• E.F. Benson's - Queen Lucia, Mapp & Lucia - Lucia in London - Miss Mapp
• Anthony Burgess - One Hand Clapping
• Michael Cunningham - The Hours
• Virginia Woolf - Mrs. Dalloway
• Rachel Cusk - Country Life
• J.R.Tolkien - Lord of the Rings
• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
• Thomas Hardy - Jude the Obscure
• Charles Dickens Hard Times
• Geoffrey Chaucer - Caterbury Tales
• J.K.Rowlings ( although she may be Scotish) all four Harry Potter books
• Welchman - Dylan Thomas
• another Scott in Rosamund Pilcher - September
• Alice in Wonderland the new annotated edition
• David Niven- Moon's a Balloon, Bring On The Empty Horses
• Peter O'Toole (Irishman) -Loitering With Intent (Child and Apprentice)
• James Joyce (another Irishman) - Portrait of a Young Man
• Noel Coward - Future Indefinite
• Coleridge - The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
• Ian McEwan -Amsterdam
• A. S. Byatt - Possession

"The general philosophical concept of transcendence, or belief in a higher reality not validated by sense experience or pure reason, was developed in ancient times by Parmenides and Plato. Plato referred to a realm of ideal Forms that was unknowable through the senses, and theologians since have spoken of God in the same way. The term transcendentalism is sometimes used to describe Immanuel Kant's philosophy and the philosophies of later German Idealists influenced by Kant."

"When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only. I lived there two years and two months. At present I am a sojourner in civilized life again."

• Samuel Slater: 1790 First New England Textile mill - by 1830, more than 40,000 women worked in textile mills in New England, ranging in age from 7 to 30
• Erie Canal opened in 1819 - Steamboat, 1807 by Robert Fulton - railroads link northwest with northeast; lower northwest with south - In 1835 Photography invented - 1837 Telegraph invented (Morse)
• 1831 Garrison commences anti-slavery crusade and founds The Liberator in Boston
• 1834 State Lunatic Hospital at Worcester provided for in 1834. Angry mob burns Ursuline Convent at Charlestown in outburst of anti-Catholic feeling
• 1827 - Massachusetts Legislation permitted local taxation for the support of public schools to provide education for all children for 12 weeks/year
• 1834/36 Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, the first American college for women, incorporated.
• urban population grows 400 % from 1820-1840 - boom towns: Chicago, St. Louis, New Orleans, New York, Detroit

• 1800: top 10 percent of nation's families owned 40 percent of wealth
  In 1860: top 10 percent owned nearly 70 percent of wealth

• By 1840, 30 percent of northeastern population was middle class;
  

  Values of the Middle Class: Education - Reading - Thrift, sobriety, dependability, hard work

• Immigration 1840 and 1860: 2 million Irish; 1.5 million Germans; 750,000 Britons
• Cherokee Indians Relocation - Trail of Tears 1838 politics and population growth that lead to the Trail of Tears and the continuation of the story.
• Seminole War 2nd 1835 1842 - Seminole War 3rd 1855 1858
• a.Traditional skilled labor before the industrial revolution
  • Craft identity
  • Pride in work
  • Personal relations between master, journeyman, apprentice
  • Wages and prices fairly static
  • Informal working conditions
  b.Effects of industrial revolution
  • New factories, corporations, etc. threaten traditional position of skilled workers
  • More Americans are wage workers, meaning they are dependent on employers for livelihood
  • Concept of "free labor" and "free enterprise" requires disciplined labor force that recognizesproperty rights, right of employers to their profits over right of workers to their jobs
  • Personal relationship with employer as benefactor, teacher of craft eroded
• Early Labor movement ends in 1837 with a huge depression.
• 1840 Federal Census: 29 States
  • total population = 16,987,946
  • Total no. of Free persons of color = 377,757
  • Total no. of Slaves = 2,482,546
    • Massachusetts = 737,699 - Free persons of color = 8,669 - Slaves = 1
    • Kentucky = 779,828 - Free persons of color = 7,317- Slaves = 182,258
    • New York =2,428,921 - Free persons of color = 50,027- Slaves = 4
    • Pennsylvania = 1,724,033 - Free persons of color = 47,854- Slaves = 64
    • Maine = 501,793 - Free persons of color = 1,355- Slaves = 0
    • Georgia = 691,392 - Free persons of color = 2,753- Slaves = 280,944
• 1841 The Brook Farm community established by George Ripley and other Transcendentalists -
• Literary works published 1839 - 1841 include: Poe's House of Usher Cooper's Pathfinder and Dearslayer; Dickens' Old Curiosity Shop; Longfellow and James Russell Lowell poems.
• Hudson River School of Landscape Art is thriving - Workd of Jasper Francis Cropsey; Frederic Edwin Church, including Niagara Falls, 1857|| Work of Thomas Doughty; Ashur B. Durand; Thomas Cole
• Minstrel Shows, to the Civil War, ca. 1828-1864 - The songs sung at the time include: Miss Lucy Long; Home, Sweet Home; Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms [ca. 1823]; America ( My Country 'Tis of Thee); Long, Long Ago; Annie Laurie; The Last Rose of Summer; Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean; I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls; Jim Crack Corn; Carry Me Back to Old Virginia; Oh! Susanna; Wait for the Wagon; Old Dan Tucker and The Other Side of Jordan Link to 19th C, Popular Song site

• The westward expansion from the South with their slaves; from Kentucky and Virginia across the Ohio River into southern midwestern states: small farmers without slaves ; From New England into upper midwest
• Westward expansion brought up issues of tarriff and a National Bank.
• Merchants from Salem, Boston, and New York were sending ships to California and from there to the Orient.
• Henry Clay from Lexington Kentucky was in Washington -
• 1840 the Whig party was stuck with John Tyler since the Whigs had hoped that William Henry Harrison, who died, was going to be their candidate.
• Webster-Ashburton Treaty, set the Maine-Canada boundary
• The famous speaker, 'Iron Man' John C. Calhoun was Secratery of State
• In 1844 James K. Polk of Tennessee was chosen by the Electoral College since neither he nor Clay received a majority of the popular vote -
• During the 1840s large numbers of US citizens were moving to Oregon which at the time was jointly owned by Britain and the US. - the 49th parallel was settled
• Texas was an independent nation - annexed after much Congressional controversy in 1846
• Mexico still considered Texas as part of its nation, for it had never recognized Texas independence. Polk declaired war, the Mexican-American and among other settlements the border was established being the Rio Grande versus the Nueces River
• Every time the US acquired territory the slavery issue arose
• the 1848 election won by Zachary Taylor was over Slavery and free soil
• 1848/9 gold was discovered in California.
• Southerners who were already angry at attempts to abolish the slave trade in the national capital and whose extremists were asserting that the South would secede if the Wilmot Proviso were applied to the Mexican War booty. After all, that is not why they started and won the war.  When Congress assembled in December, 1849, many members carried revolvers and Bowie knives onto the floors of Congress and observers worried if murder was imminent.
• Taylor died and we have President Millard Fillmore
• Stephen A. Douglas effectively split bills that allowed the south to stay on board.
• During the 1852 presidential election, Franklin Pierce, A New Hampshire Democrat won the presidential election because he supported the compromise.
• The Whigs unify with the Democrates - both believing in Slavery.

• U.S.writer, note esp. for Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854), an account of his experiment in living in solitude. A powerful social critic, his essay Civil Disobedience (1849) influenced such dissenters as Gandhi.
• various extracts from 'Walden':
  • It may be vain to ask why the imagination will not be reconciled to flesh and fat. I am satisfied that it is not. Is it not a reproach that man is a carnivorous animal?
  • I have just been through the process of killing the cistudo for the sake of science; but I cannot excuse myself for this murder, and see that such actions are inconsistent with the poetic perception, however they may serve science, and will affect the quality of my observations. I pray that I may walk more innocently and serenely through nature.
  
  
  And from A Short History of the Human Rights Movement we have

  The term natural rights eventually fell into disfavor, but the concept of universal rights took root. Philosophers such as Thomas Paine, John Stuart Mill, and Henry David Thoreau expanded the concept. Thoreau is the first philosopher I know of to use the term, "human rights", and does so in his treatise, Civil Disobedience. This work has been extremely influential on individuals as different as Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King. Gandhi and King, in particular, developed their ideas on non-violent resistance to unethical government actions from this work.

  
  
  And then this site Major Problems in American Environmental History the retelling of a lively discssion that starts

  Henry David Thoreau and Calvin Colton meet and begin a lively discussion. Thoreau begins to rebuke Colton for his view of America as a "country of self-made men" and the American environment as a source of "inexhaustible" wealth. The result of Colton's perspective, he argues, is that entrepreneurs have vanquished wilderness and that the American farmer know nature only "as a robber."

