I opened Thoreau’s journals at random this morning (the
real thing, a codex), and found this:
Oct. 26.
I awoke this morning to infinite regret. In my
dream I had been riding, but the horses bit each other and
occasioned endless trouble and anxiety, and it was my
employment to hold their heads apart. Next I sailed over
the sea in a small vessel such as the Northmen used, as
it were to the Bay of Fundy, and thence overland I sailed,
still over the shallows about the sources of rivers toward
the deeper channel of a stream which emptied into the
Gulf beyond, - the Miramichi, was it? Again I was in my
own small pleasure-boat, learning to sail on the sea, and
I raised my sail before my anchor, which I dragged far
into the sea. I saw the buttons which had come off the
coats of drowned men, and suddenly I saw my dog -
when I knew not that I had one - standing in the sea up
to his chin, to warm his legs, which had been wet, which
the cool wind numbed. And then I was walking in a
meadow, where the dry season permitted me to walk further
than usual, and there I met Mr. Alcott, and we fell to
quoting and referring to grand and pleasing couplets and
single lines which we had read in times past ; and I quoted
one which in my waking hours I have no knowledge of, but
in my dream it was familiar enough. I only know that
those which I quoted expressed regret, and were like the
following, though they were not these, viz . :-
"The short parenthesis of life was sweet,"
"The remembrance of youth is a sigh," etc.
It had the word " memory " in it!! And then again the
instant that I awoke, methought I was a musical instrument
from which I heard a strain die out, - a bugle,
or a clarionet, or a flute. My body was the organ and
channel of melody, as a flute is of the music that is
breathed through it. My flesh sounded and vibrated
still to the strain, and my nerves were the chords of
the lyre. I awoke, therefore, to an infinite regret, - to
find myself, not the thoroughfare of glorious and world
stirring inspirations, but a scuttle full of dirt, such a
thoroughfare only as the street and the kennel, where,
pcrc1ianc,,,, the wind may sometimes draw forth a strain
of music from a straw.
I can partly account for this. Last evening I was
reading Laing's account of the Northmen, and though
I did not write in my Journal, I remember feeling a fertile
regret, and deriving even an inexpressible satisfaction,
as it were, from my ability to feel regret, which made that
evening richer than those which had preceded it. .I heard
the last strain or flourish, as I woke, played on my body
as the instrument. Such I knew I had been and might
be again, and my regret arose from the consciousness
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