The life of Henry David Thoreau, including many essays hitherto unpublished, and some account of his family and friends

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The life of Henry David Thoreau.includin

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THE LIFE OF
HENRY DAVID THOREAU

(Jienri\ Q)avid Ypnoreau

V^/A/ V'

THE LIFE OF
HENRY DAVID THOREAU

INOLTJDING MANY ESSAYS HITHERTO

UNPUBLISHED

ASD SOME ACCOUNT OP HIS

FAMILY AND FEIENDS

BY

F. B. SANBORN

With Illustrations

BOSTON AND NEW YORK

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

1917

COPIRIGHT, 1917, BY LOUISA SAKBORW
ALL RIGHTS RBSBRVED

Pktlished May tqij

PREFACE

A FINAL Life of Thoreau from my hand has this
peculiar claim on the reader's attention, that it
includes memoirs of his ancestors not before given
to the public; and also, in their complete form,
many essays written in his early youth, — all that
the care of his kindred had preserved, — besides
what escaped from their research, verses, letters,
and memoranda. Other letters and fragments
may come to light; but so careful has been the
search (and the price paid for his manuscripts so
high, though he was much neglected in his life-
time), that few can be now in existence, outside of
well-known collections. Their stores have mostly
passed through my hands for editing or for ex-
amination.

Important single finds, exclusive of fragmentary
or perfect Journals, now printed, were an essay of
1840, The Service, from the portfolio of Emerson,
(here mainly included); a lecture of 1843 on Sir
Walter Raleigh, meant for the Dial; and the Notes
of his Western journey of 1861, of which no copy
was made until I edited it for the Boston Biblio-
phile Society in 1905. The Raleigh had before been

[V]

PREFACE

printed by this Society; both were from the manu-
scripts of Mr. Bixby, bought of Mr. Russell, to
whom they came by bequest from Mr. Blake, to
whom Miss Thoreau gave them. From the Walden
manuscripts in Mr. Bixby's hands I made many
additions to the original printed book, published
in 1854, when I edited the two volumes of Walden
for the Bibliophile Society in 1909, with elucidat-
ing notes and some rearrangement of the text.

Such insertions and notes, with passages and
prefaces iij other volumes, privately printed, or
now out of print, have been freely used by me
here; being mostly the fruit of my long research in
the writings of EUery Channing and Thoreau, and
of my ten years' intimacy with him and his family.
My acquaintance with his sister Sophia lasted for
ten years more; but I never saw her after 1875,
though I occupied her house until it was sold to
Louisa Alcott in 1877. Her aunt, Maria Thoreau,
last of the name in America, died at Bangor in
1881, Her known ancestors were wholly English
and Scotch; but on Henry's mother's side was a
New England ancestry, — Joneses of Weston and
Dunbars of Bridgewater, — whose collegiate and
political history was so peculiar and so little known,
even to the Thoreaus, that I here tell it at some
length in my first chapter, and in an Appendix.

[vi]

PREFACE

as we can learn by an inspection of his manu-
scripts, as well as his publications, never came in
contact with the travels and researches of that
earlier Poet-Naturalist of the Eighteenth Century,
commonly known as Hector St. John, but entitled
from his birth to the baptismal name of Michel-
Guillaume St. Jean de Crevecceur, which he used
in his later Ufe, when he appeared on the stage
of European and international affairs. Like the
Thoreau family, these St. Johns were subjects of
the ancient Duchy of Norn^andy, which became
for some centuries connected with the Crown of
England, — the Thoreaus in the Channel Islands,
the St. Johns on the coast of Lower Normandy.
Like the Thoreaus, too, the St. Johns took to wan-
dering, — at least in the branch that settled in
England, — and sent offshoots to Massachusetts
and Connecticut, of whom in England were
Cromwell's Solicitor-General, Oliver St. John, and
Pope's brilliant friend Henry St. John, the poli-
tician Bolingbroke, and in New England the
Bulkeleys and Emersons of Concord and Connecti-
cut. Thoreau's friend and early patron, Waldo
Emerson, seems to have been a fifth cousin of the
uneasy and immoral politician of Queen Anne's
time, Henry St. John, to whom Po^pe dedicated his
Essay on Man. The St. John family remaining

[ viii ]

PREFACE

in Normandy, to which Hector St. John belonged,
was probably distantly related to that branch of
it which had crossed over into England, and from
England had migrated to America. And it was
singular that the same love and close observation
of external nature, the same admiration for the
American Indians, with far greater faciUties for
studying and living their mode of life, and a simi-
lar turn of expression in literatm^e, should have
existed in the American Colonies, and inscribed
itself in half a dozen French volumes, before the
American Thoreaus, in 1801, had settled them-
selves in Condord, which they were to aid in mak-
ing famous.

For it now appears that a considerable part of
the present fame of Concord in literature grows
out of the life and writings of Henry Thoreau,
whose writings had little circulation before his
death in 1862. Almost every page of his manu-
script, of which he left enough to fill at least
twenty-five volumes, has now been searched out
and printed, — some of it over and over, — and
something of it has been translated into the lan-
guages of Europe. Selections from these volumes
now make part of the courses of instruction in the
secondary schools and colleges of the United
States; and his haunts in and near Concord have

PREFACE

been carefully traced out and pictured in sketches
and photographs, to the number of several hun-
dred. The same is true of his wanderings by the
Atlantic seashore, and in the mountains and for-
ests, and along the rivers of New England. As
many pilgrims come, from all directions, to follow
his well-described paths and visit his grave, as
now frequent the haunts of any of the Concord
authors, except of Louisa Alcott, who still con-
tinues to be more widely read than any one of her
famous contemporaries in the town where they are
buried.

This constant growth for more than half a cen-
tury, since his death in May, 1862, has finally
called forth from my portfolios his earlier writings
(chiefly college essays), where they have lain since
I made some use of them in my first biography of
Thoreau, pubhshed in 1882, just before the death
of Emerson, who had already edited a volume of
his friend's Letters and Poems in 1865, and had
strongly urged the publication of his Journals in
full, which has been done.

It might be a question whether these Journals
should not have been edited, at least so far as to
bring together those entries which manifestly
concern the same or similar subjects; for that was
his own manner of editing, when he drew from the

[ X 1

PREFACE

same Journals the material of his two volumes, —
the Week and Walden, — and his numerous de-
tached magazine articles and essays, which were
collected into volumes after his death. Why these
entries were not better classified in the completed
Journals is rather puzzling; for it was sometimes
months before the final transfer was made from
the notebook to the bound Journal volume.
Thoreau was a person of mercantile method, and
had little of the erratic moods of his friend Chan-
ning, or of the temporary incapacities of Emerson
to give expression to his higher thought. All three
had certain peculiarities, which Emerson frankly
styled "whim," and this was true also of Alcott,
whose power of original thought was by no means
equally mated with a power of written expres-
sion. In Alcott's case, the defect was heightened
by the fact that in conversation he was often
most felicitous in the choice and collocation of
words.

Except in periods of extreme physical weakness,
as in his last illness, Thoreau seemed always ready
to express himself, up to the limit of his most sub-
tile and delicate thought; though he was as scrupu-
lous as Emerson (and as Channing was unscrupu-
lous) about the form in which his thought should
be presented to the world in print. No author

[xi]

PREFACE

whose manuscripts have ever come before me, in a
long career of editing and commenting, was so
constant and insistent in revising what he had
written; so that some of his manuscripts are from
correction practically illegible. But in spite of a
certain hesitation of manner, — which was long
regarded as an affectation or an imitation, con-
scious or unconscious, of Emerson's manner, —
Thoreau, like Emerson, was ever ready in conver-
sation. Channing pictured him as "with promi-
nent lips, pursed up with meaning and thought
when silent, and giving out when open a stream
of the most varied and unusual and instructive
sayings." I can testify to this from half a dozen
years of daily and intimate conversation, on a
thousand topics. The early papers here collected
and printed in full are noteworthy from the same
felicity in expression, the same vigor and inde-
pendence of thought, and a similar quaintness of
humor, so perceptible in his finished and pub-
lished writings, long since given to the world. The
love of paradox, very noticeable in The Service,
and much of his early published writing, and very
irritating to some of his critics, is perceptible in a
few of the college essays, where he was sometimes
defending opinions that his topic required him to
hold, but which were not really his own. The

[xii]

PREFACE

paradox, however, was actually an intermediate
phase of his style, growing out of the general exal-
tation of the early New England Transcendental-
ists, and showed itself in Emerson in the form of
hyperbole, which adhered to him from first to last,
and has given rise to some unfounded views of
Thoreau's character as portrayed by Emerson.

As with all original authors, Thoreau is best
read, not in the comments and guesses of others, —
especially of the professorial or pedantic class, in
its younger specimens, — but in his own pages.
Something, not easily to be defined, passes from
himself to his readers, which differentiates Tho-
reau from the mass of naturalists, and even from
poet-naturalists of another training, such as
Hector St. John. The flavor of the genuine, un-
mistakable Thoreau is found in his writings, —
serious, yet suffused with humor; mystical, yet
not religious in your fashion or mine; full of the
most sensitive and loyal spirit of friendship, yet
also a little cold and pugnacious, and only intelli-
gible from his own point of view. Yet in his effect
on the reader he warrants that eulogy and that
discrimination which led Montaigne to say of his
friend, too early lost, Etienne de la Boetie, that he
valued what he said and did because it was
Etienne and not another friend who said it or

[ xiii ]

PREFACE

who did it. There are many writers on Nature,
but there is only one Thoreau; many Stoics,
ancient and modern, but only this one affection-
ate Stoic since Marcus Aurelius.

F. B. Sanborn.

CoNCOKD, January 3, 1917.

Mr. Sanborn died February 24, 1917, before the
publication of this book; but he had read all the
proof and had planned in part the list of illustra-
tions. In a letter to the Publishers dated January
15, 1917, he had expressed the intention of making
somewhere in the book a brief statement of his
method of dealing with quoted matter. This state-
ment had apparently been left for insertion in the
revised proof of the Preface, which, unf ortimately,
was dispatched to him only on the very day of his
death. It remains for the Publishers, therefore,
to carry out the author's intention.

Mr. Sanborn was not a slavish quoter, and in
dealing with Thoreau's Journals and those other of
his writings which Thoreau himself had not pre-
pared for publication, he used the privilege of an
editor who is thoroughly familiar with his author's
subjects and habits of thought to rearrange para-

sdvj

PREFACE

graphs, to omit here, to make slight interpolations
there, and otherwise to treat the rough and un-
polished sentences of the Journals, letters, etc.,
much as it may be supposed the author himself
would have treated them had he prepared them
for the press. If, therefore, the reader finds occa-
sional discrepancies between the extracts from
Thoreau's Journals as here given and the forms
in which the same passages appear in the scrupu-
lously exact transcript contained in the pubUshed
Journalyhe is not to set them down to carelessness,
but is rather to thank Mr. Sanborn for making
these passages more orderly and more readable.

CONTENTS

I. Ancestkt and Social Conditions 1

n. The Boyhood and Youth of Thobeatt ... 29

in. CoUjEGE Essays of a Youth of Genius ... 54

IV. College Essays (concluded) . . ' . . . . 122

V. Pencil-making Schoolmasters and their School 190

VI. The Week on the Rivers 219

Vn. Thoreau in Literature 242

Vni. Symbolism and Paradox 267

IX. Thoreau as Friend, Neighbor, and Citizen . . 283

X. Thoreau as Man of Letters and of Affairs . 314

XI. Thoreau as Author in Prose and Verse . . 336

Xn. The Jouhneyings of Thoreau 366

Xin. Village Sketches, chiefly from the Journals . 416

XIV. Slavery and John Brown 466

XV. Death and Literary Rebirth of I^heau .. . 485
Appendix 503

A. LiBiBABY of Henry D. Thoreau .... 505

B. A List of Authors read or to be read by

H.D. Thoreau 520

C. Asa Dunbar: Parson, Freemason, and At-

torney 522

D. The Boston Home of the Thoreaus in

Prince Street 526

E. The Jones Family and their Property . 628

F. Letter of Z. R. Beockway 532

Index 535

ILLUSTRATIONS

Henbt David Thoheau . . . Photogravure Frontispiece
From the crayon made in 1854 by Samuel W. Rowse, now in
the Concord Public Library.

Mart (Jones) Dunbar, Grandmothbh of Thoreau . . 6
From a silhouette, made probably after she became Mrs.
Jonas Minot, in the collection of the Concord Antiquarian Society.

Thoheau's Birthplace on the Virginia Road ... 32
From a drawing by Mary Wheeler, 1897.

John Thoreau, Father of Hbnrt D. Thoreau . . 36
From a photograph taken by Alfred W. Hosmer of a daguerre-
otype then in the possession of Miss Elizabeth Lowell, of Bangor,
Maine.

Louisa Dunbar, Aunt of Thoheau 46

From a photograph by Alfred W. Hosmer, probably taken from
another photograph.

Concord Jail in 1777 82

From the drawing by John Wilson in the Concord Public Li-
brary. The drawing, which bears the written legend, "Concord
Jail — near Boston — America," was made by Wilson, Clerk to
Sir Archibald Campbell, when he and General Campbell were
confined there on their capture off Boston by a French priva-
teer. This is the jail in which Thoreau's great uncles Josiah and
Simeon Jones were confined as Tories.