"He was no ascetic, rather an Epicurean of the nobler sort; and he had this one great merit, that he succeeded so far as to be happy. "I love my fate to the core and rind," he wrote once; and even while he lay dying, here is what he dictated (for it seems he was already too feeble to control the pen): 'You ask particularly after my health. I suppose that I have not many months to live, but of course know nothing about it. I may say that I am enjoying existence as much as ever, and regret nothing.' It is not given to all to bear so clear a testimony to the sweetness of their fate, nor to any without courage and wisdom; for this world in itself is but a painful and uneasy place of residence, and lasting happiness, at least to the self-conscious, comes only from within. Now Thoreau's content and ecstasy in living was, we may say, like a plant that he had watered and tended with womanish solicitude; for there is apt to be something unmanly, something almost dastardly, in a life that does not move with dash and freedom, and that fears the bracing contact of the world. In one word, Thoreau was a skulker. He did not wish virtue to go out of him among his fellow-men, but slunk into a corner to hoard it for himself. He left all for the sake of certain virtuous self-indulgences. It is true that his tastes were noble; that his ruling passion was to keep himself unspotted from the world; and that his luxuries were all of the same healthy order as cold tubs and early rising. But a man may be both coldly cruel in the pursuit of goodness, and morbid even in the pursuit of health. I cannot lay my hands on the passage in which he explains his abstinence from tea and coffee, but I am sure I have the meaning correctly. It is this; He thought it bad economy and worthy of no true virtuoso to spoil the natural rapture of the morning with such muddy stimulants; let him but see the sun rise, and he was already sufficiently inspirited for the labours of the day. That may be reason good enough to abstain from tea; but when we go on to find the same man, on the same or similar grounds, abstain from nearly everything that his neighbours innocently and pleasurably use, and from the rubs and trials of human society itself into the bargain, we recognise that valetudinarian healthfulness which is more delicate than sickness itself. We need have no respect for a state of artificial training. True health is to be able to do without it. Shakespeare, we can imagine, might begin the day upon a quart of ale, and yet enjoy the sunrise to the full as much as Thoreau, and commemorate his enjoyment in vastly better verses. A man who must separate himself from his neighbours' habits in order to be happy, is in much the same case with one who requires to take opium for the same purpose. What we want to see is one who can breast into the world, do a man's work, and still preserve his first and pure enjoyment of existence."

"Thoreau's faculties were of a piece with his moral shyness; for they were all delicacies. He could guide himself about the woods on the darkest night by the touch of his feet. He could pick up at once an exact dozen of pencils by the feeling, pace distances with accuracy, and gauge cubic contents by the eye. His smell was so dainty that he could perceive the foetor of dwelling-houses as he passed them by at night; his palate so unsophisticated that, like a child, he disliked the taste of wine -- or perhaps, living in America, had never tasted any that was good; and his knowledge of nature was so complete and curious that he could have told the time of year, within a day or so, by the aspect of the plants. In his dealings with animals, he was the original of Hawthorne's Donatello. He pulled the woodchuck out of its hole by the tail; the hunted fox came to him for protection; wild squirrels have been seen to nestle in his waistcoat; he would thrust his arm into a pool and bring forth a bright, panting fish, lying undismayed in the palm of his hand. There were few things that he could not do. He could make a house, a boat, a pencil, or a book. He was a surveyor, a scholar, a natural historian. He could run, walk, climb, skate, swim, and manage a boat. The smallest occasion served to display his physical accomplishment; and a manufacturer, from merely observing his dexterity with the window of a railway carriage, offered him a situation on the spot. 'The only fruit of much living,' he observes, 'is the ability to do some slight thing better.' But such was the exactitude of his senses, so alive was he in every fibre, that it seems as if the maxim should be changed in his case, for he could do most things with unusual perfection. And perhaps he had an approving eye to himself when he wrote: 'Though the youth at last grows indifferent, the laws of the universe are not indifferent, but are for ever on the side of the most sensitive.' "

"Mr. Thorow [sic] dined with us yesterday. He is a singular character -- a young man with much wild original nature still remaining in him; and so far as he is sophisticated, it is in a way and method of his own. He is as ugly as sin, long-nosed, queer-mouthed, and with uncouth and somewhat rustic, although courteous manners, corresponding very well with such an exterior. But his ugliness is of an honest and agreeable fashion, and becomes him much better than beauty. He was educated, I believe, at Cambridge, and formerly kept school in this town; but for two or three years back, he has repudiated all regular modes of getting a living, and seems inclined to lead a sort of Indian life among civilized men -- an Indian life, I mean, as respects the absence of any systematic effort for a livelihood. He has been for sometime an inmate of Mr. Emerson's family; and, in requittal, he labors in the garden and performs such other offices as may suit him -- being entertained by Mr. Emerson for the sake of what true manhood there is in him. Mr. Thorow is a keen and delicate observer of nature -- a genuine observer, which, I suspect, is almost as rare a character as even an original poet; and Nature, in return for his love, seems to adopt him as her especial child, and shows him secrets which few others are allowed to witness. He is familiar with beast, fish, fowl, and reptile, and has strange stories to tell of adventures, and friendly passages with these lower brethern of mortality. Herb and flower, likewise, wherever they grow, whether in garden, or wild wood, are his familiar friends. He is also on intimate terms with the clouds and can tell the portents of storms. It is a characteristic trait, that he has a great regard for the memory of the Indian tribes, whose wild life would have suited him so well; and strange to say, he seldom walks over a ploughed field without picking up an arrow-point, a spear-head, or other relic of the red men -- as if their spirits willed him to be the inheritor of their simple wealth."

"'David Henry' after leaving college was eccentric and did not like to, and so would not, work. The opposite of John in every particular, he was [a] thin, insignificant, poorly dressed, careless looking young man, ..."

"His virtues, of course, sometimes ran into extremes. It was easy to trace to the inexorable demand in all for exact truth that austerity which made this willing hermit more solitary even than he wished. Himself of a perfect probity, he required not less of others. He had a disgust at crime, and no worldly success could cover it. He detected paltering as readily in dignified and prosperous persons as in beggars, and with equal scorn. Such dangerous frankness was in his dealing that his admires called him 'that terrible Thoreau,' as if he spoke when silent, and was still present when he had departed. I think the severity of his ideal interfered to deprive him of a healthy sufficiency of human society.



"The habit of a realist to find things the reverse of their appearance inclined him to put every statement in a paradox. A certain habit of antagonism defaced his earlier writings,--a trick of rhetoric not quite outgrown in his later, of substituting for the obvious word and thought its diametrical opposite. He praised wild mountains and winter forests for their domestic, air, in snow and ice he would find sultriness, and commended the wilderness for resembling Rome and Paris. 'It was so dry, that you might call it wet.'"

---

"Had his genius been only contemplative, he had been fitted to his life, but with his energy and practical ability he seemed born for great enterprise and for command; and I so much regret the loss of his rare powers of action, that I cannot help counting it a fault in him that he had no ambition. Wanting this, instead of engineering for all America, he was the captain of a huckleberry party. Pounding beans is good to the end of pounding empires one of these days; but if, at the end of years, it is still only beans!"

"'Resistance to Civil Government' originated as a Concord Lyceum lecture delivered by Henry on January 26, 1848. It was first published in May of 1849, in Aesthetic Papers, a short-lived periodical that never managed a second issue. The modern title of 'Civil Disobedience' comes from 'Yankee in Canada, with Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers', an 1866 collection of Thoreau's work."

Yours was an interesting post and introduced a new element into this New England-focused discussion : the fact that Thoreau's ancestors were Huguenots (French Calvinists).

Historically, that brings up the Huguenot Wars (1562-1629) ; the slaughter of Huguenots in Paris on August 23/24 1572 during the infamous St. Bartholomew's Night when they lost their leader, Admiral Coligny, all this occasioned by the the marriage of Henry of Bourbon Parma and Margarete of Valois, and the Edict of Nantes (1598) with which Henry IV guaranteed the Huguenotes religious freedom. In 1685, Louis XIV declared the edict null and void, and untold numbers of Huguenotes fled to other European countries and also to America !

I did not intend to lead us off into the wild blue yonder, but my passion for history got the better of me. Besides, it's interesting, isn't it, that there is more than just the New England heritage to our man ?

"The Huguenots were highly iconoclastic; they tore down statues of the Virgin Mary, broke stained glass windows representing Christ or the Virgin, and they vandalized reliquaries. They believed God's Holy Word ('You shall not make for yourselves an idol...'(Exodus 20:4)) to be their justification smashing the 'idols' of the Church.



"Political ideas were inextricably bound to religious ones, and many actions by the Huguenots stemed from a dualistic agenda. Most Huguenots were as eager to overthrow the political regime as they were to restructure the Holy Church, and they used Scripture as the basis for both."

"Thoreau did not speak of Brook Farm, and Emerson wished the Brook Farmers well but declined membership."

Indeed indeed, I cannot tell

Indeed indeed, I cannot tell,
Though I ponder on it well,
Which were easier to state,
All my love or all my hate.
Surely, surely, thou wilt trust me
When I say thou dost disgust me.
O, I hate thee with a hate
That would fain annihilate;
Yet sometimes against my will,
My dear friend, I love thee still.
It were treason to our love,
And a sin to God above,
One iota to abate
Of a pure impartial hate.

Henry David Thoreau

"What should we think of the shepherd's life if his flocks
always wandered to higher pastures than his thoughts?"


Henry David Thoreau
Walden: Where I Lived and What I Lived For

"Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail. In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quick-sands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify."

---

"Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are determined to be starved before we are hungry. Men say that a stitch in time saves nine, and so they take a thousand stitches today to save nine tomorrow."

"I have read in a Hindoo book, that 'there was a king's son, who, being expelled in infancy from his native city, was brought up by a forester, and, growing up to maturity in that state, imagined himself to belong to the barbarous race with which he lived. One of his father's ministers having discovered him, revealed to him what he was, and the misconception of his character was removed, and he knew himself to be a prince. So soul,' continues the Hindoo philosopher, 'from the circumstances in which it is placed, mistakes its own character, until the truth is revealed to it by some holy teacher, and then it knows itself to be Brahme.' I perceive that we inhabitants of New England live this mean life that we do because our vision does not penetrate the surface of things. We think that that is which appears to be."

