PERTAINING TO

THOREAU

PERTAINING TO
THOREAU
" I f from all these sketches it were possible to make a
photographic ' composite,' I much doubt if the Recording
Angel could recognize the man by the picture."
THOREAU : A

DETROIT

EDWIN B. HILL
1901

GLIMPSE.

e>
&

i
\

TO

HENRY S. SALT
THOREAl/s

MOST SYMPATHETIC

T H I S VOLUME

IN

IS

BIOGRAPHER

INSCRIBED

CONTENTS.
PAGE
INTRODUCTORY
H.

D.

THOREAU'S

A WEEK

THOREAU
TOWN

THE

AND R U R A L

HUMBUGS,

DIOGENES,

13
35

BOOKS,

FORESTER,
D.

i
AND M E R R I M A C K R I V E R S ,

DIOGENES,
AND H I S

AMERICAN

HENRY

xi

BOOK,

ON T H E C O N C O R D

A YANKEE

AN

NOTE,

51
.

.

.

.

75
91
107

THOREAU,

117

THOREAU,

129

HENRY

DAVID THOREAU,

163

INTRODUCTORY

NOTE

INTRODUCTORY

I

NOTE.

T is the purpose of this collection of papers Pertaining to Thoreau to preserve and make easy
of access the earliest mentionings of him for such
students of his writings as may be interested to know
what was his reception at the hands of his cotemporaries. To trace the growing river of his fame to the
rivulets in which it had its beginning has been a pleasure to the compiler and he believes that these gatherings from out-of-the-way sources will be welcomed by
the readers of Thoreau.
Thoreau's first book fell still-born from the press
and Ripley's review, with its gentle remonstrance, may
point out the fault that caused its rejection by the
audience which Emerson thought would welcome the
young iconoclast.
Lowell's paper, though flippant and patronizing, contrasts strangely with his later review, which alone finds
a place in Lowell's collected writings. The altered
tone of the critic is explained by Emerson in a remark
dropped by him in one of his talks with Mr. Charles J.
Woodbury:

Xll

INTRODUCTORY

NOTE.

" J a m e s Russell Lowell is a man of w i t ; a genial man of
good inspirations, who can write poems of wit and something
better. H e has a good deal of self-consciousness, and never
forgave Margaret Fuller and T h o r e a u for wounding i t . "

As editor of The Atlantic Monthly, Lowell had elided
a passage from one of Thoreau's manuscripts, whereupon Thoreau refused to continue his contributions
to the magazine.
Lowell had read the Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers to good purpose, for he appropriated a
beautiful nature-picture from its pages when he delivered his Ledures on English Poets some few years later.
In the first of these brilliant leciures he says:
" W h o can doubt the innate charm of r h y m e whose eye has
ever been delighted by the visible consonance of a tree growing
at once toward an upward and a d o w n w a r d heaven, on the
edge of an unrippled river ; or as the kingfisher flies from shore
to shore, his silent echo flies u n d e r him and completes the vanishing couplet in the visionary world b e l o w . "

But in his account of that now-famous river journey,
Thoreau had written :
" A s we dipped our way along between fresh masses of foliage overrun with the grape and smaller flowering vines, the
surface was so calm, and both air and water so transparent, that
the flight of a kingfisher or robin over the river was as distinctly
seen in the water below as in the air a b o v e . "

Thoreau found the nugget that Lowell so deftly
coined: Thoreau had the seeing eye; Lowell the cunning hand.

INTRODUCTORY

NOTE.

Xlll

The paper by Mr. Briggs is chiefly noteworthy for
being the first published misconception of Thoreau
as akin to Diogenes. Briggs was Lowell's alter ego
and too much like him to comprehend Thoreau.
Mr. Morton's paper has an added interest from the
fad that we know it was read by Thoreau himself.
It is the enthusiastic greeting of an ingenuous undergraduate, not yet sophisticated enough to damn with
faint praise; and it remains the first warm greeting
that Thoreau had received. He presented the writer
with a copy of the book.
The article from the old Knickerbocker Magazine,
" T o w n and Rural Humbugs," is so plainly a needy
scribe's " p o t boiler" that it is reproduced only as
showing to what sore straits your mere critic is sometimes reduced. To classify Thoreau with Barnum
and to declare that " b o t h were humbugs" is such
an "excess of stupidity" as had hitherto been found
only in Thomas Sheridan by Dr. Samuel Johnson.
" A n American Diogenes" is clearly an echo from
the preceding papers in Putnanis Monthly and the
Knickerbocker Magazine.
It is the first mention of
Thoreau on the other side of the Atlantic; and while
far from able to comprehend Thoreau, its writer was
sufficiently favored of the gods to be able to declare:
" I f Barnum's autobiography be a bane, Thoreau's
woodland experiences may be received as its antidote."
There is a pathetic interest attaching to the next
two papers. Mr. Alcott's "Forester" was published

XIV

INTRODUCTORY

NOTE.

the month before Thoreau died, and may have been
read to him; so he had a foretaste of what the future
would say of him and his life.
Mr. Alcott had every opportunity to know him of
whom he wrote and his contribution must ever remain one of the most trustworthy sources to which
the future biographers of Thoreau will have recourse
in forming their conception of the " Poet-Naturalist."
Mr. Storms Higginson's contribution to the Harvard Magazine was published in the very month that
Thoreau died, but after that event. It afforded a sad
pleasure to the bereaved mother and sister, and is tenderly mentioned by Sophia in letters written at the
time. For biographical purposes, Mr. Higginson's
paper is the most valuable in this collection.
It
corrects the erroneous conception of Thoreau as being unsocial, cold and repellant. It refutes the false
estimate of the Rev. W. R. Alger. A frank and earnest
school-boy meets Thoreau in his woodland rambles
and finds him anything but the stony " s t o i c " that a
friend's mistaken fancy has depicted.
The Rev. John Weiss was one of Thoreau's classmates, and his paper embodies his matured recollections, twenty-eight years after graduation. There is
in it an absence of the superlative that gives one confidence in the judgment pronounced ; and amongst
the recollections of Thoreau this paper must be allowed the highest rank.'
The reprint from the Memorials of the Class of i8jy
is valuable as giving a portrait of Thoreau by his

INTRODUCTORY

NOTE.

XV

own hand. His brief and naive retrospect of his
school and college days and the schedule of his multifarious employments are a sufficient reply to those
who say Thoreau had no humor, and his affirmation
of the soundness of his philosophy, as regards the life
he chose to lead, has the clear note of the best pages
of Walden.
At Thoreau's funeral Emerson said: " T h e scale on
which his studies proceeded was so large as to require
longevity, and we were the less prepared for his sudden
disappearance. . . . It seems an injury that he should
leave in the midst of his broken task, which none else
can finish, — a kind of indignity to so noble a soul,
that it should depart out of Nature before he has really
been shown to his peers for what he is." When this
was spoken two books and a few magazine articles
were all that the world knew of Thoreau; but within
four years after his demise the tender solicitude of
friends had prepared for the press five posthumous
volumes. Then the "broken task" seemed not so
grievous a disappointment and the "kind of indignity" proved to be a veiled benignity.
In these seven volumes " h e has been really shown
to his peers for what he is," but it still remained for
his friend and literary executor, Mr. H. G. O, Blake, to
show him to us in his daily walk and to reveal the
" t a s k " to which he devoted his days. In the broad
light that is now thrown upon the Concord "loafer,"
the early misconceptions are fading away, the lesson
of his life is being rightly read and the arbitrament of

XVI

INTRODUCTORY

NOTE.

Time has in it the assurance of his immortality, for
"there is no fame more permanent than that which
begins its real growth after the death of an author;
and such is the fame of Thoreau."
" H e kept the temple as divine
Wherein his soul abided ;
H e heard the Voice within the shrine
And followed as it guided ;
H e found no bane of bitter strife,
But laws of His designing ;
H e quaffed the brimming cup of Life
And went forth u n r e p i n i n g . "

S. A. J.
A N N A R B O R , 27th of December, 1900.

H. D. THOREAU'S

BOOK

H. D. THOREAU'S BOOK.1

A

REALLY new book — a fresh, original, thoughtful work — is sadly rare in this age of omniferous publication. Mr. Thoreau's, if not entirely this, is
very near it. Its observations of Nature are as genial
as Nature herself, and the tones of his harp have an
x'Eolian sweetness. His reflections are always striking, often profoundly truthful, and his scholastic treasures, though a little too ostentatiously displayed, are
such as the best instructed reader will enjoy and thank
him for. His philosophy, which is the Pantheistic egotism vaguely characterized as Transcendental, does not
delight us. It seems second-hand, imitative, often exaggerated— a bad specimen of a dubious and dangerous school. But we will speak first of the staple
of the work.
Mr. Thoreau is a native and resident of Concord,
Massachusetts — a scholar, a laborer, and in some sort
a hermit. He traveled somewhat in his earlier years
1

A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers:
By H E N R Y
D. T H O R E A U . (pp.413. i2mo.) Boston: Munroe & Co. NewY o r k : G. P. P u t n a m ,

2

PERTAINING

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(he is still young), generally trusting to his own thoughts
for company and his walking-cane for motive power.
It would seem a main purpose of his life to demonstrate how slender an impediment is poverty to a man
who pampers no superfluous wants, and how truly
independent and self-sufficing is he who is in no manner the slave of his own appetites. Of his fitful hermit
life and its results we have already given some account :
Now for his "Week on the Concord and Merrimac."
The Concord is a dull, dark, sluggish creek or petty
river which runs through the Massachusetts town of
that name and is lost in the Merrimac at Lowell. On
this stream, Mr. Thoreau and his friend embarked one
Autumn afternoon in a small rowboat, and rowed or
sailed down to the dam near its mouth, thence across
by the old Middlesex Canal to the Merrimac above
Lowell, thence up the latter to Hookset, New Hampshire, where they left their boat and varied their experience by a pedestrian tour through the wild and
rugged heart of the Granite State, returning to their
boat after a week's absence and retracing their course
homeward. They had a tent which, while boating,
they pitched in the most inviting and secluded spot—
generally a wood, when night overtook them — they
cooked and served for themselves, only approaching
the dwellings rarely to purchase milk or fruit or bread.
Such is the thread of the narrative : Let us give a single specimen of its observations of Nature. It is a
description of the commencement of their aquatic
journey:

H. D. T H O R E A U S BOOK.

3

Gradually the village m u r m u r subsided, and we seemed to
be embarked on the placid current of our dreams, floating from
past to future as silently as one awakes to fresh morning or evening thoughts. W e glided noiselessly down the stream, occasionally driving a pickerel from the covert of the pads, or a bream
from her nest, and the smaller bittern now and then sailed away
on sluggish wings from some recess in the shore, or the larger
lifted itself out of the long grass at our approach, and carried
its precious legs away to deposit them in a place of safety.
T h e tortoises also rapidly dropped into the water, as our boat
ruffled the surface amid the willows breaking the reflections of
t h e trees. T h e banks had passed the height of their beauty,
and some of the brightest flowers showed by their faded tints
that the season was verging toward the afternoon of the year ;
but this sombre tinge enhanced their sincerity, and in the still
unabated heats they seemed like the mossy brink of some cool
well. T h e narrow-leaved willow lay along the surface of the
water in masses of light g r e e n foliage, interspersed with the
large white balls of the button-bush. T h e rose-colored polygonum raised its head proudly above the water on either hand,
and, flowering at this season and in these localities, in the midst
of dense fields of the white species, which skirted the sides of
the stream, its little streak of red looked very rare and precious.
T h e p u r e white blossoms of the arrow-head stood in the shallower
parts, and a few cardinals on the margin still proudly surveyed
themselves reflected in the water, though the latter, as well as
the pickerel-weed, was now largely out of blossom. T h e snakehead, chelone glabra, grew close to the shore, while a kind of
coreopsis, t u r n i n g its brazen face to the sun, full and rank, and
a tall, dull red flower, enpatorium purpiireum, or trumpet-weed,
formed the rear rank of the fluvial a r r a y . T h e bright blue
flowers of the soap-wort gentian were sprinkled here and there
in the adjacent meadows, like flowers which Proserpine had
dropped, and still farther in the fields, or higher on the b a n k ,
were seen the Virginian rhexia, and drooping neottia or ladies'tresses; while from the more distant waysides, which we occa-

4

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sionally passed, and banks where the sun had lodged, was
reflected a dull yellow beam from the r a n k s of tansy, now in its
prime. In short, n a t u r e seemed to have adorned herself for
our d e p a r t u r e with a profusion of fringes and curls, mingled
with the bright tints of flowers, reflected in the water. But we
missed the white water-lily, which is the queen of river-flowers,
its reign being over for this season. H e makes his voyage too
late, perhaps, by a true water-clock who delays so long. Many
of this species inhabit our Concord water. I have passed down
the river before sunrise on a Summer morning between fields
of lilies still shut in sleep ; and when at length the flakes of sunlight from over the bank fell on the surface of the water, whole
fields of white blossoms seemed to flash open before me, as I
floated along, like the unfolding of a banner, so sensible is this
flower to the influence of the sun's rays.

Here is another in a similar vein:
W h e t h e r we live by the sea-side, or by the lakes and rivers,
or on the prairie, it concerns us to attend to the nature of fishes,
since they are not p h e n o m e n a confined to certain localities
only, but forms and phases of the life in n a t u r e universally dispersed. T h e countless shoals which annually coast the shores
of Europe and America, are not so interesting to the student of
n a t u r e as the more fertile law itself, which deposits their spawn
on the tops of mountains, and on the interior plains ; the fish
principle in nature, from which it results that they may be found
in water in so many places, in greater or less numbers. T h e
natural historian is not a fisherman, who prays for cloudy days
and good luck merely, but as fishing has been styled, " a contemplative m a n ' s recreation," introducing him profitably to
woods and water, so the fruit of the naturalist's observations
is not in new genera or species, but in new contemplations still,
and science is only a more contemplative m a n ' s recreation.
T h e seeds of the life of fishes a r e everywhere disseminated,
whether the winds waft them, or the waters float them, or the

H. D. THOREAl/s BOOK.

5

deep earth holds them ; wherever a pond is dug, straightway
it is stocked with this vivacious race. T h e y have a lease of
n a t u r e , and it is not yet out. T h e Chinese are bribed to carry
their ova from province to province in jars or in hollow reeds,
or the water-birds to transport them to the mountain tarns and
interior lakes. T h e r e are fishes wherever there is a fluid medium, and even in clouds and in melted metals we detecT their
semblance. T h i n k how in Winter you can sink a line down
straight in a pasture through snow and t h r o u g h ice, and pull
up a bright, slippery, d u m b , subterranean silver or golden fish!
It is curious, also, to reflect how they m a k e one family, from
the largest to the smallest. T h e least minnow 7 , that lies on
the ice as bait for pickerel, looks like a h u g e sea-fish cast up
on the shore.

Our next extrad is a specimen of his more dida&ic
mood :
As the truest society approaches always nearest to solitude,
so the most excellent speech finally falls into Silence. Silence
is audible to all men, at all times, and in all places. She is
speech when we hear inwardly, sound when we hear outwardly.
Creation has not displaced her, but is her visible frame-work
and foil. All sounds are her servants and purveyors, proclaiming not only that their mistress is, but is a rare mistress, and
earnestly to be sought after. T h e y are so far akin to Silence,
that they are but bubbles on her surface, which straightway
burst, an evidence of the strength and prolificness of the undercurrent ; a faint utterance of silence, and then only agreeable
to our auditory nerves when they contrast themselves with and
relieve the former. In proportion as they do this, and are
heighteners and intensifiers of the Silence, they are h a r m o n y
and purest melody.
Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses
and all foolish acls, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome
after satiety as after d i s a p p o i n t m e n t ; that back-ground which

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the painter may not d a u b , be he master or bungler, and which,
however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity
can assail, no personality disturb us.
T h e orator puts off his individuality, and is then most eloquent when most silent. H e listens while he speaks, and is a
hearer along with his audience. W h o has not hearkened to
H e r infinite din ? She is T r u t h ' s speaking-trumpet, the sole
oracle, the true Delphi and Dodona, which kings and courtiers
would do well to consult, nor will they be baulked by an ambiguous answer. For through H e r all revelations have been made,
and just in proportion as men have consulted her oracle within,
they have obtained a clear insight, and their age has been marked
as an enlightened one. But as often as they have gone gadding
abroad to a strange Delphi and her mad priestess, their age has
been d a r k and leaden. Such were garrulous and noisy eras,
which no longer yield any sound, but the Grecian or silent and
melodious era is ever sounding and resounding in the.ears of men.

Half the book is like and as good as this. — Nearly
every page is instind with genuine Poetry except those
wherein verse is haltingly attempted, which are for the
most part sorry prose. Then there is a misplaced
Pantheistic attack on the Christian Faith. Mr. Thoreau -— we must presume soberly — says:
In my Pantheon, Pan still reigns in his pristine glory, with
his r u d d y face, his flowing beard, and his shaggy body, his pipe
and his crook, his n y m p h Echo, and his chosen d a u g h t e r Iambe ;
for the great god Pan is not dead, as was r u m o r e d . Perhaps
of all the gods of New England and of ancient Greece, I am
most constant at his shrine.
One memorable addition to the old mythology is due to this
era,— the Christian fable. With what pains, and tears, and
blood, these centuries have woven this and added it to the

H. D. T H O R E A U ' S

BOOK.

7

mythology of mankind. T h e new P r o m e t h e u s . W i t h w h a t
miraculous consent, and patience, and persistency, has this
m y t h u s been stamped upon the memory of the race? It would
seem as if it were in the progress of our mythology to dethrone
J e h o v a h , and crown Christ in his stead.
If it is not a tragical life we live, then I know not w h a t to call
it. Such a story as that of Jesus Christ,— the history of Jerusalem, say, being a p a r t of the Universal History. T h e naked,
the embalmed, unburied death of Jerusalem amid its desolate
hills,— think of it. In Tasso's poem I trust some things are
sweetly buried. Consider the snappish tenacity with which
they preach Christianity still. W h a t are time and space to
Christianity, eighteen h u n d r e d years, and a new w o r l d ? — that
the humble life of a Jewish peasant should have force to m a k e
a N e w - Y o r k bishop so bigoted. Forty-four lamps, the gift of
kings, now burning in a place called the Holy Sepulchre ; — a
church bell ringing ; — some unaffected tears shed by a pilgrim
on Mount Calvary within the week.
" Jerusalem, Jerusalem, when I forget thee, may my right
hand forget her c u n n i n g . "
" By the waters of Babylon there we sat d o w n , and we wept
when we remembered Z i o n . "
I trust that some may be as near and dear to Buddha, or
Christ, or Swedenborg, who are without the pale of their
churches. It is necessary not to be Christian, to appreciate
the beauty and significance of the life of Christ. I know that
some will have hard thoughts of me, when they hear their Christ
n a m e d beside my Buddha, yet I am sure that I am willing they
should love their Christ more than my Buddha, for the love is
the main thing, and I like him too. W h y need Christians be
still intolerant and superstitious ?
T h e reading which I love best is the Scriptures of the several
nations, though it happens that I am better acquained with
those of the Hindoos, the Chinese, and the Persians, t h a n of the
H e b r e w s , which I have come to last. Give me one of these
Bibles, and you have silenced me for a while.

8

PERTAINING TO THOREAU.

We have quoted a fair proportion of our author's
smartest Pantheistic sentences, but there is another in
which he diredly asserts that he considers the Sacred
Books of the Brahmins in nothing inferior to the Christian Bible. It was hardly necessary to say in addition
that he is not well acquainted with the latter — the
point worth considering is rather—ought not an author
to make himself thoroughly acquainted with a book,
which, if true, is of such transcendent importance, before uttering opinions concerning it calculated to shock
and pain many readers, not to speak of those who will
be utterly repelled by them ? Can that which Milton
and Newton so profoundly reverenced (and they had
studied it thoroughly) be wisely turned off by a youth
as unworthy of even consideration ? Mr. Thoreau's
treatment of this subject seems revolting alike to good
sense and good taste. We ask him to weigh all he
has offered with regard to the merits of the Christian
as compared with other Scriptures against the following brief extract from the last "Edinburgh Review":
T h e Bible, supposing it other than it pretends to be, presents
us with a singular phenomenon in the space which it occupies
throughout the continued history of literature. W e see nothing
like i t ; and it may well perplex the infidel to account for it.
Nor need his sagacity disdain to enter a little more deeply into
its possible causes than he is usually inclined to do. It has not
been given to any other book of religion thus to triumph over
national prejudices, and lodge itself securely in the h e a r t of
great communities,— varying by every conceivable diversity of
language, race, manners, customs, and indeed agreeing in nothing but a veneration for itself. It adapts itself with facility to

H. D. T H O R E A U ' S

BOOK.

9

the revolutions of thought and feeling which shake to pieces all
things else ; and flexibly accomodates itself to the progress of
society and the changes of civilization.— Even conquests
the
disorganization of old nations — the formation of new — do not
affect the continuity of its empire. It lays hold of the new
as of the old, and transmigrates writh the spirit of humanity ;
attracting to itself, by its own moral power, in all the communities it enters, a ceaseless intensity of effort for its propagation,
illustration, and defence. Other systems of religion are usually
delicate exotics, and will not bear transplanting. T h e gods of
the nations are local deities, and reluctantly quit their native
soil ; at all events they patronize only their favorite races, and
perish at once when the tribe or nation of their worshipers
becomes extinct, often long before. Nothing, indeed, is more
difficult than to m a k e foreigners feel anything but the utmost
indifference (except as an object of philosophic curiosity) about
the religion of other nations ; and no portion of their national
literature is regarded as more tedious or unattractive than that
which treats of their theology. T h e elegant mythologies of
Greece and R o m e m a d e no proselytes among other nations,
and fell hopelessly the moment they fell. T h e Koran of Mahomet has, it is true, been propagated by the sword ; but it has
been propagated by nothing else ; and its dominion has been
limited to those nations who could not reply to that logic. If
the Bible be false, the facility with which it overleaps the otherwise impassable boundaries of race and clime, and domiciliates
itself among so many different nations, is assuredly a far more
striking and wonderful proof of h u m a n ignorance, perverseness
and stupidity, than is afforded in the limited prevalence of even
the most abject superstitions ; or, if it really has merits which,
though a fable, have enabled it to impose so comprehensively
and variously on mankind, wonderful indeed must have been
the skill in its composition ; so wonderful that even the infidel
himself ought never to regard it but with the profoundest reverence, as far too successful and sublime a fabrication to admit a
t h o u g h t of scoff or ridicule. In his last illness, a few days be-

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fore his death, Sir Walter Scott asked Mr. L o c k h a r t to read to
him. Mr. L o c k h a r t inquired w h a t book he would like. " C a n
you a s k ? " said Sir Walter, — " t h e r e is but O N E ; " and requested him to read a chapter of the gospel of J o h n . W h e n
will an equal genius, to whom all the realms of fiction are as
familiar as to him, say the like of some professed revelation,
originating among a race and associated with a history and a
clime as foreign as those connected with the birthplace of the
Bible from those of the ancestry of Sir Walter Scott ? Can we,
by any stretch of imagination, suppose some Walter Scott of a
new race in Australia or South Africa, saying the same of the
Vedas or the K o r a n ?

Albeit we love not theologic controversy, we proffer
our columns to Mr. Thoreau, should he see fit to answer these questions. We would have preferred to pass
the theme in silence, but our admiration of his book
and our reprehension of its Pantheism forbade that
course. May we not hope that he will reconsider his
too rashly expressed notions on this head ?5
1
[George Ripley, in the " N e w - Y o r k T r i b u n e " for the 13th
of June, 1849.]

A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND
MERRIMACK RIVERS

A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND
MERRIMACK RIVERS.'

W

E stick to the sea-serpent. Not that he is found
in Concord or Merrimack, but like the old
Scandinavian snake, he binds together for us the two
hemispheres of Past and Present, of Belief and Science.
He is the link which knits us seaboard Yankees with
our Norse progenitors, interpreting between the age of
the dragon and that of the railroad-train. We have
made ducks and drakes of that large estate of wonder
and delight bequeathed to us by ancestral irkings, and
this alone remains to us unthrift heirs of Linn. We
give up the Kraken, more reluctantly the mermaid,
for we once saw one, no mulier /brmosa, superne, no
greenhaired maid with looking-glass and comb, but
an adroit compound of monkey and codfish, sufficiently attractive for purposes of exhibition till the
suture where the desinit in piscem began, grew too obtrusively visible.
1

A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.
By H E N R Y
D. T H O R E A U . Boston and C a m b r i d g e : J a m e s Monroe & Comp a n y . 1849. p p . 413.

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We feel an undefined respeci for a man who has seen
the sea-serpent. He is to his brother-fishers what the
poet is to his fellow-men. Where they have seen nothing better than a school of horsemackerel, or the idle
coils of ocean around Halfway Rock, he has caught
authentic glimpses of the withdrawing mantlehem of
the Edda-age. We care not for the monster himself.
It is not the thing, but the belief in the thing, that is
dear to us. May it be long before Professor Owen is
comforted with the sight of his unfleshed vertebrae,
long before they stretch many a rood behind Kimball's or Barnum's glass, reflected in the shallow orbs
of Mr. and Mrs. Public, which stare but see not!
When we read that Captain Spalding of the pinkstern Three Pollies has beheld him rushing through
the brine like an infinite series of bewitched mackerelcasks, we feel that the mystery of old Ocean, at least,
has not yet been sounded, that Faith and Awe survive
there unevaporate. We once ventured the horsemackerel theory to an old fisherman, browner than a
tomcod. " Hosmackril ! " he exclaimed indignantly,
"hosmackril be — " (here he used a phrase commonly
indicated in laical literature by the same sign which
serves for Doctorate in Divinity,) "don't yer spose
/ k n o w a hosmackril?" The intonation of that " / "
would have silenced professor Monkbairns Owen with
his provoking phoca forever. What if one should ask
him if he knew a trilobite?
The fault of modern travellers is that they see nothing out of sight. They talk of eocene periods and

A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK.