Lucy C. (Jackson) Brown 128

From a photograph by Allen, Boston, owned by Miss Maria
Jane Weir, of Concord.

Helen Thoreau 192

From a photograph taken by Alfred W. Hosmer of a daguerreo-
type then in the possession of Miss Elizabeth Lowell.

Prudence Bird Ward (Mrs. Joseph Ward) at Twenty-One 198
From a photograph taken by Alfred W. Hosmer of a miniature
then in the possession of Miss Annie J. Ward, of Spencer, Mass.

xix

ILLUSTRATIONS

Miss PKtrDENCE Ward 202

From a photograph taken by Alfred W. Hosmer of a photograph
then in the possession of Miss Annie J. Ward.

Thomas Chouhondeley 302

From a photograph in the Hosmer collection, now owned by
Mr. Herbert W. Hosmer, of Concord.

The Thobeaus' House on Main Street .... 326
From a photograph by Alfred W. Hosmer.

Sophia Thokeau 338

From a photograph by Alfred W. Hosmer, probably taken
from another photograph.

William Ellert Changing, the Younger . . . . 358
From the photogravm'e in Channing's Poems of Sixty-Five
Years, edited by Mr. Sanborn and published by Mr. James H.
Bentley, Philadelphia.

Daniel Ricketson in 1862 386

From a photograph by Bierstadt Brothers, New Bedford, in the
possession of Mr. Walton Ricketson.

Jane Thoreau 444

From a photograph by J. J. Hawes, Boston, in the possession
of Mr. George T. Thatcher, of Bangor.

Maria Thoheau 474

From a photograph by J. J. Hawes in the possession of Mr.
George T. Thatcher.

The photographs of John Thoreau, Helen Thoreau, and
Louisa Dunbar were kindly furnished by Mr. Edwin B. Hill, of
Mesa, Arizona. Those of Mrs. and Miss Ward, as well as that
of Thomas Cholmonddey, are reproduced through the courtesy
of Mr. Herbert W. Hosmer, of Concord.

THE LIFE OF
HENRY DAVID THOREAU

THE LIFE OF
HENRY DAVID THOREAU

CHAPTER I

ANCESTEY AND SOCIAL CONDITIONS

In January, 1874, meeting my neighbor and
friend Emerson at the Social Circle of Concord
(a club of twenty-five townsmen, in all occupa-
tions), of which he had been a member for more
than thirty years, and I, then and afterwards for
more than thirty, — neither Alcott, Hawthorne,
Thoreau, nor EUery Channing were ever mem-
bers, — our talk fell upon Henry Thoreau. He
had been dead for nearly twelve years, but his
"Life" had recently been published by his inti-
mate comrade, Channing. Emerson spoke of him
as "a person not accounted for by anything in his
antecedents, his birth, his education, or his way of
life." Something like this was said by Clarendon,
of Sir Henry Vane; and that remark, in Thoreau's
case, has long put me upon inquiry as to the
sources of his genius and character, which led
him, as Emerson said, "to say and write such sur-

[1 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

prising things." We must believe that most of our
traits come to us, modified and combined, from
the long procession of our ancestors; until such
time as our own free will has changed and re-
modelled our mental structure, under inspiration
from divine sources, — in which both Thoreau
and Emerson had implicit faith. I therefore seek
in this chapter to trace farther than has yet been
done the ancestral origins of this extraordinary-
denizen of the village and the woodlands of his
native township, — in which, however, his family
had been resident less than a quarter-century
when Henry "was born there, July 12, 1817.

Strange mistakes have been made on this sub-
ject, — one historian of American literature hav-
ing told his readers that Thoreau was born "of
farmer folk, a Connecticut family, recently emi-
grated from France." But no ancestor of his ever
lived in Connecticut; while the latest of them to
emigrate from France (if any did) must have
lived there before the Tudors reigned in England.
The Thoreaus of Jersey, when we first hear of
them (about 1725), were merchants in St. Helier,
the capital of Jersey, a Channel Island between
France and England, formerly attached to the
Duchy of Normandy. Its community is of great
antiquity, where, until lately, English was a for-

{ 2 ]

ANCESTRY

eign tongue. When the Angevin kings of England
gave up Normandy, Jersey went with England,
only now and then yielding to French control.
Its language continued to be Norman-French,
which still is the official dialect of its courts, as
it long was in England.

No Thoreaus by that name remain now in Jer-
sey, the last, Philippe Thoreau, having emigrated
to New Zealand in 1876, where the family name is
probably kept up. It was brought to Boston in
1773, by John Thoreau, a seaman, one of the three
sons of Maltre Philippe Thoreau, who in or about
1720 was born at St, Helier, the son of a wine-
merchant, and carried on the family business. His
wife, Marie Le Galais, born in 1723, and married
in 1749, outlived her husband and two of her
three sons, dying at St. Helier, June 26, 1801, a
few months after her son John Thoreau had died in
Concord. She had six daughters, several of whom
married in England, by the names of Pinkney,
Le Cappelain, etc. Her son Peter Thoreau died
about 1810, leaving two children, Elizabeth and
Peter. This young Peter (bom in 1790, died in
1867) left a son who in 1896 was employed in the
Oxford University Press, and a daughter who
married in Jersey a Mr. Du Pare, and may be still
living there. Her uncle Philippe, dying in 1800,

[3]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

left two sons and a daughter, both married in 1801
and with children, "living in a good way," but in
Grouville, not far from St. Helier. Of Peter's
nephews in England, one, John, was in 1806 a
lieutenant in the British army, and had been in
a campaign on the Continent; "he is very fond of
a soldier's life."

It will thus be seen that the Jersey ancestors
were respectable middle-class people, well edu-
cated, and rising in the social scale. John, who
migrated, was a seaman, — also a respectable em-
ployment in Jersey, — and came to Boston in the
hope of making his fortune. At first he found
Boston in difficulties. The Stamp Act had been
passed and repealed, but other taxes were levied
by Parliament, and Boston had nullified the tea-
tax by throwing a cargo of the herb overboard in
Boston Harbor. In consequence, the Boston Port
Bill was passed, and the trade of the town embar-
goed. John Thoreau, then working in a sail loft or
some other outfitting shop, was thrown out of
work, and took to the sea (it is thought, as a pri-
vateersman). During the Revolution he pros-
pered in privateering and commerce, and in 1781
married Jane Burns, the daughter of a Scotch
emigrant from StirUng, who had married in Bos-
ton Sarah, the daughter of a Quaker, David

[41

ANCESTRY

Orrok, and of a Hannah Tillet, who may have
been of Huguenot descent, like the Bowdoins.
John and Jane Thoreau had a good house in
Prince Street, and the partners, Thoreau and
Hayse, a shop on Long Wharf, where my mother's
uncle, Levi Melcher, was one of their clerks. John
Thoreau had been one of nine children; by his
marriage with Miss Burns he had eight sons and
daughters, all of whom survived him. Only two of
the eight married, however, — John, the father of
Henry, and Elizabeth, who married a Mr. Billings,
and removed to Maine. John Thoreau had four
children, none of whom married; and John's
brother David, named for the Quaker grandfather,
died just after coming of age.

On the maternal side Henry Thoreau had an-
cestors more prolific and even more adventur-
ous than the seafaring and migrating Thoreaus.
Cynthia Dunbar, the youngest child of Asa Dun-
bar and Mary Jones, was born in 1787, a few
months after her father's death, at Keene, New
Hampshire, where the family had lived less than
ten years. Her mother was one of the fifteen chil-
dren of Colonel Elisha Jones, of Weston, near
Concord, and the only daughter among them.
Twelve of the sons lived to grow up, and eight of
them were banished from the United States and

[5 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

had their considerable property confiscated, for
joining the mother country in her effort to con-
quer the revolted Colonies. Colonel Jones himself
escaped banishment only by death, but his estate
in Weston was also confiscated, after some delay.
He had taken refuge with the British garrison in
Boston in 1775, and died and was buried there in
January, 1776. His daughter Mary had married,
in 1772, Rev. Asa Dunbar, a graduate in 1767 of
Harvard College, and was "settled" as pastor of a
Congregational church in Salem at the time of
marriage. On the removal of her father t6 Boston
in 1775, Mrs. Dunbar returned to Colonel Jones's
fine house in Weston, to care for her mother, and to
keep house for her brothers, and there her husband
seems to have resided while preaching in Salem.

Asa Dunbar had thrilling experiences before
marriage. In 1766, while a Junior at college, he
had headed a rebellion there which for a time
threatened to paralyze President Holyoke's insti-
tution, over which he ruled with so much dignity.
No very full account of this affair has been printed
of late years; but some ten years ago some manu-
scripts of the Weeks family, of Greenland, New
Hampshire, came into the hands of Mr. Good-
speed, who allowed me to copy them before they
were sold to Harvard University. They detailed

[6]

MARY (JONES) DUNBAR

ANCESTRY

in a humorous vein, but with attention to the
main facts, the origin, progress, and adjustment
of this serious affair. It had two causes, unsatis-
factory food at the college commons, and misuse
of special privileges by students.

The troubles began early in the autumn of 1766,
when Dunbar's class of between forty and fifty
had just entered on its Senior year. A new sever-
ity in the offence of absence from morning prayers
had been decreed by the Faculty. The time-
honored excuse, "detentus a nuncio paterno" ("a
message from my father"), being no longer re-
ceived, punishment followed. Dunbar, Senior
Sophister, took the lead in demanding better fare,
going to the college steward. Belcher Hancock,
and renewing a former request for better food, —
especially stigmatizing the daily butter. He was
refused and threatened with expulsion by Han-
cock, who was one of the few tutors. The students
of the four classes (numbering in all but one hun-
dred and sixty) then held a general meeting (Sep-
tember 23, 1766) and voted that they would
"resent it in a proper manner" should Dunbar be
sent away. In the "nuncio paterno" grievance,
they further voted that they would leave Holden
Chapel in a body, before the "weekly bill" was
read, unless their wrongs were redressed. This

[7]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

they did, with much noise, and there was even
talk of withdrawing wholly from college. The
trouble lasted a week or two; but Dr. Holyoke
was more reasonable than young George III, and
yielded to a modus vivendi. Dunbar's action was
wholly to his credit. He wrote the manifesto put
forth by the whole student body, justifying their
action, and was one of the four Seniors to sign it,
the others being Thomas Bernard, son of the
royal Governor of Massachusetts and afterwards
Sir Thomas, Isaac Smith, and Zephaniah Briggs.
It was also signed by David Green (1768), Ste-
phen Peabody, who married a sister of John
Adams (1769), and George Cabot, Freshman.
Cabot never graduated, but had an honorary
degree in 1779. He was afterward the eminent
Federalist politician of Boston, Senator under
Washington, friend of Hamilton, and president of
the Hartford Convention. Possibly the presence
of Governor Bernard's son in the oflFending class of
1767 may have had much to do with the forgive-
ness of the oflFenders, as President Quincy hints
in his brief notice of this greatest of the Harvard
rebellions. It gave Dunbar a high standing among
the alumni, and doubtless favored his early ordina-
tion at Salem, and his marriage with the daughter
of Colonel Jones in 1772.

[8]

ANCESTRY

The Colonel owned two slaves and mucla land
in Massachusetts and Maine; had for ten years
represented Weston in the Provincial Assembly,
and in January, 1774, had prevented his town
from adopting the plan for Committees of Cor-
respondence and a Continental Congress, — sure
preliminaries of the Revolution. In May he was
chosen, as usual, to the Assembly, then called to
meet in Boston. This was his last glimmer of poj)-
ularity; in September, 1774, his patriotic rival,
Bradyll Smith, represented Weston in the As-
sembly at Salem, where Parson Dunbar was
preaching; and Colonel Jones soon took shelter
in Boston, where General Gage made him For-
age Commissioner, as will be noticed presently.

Intermarriage with so loyal a family naturally
brought Dunbar under suspicion by the Adamses
and other patriotic leaders; and he was obliged
once or twice to declare his respect for the Ameri-
can cause, in public. When hostilities began at
Lexington, his brothers-in-law took sides with the
King's troops, and one of them showed Earl
Percy how to find the short way to Lexington, to
reinforce the regulars fleeing from their ill-advised
excursion to Concord. Another brother, Dr. Jo-
siah Jones, came home to Weston from New
Hampshire, where he was practising medicine at

[9]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

Hinsdale, and reported himself for the King's
service in Boston. His father at once made him
supercargo of a captured sloop from the Maine
coast (the Polly) returning from Plymouth to
Arundel, but carried as a prize into Boston. "Be-
ing soUcited by Admiral Graves's secretary," said
the ingenuous skipper Smith, "to enter His Ma-
jesty's service, and knowing no other way wherein
I could possibly make my escape, I entered into
said service, to go to Windsor in Nova Scotia for
hay and other things." In an evil hour for Dr.
Jones and his friend Dr. Hicks, from the region
of Plymouth, they went on board the Polly to
purchase her intended freight in the loyal Colony
of Nova Scotia. "I desired the captain of our
convoy," says the shrewd skipper, "leave to sail;
but he told me I was not to sail till to-morrow at
10 o'clock, as there was a number of other vessels
in the same employ, and should all sail together.
I then desired leave of Mr. Jones to haul off into
the Road, and obtained leave. It being dark, as I
had got consent of our Factor to sail, I embraced
the opportunity, and immediately sailed for
Arundel,^ where I arrived in about twenty-four
hours, and delivered up Mr. Jones and one Jona-
than Hicks."