Henry David Thoreau -- Walden

For nearly three decades, from 1836 to 1866 or the end of the Civil War in America, the United States witnessed the flowering of an intellectual movement the like of which had not been seen before. The movement flourished in Concord, Massachusetts and was known-though it had no formal organization- as the Transcendental Club or Circle. Its members were Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, the Unitarian Minister James Freeman Clark, the teacher and philosopher Amos Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller, and some clergymen. Their collective achievement in quality of style and in depth of philosophical insight has yet to be surpassed in American literature. And their major influence, without exception, were the Vedic literatures of India.

Article continued

Interesting points, YiLi. I've never known a writer who did not want his or her work to be published. Only the dumbest (or the smartest, depending on how you look at it) write for an audience. Romance novelists, and I'll stick my neck out here and say Stephen King until only recently, write for the audience which will buy their books. Serious nonfiction writers do not write with such an audience in mind, unless, of course, they are established and already have a reliable, good-paying publisher.

In Thoreau and Emerson's day, there were not many publishers who'd bite at what they wrote, except, of course, the Dial Magazine. If you've read the letters between them on the site of which I posted a link, you'll see that there is much talk between them about the Dial.

Transcendentalism did not sell, and even in those days publishers were looking for a winner. As far as I know, New Englanders who had heard of Transcendentalism then, and even people in far away New York, thought Transcendentalists were eccentric kooks, much as many people in the 60's and 70's thought Hippies were kooks. Trancendentalists threatened the status quo, and New Englanders of that time were imbued with the idea of stability and the status quo. I'll go so far as to say that they hated change much, much more than I do as I drive what once was a lovely country road to the supermarket where I shop and see strip malls and convenience stores being built.

We have to remember that Unitarianism was considered very far out in those days, just as it is considered today by some, and Transcendentalism probably seemed even more threatening than that.

Seriously, did any of you think much about Thoreau until the Hippies picked up on him, and the nation began to equate Walden with the Hippie movement? Where I was at that time, first in Indianapolis and then fifty miles north of New York City in Westchester County, behavior of the Hippies was not much liked by 90 percent of the people I knew, and Thoreau was considered as weird and suspect as they were. I have often smiled to think what Thoreau's reaction to the Hippie's latching onto what he said might be. Seems to me he'd have been distressed at their misinterpretation of what he wrote.

Thoreau was a scholar, as were many in his very small, elite group in Concord. He tried to impress and emulate Emerson. If you've ever been in Emerson's house in Concord and seen the little chair in Emerson's front hall where Thoreau sat waiting, often for hours, to be granted an audience by the great man, perhaps you have an idea about how Emerson thought about him. Read Emerson's essay about Thoreau, and you'll see.

What Thoreau wrote does not make me think about "spiritual and physical Waldens and what I would criticize about the nature of things today." No doubt it is my background that makes me different. My New England family and everyone I knew believed in hard, industrious work, eating the vegetables you yourself planted, studying so you'd improve yourself and the place where you lived, thrift, frugality, individuality, self-sufficiency and self-restraint. Maybe that's why, when I became a teenager, like many of my peers, the only thing I could think of was to get as far away from that restrictive, "old-fashioned" place as I could.

Mal

"Who looks upon a river in a meditative hour, and is not reminded of the flux of all things? Throw a stone into the stream, and the circles that propagate themselves are the beautiful type of all influence. Man is conscious of a universal soul within or behind his individual life, wherein, as in a firmament, the natures of Justice, Truth, Love, Freedom, arise and shine. This universal soul, he calls Reason: it is not mine, or thine, or his, but we are its; we are its property and men. And the blue sky in which the private earth is buried, the sky with its eternal calm, and full of everlasting orbs, is the type of Reason. That which, intellectually considered, we call Reason, considered in relation to nature, we call Spirit. Spirit is the Creator. Spirit hath life in itself. And man in all ages and countries, embodies it in his language, as the FATHER."

"The emergence of the Transcendentalists as an identifiable movement took place during the late 1820s and 1830s, but the roots of their religious philosophy extended much farther back into American religious history. Transcendentalism and evangelical Protestantism followed separate evolutionary branches from American Puritanism, taking as their common ancestor the Calvinism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. "



"Transcendentalism cannot be properly understood outside the context of Unitarianism, the dominant religion in Boston during the early nineteenth century. "



" Unitarians placed a premium on stability, harmony, rational thought, progressive morality, classical learning, and other hallmarks of Enlightenment Christianity. Instead of the dogma of Calvinism intended to compel obedience, the Unitarians offered a philosophy stressing the importance of voluntary ethical conduct and the ability of the intellect to discern what constituted ethical conduct.

"Theirs was a "natural theology" in which the individual could, through empirical investigation or the exercise of reason, discover the ordered and benevolent nature of the universe and of God's laws. Divine "revelation," which took its highest form in the Bible, was an external event or process that would confirm the findings of reason. discovering new truths."

"It would be misleading, however, to say that Transcendentalism entailed a rejection of Unitarianism; rather, it evolved almost as an organic consequence of its parent religion. By opening the door wide to the exercise of the intellect and free conscience, and encouraging the individual in his quest for divine meaning, Unitarians had unwittingly sowed the seeds of the Transcendentalist ‘revolt.’ "

"For the Transcendentalists, then, the critical realization, or conviction, was that finding God depended on neither orthodox creedalism nor the Unitarians' sensible exercise of virtue, but on one's inner striving toward spiritual communion with the divine spirit. From this wellspring of belief would flow all the rest of their religious philosophy."



"Transcendentalism was not a purely native movement, however. The Transcendentalists received inspiration from overseas in the form of English and German romanticism, particularly the literature of Coleridge, Wordsworth and Goethe, and in the post-Kantian idealism of Thomas Carlyle and Victor Cousin. Under the influence of these writers (which was not a determinative influence, but rather an introduction to the cutting edge of Continental philosophy), the Transcendentalists developed their ideas of human "Reason," or what we today would call intuition. For the Transcendentalists, as for the Romantics, subjective intuition was at least as reliable a source of truth as empirical investigation, which underlay both deism and the natural theology of the Unitarians."

"The Transcendentalists had stood at the vanguard of the "new consciousness" Emerson recalled so fondly, and it is for their intellectual and moral fervor that we remember them now as much as for their religious philosophy; the light of Transcendentalism today burns strongest on the page and in the classroom, rather than from the pulpit."

Whenever I am trapped into a seemingly endless series of days with friends, and just plain people, panic seizes me, and I long for the privacy of the woods, and the stillness that is available to me in this seclusion.

Here I like to ramble, relax and dream, breathing the fresh air, sorting sounds, coming to friendly terms with birds and squirrels and brooding upon the the strange shapes of scattered clouds. Here I am free to think about life's meanings, and whatever pleases or puzzles me.Here I really learn how little I really need in order to be happy. Every smell and noise and breeze and stirring of thought lightly echoes, and adds to the total of me, and all I have ever acquired in the way of learning and knowledge.

To live a fruitful and interesting life, I believe that our thoughts must wander up and down, to and fro. Such thoughts require space and freedom from impact. People who like to be alone are always people who like to think. Thoughts require room to explode, bounce around, or lie dormant, if necessary. Thinkers, therefore, instinctively avoid a crowd, and secede into secret seclusion whenever conditions permit.

When I am in the solitude of the woods, I like to think. Alone, but not lonely, I postulate philosophies, explore my soul, and in the midst of wilderness, listening to the large soft silence, expose my likes and angers, wishes and disappointments, I examine each, and put it in its place. Alone, I redefine my appreciation of the people with whom I live.

At times I need only a few hours; at other times I need a few days withdrawal1o restore myself to the point where I am smothered with seclusion and silence, Then I am ready to return to the hubbub of family and busy people, where I can easily slide back into the ordinary rhythm of my life.

Aloneness is a means, a method to meditation and results in three paradoxes. The first is that a person who truly wishes to find himself must lose himself.

Secondly, the person who is truly alone, is also most fully with others.

Finally, when a thinker stops asking questions, the answer most properly comes, while he is alone, in communion with the Source of Creation, God Himself.

It is in our reflections during these moments that we discover the meaning of our physical existence, the root of our spiritual life, and the necessity of amplifying our meditation and prayer life.

Pat

"In the great teaching of the Vedas,
there is no touch of sectarianism.
It is of all ages, climes and nationalities
and is the royal road for the attainment
of the Great Knowledge."

Henry David Thoreau

Yes, it's early Monday morning here in the East, and I'm giving myself the liberty to come here and post.

I grew up in a small city on the Massachusetts-New Hampshire border. From age 7 until age 18, I lived in a house across the street from Round Pond in Haverhill, Massachusetts. Manufacturing shoes was its main industry. Kenoza Lake, less than a mile from where I lived, was the largest part of the small city's water supply. Round Pond across the street provided ice for iceboxes.

There was an ice house near the end of Concord Street, the country street where I lived. It was a kind of eerie place, I thought as a kid. Sawdust all around, darkness inside and musty and cold. Men went out on the pond and sawed cakes of ice which they took back to the icehouse; packed in sawdust and wood shavings and later sold to smalltime dealers who sold it door to door.

Those of you who are familiar with northern Massachusetts know that Winters are long and cold with much snowfall after the ponds and lakes freeze over in October. My mother died in April, 1940, and my two younger sisters and brother came to that house where I'd been taken the day after I had polio five years before, and lived with our aunt and uncle and me two years before they went to New Hampshire to live with my father.