15

tertiary formations, and tell us how the world looked
to the plesiosaur. They take science (or nescience)
with them, instead of that soul of generous trust their
elders had. All their senses are skeptics and doubters,
materialists reporting things for other skeptics to doubt
still further upon. Nature becomes a reludant witness upon the stand, badgered with geologist hammers
and phials of acid. There have been no travellers
since those included in Hakluyt and Purchas, except
Martin, perhaps, who saw an inch or two into the invisible at the Orkneys. We have peripatetic ledurers,
but no more travellers. Travellers' stories are no
longer proverbial. We have picked nearly every apple
(wormy or otherwise,) from the world's tree of Knowledge, and that without an Eve to tempt us. Two or
three have hitherto hung luckily beyond reach on a
lofty bough shadowing the interior of Africa, but there
is a Dodor Bialloblotzky at this very moment pelting
at them with sticks and stones. It may be only next
week, and these, too, bitten by geographers and geologists, will be thrown away. We wish no harm to this
worthy Sclavonian, but his name is irresistibly suggestive of boiled lobster, and some of the natives are not
so choice in their animal food.
Analysis is carried into everything. Even Deity is
subjected to chemic tests. We must have exad knowledge, a cabinet stuck full of fads pressed, dried, or preserved in spirits, instead of a large, vague world our
fathers had. Our modern Eden is a hortus siccus.
Tourists defraud rather than enrich us. They have

i6

PERTAINING TO THOREAU.

not that sense of aesthetic proportion which characterized the elder traveller. Earth is no longer the fine
work of art it was, for nothing is left to the imagination. Job Hortop, arrived at the height of the Bermudas, thinks it full time to throw us in a merman,—
" w e discovered a monster in the sea who showed
himself three times unto us from the middle upwards,
in which parts he was proportioned like a man, of
the comple&ion of a mulatto or tawny Indian." Sir
John Hawkins is not satisfied with telling us about
the merely sensual Canaries, but is generous enough
to throw us in a handful over: "About these islands
are certain flitting islands, which have been oftentimes
seen, and when men approached near them they vanished, . . . and therefore it should seem he is not
yet born to whom God hath appointed the finding of
them." Henry Hawkes describes the visible Mexican
cities, and then is not so frugal but that he can give
us a few invisible ones. " The Spaniards have notice
of seven cities which the old men of the Indians
show them should lie toward the N. W. from Mexico.
They have used, and use daily, much diligence in
seeking of them, but they cannot find any one of
them. They say that the witchcraft of the Indians
is such that when they come by these towns they cast
a mist upon them so that they cannot see them."
Thus do these generous ancient mariners make children of us again. Their successors show us an earth
effete and past bearing, tracing out with the eyes of
industrious fleas every wrinkle and crowfoot.

A W E E K ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK.

17

The journals of the elder navigators are prose Odyssees. The geographies of our ancestors were works of
fancy and imagination. They read poems where we
yawn over items. Their world was a huge wonderhorn, exhaustless as that which Thor strove to drain.
Ours would scarce quench the small thirst of a bee.
No modern voyager brings back the magical foundation
stones of a Tempest. No Marco Polo, traversing the
desert beyond the city of Lok, would tell of things
able to inspire the mind of Milton with
Calling shapes and beckoning shadows dire
And airy tongues that syllable m e n ' s names
On sands and shores and desert wildernesses.

It was easy enough to believe the story of Dante, when
two thirds of even the upper-world were yet untraversed
and unmapped. With every step of the recent traveller our inheritance of the wonderful is diminished.
Those beautifully pictured notes of the Possible are
redeemed at a ruinous discount in the hard and cumbrous coin of the a&ual. How are we not defrauded
and impoverished? Does California vie with El Dorado, or are Bruce's Abyssinian Kings a set-off for Prester John ? A bird in the bush is worth two in the
hand. And if the philosophers have not even yet been
able to agree whether fche world has any existence independent of ourselves, how do we not gain a loss in
every addition to the catalogue of Vulgar Errors?
Where are the fishes which nidificated in trees?
Where the monopodes sheltering themselves from the

i8

PERTAINING TO THOREAU.

sun beneath their single umbrella-like foot, umbrellalike in every thing but the fatal necessity of being
borrowed ? Where the Acephali, with whom Herodotus, in a kind of ecstasy, wound up his climax of men
with abnormal top-pieces? Where the Roc whose eggs
are possibly boulders, needing no far-fetched theory of
glacier or iceberg to account for them ? Where the
tails of the Britons? Where the no legs of the bird
of Paradise? Where the Unicorn with that single
horn of his, sovereign against all manner of poisons?
Where the fountain of Youth ? Where that Thessalian
spring which, without cost to the county, convided
and punished perjurers? Where the Amazons of Orellana? All these, and a thousand other varieties we
have lost, and have got nothing instead of them. And
those who have robbed us of them have stolen that
which not enriches themselves. It is so much wealth
cast into the sea beyond all approach of diving bells.
We owe no thanks to Mr. J. E. Worcester, whose Geography we studied enforcedly at school. Yet even he
had his relentings, and in some softer moment vouchsafed us a fine, inspiring print of the Maelstrom,
answerable to the twenty-four mile diameter of its
sudion. Year by year, more and more of the world
gets disenchanted. Even the icy privacy of the ardic
and antardic circles is invaded. Our youth are no
longer ingenious, as indeed no ingenuity is demanded
of them. Every thing is accounted for, every thing
cut and dried, and the world may be put together as
easily as the fragments of a disseded map. The Mys-

A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK.

19

terious bounds nothing now on the North, South, East,
or West. We have played Jack Horner with our earth,
till there is never a plum left in it.
Since we cannot have back the old class of voyagers,
the next best thing we can do is to send poets out
a-travelling. These will at least see all that remains
to be seen, and in the way it ought to be seen. These
will disentangle nature for us from the various snarls
of man, and show us the mighty mother without paint
or padding, still fresh and young, full-breasted, strongbacked, fit to suckle and carry her children. The
poet is he who bears the charm of freshness in his
eyes. He may safely visit Niagara, or those adopted
children of nature the Pyramids, sure to find them
and to leave them as if no eye had vulgarized them
before. For the ordinary tourist all wells have been
muddied by the caravans that have passed that way,
and his eye, crawling over the monuments of nature
and art, adds only its quota of staleness.
Walton quotes an "ingenious Spaniard" as saying,
that "rivers and the inhabitants of the watery element
were made for wise men to contemplate and fools to
pass by without consideration," and Blount, in one of
the notes to his translation of Philostratus, asserts that
" a s travelling does much advantage wise men, so does
it no less prejudice fools." Mr. Thoreau is clearly the
man we want. He is both wise man and poet. A
graduate of Cambridge—the fields and woods, the axe,
the hoe, and the rake have since admitted him ad eundem. Mark how his imaginative sympathy goes be-

20

PERTAINING TO THOREAU.

neath the crust, deeper down than that of Burns, and
needs no plough to turn up the objed of its muse.
" I t is pleasant to think in winter, as we walk over the
snowy pastures, of those happy dreamers that lie under
the sod, of dormice and all that race of dormant creatures which have such a superfluity of life enveloped
in thick folds of fur, impervious to the cold."—p. 103.
" For every oak and birch, too, growing on the hilltop,
as well as for these elms and willows, we knew that
there was a graceful ethereal and ideal tree making
down from the roots, and sometimes nature in high
tides brings her mirror to its foot and makes it visible."— p. 49. Only some word were better here than
mirror, (which is true to the fad, but not to the fancy,)
since we could not see through that. Leigh Hunt
represents a colloquy between man and fish, in which
both maintain their orthodoxy so rigidly that neither
is able to comprehend or tolerate the other. Mr.
Thoreau flounders in no such shallows. He is wiser,
or his memory is better, and can recreate the sensations of that part of his embryonic life which he passed
as a fish. We know nothing more thoroughly charming
than his description of twilight at the river's bottom.
The light gradually forsook the deep water, as well as the
deeper air, and the gloaming came to the fishes as well as to
us, and more dim and gloomy to them, whose day is perpetual
twilight, though sufficiently bright for their weak and watery
eyes. Vespers had already rung in many a dim and watery
chapel down below, where the shadows of the weeds were extended in length over the sandy floor. The vespertinal pout
had already begun to flit on leathern fin, and the finny gossips

A W E E K ON T H E CONCORD AND MERRIMACK.

21

withdrew from the fluvial streets to creeks and coves, and other
private haunts, excepting a few of stronger fin, which anchored
in the stream, stemming the tide even in their d r e a m s . Meanwhile, like a d a r k evening cloud, we were wafted over the cope
of their sky, deepening the shadows on their deluged fields.

One would say this was the work of some bream
Homer. Melville's picxures of life in Typee have no
attraction beside it. Truly we could don scales, pectorals, dorsals, and anals, (critics are already coldblooded,) to stroll with our dumb love, fin in fin,
through the Rialto of this subfluvial Venice. The
Complete Angler, indeed ! Walton had but an extraqueous and coquine intimacy with the fishes cornpared with this. His tench and dace are but the poor
transported convids of the frying-pan.
There was a time when Musketaquid and Merrimack flowed down from the Unknown. The adventurer wist not what fair reaches stretched before him, or
what new dusky peoples the next bend would discover.
Surveyor and map have done what they could to rob
them of their charm of unexpectedness. The urns of
the old river-gods have been twitched from under their
arms and set up on the museum-shelf, or, worse yet,
they serve to boil the manufacturer's plum-porridge.
But Mr. Thoreau with the touch of his oar conjures
back as much as may be of the old enchantment.
His map extends to the bed of the river, and he makes
excursions into finland, penetrating among the scaly
tribes without an angle. He is the true cosmopolitan
or citizen of the Beautiful. He is thoroughly impar-

22

PERTAINING TO THOREAU.

tial — Tros, Tyriusve — a lichen or a man, it is all one,
he looks on both with equal eyes. We are at a loss
where to class him. He might be Mr. Bird, Mr. Fish,
Mr. Rivers, Mr. Brook, Mr. Wood, Mr. Stone, or Mr.
Flower, as well as Mr. Thoreau. His work has this
additional argument for freshness, the birds, beasts,
fishes, trees, and plants having this advantage, that
none has hitherto gone among them in the missionary
line. They are trapped for their furs, shot and speared
for their flesh, hewn for their timber, and grubbed for
Indian Vegetable Pills, but they remain yet happily
unconverted in primitive heathendom. They take
neither rum nor gunpowder in the natural way, and
pay tithes without being Judaized. Mr. Thoreau goes
among them neither as hunter nor propagandist. He
makes a few advances to them in the way of Booddhism, but gives no list of catechumens, though flowers
would seem to be the natural followers of that prophet.
In truth, Mr. Thoreau himself might absorb the
forces of the entire alphabetic sandity of the A. B. C.
F. M., persisting as he does in a fine, intelligent paganism. We need no more go to the underworld to converse with shadows of old philosophers. Here we
have the Academy brought to our doors, and our modern world criticized from beneath the shelter of the
Portico. Were we writing commendatory verses after
the old style, to be prefixed to this volume, we should
begin somewhat thus: —
If the ancient, mystique, antifabian
Was (so he claimed) of them that Troy town wan

A W E E K ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK.

2$

Before he was born ; even so his soul we see
(Time's ocean underpast) revive in thee,
As, diving nigh to Elis, Arethuse
Comes up to loose her zone by Syracuse.

The great charm of Mr. Thoreau's book seems to
be, that its being a book at all is a happy fortuity.
The door of the portfolio-cage has been left open, and
the thoughts have flown out of themselves. The paper
and types are only accidents. The page is confidential like a diary. Pepys is not more minute, more
pleasantly unconscious. It is like a book dug up,
that has no date to assign it a special contemporaneousness, and no name of author. It has been written with no uncomfortable sense of a public looking
over the shoulder. And the author is the least ingredient in it, too. All which I saw and part of which I
was, would be an apt motto for the better portions of
the volume : a part, moreover, just as the river, the
trees, and the fishes are. Generally he holds a very
smooth mirror up to nature, and if, now and then, he
shows us his own features in the glass, when we had
rather look at something else, it is as a piece of nature,
and we must forgive him if he allow it a too usurping
position in the landscape. He looks at the country
sometimes (as painters advise) through the triumphal
arch of his own legs, and, though the upsidedownness
of the prosped has its own charm of unassuetude, the
arch itself is not the most graceful.
So far of the manner of the book, now of the book
itself. It professes to be the journal of a week on

24

PERTAINING

TO

THOREAU.

Concord and Merrimack Rivers. We must have our
libraries enlarged, if Mr. Thoreau intend to complete
his autobiography on this scale — four hundred and
thirteen pages to a sennight! He begins honestly
enough as the Boswell of Musketaquid and Merrimack. It was a fine subject and a new one. W^e are
curious to know somewhat of the private and interior
life of two such prominent and oldest inhabitants.
Musketaquid saw the tremulous match half-doubtingly
touched to the revolutionary train. The blood of
Captain Lincoln and his drummer must have dribbled
through the loose planks of the bridge for Musketaquid
to carry down to Merrimack, that he in turn might
mingle it with the sea. Merrimack is a drudge now,
grinding for the Philistines, who takes repeated dammings without resentment, and walks in no procession
for higher wages. But its waters remember the Redman, and before the Redman. They knew the first
mammoth as a calf, and him a mere parvenu and
modern. Even to the saurians they could say — we
remember your grandfather.
Much information and entertainment were to be
pumped out of individuals like these, and the pump
does not suck in Mr. Thoreau's hands. As long as he
continues an honest Boswell, his book is delightful,
but sometimes he serves his two rivers as Hazlitt did
Northcote, and makes them run Thoreau or Emerson,
or, indeed, anything but their own transparent element.
What, for instance, have Concord and Merrimack to
do with Boodh, themselves professors of an elder and

A W E E K ON T H E CONCORD AND MERRIMACK.

25

to them wholly sufficient religion, namely, the willing
subjeds of watery laws, to seek their ocean ? We have
digressions on Boodh, on Anacreon, (with translations
hardly so good as Cowley,) on Persius, on Friendship,
and we know not what. We come upon them like
snags, jolting us headforemost out of our places as we
are rowing placidly up stream or drifting down. Mr.
Thoreau becomes so absorbed in these discussions,
that he seems, as it were, to catch a crab, and disappears uncomfortably from his seat at the bow-oar. We
could forgive them all, especially that on Books, and
that on Friendship, (which is worthy of one who has
so long commerced with Nature and with Emerson,)
we could welcome them all, were they put by themselves at the end of the book. But as it is, they are
out of proportion and out of place, and mar our Merrimacking dreadfully. We were bid to a river-party,
not to be preached at. They thrust themselves obtrusively out of the narrative, like those quarries of red
glass which the Bowery dandies (emulous of Sisyphus)
push laboriously before them as breast-pins.
Before we get through the book, we begin to feel as
if the author had used the term week, as the Jews did
the number forty, for an indefinite measure of time.
It is quite evident that we have something more than
a transcript of his fluviatile experiences. The leaves
of his portfolio and river-journal seem to have been
shuffled together with a trustful dependence on some
overruling printer-providence. We trace the lines of
successive deposits as plainly as on the sides of a deep

26

PERTAINING TO THOREAU.

cut, or rather on those of a trench carried through
made-land in the city, where choiceness of material
has been of less import than suitableness to fill up,
and where plaster and broken bricks from old buildings, oyster-shells, and dock mud have been shot pellmell together. Yet we must allow that Mr. Thoreau's
materials are precious, too. His plaster has bits of
ancient symbols painted on it, his bricks are stamped
with mystic sentences, his shells are of pearl-oysters,
and his mud from the Sacramento.
"Give me a sentence," prays Mr. Thoreau bravely,
"which no intelligence can understand!"—and we
think that the kind gods have nodded. There are
some of his utterances which have foiled us, and we
belong to that class of beings which he thus reproachfully stigmatizes as intelligences. We think it must
be this taste that makes him so fond of the Hindoo
philosophy, which would seem admirably suited to
men, if men were only oysters. Or is it merely because, as he naively confesses in another place, "his
soul is of a bright invisible green " ? We would recommend to Mr. Thoreau some of the Welsh sacred poetry.
Many of the Triads hold an infinite deal of nothing,
especially after the bottoms have been knocked out of
them by translation. But it seems ungrateful to find
fault with a book which has given us so much pleasure. We have eaten salt (Attic, too,) with Mr. Thoreau. It is the hospitality and not the fare which
carries a benediction with it, and it is a sort of ill
breeding to report any oddity in the viands. His

A WEEK

ON T H E

CONCORD AND

MERRIMACK.

2J

feast is here and there a little savage, (indeed, he professes himself a kind of volunteer Redman,) and we
must make out with the fruits, merely giving a sidelong glance at the baked dog and pickled missionary,
and leaving them in grateful silence.
We wish the General Court had been wise enough
to have appointed our author to make the report on
the Ichthyology of Massachusetts. Then, indeed,
would the people of the state have known something
of their aquicolal fellow-citizens. Mr. Thoreau handles them as if he loved them, as old Izaak recommends us to do with a worm in impaling it. He is
the very Asmodeus of their private life. He unroofs
their dwellings and makes us familiar with their loves
and sorrows. He seems to suffer a sea-change, like
the Scotch peasant who was carried down among the
seals in the capacity of family physician. He balances
himself with them under the domestic lily-pad, takes a
family-bite with them, is made the confidant of their
courtships, and is an honored guest at the weddingfeast. He has doubtless seen a pickerel crossed in
love, a perch Othello, a bream the vidim of an unappreciated idiosyncrasy, or a minnow with a mission.
He goes far to convince us of what we have before
suspected, that fishes are the highest of organizations.
The natives of that more solid atmosphere, they are
not subject to wind or rain, they have been guilty of
no Promethean rape, they have bitten no apple. They
build no fences, holding their watery inheritance undivided. Beyond all other living things they mind their

28

PERTAINING TO THOREAU.

own business. They have not degenerated to the necessity of reform, swallowing no social pills, but living
quietly on each other in a true primitive community.
They are vexed with no theories of the currency which
go deeper than the Newfoundland Banks.
Nimium
fortunati!
We wish Mr. Thoreau would undertake a
report upon them as a private enterprise. It would
be the most delightful book of natural history extant.
Mr. Thoreau's volume is the more pleasant that with
all its fresh smell of the woods, it is yet the work of a
bookish man. We not only hear the laugh of the
flicker, and the watchman's rattle of the red squirrel,
but the voices of poets and philosophers, old and new.
There is no more reason why an author should reflecl;
trees and mountains than books, which, if they are in
any sense real, are as good parts of nature as any other
kind of growth. We confess that there is a certain
charm for us even about a fool who has read myriads
of books. There is an undefinable atmosphere around
him, as of distant lands around a great traveller, and
of distant years around very old men. But we think
that Mr. Thoreau sometimes makes a bad use of his
books. Better things can be got out of Herbert and
Vaughan and Donne than the art of making bad
verses. There is no harm in good writing, nor do
wisdom and philosophy prefer crambo. Mr. Thoreau
never learned bad rhyming of the river and the sky.
He is the more culpable as he has shown that he can
write poetry at once melodious and distinct, with rare
delicacy of thought and feeling.

A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK.

29

My life is like a stroll upon the beach,
As near the ocean's edge as I can go,
My tardy steps its waves sometimes o'erreach,
Sometimes I stay to let them overflow.
My sole employment ' t is, and scrupulous care,
T o place my gains beyond the r e a c h of tides,
E a c h smoother pebble, and each shell more rare,
Which ocean kindly to my h a n d confides.
I have b u t few companions on the shore,
T h e y scorn the strand who sail upon the sea,
Yet oft I t h i n k the ocean they 've sailed o'er
Is deeper k n o w n upon the strand to me.
T h e middle sea contains no crimson dulse,
Its deeper waves cast up no pearls to view,
Along the shore my h a n d is on its pulse,
And I converse with m a n y a shipwrecked crew.

If Mr. Emerson choose to leave some hard nuts for
posterity to crack, he can perhaps afford it as well as
any. We counsel Mr. Thoreau, in his own words, to
take his hat and come out of that. If he prefer to put
peas in his shoes when he makes private poetical excursions, it is nobody's affair. But if the public are to go
along with him, they will find some way to boil theirs.
We think that Mr. Thoreau, like most solitary men,
exaggerates the importance of his own thoughts. The
" I " occasionally stretches up tall as Pompey's pillar
over a somewhat flat and sandy expanse. But this
has its counterbalancing advantage, that it leads him
to secure many a fancy and feeling which would flit
by most men unnoticed. The little confidences of

3°

PERTAINING TO THOREAU.

nature which pass his neighbours as the news slip
through the grasp of birds perched upon the telegraphic wires, he received as they were personal messages from a mistress. Yet the book is not solely
excellent as a Talbotype of natural scenery.
It
abounds in fine thoughts, and there is many a critical obiter didum which is good law, as what he says of
Raleigh's style.
Sir Walter Raleigh might well be studied if only for the excellence of his style, for he is r e m a r k a b l e in the midst of so
many masters. T h e r e is a n a t u r a l emphasis in his style, like
a m a n ' s tread, and a breathing space between the sentences,
which the best of modern writing does not furnish. His chapters are like English p a r k s , or say r a t h e r like a Western forest,
where the larger growth keeps down the underwood, and one
may ride on horseback through the openings.

Since we have found fault with some of what we
may be allowed to call the worsification, we should
say that the prose work is done conscientiously and
neatly. The style is compact and the language has
an antique purity like wine grown colorless with age.
There are passages of a genial humor interspersed at
fit intervals, and we close our article with one of them
by way of grace. It is a sketch which would have
delighted Lamb.
I can just remember an old brown-coated m a n who was the
Walton of this stream, who h a d come over from Newcastle,
E n g l a n d , with his son, the latter a stout and hearty m a n who
h a d lifted an anchor in his day. A straight old m a n he was
who took his way in silence t h r o u g h the meadows, having passed

A WEEK

ON T H E

CONCORD AND

MERRIMACK.

31

the period of communication with his fellows; his old experienced coat hanging long and straight and brown as the yellow
pine bark, glittering with so m u c h smothered sunlight, if you
stood near enough, no work of art b u t naturalized at length.
I often discovered him unexpectedly amid the pads and the gray
willows when he moved, fishing in some old country method,—
for youth and age then went a fishing together,— full of incommunicable thoughts, perchance about his own T y n e and Northu m b e r l a n d . H e was always to be seen in serene afternoons
h a u n t i n g the river, and almost rustling with the sedge; so many
sunny hours in an old m a n ' s life, entrapping silly fish, almost
grown to be the sun's familiar; what need had he of hat or
raiment any, having served out his time, and seen t h r o u g h such
thin disguises? I have seen how his coeval fates rewarded him
with the yellow perch, and yet I thought his luck was not in
proportion to his y e a r s ; and I have seen when, with slow steps
and weighed down with aged thoughts, he disappeared with his
fish u n d e r his low-roofed house on the skirts of the village. I
think nobody else saw him ; nobody else remembers him now,
for he soon after died, and migrated to new T y n e streams.
His fishing was not a sport, nor solely a means of subsistence,
b u t a sort of solemn sacrament and withdrawal from the world,
just as the aged read their bibles. 1
1
[ J a m e s Russell Lowell, in " T h e Massachusetts Quarterly
R e v i e w " for December, 1849.]

A YANKEE

DIOGENES

A YANKEE DIOGENES.'

T

H E New England character is essentially antiDiogenic ; the Yankee is too shrewd not to
comprehend the advantages of living in what we call
the world; there are no bargains to be made in the
desert, nobody to be taken advantage of in the woods,
while the dwellers in tubs and shanties have slender
opportunities of bettering their condition by barter.
When the New Englander leaves his home, it is not
for the pleasure of living by himself; if he is migratory
in his habits, it is not from his fondness for solitude,
nor from any impatience he feels at living in a crowd.
Where there are. most men, there is, generally, most
money, and there is where the strongest attractions
exist for the genuine New Englander. A Yankee
Diogenes is a lusus, and we feel a peculiar interest in
reading the account which an oddity of that kind
gives of himself. The name of Thoreau has not a
New England sound ; but we believe that the author
of " Walden " is a genuine New Englander, and of
1

Walden; or, Life in the Woods.
Boston: Ticknor & Fields. 1854.

By HENRY D. THOREAU.

36

PERTAINING TO THOREAU.

New England antecedents and education. Although
he plainly gives the reasons for publishing his book,
at the outset, he does not clearly state the causes that
led him to live the life of a hermit on the shore of
Walden Pond. But we infer from his volume that his
aim was the very remarkable one of trying to be something, while he lived upon nothing; in opposition to
the general rule of striving to live upon something,
while doing nothing. Mr. Thoreau probably tried the
experiment long enough to test its success, and then
fell back again into his normal condition. But he
does not tell us that such was the case. He was
happy enough to get back among the good people of
Concord, we have no doubt; for although he paints
his shanty-life in rose-colored tints, we do not believe
he liked it, else why not stick to it? We have a mistrust of the sincerity of the St. Simon Stylites', and suspect that they come down from their pillars in the
night-time, when nobody is looking at them. Diogenes placed his tub where Alexander would be sure of
seeing it, and Mr. Thoreau ingenuously confesses that
he occasionally went out to dine, and when the society
of woodchucks and chipping-squirrels were insufficient
for his amusement, he liked to go into Concord and
listen to the village gossips in the stores and taverns.
Mr. Thoreau informs us that he lived alone in the
woods, by the shore of Walden Pond, in a shanty
built by his own hands, a mile from any neighbor, two
years and a half. What he did there besides writing
the book before us, cultivating beans, sounding Wal-

A YANKEE

DIOGENES.

