Thoreau closes Walden with a simple image of an insect hatching from within old wooden table. It’s a beautiful metaphor for the potential appearance of something amazing and surprising in an unexpected place:

Every one has heard the story which has gone the rounds of New England, of a strong and beautiful bug which came out of the dry leaf of an old table of apple-tree wood, which had stood in a farmer’s kitchen for sixty years…from an egg deposited in the living tree many years earlier still…, which was heard gnawing out for several weeks, hatched perchance by the heat of an urn….

Who knows what beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society, deposited at first in the alburnum of the green and living tree, which has been gradually converted into the semblance of its well-seasoned tomb,—heard perchance gnawing out now for years by the astonished family of man, as they sat round the festive board,—may unexpectedly come forth from amidst society’s most trivial and handselled furniture, to enjoy its perfect summer life at last!

I am including this passage in Not Less Than the Good. It is hopeful and optimistic.