The following winter, we went out on the pond; shoveled the snow off a space maybe 10 feet by 8 feet, so my brother and sisters could skate. I couldn't skate, so sat on a sled and watched them. Once in a while we'd take the old Victrola wind-up portable record player and records over and play music for them to skate by.

March was cold when I was a kid, and there always was a bad snowstorm around St. Patrick's Day. April Fool's Day brought some hope that the snow and ice would melt, but the weather always let us down. It was late in the month when the ice in the pond began to break up, and we had some signs of Spring with crocuses beginning to poke their heads up at the foot of the chimney of the house.

I don't remember hearing the ice creak in the pond as it melted when I was a kid, but in the 70's when I moved back to my hometown from New York after my marriage ended, I lived very near the Merrimack River on which Haverhill is located, and recall being wakened at night by the sound of the ice as it broke up and began its journey southeast to Newburyport and the sea.

When we were children and the first of May came, my brother and sisters and I hoped that perhaps we could take our long, brown, lisle stockings off and hang up our winter coats and snowsuits at last, but that didn't always happen. Nevertheless, we made May baskets in which we put the few early Spring wildflowers we could find and took them to school to our teachers. When warm weather finally came close to Memorial Day, there was an enormous sense of relief -- relief that we'd managed to get through the long winter so we could feel the warmth of the sun. These are a few of the memories that Thoreau's chapter on Spring at Walden Pond brings back to me.

Mal

Thoreau's writing on economics does show his frugality, but also points out the necessity for saving at that particular time period,

The writer talks about the necessities of life a century ago, at a time when wages were 0.60 cents to a dollar a day for laborers, when workers were not organized, and there was no union to protect them from exploitation.

Having worked for that same wage myself in this century I can easily understand his thriftiness.

Like Barbara, I can see the symbolism used by Thoreau, when he mentions the alligators, as the fleecing of the laborers by their employers, who lived more luxurious lifes than their workers.

When Thoreau says he regrets the inability of man to live in an hour through all the ages of man, to absorb every bit of knowledge, history, poetry and mythology, I think of how far we have advanced in this century in our life time and I realize how fortunate we are to have the computer capability and literacy that we now enjoy.

During the depression my family household consisted of a mother and father and 14 children, living in a house near the railroad yards, coming into continual contact with the hoboes and vagrants who rode the rails, sometimes tasting their "mulligan stew" down by the tracks, or having them sitting at our table with us, sharing food and stories, without benefit of the government grants, foodstamps, and social benefits so easily available today.

In spite of the fact that there was such a lack of jobs available in 1936 when I graduated from High School, I was able to get a job at the Grand Union Store for the marvelous salary of $7.00 for a 70 hour week, and was very grateful to the friend who got me the job.

  Money was very limited, and radio was just beginning to be received from transmitters broadcasting across the St. Lawrence River from Canada.

My grandfather had purchased a radio, so we children found many excuses to visit grandpa, in order to listen to this marvelous invention.

It was called an Atwater-Kent , and consisted of a long black box filled with tubes. It could be used either with head-phones or a huge horn speaker which sat on the top.

During WW2 my 3rd Infantry Division was trapped on the Anzio Beachead for 5 months.

As a diversion from the continual artillery and mortar shell fire we were receiving, I was able to build a crystal radio receiver. I used 2 flashlight batteries, a razor blade, headphones and a piece of copper wire.

With this equipment we could hear Axis Sally and the enemy propaganda, music and broadcasts from Rome.

   After WW2 I was able to build my first tv set from a kit, and I was amazed to realize how far technology had advanced during the four years I was away at war.

I look back on the years since my high school days with amazement. At that time there were no birth control pills, and no population explosion.

This was before TV, pencilin, polio shots, antibiotics and frisbees, before frozen foods,nylon, dacron xerox radar, fluorescent lights, credit cards and ballpoint pens.

Timesharing meant togetherness, not computers. Hardware meant hardware. Software was not even a word. Instant Coffee, McDonalds and Burger King were unheard of, and fast food was what we ate for Lent.

This was before FM radio, tape recorders, electric typewriters, word processors, electronic music, digital clocks and disco dancing. This was before the 40 hour week and the minimum wage.

We got married and then we lived together. Grass was mowed, coke was something you drank, and pot was something you cooked in.

  In the mid-thirties there were no vending machines, jet planes, helicopters and interstate highways. "Made in Japan" meant junk, and "making out" referred to how you did on an exam.

  In our time there were 5 and 10 cent stores where you could buy things for 5 or 10 cents. For just one dime you could ride the street car all day. For a nickle you could make a phone call, or buy a coke or ice cream cone or buy enough stamps to mail one letter and two post cards.

During the depressionyou could buy a new Chevy coupe or a Ford Sedan for $659.00 but who could afford it? Nobody. Very sad, because gas was 11 cents a gallon.

If anyone had asked us to explain CIA, NATO, UFO, NFL, JFK. or ERA we would have said, " that must be alphabet soup."

In the years that have transpired since I graduated, we have come from the horse and buggy age with the outside privies, kerosene lanterns, and all of the limitations, to the rocket age, where we now explore the outer limits of the universe.

This evolution is the result of man's brainpower, Godpower, and faith in God's Grace, combined with man's inventiveness and ingenuity.

With God's help, nothing is impossible.

  Pat Bruyere

The chapter isn’t really written though as a statement of social justice. He sounds like a kid that has had the advantage of higher education, which was a privilege enjoyed by a select few and now he, in a superior way, lecturs on how much is enough.

"What everybody echoes or in silence passes by as true today may turn out to be falsehood tomorrow, mere smoke of opinion" Now haven't we all found that to be true time and time again in the last fifty years?

Charles Stearns Wheeler - A brilliant scholar at Harvard, he was a classmate and friend of Henry David Thoreau.

In 1837, the two spent a summer vacation in a cabin Wheeler had built on the shore of Flint’s (Sandy) Pond in Lincoln, Massachusetts. This experience is generally believed to have been a source of inspiration for Thoreau’s later and more famous residence at Walden.

Thoreau's College essays: "Titus pomponius Atticus, as an Example," - "Social Forms and Restraints," - "The Morality of Living," - "Various Means of Public Influence," - "Provincial Americans," - "The Superior and the Common Man," - "Barbarism and Civilization," - "Conformity in Things Unessential," - "The Sublimity of Death."

His Speech: "The Commercial Spirit."

"Transcendentalism" is a much misunderstood term. It is not connected with any form of meditation. Simply defined, it is a form of idealism. Among other things, it is a belief that the world and everything in it has a spiritual basis, and that God speaks directly to human beings through intuition as well as through nature.

As a philosophical term; The “transcendentals” were notions, such as unity, truth, goodness, and being, which were wider than the categories. Since these went beyond the categories, they were said to transcend them. In a metaphysical sense, the Scholastics considered the “transcendent” the opposite of the “immanent,” and, in this manner, the doctrine of Divine Transcendence was opposed to the doctrine of Divine Immanence

The New England Transcendentalists to some extent followed and creatively transformed German transcendental philosophy. This German portion of their history, influence, and intellectual lineage is exceedingly vast and varied, involving such disparate authors, dramatists, scholars, philosophers, theologians, poets, educators, and reformers as; von Herder, Lessing, Immanuel Kant, von Schelling, Schiller, Schleiermacher, Wilhelm Martin, Leberecht de Wette, David Friedrich Strauss, Weisse, Wolff, and Novalis.

In a stricter sense, transcendentalism refers to a celebrated distinction first made by the great philosopher "Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). whose "Critique of Pure Reason" was published in 1781, and opened a new epoch in metaphysical thought. . . Thus far in the history of philosophy the human mind had not been fairly considered. Thinkers had concerned themselves with the objects of knowledge, not with the mind that knows."

Johann Gottfried von Herder was a brilliant German critic, theologian, and philosopher whose work anticipated the spiritual concepts inherent in Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. The New England Transcendentalists were stimulated by his spiritual outlook, which emphasized the perfection of nature, the interconnectedness of all phenomena, the illimitability of humankind, the power of reason, and the nobility of conscience.

Charles Stearns Wheeler, heard Schelling in person when he presented his famous lectures on the philosophy of revelation—attempting to harmonize faith and science—in Berlin in 1842. Schelling restored the external world to its place as an objective reality, no fiction, no projection from the human mind. Subject and object, in his view, were one, but in the ABSOLUTE, the universal soul, the infinite and eternal mind. His original fire mist was the unorganized intelligence of which the universe was the expression.

Schiller influenced Margaret Fuller, who taught German using his works. Schiller’s corresponds with Goethe who was influenced by Spinoza.

Spinoza influenced Emerson and Thoreau. Thoreau's thoughts on the human community in Walden reflects Spinoza's Stoic approach to ethics, wherein the greatest joy is a human nature that is perfectly aware and accepting of its place in and unity with the universe. As a philospher Thoreau is labeled as essentially a philosopher of individualism, who placed nature above materialism in private life and ethics above conformity in politics.

Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg, better-known by his pseudonym Novalis, was a German poet, novelist, essayist, and philosopher whose quote "Philosophy can bake no bread, but she can procure for us God, Freedom, and Immortality" is later chosen as the motto for the Journal of Speculative Philosophy.

When the word is used in a very general sense, transcendentalism can well be seen to include all philosophers from Plato to Bradley.