37

den Pond, reading Homer, baking johnny-cakes, studying Brahminical theology, listening to chipping-squirrels, receiving visits, and having high imaginations, we
do not know. He gives us the results of his bean
cultivation with great particularity, and the cost of his
shanty; but the actual results of his two years and a
half of hermit life he does not give. But there have
been a good many lives spent and a good deal of noise
made about them, too, from the sum total of whose
results not half so much good could be extracted as
may be found in this little volume. Many a man will
find pleasure in reading it, and many a one, we hope,
will be profited by its counsels. A tour in Europe
would have cost a good deal more, and not have produced half as much. As a matter of curiosity, to show
how cheaply a gentleman of refined tastes, lofty aspirations and cultivated intellect may live, even in these
days of high prices, we copy Mr. Thoreau's account
of his first year's operations; he did better, he informs
us, the second year. The entire cost of his house,
which answered all his purposes, and was as comfortable and showy as he desired, was $28 1 2 ^ . But
one cannot live on a house unless he rents it to somebody else, even though he be a philosopher and a
believer in Vishnu. Mr. Thoreau felt the need of a
little ready money, one of the most convenient things
in the world to have by one, even before his house was
finished.
"Wishing to earn ten or twelve dollars by some
agreeable and honest method," he observes, " I planted

38

PERTAINING TO THOREAU.

about two acres and a half of light and sandy soil,
chiefly with beans, but also a small part with potatoes
and corn, peas and turnips." As he was a squatter,
he paid nothing for rent, and as he was making no
calculation for future crops, he expended nothing for
manure, so that the results of his farming will not be
highly instructive to young agriculturists, nor be likely
to be held up as excitements to farming pursuits by
agricultural periodicals. He says:
My farm outgoes for the first season were, for implements,
seed, work, & c , $14 7 2 ^ .
T h e seed corn was given me.
This never costs anything to speak of, unless you plant more
than enough. I got twelve bushels of beans, and eighteen
bushels of potatoes, besides some peas and sweet corn. T h e
yellow corn and turnips were too late to come to a n y t h i n g .
My whole income from the farm was
Deducting the outgoes,
T h e r e are left,

.

.

.

.

.

.
'

.

$23 44
1472%

.

.

$8 7 1 ^

besides produce consumed and on h a n d at the time this estimate was made of the value of $4 50,— the amount on hand
m u c h more t h a n balancing a little grass which I did not raise.
All things considered, that is, considering the importance of a
m a n ' s soul and of to-day, notwithstanding the short time occupied by my experiment, nay, partly even because of its transient
character, I believe that that was doing better than any farmer
in Concord did that year.

We will not extract the other items which Mr. Thoreau favors us with in the accounts of his menage;
according to his figures it cost him twenty-seven cents

A YANKEE

DIOGENES.

39

a week to live, clothes included ; and for this sum he
lived healthily and happily, received a good many distinguished visitors, who, to humor his style, used to
leave their names on a leaf or a chip, when they did
not happen to find him at home. But, it strikes us
that all the knowledge which the '' Hermit of Walden "
gained by his singular experiment in living might have
been done just as well, and as satisfactorily, without
any experiment at all. We know what it costs to feed
prisoners, paupers and soldiers ; we know what the
cheapest and most nutritious food costs, and how little
it requires to keep up the bodily health of a full-grown
man. A very simple calculation will enable any one
to satisfy himself in regard to such points, and those
who wish to live upon twenty-seven cents a week, may
indulge in that pleasure. The great Abernethy's prescription for the attainment of perfect bodily health
was, "live on sixpence a day and earn it." But that
would be Sybaritic indulgence compared with Mr.
Thoreau's experience, whose daily expenditure hardly
amounted to a quarter of that sum. And he lived
happily, too, though it do n't exactly speak volumes
in favor of his system to announce that he only continued his economical mode of life two years. If it
was "the thing," why did he not continue it? But, if
he did not always live like a hermit, squatting on other
people's property, and depending upon chance perch
and pickerel for his dinner, he lived long enough by
his own labor, and carried his system of economy to
such a degree of perfection, that he tells us:

40

PERTAINING

TO

THOREAU.

More than five years I maintained myself thus solely by the
labor of my hands, and I found that by working about six wTeeks
in a year, I could meet all the expenses of living. T h e whole
of my winters, as well as most of my summers, I had free and
clear for study. I have thoroughly tried school-keeping, and
found that my expenses were in proportion, or rather out of
proportion, to my income, for I was obliged to dress and train,
not to say think and believe, accordingly, and I lost my time
into t h e bargain. As I did not teach for the good of my fellowmen, but simply for a livelihood, this was a failure.
I have
tried trade ; but I found that it would take /ten years to get
under way in that, and that then I should probably be on my
way to the devil. I was actually afraid that I might by that
time be doing what is called a good business. When formerly
I was looking about to see what I could do for a living, some
sad experience in conforming to the wishes of friends being
fresh in my mind to tax my ingenuity, I thought often and
seriously of picking huckleberries ; that surely I could do, and
its small profits might suffice,—for my greatest skill has been to
want but little,— so little capital it required, so little distraction
from my wonted moods, I foolishly thought. While my acquaintances went unhesitatingly into trade or the professions, I
contemplated this occupation as most like t h e i r s ; ranging the
hills all summer to pick the berries which came in my way, and
thereafter carelessly dispose of them ; so, to keep the flocks of
Admetus. I also dreamed that I might gather the wild herbs,
or carry evergreens to such villagers as loved to be reminded
of the woods, even to the city, by hay-cart loads. But I have
since learned that trade curses everything it handles ; and
though you trade in messages from heaven, the whole curse
of trade attaches to the business.
As I preferred some things to others, and especially valued
my freedom, as I could fare hard and yet succeed well, I did
not wish to spend my time in earning rich carpets or other fine
furniture, or delicate cookery, or a house in the Grecian or
Gothic style just yet. If there be any to whom it is no inter-

A YANKEE

DIOGENES.

41

ruption to acquire these things, and who know h o w to use them
w h e n acquired, I relinquish to them the pursuit. Some are
" i n d u s t r i o u s , " and appear to love labor for its own sake, or
p e r h a p s because it keeps them out of worse mischief; to such I
h a v e at present nothing to say. Those who would not k n o w
w h a t to do with more leisure than they now enjoy, I might
advise to work twice as hard as they d o , — w o r k till they pay
for themselves, and get their free papers. For myself, I found
that the occupation of a day-laborer was the most independent
of any, especially as it required only thirty or forty days in
a year to support one. T h e laborer's day ends with the going
down of the sun, and he is then free to devote himself to his
chosen pursuit, independent of his labor ; but his employer, who'
speculates from month to month, has no respite from one end of
the year to the other.
In short, I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that
to maintain one's self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely ; as the pursuits of the
simpler nations are still the sports of the more artificial. It is
not necessary that a man should earn his living by the sweat of
his brow, unless he sweats easier t h a n I do.

There is nothing of the mean or sordid in the economy of Mr. Thoreau, though to some his simplicity
and abstemiousness may appear trivial and affe&ed;
he does not live cheaply for the sake of saving, nor
idly to avoid labor; but, that he may live independently and enjoy his great thoughts; that he may read
the Hindoo scriptures and commune with the visible
forms of nature. We must do him the credit to admit
that there is no mock sentiment, nor simulation of
piety or philanthropy in his volume. He is not much
of a cynic, and though we have called him a Yankee

42

PERTAINING TO THOREAU.

Diogenes, the only personage to whom he bears a
decided resemblance is that good humored creation of
Dickens, Mark Tapley, whose delight was in being
jolly under difficulties. The following passage might
have been written by Mr. Tapley if that person had
ever turned author, for the sake of testing the provocatives to jollity, which may be found in the literary profession :
Sometimes, when I compare myself with other men, it seems
as if I were more favored by the gods than they, beyond any
deserts that I am conscious of ; as if I had a w a r r a n t and a
surety at their h a n d s which my fellows have not, and especially
guided and g u a r d e d . I do not flatter myself, but if it be possible they flatter me. I have never felt lonesome, or in the least
oppressed by a sense of solitude, but once, and that was a few
weeks after I came to the woods, when, for an hour, I doubted
if the near neighborhood of m a n was not essential to a serene
and healthy life. T o be alone was something unpleasant. But
I was at the same time conscious of a slight insanity in my mood,
and seemed to foresee my recovery. In the midst of a gentle
rain, while these thoughts prevailed; I was suddenly sensible of
such sweet and beneficent society in Nature, in the very pattering of the drops, and in every sound and sight around my
house, an infinite and unaccountable friendliness all at once
like an atmosphere sustaining me, as made the fancied advantages of h u m a n neighborhood insignificant, and I have never
t h o u g h t of them since. E v e r y little pine needle expanded and
swelled with sympathy and befriended me. I was so distinctly
m a d e a w a r e of the presence of something kindred to me, even
in scenes which we are accustomed to call wild and dreary, and
also that the nearest in blood to me and h u m a n e s t was not a
person nor a villager, that I thought no place could ever be
strange to me again.

A YANKEE

DIOGENES.

43

Mourning untimely consumes the sad ;
Few are their days in the land of the living,
Beautiful daughter of Toscar.

Some of my pleasantest hours were d u r i n g the long rain
storms in the spring or fall, which confined me to the house
for the afternoon as well as the forenoon, soothed by their ceaseless roar and p e l t i n g ; when an early twilight ushered in a long
evening in which m a n y thoughts had time to take root and unfold themselves. In those driving north-east rains which tried
the village houses so, when the maids stood ready with mop
and pail in front entries to keep the deluge out, I sat behind
the door in my little house, which was all entry, and thoroughly
enjoyed its protection. In one heavy t h u n d e r shower, the lightning struck a large pitch-pine across the pond, m a k i n g a very
conspicuous and perfectly regular spiral groove from top to bottom, an inch or more deep, and four or five inches wide, as you
would groove a walking-stick. I passed it again the other day,
and was struck with awe on looking up and beholding t h a t
m a r k , now more distinct t h a n ever, where a terrific and resistless bolt came down out of the harmless sky eight years ago.
Men frequently say to me, " I should think you would feel lonesome down there, and w a n t to be nearer folks, rainy a n d snowy
days, and nights especially." I am tempted to reply to such,
— This whole earth which we inhabit is but a point in space.
H o w far apart, think you, dwell the two most distant inhabitants of yonder star, the b r e a d t h of whose disc cannot be appreciated by our instruments ? Why should I feel lonely ? Is not
our planet in the Milky W a y ? This which you put seems to
me not to be the most important question. W h a t sort of space
is that which separates a m a n from his fellows and makes him
solitary ? I have found that no exertion of the legs can bring
two minds much nearer to one another. W h a t do we want
most to dwell near to ? Not to many m e n surely, the depot, the
post-office, the bar-room, the meeting-house, the school-house,
the grocery, Beacon Hill, or the Five Points, w h e r e men most

44

PERTAINING

TO

THOREAU.

congregate, but to the perennial source of our life, whence in all
our experience we have found that to issue, as the willow stands
near the water and sends out its roots in that direction. T h i s
will vary with different natures, but this is the place where a
wise man will dig his cellar. . . .
I one evening overtook one
of my townsmen, who has accumulated what is called " a handsome p r o p e r t y , " — t h o u g h I never got A fair view of it,— on
the Walden road, driving a pair of cattle to market, who inquired of me how I could bring my mind to give up so m a n y
of the comforts of life. I answered that I was very sure I liked
it passably well; I was not joking. And so I went home to my
bed, and left him to pick his way through the darkness and the
mud to Brighton,— or Bright-town,— which place he would
reach some time in the morning.

There is a true vagabondish disposition manifested
now and then by Mr. Thoreau, which, we imagine,
was more powerful in leading him to his eremite way
of life, than his love of eastern poetry, and his fondness
for observing the ways of snakes and shiners. If there
had been a camp of gipsies in the neighborhood of
Concord, he would have become a king among them,
like Lavengro. It breaks out here with unmistakable
distinctness:
As I came home through the woods with my string of fish,
trailing my pole, it being now quite dark, I caught a glimpse of
a woodchuck stealing across my path, and felt a strange thrill
of savage delight, and was strongly tempted to seize and devour
him raw ; not that I was h u n g r y then, except for that wildness
which he represented. Once or twice, however, while I lived
at the pond, I found myself ranging the woods, like a halfstarved hound, with a strange abandonment, seeking some kind
of venison which I might devour, and no morsel could have

A YANKEE

DIOGENES.

45

been too savage for me. T h e wildest scenes had become unaccountably familiar. I found in myself, and still find, an instinct
toward a higher, or, as it is n a m e d , spiritual life, as do most
men, and another toward a primitive, rank, and savage one,
and I reverence them both. I love the wild not less than the
good. T h e wildness and adventure that are in fishing still recommend it to me. I like sometimes t o ' t a k e rank hold on life
and spend my day more as the animals do. P e r h a p s I have
owed to this employment and to h u n t i n g , when quite young,
my closest acquaintance with N a t u r e . They early introduce
us to and detain us in scenery with which otherwise, at that
age, we should have little acquaintance. Fishermen, hunters,
woodchoppers, and others, spending their lives in the fields and
woods, in a peculiar sense a p a r t of N a t u r e themselves, are often
in a more favorable mood for observing her in the intervals of
their pursuits, than philosophers or poets even, who approach
her with expectation. She is not afraid to exhibit herself to
them. T h e traveller on the prairie is naturally a h u n t e r , on
the head waters of the Missouri and Columbia a trapper, and at
the Falls of St. Mary a fisherman. H e who is only a traveller
learns things at second-hand and by the halves, a n d is poor
authority. We are most interested when science reports w h a t
those men already know practically or instinctively, for that
alone is a true humanity, or account of h u m a n experience.
T h e y mistake w h o assert that the Y a n k e e has few amusements, because he has not so many public holidays, and men
and boys do not play so many games as they do in England, for
here the more primitive but solitary amusements of hunting,
fishing and the like, have not yet given place to the former.
Almost every New England boy among my contemporaries
shouldered a fowling-piece between the ages of ten and fourteen ; and his h u n t i n g and fishing g r o u n d s were not limited
like the preserves of an English nobleman, but were more
boundless even t h a n those of a savage. No wonder, then, that
he did not oftener stay to play on the common. But already a
change is taking place, owing, not to an increased h u m a n i t y ,

46

PERTAINING TO THOREAU.

but to an increased scarcity of game, for perhaps the hunter is
the greatest friend to the animals hunted, not excepting the
Humane Society.

There is much excellent good sense delivered in a
very comprehensive and by no means unpleasant style
in Mr. Thoreau's book, and let people think as they
may of the wisdom or propriety of living after his
fashion, denying oneself all the luxuries which the
earth can afford, for the sake of leading a life of lawless vagabondage, and freedom from starched collars,
there are but few readers who will fail to find profit
and refreshment in his pages. Perhaps some practical
people will think that a philosopher like Mr. Thoreau
might have done the world a better service by purchasing a piece of land, and showing how much it might
be made to produce, instead of squatting on another
man's premises, and proving how little will suffice to
keep body and soul together. But we must allow
philosophers, and all other men, to fulfil their missions
in their own way. If Mr. Thoreau had been a practical farmer, we should not have been favored with his
volume; his corn and cabbage would have done but
little towards profiting us, and we might never have
been the better for his labors. As it is, we see how
much more valuable to mankind is our philosophical
vagabond than a hundred sturdy agriculturists; any
plodder may raise beans, but it is only one in a million
who can write a readable volume. With the following
extract from his volume, and heartily recommending
him to the class of readers who exacl; thoughts as well

A YANKEE

DIOGENES.

47

as words from an author, we must take leave, for the
present, of the philosopher of Walden Pond:
Most men appear never to have considered w h a t a house is,
and are actually, though needlessly poor all their lives, because
they think that they must have such a n one as their neighbors
have. As if one were to wear any sort of coat which the tailor
might cut out for him ; or, gradually leaving off palmleaf h a t or
cap of woodchuck skin, complain of h a r d times because h e could
not afford to buy him a c r o w n ! It is possible to invent a house
still more convenient and luxurious t h a n we have, which yet all
would admit that man could not afford to pay for. Shall we
always study to obtain more of these things, and not sometimes
to be content with less? Shall the respectable citizen thus
gravely teach by precept and example, the necessity of the
young m a n ' s providing a certain n u m b e r of superfluous glowshoes, and umbrellas, and empty guest chambers for empty
guests, before he dies? W h y should not our furniture be as
simple as the A r a b ' s or the I n d i a n ' s ? W h e n I think of the
benefactors of the race, whom we have apotheosized as messengers from heaven, bearers of divine gifts to man, I do not see in
my mind any retinue at their heels, any car-load of fashionable
furniture. Or what if I were to allow — would it not be singular allowance? — that our furniture should be more complex
than the Arab's, in proportion as we are morally and intellectually his superiors! At present our houses are cluttered and
defiled with it, and a good housewife would sweep out the
greater p a r t into the dust-hole, and not leave h e r m o r n i n g ' s
w o r k undone. Morning work ! By the blushes of Aurora, and
the music of Memnon, what should be a m a n ' s morning work in
this world ? I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, b u t I
was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, w h e n
the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and I threw
them out of the window in disgust. H o w , then, could I have a
furnished h o u s e ? I would r a t h e r sit in the open air, for no
dust gathers on the grass, unless w h e r e m a n h a s broken ground.

48

PERTAINING TO THOREAU.

It is the luxurious and dissipated who set the fashions which
the herd so diligently follow. T h e traveller who stops at the
best houses, so called, soon discovers this, for the publicans presume him to be* a Sardanapalus, and if he resigned himself to
their tender mercies he would soon be completely emasculated.
I think that in the railroad car we are inclined to spend more
on luxury than on safety and convenience, and it threatens,
without attaining these, to become no better t h a n a m o d e r n
drawing-room, with its divans, and ottomans, and sunshades,
and a h u n d r e d other oriental things, which we are taking west
with us, invented for the ladies of the h a r e m and the effeminate natives of the Celestial Empire, which J o n a t h a n should be
ashamed to know the names of. I would r a t h e r sit on a p u m p kin and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet
cushion. I would rather ride on earth in an ox-cart with a free
circulation, than go to heaven in the fancy car of an excursion
train, and breathe a malaria all the way. 1
1
[Charles Frederick Briggs, in " P u t n a m ' s M o n t h l y " for
O a o b e r , 1854.]

THOREAU AND

HIS BOOKS

THOREAU AND HIS BOOKS.1
" S i l e n c e , good Meton! cried Anaxagoras, or I may begin
to talk of a luminary whose light has not yet reached the
earth." — PERICLES AND ASPASIA.

" I sing of times trans-shifting ; and I write
H o w roses first came red and lilies w h i t e . " — H E R R I C K .

S

OME books are for sea-side reading; others for
the "country." Some for one time, some for
another. A few for all times and all places. But
just see, gentle reader, (for such are all the readers
of the "Harvard Magazine,") with what propriety of
time and place I read Mr. Thoreau's charming books!
If you knew of a small island, beautiful in its situation, beautiful in itself, rising with its green trees and
shrubbery like a mermaid's palace from the ocean;
where a thousand years ago Thorwald Ericsson, bold
Icelandic Columbus, landed, saying, " T h i s spot is
1
I. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack
Rivers.
Boston
and C a m b r i d g e : J a m e s Munroe & Co. 1849.
2. Walden; or. Life in the Woods.
Boston: Ticknor & Fields.
1854.

52

PERTAINING

TO

THOREAU.

beautiful, here should I like to build myself a habitation,"— there living and dying; where, two hundred
and thirty-four y^ars ago last month, a handful of
English Puritans landed and kept the first New England Sabbath,— uncomfortably enough, no doubt, yet
not without great thankfulness and sincerity unknown
in these days; and where now live voyagers, life voyagers, whose lives seem as natural and fair as the trees
growing up around them; — would not that be the
place? Would you have a better spot than this, pray,
where in summer days to read pleasant books? There
might you sit in an arbor, quite unartificial, of young
balm-of-Gilead trees {Populus candiscans, as Mr. Thoreau would stop to add), and, thus intimate with Nature,
interpret with a finer sense her commissioned reporters.
Music should not be wanting ; from the trees and the
shore might you hear the old eternal song, Das alte
ew'ge Lied, heard long enough ago, — never sung out;
and with such advantages your book should acquire an
adventitious beauty which you would in vain seek for
elsewhere. You assent to this, dear reader, — not without a smile, perhaps, — but you assent. Prosaic as you
boast of being, you confess to a little romance, — in
fad, if the truth were known, considerable. Old as
you are, how often do you go to bed repeating snatches
of verse, or thinking of the time you first saw Betsey
at the party and how hastily time is dealing with you !
And even you, bravadoing, rough-seeming youth, even
you, in your more private hours, glancing at a favorite
engraving, wonder wTith a not unpleasant anxiety when

THOREAU AND HIS BOOKS.

53

you shall see Betsey, — one who alone shall at last
know what is best in you, and solve for you an as
yet only pleasant mystery.
Be that as it may, there in such wise did I read
these pleasant volumes, enjoying their many beauties,
and endeavoring—not always successfully—to understand and approve the philosophy therein set forth;
where beauties occurred I used an appropriate bookmark, a green leaf, while the tree also sung its approval.
From the passages thus distinguished, and from the
inspiration of that hour, "the recurrence of the ray
divine," I had written " a n article" which was intended
for these pages. But fortunately for you, dear reader,
a circumstance has occurred which renders its publication unnecessary.
Strangely and unexpectedly
enough, a criticism on this subject has come into
my hands, written apparently by a person who has
passed some of his days in that pleasant village of
Concord. I therefore, somewhat reluctantly, lay my
own aside, with all its admiration-marks, beautiful passages, trite quotations, and extravagant (though, by
your leave, sincere) expressions, natural to all young
writers. How I came by this is neither for you to ask
nor me to answer. There is no romance about it. I
neither found it in the trunk of a tree, nor enveloped
in ominous mystery in my letter-box at the post-office.
It is enough that I have it; and I will make such
selections therefrom as I hope will not be unpleasing
to you. " D i d you talk?" said one to a friend who
had visited Coleridge. " N o ; I could never get in a

54

P E R T A I N I N G TO T H O R E A U .

word." We have the critic at a vast advantage, and
shall slip in a word whenever we choose.
Thus, with a slight flourish of trumpets does the
Unknown begin: —
" 'Sails between worlds and

worlds.'—MILTON.

" ' W h e r e is he that loves the woods,
At home in all green s o l i t u d e s . ' — C R A N C H .

"THANKS! O Pliniogenes, for those rare books!
Verily, Concord, thou art a blessed town ; dear to
me, every stone in thy streets, every drop in thy river.
Here long since lived the brave farmer-warriors, and
here to-day dwell many worthy men. Here lives the
serenest and best of poets ; here, the Arcadian lover of
Priscilla ; here, at times, comes the eloquent 'Sayer,'
hushing the noisy street with a peaceful presence ;
here, the dreaming Howadji, in his linen frock, sought
a true and simple life; and here lives and labors Pliniogenes,— artisan, farmer, natural historian, philosopher, and poet,—
' Foreteller of the vernal ides,
Wise harbinger of spheres and tides,' —

of whom the world has much yet to hear, — somewhat
of whom the world shall hear, if these papers come to
light."
Here follow some ill-considered remarks on criticism, not wholly uninteresting to the reader, from which
we take the following; as though a critic should prejudice his mind by reading a book beforehand !

THOREAU

AND

HIS

BOOKS.

55

" I never allow myself to give an opinion of any
book whatever, until I have read it considerately, and
endeavored sincerely to understand the spirit of the
author. Why can we not have some charity and conscientiousness in our criticisms? We must be truthful and impartial, ruat coelum; but do not, pray, sacrifice justice to a love of pungent sarcasm. That is a
good saying of Teufelsdrockh: 'Sarcasm I now see to
be the language of the Devil; for which reason I have
long since as good as renounced it/ How indignant
were we all, some years ago, at the treatment which
our best poet received in a leading Review, in which
his verses were compared with ' the great Panjandrum
with the little button at the top,'&c. Think of it!
Think of this, and then read his 'Each and All/ 'The
Problem/ 'Wood-Notes/ 'The Amulet/ etc., and I
will not listen to your remarks upon the Reviewer.
It has often reminded me of that saying of Sir Thomas
Moore in his epistle to Peter Giles: 'Some love only old
things, and many like nothing but what is their own.
Some again, when they meet in taverns, take upon
them, among their cups, to pass censure very freely on
all writers, and, with a supercilious liberty, to condemn
everything they do not like; in which they have an
advantage, like that of a bald man, who can catch hold
of another by the hair, while the other cannot return
the like upon him.' The lines of a poet, turned and
twisted, quoted ex parte, sadly misrepresent him. As
if one should mangle Beethoven's Fifth Symphony by
skipping from the allegro to the andante, playing both

56

PERTAINING TO THOREAU.

together, and stopping in the crescendo of a climax;
which, as a whole, is a very beautiful and very transcendental performance. The poet's children came
home so bespattered with the mud of the critic that we
hardly knew them, and it is no wonder that they are
thought by some to have a strange bearing. But there
is no fear for them; it is the 'strange boy' who makes
the great man. As Dr. Holmes says, one may stand
at the street corners and sell the gilt farthings of Tupper, when he can't give away the golden guineas of
Tennyson; and he might have added, 'or of Emerson.' When will these two-penny //Witudes, without
the government stamp, be prohibited ?"
The Unknown grows impatient! and perhaps not
wholly without reason. He concludes: —
" T h e spirit of the criticism which I complain of,
seems worse to me than the matter itself. 'The great
Panjandrum' business doesn't amount to anything; —
'tis merely a 'cover for hidden fire,' like Pickwick's
warming-pan. — only there's a deal more brass in it."
But let us come to that "somewhat" of "Pliniogenes."
Mr. Thoreau's first book is a pleasant narrative of
a week's journey on the "Concord and Merrimack
rivers." Many people smile at the title, as who should
say, What was Thoreau doing on those streams, that
he should publish an account of his journey? I have
written no account of my last excursion to Nahant.
True; but Mr. Thoreau might have done so, and made
a valuable book, I doubt not. This Merrimac navi-

THOREAU

AND

HIS

BOOKS.

