n the system and the heart in man, but draws lines
through the length and breadth of the aggregate of a man's particular
daily behaviors and waves of life into his coves and inlets, and where
they intersect will be the height or depth of his character. Perhaps
we need only to know how his shores trend and his adjacent country
or circumstances, to infer his depth and concealed bottom. If he is
surrounded by mountainous circumstances, an Achillean shore, whose peaks
overshadow and are reflected in his bosom, they suggest a corresponding
depth in him. But a low and smooth shore proves him shallow on that
side. In our bodies, a bold projecting brow falls off to and indicates a
corresponding depth of thought. Also there is a bar across the entrance
of our every cove, or particular inclination; each is our harbor for
a season, in which we are detained and partially land-locked. These
inclinations are not whimsical usually, but their form, size, and
direction are determined by the promontories of the shore, the ancient
axes of elevation. When this bar is gradually increased by storms,
tides, or currents, or there is a subsidence of the waters, so that it
reaches to the surface, that which was at first but an inclination in
the shore in which a thought was harbored becomes an individual
lake, cut off from the ocean, wherein the thought secures its own
conditions--changes, perhaps, from salt to fresh, becomes a sweet sea,
dead sea, or a marsh. At the advent of each individual into this life,
may we not suppose that such a bar has risen to the surface somewhere?
It is true, we are such poor navigators that our thoughts, for the most
part, stand off and on upon a harborless coast, are conversant only with
the bights of the bays of poesy, or steer for the public ports of entry,
and go into the dry docks of science, where they merely refit for this
world, and no natural currents concur to individualize them.

As for the inlet or outlet of Walden, I have not discovered any but rain
and snow and evaporation, though perhaps, with a thermometer and a line,
such places may be found, for where the water flows into the pond it
will probably be coldest in summer and warmest in winter. When the
ice-men were at work here in '46-7, the cakes sent to the shore were one
day rejected by those who were stacking them up there, not being
thick enough to lie side by side with the rest; and the cutters thus
discovered that the ice over a small space wa