlings. But now one answers from far
woods in a strain made really melodious by distance--Hoo hoo hoo,
hoorer hoo; and indeed for the most part it suggested only pleasing
associations, whether heard by day or night, summer or winter.

I rejoice that there are owls. Let them do the idiotic and maniacal
hooting for men. It is a sound admirably suited to swamps and twilight
woods which no day illustrates, suggesting a vast and undeveloped nature
which men have not recognized. They represent the stark twilight and
unsatisfied thoughts which all have. All day the sun has shone on the
surface of some savage swamp, where the single spruce stands hung with
usnea lichens, and small hawks circulate above, and the chickadee lisps
amid the evergreens, and the partridge and rabbit skulk beneath; but now
a more dismal and fitting day dawns, and a different race of creatures
awakes to express the meaning of Nature there.

Late in the evening I heard the distant rumbling of wagons over
bridges--a sound heard farther than almost any other at night--the
baying of dogs, and sometimes again the lowing of some disconsolate cow
in a distant barn-yard. In the mean-while all the shore rang with the
trump of bullfrogs, the sturdy spirits of ancient wine-bibbers and
wassailers, still unrepentant, trying to sing a catch in their Stygian
lake--if the Walden nymphs will pardon the comparison, for though there
are almost no weeds, there are frogs there--who would fain keep up the
hilarious rules of their old festal tables, though their voices have