Walden - extrait page 49 sur 152
My house was on the side of a hill, immediately on the
edge of the larger wood, in the midst of a young forest of pitch pines and
hickories, and half a dozen rods from the pond, to which a narrow footpath
led down the hill. In my front yard grew the strawberry, blackberry, and
life-everlasting, johnswort and goldenrod, shrub oaks and sand cherry, blueberry
and groundnut. Near the end of May, the sand cherry (Cerasus pumila) adorned
the sides of the path with its delicate flowers arranged in umbels cylindrically
about its short stems, which last, in the fall, weighed down with goodsized
and handsome cherries, fell over in wreaths like rays on every side. I tasted
them out of compliment to Nature, though they were scarcely palatable. The
sumach (Rhus glabra) grew luxuriantly about the house, pushing up through
the embankment which I had made, and growing five or six feet the first
season. Its broad pinnate tropical leaf was pleasant though strange to look
on. The large buds, suddenly pushing out late in the spring from dry sticks
which had seemed to be dead, developed themselves as by magic into graceful
green and tender boughs, an inch in diameter; and sometimes, as I sat at
my window, so heedlessly did they grow and tax their weak joints, I heard
a fresh and tender bough suddenly fall like a fan to the ground, when there
was not a breath of air stirring, broken off by its own weight. In August,
the large masses of berries, which, when in flower, had attracted many wild
bees, gradually assumed their bright velvety crimson hue, and by their weight
again bent down and broke the tender limbs. Henry David Thoreau (1817 à Concord dans le Massachusetts aux États-Unis, décédé le 6 mai 1862 également à Concord) |