57

gation was not for trading purposes, — no ventures for
Lowell or Concord (N. H . ) ; neither, geographically
speaking, for discovery. Yet the intelligent reader
may find that discoveries, not wholly unimportant
or uninteresting, were made, and natural phenomena
recorded in a pleasant way, which in no way whatever
are recorded in the text-books. If the reader remembers that, according to the Unknown, he is both poet
and philosopher, the matter will become plain. He
says: " I had often stood on the banks of the Concord, watching the lapse of the current, an emblem of
all progress, the weeds at the bottom gently bending
down the stream, shaken by the watery wind, erelong
to die and go down likewise. . . . The occasional
logs and stems of trees that floated past, fulfilling their
fate, were objeds of singular interest to me, and at last
I resolved to launch myself on its bosom, and float
whither it would bear me." And thus they float (Mr.
Thoreau and his brother) down the Concord and up
the Merrimack, in a skiff, " which had cost us a week's
labor, painted green below, with a border of blue,
with reference to the two elements in which it was
to spend its existence." Thus they float through the
pleasant days, and at night — pitching their tent on
the bank, where "huckleberries still hanging on the
bushes, . . . bread and sugar, and cocoa boiled in
river water, made our repast"—they jot down the
adventures of the day (and night), what they have
seen and heard, and reflections thereupon. But here
is a philosophic scintillation from the critic.

58

PERTAINING TO THOREAU.

" 'Fulfilling their fate'! 'Es leuchtet mir e m , ' "
cries he; "plainly enough, thou art somewhat a fatalist. That Concord River was merely a symbol, standing for that irresistible stream of Fate which bore you
on. This it is which has shifted you from one occupation to another, dissatisfied you with all, and at last
placed you in your true position as priest and poet of
Nature."
Rare doctrine this, for these sensible Christian days !
Is this form of Napoleonism also redivivus? But let
us hear of Mr. Thoreau as the "priest and poet of
Nature"; for, in thus specifying his "profession," the
critic hits the nail on the head.
" T h e journey from Concord-upon-Concord to the
sources of the Merrimack, and back, occupied a week.
The author has therefore divided his book according
to the days of the week, discussing topics somewhat
appropriate to each day, as well as to the scenes through
which they were passing. This he has very successfully done; and in this light his book is an artistic
and beautiful performance, — more so, I think, than
'Walden.' This refers to the form merely, not to the
matter, a good deal of which is surprisingly true and
beautiful, though not without much that is open to
just criticism. Pliniogenes, as my well-meant sobriquet
asserts, is a man wonderfully intimate with Nature,
versed in all her secrets, as well as a rugged, hearty,
and not unfrequently blunt philosopher; a natural
philosopher in more than one sense. Horace will
never have a better illustration of that verse,—

THOREAU

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HIS

BOOKS.

59

' Rusticus, abnormis sapiens, crassaque Minerva.'

Though answering to both, he is more truly the poet
than the priest of Nature. As the latter, his philosophy is sometimes at fault, and his homilies not wholly
important or intelligible; so that you may sometimes
sleep under them, and not be a great loser. Only be
sure and wake up in time to hear the most rare and
beautiful psalm and benediction at the end ! If not,
you lose much, and your friends will in vain endeavor
to communicate the blessing which has fallen upon
them. But, as the Poet of Nature, Pliniogenes is unsurpassed. I never read or heard of a man who lived
so near to nature. He says himself: 'There is in
my nature, methinks, a singular yearning toward all
wildness. I know of no redeeming qualities in myself
but a sincere love for some things, and when I am
reproved, I fall back on to this ground.' Courage!
Pliniogenes, it is good ground. Only, when you 're
there, don't chanticleer it too loudly, in derision of
our poor footholds, — footholds which we like somewhat, feel their disadvantages, yet think to toil on with
them to the end, — not without improvement, — keeping the best heart we may. Yet, O Pliniogenes, shout
to us from the woods, — tell us that best refreshing
news of yours ! We need it, and love it; and welcome it as it comes, — refreshing in the dust of this
battle, which you forsake. (Ah! do you succeed?)
Surely, if I were not Alexander, I would be Diogenes.
"This extraordinary lover of Nature adapts himself
to all her moods and tenses; studies her least whim

6o

PERTAINING TO THOREAU.

or caprice. The day is his; the night also is his.
Think of a man wandering the whole night through,
and the next day producing a lecture on 'Moonlight/
He is, more by nature than book-culture, both zoologist and botanist. No bird or flower escapes his
eye; indeed, the poet thinks they meet him half-way.
He says: —
' A n d such I k n e w , a forest seer,
A minstrel of the n a t u r a l year,
A lover true, who k n e w by heart
E a c h joy the mountain dales impart.
It seemed that N a t u r e could not raise
A plant in any secret place,
But he would come in the very hour
It opened in its virgin
bower,
(As if a sunbeam showed t h e place,)
And tell its long-descended race,
As if by secret light he knew
W h e r e in far fields the orchis g r e w . ' l

" T h e sounds, too, of Nature, — from the chirping
sparrow to the screeching owl; 2 from the lowing cow
to the tr-r-o-o-nking frog, — who has ever heard them
as he has? That chapter of 'Walden' on 'Sounds'!
I have read and re-read it, always with delight. It
deserves binding by itself, and gilt binding at that/'
Thus the delighted critic. We confess we share his
delight, but were he here, we would ask him if Mr.
Thoreau understands as well the sublime in Nature as
the detail; though we afterwards find quoted a descrip1
2

Emerson, Woodnotes, p p . 69, 70.
Walden, p . 135.

THOREAU AND HIS BOOKS.

6l

tion of daybreak on the Saddleback Mountain, which
is hardly less sublime than anything which has been
said to Mount Blanc. 1 Setting forth the author as the
poet of Nature, various quotations are made, of which
we select the following.
"Behold," says the critic, "the poetry of Botany.
The happy Pliniogenes, seated in his skiff, 'painted
green with a border of blue/ 'loaded the evening before at our door, with potatoes and melons from a
patch which we had cultivated/ is fairly embarked.
'Gradually/ says he, 'the village murmur subsided,
and we seemed to be embarked on the placid current
of our dreams, floating from past to future, as silently
as one awakes to fresh morning or evening thoughts.
We glided noiselessly down the stream. The banks
had passed the height of their beauty, and some of the
bright flowers showed, by their faded tints, that the
season was verging towards the afternoon of the year;
but this sombre tinge enhanced their sincerity. The
narrow-leaved willow lay along the surface of the water,
in masses of light green foliage, interspersed with the
large white bells of the button-bush. The rose-colored
polygonum raised its head proudly above the water on
either hand, and flowering at this season and in these
localities, in the midst of dense fields of the white species which skirted the sides of the stream, its little
streak of red looked very rare and precious. The pure
white blossoms of the arrow-head stood in the shal1

A Week on the Concord, &c, pp. 198, 199.

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lower parts, and a few cardinals on the margin, still
proudly surveying themselves refleded in the water,
though the latter, as well as the pickerel-weed, was now
nearly out of blossom. The snake-head, Cheloneglabra,
grew close to the shore, while a kind of coreopsis, turning its brazen face to the sun, full and rank, and a tall,
dull, red flower, Eupatorium purpureum, or trumpetweed, formed the rear rank of the fluvial array. The
bright blue flowers of the soapwort gentian were sprinkled here and there in the adjacent meadows, like
flowers which Proserpine had dropped, and still farther
in the fields, or higher on the banks, were seen the Virginia rhexia and drooping neottia, or ladies' tresses ;
while from the more distant way-sides and the banks
where the sun had lodged was reflected a dull yellow
beam from the ranks of tansy, now in its prime. In
short, Nature seemed to have adorned herself for our
departure with a profusion of fringes and curls, mingled with the bright tints of flowers, refleded in the
water. But we missed the white water-lily, which is
the queen of river-flowers, its reign being over for this
season. He makes his voyage too late, perhaps, by a
true water-clock, who delays so long. I have passed
down the river before sunrise, on a summer morning,
between fields of lilies still shut in sleep ; and when at
length the flakes of sunlight from over the bank fell
on the surface of the water, whole fields of while blossoms
seemed to flash open before ?ne as I floated along, like the
unfolding of a banner, so sensible is this flower to the
influence of the sun's rays.'

THOREAU AND HIS BOOKS.

6$

" A rare and pleasant way has this navigator of
treating these matters. In other places he speaks of
the willow, in a way to remind one of the music suggested to Beethoven by that tree.
" I n the matter of fishes, I have hitherto seen little
but dry facts, if such can be called dry. Has the
reader ever read any ' poetry of zoology' ? This is
what Pliniogenes says of fishes: 'Whether we live by
the sea-side or by the lakes and rivers, it concerns us
to attend to the nature of fishes. . . . There are fishes
wherever there is a fluid medium, and even in clouds
and in melted metals we detect their semblance. Think
how in winter you can sink a line down straight in a
pasture, through snow and through ice, and pull up a
bright, slippery, dumb, subterranean silver or golden
fish ! I have thus stood over them (the breams) half
an hour at a time, and stroked them familiarly without frightening them, suffering them to nibble my fingers harmlessly, and have even taken them out of the
water with my hands by letting the fingers gradually
close about them as they are poised over the palm,
and with the utmost gentleness raising them slowly
to the surface. They keep up a constant sculling or
waving motion with their fins, exceedingly graceful,
and expressive of their humble happiness. The edges
of the dorsal and caudal fins have a singular dusty
golden reflection. Seen in its native element, it is a
very beautiful and compact fish, perfect in all its parts,
and looks like a brilliant coin fresh from the mint. It
is a perfect jewel of the river; the green, red, coppery,

64

PERTAINING

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and golden reflections of its mottled sides in harmony
with the sunlit brown and yellow pebbles. I have
often attracted these small perch to the shore at eveni n g l y rippling the water with my fingers. It is a true
fish, such as the angler loves to put into his basket, or
hang at the top of his willow twig in shady afternoons,
along the banks of the stream. The Chivin, Dace,
Roach, or Cousin Trout, Leuciscus pulchellus, any angler is glad to hook for its rarity. It is commonly a
silvery, soft-scaled fish, of graceful, scholar-like, and
classical look, like many a picture in an English book.
The red chivin, according to some, is still the same
fish, with its tints deepened, they think, by the darker
water it inhabits, as the red clouds swim in the twilight
atmosphere. I have caught white chivin of great size
in the Aboljacknagesic, at the base of Mount Ktaadn,
but no red ones there. The latter variety seems not
to have been sufficiently observed. . . . The shiner,
Leuciscus crysoleucas, is a gold or silver fish that passes
current in the river, its limber tail rippling the surface
in sport or flight. . . . The pickerel, Esox retiadatus,
the swiftest, wariest, and most ravenous of fishes, is a
solemn, stately ruminant fish, lurking under the shadow
of a pad at noon, with still, circumspect, voracious eye,
motionless as a jewel set in the water/
" H o w can I refrain," asks the critic, "from illustrating this poetical intimacy with Nature with such
passages as these? Speaking of the transparency of
the air and water, as they dipped their way along, between fresh masses of foliage, overrun with the grape

THOREAU AND HIS BOOKS.

65

and smaller flowering vines, the author says : ' The
birds seemed to flit through submerged groves, alighting
on the yielding sprays, and their clear notes to come up from
below. The w7orld seemed holiday or prouder pageantry,
with silken streamers flying, and the course of our lives
to wind on before us like a green lane into a country
maze at the season when fruit-trees are in blossom.
Why should not our whole life and its scenery be actually thus fair and distind?'
"And again at sunset he writes: 'Vespers had already rung in many a dim and watery chapel down
below, where the shadow of weeds were extended in
length over the sandy floor. The vespertinal pout had
already begun to flit on leathern fin, and the finny
gossips withdrew from the fluvial streets to creeks and
coves, and other private haunts, excepting a few of the
stronger fish, which anchored in the stream, stemming
the tide even in their dreams/
:
'Still more characteristic of the author is the following: ' I have stood under a tree in the woods half
a day at a time, during a heavy rain, in the summer
and yet employed myself happily and profitably there,
prying with microscopic eye into the crevices of the
bank, or the leaves, or the fringe at my feet. I can
fancy that it would be a luxury to stand up to one's
chin in some retired swamp a whole summer's day,
scenting the wild honeysuckle and bilberry blows, and
lulled by the minstrelsy of gnats and mosquitos ! Say
twelve hours of genial and familiar intercourse with
the leopard frog; the sun to rise behind alder and

66

PERTAINING TO THOREAU.

dogwood, climb buoyantly to his meridian of two
handsbreadth, and finally to sink to rest behind some
bold western hummock. To hear the evening chant of
the mosquito from a thousand green chapels, and the bittern begin to boom from some concealed fort, like a
sunset gun !'
"Sweet are the honeysuckles and bilberry blows, O
Pliniogenes; sweet, too, the minstrelsy of gnats and
mosquitos; but do they not bite? I have heard that a
wise man has spent ten years over a Nautilus preliminary to a dissection ; 1 but what transcendent knowledge do you bring us from that 'twelve hours of genial and familiar intercourse with the leopard frog'?
" I t is but one step from this swamp to the clouds.
Hear this from the mountains: 'All around beneath
me was spread for a hundred miles on every side,
as far as the eye could reach, an undulating country of clouds, answering in varied swell of its surface to the terrestrial world it veiled. It was such
a country as we might see in dreams, with all the
delights of paradise. There were immense snowy
pastures and shady vales between the vaporous mountains ! But when its own sun began to rise on this
pure world I found myself a dweller in the dazzling
halls of aurora, drifting amid the saffron-colored
clouds and playing with the rosy fingers of the dawn
in the very path of the sun's chariot and sprinkled
with its dewy dust, surveying with a benignant smile,
Agassiz's Lecftures.

THOREAU AND HIS BOOKS.

6j

and near at hand, the far-darting glances of the god/ "
But let us hear something of the priest and philosopher.
" 'Their Christ' and 'my Buddha' ! " ] cries the
Critic, " 'Shakespeare youthfully green' beside the
'cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat Geeta M In
what unpleasant lands have fallen our noble lines?
0 where the end of this eternal Eastern business,-—
this Buddha and Brahm panegyric! Make the most
you can of your 'Buddha'; pass him through all forms
of animate existence, from the time his creation depends
on a flower-stalk to that last transmigration into annihilation which is not annihilation, he is not worthy to
be compared to Jesus Christ, much less to our God,
with whom he corresponds in the Buddhist mythology. And as for Shakespeare and the Bhagvat Geeta,
1 should value more one drama of the great bard,
than all the dialogues of Kreeshna and Arjoon together. Rare books those Eastern works; but what
avails it to learn that the ' souls of women and of the
inferior tribes are doomed to transmigration till they
can be regenerated in the body of a Brahman';2
that
the man 'who may be happy in his soul,' 'hath no
interest either in that which is done or that which is
not d o n e ' ; 3 that 'the Yogee sitteth upon the sacred
grass' during the 'purification of his soul, keeping his
1
A Week, etc., p. 72.
"2 As the Veds declare.
3
Bhagvat Geeta, p. 46.

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PERTAINING TO THOREAU.

head, neck, and body steady without motion, his eyes
fixed on the point of his nose, looking at no other place
around.' For these things you shall see, as well as
the wise things which Pliniogenes has quoted. Wonderful God, for our purposes, that Brahm, whose existence is a ' dreamless sleep,' * ' who can neither be called
Sat {ens) nor Asat (non ens)';2 neither the ego nor the
non-ego, the ich nor the nicht-ich, the me nor the not-me.
O philosophers, your jargon is at fault; schoolmen,
your vocabularies are defective. Now do I see why
those good Eastern people regard creation—to us not
wholly unreal — as a 'delusion,' since to them it is
only an 'appearance' of this Brahm, this existing nonexistence! Transcendentalism, thy name is Brahm!"
Peace, O Unknown S There are many very wise
things in those books; and Mr. Thoreau esteems them
for the most part for their "rare intellectuality." Yet
he plays too long upon that one string,— we get too
much of that heathenish music, when we have as good
or better of our own. Nor is Shakespeare "youthfully
green" by the side of anybody. As the critic rather
aptly concludes this topic : —
"Your Buddhas and~~i?rakmas and Vedas are (not
to speak it flippantly) all very good in their way; and
we will attend to them. But I insist upon it, we have
a better way; that, since that sublime life of Christ,
we have a better religion, and thereby a better philos1
2

Rev. James F. Clarke's Lectures.
Bhagvat Geeta, p. 103.

THOREAU AND HIS BOOKS.

69

ophy; that the Hebrew Scriptures have more grandeur
and sublimity, with less obscurity, than the Hindoo.
And as they are better fitted for a somewhat enlightened and civilized nation like our own, I trust we
shall continue, dear Pliniogenes, to prefer them, emulating, in the study thereof, your 'twelve hours of genial
and familiar intercourse with the leopard frog/ and the
Fbgee, sitting on 'the sacred grass which is called Koos,'
'his eyes fixed on the point of his nose, looking at no
other place/ " l
Here, dear reader, we come to an abrupt cetera desunt.
Though disappointed in not finding something of 'Walden/ I agree with you that we should not enter that
somewhat Dantean wood, after this pleasanter river
excursion. Rather let us come " o u t of the woods"
and crow, in satisfaction of our safe return. Even Mr.
Thoreau does the like: —
"As it grew later in the afternoon, and we rowed
leisurely up the gentle stream, shut in between fragrant
and blooming banks, where we had first pitched our
tent, and drew nearer to the fields where our lives had
passed, we seemed to deted; the hues of our native sky
in the southwest horizon. Thus thoughtfully we were
rowing homeward to find some autumnal work to do,
and help on the revolution of the seasons."
The critic, however, adds, that, in event of a further "illumination," (which he confidently expeds,)
however feeble, he may furnish other matter; that he
1

Bhagvat Geeta, p. 63.

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has something more to say of "Pliniogenes" as priest
and philosopher, and alludes to his wholesale condemnation of newspapers, as " a worse than Napoleonic
' ontrooting of journalism' "; his remarks upon philanthropists and reformers, as "darkly unintelligible to
those unacquainted with him, to few, indeed, wholly
clear"; and his numerous complaints against society,
" n o t always placid and serene," as "reminding one
a little of what Mr. Carlyle calls a 'running shriek/ "
The critic will remember that Mr. Thoreau, where he
speaks of "browsing Olive-Branches," * has some excellent remarks upon newspapers; that reformers, alas !
may sometimes begin with themselves; and that society, God knows, is bad enough. The question is,
whether Mr. Thoreau takes the right way, or any way,
to mend it. On the whole, we think he has no
business with it. He has as distind an office — mission, if you will — as any which Mr. Pierce can dispense, and many times more honorable. As the critic
says, he is the "priest and poet of Nature," but, as the
Night-song runs,—
" Zu was a n d e r m taugt

er

nicht."

Further alluding to "Walden," as a "book, though
less artistic than its predecessor, yet in other respeds
superior, and in every way worthy the attention [he
might have added, the admiration] of all honest readers," the critic disappears in the sunset cloud of this
1

Walden, p . 119.

THOREAU AND HIS BOOKS.

71

farewell apostrophe. Speaking of the discontent of
some of his friends with society, and what prompted
them to organize (?) the "Brook Farm Community,"
as " a true and noble aspiration for a better life," and
of this joined with a certain "natural wildness" as
shaping the destiny of Mr. Thoreau, he says: " T h i s
is the daemon, seemingly satyrical, with a head for the
stars, and hoofs to dig in the earth, which harries you
now, as it ever will. This it is which causes you to
shift from 'pencil-making/ 'huckleberrying,' or thy
more praiseworthy and excellent surveying, 'from fear
of doing a good business'; — a Brahministic antipathy
to what is, in a worldly sense, practical. This, which
sent you dreaming down the Concord River, and up
the Merrimack. Spiritually, poetically Quixotic pilgrimage ! Rozinantean bark ! Quaint navigators !
Dreams infinitely beautiful, and sometimes, as the best
dreams are, infinitely unintelligible!—Ah! Pliniogenes,
if, in that divine pilgrimage, that Ulyssean wandering,
(for the fates are not idle with thee,) thou hadst met
with some Calypso's island, what dreams should we
not have had ! —And this, at last, which drove thee
restless from a peaceful home, to live like a Gaboon
savage, materially, at Walden Pond; spiritually, a true
— the truest — prophet of Nature. Your life is a poem,
O Pliniogenes, of shifting scene and changing metre.
Only make it, I pray you, always fair and intelligible. It has the freshness of morning, the beauty of
evening. Give it the clearness of noonday. Lacking
the rare gift of verse, you may never give it that final

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form, but you may live for us a 'many-colored' poem.
'My life has been the poem I would have writ,
But I could not both live and utter it.' "

Landor says, "There are writings which must lie
long upon the straw before they mellow to the taste;
and there are summer fruits that cannot abide the
keeping." There is also a fruit of the tropics, protected by a rough and shaggy coat, which affords both
meat and milk at all seasons. Such are Mr. Thoreau's
books.
''Still, O Pliniogenes, shout to us from the woods;
tell us that best refreshing news of yours ! Thy voice
bringeth the breath of the pines, the song of birds, and
the perfume of flowers. We need it and love it, and
welcome it as it comes, — refreshing in the dust of this
battle which you forsake." *
1

[Edwin Morton,'55, in "Harvard Magazine" for January,
1855-]

TOWN AND RURAL HUMBUGS

TOWN AND RURAL HUMBUGS..

W

H E N Philip, King of Macedon, had made preparations to march against the Corinthians, the
latter, though utterly incapable of coping with that sagacious and powerful monarch, affected to make great
efforts at defence with a view to resist him. Diogenes,
who took great delight in ridiculing such follies as he
was too proud to indulge in himself, or did not happen to have a taste for, began to roll about his tub in
a bustling and excited manner, thus deriding the idle
hurry and silly show of opposition by which the feeble
Corinthians were trying to deceive themselves or Philip
into a belief that he had something to fear from them.
It is a wonder to a certain Yankee Diogenes, that
there are not more tubs rolled about now-a-days; for
the world, in his estimation, never contained more
bustling, shadow-pursuing Corinthians, than at the
present time.
A Concord philosopher, or modern Diogenes, who
has an eye of acute penetration in looking out upon
the world, discovered so much aimless and foolish
bustle, such a disproportion of shams to realities, that

j6

PERTAINING TO THOREAU.

his inclination or self-respect would not permit him to
participate in them; so he built himself in the woods,
on the banks of a pond of pure water — deep enough
for drowning purposes if the bean-crop failed — a tub
of unambitious proportions, into which he crawled.
In this retreat, where he supported animal and intellectual life for more than two years, at a cost of about
thirteen (!) dollars per annum, he wrote a book full of
interest, containing the most pithy, sharp, and original
remarks.
It is a fortunate circumstance for Mr. Thoreau, the
name of this eccentric person, that his low estimate of
the value of the objects, compared with their cost, for
which the world is so assiduously and painfully laboring, should have received, so soon after the publication
of his book, such an important, substantial, and practical confirmation in the auto-biography of Barnum.
If any thing is calculated to induce a man to see how
few beans will support animal life, we think it is a contemplation of the life and career of the great show-man.
If there is any thing calculated to reconcile us, not to
the career of Barnum, but to whatever laborious drudgery may be necessary to procure good beef-steaks and
oysters, with their necessary accompaniments, it is the
thought of those inevitable beans, that constituted so
large a part of the crop of Mr. Thoreau, and that extraordinary compound of corn-meal and water, which he
facetiously called bread.
Beyond all question, the two most remarkable books
that have been published the last year are the "Auto-

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HUMBUGS.

77

biography of Barnum," and "Life in the Woods/' by
Thoreau. The authors of the two books, in tastes,
habits, disposition, and culture are perfect antipodes to
each other; and the lessons they inculcate are consequently diametrically opposite. If ever a book required an antidote, it is the auto-biography of Barnum, and we know of no other so well calculated to
furnish this antidote as the book of Thoreau's.
If any of the readers of the " Knickerbocker" have
so long denied themselves the pleasure of reading
" Walden, or Life in the Woods," we will give them
a slight account of the book and its author; but we
presume the information will be necessary to only very
few. Mr. Thoreau is a graduate of Harvard University. He is a bold and original thinker-; " h e reads
much, is a great observer, and looks quite through
the deeds of men." "Beware," says Emerson, "when
the great GOD lets loose a thinker on this planet.
Then all things are at risk." Are thinkers so rare
that all the moral, social, and political elements of
society may be disturbed by the advent of one? The
sale Barnum's book has already met with is not, to be
sure, suggestive of an overwhelming number of thinkers
in the country. Thinkers always have been considered
dangerous. Even Caesar, if he could have feared any
thing, would have been afraid of that lean Cassius,
because
" H e thinks too m u c h : such men are d a n g e r o u s . "

And why are thinkers dangerous?

Because the world

78

PERTAINING TO THOREAU.

is full of "time-honored and venerable" shams, which
the words of thinkers are apt to endanger.
After leaving college, Mr. Thoreau doffed the harness which society enjoins that all its members shall
wear, in order for them " t o get along well," but it
galled and chafed in so many places that he threw it
off, and took to the woods in Concord. He built a
hut there, a mile from any neighbors, that cost him
twenty-eight dollars, twelve and a-half cents, and lived
there more than two years — eight months of the time
at an expense of nearly nine shillings a-month. Before adopting this mode of life, he first tried schoolkeeping, reporting for a newspaper, and then trading
for a livelihood; but after a short trial at each, became
persuaded that it was impossible for his genius to lie
in either of those channels.
After hesitating for some time as to the advisability
of seeking a living by picking huckle-berries, he at last
concluded that "the occupation of a day-laborer was
the most independent of any, as it required only thirty
or forty days in a year to support one. The laborer's
day ends with the going down of the sun, and he is
then free to devote himself to his chosen pursuit, independent of his labor; but his employer, who speculates from month to month, has no respite from one
end of the year to the other. In short, I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain
one's self on this earth, is not a hardship, but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely, as the pursuits
of the simpler nations are still the sports of the more

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HUMBUGS.