' Now Kennebunkpott.
[10]

ANCESTRY

By this time it was June 2, Skipper Smith had
forfeited one hundred and eighty dollars, but had
saved his Polly, and captured two Tories, whom
he at once turned over to the Committee of
Safety. This Committee, the next day, June 3,
reported the case to Sam Adams's Provincial
Congress, in session at Watertown, near Weston,
adding: —

A number of the King's Arms, with cartridges, were
put on board and two young men, one named Josiab
Jones, and the other Jona. Hicks, were put on board
at Boston, — one or both as supercargo, with a packet
of letters, orders and other papers.

By June 10, the youths with their papers were
before a Committee of the Watertown Congress,
which at once voted : —

That Josiah Jones, taken from the sloop Polly, be
sent with a suflBcient guard to the Town of Concord,
and committed to the common Gaol, there to remain
imtil the further order of Congress or House of Repre-
sentatives of this Colony.

Further orders were not found necessary. Mary
Dunbar had taken the case into her consideration
— driving over the seven miles between her
father's house and the wooden prison at Concord,
she carried to her brother and his companion

[11]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

palatable food, in which files were concealed, with
which the young rogues cut away the prison bars,
and escaped by night to Colonel Jones's cider-
mill, where Black Cicero reported them early the
next morning. Capturing a neighbor's horse in
one of the great pastures of Weston, Mrs. Dun-
bar had him harnessed into one of the Jones
chaises, in which the captives made their way to
Falmouth (now Portland) and there, being sup-
plied with money at Weston, they made their
way to the home of Nathan Jones, a son of the
Colonel, in Gouldsborough, and from there to
the loyal colonies.

This took place some time after the battle of
Bunker Hill, — for on that day Mrs. Dunbar, as
she said afterward, carried a basket of cherries
(with more files, no doubt) to her brother in
bonds; and her husband, seeking to drive across
from Weston to Salem to preach there, found the
intervening country so disturbed by the move-
ment of troops that he was fain to return to
Weston. Nathan Jones in Maine was so strongly
suspected of Toryism that he had much diflBculty
in keeping out of prison, but remained nomi-
nally American, and died a citizen of the United
States. Stephen Jones, who joined the British
army on the day of the Concord Fight, was the

[12]

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one who guided Lord Percy. Simeon, who had
been the clerk of his brother Daniel's court at
Hinsdale, was imprisoned in Concord jail for
aiding his brother Josiah to escape, but himself
escaped in 1777, while Sir Archibald Campbell was
himself a prisoner there, before his exchange for
Colonel Ethan Allen, who had been captured in
Canada, in 1776. Stephen afterwards served in
the Royal American Dragoons under Colonel
Thompson (afterward Sir Benjamin Thompson
and Cotint Rumford), under whose command he
fought in South Carolina against Marion and his
men by the Santee River.

The Concord prison in which these brothers of
Mrs. Dunbar were confined, and from which they
escaped, was not that stone jail in which Henry
Thoreau afterwards spent a night, and with
which Bronson Alcott was threatened two years
earlier. The older jail was of wood, and a clerk of
Sir Archibald Campbell, who was long a prisoner
there, made a sketch of it, which has long hung
in the Town Library of Concord. It stood on the
main street in the midst of the village, near the
oldest cemetery, and nearly opposite the present
library. The family tradition concerning these
imprisonments was written down by Henry in
one of the Journals before 1846, since destroyed.

[13]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

It runs thus, defective and erroneous in some
points, but worth preserving here: —

My mother's grandfather. Colonel Elisha Jones, was
the owner and inhabitant of an estate in Weston, be-
fore the Revolution. He was a man of standing and
influence among his neighbors, but was a Tory. He
had fourteen sons and one daughter, — namely,
Nathan, Daniel, Ephraim, Israel, Elias, Josiah, Sim-
eon, Mary (eighth child), Stephen, Charles, Edward,
Silas, Philemon and Jonas. Simeon was confined in
Concord Jail four months and a fortnight. [Query,
nine months?] His sister brought every meal he had
from Weston; he was afraid he might be poisoned else.
On the 17th of June, 1775, she brought over ripe cher-
ries in her chaise. There was one Hicks, and one more,
imprisoned with him. They secreted knives furnished
them with their food, sawed the grates oil and escaped
to Weston. Hid in the cider-mill. Mary heard they
were in the mill; was frightened because somebody had
told her there were two or three blackbirds hid that
day somewhere. She met Cicero (?) who did not know
her; took old Baldwin's (the sheriff's who took up
Simeon Jones) horse from the lower part of Weston.
Simeon went to Portland with him, and pawned him
for two bushels of potatoes; then wrote back to Bald-
win where he'd find his horse, by paying charges.

What is here said of Simeon, who was not ar-
rested till his brother Josiah had escaped, was
true of Josiah and Dr. Hicks; and it is scarcely

[ 14]

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probable that Simeon escaped in the same way
they did. Perhaps he was aided to get away by
Sir Archibald Campbell, who had certain privi-
leges due to his rank as member of Parliament and
Colonel of a Scotch regiment, and did occasion-
ally dine at the neighboring house of Captain
Duncan Ingraham, a friend of Colonel Jones, and,
like him, a loyalist. The tradition was noted
down from the narration of Thoreau's mother,
aunts, or grandmother, and suffered the inaccu-
racies of oral tradition. It was not from dread of
poison, but because the prison-fare was meagre,
as Sir Archibald complained, that Mrs. Dunbar
carried food from her mother's ample table.^

^ The fine old mansion of Colonel Jones, where Mrs. Dunbar and
her husband resided in 1775-76, is still standing in Weston in good
condition, but removed from the estate, which was confiscated
with it after the Peace of 1783. It is now in the village, and is the
summer residence of Mr. Charles Fiske, a nephew of Mrs. Ripley,
of the Old Manse. The land was the property of General Charles
Paine, a veteran of the Civil War, who sold the house to Mr. Fiske
for removal. In a meadow of the Jones estate, some twenty years
ago, Mr. Alfred Hosmer, of Concord, found the English cuckoo-
plant, often mentioned by Shakespeare, growing wild, as it now
does in Concord. Apparently it was brought over to the Jones
garden, whence it escaped into the meadow.

In this house of the Joneses, Rev. Asa Dunbar, in September,
1775, wrote and published at Cambridge, in a patriotic weekly, an
explanation of his clerical conduct on the occasion of a solemn Fast
proclaimed by the Philadelphia Congress, and ordered by the
Massachusetts Legislature. It was addressed to the Weston Com-
mittee of Safety, who "receive it as satisfactory, and think it

[15]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

Cicero was one of Colonel Jones's black slaves,
and probably was in the secret. The cider-mill
was at some distance from the house, and in that
season not frequented. Thoreau went on with his
record: —

All but three of the sons of Colonel Jones went
abroad, — to England, Canada, New Brunswick,
Nova Scotia, and Maine. Four settled in one town,
Sissiboo, now called Weymouth, in Nova Scotia, —
Simeon, Josiah, Elisha, and Stephen, — Nathan, the
eldest son, to Gouldsborough on Frenchman's Bay in
Maine.

A fuller statement of the location of these
brothers will be found in the Appendix. Charles
had died in Virginia during the war, probably in
one of the British regiments invading there. Jonas,
the thirteenth son, being an officer in the British
army, went with his regiment to England and died
there.

The fortunes of Asa Dunbar as parson, coun-
sellor at law, patriot, and Freemason need to be

ought to release him from any unfavorable suspicions that have
arisen to his disadvantage." This paper and his Masonic oration at
Lancaster will be quoted later. He never returned to his pulpit,
but studied law with a friend, Joshua Atherton, who settled in
New Hampshire, and Dunbar himself practised law in Keene, New
Hampshire, where he died in 1787, a few months before the birth
of his daughter, afterwards Mrs. Thoreau.

The mother of Mrs. Dunbar, Mrs. Colonel Jones of Weston,
died at Mrs. Dunbar's house in Keene.

[ 16]

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exposed a little farther, since he so soon vanishes
from his family record, at the age of little more than
forty. His connection with the college rebellion
which first brought him into notice in good com-
pany, has been preserved for us, in some detail,
by Clement Weeks, a youth of eighteen, son of a
rich farmer in Greenland, New Hampshire, who
entered Harvard in 1768, and graduated in 1772.
His college notebook, partly humorous and partly
serious, has come down to President LoWell's time;
and discloses the confession of the students and
the agreement with the Faculty, in which Presi-
dent Holyoke showed unexpected leniency to the
active offenders. In 1772, after studying divinity
for several years, Dunbar became the colleague
of Rev. Thomas Barnard at Salem and the hus-
band of Mary Jones; living with her, an only
daughter, at the mansion of Colonel Jones. As
the inmate of a Tory household he had a diflScult
part to play. Most of his Salem parishioners were
patriots; his wife was keeping house for her father
and his English guests at Weston, twenty-five
miles off. John Hancock, a proscribed patriot,
was presiding over a Continental Congress in
Philadelphia, and was treasurer of Harvard Col-
lege, of which Dr. Langdon, a patriotic scholar and
preacher, had become President; while Samuel

{17]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

Adams had a Provincial Congress in session at
Watertown, which had sent Dunbar's brother-
in-law Josiah to Concord jail, and his wife was
supplying him with means of escape. In the April
previous, Hancock's Congress had ordered a Co-
lonial Fast for July 20, and Adams's Congress
had insisted that it be rigidly observed in Massa-
chusetts. In some way or other, either at Salem
or in Weston, Dunbar had given offence to patri-
ots in his town, and the Weston Committee had
called him to account. He therefore sent this note
to the Committee of Weston, and published it in
the "Essex Gazette," issued from the college build-
ings in Cambridge: —

Having been acquainted by the Gentlemen, the
Committee of Correspondence in Weston, with some
uneasiness arising in the minds of the people, from
the conduct of myself and family upon Fast day, the
20th of last July; and having a desire to live in
good fellowship with every friend of American liberty,
I beg leave publicly to declare that the part I bore
in those transactions that gave offence was dictated
solely by the principles of religion and humanity, with
no design of displeasing any one: and that I am sorry
it was, in the eyes of one of my countrymen attended
with any disgusting circumstances. ... As it has been
suspected that I despised the Day, and the authority
that appointed it, I must, in justice to myself, and

[18]

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from the love of truth, affirm, that I very highly re-
spect and revere that authority; and, were it not from
the appearance of boasting, could add, that I believe
no person observed it with greater sincerity than

Asa Dunbab.
Weston, Seftemher 8, 1775.

We are left in doubt what his conduct had been,
— possibly praying that Xing George might have
that wisdom he so much needed, — or praying
for those in prison, among whom was his wife's
brother Josiah (not Simeon, who did not get there
till later). He did pray for King George and the
royal family in 1774, and afterward gave thanks
for American victories. Josiah remained in bonds
four months at least, or until October; and Simeon,
perchance, for nine. Meanwhile, the parson was
managing the farm of Colonel Jones (for a time
on his widow's "thirds," as John Thoreau man-
aged his mother-in-law's in Concord, fifty years
later) ; and was driving the Jones cattle to their
pasture in Princeton, through Lancaster, where
the Masonic lodge was. His health was not good,
and he had retired from his Salem pulpit, which
he finally gave up in 1779, when the parish voted
him seven hundred pounds, lawful money, to end
their pecuniary contract, but in paper money at
much discount. He was studying law, and was an

[19]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

active Freemason in that year; and he came
down to Lancaster from Keene in June, 1781, to
give a fervid Masonic address, which has been
twice printed, and offers a favorable view of his
heart and of his style. He fomided a sister lodge
in Keene, which met at his house, and seems to
have involved him in some debts. There he had
law students, and was a social favorite, appar-
ently, as his family were after his death. They
had Dunbar relatives in Keene, one of whom,
Mrs. Ralston, spoke of Cynthia in her youth, as
a handsome, dark-eyed girl, singing with a sweet
voice. Her gift in conversation was well known
in most of the village homes of Concord.

Mary Jones (Mrs. Dunbar) was bom in 1748,
the ninth child of the Jones fifteen; but one of her
elder brothers had died in childhood so that she
was practically the eighth, as her gran(^son said.
She lived until 1830, when Henry was in his four-
teenth year, and he remembered her well. He was
born in the house of her second husband. Captain,
Jonas Minot of Concord, of whom and her his
Journal had stories to tell. In 1795, before she
married Minot, she took her children from Keene
and went on a visit to her brothers in Maine and
the British Provinces, of which journey Henry had
this to record: —

[20]

ANCESTRY

With her three daughters, Sophia, aged fourteen,
Louisa ten, and Cynthia eight, ^- health failing, — she
went to visit her brother Nathan at Frenchman's Bay,
and her four brothers at Sissiboo afterward. They
took passage in the Fall of 1795 in a ninety-ton wood-
sloop, with a crew of three men besides the captain.
They went at random down from Boston; the hands
said they had touched every rock between Boston and
Goldsborough, — the sloop going down empty. [She
brought firewood from Maine to Boston.]

Coming up she had all her sails blown away (not sea-
worthy) ; then had fallen down into the stream to bend
on her new sails. The Dmibars were put on board
Saturday afternoon, by a boat; found her down the
stream. Sunday was fine weather, but they were all
sick; were all in their berths at midiiight, Sunday, when
they struck on Matinicus Rock. "All hands on deck!"
The water came in so fast as to wet Mrs. Dunbar be-
fore they got up on deck. She exclaimed, "Captain,
where are we? " " God Almighty alone knows, for I do
not," said he, who was pulling a rope.

