We love to see any redness in the vegetation of the temperate zone.  It is the color of colors.  This plant speaks to our blood.  It asks a bright sun on it to make it show to best advantage, and it must be seen at this season of the year.  On warm hill-sides its stems are ripe by the twenty-third of August.  At that date I walked through a beautiful grove of them, six or seven feet high, on the side of one of our cliffs, where they ripen early.  Quite to the ground they were a deep brilliant purple with a bloom, contrasting with the still clear green leaves.  It appears a rare triumph of Nature to have produced and perfected such a plant, as if this were enough for a summer.  What a perfect maturity it arrives at!  It is the emblem of a successful life concluded by a death not premature, which is an ornament to Nature.  What if we were to mature as perfectly, root and branch, glowing in the midst of our decay, like the Poke!  I confess that it excites me to behold them.  I cut one for a cane, for I would fain handle and lean on it.  I love to press the berries between my fingers, and see their juice staining my hand.  To walk amid these upright, branching casks of purple wine, which retain and diffuse a sunset glow, tasting each one with your eye, instead of counting the pipes on a London dock,—­what a privilege!  For Nature’s vintage is not confined to the vine.  Our poets have sung of wine, the product of a foreign plant which commonly they never saw, as if our own plants had no juice in them more than the singers.  Indeed, this has been called by some the American grape, and though a native of America, its juices are used in some foreign countries to improve the color of the wine; so that the poetaster maybe celebrating the virtues of the Poke without knowing it.  Here are berries enough to paint afresh the western sky, and play the bacchanal with, if you will.  And what flutes its ensanguined stems would make, to be used in such a dance!  It is truly a royal plant.  I could spend the evening of the year musing amid the Poke-stems.  And perchance amid these groves might arise at last a new school of philosophy or poetry.

* * * * *

From “Walden, or Life in the Woods.”

=_232._= WALDEN POND.

The greatest depth was exactly one hundred and two feet, to which may be added the five feet which it has risen since, making one hundred and seven.  This is a remarkable depth for so small an area; yet not an inch of it can be spared by the imagination.  What if all ponds were shallow?  Would it not react on the minds of men?  I am thankful that this pond was made deep and pure for a symbol.  While men believe in the infinite, some ponds will be thought to be bottomless.

* * * * *

From “Life without Principle.”

=_233._= WANTS OF THE AGE.