e
foreground, a head,--a colossal head, inclined towards the iceberg, and
resting against it. Two thin hands, joined under the forehead, and
supporting it, drew up before the lower features a sable veil; a brow
quite bloodless, white as bone, and an eye hollow and fixed, blank of
meaning but for the glassiness of despair, alone were visible. Above
the temples, amidst wreathed turban folds of black drapery, vague in
its character and consistency as cloud, gleamed a ring of white flame,
gemmed with sparkles of a more lurid tinge. This pale crescent was
"the likeness of a Kingly Crown"; what it diademed was "the shape which
shape had none."

(_Jane Eyre_.)

{157}

HENRY DAVID THOREAU 1817-1862

A HUT IN THE WOODS

I did not read books the first summer; I hoed beans. Nay, I often did
better than this. There were times when I could not afford to
sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the
head or hands. I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes, in a
summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny
doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a reverie, amidst the pines and
hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the
birds sang around, or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the
sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveller's
waggon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time. I
grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better
than any work of the hands would have been. They were not time
subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance.
I realised what the Orientals mean by contemplation and the forsaking
of works. For the most part, I minded not how the hours went. The day
advanced as if to light some work of mine; it was morning, and lo, now
it is evening, and nothing memorable is accomplished. Instead of
singing like the birds, I silently smiled at my incessant good fortune.
As the sparrow had its trill, sitting on the hickory before my door, so
I had my chuckle or suppressed warble which he might hear out of my
nest. My days were not days {158} of the week, bearing the stamp of
any heathen deity, nor were they minced into hours and fretted by the
ticking of a clock; for I lived like the Puri Indians, of whom it is
said that for yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow they have only one word,
and they express the variety of meaning by pointing back