Out of this danger they safely came back to
Keene, where, and in Concord, Mrs. Dunbar
survived most of her brothers. Elias married a
daughter of Sheriff Baldwin, whose wife was a
Jones, — which may account for the use of the
Baldwin horse in the escape to Maine. Josiah
had become a commissary in the British service.
Stephen, Simeon, and Jonas also fought against

[21 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

their countrymen. Jonas continued in the army,
married an heiress. Miss Mason, in England, and
died there. Simeon married a Miss WiUiams, of
Roxbury, a distant cousin; for the fighting Wil-
liamses of Berkshire were cousins of Colonel
Jones. Ephraim Williams was a first cousin —
he for whom Williamstown and Williams College
were named, and who was killed at the battle of
Lake George in 1757. Charles Jones, who was in
Harvard College when the Revolution broke out,
and who died early, was remembered by Mrs.
Dunbar in the name of her only son, Charles, the
first child who survived, though not born till 1780,
after his parents had left Salem and Weston, which
was their occasional honae until 1779, when they
went to Keene.

The result of the choice of sides in the contest, by
Colonel Jones and his sons, was their exile, and
the confiscation of their property, except that of
the four brothers, Nathan, Daniel, Isaac, and
Elias, who remained in the United States —
Daniel becoming a lawyer of some note at Hins-
dale near Keene. Simeon was named by Daniel as
the clerk of his law-court, and Josiah went to
Hinsdale to practise medicine. After his banish-
ment he changed his profession to the law, became
a judge in Nova Scotia, and died at Annapolis,

[ 22 ]

ANCESTRY

not far from Weymouth, The efTect of the Revo-
lution was to impoverish this once prosperous
family, wherever they might reside. But they
never lost their social respectability.

Frenchman's Bay, where their risky voyage to
Boston began for Mary Jones and her daughters, is
formed by the long peninsula of Gouldsborough
on one side, and by Mount Desert Island on the
other, which had been granted by his Province
of Massachusetts to Sir Francis Bernard, father
of Sir Thomas, Dunbar's classmate at Harvard.
Matinicus, where they ran aground, is an island
nearer Boston, at the entrance of Frenchman's
Bay. Not long after this hazardous voyage Mrs.
Dunbar married Jonas Minot, in whose farm-
house, twenty years later, Henry Thoreau was
born, at the lowest stage of the fortunes of his
parents. During his period of prosperity. Captain
Minot had owned much wild land in New Hamp-
shire. On one occasion he and his wife visited this
property, in the present town of Wilmot; an
excursion that Thoreau described in his Journal,
perhaps from his unclte Charles Dunbar's account,
— losing nothing by either narrator: •^-

I have been told (a tradition in our family) that
when my Grandmother with her second husband, the
Captain, first went into Kearsarge Gore in her chaise,

[23 J

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

— where, by the way, the inhabitants baked a pig in
expectation of their coming, which, as they did not
come immediately, was kept baking for three days, —
her chaise so frightened the geese in the road that they
actually rose and flew half a mile. And the sheep all
ran over the hills, with the pigs after them; and some
of the horses they met broke their tackling or threw
their riders; so that they had to put their chaise down
several times, to save life.

When they drove up to the (Baptist) meeting-house,
snap, snap went the bridles of several of the horses
that were tied there, and they scattered without a
benediction. Though it was in the middle of sermon-
time, the whole congregation rushed out, "for they
thought it was a leather judgment a-comin'." The
people about the door got hold of and got into the
vehicle, so that "they liked to have shaken it all to
pieces" with curiosity. The minister's wife got in, too,
and "tetered up and down a little"; but she thought it
was "a darn tottlish thing," and said she "would n't
ride in it for nothin' in the world." There was no
service in the afternoon.

The next day some old women took their knitting-
work and sat in the chaise. As my Grandfather had
a lawsuit with a "witch-woman" there, the people
prophesied that she would upset his chaise, till they
remembered that there was silver-plating enough
about it and the harness, to lay all the witches in the
country.

My Grandmother also instructed that people how
to make coflfee, which was pounded in a mortar; and

[24 ]

ANCESTRY

by the time she went out of town, the sound of the
mortar was heard in all that land. By this time, no
doubt, she and Ceres are equally regarded as mytho-
logical, by their posterity.

These family tales, apt to be exaggerated by
the humorous and embroidering faculty of the
Dunbars, Joneses, and Thoreaus, explain in part
the peculiarities that descended to the persons
whom I knew; in which, as Tacitus says of the
customs of Marseilles, wh6re Agricola was edu-
cated, "provincial frugality and urban courtesy
were mingled and well combined."

Like the Joneses, the Dunbars, of Bridgewater,
were a large family. Samuel, the son of James, of
Hingham, had thirteen children besides Asa; pf
the fourteen, eleven were sons and three daugh-
ters, giving the Thoreaus a great many cousins.
But in the three households with which this book
is concerned, prosperity disappeared between
1776 and 1817 (the year of Henry's birth) either
by reason of the Revolution and confiscation, or
of orphanage (by the death of John Thoreau the
Jerseyman), or by the later quarrel with England,
between 1804 and 1816. The large estate of the
Joneses was mostly confiscated, or lost, in the long
struggle of the American Revolution; while the dis-
persion of her relatives to the British provinces, to

[25]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

England, or to remote parts of New England, kept
them apart from Mrs. Minot. John Thoreau the
Jerseyman for years kept up little communication
with his Jersey family, during the war; and the
foundation of his fortune in Boston was laid by
privateering against English commerce. His cas-
ual meeting at sea with the first President Adams
is only traditional, but highly probable. In his
Journal for June 11, 1853, four years after his
sister Helen's death, Henry wrote: —

I remember Helen's telling me that John Marston,
of Taunton, told her that he was on board a vessel dur-
ing the Revolution, which met another vessel, — and,
as I think, one hailed the other, — and a French name
being given could not be understood, whereupon a
sailor, probably aboard his vessel, ran out on the
bowsprit and shouted "La Sensible," and that sailor's
name was Thoreau. My father has an idea that he
stood on the wharf and cried this to the bystand-
ers. . . .

I find from his Diary that John Adams set sail
from Port Louis at L'Orient in the French frigate
Sensible, Captain Chavagnes, June 17th, 1779, the
Bonhomme Richard, Captain Jones, and four other
vessels being in company at first, and the Sensible
arrived at Boston the 2d of August. On the 13th of
November following, he set out for France again in the
same frigate from Boston, and he says that a few days
before the 24th, being at the last date " on the Grand

[26]

ANCESTRY

Bank of Newfoundland," "we spoke an American pri-
vateer, the General Lincoln, Captain Barnes." If the
above-mentioned incident occurred at sea, it was
probably on this occasion.

The Marstons, of Taunton, were kinsmen of the
Marston- Watsons, of Plymouth, Thoreau's friends,
and of the late Commodore John Marston, of the
American navy. The incident may have dwelt in
John Marston's mind, as being the first time he
had heard the name Thoreau; indeed this emi-
grant was the first man who bore that name from
Jersey to New England, where it is now extinct.
Other Jersey and Guernsey names are common
here, — Langlais, Le Breton, Janvrin, Cabot,
Graff ort, Sohier, etc., — but this one scion of a
race, nearly perished from Jersey itself, is all that
ever took root here, and that for little more than
a century — from 1773 to 1881.^

Certain traits in which Henry seemed peculiar
might be traced back to this Channel island,
inhabited by a composite, pugnacious, sturdy,
thrifty, equalized but privileged people of the
old Duchy of Normandy. Their rocky island had
been known to Celts, Phoenicians, Carthaginians,

* The Peter Thoreau mentioned in a former note bought in
1782 a house on Cambridge Street, Boston, which he sbld in
September, 1784, to Josiah Harris for four hundred dollars,; with
land adjacent.

[27]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

Romans, Gauls, Goths, Scandinavians, Normans,
and other branches of the Indo-European and
Semitic families. They were as mixed as any
population in Europe; but for five or six centu-
ries had enjoyed special privileges arising from
their position intermediate between the warring
nations of France and England. King John of
England had given them exemption from tariffs,
and allowed them to be governed by their own
laws and usages. They had resisted conquest, and
extended trade and fishery; their customs were
ancient, their language neither good French nor
good English; and yet in it they had gained moice
education of its own sort than most of the sub-
jects of the English crown. Privateering, a kind of
legalized piracy, was a habit with them; so that
young John Thoreau readily fell into it when he
got to Boston. His marriage with a Scotch lassie,
Jane Burns, whose father had lately died in Scot-
land, introduced a fresh Scottish element among
his descendants, who, as his daughter Maria said
of herself, might have "the vivacity of the French
and the superstition of the Scotch." To all this,
genteel poverty was added in Henry Thoreau's
immediate family, for reasons that will appear in
the next chapter.

CHAPTER n

THE BOYHOOD AND YOUTH OF THOREAU

Although all the children of John Thoreau and
Cynthia Dunbar (who were married in Concord
in 1812) well remembered their grandmother
Mary Jones, of Weston, none of them ever saw
their grandfather John Thoreau, of Jersey, who
had died at Concord in 1801. His privateering hiad
given him a fund for mercantile ventures, and he
was a prosperous merchant on the Long Wharf, at
the foot of State Street, for some twenty years, be-
fore he took up his residence in Concord, buying the
house which is now a portion of the Colonial Inn,
on the public Square, opposite the Court House
there. His house in Boston was on Prince Street
at the North End, and it continued to be the prop-
erty of his children for many years after his death.
His first wife, Jane, had died in 1797, leaving him
eight children, of whom the eldest son, John, was
in 1801 but fourteen years old; and he had mar-
ried a second wife, a widow Kettell, the sister of
a Charlestown merchant, Joseph Hurd, who long
survived her husband, and had the care of his
minor children. She was also related to Dr. Hurd,

[29]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

of Concord, a respectable physician, who had
married the mother of Mary Wilder at Lancaster,
and brought her to reside with her lovely daugh-
ter, in the oldest house in the village, which had
been the parsonage of Rev. Daniel Bliss, the
great-grandfather of the Emerson brothers, and
the grandfather of Mary Moody Emerson. The
estate of the elder Thoreau had been consider-
able for those early days of the Republic, when
$100,000 (the estate of the widow Custis, when
Colonel Washington married her) was esteemed
great riches in Virginia. John Thoreau left about
$25,000, including his two houses, in Boston and in
Concord, and some $12,000 in cash or good securi-
ties. But his eight children were to be supported
and educated, and the times soon became "hard"
in consequence of the long war between England
and France, and the consequent embargoes and
spoliations aflBicting New England conamerce.

By will John Thoreau left to his second wife,
Rebecca Thoreau, the use of the Concord house
and furniture, with $3702 in money at interest;
and made her brother, Joseph Hurd, executor of
the will, who soon became guardian of the eight
children. An examination of his guardian's ac-
coiint, which I have made, shows what became of
the property of these orphans. Mr. Hurd re-

[30]

BOYHOOD AND YOUTH

ceived $200 a year for his care of the property.
His sister, the widow Thoreau, received not less
than $850 a year for the board, clothing, etc., of
the eight; of whom two, Mary and Nancy, died
before coming of age and a third, David Thoreau,
before he had any occupation. The fees of lawyers,
clerks, sheriffs, etc., consumed from $50 to $100 a
year besides. The widow Thoreau died in 1814,
and Mr. Hurd became her administrator. Her
own private estate had been encumbered in the
care of her stepchildren, and out of $2903 of her
personal property, Mr. Hurd paid himself $1488
for money lent and interest thereon. He added
$1032 for expenses of settlement and sale (of
furniture, etc., partly to himself) ; and this left but
$445 to pay the legacies of $600 which she had
left — $100 to Dr. Ripley, her minister, and $100
each to her five brothers and sisters. Her estate
was not finally settled till 1819, and then the lega-
tees had to accept but $71 each, in lieu of the round
hundred. One cause of the delay was that young
John Thoreau had borrowed of his stepmother,
on a mortgage of the paternal house in Boston,
$1500 to set himself up in business as a merchant;
had been unsuccessful, and delayed repayment.
(The mortgage was of 1808 for $1000, but not
recorded till 1811.)

[Sll

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

Mr. Kurd's account as guardian was not settled
till 1815, when there remained but six of the eight
orphans in life. Two of these had married — John,
and EKzabeth (who wedded and settled in Maine),
while John afterwards lived for short times in
Chelmsford and in Boston, but returned to Con-
cord, where all his children were born. It does
not appear that the thrifty Mr. Hurd lost any-
thing by his management of the two estates;
perhaps their diminution was imavoidable; but
the result was to leave five orphans well educated
but poor and frugal. They kept what they inher-
ited and earned, and at the death of the last sur-
vivor, Maria Thoreau, in 1881, a hundred years
after the marriage of her mother, Jane Burns, the
united estates of herself and her niece Sophi£|.,
dead five years earlier, were just about equal to
the $25,000 that John Thoreau had bequeathed.