79

artificial. It is not necessary that a man should earn
his living by the sweat of his brow, unless he sweats
easier than I do."
The establishment in the woods, kept up by the extravagant expenditures we have mentioned before, was
the result of these reflections.
If there is any reader of the "Knickerbocker"—native-born and a Know-Nothing—who needs to be told
who P. T. BARNUM is, such a person might, without
doubt, "hear something to his advantage," by inquiring out and presenting himself before that illustrious
individual; for the great show-man has made a good
deal of money by exhibiting less extraordinary animals
than such a man would be.
It was pretty well understood by physiologists, before the recent experiment of Mr. Thoreau, how little
farinaceous food would suffice for the human stomach;
and Chatham-street clothiers have a tolerably accurate
knowledge of how little poor and cheap raiment will
suffice to cover the back, so that his '' life in the woods"
adds but little to the stock of information scientific men
already possessed. But it was not clearly known to
what extent the public was gullible until the auto-biography of Barnum fully demonstrated the fad. This
renowned individual has shown to a dignified and
appreciative public the vulgar machinery used to humbug them, and they (the public) are convulsed with
laughter and delight at the exposition. 'Cuteness is
held in such great esteem that the fad of being egregiously cajoled and fooled out of our money is lost sight

80

PERTAINING TO THOREAU.

of in admiration for the shrewdness of the man who
can do it. And then there is such an idolatrous worship of the almighty dollar, that the man who accumulates " a pile" is pretty sure to have the laugh on his
side. " L e t him laugh who wins," says Barnum, and
the whole country says amen. It is very evident that
shams sometimes "pay better" pecuniarily than realities, but we doubt if they do in all respects. Although
Thoreau "realized" from his bean-crop one season —
a summer's labor — but eight dollars seventy-one and
a-half cents, yet it is painful to think what Barnum
must have "realized" from " Joice Heth " and the
" Woolly Horse."
If we were obliged to choose between being shut up
in "conventionalism's air-tight stove," (even if the said
stove had all the surroundings of elegance and comforts that wealth could buy,) and a twenty-eight dollar
tub in the woods, with a boundless range of freedom
in the daily walks of life, we should not hesitate a moment in taking the tub, if it were not for a recollection
of those horrid beans, and that melancholy mixture of
meal and water. Aye, there's the rub; for from that
vegetable diet what dreams might come, when we had
shuffled off the wherewith to purchase other food, must
give us pause. There 's the consideration that makes
the sorry conventionalisms of society of so long life.
We rather bear those ills we have, than fly to others
that we know not of. A very reasonable dread of
something unpleasant resulting to us from eating beans
in great quantities, would be likely to be a consequence

T O W N AND RURAL HUMBUGS.

8l

of our experience alone, if we happened to be deficient
in physiological knowledge. Whatever effeds, however, different kinds of diet may have upon different
persons, mentally or physically, nothing is more clear
than the fad; that the diet of Mr. Thoreau did not
make him mentally windy. We think, however, between Iranistan, with Joice Heth and the Mermaid for
associates, and the tub at Walden, with only Shakespeare for a companion, few probably would be long
puzzled in making a choice, though we are constrained
to say that the great majority would undoubtedly be
on the side of the natural phenomena — we mean on
the side of Barnum and the other mentioned curiosities. Still, in contemplating a good many of the situations in which Barnum was placed, it is impossible to
conceive that any person of a comparatively sensitive
nature would not gladly have exchanged places with
the man of the woods. (We refer of course to the
author of "Walden," and not to the animal known as
" t h e man of the woods." Some perhaps would not
have taken pains to make this explanation.)
There is a good deal more virtue in beans than we
supposed there was, if they are sufficient to sustain a
man in such cheerful spirits as Thoreau appears to
have been in when he wrote that book. The spirit
oftentimes may be strong when the flesh is weak; but
there does not appear to be any evidence of weakness
of the flesh in the author of "Walden." We cannot
help feeling admiration for the man

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P E R T A I N I N G TO T H O R E A U .

" T H A T fortune's buffets and rewards
Hast ta'en with equal t h a n k s : "

and since Sylla so coolly massacred so many Roman
citizens, there has not been a man who apparently has
contemplated his fellow-men with a more cheerful, lofty,
and philosophical scorn than the occupant of this Walden tub. If a man can do this upon beans, or in spite
of them, we shall' endeavor to cultivate a respect for
that vegetable, which we never could endure.
It was a philosopher, as ancient as Aristotle, we believe, who affirmed that "they most resemble the gods
whose wants were fewest." Whether the sentiment is
a true one or not, we have no hesitation in saying that
the gods we worship will bear a good deal more resemblance to H. D. Thoreau than to P. T. Barnum. We
believe it requires a much higher order of intellect to
live alone in the woods, than to dance attendance in
the museum of a great metropolis upon dead hyenas
and boa constrictors, living monkeys and rattle-snakes,
giants and dwarfs, artificial mermaids, and natural zanies. There is, however, a good deal of society worse
than this.
Of the many good things said by Colton, one of the
best, we think, is the following:
"Expense of thought is the rarest prodigality, and
to dare to live alone the rarest courage; since there are
many who had rather meet their bitterest enemy in the
field, than their own hearts in their closet. He that
has no resources of mind is more to be pitied than he
who is in want of necessaries for the body; and to be

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HUMBUGS.

83

obliged to beg our daily happiness from others, bespeaks a more lamentable poverty than that of him
who begs his daily bread."
We do not believe there is any danger of proselytes
to Mr. Thoreau's mode of life becoming too numerous.
We wish we could say the same in regard to Barnum's.
We ask the reader to look around among his acquaintances, and see if the number of those whose resources
of mind are sufficient to enable them to dispense with
much intercourse with others, is not exceedingly small.
We know of some such, though they are very few; but
their fondness for solitude unfortunately is not associated with any particular admiration for a vegetable
diet. It is a melancholy circumstance, and one that
has been very bitterly deplored, ever since that indefinite period when " t h e memory of man runneth not
to the contrary," that the accompaniments of poverty
should go hand-in-hand with a taste for a solitary life.
A hearty appreciation of and love for humble fare,
plain clothes, and poor surroundings generally, are
what men of genius need to cultivate. " WTalden "
tends to encourage this cultivation.
The part of Mr. Barnum's life, during which he has
become a millionaire, has been spent almost wholly in
a crowd. It would be no paradox to say that if the
time he has spent as a show-man had been spent in
the woods, neither the brilliancy of his imagination
nor the vigor and originality of his thoughts would
have enabled him to have produced a book that would
have created any very great excitement, notwithstand-

84

PERTAINING

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THOREAU.

ing the extraordinary attributes of that intellect which
could conceive the idea of combining nature and art
to produce "natural curiosities/'and which was shrewd
enough to contrive ways and means for drawing quarters and shillings, and for the smallest value received,
indiscriminately from residents in the Fifth Avenue
and the Five-Points, from the statesman and " t h e
Bowery-boy," from savans, theologians, lawyers, doctors, merchants, and " t h e rest of mankind/' to say
nothing about Queen Victoria, the Duke of Wellington, and a large portion of the Eastern continent beside.
Unlike as Barnum and Thoreau are in most every
other respect, in one point there is a striking resemblance. Both of them had no idea of laboring very
hard with their hands for a living; they were determined to support themselves principally by their wits.
The genius of Barnum led him to obtain the meat he
fed upon by a skillful combination of nature with art
— by eking out the short-comings in the animal creation with ingenious and elaborate manufactures^ and
then adroitly bringing the singular compounds thus
formed to bear upon the credulity of the public. And
thus, while he taxed the animal, vegetable, and mineral
kingdoms, either separately or combined, to gratify the
curiosity of the public, the most valued products of the
last-mentioned kingdom flowed in a large and perpetual stream into his pocket. But his expenditures of
" b r a s s " in these labors were enormous. Thoreau
had no talent for "great combinations." The meat

TOWN AND RURAL HUMBUGS.

85

he fed upon evidently would not be that of extraordinary calves or over-grown buffaloes, baked in the paragon cooking-stove of public curiosity; or rather, as he
ate no meat, the vegetables he lived upon would not
come from the exhibition of India-rubber mermaids,
gutta-percha fish, or mammoth squashes. His genius
did not lie at all in that direction. On the contrary,
he preferred to diminish his wants, instead of resorting
to extraordinary schemes to gratify them.
Mr. Thoreau gives a description of a battle fought
upon his wood-pile between two armies of ants, that is
exceedingly graphic and spirited. We think it surpasses in interest the description of battles fought about
Sebastopol, written by the famous correspondent of the
London '' Times." Perhaps, however, we are somewhat
prejudiced in the matter. The truth is, we have read so
much about the war in Europe, that the whole-subject
has become somewhat tiresome; and this account of the
battle of the ants in Concord had so much freshness
about it — so much novelty, dignity, and importance,
which the battles in Europe cease to possess for us —
that we have read it over three or four times with increased interest each time. We regret that the whole
account is too long to copy here, but we will give the
closing part: " They fought with more pertinacity than
bull-dogs. Neither manifested the least disposition to
retreat. It was evident that their battle-cry was, Conquer or die! . . . I was myself excited somewhat,
even as if they had been men. The more you think
of it, the less the difference. And certainly there is not

86

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the fight recorded in Concord history, at least, if in the
history of America, that will bear a moment's comparison with this, whether for the numbers engaged in it,
or for the patriotism and heroism displayed. For
numbers and for carnage it was an Austerlitz or Dresden. Concord fight! Two killed on the patriot's side,
and Luther Blanchard wounded ! Why, here every ant
was a Buttrick. ' F i r e ! — for God's sake, fire!' and
thousands shared the fate of Davis and Hosmer. There
was not one hireling there. I have no doubt it was a
principle they fought for, as much as our ancestors,
and not to avoid a three-penny tax on their tea; and
the results of this battle will be as important and memorable to those whom it concerns as those of the battle
of Bunker-Hill, at least."
The more you think of it the less the difference between this fight and those battles about Sebastopol.
There appears, however, to have been this advantage
in favor of the battle of the ants, there was no "mistake" made in the orders, (that the chronicler could
discover), by which many valuable lives were lost, as
in the charge of cavalry at Sebastopol. All the operations of the ants appeared to be systematic and welltimed. This rather goes to show that the commanders
of ants are more cautious than the commanders of men,
for the reason probably that they hold the lives of their
combatants in greater estimation.
The machinery that is used to bring about battles
between different nations by " t h e powers that be," is
very much like that Barnum used to divert the public

TOWN AND RURAL HUMBUGS.

87

— to divert money from their pockets into his. By
adding to the age of his remarkable " n u r s e " — t h e
vivacious and interesting Joice — in about the same
proportion that he increased the age of his juvenile
phenomenon, General Thumb, he was guilty of a departure from truth not a whit more extraordinary than
the discrepancy between the conversation of the Emperor of all the Russias with the English ambassadors
in regard to the health of Turkey, and his adions at
the same time. Barnum unquestionably possesses
superior diplomatic talents. Talleyrand would have
approved them.
We said some little way back that there was one
point of resemblance between Barnum and Thoreau.
There are half-a-dozen. Both are good-natured, genial, pleasant men. One sneers at and ridicules the
pursuits of his contemporaries with the same cheerfulness and good-will that the other cajoles and fleeces
them. The rural philosopher measured the length,
breadth, and depth of Walden Pond, with the same
jovial contentedness that the metropolitan show-man
measured the length, breadth, and depth of the public
gullibility. Both too are compassionate men. Flashes
of pity are occasionally met with in the book of Barnum's, at the extent of the credulity of that public he
seemingly so remorselessly wheedled ; and Thoreau
evinced a good deal of compassion for some of his
well-to-do townsmen. His sympathy was a good deal
moved in behalf of the farmer that owned " a handsome property," who was driving his oxen in the night

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to Brighton, through the mud and darkness. Both
were artists. He of the wood constructed himself the
unpretending edifice he occupied — a representation
of which graces the title-page of his book. Barnum's
artistic skill was more evinced in constructing such
"curiosities" as we have before alluded to. And
finally, both were humbugs — one a town and the
other a rural humbug.
But both of them have nevertheless made large contributions to the science of human nature. Malherbe,
once upon hearing a prose work of great merit extolled,
dryly asked if it would reduce the price of bread! If
" W a l d e n " should be extensively read, we think it
would have the effect to reduce somewhat the price of
meat, if it did not of bread. At all events it encourages the belief, which in this utilitarian age enough
needs encouragement, that there is some other object
to live for except " t o make money/'
In the New-England philosophy of life, which so
extensively prevails where the moral or intellectual
character of a man is more or less determined by his
habits of thrift, such a book as " W a l d e n " was needed.
Extravagant as it is in the notions it promulgates, we
think it is nevertheless calculated to do a good deal of
good, and we hope it will be widely read. Where it
exerts a bad influence upon one person, Barnum's autobiography will upon a hundred. 1
1

["The Knickerbocker " for March, 1855.]

AN AMERICAN

DIOGENES

AN AMERICAN DIOGENES.

W

H E N Philip of Macedon announced his intention to invade Corinth, the inhabitants of that
city, overlooking, or feigning not to perceive, their utter
incapability of resistance, affeded to make great preparations for defence; while Diogenes, who, like many
of us, even at the present time, delighted to ridicule the
follies he did not himself commit, rolled about his tub
in an excited, bustling manner, by way of deriding the
fussy, fruitless show of opposition made by the feeble
Corinthians. The transatlantic Diogenes, however,
when he observed the foolish, aimless bustle made by
the modern Corinthians of the world, in pursuit of the
sacred dollar and its glittering accessories, instead of
rolling about his tub, quietly sat down in it, and wrote
an interesting book, replete with pithy, original observations, but strongly tindured with the inevitable dogmatism that ever attends the one soi-disant wise man
who assumes to be the teacher of all the rest of his
race. Henry D. Thoreau, the American Diogenes, if
we may presume to term him so — assuredly we mean
no offence—is a graduate of Harvard university, a
ripe scholar, and a transcendentalist of the Emerson-

9

2

PERTAINING

TO

THOREAU.

ian school, though he goes much further than his master; his objed, apparently, being the exaltation of mankind by the utter extindion of civilisation. When Nat
Lee was confined in Bedlam, the unfortunate dramatist
roundly asserted his perfed sanity, exclaiming: "All
the world say that I am mad, but I say that all the
world are mad; so being in the minority, I am placed
here." Now, the truth, as it generally does, may have
lain between the two extremes; and in like manner,
Mr. Thoreau, when he lazily lived in a hut, in a lonely
wood, subsisting on beans, was not half so mad as his
neighbours, the 'cute New Englanders, supposed him
to be; nor, on the other hand, wrere they so mad as
he considered them, though they lived in comfortable
houses, in towns, and ate beef and mutton, which they
consequently worked hard to pay for.
Mr. Thoreau had "tried school-keeping,'' but without success,because he "did not teach for the good of
his fellow-men, but simply for a livelihood/' He had
tried commerce, but found " that trade curses everything it handles; and though you trade in messages
from heaven, the whole curse of trade attaches to the
business." He had tried "doing good," but felt satisfied that it did not agree with his constitution. Indeed he says: " T h e greater part of what my neighbours call good, I believe in my soul to be bad ; and
if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my goodbehaviour." At last, as he could fare hard, and did
not wish to spend his time in earning rich carpets or
other fine furniture, or a house in the Grecian or Gothic

AN AMERICAN

DIOGENES.

93

style, he concluded that " t h e occupation of a daylabourer was the most independent of any, especially
as it required only thirty or forty days' work to support
a man for the whole year. Besides, the labourer's day
ends with the going down of the sun, and he is then
free to devote himself to his chosen pursuit; but his
employer, who speculates from month to month, has
no respite from one end of the year to the other." So,
borrowing an axe, he boldly marched into the woods
of Concord, where, on the pleasant bank of Walden
Pond, he built himself a hut, in which he lived alone
for more than two years, subsisting chiefly on beans
planted and gathered by his own hands. In the book, 1
already adverted to, his thoughts and actions during
this period are pleasantly and interestingly related ;
though, like all solitary men, the author exaggerates
the importance of his own thoughts, his / s t a n d i n g up
like an obelisk in the midst of a level, though by no
means barren expanse.
The building of his hut gave rise to many reflections. He wondered that in all his walks he never
came across a man engaged in so simple and natural
an occupation as building his own house. *' There is,"
he says, "some of the same fitness in a man's building
his own house, as there is in a bird's building its own
nest. Who knows but if men constructed their dwellings with their own hands, and provided food for
themselves and families, simply and honestly enough,
1

Walden, or Life in the Woods. Boston: Ticknor and Fields.

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P E R T A I N I N G TO

THOREAU.

the poetic faculty would be universally developed, as
birds universally sing when they are thus engaged."
So, as he hewed his studs and rafters, he sang — if not
as musically, at least quite as unintelligibly as any
bird—
" M e n say they know m a n y t h i n g s ;
But lo! they have taken wings —
T h e arts and sciences,
And a thousand appliances ;
T h e wind that blows
Is all that anybody k n o w s . "

As Mr. Thoreau squatted, he paid no rent; but the
glass, ironwork, and other materials of his hut, which
he could not make himself, cost twenty-eight dollars.
The first year he lived in the woods, he earned, by
day-labour, thirteen dollars, and the surplus produce
of his beans he sold for twenty-three dollars; and as
his food and clothing during that period cost him
thirteen dollars only, he, thus secured leisure, health,
and independence, besides a comfortable house, as
long as he chose to occupy it. Rice, Indian meal,
beans, and molasses, were his principal articles of food.
He sometimes caught a mess of fish; and the wood
gratuitously supplied him with fuel for warmth and
cooking. Work agreed with his constitution as little
as "doing good." He tells us: " I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a reverie, amidst the
pines, and hickories, and sumachs, in undisturbed
solitude and stillness, while the birds sang around or

AN AMERICAN DIOGENES.

95

flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun
falling in at my west window, or the noise of some
traveller's wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in those seasons
like corn in the night, and they were far better than
any work of the hands would have been. They were
not times subtracted from my life; but so much over
and above my usual allowance. This was sheer idleness to my fellow-townsmen, no doubt; but if the birds
and flowers had tried me by their standard, I should
not have been found wanting."
As he walked in the woods to see the birds and
squirrels, so he sometimes walked in the village to see
the men and boys. The village appeared to him as
a great newsroom: its vitals were the grocery, the barroom, the post-office, and the bank; and as a necessary part of the machinery, it had a bell, a big gun,
and a fire-engine. The houses were arranged to make
the most of mankind, in lanes and fronting one another, so that every traveller had to run the gantlet,
and every man, woman, and child might get a lick at
him; But to one of his village visits there hangs a
tale, which he shall tell himself: " O n e afternoon,
when I went to the village to get a shoe from the
cobbler's, I was seized and put into jail, because I did
not pay a tax to, or recognise the authority of, the
state, which buys and sells men, women, and children,
like cattle, at the door of its senate-house. I had gone
down to the woods for other purposes. But wherever
a man goes, men will pursue and paw him with their

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PERTAINING TO THOREAU.

dirty institutions and, if they can, constrain him to
belong to their desperate odd-fellow society. It is true,
I might have resisted forcibly, with more or less effect,
might have run a muck against society; but I preferred
that society should run a muck against me, it being the
desperate party. However, I was released the next
day, obtained my mended shoe, and returned to the
woods in season to get my dinner of huckleberries on
Fair Haven Hill."
Mr. Thoreau failed in making any converts to his
system; one person only, an idiotic pauper, from the
village poor-house, expressed a wish to live as he did.
An honest, hard-wrorking, shiftless Irishman, however,
seemed a more promising subject for conversion. This
man worked for a farmer, turning up meadow, with a
spade, for ten dollars an acre, with the use of the land
and manure for one year, while a little broad-faced son
worked cheerfully at his side. So as Mr. Thoreau
relates : " I tried to help him with my experience,
telling him that he was one of my nearest neighbours,
and that I, who looked like a loafer, was getting my
living like himself; that I lived in a tight, light, and
clean house, which hardly cost more than the annual
rent of such a ruin as his commonly amounts to; and
how, if he chose, he might in a month or two build
himself a palace of his own ; that I did not use tea, nor
coffee, nor butter, nor milk, nor fresh meat, and so did
not have to work to get them; again, as I did not work
hard, I did not have to eat hard, and it cost me but a
trifle for my food; but as he began with tea, and coffee,

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97

and butter, and milk, and beef, he had to work hard to
pay for them, and when he had worked hard, he had to
eat hard again to repair the waste of his system. And
so it was as broad as it was long — indeed, it was
broader than it was long, for he was discontented, and
wasted his life into the bargain. I told him that as he
worked so hard, he required thick boots and stout
clothing, which yet were soon soiled and worn out;
but I wore light shoes and thin clothing, which cost
not half so much; and in an hour or two, without
labour, but as a recreation, I could catch as many fish
as I should want for two days, or earn enough money
to support me a week. If he and his family would
live simply, they might all go a huckleberrying in the
summer for their amusement/'
Puzzled, but not convinced, the Irishman and his
"greasy-faced wife" stared and scratched their heads.
Such teaching must have sounded strangely to them,
who had crossed the Atlantic to do their share of work
in the world, and enjoy its reward in the form of tea,
coffee, butter, and beef. Patrick, however, was silly
enough to leave his work for that afternoon, and go
a-fishing with the philosopher; but his "derivative oldcountry mode of fishing disturbed only two fins." So
he wisely went back to his work the next morning,
probably studying the proverb of his country which
teaches, that "hunger and ease is a dog's life;" and
our author thus rather uncourteously dismisses him :
"With his horizon all his own, yet he a poor man,
born to be poor, with his inherited Irish poverty, or

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poor life, his Adam's grandmother and boggy ways,
not to rise in this world, he nor his posterity, till their
wading, webbed, bog-trotting feet get talaria to their
heels."
,
Another Irishman, of a very different stamp, a
squatter in the woods of Walden, might have proved
a more facile subject for conversion ; but he died just
after making Mr. Thoreau's acquaintance. This man's
name was Quoil; and when he did work, which was
very seldom—for he liked work as little as Mr.Thoreau
himself did — followed the occupation of a ditcher.
Having, however, been a soldier in the British army,
his American neighbours gave him the brevet rank of
colonel. Colonel Quoil, Mr. Thoreau tells us, "was a
man of manners, like one who had seen the world,
and capable of more civil speech than one could well
attend to. He wore a greatcoat in midsummer, being
affected with the trembling delirium, and his face was
the colour of carmine. He died in the high-road.
Before his house was pulled down, when his comrades
avoided it as 'an unlucky castle,' I visited it. There
lay his old clothes curled up by use, as if they were
himself, on his raised plank-bed. His pipe lay broken
on the hearth, instead of a bowl broken at the fountain. - The last could never have been the symbol of
his death, for he confessed that though he had heard
of Brister's spring, he had never seen it; and soiled
cards—diamonds, spades, and hearts—were scattered
over the floor. One black chicken—black as night,
and as silent—still went to roost in the apartment.

AN

AMERICAN

DIOGENES.

99

In the rear, there was the dim outline of a garden,
which had been planted, but had never received its
first hoeing, though it was now harvest-time."
The natural sights and sounds of the woods, as
described by Mr. Thoreau, form much pleasanter reading than his vague and scarcely comprehensible social
theories. He says: " I had this advantage, at least,
in my mode of life over those who were obliged to
look abroad for amusement to society and the theatre,
that my life itself was become my amusement, and
never ceased to be novel. It was a drama of many
scenes, and without an end. As I sit at my window
this summer afternoon, hawks are circling about my
clearing; the tantivy of wild pigeons, flying by twos
and threes athwart my view, or perching restless on
the white pine boughs behind my house, gives a voice
to the air; a fish-hawk dimples the glassy surface of
the pond, and brings up a fish ; a mink steals out of
the marsh before my door, and seizes a frog by the
shore; the sedge is bending under the weight of the
reed-birds flitting hither and thither; and for the last
half-hour I have heard the rattle of railroad-cars — now
dying away, and then reviving like the beat of a partridge— conveying travellers from Boston to the country. At night," he continues, "when other birds are
still, the screech-owl takes up the strain, like mourning
women in their ancient u-lu-lu. Their dismal scream
is truly Ben Jonsonian. 'Wise midnight hags!' It
is no honest and blunt iu-whit ta-who of the poets, but,
without jesting, a most solemn grave-yard ditty, the

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mutual consolations of suicide lovers remembering the
pangs and the delights of supernal love in the infernal
groves. Yet I love to hear their wailing, their doleful
responses, trilled along the wood-side; reminding me
sometimes of music and singing-birds, as if it were the
dark and tearful side of music, the regrets and sighs
that would fain be sung. They are the spirits, the low
spirits and melancholy forebodings of fallen souls that
once in human shape night-walked the earth and did
the deeds of darkness, now expiating their sins with
their wailing hymns or threnodies in the scenery of
their transgressions. They give me a new sense of
the variety and capacity of that nature which is our
common dwelling. Oh-o-o-o-o that I never had been
bor-r-r-r-r-n! sighs one on this side of the pond, and
circles with the restlessness of despair to some new
perch on the gray oaks. Then—that I never had been
bor-r-r-r-nf echoes another on the further side with
tremulous sincerity ; and bor-r-r-r-n / comes faintly
from far in the Lincoln woods. In the meanwhile,
all the shore rang with the trump of bull-frogs, the
sturdy spirits of ancient -wine-bibbers and wassailers,
still unrepentant, trying to sing a catch in their Stygian lake, though their voices have waxed hoarse
and solemnly grave, mocking at mirth; and the wine
has lost its flavour, and become only water to distend
their paunches, and sweet intoxication never comes to
drown the memory of the past, but mere saturation,
and water-loggedness, and distension. The most aldermanic, with his chin upon a leaf, which serves for

AN AMERICAN

DIOGENES.

