830 
"WALDEN. 
will decipher this hieroglyphic for us, that we may 
turn over a new leaf at last ? This phenomenon is 
more exhilarating to me than the luxuriance and fertility 
of vineyards. True, it is somewhat excrementitious in 
its character, and there is no end to the heaps of liver 
lights and bowels, as if the globe were turned wrong 
side outward ; but this suggests at least that Nature has 
some bowels, and there again is mother of humanity. 
This is the frost coming out of the ground ; this is Spring. 
It precedes the green and flowery spring, as mythology 
precedes regular poetry. I know of nothing more pur¬ 
gative of winter fumes and indigestions. It convinces 
me that Earth is still in her swaddling clothes, and 
stretches forth baby lingers on every side. Fresh curls 
spring from the baldest brow. There is nothing inor¬ 
ganic. These foliaceous heaps lie along the bank like 
the slag of a furnace, showing that Nature is “ in full 
blast ” within. The earth is not a mere fragment of 
dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a 
book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries 
chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which 
precede flowers and fruit, —not a fossil earth, but a 
living earth; compared with whose great central life all 
animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic. Its throes 
will heave our exuviae from their graves. You may 
melt your metals and cast them into the most beautiful 
moulds you can; they will never excite me like the 
forms which this molten earth flows out into. And not 
only it, but the institutions upon it, are plastic like clay 
in the hands of the potter. 
Ere long, not only on these banks, but on every hill 