His son John bad learned the family trade of
merchandising from Deacon John White in Con-
cord, his nearest neighbor in the village squarej
and had commenced as a merchant in Concord.
The daughter of Mrs. Captain Minot, Cynthia
Dunbar, was living with her mother on the Minot
farm, Virginia Road, where afterwards her son
Henry was bom, and she was there wooed by the
young merchant, and followed his sinking for-

[32]

w

X

H

'A
O

BOYHOOD AND YOUTH

tunes with cheerful courage. They remained in
Concord till late in 1818, when they removed to
Chelmsford, ten miles aWay, wfiere John Thoreau
sold groceries and liquor. While I lived in the Old
Manse, or in the house of Mrs. Simmons near
by, 1865-66, I was allowed by the Ripley family
to examine the papers of Dr. Ezra Ripley, which
he had carefully preserved, and which I found in
a dusty attic, near the "Prophets' Chainber"
which the youthful Emersons had occupied when
visiting their grandmother. There I discovered
amid a mass of letters and manuscripts, inscrip-
tions for tombstones, appointments for parish
meetings, etc., a pious meditation of 1818, on the
back of which Dr. Ripley had written, at the re-
quest of his former parishioner, Henry Thoreau's
father, this certificate: —

Understanding that Mr. John Thoreau, now of
Chelmsford, is going into business at that place, and
is about to apply for license to retail ardent spirits, I
hereby certify that I have been long acquainted with
him, that he has sustained a good character, and now
view him as a man of integrity, accustomed to store-
keeping, and of correct morals.

There was no singularity in a merchant of any
village at that date vending or giving away the
liquors now so mudi under legal ban. Every store-

[SS]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

keeper did it, and Deacon White had accustomed
his apprentice Thoreau to serve it to his custom-
ers in the village. Colonel Whiting, one of my
friends in Concord so long as he lived (he died
in 1862) and in whose house I took refuge when
the United States Senate ordered my arrest in
February, 1862, for refusing to appear before them
as a witness, told me that in his youth at Con-
cord, early in the nineteenth century, there were
five "stores" and three taverns in the village,
then containing one thousand inhabitants only,
in which liquors (usually New England rum) were
sold by the glass to any and everybody. It was
the habit, too, when a customer bought so much
as a half-dollar's worth of goods, to oflFer him a
glass of liquor, which was generally accepted.
John Thoreau, Jr., had become of age late in
1808, had borrowed money of his stepmother, and
had begun as a merchant at Concord in 1809. He
then took his father's last Boston daybook, for
merchandise sold in Boston (dated in 1797), cut
out the Boston entries, put in his own Concord
entries of 1809 and later, and used the rest of the
book for his Chelmsford sales, from November
15, 1818, to March 21, 1821, the date of his re-
moval to Boston, or just before.
Then the unprosperous merchant removed to
[34]

BOYHOOD AND YOUTH

Boston, through Concord, and lived for two years
in Pinckney Street. There Henry began his school
instruction, at the age of five (he was born July
12, 1817) , having been taught his letters before that
by one of his aunts, no doubt. His family returned
to Concord in 1823, soon gave up trade, in which
there had been so little success, and took to the
more profitable art of pencil-making, which ha<^^^
been introduced at Concord, in 1812, by William ^
Monroe, the father of the benefactor of the same''
name who in 1863 presented Concord with its
fine library building, and a fund for its support in
certain directions.

At his birth, Henry had been named David,
for his uncle David Thoreau (himself named for
a Boston ancestor, the Quaker seaman David
Orrok), who had come of age in 1815, seven years
after his brother John. David received only $724
from his father's $25,000 — not less than $1453
having been exf>ended on his support and educa-
tion. He died in August, 1817, a few weeks after
the birth of his nephew Henry, who was baptized
in October by Dr. Ripley, under the name of
David Henry. He remembered a few incidents
that occurred at the Minot farm, where he lived
, for a year; then for a few months in a red house
on the Lexington road, near where the Emerson

[36]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

house was afterwards bviilt. Then Henry's father,
having been in debt to his stiepmother's estate,
and unable to pay,* removed to Chelmsford, as
above mentioned. There he kept store and prac-
tised mechanic arts, in which, like his son, he
was skilful, p^inting_signs and doing such things.
When he returned to Concord in 1823, he Uved
with his sisters for some years in the house of his
father on the square; but till 1826 in the brick
house of the late Josiah Jones, at the corner of
Main Street and the Walden Road, next to the
three-story wooden house of Deacon Vose. Across
the street, but a little westward, stood the man-
sion of Dr. Isaac Hurd, who practised medicine
in Concord for fifty-four years. It had been suc-
cessively a garrison against Indians, parsonage
house of the town minister, and Ubrary of Har-
vard College in 1775-76. The students then re-
cited in the parish church, and an old lady whom
Thoreau visited in after years, gave these recol-
lections of that troubled period: —

* August 23, 1817, John Thoreau was adjudged to turn over to
J. Hurd, executor, the Prince Street property, which was then
taken by his sisteia.

[36 1

JOHX THOREAU
Father of Heiirv I'. Thoreau

BOYHOOD AND YOUTH

Miss Anna Jones's Statement {November, 1837)
(Taken down by Henry Thoreau)

I lived down in the east part of Concord in 1775,
two miles from Dr. Ripley's Meeting-house. Professor
Wigglesworth (one of the two professors of the college
while in Concord) lived in part of our house nine
months; he used to go up twice a week to hear the
scholars recite at the Meeting-house.

I had two brothers in the war, Stephen and Timothy
Jones, Stephen a Minute Man. About one o'clock at
night, April 18, Dr. Prescott came and told him the
British were coming: he ran right down the back-
stairs and fired his gun, as he had been directed. I
went down too, and heard the guns popping all
around. Stephen went off to join his company under
Captain David Brown. Mother "took on" very much
for fear he would be killed. He cafiae back with his
company about 10 a.m., went down cellar and got his
mother's best cheese, tapped a barrel of cider, and
drew two pailsfiU; so they had something to eat and
drink. Brother Timothy's captain was a Bedford man
(David Wilson, a brother-in-law of Thompson Max-
well, of Amherst, New Hampshire, who took part in j
the fight).

Rev. William Emerson used to preach to the Minute
Men in Concord and Acton twice a week; he told them
"they had better go without their firelock than with-
out their religion."

Mr. Buttrick the miller was taken by the British;
they took hold of him and said they "would send him

[37]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

to hell." But he said he had such a well-established
mind that he was n't af eared; they might do as they
pleased, he could not live long at any rate.

The village in 1823 was much what it had been
when the British arrived there at noon, April 19,
1775. The schoolhouse, town-house, and church
were not far from the "Milldam," where now the
shops are — at first a footway over the dam
which made the millpond for this nonchalant
miller; afterwards a street to shorten travel from
Boston, which was incessant by 1823. ^A daily
stage-coach ran through, from the westward as
far as Keene, to Boston, and Concord itself sup-
plied a local coach or wagon to take the towns-
people through Charlestown, or over the Cam-
bridge turnpike, to the city; while wagons, chaises,
and long lines of market-wagons went and came
by the same roads. New Hampshire and Ver-
mont sent their rural products to market by
teams that "baited" at the three taverns as they
went down to Boston with their loads, or returned
with "dry goods," "West India goods," and gro-
ceries, from that port of entry. Everything in
the village bespoke commerce and the mechanic
arts, for every kind of mechanic had his shop or
bench there. All thriving persons kept their own
cows and hogs, hens and geese; and many rode

[38]

BOYHOOD AND YOUTH

or drove their own horses and yokes of oxen. John
Thoreau pastured his cow, like the rest, and little
Henry» barefoot, was sent to "turn her out," or
drive her home at night for milking. In the sum-
mer and early autumn he went barefoot to school;
and I had my first glimpse of him climbing the hill
of science, when an old lady, a cousin of the Emer-
sons, and niece of Mary Moody Emerson, told me,
with a little start, how the girls' school of Phebe
Wheeler, on one disturbing day, saw ushered into
it, where she, a member of Dr. Ripley's household,
was studying, John and Henry Thoreau, big bare-
foot boys.^ They had been sent by their mother,
the careful Cynthia, to get a little private school-
ing, after the town primary school had closed for
the term.

No doubt both these boys pursued learning
eagerly, and both were ready pupils in what are
now called "vocational" studies — taught per-
haps, by their father, and stimulated by the ex-
ample of other boys, with their knives and bows,
traps and sleds, and by and by their shotguns.

' This schoolgirl, afterwards Mrs. Cleveland, of New York,
when leaving the Old Manse of her kinsman. Dr. Ripley, I suppose
about 1SS5, was given some good advice, of which she remembered
this: "When you must choose between a duty and a pleasure,
always follow the path of duty — something which your Aunt
Mary never does."

[39]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

Years afterwards while at Walden, Henry wrote,
with keen recollections: —

In the country a b<^'s love is apt to be divided be-
tween a gun and a watch; but the more active and
manly choose the gun. I have seen the time when I
could carry a gun in my hand all day long on a journey,
and not feel it to be heavy, though I did not use it
once. The himter has an affection for his gun which
no laborer has for the tool which he uses — his axe or
spade. To-day the villager, whose way leads him
through a piece of wood or over a plain where game is
sometimes met with, will deliberate whether he shall
not take his gun, because, as he says, "he may see
something." If the Indian and the bear are gone, the
partridge and the rabbit are left.

George Minot, Thoreau's "old man of Verona,"
was a famous shot. Meeting his nearest neighbor,
Emerson, one day, going to town-meeting, the
sage a^ked Minot if he was not going to vote, too?
"N-no," drawled the old hunter; "what you do
with your vote hez got to be done over ag'in;
what I do with my gun stays where 't is; —
I'm goin' gunnin'." In his youth, Thoreau was
interested both in gunning and voting; and there
is an old letter of 1838 to his brother John, in
the Indian lingo of Cooper or Schoolcraft, in which
the town-meeting and the pleasures of hunting

[ 40 ]

BOYHOOD AND YOUTH

are mixed up, with some allusion also to the ris-
ing lights of Transcendentalism.

In his Life of Thoreau, which, on the whole,
is still the best account of him, EUery Channing's
turn for recording queer trijfles is indulged. Its
first edition of 1873 relates that at Chelmsford,
before he was six years old, "he was tossed by a
cow," like Tom Thumb in the story; "and again,
by getting at an axe without advice, he cut ofif a
part of one of his toes. And once he fell from a
stair, after which last achievement, as after others,
he had a singular suspension of breath, with a
purple hue in his face, — owing, I think, to his
slow circulation. Perhaps a more active flow of
blood might have aflForded him an escape from
other and later troubles. I have heard many such
stories from his mother about these early years;
she enjoyed not only the usual feminine quantity
of speech, but thereto added the lavishness of
age. Being complained of for taking a knife be-
longing to another boy, Henry said, 'I did not
take it,' and was believed. In a few days the cul-
prit was found out. He then said, *I knew all the
time who it was. The day it was taken I went to
Newton with father.' 'Why did you not say so
at the time?' 'I did not take it' was the reply.
At the earlier age of three, being told that he must

[411

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

die, like the men in the catechism, he said, as he

came in from coasting, that he did not want to

die and go to Heaven, if he could not take his

sled with him; the boys said it was not worth a

cent, because it was not shod with iron." His ideal

Indian of after years had the same weakness: —

"And thinks, admitted to that equal sky.
His faithful dog shall bear him company."

When he was an infant, a few of the richer
men of the village. Squire Hoar, Colonel Whiting,
Dr. Heywood, and others, gave a fund and opened
the Concord Academy, in which their children
and others, whether boys or girls, could study
Latin, Greek, and French. To this school Henry
aspired, and there he was fitted for college at the
age of sixteen, entering the Freshman class of 1833.

Honest poverty, which was the lot of the Tho-
^reaus from 1812 to 1828, was no bar to respectabil-
ity in Concord then, and indeed was a frequent
result of mercantile ventures. Tilly Merrick, the
stepson of Captain Duncan Ingraham, who was
in 1777 the host of Sir Archibald Campbell when
a prisoner, and became the ancestor of the novelist
Marryat, had inherited a small fortune, and in-
creased it in trade at Charleston, South Caro-
lina; but lost some forty thousand dollars there,
and returned to Concord to be a poor man the

[42 1

BOYHOOD AND YOUTH

rest of his life. But he was sent to the General
Court for years, and lived and died respected.
He was the father of Mrs. Mary Merrick Brooks,
whose mother was akin to Captain Minot, the
second husband of Mrs. Dunbar, and who was
herself a constant associate of the Thoreaus.
Colonel Hurd, a son of Dr. Hurd^ and nephew of
Joseph, the guardian of the orphan Thoreaus,
lost all his property, involved his father in his
debts, and was for a while a prisoner for debt
in the Concord jail. These persons and others,
though saddened by their losses, continued to be
members of the Social Circle (a Senate of the
township), and their children were as carefully
educated as those of the wealthy. The public
taxes paid for good schools; private lessons in the
languages (at the Academy or elsewhere) and in
music and dancing cost but little; and good so-
ciety was open to all who conducted themselves
well — and to some who did not. John Thoreau
was a peaceful and rather silent man; his wife and
her sister, and his own unmarried sisters, took
their share in the village politics and disputes.
One of the first subjects of dispute and division

• Dr. Kurd's son, a stepson of Mary Wilder, had been a part-
ner of young John Thoreau, and involved him in some debts be-
fore 1813.