IOI

a napkin to his drooling chaps, under this northern
shore quaffs a deep draught of the once scorned
water, and passing round the cup with the ejaculation tr-r-r-oonk, tr-r-r-oonk, tr-r-r-oonk! and straightway comes over the water, from some distant cove,
the same password repeated, where the next in seniority and girth has gulped down to his mark; and when
this observance has made the circuit of the shores,
then ejaculates the master of ceremonies, with satisfaction, tr-r-r-oonk! and each in its turn repeats the same,
down to the least distended, leakiest, and flabbiest
paunched, that there be no mistake ; and then the
bowl goes round again and again, until the sun disperses the morning mist, and only the patriarch is not
under the pond, but vainly bellowing troonk from time
to time, and pausing for a reply."
Those were the summer sounds; in winter nights
he heard the forlorn but melodious note of the hooting owl, such a tone as the frozen earth would yield
if struck with a suitable ple&rum. " I seldom/' he
writes, " opened my door in a winter evening without
hearing it: hoo hoo hoo,hoorer hoo,sounded sonorously,
and the first three syllables accented something like
how der do, or sometimes hoo hoo hoo only. One night
in the beginning of winter, before the pond froze over,
about nine o'clock, I was startled by the loud honking
of a goose, and stepping to the door, heard the sound
of their wings, like a tempest in the woods, as a flock
flew low over my house. They passed over the pond,
seemingly deterred from settling by my light, their

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commodore honking all the while with a regular beat.
Suddenly an unmistakable cat-owl, from very near
me, with the most harsh and tremendous voice I ever
heard from any inhabitant of the woods, responded at
regular intervals to the goose, as if determined to
expose and disgrace this intruder from Hudson Bay
by exhibiting a greater compass and volume of voice
in a native, and boo hoo him out of Concord horizon!
What do you mean by alarming the citadel at this
time of night consecrated to me? Do you think I am
ever caught napping at such an hour, and that I have
not got lungs and larynx as well as yourself? Boohoo, boo-hoo, boo-hoo. It was one of the most thrilling
discords I ever heard. And yet, to a discriminating
ear, there were in it the elements of a concord such as
these plains never saw nor heard."
"Sometimes," Mr. Thoreau continues, " I heard the
foxes, as they ranged over the snow-crust, in moonlight nights, in search of a partridge or other game,
barking raggedly and demoniacally like forest-dogs,
as if labouring with some anxiety, or seeking expression, struggling for light, and to be dogs outright, and
run freely in the streets; for if we take the ages into
our account, may there not be a civilisation going on
among brutes as well as men ? They seemed to me
to be rudimental burrowing men, still standing on
their defence, awaiting their transformation. Sometimes one came near to my window, attracted by
my light, barked a vulpine curse at me, and then
retreated."

AN AMERICAN

DIOGENES.

IO3

Mr. Thoreau went to the woods, because he wished
to live deliberately, to front only the essential fads of
life, and see whether he could learn what it had to
teach; so that when he came to die, he might not discover that he had not lived. After supporting animal
and intellectual life for two years, at the cost of thirteen dollars per annum, he "left the woods for as good
a reason as he went there." It seemed to him that he
had several more lives to live, so he could not spare
any more time for that particular one. He learned,
however, by his experiment, " that it is not necessary a
man should earn his living by the sweat of his brow;
and to maintain one's self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely.
Moreover, if a man advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavours to live the life
which he has imagined, he will meet with a success
unexpeded in common hours. In proportion as he
simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear
less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor
poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness."
Who is it, we have more than once mentally inquired, when penning the preceding sketch, that Mr.
Thoreau reminds us of? Surely it cannot be — yes, it
is — no other than his renowned compatriot Barnum.
As homespun, beans, and water differ from fine linen,
turtle, and champagne, so do the two men differ in
tastes, habits, disposition, and culture; yet we cannot
think of the one without an ideal association of the
other. In one resped only do they seem to agree —

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both have an antipathy to hard work; but while one
prefers diminishing his wants, the other, increasing
them, invents extraordinary schemes for their gratification. If Barnum's autobiography be a bane, Thoreau's woodland experiences may be received as its
antidote; but, unfortunately, the former musters its
readers by tens of thousands, the latter probably in
hundreds only. It is to be hoped, however — though
all of us have a reasonable predilection for beef, pudding, and the society of our fellow creatures — that
there are few readers of this "Journal" who would not
prefer eating beans in the woods with Thoreau to
living on the fat of the earth, in the best show in all
Vanity Fair, with Barnum. 1
1

["Chambers's Journal" for the 21st of November, 1857.]

THE FORESTER

THE FORESTER.
T h e n bless thy secret growth, nor catch
At noise, but thrive unseen and dumb,
K e e p clean, bear fruit, earn life, and watch
Till the white-winged reapers come.
— HENRY

1

VAUGHAN.

HAD never thought of knowing a man so thoroughly of the country as this friend of mine, and
so purely a son of Nature. Perhaps he has the profoundest passion for it of any one living; and had the
human sentiment been as tender from the first, and
as pervading, we might have had pastorals of which
Virgil and Theocritus would have envied him the
authorship, had they chanced to be his contemporaries. As it is, he has come nearer the antique spirit
than any of our native poets, and touched the fields
and groves and streams of his native town with a
classic interest that shall not fade. Some of his verses
are suffused with an elegiac tenderness, as if the woods
and fields bewailed the absence of their forester, and
murmured their griefs meanwhile to one another,—
responsive like idyls. Living in close companionship

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with Nature, his Muse breathes the spirit and voice
of poetry; his excellence lying herein: for when the
heart, is once divorced from the senses and all sympathy with common things, then poetry has fled, and
the love that sings.
The most welcome of companions, this plain countryman. One shall not meet with thoughts invigorating like his often : coming so scented of mountain and
field breezes and rippling springs, so like a luxuriant
clod from under forest-leaves, moist and mossy with
earth spirits. His presence is tonic, like ice-water in
dog-days to the parched citizen pent in chambers and
under brazen ceilings. Welcome as the gurgle of
brooks, the dripping of pitchers, — then drink and be
cool! He - seems one with things, of Nature's essence
and core, knit of strong timbers, most like a wood and
its inhabitants. There are in him sod and shade,
woods and waters manifold, the mould and mist of
earth and sky. Self-poised and sagacious as any denizen of the elements, he has the key to every animal's
brain, every plant, every shrub; and were an Indian to
flower forth, and reveal the secrets hidden in his cranium, it would not be more surprising than the speech
of our Sylvanus. He must belong to the Homeric
age, — is older than pastures and gardens, as if he were
of the race of heroes, and one with the elements. He,
of all men, seems to be the native New-Englander, as
much so as the oak, the granite ledge, our best sample
of an indigenous American, untouched by the Old
Country, unless he came down from Thor, the North-

THE FORESTER.

IO9

man; as yet unfathered by any, and a nondescript in
the books of natural history.
A peripatetic philosopher, and out of doors for the
best parts of his days and nights, he has manifold
weather and seasons in him, and the manners of an
animal of probity and virtues unstained. Of our moralists he seems the wholesomest; and the best republican citizen in the world, — always at home, and minding
his own affairs. Perhaps a little over-confident sometimes, and stiffly individual, dropping society clean out
of his theories, while standing friendly in his strict
sense of friendship, there is in him an integrity and
sense of justice that make possible and actual the
virtues of Sparta and the Stoics, and all the more welcome to us in these times of shuffling and of pusillanimity. Plutarch would have made him immortal in
his pages, had he lived before his day. Nor have we
any so modern as he, — his own and ours; too purely
so to be appreciated at once. A scholar by birth-right,
and an author, his fame has not yet travelled far from
the banks of the rivers he has described in his books;
but I hazard only the truth in affirming of his prose,
that in substance and sense it surpasses that of any
naturalist of his time, and that he is sure of a reading
in the future. There are fairer fishes in his pages than
any now swimming in our streams, and some sleep of
his on the banks of the Merrimack by moonlight that
Egypt never rivalled ; a morning of which Memnon
might have envied the music, and a greyhound that
was meant for Adonis; some frogs, too, better than

no

PERTAINING TO THOREAU.

any of Aristophanes. Perhaps we have had no eyes
like his since Pliny's time. His senses seem double,
giving him access to secrets not easily read by other
men: his sagacity resembling that of the beaver and
the bee, the dog and the deer; an instinct for seeing
and judging, as by some other or seventh sense, dealing with objects as if they were shooting forth from
his own mind mythologically, thus completing Nature
all round to his senses, and a creation of his at the
moment. I am sure he knows the animals, one by
one, and everything else knowable in our town, and
has named them rightly as Adam did in paradise, if he
be not that ancestor himself. His works are pieces
of exquisite sense, celebrations of Nature's virginity,
exemplified by rare learning and original observations. Persistently independent and manly, he criticizes men and times largely, urging and defending his
opinions with the spirit and pertinacity befitting a
descendant of him of the Hammer. A head of mixed
genealogy like his, Franco-Norman crossed by Scottish and New-England descent, may be forgiven a few
characteristic peculiarities and trenchant traits of thinking, amidst his great common sense and fidelity to the
core of natural things. Seldom has a head circumscribed so much of the sense of Cosmos as this footed
intelligence, — nothing less than all out-of-doors sufficing his genius and scopes, and, day by day, through all
weeks and seasons, the year round.
If one would find the wealth of wit there is in this
plain man, the information, the sagacity, the poetry, the

THE FORESTER.

Ill

piety, let him take a walk with him, say of a winter's
afternoon, to the Blue Water, or anywhere about the
outskirts of his village-residence. Pagan as he shall
outwardly appear, yet he soon shall be seen to be the
hearty worshipper of whatsoever is sound and wholesome in Nature, — a piece of russet probity and sound
sense that she delights to own and honor. His talk
shall be suggestive, subtile, and sincere, under as many
masks and mimicries as the shows he passes, and as
significant, — Nature choosing to speak through her
chosen mouth-piece, — cynically, perhaps, sometimes,
and searching into the marrows of men and times
he chances to speak of, to his discomfort mostly, and
avoidance. Nature, poetry, life, — not politics, not strid
science, not society as it is, — are his preferred themes:
the new Pantheon, probably, before he gets far, to the
naming of the gods some coming Angelo, some Pliny,
is to paint and describe. The world is holy, the things
seen symbolizing the Unseen, and worthy of worship
so, the Zoroastrian rites most becoming a nature so
fine as ours in this thin newness, this worship being so
sensible, so promotive of possible pieties, — calling us
out of doors and under the firmament, where health
and wholesomeness are finely insinuated into our
souls, — not as idolaters, but as idealists, the seekers
of the Unseen through images of the Invisible.
I think his religion of the most primitive type, and
inclusive of all natural creatures and things, even to
" t h e sparrow that falls to the ground,"—though never
by shot of his, — and, for whatsoever is manly in man,

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his worship may compare with that of the priests and
heroes of pagan times. Nor is he false to these traits
under any guise, — worshipping at unbloody altars, a
favorite of the Unseen, Wisest, and Best. Certainly he
is better poised and more nearly self-reliant than other
men.
Perhaps he deals best with matter, properly, though
very adroitly with mind, with persons, as he knows
them best, and sees them from Nature's circle, wherein
he dwells habitually. I should say he inspired the
sentiment of love, if, indeed, the sentiment he awakens
did not seem to partake of a yet purer sentiment,
were that possible, — but nameless from its excellency.
Friendly he is, and holds his friends by bearings as
strid in their tenderness and consideration as are the
laws of his thinking, — as prompt and kindly equitable,— neighborly always, and as apt for occasions as
he is strenuous against meddling with others in things
not his.
I know of nothing more creditable to his greatness
than the thoughtful regard, approaching to reverence,
by which he has held for many years some of the best
persons of his time, living at a distance, and wont to
make their annual pilgrimage, usually on foot, to the
master, — a devotion very rare in these times of personal indifference, if not of confessed unbelief in persons and ideas.
He has been less of a housekeeper than most, has
harvested more wind and storm, sun and sky; abroad
night and day with his leash of keen scents, hounding

THE FORESTER.

n

3

any game stirring, and running it down, for certain, to
be spread on the dresser of his page, and served as a
feast to the sound intelligences, before he has done
with it. We have been accustomed to consider him
the salt of things so long that they must lose their
savor without his to season them. And when he goes
hence, then Pan is dead, and Nature ailing throughout.
His friend sings him thus, with the advantages of
his Walden to show him in Nature: —
" I t is not far beyond the Village church,
After we pass the wood that skirts the road,
A L a k e , — the blue-eyed W a l d e n , that doth smile
Most tenderly upon its neighbor Pines ;
And they, as if to recompense this love,
In double beauty spread their branches forth.
This L a k e has tranquil loveliness and b r e a d t h ,
A n d , of late years, has added to its c h a r m s ;
For one attracted to its pleasant edge
H a s built himself a little Hermitage,
W h e r e with much piety he passes life.
" More fitting place I cannot fancy now,
F o r such a m a n to let the line r u n off
T h e mortal reel,— such patience h a t h the L a k e ,
Such gratitude and cheer is in the Pines.
But more than either lake or forest's depths
This man has in himself: a tranquil man,
With sunny sides where well the fruit is ripe,
Good front and resolute bearing to this life,
And some serener virtues, which control
This rich exterior prudence,—virtues high,
T h a t in the principles of T h i n g s are set,
Great by their nature, and consigned to him,

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W h o , like a faithful Merchant, does account
T o God for what he spends, and in w h a t w a y .
Thrice h a p p y art thou, Walden, in thyself!
Such purity is in thy limpid springs,—
In those green shores which do refledl in thee,
And in this m a n who dwells upon thy edge,
A holy m a n within a H e r m i t a g e .
May all good showers fall gently into thee,
May thy surrounding forests long be spared,
And may the Dweller on thy tranquil m a r g e
T h e r e lead a life of deep tranquillity,
P u r e as thy W a t e r s , handsome as thy Shores,
And with those virtues which are like the S t a r s ! "

1

1
[Amos Bronson Alcott, in ' * T h e Atlantic Monthly ' ' for
April, 1862.]

HENRY D. THOREAU

HENRY D. THOREAU.
" M a n y haps fall in the field,
Seldom seen by wishful eyes,
But all her shows did N a t u r e yield
T o please and win this pilgrim w i s e . "
WOODNOTES.

T

HOSE who have perused with interest the pages
of " Walden," yet laughed at the eccentricities
therein, or admired the simple narrative, together with
the profound philosophy contained in " A Week on
the Concord and Merrimack Rivers/' will lament the
recent death of their gifted author. It is with feelings
akin to reverence that we now recall the life of one
whose simplicity of heart and beauty of character
seemed but the reflection of all the sweetness in the
pursuits to which he was so enthusiastically devoted;
yet it is not without mingled feelings of joy that we
were permitted to become acquainted with him, and
in some measure learn to appreciate his worth.
It was during the year 1857, while revelling in our
school-life at Concord, that we first became attracted
by a singular person who might be seen each day

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PERTAINING TO THOREAU.

pacing through the long village street, with sturdy step
and honest mien, now pausing to listen to some rich
warble from the elms high overhead, or stooping to
examine some creeping thing, of interest only to him
who knew its ways. A casual observer might have
passed him in the street without noticing in him anything peculiar or interesting, for his dress was plain,
befitting the man, and consistent with his stoical
principles respecting matters of this description; yet
whoever penetrated deeper, could not fail to mark in
him the "honest man," nor in his countenance, half
hidden by a generous beard, his nut-brown complexion
and soft blue eye, help discerning beneath them only
a warm heart, and a nature keenly alive to what was
most impressive in the world around him. Spite of
the faded corduroy, this salient trait in his character
shone forth with unmistakable sincerity. He seemed
like some sturdy mountaineer or hardy lumberman,
in whom a rugged life has left only yet sturdier strength,
with finer traits awakened by a daily contemplation of
stupendous mountains or primeval forests. This love
for man formed his passport to the favor of all whom
he chanced to meet. It procured for him respeci
among his townsmen, and a welcome greeting from
every schoolboy, for he "carried his heart in his hand,"
as it were, always willing to offer it to him who might
justly claim a share of it.
Our curiosity, once excited, increased daily. In the
ramble after school, we often met him, sometimes far
from the town, deep in the thickest of the wood, search-

HENRY

D. T H O R E A U .

II

9

ing untiringly among the brambles or underbrush, as
though he had yet something to find, for which his
search had hitherto been vain; or oftener we passed
him on the river, paddling in his strange craft, built
long ago for visiting the Merrimack, gliding silently
along so as hardly to ruffle the surface of the water,
the prow, sturdy forerunner of himself, parting the lilypads with gentle touch, quietly cleaving a way among
them, or thrusting them impatiently beneath. As he
glided on, the ripple at the bow appeared to herald
unto each denizen of the stream the coming of a friend.
All seemed to know him, and hail his approach with
increased song. The "red-wing" kept his perch beside his mate, the little "yellow-throat" moved listlessly about, chasing his reflection in the water, or sang
his kind welcome, "Don't you wish it? don't you wish
it? don't you wish it?" Even the staid turtle thought
twice before dropping from his seat, finally deciding,
with wonted judgment, after the boat had passed.
Every living thing, every leaf and flower, were known
to him, nor did the smallest objects of interest escape
the glance of his observing eye. There was no corner
of the way but it contained something for him, though
others might look in vain to find it. No barren twig
but it held in its grasp some new chrysalis, or the ova
of some strange insed. Thus did Nature reveal to
him the richest treasures of her store, as if sure of finding in this disciple a worthy advocate.
It was with joy that we hailed our first approach to
this man, and gradually came to know more in regard

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to his private life. As our acquaintance grew, we found
him to be one of the rarest companions, beneath whose
rugged exterior there lay a lively appreciation of all
that is vivifying in nature, and a natural yearning toward his fellow-men, together with a kindly sympathy,
which was but the basis of his simple philosophy. In
place of affected eccentricity, we discovered in him only
originality, every thought and action revealing to us a
mind singularly individual, acknowledging no model
save that fashioned by the dictates of conscience, and
by the inferences drawn from a thoughtful contemplation of the natural world. He appeared to us more
than all men to enjoy life, not for its hypocrisies, its
conventional shams and barbarisms, but for its intrinsic
worth, taking great interest in everything connected
with the welfare of the town, no less than delight in
each changing aspect of Nature, with an instinctive
love for every creature of her realm.
In this he may have found the philosopher's-stone,
or at least the pebble adjoining it, which all the world
aspire to reach, yet few attain. This feature, which, as
I have said, formed the predominating element in his
character, was contagious. No one could approach
without feeling himself irresistibly drawn yet nearer to
him, for he bore his credentials for our esteem in his
bronzed and honest countenance. Thus we could
not fear, though we had great reverence for him, and
must needs deem it the greatest privilege to associate
with him. In the wood, his spirits were always most
elastic and buoyant. At such times he evinced the

HENRY

D. T H O R E A U .

121

liveliest interest in our conversation, entering into our
feelings with an earnestness and warmth of sentiment
which only bound us still closer to him, and taught us
to look upon him rather as a glorious boy, than one
who had arrived at full maturity; one whose healthy
life and vigorous thought had put to flight all morbidness, leaving his mind yet unclouded by the sorrows
which too often tinge the years of riper manhood.
He climbed and leaped as though he knew every
" r o p e " of the wood, and quite shamed our efforts,
the results of bars, racks, and wooden contrivances
unknown to him.
But he was to be to us more than a charming companion ; he became our instructor, full of wisdom and
consideration, patiently listening to our crude ideas of
Nature's laws and to our juvenile philosophy, not without a smile, yet in a moment ready to corred and set
us right again. And so in the afternoon walk, or the
long holiday jaunt, he first opened to our unconscious
eyes a thousand beauties of earth and air, and taught
us to admire and appreciate all that was impressive
and beautiful in the natural world around us. When
with him, objeds before so tame acquired new life and
interest. We saw no beauty in the note of veery or
wood-thrush until he pointed out to us their sad yet
fascinating melancholy. He taught us the rich variety
of the thrasher's song, bidding us compare with it the
shrieks of the modern prima donna. The weary peep
of Hyla had for us no charm until he showed us how
well it consorted with the surrounding objeds, — the

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THOREAU.

dark pool with the andromeda weeping over it, as if in
fear of the little "sea-monster." Nor did we fancy the
flaming red-wing, with his anxious cry, the Perseus of
the story, who makes his home near by, to keep the
maiden company, until by his very love he caused us
too to like him. Then we sought to know more of
the young gallant, and saw how wonderfully well he
built his home, and laughed at the grotesque markings
upon the eggs. He turned our hearts toward every
flower, revealing to us the haunts of rhodora and arethusa, or in the fragrant wood, half hidden by the
withered leaves,
" H e saw beneath dim aisles, in odorous beds,
T h e sweet Linnea hang its twin-born h e a d s . "

His ear was keenly alive to musical sounds, discriminating with astonishing accuracy between the
notes of various songsters. This discernment enabled
him to distinguish at once the songs of many birds
singing together, selecting each one with great nicety
of perception. A single strain was enough for him to
recall the note at once, and he always had some English translation, or carefully marked paraphrase of it,
singularly expressive and unique.
His love of nature was unbounded. No subject of
the animate creation was beneath his notice; no uncouth reptile, no blade of grass nor wayside weed, but
it might confidently claim a share in his esteem. To
him Nature seemed to speak a language clear, intelligible. He never wearied of her; but from whatever

HENRY D. THOREAU.

123

he found uncongenial and prosaic in daily life,—from
the cares which must come home to him, from bereavement and sorrow,— he always returned again, with
renewed devotion unto her sweet embrace.
His philosophy contained little that could be called
visionary, but every tenet of it was made subservient
to some pradical end. He had a passion for Oriental literature, especially admiring, as he tells us, the
"Bhagvat Geeta," full of sublimity and divine thought.
From these heathen writings his keen discernment
enabled him to gather much pradical good, gleaning
from them maxims which to-day may help to shape
the perfed mind and charader.
It seemed part of his generous heart, that in all his
researches, he rarely injured the smallest insed, never
indulging in wanton slaughter, that he might stock
cabinets, but respeding the life of every creature. Life,
with its gushing melody and happy enjoyment, was to
him far dearer than death with its "pickled vidims,"
designed to show every little dimension, to the extent
of a barleycorn.
"Hast thou named all the birds without a gun,
Loved the wood-rose, and left it on its stalk,—
O be my friend, and teach me to be thine! "

Nothing seems to me more touching in the life
of this man than his veneration for every little songster of the wood, which appeared to minister to
him, and answer the inmost cravings of his nature.
These were his pets, for whom he ever had a ready

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sympathy, regarding them with an affection almost
paternal.
Thus the good man seemed to be Nature's child,
rather than ours. By her was he fostered, under her
willing guidance he grew up, and now within her bosom
he sleeps the long sleep. From her he learned the
lesson of forbearance, of sympathy for his fellow-men,
of pity for the needy, nay, more, of godlike trust and
holy reverence. His life was moulded from a serious
contemplation of her laws, and a careful study of the
world in which he lived. For him Nature donned
her costliest dress, that he might view her in her fairest
attire. Nor did he ever desert her, but passively yielded
to her charms, and suffered no rude hand to tear him
away.- The freshness of spring, the long monotony of
the dreamy summer, the changing glories of autumn,
and the crisp and merry winter, — all had for him a
significance deeper than we could conceive, and lent
their influence to quicken and intensify his life.
But Nature needed him, and with firm but gentle
hand broke down his mighty strength, and with the
fair May morning lifted him away within herself. As
was his life, so was his lingering decline, and death
the same beautiful dream, as it were, in which he clung
yet closer to the haunts he loved, though unable longer
to revisit them.
As clings to russet-oak the living vine,
As from the withered leaves and mould peep forth
The fresh and fragrant wild-flowers of the wood,
So Life and Death walk hand in hand on earth,

HENRY D. THOREAU.

I25

So in the perfect May sank slowly to his rest
T h e m a n of lowly mien, the humble forester.
Now is the golden Spring returned again,
And far t h r o u g h o u t the vale each harbinger
Of hope and joy now pauses listlessly,
And lingers by the threshold of the year.
Yet N a t u r e mourns for him, her darling child,
W h o cherished her and loved h e r for her own sweet sake.
On that d a r k day whose morn was bright and fair,
While yet his spirit waited here with us,
Methought the purple-martin screamed aloud,
As 't were a knell of death, a passing-bell.
Again I listened, and the very air was still:
T h e sparrow held his peace for sympathy,
T h e noisy catbird ceased his song, and h e ,
T h e little chorister whom most he loved,
T h e gentle finch, sat brooding thoughtfully,
All his rich warble silent now and hushed.
And so the good man passed away from earth,
And left us desolate. Nor p o m p nor wealth
Marked his p u r e life, but honest worth instead.
No village c h u r c h could claim his patronage,
No p r e a c h e r ' s cant could lure him from his love,
But far within the grove he wandered on
' N e a t h cloistered glade and woodland corridor,—
His life one long, unceasing p r a y e r to H i m
Who of his wondrous majesty created a l l ;
W h o filled the wood with the sweet forest sounds,
And gave each tiny chorister to sing his praise,
T u n i n g his lay unto the m u r m u r of the pines.
Such was his high divinity, his holy aim,
And such the simple g r a n d e u r of his character.
Deserted now the grassy stream he loved,
And all the tangled wood left desolate and d r e a r , —
All silent is the grove, the shaded aisle:

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Still " b l u e - e y e d W a l d e n " sighs in vain for him
W h o lieth low beneath yon sloping hill.
So let him rest in peace, nor we repine,
Seeing that is lost to us which can r e t u r n no m o r e ;
But learn of him, and e'er revere his name,
W h o m N a t u r e cherished thus so tenderly. 1
1
[ S t o r m s Higginson, in " H a r v a r d
1862.]