"The old have no very important advice to give the young, their own experience has been so partial, and their lives have been such miserable failures, for private reasons, as they must believe; and it may be that they have some faith left which belies that experience, and they are only less young than they were. I have lived some thirty years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors. They have told me nothing, and probably cannot tell me any thing, to the purpose. Here is life, an experiment to a great extent untried by me; but it does not avail me that they have tried it. If I have any experience which I think valuable, I am sure to reflect that this my Mentors said nothing about."

Thoreau seems to be saying that he himself learned nothing from his College Education or from the older mentors, teachers and people he was aquainted with, and his effective education was really acquired from "the School of Hard Knocks" and that in his writings he was attempting to pass this advice on to his readers.

I myself write to my grandchildren regularly by e-mail and try to pass on to them lessons I have learned in my life- time:

We, were raised during the world wide depression era, and our culture was developed from the difficulties and happy episodes we endured during that time.

We tried so hard to make things better for our own kids that we made them worse.

For you, my grandchildren, I'd like better. I'd really like for youy to know about hand me down clothes and homemade ice cream and leftover meat loaf sandwiches. I really would.

I hope you learn humility by being humiliated, and that you learn honesty by being cheated.

I hope you learn to make your own bed and mow the lawn and wash the car.

And I really hope nobody gives you a brand new car when you are sixteen.

It will be good if at least one time you can see puppies born and your old dog put to sleep.

I hope you get a black eye fighting for something you believe in.

I hope you have to share a bedroom with your younger brother/sister. And it's all right if you have to draw a line down the middle of the room,but when he wants to crawl under the covers with you because he's scared, I hope you let him.

When you want to see a movie and your little brother/sister wants to tag along, I hope you'll let him/her.

I hope you have to walk uphill to school with your friends and that you live in a town where you can do it safely.

On rainy days when you have to catch a ride, I hope you don't ask your driver to drop you two blocks away so you won't be seen riding with someone as uncool as your Mom.

If you want a slingshot, I hope your Dad teaches you how to make one instead of buying one.

I hope you learn to dig in the dirt and read books. When you learn to use computers, I hope you also learn to add and subtract in your head.

I hope you get teased by your friends when you have your first crush on a boy\girl, and when you talk back to your mother that you learn what ivory soap tastes like.

May you skin your knee climbing a mountain, burn your hand on a stove and stick your tongue on a frozen flagpole. I don't care if you try a beer once, but I hope you don't like it. And if a friend offers you dope or a joint, I hope you realize he is not your friend.

I sure hope you make time to sit on a porch with your Grandma/Grandpa and go fishing with your Uncle.

May you feel sorrow at a funeral and joy during the holidays.

I hope your mother punishes you when you throw a baseball through your neighbor's window and that she hugs you and kisses you at Hannukah/Christmas time when you give her a plaster mold of your hand.

These things I wish for you - tough times and disappointment, hard work and happiness. To me, it's the only way to appreciate life.

"...I used to see a large box by the railroad, six feet long by three wide, in which the laborers locked up their tools by night; and it suggested to me that every man who was hard pushed might get such a one for a dollar, and, having bored a few auger holes in it, to admit the air at least, get into it when it rained and at night, and hook down the lid, and so to have freedom in his love, and in his soul be free."

• He reads Emerson's Nature, Goethe, and modern German philosophy. Emerson addresses his "American Scholar" to Thoreau's graduating class.
  
  
• Thoreau receives his degree from Harvard College, graduating 19th in a class of 44.
  
  
• He meets Emerson, who becomes his mentor and friend: "'What are you doing now?' he asked. 'Do you keep a journal?' So I make my first entry today." Thoreau's lifelong Journal will reach seven thousand pages.
  
  
• Thoreau accepts a teaching position at Concord's public school but, unwilling to administer routine corporal punishments, he resigns after two weeks.
  
  
• Thoreau's mother and sisters are among the founding members of the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society.
  
  
• Financial panic launches the U.S.'s first nationwide economic depression. Henry's family's precarious finances will stabilize only with the success of John

Well Barb, you did say our discussion should highlight things that strike us- and the above strikes. - and interests me in the timliness of the statement, one that was as provocative then as it is now.

• 1 rod onion and leeks
• 1/2 rod carrots
• 1/2 rod Windsor beans
• 1 rod parsnips
• 3 rods cabbages, with a row of scarlet runners to be planted round the edges, to give a yield of 525 cabbages
• 4 rods early potatoes
• 4 rods Prussian potatoes
• 6 rods Devonshire Potatoes
• a handful of Cobbett dwarf Indian corn would provide feed for fowl and pigs
• 1 rod (if room for the 1 rod or sown in and around) the quick growth crops that rotate after each harvest; radishes, early peas and beans, cos lettuce, barley, leeks and cucumbers.

Too bad this statement was not examined by each succeeding generation, perhaps our way of life today would be very different, and ideally more peaceful. I wonder now in my past under 'what light' I hoed my gardens and will try to gather from you all an awareness of the various lights available for my future. was it on this discussion way back - or another- that we explored the gardening metaphors and similies?

It appeared to me that for a like reason men remain in their present low and primitive condition; but if they should feel the influence of the spring of springs arousing them, they would of necessity rise to a more ethereal life.

 "Notwithstanding much cant and hypocrisy - chaff which I find it difficult to separate from my wheat, but for   which I am as sorry as any man - I will breathe freely and stretch myself in this respect........and I am resolved that I will not through humility become the devil's attorney."

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn and what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive live into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, and if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it was sublime, to know by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

for a man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.

Smoky was the reconnoaissance scout for my plattoon and the best example of stoicism I can think of. Even in the most dangerous situations, his face was always impassive and expressionless.

His quiet endurance, and his indifference to danger, pleasure or pain made him an invaluable asset to his platoon.

During army basic traing the recruits would frequently make good natured jokes about, and to each other, about their   racial or ethnic background or accents and method of speaking.

They respected those differences after going through many battles together in Africa. Sicily, Italy and France, and could distinquish the unique qualities that each soldier excelled in, because of their cultural backgrounds.

Smoky was invaluable as a recon scout. point man on patrol, or as part of the Forward Observation Team, because of his keen Indian intuition, knowledge   and discernment.

One of the many jokes the platoon related about Smoky ocurred during the "Battle of the Bulge", when no one knew where the front lines were, and Smoky was sent forward on recon by the Battalion M/Sgt.

According to the Master/ Sgt., General George Patton came riding forward in his jeep. with his fender pennants flying and got out and asked the Sgt. where the front line was.

The Sgt.walked forward with the General a short distance and they came upon Smoky at the cross roads on his stomach with his ear pressed to the ground in the middle of the road.

The Sgt.was very proud of Smoky's abilility so he says to the General, " Sir. do you see that Indian?"

"Yeah," says the General.

"Look," says the Sgt., "He's listening to the ground. He can hear things for miles in any direction."

Just then the Indian stares up at the General and says impassively, "German Command car. green. now about two miles away.It contains two officers, one Captain and one Major with pistols and two soldiers with rifles."

"Incredible!" says the General to the Sgt.. "This Indian knows how far away they are, how many officers,how many soldiers, what color their vehicle is, who is in the car. and their rank and how they are armed, amazing!"

The Indian looks up stoically without any expression on his face and says, "They ran over me about a half hour ago, when I had my ear pressed to the ground, More are coming. Drag me out of the way, and jump in the ditch and duck!"

Pat

"Tis the good reader that makes the good book...in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear." --Ralph Waldo Emerson

My brother, Jack, went to high school and shared sports with his best friend, Joe. After graduation Joe became a steam locomotive engineer for the New York Central Railroad.

Jack married a former high school sweetheart and they moved to an area in the city where the railroad tracks ran near their house.

When friend Joe would take off for NY City everyday at 6.00 AM , with his locomotive pulling a long load of freight and passenger cars, he would blow his train whistle loud and long on purpose when he went by Jack's house, to wake Jack and his wife up.

As Jack and his wife did not have to get up until 8.00 AM to go to work, that left them wide awake in bed together, with 2 hours to spend before they got dressed.

Jack and his wife blame friend Joe's loud train whistle for the fact that they are now the parents of 14 children.

They called the last child "Quits".

The Constellation Cassiopeia

The Story of Cassiopeia

The Pleiades star cluster, also known as the Seven Sisters and Messier 45, is a conspicuous object in the night sky with a prominent place in ancient mythology.

Digetal image from Cerro Tololo Observatory of the Open Star Cluster of the Hyades.

the Hyades: In the constellation of Taurus the bull are two famous clusters of stars. The stars in them are, in mythology, sisters. The more famous of the two, is the Pleiades or Seven Sisters; more sparse, and more important astronomically, are the Hyades. The Hyades and the bright star Aldebaran make up the V shaped face of Taurus.

An old Arab story tells of Aldebaran, the Brightest star in Taurus, who was rejected by one of the sisters because he was so poor. He left the sky to pursue his fortune and became wealthy after long and arduous labor.

CONSTELLATIONS - A Brief Introduction includes link to Altair

Chinese star festival celebrates two lovers kept apart by the celestial river, The Milky Way. The lovers are represented by the stars Vega and Altair.

The Girl Weaver and A Peasant one of the famous Chinese legend... One day, the seven daughters of the Taoist God felt that is bore to stay in the heaven. Therefore, they decided to go down to the heaven for a walk. That was a humid day. When the seven ladies got down to the earth, the first thing they saw was a beautiful pond with clear and cool water, with colorful flowers, singing birds, green and lively grass around.