[43]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

in the as yet undivided religious household of the
town was the Unitarian controversy, between
Calvinists and Arminians, among the New Eng-
land Congregationalists. Under the stimulus of
political revolutions, and exposed to the mild
sunlight of Dr. Channing's philanthropic preach-
ing in Boston, with other and more learned
influences exerted by Harvard Professors (Ed-
ward Everett, Jared Sparks, Andrews Norton,
Dr. Ware, and Dr. Palfrey), the seeming-solid
ice of Calvinism had given way in Massachusetts,
and those once accepted doctrines of Total De-
pravity and Eternal Damnation had been re-
jected by thousands of Christians and scores of
parishes. After enduring this in comparative quiet
for years, — though i indulging in political ani-
mosity against Jefferton, who was Unitarian,
and Madison, who, though an Anglican, had se-
cured religious liberty for the Baptists of Vir-
ginia, — the Trinitarians rallied to the contest.
They began to set up dissenting Congregational
churches where the pewholders had given the
control of the old church edifices to the heretics.
Concord, in spite of its regard for Dr. Ripley,
its sole pastor then for nearly forty years, began
to divide, and to hold days of prayer, and Calr
vinistic meetings on Sundays.

[ 44 ]

BOYHOOD AND YOUTH

The sisters of John Thoreau, then living in
their father's house, joined this dissenting move-
ment, in 1826-30, and became paying supporters
of an orthodox parson Southmayd, first, and then
of Rev. John Wilder, the grandfather of Mrs.
Mabel Loomis Todd, of Amherst. These mis-
sionaries preached to the seceding congregation,
and even drew away from Dr. Ripley's church
his old and familiar deacon. White, the tithing-
man, village merchant, and instructor of John
Thoreau in merchandising, which the latter had
so unprofitably pursued. We may well fancy the
bitter quarrel that soon arose, which, happily, did
not permanently divide the fraternal and af-
fectionate Thoreaus. John and Cynthia remained
in the congregation of Dr. Ripley, until the period
of the anti-slavery "come-outers," but Henry
had "signed off " from the First Parish soon after
leaving college in 1837. He then held opinions
which his good aunts on either side (Thoreaus or
Dunbars) scarcely ventured to examine for fear
of being shocked; but they must have looked on
him as a brand mysteriously saved from the burn-
ing. What induced these good women to retain
their hold on opinions fast growing obsolete, and
now hardly professed in the same New England
circles, I cannot say. But with regard to Henry's

[451

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

Aunt Louisa, I have heard the tale from her own
mouth. In her youth, being left, by the early death
of her father, to depend on herself, she soon took
to teaching school, as the custom was; and chance
brought her into that region, in New Hampshire,
where a brilliant youth, a little older than her^
self, Daniel Webster (soon to be heard among the
orators and statesmen of the nation), was pre-
paring himself for his high career. In 1805-06, be-
ing in the same township (Boscawen) with Miss
Dunbar, a lively and pleasing young lady of
twenty, bred in Keene, he would sometimes invite
her of an afternoon to drive out in his chaise; and
his serious conversation on religion so afifected her
mind that (as I suppose) she went through an
orthodox conversion, and joined Rev. Mr. Wood's
church. At any rate, she told me, a few years
after Webster's death, while looking at a good
engraved portrait of Ames's Webster, made by
Rowse, the crayon artist, which hung in the
Thoreau dining-room, "that she owed her con-
version, under Providence, to the serious im-
pression made on her conscience by Daniel Web-
ster." And from this Calvinistic profession of
faith I think she never varied.

Whatever effect the Christian Church, with
its catechism and ceremonies, may have had on

[46]

LOUISA DUNBAR

BOYHOOD AND YOUTH

Henry's childish mind, I incline to think that the
spectacle of Nature, in all her variable magnifi-
cence and vitality, was of greater moment. Next
to that, perhaps, was the interest and the debates
of the newly established Concord Lyceum, that
opened its doors when Henry was twelve years
old, in January, 1829.

This institution, still existing, but greatly changed
from its first aims, and now used chiefly for
popular entertainment, was propagated all over
Massachusetts ninety years ago, as a source of
enlightenment, by an enthusiast named Josiah
Holbrook, who went about giving gratuitous lec-
tures on geology and other nascent sciences, and
incidentally urging the villagers to form libraries
and collections, and institute debating societies,
under the Greek name of Lyceums. Concord
responded favorably, as Salem did; and in the
winter that saw General Jackson inaugurated
President, our village inaugurated its Lyceum,
with Dr. Ripley for president, and Lemuel
Shattuck, its future town historian, for secretary.
Before his death in 1882, Waldo Emerson had
given a hundred lectures in this Lyceum, and
Thoreau nearly twenty before 1862. In its first
winter, Edward Emerson, who had studied law
with Daniel Webster, represented the four Emer-

[47]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

son brothers, in a lecture on "The Geography of
Asia." In Boston a similar but more pretentious
Lyceum had Webster for its president, but did
not continue much beyond 1840. The Concord
audiences met at first in the brick school-room on
the public square, near the Thoreau house, above
which was the lodge-room of the Freemasons;
next held their weekly meetings in the Unitarian
Church vestry; and, since 1853, met in the Town
Hall. In its first modest hall, Charles Emerson
gave his famous lecture on Socrates, to which Tho-
reau listened. Quite as instructive as the lectures
generally were the debates in alternate weeks, in
which the attentive youth took a warm interest,
and modelled their own speeches upon those
which they heard from their village oracles.
While fitting for college at the Academy (1830
to 1833), Thoreau frequented these exercises,
and soon became a member (which could be done
when twelve years old), and was an oflScial for
several years after graduating in 1837.

Before he entered college he had occasion to
witness two violent political disputes, that be-
tween Masonry and the Anti-Masons over the
mysterious murder of Morgan, a recanting Free-
mason, and that between President Jackson and
three great Senators, Calhoun, Clay, and Web-

[48]

BOYHOOD AND YOUTH

ster, over the United States Bank and the Nulli-
fication Act of South Carolina. On that, Webster
was on Jackson's side; but on the Bank question,
violently against the President. It does not appear
that either of these disputes, although they raged
violently for years, and divided households and
churches, much affected Henry or John Thoreau.
Henry was already training himself for the pro-
/'fession he early chose, that of a writer. With his
vivacity and humor, he soon saw the ludicrous
aspect of these political wrangles; and without
much ambition for public distinction, he jested
with both sides, or gravely pointed out serious
moral consequences. A strain of that drollery
which in his uncle Charles Dunbar ran to excess
was early and long manifest in Henry Thoreau.
Concord had a flourishing " Corinthidn Lodge"
of Masons, of which both Dr. Ripley and his son,
Rev. Samuel Ripley, were members; while Asa
Dunbar, as we saw, had been an orator in the
Massachusetts lodges, and the master of a lodge
in Keene for some years. His address at the Lan-
caster lodge has been reprinted in recent years,
and is a good sample of his style. But the Thoreaus
seem to have been averse to Masonry, and to se-
cret societies in general. The quarrel extended
from New York, where the murder of Morgan

[49]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

occurred in 1826, to Vermont, Massachusetts,
and other States, and in 1832 one State, Vermont,
cast its vote for the Anti-Masonic candidate for
President, William Wirt, of Virginia, a distin-
guished orator and author.^ In Massachusetts,
John Quincy Adams was the most distinguished
Anti-Mason, and his influence and that of others
was so great that the "Corinthians" lost their
popularity, and held but few meetings for the
dozen years between 1832 and 1845. Their emi-
nent members. Dr. Ripley and his son, Lemuel
Shattuck, the historian of the town, Drs. Hurd
and Nelson, John Keyes, the postmaster, Colonel
Whiting, Abel Moore (Emerson's "Captain Hardy ") ,
Wesson, the Landlord of Thoreau's early essay,
etc., united, in 1831, for a defence of Freemasonry,
which had wide circulation, but did not make
the lodge popular in Concord. Its "History" pub-
lished in 1859 by Louis Surette, and jocosely
known as "The Third Epistle to the Corinthians,"
is a valuable biographical work for local histo-
rians, and includes a very curious full-length por-
trait of Dr. Ripley, one of its earliest members. In
its pages I made my first appearance as a biog-
rapher, furnishing short sketches of the two

' The first successes of Governor Seward and Thurlow Weed in
New York were won as Anti-Masons. I was never a Mason.

[50]

BOYHOOD AND YOUTH

clerical Ripleys, from papers at the Old Manse
and in Emerson's library.

Thoreau had various missions in this world,
some of which he fulfilled, and passed beyond
them; others he did not live long enough to com-
plete, and only approached perfection at remote
intervals. Versifying was one of these latter;*'-
though the poetic perception and ideal nature
were his in a marked degree. But his prose style
was not only brought to a high point of excellence
in his last twenty years, but he exhibited in youth
an early capacity for good writing, which his de-''^
votion to the art developed into what may easily
pass for perfection in his best passages. As I was
fourteen years younger than Thoreau, and only
knew him in his last seven years, though inti-
mately for that length of time, I never saw his
boyish compositions. But the affectionate re-
search of Alfred Hosmer rescued from oblivion,
and a more distant disciple, Mr. Hill, of Arizona,
has lately printed, a faultless specimen of his com-
position at about the age of ten, while he was still
known by the family title of " David Henry." It is

The Seasons

Why do the seasons change? and why
Does Winter's stormy brow appear?

Is it the word of Him on high
Who rules the changing, varied year?

[51 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

There are four Seasons in a year, Spring, Summer,
Autumn, and Winter. I will begin with Spring. Now
we see the ice beginning to thaw, and the trees to bud.
Now the winter wears away, and the ground begins to
look green with the new-born grass. The birds, which
have lately been to more southern countries, return
again to cheer us with their morning song.

Next comes Summer. Now we see a beautiful sight.
The trees and flowers are in bloom. Now is the pleas-
antest part of the year. Now the fruit begins to form
on the trees, and all things look beautiful.

In Autumn we see the trees loaded with fruit. Now
the farmers begin to lay in their Winter's store, and
the markets abound with fruit. The trees are partly
stripped of their leaves. The birds which visited us in
Spring are now retiring to warmer countries, as they
know that Winter is coming.

Next comes Winter. Now we see the ground covered
with snow, and the trees are bare. The c(dd is so in-
tense that the rivers and brooks are frozen.

There is nothing to be seen. We have no birds to
cheer us with their morning song. We hear only the
sound of the sleigh bells.

Here is selection of topics and simplicity of style
which the Master of Sentences could not surpass.
He could infuse more imagination, and display
more energy; but the child here is father of the
man; or, rather, here is the perennial boy. As
Channing wrote: "Never eager, with a pensive

[52]

BOYHOOD AND YOUTH

hesitancy he steps about his native fields, singing
the praises of music and Spring and Morning,
forgetful of himself"; adding, "He was one of
those who keep so much of the boy in him, that
he could never pass a berry without picking it."

CHAPTER m

COLLEGE ESSAYS OP A YOUTH OF GENIUS

David Henry Thoreau entered Harvard Col-
lege in 1833 at the age of sixteen, at that time
rather above the average age of entrance. Ed-
ward Everett had graduated at about that age,
and had written many essays before graduating.
Thoreau was not required to write English essays
in his Freshman year; and, with the exception of
the brief "composition" on "The Seasons," al-
ready printed, there are no extant letters, or
essays of his, earlier than those soon to be given.
Presumably he had written short essays at school,
had composed translations, and had indited and
sent letters; but no such seem to have been
preserved. We might ask why these particular
manuscripts were saved when others went to the
fireplace in the years when the use of flint and steel
and the tinder-box for kindling winter fires required
the aid of dry paper; still more when the hard-
wood coals, covered up with ashes, furnished the
seeds of fire in the December morning, or at the
outdoor blaze which the priming of the flintlock
musket, or the cherished sparks of the tobacco

[54 1

COLLEGE ESSAYS

pipe, kindled in woodland or pasture, for the ram-
bling or wood-chopping boy. The most likely
answer is that aunt or sister had cherished them,
and taught the youth to keep them, until, as with
the later manuscripts, they were kept till there
seemed to be no further use for them. Thoreau
never appears to have begrudged the labor of
copying and revising; seldom have I known an
author who made more drafts of what he might
some time print, or moTe persistently revised what
he had once composed. The Journal entries,
which may have begun as early as 1835, com-
monly went through three forms, — the first
notes, hastily jotted down on a walk or a sail,
then the full copy written out at leisure, and,
third, the copying into a volume, to be afterwards
broken up and destroyed, when its chief contents
had gone to be printed or had been put into fin-
ished essays, like the "Service" of 1840. He em-
ployed no amanuensis so long as his fingers could
hold the pen; then for a few months his sister So-
phia wrote a few letters, and possibly some pages
for the magazines in which his rare contributions
appeared. I have found a meditative description
(evidently influenced by L^ing) as early as 1835,
and it is possible that the ballad "Godfrey of
Boulogne," soon to be given, dates as far back as

[SS]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

that. But of the date of the college essays, we
can be reasonably sure.

The earliest dated letter from Thoreau yet
found was written to a classmate in college, Henry
Vose, of a family resident in Concord, though not
himself then living there, but in Dorchester;
otherwise the two Seniors would have met and
arranged colloquially for rooming together. He
was afterwards Judge Vose, and outlived Thoreau
by seven years, dying in 1869.

Concord, Jvly 5, 1836.

Dear Vose: — You will probably recognize in the
following dialogue a part which you yourself acted.

Act I. Scene 1st.

