some boasting housekeeper which keepeth open doors for one day […] and lives starvedly all the year after

Perhaps the finest part of it [the Lysjoch] is the grand sérac scenery of the Zwillinge Glacier. In August, 1876, a party of four, having missed the right track in crossing this pass when the snow was in very bad condition, were carried down in an avalanche of loose snow probably started by their own weight.

[N]obody knows how the wind is tempered to shorn Irish lambs, and in what marvellous places they find pasture.

In each case, we are reborn—a fact that explains [Henry David] Thoreau's preference here for the father tongue over the mother tongue, as [Stanley] Cavell explains: A son of man is born of woman; but rebirth, according to our Bible, is the business of the father. The rebirth of Walden will involve baptism in the waters of Walden Pond, and, by extension, in Walden, the book Thoreau endeavors to write in the father tongue.