Harivamsa, Harivansa (Sanskrit) The lineage of Hari, or Krishna. A celebrated poem of 16,374 verses, generally regarded as a part of the Mahabharata, but believed by some to be of much later date than the greater epic. It treats of the adventures of the family of Krishna, being divided into three parts: an introduction that traces the dynasty; the life and adventures of Krishna; and the conditions occurring during the kali yuga and the future condition of the world.

Krishna krsna (Sanskrit) Black, dark, dark blue; the most celebrated and eighth avatara of Vishnu. Hindus consider him their savior, and he is worshiped as the most popular of their gods. Krishna was born some 5000 years ago, the incarnated human spiritual power that closed the dvapara yuga -- his death in 3102 BC marked the beginning of kali yuga. He was the son of Devaki and the nephew of Kansa, who parallels King Herod.

The life of Krishna bears interesting and occasionally striking similarities to the legends of other spiritual teachers. The lives of all those great spiritual messengers were recorded by initiates in the language of symbol and allegory. Krishna's conception, birth, and childhood are in essentials a prototype of the New Testament story.

One portion of the Mahabharata, the Bhagavad-Gita, contains the teachings given by Krishna to Arjuna as his guide and spiritual instructor, teachings which are the quintessence of the highest yoga. The details of Krishna's life are symbolically given in the Puranas.

Kala (Sanskrit) A small part of anything, especially a 16th part; also a cycle, variously given as 1/900 part of a day -- 1.6 minutes; 1/1800 -- 0.8 minutes; etc. Used for the seven substrata of the elements or dhatus of the human body (flesh, blood, fat, phlegm, urine, bile, semen) there being 3015 kalas or atoms in every one of the six dhatus.

Also any practical mechanical or fine art, 64 being enumerated.

Kala Brahma (Gouri) (Sanskrit) Another name for the god Sabda Brahma, a mystic name for akasa or the astral light, the source of occult sounds and the power of mantras. Sabda Brahma's "vehicle is called Shadja, and the latter is the basic tone in the Hindu musical scale. It is only after . . . passing through the study of preliminary sounds, that a Yogi begins to see Kala Brahma, i.e., perceives things in the Astral Light."

Kala-chakra (Sanskrit) Wheel of time; in Tibetan Dus-Kyi-Khorlo, part of the Kanjur, rewritten by Tsong-kha-pa. Also a synonym for yuga or cycle.

Devaki (Sanskrit) The mother of Krishna. She was shut up in a dungeon by her brother, King Kansa, for fear of the fulfillment of a prophecy that a son of hers would dethrone and kill him. Not-with-standing the strict watch kept, Devaki was overshadowed by Vishnu, the holy spirit, and thus gave birth to that god's avatara, Krishna as the incarnated ray of the Logos.

In later mythology Devaki became the anthropomorphized form of Aditi or cosmic space, just as the Hebrew Mary became a celestial entity. The seven sons of Devaki killed by Karsa before the birth of Krishna symbolize the seven human principles. We must rise above them before reaching the ideal, Krishna, the Christ or the Buddha state, thus centering ourselves in the highest, the seventh or first.

That Pose of Sri Damodara

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...expressive of a mind which has reached the gelatnious, mildewy stage in the mortification of all healthy and courageous thought. It reminded me of ghouls and idiots and insane howlings.

Ben Jonson 1572 - 1637 Jonson was in conflict with the authorities and imprisoned resulting from the presumed slander in his collaborative plays The Isle of Dogs (1597) and Eastward Ho! (1604), Jonson was threatened with prosecution by the people he attacked in Poetaster, and the commercial failures of Poetaster and Sejanus.

Ben Jonson

And than this bit about other play writes depicting Johnson in a character. Seems there was a big quarrel between Johnson and Marston who wrote a part for a character called Anaides who was a critic and supposed to duplicate Johnson -- this is what is said:

The Marston play is a plot against Crites, who, they agree to give out, is a plagiary, "all he does is dictated from other men," and "the time and place where he stole it" is known. Anaides is described as one "who will censure or discourse of anything, but as absurdly as you would wish. His fashion is not to take knowledge of him that is beneath him in clothes. He never drinks below the salt." He has a voice like the opening of some justice’s gate or a postboy’s horn, "a great proficient in all the illiberal sciences...He will blaspheme in his shirt. The oaths which he vomits at one supper would maintain a town of garrison in good swearing a twelve month." We hear from him that, in argument with Crites, "because I could not construe an author I quoted at first sight, he went away and laughed at me.” Anaides revenges himself by describing Crites as smelling of "lamp-oil with studying by candle-light."

be-longed', was a part of.
cor'po-ral, an officer next below a sergeant.
cond-di'tion(-dish'un), state.
sur'geon (-jun), a doctor who

sets broken limbs, cures wounds, & c.

sus-pend'ers, gallowses.
cav'al-ry, a body of soldiers who serve on horseback.

LITTLE EDDIE, THE DRUMMER, CONCLUDED.

1. Eddie, as he was called, was now the drummer

of the company. All the men became very fond of him. When they got any watermelons, or peaches, on their march, he was always served first. He and the great, stout fifer became warm friends. When they had to cross a stream, the fifer would take little Eddie on his back, and so carry him over.

2. The company to which our little drummer belonged

was in the battle of Wilson's Creek, in which the brave General Lyon fell. The next morning little Eddie was not to be seen, but from a distance, in the woods, the sound of his drum was heard.

3. A corporal of the company went out to look for him,

and found him seated on the ground, his back leaning against the trunk of a fallen tree, while his drum hung upon a bush in from of him, reaching nearly to the ground.

4. As soon as he saw his friend he dropped his drumsticks,

and exclaimed, "O, corporal, I am so glad to see you! Give me a drink of water." The corporal turned to bring him some water froma brook that was near by, when Eddie, Thinking that he was going to leave him, began to cry, saying. "Don't leave me, corporal; I can't walk." Poor little Eddie! both his feet had been carried away by a cruel cannon ball.

This continues for 8 sections that include the explanation that a fallen rebel soldier lying near by had seen the boy's condition and crawled to take off his suspenders made of deerskin and tied then tightly around Eddie's legs, below the knee - this is followed by how kind the man was and how we should not be fighting -

This story finishes up in true Victorian fashion with the the sound of horses and although the officer is kind-hearted and takes Eddie onto his own horse

"when they had reached their camp, little Eddie was dead."

"simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half-a-dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail."

"For the gods keep hidden from men the means of livelihood. Otherwise, working even for one day only you would easily make enought to provide you for a whole year without working; soon you would put aside the rudder [of your ship] over the smoke [of your hearth], and the work of the oxen and the sturdy mules would disappear."

Solitude

Laugh, and the world laughs with you;

Weep, and you weep alone,

For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,

But has trouble enough of its own.

Sing, and the hills will answer;

Sigh, it is lost on the air,

The echoes bound to a joyful sound,

But shrink from voicing care.

Rejoice, and men will seek you;

Grieve, and they turn and go.

They want full measure of all your pleasure,

But they do not need your woe.

Be glad, and your friends are many;

Be sad, and you lose them all,--

There are none to decline your nectar'd wine,

But alone you must drink life's gall.

Feast, and your halls are crowded

Fast, and the world goes by.

Succeed and give, and it helps you live,

But no man can help you die.

There is room in the halls of pleasure

For a large and lordly train,

But one by one we must all file on

Through the narrow aisles of pain.

Poems of Passion. by Ella Wheeler. Chicago: Belford, Clarke & Co, 1883.

Now this one I find so much more meaningful - What do you think?

FROM LONELINESS TO SOLITUDE

We enter the world alone.
We leave the world alone.
We stand before God alone.
Aloneness is a universal human experience.
There is great value in standing alone.
Being aware of aloneness
And not loneliness, (which is negative)
Is a state not many of us achieve.
We fear being alone with ourselves.
We try to fill that void (avoid the void)
With distractions, people, noise, etc.
We fear the quiet path leading to our inner selves,
And the dark side of our hearts.
But, it is in such solitude that we discover
Our inner riches and strengths,
And discover too, the real person God has created.
In solitude we can find our true connection to God.
The desert is an image of solitude.
Many go there to seek peace and joy.
Our hearts are receptacles during these peaceful times
And nature can provide the space to be present with ourselves.
Other settings for the introduction of solitude
Are sunrises, sunsets, oceans, rainbows, etc.
As the flower blooms in the silent desert,
So may our hearts bloom in peaceful solitude.

-- poem by Ann Winter from her booklet "Friends for all Reasons"

But my all time favorites are - William Wordsworth's I WANDERED lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;...
And John Keats O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell

"How sweet, how passing sweet, is solitude!   
                      But grant me still a friend in my retreat,  
                      Whom I may whisper, 'Solitude is sweet'.

One inconvenience I sometimes experienced in so small a house, the difficulty of getting to a sufficient distance from my guest when we began to utter the big thoughts in big words. You want room for your thoughts to get into sailing trim and run a course or two before they make their port. The bullet of your thought must have overcome its lateral and ricochet motion and fallen into its last and steady course before it reaches the ear of the hearer, else it may plow out again through the side of his head.

If we would enjoy the most intimate society with that in each of us that is without, or above, being spoken to, we must not only be silent, but commonly so far apart bodily that we cannot possibly hear each other's voice in any case.

"but because we baited our fish-hooks with darkness, namely, misanthropy and melancholy, making us strangers in our own house."

"I only know myself as a human entity; the scene, so to speak, of thoughts and affections; and am sensible of a certain doubleness by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another. However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as if were, is not a part of me, but spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it; and that is no more I than it is you."

Whom I may whisper, 'Solitude is sweet'.