T. Come, Vose, let's hear from a fellow now and
then.

V. We-U, I certainly will, but you must write first.

T. No, confound you, — I shall have my hands
full, and, moreover, shall have nothing to say; while
you will have bonfires, gunpowder plots, and deviltry
enough to back you.

V. Well, I'll write first; and in the com-se of our
correspondence we can settle a certain other matter.

Now 't is to this "certain other matter" alone that
you are indebted for this epistle.

The length and breadth, the height and depth, the
sum and substance of what I have to say is this: —

Your hmnble servant will endeavor to enter the
[56]

COLLEGE ESSAYS

Senior Class of Harvard University next term; and if
you intend taking a room in College, and it should be
consistent with your pleasure, will joyfully sign him-
self your lawful and proper "chum."

Should the case be otherwise, you will oblige him
much if you will request that sage doughface of a
Wheeler to secure me one of the following rooms,
agreeably to his polite offer.

H. D3 [Holworthy].

St. do [Stoughton].

H. 27. St. do.

St. 28. H. do.

Look well to the order. I shall expect to hear
from you forthwith. I leave it to you to obtain a
room, should it be necessary.

Yrs. Matter-of-fact

D. H. Thoreau

There is nothing very noticeable about this
letter, except that it implies a youthful convers-
able spirit, such as a collegian approaching nine-
teen ought to have.

Nor was he averse to the usual rebellious gaye-
ties of college life, as may be inferred from a letter
sent to him five weeks before, while he was at
home and in poor health, by his classmate Pea-
body, reciting the pranks of the Davy club, a
chemical society, when fireworks were exhibited
by Henry Williams, and were reported to the

[57]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

Faculty by Tutor Bowen, thus securing a small
punishment (public admonition) from President
Quincy for Henry Bigelow, afterwards a cele-
brated surgeon, and Williams. The chemical
professor at that time was J. W. Webster, who
was executed some years after for the murder of
Dr. Parkman.

That Thoreau was ever thus admonished, or
came under direct college censure, nowhere ap-
pears, but his independent spirit seems to have
been recognized before this date. When his
townsman, Emerson, in June, 1837, wrote to
Quincy urging some lenity toward so good a
scholar and so wide a reader, the good-natured
old President replied (June 23, 1837):—

I was willing and desirous that whatever falling-off
there had been in his scholarship should be attributable
to his sickness. He had, however, imbibed some no-
tions concerning emulation and college rank, which
had a natural tendency to diminish his zeal, if not his
exertions. There is no doubt that, from some cause,
an unfavorable opinion has been entertained, since his
return after his sickness, of his disposition to exert
himself.

His illness must have been rather serious, from
the account he gave of himself to another class-
miate, Charles Wyatt Rice, in his next letter,

168]

COLLEGE ESSAYS

a month later than that just quoted, which

likewise throws light on his early river-sailing,

his poetic readings, and the turn of his quaint

humor at nineteen: —

CoNCOBD, August S, 1836.
Fhiend Rice: —

You say you are in the hay-field: how I envy you!
Methinks I see thee stretched at thy ease by the side
of a fragrant rick, with mighty flagon in one hand, a
cold slice in the other, and a most ravenous appetite
to boot. So much for haying.

Now I cannot hay, nor scratch dirt; I manage to
keep body and soul together another way. I have been
manufacturing a sort of vessel in miniature; not an
evaeXftov veav, as Homer has it [a well-benched ship],
but a kind of oblong bread-trough.

In times of yore, 't is said, the swimming Alder,
Fashioned rude, with branches lopt, and stript
Of its smooth coat, —

Where fallen tree was not, and rippling stream's
Vast breadth forbade adventm-ous leap.
The brawny swain did bear secure to farthest shore.

The Book has passed away.
And with the book the lay.
Which in my youthful days I loved to ponder;
Of curious things it told.
How wise Men Three of old, (Gotham)

In bowl did venture out to sea, —
And darkly hints their future fate.

If men have dared the Main to tempt
In such frail bark, why may not washtub round,
Or bread-trough square? oblong? — suffice to cross
The purling wave? and gain the destined port.

[59]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

When I begin to feel "bluey" I just step into my
hog-trough, leave care behind, and drift along our
sluggish stream, at the mercy of the winds and
waves.

The following is the log-book of the Red Jacket,
Captain Thoreau.

Set sail from the Island, — the Island, — how ex-
pressive! Reached Thayer's after a tedious voyage,
having encountered a head-wind during the whole pas-
sage; waves running mountain high, with breakers to
leeward. However, arrived safe, and, after a thorough
outfit, being provided with extra cables and a first-rate
birch mainmast, — weighed anchor at 3 P.M. August 1,
1836, N.N.E. wind blowing. The breeze having in-
creased to a gale, tacked ship and prepared for emer-
gencies. Just as the ship was rounding to Point Den-
nis, a squall struck her under a cloud of canvas, which
swept the deck. The aforesaid mast went by the
board, carrying with it the only mainsail. The vessel,
being left at the mercy of the waves, was cast ashore on
Nashawtuck Beach. The natives, a harmless, inoffen-
sive race, principally devoted to agricultural pursuits,
appeared somewhat astonished that a stranger should
land so unceremoniously on their coast. Got her oflE
at 20 minutes of 4; and after a pleasant passage of
ten minutes, arrived safely in port, with a valuable
cargo.

The short voyage, here magniloquently de-
scribed, was up the Sudbury River, toward the
south, and back again to some moorings on the

[60]

COLLEGE ESSAYS

Lowell road, where, some eighteen years before,
a young clockmaker's apprentice named Dyar
had set up the first electric telegraph ever seen in
operation, for a few rods along that causeway,
from Concord Village. For in 1836 the Thoreaus
were living in their own Thoreau house, near and
opposite to the present Coiu-t House in Concord.
The boat was probably the second that Henry and
John had built. The first was'called "The Rover";
the name of this "bread-tray" or "hog-trough"
is given as "Red Jacket" above.

In this singular epistle I have ventured to
restore the rhythmical passage into what may
have been its original form. The first verses are
evidently a rendering of some Latin poet, probably
Ovid, intimating how the European alder, large
enough for a canoe, was turned into one, where
the stream by which it grew was too large to be
jumped, or too wide to be swum across. The sec-
ond stanza is original, satirizing his own attempts
to build a boat for his river voyaging, in which
with the aid of his brother John, he succeeded in
1836.^ It is plain that David Henry, the Junior

' This letter was in the collection of Alfred Hosmer at Concord,
and has lately been printed by E. B. Hill, of Mesa, Arizona. As to
the boat, Henry indicates it was a short, oblong scow, in which a
mast and sail might be set up, as in the boats he and John after-
wards navigated on the two rivers.

[61 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

Sophister, had been seriously ill, or was recovering
from some severe illness to which, the next year.
President Quincy made allusion in writing to Em-
erson. The rest of the epistle (long for Thoreau
in those youthful years) is more like the ordinary
letters of collegians in vacation. The part about
river sailing is boyish, but original, and quaintly
forecasting.

"Epistolary matter," says Lamb, "usually com-
prises three topics, — news, sentiments, and puns."
Now, as to news, I don't know the coin; the newspa-
pers take care of that. Puns I abhor, and more es-
pecially deliberate ones. Sentiment alone is immortal;
the rest are short-lived, evanescent. This letter is
neither matter-of-fact, nor pungent, nor yet senti-
mental; it is neither one thing nor another; but a kind
of hodge-podge, — put together in much the same
style that mince pies are fabled to have been made,
i.e., by opening the oven door, and from the further
end of the room casting in the various ingredients; a
little lard here, a little flour there, — now a round of
beef, and then a cargo of spices, belter skelter.

I should like to crawl into those holes you describe;
what a crowd of associations 'twould give rise to!
"One to once, gentlemen."

As to Indian remains, the season is past with me; the
Doctor having expressly forbidden both digging and
chopping. My health is so much improved that I shall
return to Cambridge next term, if they will receive me.

[62]

COLLEGE ESSAYS

French I have certainly neglected; Dan Homer is all
the rage at present.

This from your friend and classmate,

D. H. Thokeait.

P.S. It would afford me much pleasure if you would
visit our good old town this vacation; in other words,
myself.

Don't fail to answer this forthwith; 't is a good thing
to persevere in well-doing.

How true it is that the postscript contains the most
important matter, invariably.

The style of this sprightly letter may be com-
pared with the more serious and formal manner
of his college essays of this year 1836. He con-
fines himself here to no one or even six subjects;
but ranges over a broad field, with but little con-
nection among his topics. The same disconnection
appears in his Journals, where he passes from one
topic to another, connected by no visible thread
of association. This was perhaps from an unwill-
ingness wilfully to change the flow of his rap-
idly moving thoughts. Emerson had that fancy,
which may have suggested this practice to Tho-
reau. The story of the voyage — a very real one,
I am sure — is well told, but not the secret of
manufacturing the rude boat. I have seen such
on the river-banks now and then, for the use of
boys and gunners, or for river fishing, of which

[63]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

there was more when the population of the town
was smaller than it is now. The boat built by-
John and himself two years later was a much
larger and more elaborate affair, intended for
several passengers, and adapted to the use of
ladies. In becoming the property of Hawthorne,
Mrs. Hawthorne gave it the sentimental name
of "Pond-Lily." His later boat could more prop-
erly be called the "Cow-Lily" from its ruder
form and heavier build; in it he carried loads of
wood and other useful articles. It was usually
paddled, yet sailed well, with its one sail. A
little before this date the family had lived at the
corner of Academy Lane and Main Street, where
Thoreau kept hens.

Going back now from this letter, written during
illness, to a year earlier, the calendar year 1835,
when he had been in college some seventeen
months, and had passed the first half of his eight-
eenth year; he was still called seventeen, and
rated in college as a Sophomore. His first coUege
essays are short, as Sophomore essays at Harvard
were wont to be; then they grew longer, but are
never tedious from their length; rather we should
have wished the writer to develop his clear
thought a little further. The first thing we notice
in this first of the preserved essays is the strag-

[64 ]

COLLEGE ESSAYS

gling a,nd unsteady handwriting. This village
youth at seventeen had not quite formed a firm
and consistent chirography, though he had ac-
quired a firm and significant character, and a note-
worthy command of words in their delicate shades
of meaning. His character needs chiefly the broad-
ening which experience gives, and his language is
to be guarded against the misguidance of an ac-
tive and jocose fancy. At need, he can superscribe
his "H. D. Thoreau" rather handsomely; but in
current writing the letters falter and stagger too
much. His ink is good and black — probably
made on some domestic recijpe, by his father or
himself, as the custom then was in the country.
This first essay touches without delay on that
human trait which Thoreau always regarded
with distrust, verging on disgust — hesitation
and imitation culminating in irresolution. His
text, chosen, no doubt, by Professor Edward
Channing, uncle of his future friend, EUery Chan-
ning, — who had already entered and left college,
never to return, — runs thus: "We are apt to
become what others (however erroneously) think
us to be: hence another motive to guard against
the power of others' ^sie} opinion."

We may call the subject of the essay, without
strainjing a point, —

[65]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

/. Following the Fashion

We find, on looking around us, even within the small
circle of our acquaintances, many who, though not at
all deficient in understanding, cannot muster resolution
enough to commence any undertaking, even the most
trifling, without consulting a friend; who are too diflS-
dent of their ability to judge for themselves, and who,
eventually, after a certain degree of solicitation, after
the requisite number of arguments has been brought
forward, almost invariably yield; though perhaps their
good sense tells them better. I would not by any means
have it understood that we are to neglect the advice of
our friends; and ask another's opinion, as many do,
merely to refute it, without considering that it is given
at our own request, and that therefore we are to con-
sider it a favor: but the majority of mankind are too
easily induced to follow any course which accords with
the opinion of the world. Nine out of ten will tell you,
in answer to the question, "How shall you act with
regard to this matter?" "I have n't concluded; what
do you think best?" or something similar.

They seem to be tossed about in the rapid current
of human life at the mercy of the waves: the voyage
may be prosperous, they may eventually drift into a
cakn and secure haven; but on the other hand, it is
much more likely that shipwreck will overtake them;
or, as they are drifted along by the foaming torrent,
thinking themselves secure from the innumerable
enemies who crowd the shores on either side, they may
be dashed dowiji the cataract which, while meditating

[66]

COLLEGE ESSAYS

on which shore they shall land, — to which party they
shall surrender, — had escaped their notice. Thus are
their actions principally the result of chance, and they
become mere tools in the hands of others; since they
are little qualified by nature to depend on their own
strength and powers.

One principal cause of this is a false shame which
many feel, lest they be considered singular or ec-
centric; and therefore they run into the opposite ex-
treme,— become all things to all men, and conform
to existing customs and rides, whether good or bad.
This grows into a habit, and thus an entire change
takes place in the disposition and character of the
man.

On this creditable essay the shrewd Professor
only comments by asking, "May they not retain
their character?"

We notice in our turn the felicitous choice of
words, the too great length of the sentences, and
an occasional lack of what Professor Channing
would have called "perspicuity." Perspicacity
is not lacking; and the ruling trait in Thoreau's
singularity is thus early manifested — a readiness
to be thought eccentric, and not to follow lie
fashion. But this eccentricity does not here grow
jocose, as in the letter to Rice just quoted; and
instead of wandering from the subject, the es-
sayist clings to it with the rigor of a logician,

[67]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

rather than the imagination of the symbolist
and poet, — which was his later trait.