M a g a z i n e " for May,

THOREAU

THOREAU.'

U

PON the tablet which friendship and delicate
appreciation have raised to exhibit their record
of Thoreau's genius, there is still space where a classmate's pen may leave some slight impressions, without
claiming either advantage or authority to do so beyond a late but ever-deepening regard. This bids
the thoughts return and drop themselves for holdingground into some recollections of his collegiate career.
He would smile to overhear that word applied to
the reserve and unaptness of his college life. He was
not signalized by a plentiful distribution of the parts
and honors which fall to the successful student. The
writer remembers that a speech which was made at
a highly inflammatory meeting, in Dr. Beck's recitation room, during the Christopher Dunkin Rebellion,
claimed, in allusion to Dunkin's arbitrary marking,
1
I. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers;
2. Walden; or, Life in the Woods; 3. Excursions in Field and Forest;
4. The Maine Woods; 5. Cape Cod. By H E N R Y D. T H O R E A U .
Boston: Ticknor & Co.

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PERTAINING TO THOREAU.

that " o u r offence was rank." It certainly was not
Thoreau's offence; and many of the rest of us shared,
in this resped, his blamelessness. We could sympathize with his tranquil indifference to college honors,
but we did not susped the fine genius that was developing under that impassive demeanor. Of his private
tastes there is little of consequence to recall, excepting
that he was devoted to the old English literature, and
had a good many volumes of the poetry from Gower
and Chaucer down through the era of Elizabeth. In
this mine he worked with a quiet enthusiasm, diverting to it hours that should have sparkled with emulation in the divisions where other genius stood that
never lived, like his, to ripen. For this was the class
of C. S. Wheeler, of Hildreth, Hay ward, Eustis; scholars
and poets all, to whom the sky stretched a too eager
diploma.
We owe to those studies not named in the programme, the commencement of a quaint and simple
style, and a flavor of old thinking, which appears
through all the works of Thoreau. His earliest masters were thus the least artificial of the minds which
have drawn from the well of undefiled English. And
the phrase "mother-tongue" was cherished by him,
and gained his early homage. He did not care for
the modern languages; nor was he ever seriously attracted, by the literature which they express, to lay aside
his English worthies. His mind was in native harmony with them, and it sometimes produces modern
speculation in sentences and fragments of speech and

THOREAU.

J

3*

turns of phrase that make you wonder if old Sir Thomas
Brown, or Owen Feltham, or Norris, were lodging for
awhile with him in their progress upon some transmigrating tour. We wonder if he alludes to the University when he says that he has heard of " a Society for
the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge." Heard of it, but
not personally acquainted with it. For, though he was
careful not to miss a recitation, it is plain that he was
not present at it, but was already like the man he mentions, who, " in some spring of his life, saunters abroad
into the Great fields of thought, goes to grass like a
horse, and leaves all his harness behind in the stable.
I would say to the Society for the Diffusion of Useful
Knowledge, sometimes,—Go to grass." So many of
us said most fervently, but not because we had attached
ourselves to his shyness in order to saunter with him
into the Great Fields of thought, where " a man's ignorance sometimes is not only useful, but beautiful."
But he passed for nothing, it is suspected, with most
of us; for he was cold and unimpressible. The touch
of his hand was moist and indifferent, as if he had
taken up something when he saw your hand coming,
and caught your grasp upon it. How the prominent,
gray-blue eyes seemed to rove down the path, just in
advance of his feet, as his grave Indian stride carried
him down to University Hall ! This down-looking
habit was Chaucer's also, who walked as if a great
deal of surmising went on between the earth and
him.

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PERTAINING TO THOREAU.
" A n d on the ground, which is m y m o t h e r ' s gate,
I knocke with my staff early and late,
A n d say to her, * Leve mother, let me in.' "

But Chaucer's heart sent brisk blood to and fro beneath that modest look, and his poetry is more teeming with the nature of men and women than with that
of the air and earth. Thoreau was nourished by its
simplicity, but not fanned by its passion. He was
colder, but more resolute, and would have gone to
prison and starvation for the sake of his opinions,
where Chaucer weakly compromised to preserve freedom and comfort. The vivid human life in the Elizabethan writers did not wake a corresponding genius
in Thoreau: he seemed to be feeding only upon their
raciness and Saxon vigor, upon the clearly phrased
and unaffe&ed sentiment. The rest of the leaf never
bore the marks of any hunger.
He did not care for people; his classmates seemed
very remote. This reverie hung always about him,
and not so loosely as the odd garments which the
pious household care furnished. Thought had not
yet awakened his countenance ; it was serene, but
rather dull, rather plodding. T h e lips were not yet
firm; there was almost a look of smug satisfaction
lurking round their corners. It is plain now that he
was preparing to hold his future views with great setness, and personal appreciation of their importance.
The nose was prominent, but its curve fell forward
without firmness over the upper lip; and we remember him as looking very much like some Egyptian

THOREAU.

*33

sculptures of faces, large-featured, but brooding, immobile, fixed in a mystic egotism. Yet his eyes were
sometimes searching, as if he had dropped, or expeded
tocfind, something. It was the look of Nature's own
child learning to deted her wayside secrets; and those
eyes have stocked his books with subtile traits of animate and inanimate creation which had escaped less
patient observers. For he saw more upon the ground
than anybody suspected to be there. His eyes slipped
into every tuft of meadow or beach grass, and went
winding in and out of the thickest undergrowth, like
some slim, silent, cunning animal. They were amphibious besides, and slid under fishes' eggs and into their
nests at the pond's bottom, to rifle all their contents.
Mr. Emerson has noticed, that Thoreau could always
find an Indian arrow-head in places that had been
ploughed over and ransacked for years. " T h e r e is
one," he would say, kicking it up with his foot. In
fad, his eyes seldom left the ground, even in his most
earnest conversation with you, if you can call earnest
a tone and manner that was very confident, as of an
opinion that had formed from granitic sediment, but
also very level and unflushed with feeling. The Sphinx
might have become passionate and exalted as soon.
In later years his chin and mouth grew firmer as his
resolute and audacious opinions developed, the curves
of the lips lost-their flabbiness, the eyes twinkled with
the latent humor of his criticisms of society. Still the
countenance was unruffled: it seemed to lie deep, like
a mountain tarn, with cool, still nature all around.

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PERTAINING

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THOREAU.

There was not a line upon it expressive of ambition
or discontent: the affectional emotions had never fretted at it. He went about, like a priest of Buddha
who expects to arrive soon at the summit of a life of
contemplation, where the divine absorbs the human.
All his intellectual activity was of the spontaneous,
open-air kind, which keeps the forehead smooth. His
thoughts grew with all the rest of nature, and passively
took their chance of summer and winter, pause and
germination : no more forced than pine-cones; fragrant, but not perfumed, owing nothing to special
efforts of art. His extremest and most grotesque
opinion had never been under glass. It all grew like
the bolls on forest-trees, and the deviations from stemlike or sweeping forms. No man was ever such a
placid thinker. It was because his thinking was observation isolated from all the temptations of society,
from the artificial exigencies of literature, from the
conventional sequence. Its truthfulness was not logically attained, but insensibly imbibed, during woodchopping, fishing, and scenting through the woods and
fields. So that the smoothness and plumpness of a
child were spread over his deepest places.
His simple life, so free from the vexations that belong to the most ordinary provision for the day, and
from the wear and tear of habits helped his countenance to preserve this complacency. He had instincts, but no habits; and they wore him no more
than they do the beaver and the blue-jay. Among
them we include his rare intuitive sensibility for moral

THOREAU.

!35

truth and for the fitness of things. For, although he
lived so closely to the ground, he could still say, "My
desire for knowledge is intermittent; but my desire to
bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is
perennial and constant. The highest that we can attain
to is not knowledge, but sympathy with intelligence."
But this intuition came up, like grass in spring, with
no effort that is traceable, or that registers itself anywhere except in the things grown. You would look
in vain for the age of his thoughts upon his face.
Now, it is no wonder that he kept himself aloof from
us in college; for he was already living on some Walden Pond, where he had run up a temporary shanty in
the depths of his reserve. He built it better afterwards,
but no nearer to men. Did anybody ever tempt him
down to Snow's, with the offer of an unlimited molluscous entertainment? The naturalist was not yet
enough awakened to lead him to ruin a midnight
stomach for the sake of the constitution of an oyster.
Who ever saw him sailing out of Willard's long entry
upon that airy smack which students not intended for
the pulpit launched from port-wine sangarees ? We
are confident that he never discovered the back-parlor
aperture through which our finite thirst communicated
with its spiritual source. So that his observing faculty
must, after all, be charged with limitations. We say,
our thirst, but would not be understood to include those
who were destined for the ministry, as no clergyman in
the embryonic state was ever known to visit Willard's.
But Thoreau was always indisposed to call at the

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ordinary places for his spiritual refreshment; and he
went farther than most persons when apparently he
did not go so far. He soon discovered that all sectarian and denominational styles of thinking had their
Willard within economical distance; but the respective taps did not suit his country palate. He was in
his cups when he was out of doors, where his lips fastened to the far horizon, and he tossed off the whole
costly vintage that mantled in the great circumference.
But he had no animal spirits for our sport or mischief. We cannot recollect what became of him during the scenes of the Dunkin Rebellion. He must
have slipped off into some "cool retreat or mossy cell.''
We are half inclined to suppose that the tumult startled
him into some metamorphose, that corresponded to
a yearning in him of some natural kind, whereby he
secured a temporary evasion till peace was restored.
He may also, in this interim of qualified humanity,
have established an understanding with the mute
cunning of nature, which appeared afterwards in his
surprising recognition of the ways of squirrels, birds,
and fishes. It is certainly quite as possible that man
should take off his mind, and drop into the medium
of animal intelligence, as that Swedenborg, Dr. Channing, and other spirits of just men made perfect, should
strip off the senses and conditions of their sphere, to
come dabbling about in the atmosphere of earth
among men's thoughts. However this may be, Thoreau disappeared while our young absurdity held its
orgies, stripping shutters from the lower windows of

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137

the buildings, dismantling recitation rooms, greeting
tutors and professors with a frenzied and groundless
indignation which we symbolized by kindling the
spoils of sacked premises upon the steps. It probably occurred to him that fools might rush in where
angels were not in the habit of going. We recoiled
that he declined to accompany several fools of this
description, who rushed late, all in a fine condition
of contempt, with Corybantic gestures, into morning
prayers, — a college exercise which we are confident
was never attended by the angels.
It is true he says, "Give me for my friends and
neighbors wild men, not tame ones;" and a little after,
in the same essay, " I rejoice that horses and steers
have to be broken before they can be made the slaves
of men, and that men themselves have some wild oats
still left to sow before they become submissive members of society." But, in fad:, there is nothing so conventional as the mischief of a boy who is grown large
enough to light bonfires, and run up a bill for "special
repairs," and not yet large enough to include in such
a bill his own disposition to " h a z e " his comrades
and to have his fits of anarchy. Rebellion is " b u t a
faint symbol of the awful ferity with which good men
and lovers meet."
There was no conceit of superior tendencies and
exclusive tastes which prevented him from coming into closer contad with individuals. But it was not
shyness alone which restrained him, nor the reticence
of an extremely modest temperament. For he was

I38

PERTAINING TO THOREAU.

complacent; his reserve was always satisfadory to
himself. Something in his still latent and brooding genius was sufficiently attradive to make his wit
"home-keeping;" and it very early occurred to him,
that he-should not better his fortunes by familiarity
with other minds. This complacency, which lay quite
deep over his youthful features, was the key to that
defed of sympathy which led to defeds of expression,
and to unbalanced statements of his thought. It had
all the effed of the seclusion that some men inflid
upon themselves, when from conceit or disappointment
they restrid the compass of their life to islands in the
great expanse, and become reduced at last, after nibbling every thing within the reach of their tether, to simple rumination, and incessant returns of the same cud
to the tongue. This, and not listlessness, nor indolence,
nor absolute incapacity for any professional pursuit,
led him to the banks of Walden Pond, where his cottage, sheltering a self-reliant and homely life, seemed
like something secreted by a quite natural and inevitable constitution. You might as well quarrei with
the self-sufficiency of a perfed day of Nature, which
makes no effort to conciliate, as with this primitive
disposition of his. The critic need not feel bound to
call it a vice of temper because it nourished faults.
He should, on the contrary, accept it as he sees that it
secured the rare and positive charaderistics which
make Thoreau's books so full of new life, of charms
unborrowed from the resources of society, of suggestions lent by the invisible beauty to a temperate and

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139

cleanly soul. A greater deference to his neighborhood would have impaired the peculiar genius which
we ought to delight to recognize as fresh from a divine
inspiration, filled with possibilities like an untutored
America, as it hints at improvement in its very defects,
and is fortunately guarded by its own disability. It
was perfectly satisfied with its own ungraciousness,
because that was essential to its private business.
Another genius might need to touch human life at
many points; to feel the wholesome shocks; to draw
off the subtile nourishment which the great mass generates and comprises; to take in the reward for parting
with some effluence: but this would have been fatal
to Thoreau. It would have cured his faults and
weakened his genius. He would have gained friends
within the world, and lost his friends behind it.
It is very plain, that, however much he may have
suffered for want of human sympathy, and the correction of the manners of a fine circle, his complacency
turned, the pain to himself into opportunity for his
thought. He could meditate well upon friendship;
but he soon learned to do without friends. Occasionally, as in "Concord and Merrimac," pp. 273-302, he
seems to be yearning for intercourse with worthy and
noble mates ; but he is merely describing his own
ideals. These peers whom he stands ready to love, to
share his integrity with them, his sense of all beautiful
and manly things, to suffer their heroic criticism, and
to cure them with a surgery as prompt, are only the
offspring of his solitary pen. He would care less to

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make an effort to discover and come to an understanding with such candidates for friendship after his
deliberate description of them. After the trouble of
conceiving them, they would not be worth the trouble
of knowing. His imagination enjoyed itself so well,
that it dreaded to be interrupted, perhaps to be deceived,
by people pretending to be its counterparts. They
excited his jealousy, as though they had come to survey and stake out his Walden privilege, with a view to
an air-line railroad through his front door. He had
long ago escaped from all this bustle and obtrusion :
not only tricky and conventional people, shallow neighbors, impertinent with the success of their professions
and handicrafts, mere talkers and jugglers, had been
left outside the wood, but his superiors also; for they
could never satisfy his requisitions at a moment's
notice, and they were so human as to drop away sometimes from his inexorable thought.
His Friend is simply his own meditation of an elevated, pure, and reticent behavior. He will do little
and'risk little to find it incorporated, and is content to
keep out of the way of affeclation. What is simply
human never becomes any relief or luxury to him,
compared with his own surmises: whenever he projects them upon the farmer, the teamster, the locktender, the fisherman, upon the men at cattle-show or
muster, yo*u think he has shaken hands and is pleasantly surprised to find that God has been so well
employed. But it is all his own cleverness, and the
men are still lay-figures. It is the enthusiasm of a

THOREAU.

141

reserve which men are not competent to break. So
that, whenever he shows regard for humble life, it is not
as life, but as unconventionality.
But is this a fault to quarrel with? It is rather a
characteristic to define, and keep in its providential
connection with his genius. He is not inhuman, and
never indulges in contempt. Sometimes he appears
to pretend that the apple is a great deal more divine
than the-farmer who raised it; and, if you believed his
talk, the " dry wit of decayed cranberry vines" is better
than a night with all the guests of the Symposium.
He lacks geniality for every thing but Nature; but he
truly despises nothing that is not guilty of deceit or
voluntary connivance with social frauds. Will you
mend his genius for Nature by forcing him to cultivate mankind? Can you afford to subject this originality to your experiments? And is it so plenty in
every township that you can declare you will have
none of it, unless it is willing to accommodate your
style? Agassiz, instead of observing and chronicling,
might as well fly into a passion with the innocent
shortcomings of his natural creatures.
And notice, too, that if Thoreau cannot quote with
a personality of feeling, like Theodore Parker's, the
famous nihil humani a me alienum, the very complacency of his severe ideal saves him from conceding
too much out of sympathy with human weakness.
He came to destroy customs of living, not to fulfil
them: at least, he is willing to make a personal example of the possibility of living without compliances

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THOREAU.

that are more costly to the conscience than to the
purse. The pleasantest family circle cannot tempt
him to manifest regard for the American thriftiness
that is so full of pretence. And his earliest temper
is shown in extreme protest against the comforts and
habits of the town. He would fain convince people,
that, instead of living, they are merely implicated in a
life-long struggle to save their furniture, pay rent for
garrets littered with cast-off conveniences, and keep a
best room for no eye on earth to see, no human presence to enjoy. He will escape to some place whence
he can show how living can be reduced to its minimum ; not reflecting, in his first contempt for our habits
of self-embarrassment, that his example bids every head
of a family take to the woods, there to solve life's problem by arresting life. But New-England enterprise
does not affect him ; its roads do not pierce nor bridge
his complacent economy. The cost of civilization, in
human feeling, in wasteful processes, and in hypocrisy,
piques him into pronouncing it a disease.
There is no sel^shness in this; he is not avoiding
trouble, but hoping not to increase the trouble that
already exists in the world. He must preserve the
chastity of his imagination, if he dies of starvation;
and will be a little pinched and bony, with a touch of
tartness, rather than be dissolute. When his friend
seeks him in Concord jail, whither the tax-gatherer has
taken the body of this recusant, and addresses him,
" Thoreau, why are you here?" he receives for reply,
" W h y are you not here also?" No personal incon-

THOREAU.

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43

venience can deter him from making a logical application of his principles. Trade, government, and civil
life, seem to be extortionate processes for getting the
most for your money; and he is clearly of the opinion
of Publius Syrus, who anticipated Proudhon's famous
maxim, "La propriele c'est vol," when he wrote, "Lucrum sine damno alterius fieri non potest."
He once asked the writer, with that deliberation
from which there seemed as little escape as from the
pressure of the atmosphere, " H a v e you ever yet in
preaching been so fortunate as to say anything?"
Tenderness for the future barrel, which was then a
fine plump keg, betrayed us into declaring confidently
that we had. " T h e n your preaching days are over.
Can you bear to say it again? You can never open
your mouth again for love or money."
" B u t certainly," he is shrewd enough to write,
"there are modes by which a man may put bread
into his mouth, which will not prejudice him as a
companion and neighbor." The only mode, however, which he can invent, ignores companionship and
neighborhood: he begins by withdrawing his bravery
from temptation, and then estimates the insignificance
of the cost. Once, when he felt lonesome in his Walden cottage, he doubted " if the near neighborhood of
man was not essential to a serene and healthy life."
But he soon recovered from this mood, which was as
foreign to him as invalidism to the osprey; and the
true bias and purport of his whole life is betrayed in
the method of his restoration to complacency.

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" In the midst of a gentle rain, while these thoughts prevailed,
I was suddenly sensible of such sweet and beneficent society in
N a t u r e , in the very pattering of the drops, and in every sound
and sight around my house, an infinite and unaccountable friendliness all at once like an atmosphere sustaining me, as made the
fancied advantages of h u m a n neighborhood insignificant; and
I have never thought of them since. Every little pine-needle
expanded and swelled with sympathy, and befriended me. I
was so distinctly m a d e aware of the presence of something kindred to me, even in scenes which we are accustomed to call wild
and dreary, and also that the nearest of blood to me and humanest was not a person nor a villager, that I thought no place could
ever be strange to me a g a i n . "

Here is a vein as old as the Scriptures which record
the reveries of pure souls. The infinite presence cannot thus befriend the selfish and shirking temperament.
So was Thoreau called and set apart for his fine observation of the natural world, and to reclaim its most
negle&ed provinces for the indwelling love and beauty
of the God who adopted him also in the wood. The
calling of Jonathan Edwards was not more full of sweet
and quiet rapture. How fortunate that the metaphysics
of river and meadow furnished Thoreau with a body
of divinity to enforce the sinlessness of Nature and
refute the wrath of God !
So there appears, in these five volumes of rare truthfulness of observation, and doubtless still more clearly
in the extensive manuscript notes of his daily foraging
of Nature, a providence, which ought to pro ted: him
from the complaint that he was not somebody else.
No man ever lived who paid more ardent and unselfish
attention to his business. If pure minds are sent into

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the world upon errands, with strict injunction not to
stray by other paths, Thoreau certainly was one of
these elect; and we ought to admire how the native
disposition lost its faultiness in ministering to his
work. The limitation protected the opportunity. A
great deal of criticism is inspired by inability to perceive the function and predestined quality of the man
who passes in review. It only succeeds in explaining
the difference between him and the critic. Such a
decided fact as a man of genius is, ought to be gratefully accepted and interpreted; and the best effort of
criticism should be to show how his inspiration justifies itself against every thing but meanness and affectation. " I would not question Nature, and I would
rather have him as he was, than as I would have him."
We cannot, therefore, subscribe to the regret that is
expressed in the inimitable biographical sketch, introductory to the volume of ''Excursions:" the writer
there says, " I so much regret the loss of his rare powers of action, that I cannot help counting it a fault in
him that he had no ambition. Wanting this, instead
of engineering for all America, he was the captain of a
huckleberry party." But what if the berries that filled
his pail were of a kind never picked before, from a stock
not previously discovered in our pastures, staining his
hands and pages with the blood that circulates behind
the earth, that puts forth, indeed, the earth itself as a
berry on the tree Igdrasil. That kind of engineering
tunnels the darkness which we call the visible world,
and lets us through into a more lively continent than

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this graded and turnpiked one. Thoreau was " b o r n
for great enterprise and for command," to civilize
Nature with the highest intuitions of the mind, which
show her simplicity to restless and artificial men; thus
framing a treaty of amity and commerce by which new
advantages for the finite are gathered from the infinite,
and one system of law is extended over both spheres.
His books are full of these unexpected coincidences,
which reveal the regularity and beauty of creation: from
a twig or a leaf, his adventurous spirit, "o'er-festooning
every interval," swings across, and fastens the first rope
of a bridge that shall become solid for a million feet.
These hints of the divine intention, of the tolerance
and impartiality that fill all animated forms with one
kind spirit; this unerring scent that finds footsteps
where no microscope could gather one, and refers all
their stratagems to a single Presence, that barely escapes
his impetuous instind, and cannot cover up its tracks
so fast as he pursues; this knowledge of the habits,
graces, and shifts of all wild creatures, which humanizes them by the curious analogies it suggests, so that
we adopt them into the family, and they pay their board
by helping our perception of order and symmetry, as
we find it in the succession of forest-trees, and in that
of races, in the development of wild fruits and crabbed
stocks, in the relations of fauna and flora, in the graces
of spring days, till all of us, birds, men, beasts, and blossoms, seem to breathe in unison that One Intelligence,
whose moment is the same yesterday, to-day, and for
ever,— this was the enterprise of Thoreau; and all

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developments of his energy, or new command gained
over his gifts, would have perfected, and not changed,
the nature of his employment. It was the only way
he had, or ever could acquire, for serving politics,
society, and the religious life.
For no writer of the present day is more religious;
that is to say, no one more profoundly penetrated with
the redeeming power of simple integrity, and the spiritualizing effect of a personal consciousness of God.
It is in the interest of holiness that he speaks slightingly of Scripture and its holy men. "Keep your
Christ," he says; " b u t let me have my Buddha, and
leave me alone with him." He catches up this Buddha for a chance defence against the conventional
Christ of Democrats, slaveholders, sharpers in trade
and in society, literal theologians, and over-pious laymen. Why should there be any difficulty in detecting
the irony of such pages as p. 72 in "Concord and
Merrimack " ?
" I trust that some may be as near and dear to B u d d h a or
Christ or Swedenborg, who are without the pale of their churches.
It is necessary not to be Christian, to appreciate the beauty and
significance of the life of Christ. I know that some will have
hard thoughts of me, when they hear their Christ named beside
my B u d d h a : yet I am sure that I am willing they should love
their Christ more than my B u d d h a ; for the love is the main
thing, and I like him too. W h y need Christians be still intolerant and superstitious? T h e simple-minded sailors were unwilling to cast overboard Jonah at his own r e q u e s t . "

Compare them with the fine statements upon pp. 141,
146, where his good sense and moral discrimination

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appear. Contrasting Christianity with the Orientalists, who were " s o infinitely wise, yet infinitely stagnant," he proceeds:—
" In that same Asia, but in the western p a r t of it, appeared a
youth, wholly unforetold by them, — not being absorbed into
Brahma, but bringing Brahma down to earth and mankind ; in
whom B r a h m a had awaked from his long sleep, and exerted
himself, and the day began, — a new orator. T h e B r a h m a n had
never thought to be a brother of mankind as well as a child of
God."
T h e New Testament " n e v e r reflects but it repents.
There
is no poetry in it, we may say, nothing regarded in the light of
p u r e beauty, but moral truth is its object. All mortals are convicted by its conscience."