"Sounding the depths of the Walden Pond of our natures?" Jonathan, what kind of rarefied stuff were you sniffing at the top of that mountain you climbed while you were away? May I suggest that next time you keep your feet on lower ground and get acquainted with some nags at Nags Head; have a tete a tete with a tasty Georgia Peach and smell the camellias at a plantation in Charleston. The door is always open if you ever do go South and decide to drop by, only I tell you I'll never plumb the deep waters of my Walden Pond nature when you're around.

I loved this chapter of Walden. Thoreau sounds in such good humor. The time he spent with the Canadian woodsman was written so well. Here is a natural man who spends his time in Nature, a man who is very impressed by preachers and writers, a perfect audience for Thoreau, the intellectual, unlikely and unnatural naturalist, the "biped without feathers" who lived primarily in his mind.

Thoreau says about the woodsman when it came to writing his thoughts: "...but he could not tell what to put first, it would kill him, and then there was spelling to be attended to at the same time!" Here was a man of the woods whose only books were an almanac and an arithmetic face to face with an odd little man who spouted off Latin and Greek. When I was a kid, the Old Farmer's Almanac gave me hours and hours of enjoyment. It was different from what it is today and taught me a lot.

Then Thoreau meets a man who tells him he's "deficient in intellect". Of him, Thoreau says he was a "metaphysical puzzle". Poor complicated Thoreau.

Imagine having visitors like Mrs. Blank. "How came Mrs.--- to know that my sheets were not as clean as hers?"

Thoreau was more comfortable yelling across the pond to someone than he was in a room full of people, some of whom didn't know when the visit was over. He rustled up a Hasty Pudding, he says. In the annotated online version of this book I found, it describes a Hasty Pudding as one made from cornmeal. I wonder if it was Indian Pudding?

The Indian Pudding I knew as a child was made from yellow cornmeal, molasses, eggs and milk and baked a long time in a slow oven. Delicious with a glass of milk. It could well be what Thoreau made.

Mal

1. Basic Hasty Pudding
2. Everything you ever wanted to know about Hasty and Indian Pudding
3. And here is one I just had to include that calls for, would you believe, the addition of three pounds of cole slaw
4. "Although the first recipes for Indian Pudding did not appear in print prior to 1796, we know that Americans had been eating it for about 150 years before that time. The Dictionary of Americanisms (Chicago, 1951) records the first printed usage of the words"Indian Pudding"to be in the March 17-26, 1722, edition of The New England Courant, the third newspaper printed in Boston and the fourth in the British colonies."

• The story of Goffe and Whalley in a cave in Connecticut including photos of the cave.
• Why did Whalley and Goffe need to be lonely and concealed in Hadley?
• Policy of King Charles I for the American Colonies
• Edward Whalley (c. 1615-0. 1675), English regicide, the exact dates of whose birth and death are unknown, was the second son of Richard Whalley, who had been sheriff of Nottinghamshire in 1595, by his second wife Frances Cromwell, aunt of Oliver Cromwell.
• Robert Treat was the Governor of the Colony of Connecticut, 1683-1698
• The Hunt for the Regicides. In America they were not safe, Royalist messengers were sent from England to arrest them, and take them home to be tried. The Governor of Massachusetts pretended to be very eager to help these messengers. In reality he did nothing to help, but hindered them, rather. News of the search for the fugitives soon reached New Haven, and at once the people there helped them to hide.

"Consider the girls in a factory, -- never alone, hardly in their dreams. It would be better if there were but one inhabitant to a square mile, as where I live. The value of a man is not in his skin, that we should touch him."

Æolus was the Greek god of the winds. Æolian harp, a stringed instrument placed in an open window and vibrated by the winds. His own harp is in the Concord Antiquarian Society.

• Sketch of an Æolian Harp
• Could not figure out how this combersome looking harp was hung in the window of Thoreau's cabin till this site explains it all. How air plays across the Æolian Harp with photo
• Scroll down on this site which has the Harp playing Debussy's "Arabesque #1
• And here is where we can buy our harp - I want one - I want one. Completed or Kit for Aeolian Harp

"What is his place on earth? One view enjoined man to be humble; the other encouraged his pride. "In view of all these facts," Emerson proclaimed, "I conclude that other creatures reside inparticular places.... but the residence of man is the world. It was given to him to possess it."

Emerson accepted science largely because it answered his vast conceptions of man and God. To him it implied a rebellion against conservative pessimism. "But I think the paramount source of the religious revolution was Modern Science...."."

With a little more deliberation in the choice of their pursuits, all men would perhaps become essentially students and observers, for certainly their nature and destiny are interesting to all alike. In accumulating property for ourselves or our posterity, in founding a family or a state, or acquiring fame even, we are mortal; but in dealing with truth we are immortal, and need fear no change nor accident...

...I have had this advantage in books.

I think it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I have never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude…….

My Jewish friends have always said that it was closest to German, and it certainly sounds like German. I understand that the vocabulary became more Russian as you moved east and more German as you moved west.

Jack

A kind of cheating or a kind of idyll? What a luxury to every now and then touch base with the events ofo the world, glean what you wish and the retreat again to solitude in a protected environment.

"A man cannot free himself by any self-denying ordinances, neither by water nor potatoes, nor by violent possibilities, by refusing to swear, refusing to pay taxes, by going to jail, or by taking another man's crops or squatting on his land. By none of these ways can he free himself; no, nor by paying his debts with money; only by obedience to his own genius."


Ralph Waldo Emerson as quoted on page 384
Emerson: The Mind on Fire by Robert D. Richardson

"Mama told me I'd get sick from mixing pickles and milk, but I made up my mind I wouldn't, and I didn't."

”…..I was released the next day, obtained my mended shoe, and returned to the woods in season to get my dinner of huckleberries on Fair-Haven Hill. I was never molested by any person but those who represent the state. I had no lock nor bolt but for the desk which held my papers, not even a nail to put over my latch or windows. I never fastened my door night or day, though I was to be absent several days; not even when the next fall I spent a fortnight in the woods of Maine. And yet my house was more respected than if it had been surrounded by a file of soldiers.

In 1847 Cabet issued a call, “Forward to Icarie.” France was crowded, worn-out with a despotic government, and would never permit the establishment of modern communities, which soon would, by their example, revolutionize the society. In America it would be possible to build a communist colony of ten or twenty thousand people on the frontier, and in a few years millions would be converted. The response was tremendous. He was deluged with gifts, pledges, and recruits.

"...To earn their Walden by the turning of a cock or drawing of a plug! That devilish Iron Horse, whose ear-rending neigh is heard throughout town, has muddied the Boiling Springs with his foot, and he it is that has browsed off all the woods on Walden shore; that Trojan horse, with a thousand men in his belly, intro duced by mercenary Greeks!

Where is the country's champion, the Moore of Moore Hall, to meet him at the Deep Cut and thrust an avenging lance between the ribs of the bloated pest?

Moor of Moore Hall. The hero who slew the dragon in Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) Journal Ibid.

Thoreau and Channing make several short trips on the river near Concord. And Thoreau often revisits Walden Pond.

It finally comes out that Thoreau was less enamored with the railroad than he seemed to be. Journal June 17, 1853; V, 266. Or perhaps he had changed his mind about it.

In Connacht, Moore Hall was built in 1795 by George Moore, whose antecedents had fled to Europe with the "Wild Geese". George had done well in the wine trade in Spain and was able to return home to build his mansion at Ballyglass in County Mayo. George's son, John Moore, joined the United Irishmen and, when the French General Humbert landed at Killala in 1798 and declared Connacht a republic, he made John Moore its first, and last, president. The rising was quelled by the English and John, a gentle man, was jailed in Waterford where he died. The book, The Year of the French, is based on this episode. John's brother, George Henry Moore, is best remembered because he owned the horse, Croagh Patrick, which won the Stewart's Cup at Goodwood. George Augustus Moore (1852 - 1933), the novelist, was George's eldest son.

Signs were hung on all sides to allure him; some to catch him by the appetite, as the tavern and victualling cellar; some by the fancy, as the dry goods store and the jeweler's; and others by the hair or the feet or the skirts, as the barber, the shoe-maker, or the tailor. ...

The legend was recorded in a lighthearted ballad dating from 1699.

Some say that the whole tale is a satire based on a lawsuit over tithes in the reign of James 1. The dragon being Sir Frances Wortley, who held the disputed tithes, and More being the Attourney who set a lawsuit against him on behalf of nearby gentry. The spiked armour being a document full of names and seals of men pledged to oppose Wortley.

However, several motifs in the tale, such as the spiked armour, the well, and the (almost) invulnerable dragon argue that the 1699 poem was adapted from a far more ancient legend. Wantley, it seems, may once have had a very real dragon.

"...I have deliberately not led a quiet life but have neglected what occupies most people: wealth, household affairs, the position of general or public orator or the other offices, the political clubs and factions that exist in the city. I thought myself too honest to survive if I occupied myself with those things.

I did not follow that path that would have made me of no use either to you or to myself, but I went to each of you privately and conferred upon him what I say in the greatest benefit, by persuading him not to care for any of his belongings before caring that he himself should be as good and as wise as possible, not to care for the city's possessions more than for the city itself, and to care for other things in the same way.

What do I deserve for being such a Man? Some good, gentleman of the jury, if I must truly make an assessment according to my deserts, and something suitable."

I also heard as a child that there once were signs on Boston's bars saying "No Dogs or Irish allowed."

