Wild as if we lived on the marrow of antelopes devoured raw.[151] There would seem to be men in whose lives there have been no events of importance, more than in the beetle’s which crawls in our path. _March 19._ The ice in the pond is now soft and will not bear a heavy stone thrown from the bank. It is melted for a rod from the shore. The ground has been bare of snow for some weeks, but yesterday we had a violent northeast snow-storm, which has drifted worse than any the past winter. The spring birds—ducks and geese, etc.—had come, but now the spring seems far off. No good ever came of obeying a law which you had discovered. _March 23._ For a week past the elm buds have been swollen. The willow catkins have put out. The ice still remains in Walden, though it will not bear. Mather Howard saw a large meadow near his house which had risen up but was prevented from floating away by the bushes. _March 27._ Walden is two-thirds broken up. It will probably be quite open by to-morrow night. _March 30._ Spring is already upon us. I see the tortoises, or rather I hear them drop from the bank into the brooks at my approach. The catkins of the alders have blossomed. The pads are springing at the bottom of the water. The pewee is heard, and the lark. * * * * * “It is only the squalid savages and degraded boschmen of creation that have their feeble teeth and tiny stings steeped in venom, and so made formidable,”—ants, centipedes, and mosquitoes, spiders, wasps, and scorpions.—HUGH MILLER. To attain to a true relation to one human creature is enough to make a year memorable. The man for whom law exists—the man of forms, the conservative—is a tame man. CARRYING OFF SIMS A recent English writer (De Quincey),[152] endeavoring to account for the atrocities of Caligula and Nero, their monstrous and anomalous cruelties, and the general servility and corruption which they imply, observes that it is difficult to believe that “the descendants of a people so severe in their habits” as the Romans had been “could thus rapidly” have degenerated and that, “in reality, the citizens of Rome were at this time a new race, brought together from every quarter of the world, but especially from Asia.” A vast “proportion of the ancient citizens had been cut off by the sword,” and such multitudes of emancipated slaves from Asia had been invested with the rights of citizens “that, in a single generation, Rome became almost transmuted into a baser metal.” As Juvenal complained, “the Orontes ... had mingled its impure waters with those of the Tiber.” And “probably, in the time of Nero, not one man in six was of pure Roman descent.” Instead of such, says another, “came Syrians, Cappadocians, Phrygians, and other enfranchised slaves.” “These in half a century had sunk so low, that Tiberius pronounced her [Rome’s][153] very senators to be _homines ad servitutem natos_, men born to be slaves.”[154]