The well-disposed reader will find a truly spiritual
doctrine amid the contempt for religions on page 82: —
" A m a n ' s real faith is never contained in his creed, nor is his
creed an article of his faith. T h e last is never adopted. This
it is that permits him to smile ever, and to live even as bravely
as he does. And yet he clings anxiously to his creed as to a
straw, thinking that that does him good service because his
sheet-anchor does not d r a g .
" I n most men's religion, the ligature, which should be its
umbilical cord connecting them with divinity, is rather like that
thread which the accomplices of Cylon held in their hands when
they went abroad from the temple of M i n e r v a ; the other end
being attached to the statue of the goddess. But frequently,
as in their case, the thread breaks, being stretched, and they are
left without an a s y l u m . "

The most deferential allusion to the stock subje&s
of enlightened theologians is not so refreshing as some
of his startling sentences that hide moral earnestness

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and reverence in their whim. "Where is the man
who is guilty of direct and personal insolence to Him
that made him ? Yet there are certain current expressions of blasphemous modes of viewing things, as, frequently, when we say,' He is doing a good business,'—
more profane than cursing and swearing. There is
sin and death in such words. Let not the children
hear them." His most trying paradoxes are conceived
in a spirit of veneration for everlasting laws. The
meat is worth a little struggle with the husk; for, as
he says of himself, "they will complain, too, that you
are hard. O ye that would have the cocoa-nut wrong
side outwards! when next I weep I will let you know."
But he will be rightly understood only by reference
to his books, and not to separate pages; for his whole
mental disposition was religious. He is not content
to make little portable statements, after the manner of
sermonizers, who discharge themselves by clauses of
their weekly accumulation of awe and hope, and then
are laid up, like the gymnotus, for repairs. But every
page is firmly built upon moral earnestness and regard
for the unseen powers. He is a spiritual writer in the
sense of worshipping the presence of infinite consistency and beauty ; yet he always behaves as if his
religion was "nothing to speak of." He often quarrels with the technicalities of church-goers, and is more
petulant than he need be, lest you should susped: him
of hypocrisy. After reading the earliest English translations of Eastern scriptures, as Colebrooke's, and perhaps some fragments in the French, he recommends

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them to the people, because his sense of justice is hurt
at the exclusive and ignorant fetichism which is paid
to the Old and New Testaments. He cannot have
the notion of supplanting them ; but he longs to have
all men recognize the continuous inspiration of the
Spirit through all climes and ages. He does not
undertake to patronize the Bible, and says few good
words for it; but his books are fountains of sincerity
and moral sweetness, such as the Bible emphasizes,
and they always worship " i n spirit and in truth."
The truth is very prominent; truth of private demeanor, of public ethics, of sumptuary law, of moral
anticipation ; truth of sky, of cloud, of forest, — the
sharpest observation, the most uncompromising criticism, the very soul of honor, and of high regard for
the purity that looks on God. Nothing in these
books can destroy their healthy influence: the overdrawn passages of social corruption, the testy humor,
the apparent irreverence, the vexatious paradoxes, the
superfluous disdain, appear like tan-spots on a cheek
that is all frankness and delicacy, whose bloom and
smile extort forgiveness for them. We cannot, at present, recall a religious treatise that is better ventilated
with the sun and air of heaven.
What an easy task it would be for a lively and not
entirely scrupulous pen to ridicule his notions, and
raise such a cloud of ink in the clear medium as entirely to obscure his true and noble traits. To hear,
for instance, his requisition on mankind, "Give me
a sentence which no intelligence can understand"!

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5i

We susped that his observations upon Conscience can
be misunderstood sooner than appreciated. Find them
upon pp. 78-79 of "Concord and Merrimack ;" but
notice that the key to tune those ragged, half-strung
verses, is the quaint sentence, " M e n have a singular
desire to be good, without being good for any thing,
because, perchance, they think vaguely that so it will
be good for them in the end."
Toward the close of his life, he was visited by one
of those dealers in ready-made clothing, who advertise
to get any soul prepared at a moment's notice for a
sudden trip. Complete outfits, including " a change,"
and patent fire-proof, are furnished at the very bedside,
or place of embarkation, of the most shiftless spirits.
" Henry, have you made your peace with God?" To
which our slop-dealer received the somew?hat noticeable reply, " I have never quarrelled with him." We
fancy the rapid and complete abdication of the cheapclothing business in the presence of such forethought.
A friend of the family was very anxious to know
how he stood affeded toward Christ, and he told her
that a snow-storm was more to him than Christ. So
he got rid of these cankers that came round to infest
his soul's blossoming time. Readers ought not to
bring a lack of religion to the dealing with his answers.
His spiritual life was not deficient in soundness because it stood unrelated to conventional names and
observances'. Let it be known by the fruits of integrity, high-mindedness, and purity, which cluster on the
pages of these volumes ; by the cold and stern yet

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salutary ideals of behavior in all the human relations;
by his sense of dependence upon the invisible life, and
absolute surrender to its didates.
" Walden," and " A Week on the Concord and
Merrimack/' are most full of direct discussions upon
ethical and religious subjeds; but they are in the protesting and unsympathetic vein. "Cape Cod" shows
his sensibility for human moods and emotions, and
sometimes surprises the reader with a wealth which he
had not credited to this sturdy refuser of all ordinary
taxes. The more minute and satisfactory his observation of Nature became, the more gently his spirit
learned to share the yearnings in each of us " o f some
natural kind." How solemn and tender is the figure
of the sunken anchors! — " C a p e Cod" pp. 149, 150,—
notwithstanding its slight rust of irony, and the homely
close. And throughout this volume, wherever he comes
into contad with fragments of shipwrecks, whether by
the seas or fates; with peculiar isolations of life; with
the odd, stunted, and grotesque specimens which the
tide itself seems to deposit and nourish upon that long
spit of sand, — his humor is just touched with tenderness "beyond the reach of art," and he betrays that
the great undertow sweeps outward from his spirit also
to the deep. This is the most human of all his writings. And, at the same time, his own humanity becomes identified with the scene in a way that cannot
be mistaken for conceit. The beach becomes the
wave-rolled floor of his . privacy to walk upon : the
light-house is enflamed at evening with his sympathetic

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thought. He pleases himself, as he lies awake underneath the lamp-chamber of the Highland light, with
spinning the yarns of all sea-ward vessels towards a
centre, which was his temporary couch ; may we not
say rather, his unperturbed and friendly heart?
With this gradual mellowing of his genius, there
came also an increase of substance and richness to his
style. Wherever " Walden " philosophizes, it is thin,
and refuses to be consecutively read. The little short
sentences soon fatigue, as when one tries a rail-track
by stepping from sleeper to sleeper. The paragraphs
have no flow: the thought is not yet informed with
rhythm. The darling economy of which he writes
has penetrated to the style. Proverbs enough there
are: as, " None is so poor that he need sit on a pumpkin," and, " He was a lucky fox that left his tail in the
trap,"—meaning that it is better for a man not to
encumber himself with his baggage and fixtures, and
will apply to thoughts as well; "Rescue the drowning, and tie your shoe-strings," that is, make little fuss
with your philanthropies; "Only that day dawns to
which we are awake." There are numbers of bright
little clauses, happy touches of color or wit: as, " T h e
haze, the sun's dust of travel;" he describes le&uring
against the use of tobacco " a s a penalty which reformed tobacco-chewers have to p a y ; " — " I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and
not rather a new wearer of clothes;"—"It is desirable
that a man be clad so simply that he can lay his
hands on himself in the dark;" when he finds that he

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must depend upon mankind to the extent of borrowing an axe, he pays well for it in this, — " It is difficult
to begin without borrowing, but perhaps it is the most
generous course thus to permit your fellow-men to
have an interest in your enterprise;" he thus reduces
irksome and expensive living to plain prose, " It makes
but little difference whether you are committed to a
farm or the county jail;" the stream of time is shallow, " I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose
bottom is pebbly with stars;" if a man is really alive,
he is not out of danger of dying, so that he need not
try to shield himself, — " A man sits as many risks as
he runs." In the paper on "Autumnal Tints," if he
would get a favorable position for viewing a mapletree, he turns his head slightly, "emptying out some
of its earthiness." But we become embarrassed by
the plenteousness of these specimens, many of which
are untransferable, as they lie in words and phrases,
pollen in the bottom of his sentences.
When his pen begins to describe, the style grows
genial and flowing, as if Nature's rhythm were at the
desk. There is not room for specimens of his descriptions of scenery; of the morning and evening moods
of Nature; of the sounds of the wind, the habits of
squirrels, pigeons, foxes, muskrats, and fishes. See, for
instance, Spaulding's Farm, in "Excursions," p. 207;
the Red-Maple Swamp, p. 231 ; the night-hawk, in
"Walden," p. 172; the partridge, p. 243; the antbattle, p. 246 ; the loon, p. 251; the squirrels, p. 294 ;
the wasp in O&ober, when, says Thoreau, " I warmed

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myself by the still glowing embers which the summer,
like a departed hunter, had left;" the subtile pages on
Sounds, pp. 134, 135; the squirrels in "Concord and
Merrimack," p. 206; the pigeons, p. 233; the bittern,
p. 250; the wind, p. 349; the delightful humor in the
pidure of the soldier going to muster, p. 330. Such
things cannot be surpassed. They are minute in observation, fresh in sentiment, and completely penetrated
by the imagination. The reader will see in them how
Thoreau's personal life held all Nature's symbolism in
solution, and his thought drips with it. His mind is
not merely pantheistic; say, rather, it is Nature herself,
in a self-conscious mood, becoming aware of hereffeds.
Of all his books, " Cape Cod " has the most finished
and sustained style. With the exception of some
papers in "Excursions," the reader will find that
here the pages bear him best, without consciousness
of effort. The chapters were probably written in different years, some earlier, some later; but they make
us regret that he did not visit sea-side localities more
often, — for the ocean lifts his pen better than the
forest,— though he doubtless felt more at home in the
latter, and more in harmony with the broad complacent meadow and the placid lapse of streams. He went
into the woods, because he "wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential fads of life." Pan's
mysterious piping drew him still deeper into solitude,
by the paths of streams and the tracks of the fox and
partridge, where the beach-sounds in the pine-tree
might remind him of Glaucus without swelling into

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envy for his enterprise. But it is plain, that, after salt
water had once run up and lapped his feet, not all the
epithets in Homer could pacify the hunger of this new
sensation. He was powerfully attracted: the movement and unbounded freedom, the contrasts of strength
and gentleness in the horizon filled with the downright
sincerity that he prized, braced him like the high living of camps and explorations, and gave to his pulse
an activity which he refused to derive from towns and
business. But his observation is as sympathetic here
as on the shore of Walden Pond; dealing, that is, not
with general description of objects, or careful arrangement of their traits, but seizing their individuality, and
transferring it with a touch of the precisest color into a
sentence. Thus objects, instead of mutely falling into
their natural place, aspire to interest us through something in the imagination that is kindred ; and the
whole scene becomes peopled instead of classified.
The floating body of a woman, with her cap blown
back, one of the relics of the Cohasset shipwreck,
teaches him that " t h e beauty of the shore itself was
wrecked for many a lonely walker there, until he could
perceive, at last, how its beauty was enhanced by wrecks
like this, and it acquired thus a rarer and sublimer
beauty still." The thorn-apple, that is found on all
strands of the ocean, "suggests not merely commerce,
but its attendant vices, as if its fibres were the stuff of
which pirates spin their yarns." An island " h a d got
the very form of a ripple;" the sea nibbles voraciously
at the Continent, "the tawny rocks, like lions couchant,

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defying the ocean;" the windmills of the salt-works
"looked loose and slightly locomotive, like huge
wounded birds, trailing a wing or a leg;" the wind
seems " to blow not so much as the exciting cause, as
from sympathy with the already agitated ocean;" and
the breakers " looked like droves of a thousand wild
horses of Neptune, rushing to the shore;" the wrecker's
face was "like an old sail endowed with life, a hanging-cliff of weather-beaten flesh;" he seemed to be " a s
indifferent as a clam, — like a sea-clam with hat on
and legs, that was out walking the strand;" notice
how the kelp is described on p. 60 — the sun-squall,
and the note of the mackerel-gull, " the dreary peep of
the piping plover," whose young are " mere pinches of
down on two legs;" and our literature cannot show a
racier and more genial pidure than the chapter called
" T h e Wellfleet Oysterman." The sea plays with the
land, " holding a sand-bar in its mouth awhile before
it swallows it, as a cat plays with a mouse; but the
fatal gripe is sure to come at last." The three or four
hundred sail of the mackerel fleet hovered about the
two lights of the Cape, " like moths round a candle,
and at this distance they looked fair and white, as if
they had not yet flown into the light; but nearer at
hand, afterwards, we saw how some had formerly singed
their wings and bodies." He paints the color of the
sand, the weather-streaks upon the ocean, the "autumn
rug" of the bay and huckleberry, the lichened boards
of houses, and the fish-flakes, and the green in the
comb of a wave. All the local history and topography

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is well interwoven with great skill to enhance the
human and personal impression of these scenes. The
bleak sand-elbow of Massachusetts had been unpromising from the days of Thorfin; waiting, evidently, till
the arrival of this " Thor-eau " made promising, and
handsome performing, too, worth the while, for his sake
who was next of kin.
The reader of Thoreau's verses will be likely to
declare that all the poetry has been absorbed by the
prose. Yet the judgment will not be entirely safe.
Only two or three pieces — those commencing " My life
is like a stroll upon a beach;" " T i s sweet to hear of
heroes dead;" "My love must be as free,"—can boast
of melody and a completed form; but scattered verses
yield great subtilty of thought, and tender and sweet
expressions. We recoiled:, that when the " Dial" was
the butt of all the nibless pens in Boston, and the style
of Mr. Emerson gave the criticisms that quoted it for
ridicule all their flavor, the reigning fashion included
Thoreau's verses, and an ao-peo-ro? y A ? like that of the
ew
gods at Vulcan's limping, went up over his ragged
and halting lines. They are certainly very crude,, seldom touched with the bloom of beauty, and full of
verdant confidence in the reader's tolerance of their
youth. But his imagination sometimes descends in
their midst, and a line or a phrase blazes like a drop
that has caught the sun; or suddenly his far thought
strikes full upon the rows of common window glass,
and they all reflect the honor.
A great deal of this poetry is gnomic, and the thrifty

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59

wisdom predominates. But there are many delicate
lines about birds, the distant hills, the woodman's
" early scout, his emissary, smoke;" trees stand in the
clear sunset horizon,—
" a s the vessels in a haven
Await the morning breeze;"

and let the reader turn in confidence to "Walden,"
p. 271. So let him undaunted look up in "Concord
and Merrimack," pp. 183, 255, 274, 300, and 403, which
is better than the same vein in George Herbert.
Indeed, the frank and unpretending nobleness of his
verses often recalls the minor poets of the Elizabethan
times. It is a pity that their slovenly habit had not
been reformed.
But let these books, with all their faults of temperament and execution, be not slow in recommending
their health and calmness to the young men and
women, who retain, with integrity, that contempt for
worldly fashions and corrupt opinions of the Church
and State, which the Republic hopes to nourish for
her service and renown. Let them learn to love this
sincere and truly religious life, which, both in what it
did, and what it refrained to do, has a stimulus for
all who long to keep themselves unspotted from the
world.
" 'Tis sweet to hear of heroes dead,
To know them still alive;
But sweeter if we earn their bread,
And in us they survive.

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Our life should feed the springs of fame
With a perennial wave,
As ocean feeds the babbling founts
Which find in it their g r a v e . " l

1
[Rev. J o h n Weiss, in the " C h r i s t i a n E x a m i n e r " for July,
1865.]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

HENRY DAVID

THOREAU.

T T E N R Y DAVID THOREAU was born in Con-•- -*- cord, Mass., July 12, 1817. His ancestors took
refuge, he says, in the Isle of Jersey, on the revocation
of the E d i d of Nantes. His grandfather, John Thoreau, came to this country about the year 1773, " a n d
in 1781, married in Boston, Jane Burns, the daughter
of a Scotchman of some estate in the neighborhood of
Sterling Castle, who had emigrated earlier to Massachusetts, and had married Sarah Orrock, the daughter
of David Orrock, a Massachusetts Quaker:" so that
our classmate was a descendant of Huguenot and
Quaker ancestry. His grandfather was a merchant
on Long Wharf, and his father, born in Boston, was
bred to mercantile pursuits, which he followed till he
failed in business, and then took to the manufadure of
pencils, in which he was quite an expert. His mother
was Cynthia Dunbar, who was born in Keene, N. H.
She was the daughter of the Rev. Asa Dunbar of
Bridgewater, Mass. (H. U. 1767.)
In a letter to the Class Secretary he writes, " I was
fitted, or rather made unfit for College at Concord

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Academy and elsewhere, mainly by myself, with the
countenance of Phinehas Allen, Preceptor." And
in the Class-Book he writes: " 'One branch more/
to use Mr. Quincy's words,'and you had been turned
by entirely. You have barely got in/ However,'A
man's a man for a' that/ I was in and did not stop
to ask how I got there." Again, — "Though bodily I
have been a member of Harvard University, heart and
soul I have been far away among the scenes of my
boyhood. Those hours that should have been devoted
to study, have been spent in scouring the woods and
exploring the lakes and streams of my native village.
Immured within the dark but classic walls of a Stoughton or a Hollis, my spirit yearned for the sympathy of
my old and almost forgotten friend, Nature." Notwithstanding what he himself says of his entrance to the
college and the impression one gets from some of his
biographers, that he was rather under the ban of the
authorities, Thoreau maintained a very fair rank in his
class, and at graduation took part in a "Conference"
with Charles Wyatt Rice and Henry Vose, on the
"Commercial Spirit of Modern Times, Considered in
Its Influence on the Political, Moral, and Literary
Charader of a Nation." His relations with his associates were not intimate, and yet he says: " T h i n k not
that my classmates have no place in my heart, — but
that is too sacred a matter even for a Class-Book."
During his college life he taught a district school one
winter in Canton, Mass., and boarded in the family of
the Rev. Orestes A. Brownson, with whom he studied

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165

German; and after graduation he had some further
experience in teaching. When at home in the summer of'36, probably from illness, his former chum and
classmate, Peabody. wrote him a gossiping letter about
what was going on at Cambridge in his absence,
which Thoreau preserved. Indeed, he seems to have
had the habit of preserving every scrap of his correspondence;' and Mr. Sanborn has given this letter on
the fifty-fifth and fifty-sixth pages of his memoir, where
other classmates besides the writer will be found
embalmed, and the reading of which will call up many
pleasant and perhaps long-forgotten memories. It is
very doubtful, however, whether Thoreau ever took
part in any irregularities of the sort described, or any
others calculated to excite the distrust of the Faculty.
" H e had no animal spirits for our sport and mischief/7 says Mr. Weiss. He undoubtedly walked in
his own ways often, instead of those prescribed for
him, which may have affeded his class standing.
Yet if we could have read what was passing in' his
mind, as we do to-day in Mr. Sanborn's interesting
pages, we certainly should have looked with other eyes
upon our classmate. He appeared shy, reserved, and
undemonstrative. Apparently, " he was cold and unimpressible. We did not suspeci. the fine genius that
was developing under that impassive demeanor." His
real feeling towards his companions has been indicated above. We commend Mr. Sanborn's sixth chapter to the attention of those of our number who may
still question the fad; that Thoreau was something

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more than an egotistical dreamer, indulging in paradoxes, and an undoubted imitator of his friend, Ralph
Waldo Emerson.
This charge of imitating Mr. Emerson has often
been brought against Thoreau, and we have not the
least doubt that there is something in it. Mr. Sanborn in a note (1855) says, " I n his tones and gestures
he seemed to me to imitate Emerson, so that it was
annoying to listen to him, though he said many good
things. He looks like Emerson, too—coarser, but
with something of that serenity and sagacity which
Emerson has. Thoreau looks eminently sagacious—
like a sort of wise, wild beast." And again a little
later: " H e is a little under size, with a huge Emersonian nose, bluish grey eyes, brown hair, and a
ruddy, weather-beaten face which reminds one of
some shrewd and honest animal's — some retired,
philosophical woodchuck or magnanimous fox. He
dresses very plainly, wears his collar turned over like
Mr. Emerson, etc." And in January of the same year,
Mr. Sanborn says to Thoreau: "At the same time, if
any one should ask me what I think of your philosophy, I should be apt to answer that it is not worth a
straw." It is but fair to add that Mr. Sanborn now
regards the above as "trivial comments."
Mr. Haskins, in his little book giving an account of
the maternal ancestry of Ralph Waldo Emerson, tells
us of an interview with his cousin the year after we
graduated, at which Thoreau was present. It was
the first time they had met since leaving college, and

HENRY DAVID THOREAU.

167

Mr. Haskins says: " I was startled at the transformation that had taken place in him. His short figure
and general cast of .countenance were of course unchanged: but in his manners, in the tones and inflections of his voice, in his modes of expression, even in
the hesitations and pauses of his speech, he had become the counterpart of Mr. Emerson. Mr. Thoreau's
college voice bore no resemblance to Mr. Emerson's,
and was so familiar to my ear that I could readily
have identified him by it in the dark. I was so much
struck with the change, that I remember to have taken
the opportunity as they sat near together, talking, of
listening to their conversation with closed eyes, and to
have been unable to determine with certainty which
was speaking. It was a notable instance of unconscious imitation/' The experience of others in the
same way has been reported to us by Concord people.
Mr. Lowell, too, in his "Fable for the Critics" speaks
pretty plainly, though good naturedly, to the same
purpose: —
"There comes
, for instance; to see him 's rare sport,
Tread in Emerson's tracks with legs painfully short;
How he jumps, how he strains, and gets red in the face,
To keep step with the mystagogue's natural pace!
He follows as close as a stick to a rocket
His fingers exploring his prophet's each pocket.
Fie, for shame, brother bard! with good fruit of your own,
Can't you let neighbor Emerson's orchards alone? "

This was uttered in 1856. But, as we all fail by our
most subtle analysis to deted the marvellous chemical

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TO

THOREAU.

processes, or whatever they may be called, — which
enter into the life and organization of the humblest
flower,— how the earth, the air, the rain and the sunshine do their work, — so are we far more seriously
baffled when we try to estimate the influences of one
mind upon another.
In measuring the influence, therefore, of our great
Philosopher, Emerson, on our Class Philosopher, Thoreau, though we know it was one of the important
elements which were concerned in the development of his character, we are unwilling to admit
that Thoreau was, in any invidious sense, the imitator of his friend. The resemblance was only on
the surface.
His writings as a youth and in early manhood give
proof of an elevation and independence of thought
not often met in those of his age. It is rare for young
men to discourse of such high themes as occupied the
mind of Thoreau, when an undergraduate and as yet
hardly out of his boyhood. These, too, were often the
secret communings of the young man with himself
alone, and not in any sense an assumed posing before
others. They illustrate his character by laying before
us his inmost thoughts.
In 1847, m answer to a circular which was issued
at the time for the purpose of collecting fads in the
lives of the class during the first decade of our experience in the world, he writes as follows: "Am not
married. I don't know whether mine is a profession,
or a trade, or what not. It is not yet learned, and in

HENRY DAVID THOREAU.

169

every instance has been practised before being studied.
The mercantile part of it was begun here by myself
alone. It is not one but legion. I will give you
some of the monster's heads. I am a Schoolmaster,
a private Tutor, a Surveyor, a Gardener, a Farmer, a
Painter,— (I mean a House Painter), — a Carpenter,
a Mason, a Day-laborer, a Pencil-maker, a Glass-papermaker, a Writer and sometimes a Poetaster. If you
will a d the part of lolas, and apply a hot iron to any
of these heads, I shall be greatly obliged to you. My
present employment is to answer such orders as may
be expeded from so general an advertisement as the
above. That is, if I see fit, which is not always the
case, for I have found out a way to live without what
is commonly called employment, or industry attractive
or otherwise. Indeed, my steadiest employment, if
such it can be called, is to keep myself at the top
of my condition, and ready for whatever may turn
up in heaven or on earth. The last two or three
years I have lived in Concord woods, alone, something more than a mile from any neighbor, in a
house built entirely by myself. P. S. I beg that
the class will not consider me an object of charity,
and if any of them are in want of any pecuniary
assistance and will make known their case to me, I
will engage to give them some advice of more worth
than money.''
Two years after this, in 1849, n ^ s "Week on the
Concord and Merrimack Rivers" appeared, and his
" W a l d e n " was published in 1854.

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He wrote for the " Dial/' and during the last weeks
of his life he corrected the proof-sheets of several articles for the "Atlantic Monthly" Magazine; and these
("Walking," "Autumnal Tints," and "Wild Apples")
were published in the numbers for June, October, and
November, 1862. Among his posthumous works are
"Excursions in Field and Forest" (with a biographical sketch by R. W. Emerson), 1863. " T h e Maine
Wroods, "1864. "Cape Cod," 1865. "Letters to Various
Persons," with Editor's Notice (by R. W. Emerson),
1865. " A Yankee in Canada;" with Anti-Slavery and
Reform Papers, 1862. " H i s spiritual life," says Mr.
Weiss, "was not deficient in soundness, because it
stood unrelated to conventional names and observances. Let it be known by the fruits of integrity,
high-mindedness, and purity, which cluster on the
pages of these volumes ; by the cold and stern, yet
salutary ideals of behavior in all the human relations ;
by his sense of dependence upon the invisible life, and
absolute surrender to its dictates." He died at Concord, of consumption, May 6, 1862. The published
estimates of Thoreau's life and works are, of course,
various. We have, among others, that of his classmate, Mr. Weiss, in the "Christian Examiner" for July,
1865 ; that of his friend, Mr. R. W. Emerson ; that of
his biographer and townsman, Mr. F. B. Sanborn ; that
of his editor, Mr. Harrison Gray Otis Blake; besides
that of two English Writers, Mr. H. A. Page, in his
"Thoreau, His Life and Aims;" and, more recently,
Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson's " Study of His Life and

HENRY DAVID

THOREAU.

171

Character,"—the last the most incisive in its criticism.
They all from their different standpoints throw light
upon his career. Those who would form a wellbalanced judgment of Mr. Thoreau, would do well
to read all of these.1
1
[ H e n r y Williams, in " M e m o r i a l s of the Class of 1837 of
H a r v a r d University."
B o s t o n : Geo. H . Ellis. 1887.]