"The governer and his council faintly remember the pond, for they went a-fishing there when they were boys; but now they are too old and dignified to go a-fishing, and so they know it no more for ever. Yet even they expect to go to heaven at last. If the legislature regards it, it is chiefly to regulate the number of hooks to be used there; but they know nothing about the hook of hooks with which to angle of the pond itself, impaling the legislature for a bait."

"...escape reincarnation, to lose that fever of ego. Salvation does not come by faith, nor yet by works; it comes by such uninterrupted self-denial, by such selfless intuition of the part-engulfing Whole, that at last the self is dead."

"It is a mirror which no stone can crack, whose quicksilver will never wear off, whose gilding Nature continually repairs; no storms, not dust, can dim its surface ever fresh; - a mirror in which all impurity presented to it sinks, swept and dusted by the sun's hazy brush - this the light dust-cloth - which retains no breath that is breathed on it, but sends its own to float as clouds high above its surface, and be reflected on its bosom still...It is continually receiving new life and motion from above. It is intermediate in its nature between land and sky"

"May 25, 1853



"On this day, Thoreau and Emerson went for a walk together. They subsequently wrote about the event in their journal, each giving his own perspective of what happened.



"May 25, 1853 - from Thoreau's Journal



" 'Talked, or tried to talk, to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Lost my time--nay, almost my identity. He, assuming a false opposition where there was no difference of opinion, talked to the wind--told me what I know--and I lost my time trying to imagine myself somebody else to oppose him.'



"May 25, 1853 - from Emerson's Journal



" 'Henry is militant. He seems stubborn and implaccable; always manly and wise but rarely sweet. One would say that, as Webster could never speak without an antagonist, so Henry does not feel himself except in opposition. He wants a fallacy to expose, a blunder to pillory, requires a little sense of victory, a roll of the drum, to call his powers into full exercise.' "

Famous minister and uncle William Ellery Channing to Poet and Thoreau's friend, William Ellery Channing

In 1971 the source of water for Walden's Pond is found

The first American Pencil was made in Concord after the war of 1812 put an Embargo on European imports and Hanry David Thoreau's valuable contribution to the successful manufacture of the pencil. (He wasn't just a vagabond - He really did achieve great business success!)

In the spring of 1861, Henry David Thoreau needed a change of climate since he was in poor health and he decided on a trip to Minnesota. Good friend 17 year-old Horace Mann, Jr. quite the naturalist as well, accompanied Thoreau on his trip. (Together they carried out more research and field trips than vacationing.)

Whatever Happened to Thoreau's Hut Part I

Whatever Happened to Thoreau's Hut Part II

The Concord Magazine - New England Transcedentalism

John Soule, an Indiana newspaperman, was the one who actually used those words--"Go West, young man"-- in 1851, over ten years after Greeley wrote in his weekly New Yorker that "If you have no family or friends to aid you . . . turn your face to the Great West and there build up your home and fortune." It was the first of many such pronouncements, and Soule, like most of his colleagues in what was then considered "the West," regularly exchanged intelligence with the Tribune.

A Poet also visited him and together they made “that small house ring with boisterous mirth and resound with the murmur of much sober talk. A philosopher also stopped by. He was a great, ideal man whose personality made plain the image engraven in men’s bodies, the God of whom they are all but defaced and leaning monuments.” The narrator (always assumed by me to be Thoreau himself) was inspired by his conversation with the philosopher and felt a heightened spiritual awareness.

I weathered some merry snow-storms, and spent some cheerful winter evenings by my fireside, while the snow whirled wildly without, and even the hooting owl was hushed.

The history of American Soft Drinks - the first commercial soft drink available in 1830

The history of Pop - the first drinkable, man made glass of carbonated water in 1767 - Ginger Al was created in Ireland!

Make your own

Root Beers went through a major trauma in the 1960s, when the Food and Drug Administration banned any sassafras extract...

I laid a rule on the map lengthwise and then breadthwise and found to my surprise that the line of greatest length intersected the line of greatest breath exactly at the point of greatest depth, not withstanding that the middle is so nearly level, the outline of the pond is far from regular, and the extreme lengths and breaths were got by measuring into the coves; I said to myself, Who knows but this hint would conduct to the deepest part of the ocean as well as of a pond or puddle?

"The picturesque would be spoilt by admitting a fourth"

"Every body pretends to feel and tries to describe with the taste and elegance of him who first defined what picturesque beauty was"

Harold do you see your pond as the center of your homestead and more important representing your heartfelt feelings for your home?

"If we are part of nature, then we have to admit that what we build, like our cities, is as natural as a beaver dam, or a wasp's nest, or a termite mound. And that is something we don't want to admit, do we?"

"That line, "If it feels good, do it!" has got to be one of the dumbest phrases to come along in a lo-o-o-ng time.

Coyotes thrive on the habitat disturbances created by humans. In fact, the logging that was done in British Columbia's Fraser Valley created open farmlands and fields which the coyote needs to survive. It wasn't until the 1930's, after the area had been logged, that the coyote first appeared in the Fraser Valley. By 1980, Coyotes had moved into Stanley Park in Vancouver.

a wildlife biologist said...that the (Reno) region’s rapid population growth is responsible for drawing more of the wily canines. And they are larger and healthier than in other places because they get more food here and encounter fewer predators.

Coyotes originally moved into the central and western regions of Massachusetts in the 1950s, and they have been in the Eastern sections and Cape Cod since the 1970s. This canid species is now well established statewide. Coyotes are often seen individually, in pairs, or in small groups. The area a coyote uses may vary from 4 to 30 square miles.

Massachusetts - For all practical purposes, coyotes are no longer being hunted or trapped due to politics Yet we have already had one child attacked in less than two years after the trap ban passed. The article also used inflammatory writing with words like "slaughter, killing, exterminated." Normally one exterminates a species not a specific number of animals. The statement, "A powerful minority of Americans want coyotes dead, and so the slaughter will continue" while true fails to explain to the reader that

A. the number of ranchers and farmers have been declining in the U.S. for decades.
B. these ranchers lose money every time a coyote kills one of their animals.

By insinuating this undemocratic principle of minority rule, Mr. Finkel failed to adequately explain unfair financial burden ranchers would bear just because a bunch of city folk don't like coyotes to be controlled. Sounds to me like the oppressive majority. - Safari Club International - Wildlife Management is Beneficial and Necessary

Coyotes came to Massachusetts from Northern New England approximately 25 years ago. Although the coyote population cannot be tracked because of state legislation, it estimated that there are as many as 4,000 coyotes breeding in the state. Coyotes are being blamed for the disappearance of cats across Massachusetts.

Until the colonial settlement of North America by Europeans in the 18th and 19th centuries, coyotes were confined to the great plains of this continent...Although fur trappers in the 1700s reported a small "bush wolf" as far east as Massachusetts, coyotes were unable to compete with gray wolves (Canis lupus), which dominated the rich hunting grounds in the eastern half of North America. Yet, like so many of the large predators of the east (cougars, black bears, and bobcats), the gray wolf was hunted, trapped, and poisoned to near extinction. By the middle of the 19th century, the lack of competition from wolves allowed the coyote to expand its range and exploit the rich environments east of the Mississippi.

Looks like global warming may be another reason for the spread of wildlife into our cities

"During dry conditions our arroyos and canals become superhighways for wildlife," Aikens said. "You have coyotes sighted in downtown Phoenix and young mountain lions who are being kicked loose into the Prescott area to establish their own territory."

Chapter 14

• How successful is Thoreau turning exclusivly inward for inspiration?
• Is there any significance to the location of the homes of the former slaves?
• What do the images of the covered wells represent?
• How does he describe the impact of becoming marginalized?
• How does winter draw a line between nature and culture?
• Does his appreciation for society and village-life change as a result of the winter snow seperating him so that no longer can take his often walks to the village?

Chapter 15

• What fears is the owl projecting and how is Thoreau now describing the lake?
• What mood would you say has descended on Henry David Thoreau?
• Do you choose your music to parallel your mood or to change your mood?
• Does Thoreau have any spiritual inspiration as he describes nature during winter?
• What conflict does the conflict between the hounds and the fox represent and what fear does the fox represent to Thoreau?
• What does the "dropsical" hare come to represent for Thoreau?
• In what way do we see Thoreau's cynicism emerge - - how are the animals paralleling the villagers - how is the fox and the squirrel frustrating him and why? So what that Thoreau is frustrated, what does his frustration represent to us in our world today?
• How does Thoreau demonstrate his own reawakening from winter torpor?
• Have you ever experienced a "Winter of Discontent" or Melencholy - how did you reawaken from your depression or winter torpor?

Chapter 16

• How does Thoreau use the metaphor of awakening?
• Thoreau struggles against being dormant for three months metaphorically by opening the pond's eyes – his own perceptions – by cutting into the ice. What is Thoreau saying by exploring the depths of the pond?
• What is optimistic about the ice fishers?
• What is the metaphor of skinning the pond as if it were a living creature, demonstrate?

Bye Y'all - I had a great time and you were all wonderful during this discussion - I learned so much more than had I finally read Walden on my own - THANKS!

The June-July-August issue of the m.e.stubbs poetry journal is on the web. Writers Exchange WREX writers and guest contributors whose poetry appears in this issue, along with poems by many other poets, are John T. Baker, Mary Jane Rohr, ET (Bubble), Dr. Robert Bancker Iadeluca, Annafair and Marie DiMauro Fredrickson (Moxie). I am pleased to announce that two poems by Barbara St. Aubrey are in this issue. This is a large and varied collection of poetry, which I know you will enjoy.