Very early in the Sophomore essays comes
this brief one on —

//. Anxieties and Delights of a Discoverer

"Give your idea of the Anxieties and Delights of
a Discoverer, of whatever Class, — Columbus,
Herschel, Newton."
It almost invariably happens that the lives of most
distinguished characters are chequered with trials and
disappointments, and that their eminence has been
attained by years of toil and anxiety. But this seems
to be particularly the case with the Discoverer. With
him, all is uncertainty; chance may crown him with
the highest honors, and chance may expose him to the
ridicule and contempt of his fellow-men. Fortune tnay
flatter him when all hope has vanished, and desert him
when success seems near. Indeed, to the fall of an apple
could Newton trace his famous discovery of the laws
of universal gravitation.

Perhaps one succeeds and makes a discovery which
shall immortalize his name: still, his work is not fin-
ished, he has the prejudices of the whole world to com-
bat. He is satisfied in his own mind, but others are
yet to be persuaded; the burden of proof lies on his
side, and many are those who have sunk under it —
who have met with more difficulty in gaining prose-
lytes than in establishing the fact to their own satis-
faction.

[68]

COLLEGE ESSAYS

A dismal picture this. Of their delight we^may judge
by taking an example — Columbus, for instance. He
conceives a project of sailing to the Indies by a bold
and unusual route; this proposal, promising to make
his native shores the centre of opulence and power, is
rejected by the Genoese as chimerical. Stimg with
indignation a,nd disappointment, he retires from his
own country, to lay his scheme before the Court of
France, where his reception is still more mortifymg;
nothing daunted, he presses onward, urged forward
with irresistible ardor.

Is France averse to his project? England is his next
resort; if one hiU is not lofty enough to afford him si,
prospect of his El Dorado, he mounts another. In
fact, his whole soul is wrapt up in his undertaking.
Neglected by Portugal, Spain is his only resource; and
there, after eight years of anxiety and toil, he succeeds,
through the interest of Queen Isabella, in obtaining
three small ships.

Trials still await him. An alteration of his compass
spreads terror through his crew: threatened with
mutiny, he still pursues his course at the hazard of his
life. A glorious discovery awaits him, the dazzling
splendor of which casts into the shade all his previous
trials and diflBculties.

What must have been his reflectiotis on finding him-
self the discoverer of a New World? Did he ever
regret his perseverance? Did he ever repent of having
set himself up as the laughing-stock of Europe? Nay,
— did not rather a sense of what he had endured serve
to heighten the enjoyment of his success?

[69]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

This is truly spirited, and shows how recently
and carefully he had read Washington Irving's
early chapters of the Life of Columbus, and
perhaps Bancroft's first volume of United States
History. In neither of those books is it easy to
find a finer passage, so concisely worded.

///. An Essay on Variety of Energy in Men

"One of a cold and of a constant mind.
Not quickened into ardent action soon,
Nor prompt for petty enterprise; yet bold,
Fierce where need is, and capable of all things."

"Distinguish between this and other Kinds of ener-
getic Character, and speak of one or more in
History, who answer to the above Description."
Energy is a quality common to various characters,
which to the eye of the careless observer appear to
have no resemblance. It is as different in its nature as
in its effects. Hence are we so often surprised by hear-
ing of the decision of character, perseverance and
success of those whom we always considered weak,
irresolute, and totally unfitted to succeed in life. This
surprise in part arises from oiu" not having accustomed
ourselves to behold this quality in all its forms. Some
are easily excited, of a sanguine temper, ready for
every imdertaking, and for a time wholly absorbed in
the prosecution of their designs. They aim to accom-
plish every thing by the suddenness of their decisions,
and the rapidity of their movements; but, as some one
has justly observed, zeal and enthusiasm are never

[70]

COLLEGE ESSAYS

very accurate calculators. Their energy is of an incon-
stant kind; it is not accompanied by calmness and
deliberation; so that their success if they meet with
any, is not so much the effect of their own exertions as
the work of chance. They are bold to decide, and
though not easily overcome by obstacles (for these
have the effect of arousing them to action) still, they
are too ready to abandon a project, — not through
discouragement, but want of interest.

Others, again, differ from the former in this respect
only — that they are no less constant and determined
in carrying through their undertakings, than hasty to
decide. They are resolved not to relinquish a design
once adopted, whether good or bad; and thus their
energy amoxmts to rashness or foolishness as the case
may be, and they are apt to employ it to little or no
purpose.

That description of this quality which Philip van
Artevelde possessed in so high a degree, appears by far
the most desirable. Here Judgment is called upon to
give her sanction or veto to the course proposed; her
subjects, armed with her consent, together with that
of her counsellors. Calmness and Caution, are pre-
pared for every emergency, — they have but one end
in view, which is the execution of her projects. Energy
here holds a subordinate station; she composes the bone
and muscle of the State, but Judgment and Delibera-
tion are invested with the reins of government, and
have the sole direction of affairs.

I know of no more suitable examples, by which to
illustrate ^hese two descriptions, than the characters of

[71]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

Francis I. and Charles V., who, rivals for a period of
28 years, each possessing uncommon talents, — were
as difiEerent in their temperaments as their abilities,
and the advantages they enjoyed. The former was
sudden to adopt his resolutions, and ardent in carrying
them through; he exhibited the most daring courage in
forming, as well as executing his plans, but was, how-
ever, too apt to relinquish them through impatience
or disgust. Charles was long in coming to a decision,
and cool and collected on every occasion; having once
adopted a design, no obstacles could turn him from the
prosecution of it.

Francis, by the rapidity of his motions and the im-
petuosity of his career, often baffled his rival's best-
laid schemes. Like the mountain torrent swollen by a
freshet, which in its rapid and irresistible course
sweeps all before it, he often fell upon his erlemy in a
defenceless state, with a shock so violent as to drive
him from the field at once; but in a few days this
mighty torrent dwindled to a rippling brook which, not
being able to reach the ocean, ends its course in some
stagnant pool. Charles, on the other hand, resembled
a broad but calm river, which, steady though rapid in
its progress, flows onward to the ocean, — disdaining
to be swallowed up by any inland sea, or to contribute
its portion to a sister stream. It would doubtless have
been well, had Charles possessed a little of King Fran-
cis's ardor and enterprise; but as it was, energy such as
his was by far the most effective. The French mon-
arch's hopes, however flattering, were rarely realized;
however promising the prospect of each affair, they

[72] ^

COLLEGE ESSAYS

were seldom attended by a fortunate issue. The Em-
peror, on the other hand, in spite of every obstacle,
was generally successful in the end.

This essay shows carefiil reading in the his-
tories of these two monarchs, and a fondness for
figurative language that is somewhat fatiguing.
The subject of the next forbids such tropes.

IV. Shall We Keep Journals ?

"Of Keeping a private Journal, or Record of our
Thoughts, Feelings, Studies and daily Experience,
— containing abstracts of Books, and the Opinions
we formed of them on first reading them."

As those pieces which the painter sketches for his
own amusement in his leisure hotirs are often superior
to his most elaborate productions, — so it is that ideas
often suggest themselves to us spontaneously, as it
were, far surpassing in beauty those which arise in the
mind upon applying ourselves to any particular sub-
ject. Hence, could a machine be invented which
would instantaneously arrange on paper each idea as
it occurs to us, without any exertion on our part, how
extremely useful would it be considered ! The relation
between this and the practice of keeping a journal is
obvious. But yet the preservation of our scattered
thoughts is to be considered an object but of minor
importance.

Every one can think, but comparatively few can
express their thoughts. Indeed, how often do we hear

[73]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

one complain of his inability to express what he feels!
How many have occasion to make the following re-
mark, "I am sensible that I understand this perfectly,
but am not able to find words to convey my idea to
others." But if each one would occupy a certain por-
tion of each day in looking back upon the time which has
passed, and in writing down his thoughts and feelings,
in reckoning up his daily gains, that he may be able to
detect whatever false coins have crept into his coffers,
and as it were, in settling accounts with his mind, —
not only would his daily experience be greatly in-
creased, — since his feelings and ideas would thus be
more clearly defined, — but he would be ready to
ttirn over a new leaf, having carefully perused the
preceding one, and would not continue to glance care-
lessly over the same page without being able to dis-
tinguish it from a new one.

Most of us are apt to neglect the study of our own
characters, thoughts and feelings, and, for the purpose
of forming their own minds, look to others; who
should merely be considered as different editions of
the same great work. To be sure, it would be well for
us to examine the various copies, that we might detect
any errors; but yet it would be foolish for one to borrow
a work which he possessed himself, but had not perused.

In fine, if we endeavored more to improve ourselves
by reflection, by making a business of thinking and
giving our thoughts form and expression, we should be
led to read "not to contradict and confute, nor to
believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and dis-
course, but to weigh and consider."

[ 74]

COLLEGE ESSAYS

This is perhaps the most significant of these
early essays of Thoreau, since in it appears the
aim which he kept in view in his mature life; and
also one or two of those quaint thoughts occur
that are wont to enliven each paragraph in his
pubKshed books. It shows, too, how early he
had found the Essays of Bacon, and made that
sententious book one of his models, so far as any
author was his model, and not his remembrancer.
It is not always easy in these short pieces to know
when he is uttering himself, and when merely
striving to meet the requirements of the subject
which his professor has set before the class; but
every now and then the real Thoreau breaks
through the veil of the school exercise, and we get
a glimpse of the writer, who was in later years, and
long after his death, to exert so strong an in-
fluence on special intellects, not always akin to his
own. For Thoreau stimulates as often by provo-
cation and antagonism as by sympathy, which he
was not very ready to extend or receive. He went
through college as he went through life, with com-
paratively few intimates, and without lending his
readers much aid in opening the prickly burr in
which his sweetest kernels are apt to be lurking.

We now come to a longer essay, involving more
discrimination.

[75]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

V. The Varying Pursuits of Men

"The different ideas we form of men whose pursuit is
Mcaiey, Power, Distinction, Domestic Happiness,
Public Good."

Each one is, for the most part, under the influence
of some ruling passion, and almost invariably possesses
a taste for some particular pursuit. This pursuit, this
object of all one's wishes and end of all his endeavors,
has great influence with his fellow-men in determining
his character: so that many, when possessed of this
seemingly slight knowledge, think to fathom one's
very thoughts and feelings. When we hear it said of a
man that Money is the idol which he worships; that
his whole soul is wrapped up in the pursuit of wealth,
— • we figure to ourselves one who is continually striv-
ing after something which he is destined never to
obtain, and who does not enjoy life as it passes, but
lives upon expectation. In short, one who has painted
to himself an imaginary Elysium, towards which no
step in his progress brings him nearer.

In other words, we imagine him one who is never
satisfied with the wealth already amassed, but expects
that when arrived at a certain pitch, everything de-
sirable will be within his reach. But alas ! when he has
reached the summit of one peak, he is only enabled to
realize the more fully the immense height of the next
in succession. That every one is ashamed to acknowl-
edge the pursuit in question as his own, is a fact which
seems suflBciently to prove its baseness.

Aristocrats may say what they please, — liberty

[76]

COLLEGE ESSAYS

and equal rights are and ever will be grateful, till
nature herself shall change; and he who is ambitious
to exercise authority over his fellow-beings, with no
view to their benefit or injury, is to be regarded as
actuated by peculiarly selfish motives. Self-gratifica-
tion must be his sole object. Perhaps he is desirous
that his name may be handed down to posterity; that
in after ages something more may be said of him than
that he lived and died. He may be influenced by still
baser motives; he may take delight in the enjojonent
of power merely; and feel a kind of satisfaction in the
thought that he can command and be obej^-ed.

It is evident then that he who, thus influenced, at-
tains at last the summit of his wishes, will be a curse to
mankind. His deeds may never be forgotten, — but
is this greatness? If so, may I pass through unheeded
and unknown!

"But grant that those can conquer, — these can cheat, —
'T is phrase absurd to call a villain great."

Small, very small is the number of those who labor
for the public good. There appears to be something
noble, something exalted in giving up one's own interest
for that of his fellow-beings, which excites in us feel-
ings of admiration and respect. He is a true patriot
who, casting aside all selfish thoughts, and not suffer-
ing his benevolent intentions to be polluted by think-
ing of the fame he is acquiring, presses forward in the
great work he has undertaken, with unremitting zeal;
who is as one pursuing his way through a garden
abounding with fruits of every description, without

177]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

turning aside or i^garding the brambles that impede
his progress; but pressing onward, with his eyes fixed
upon the golden fruit before him.

He is worthy of all praise; his is indeed true great-
ness. He is satisfied with himself and all aroimd him;
nor is he troubled with his stings of conscience, whose
memory lives with the smart which he leaves: but

"One self -approving hour whole years outweighs .
Of stupid starers, and of loud huzzas."

The preceding papers are all essays, or " themes,"
as they were called in the dialect of Harvard
College, which was in 1835 just completing its
second centmy. Thoreau was likewise completing
a year, his eighteenth, still bearing the name his
parents had given him for a deceased unde David,
and of some imknown person named Henry. He
soon inverted the order of these names, and pre-
served the "David" only by the initial.

With his Junior year in college he had been re-
quired to write essays in a new form, — "Foren-
sics" they were called, implying a sort of discus-
sion pro or con by the student, who enters now
on the stage of debate. In this stage Thoreau had
been aided by the fortnightly debates at the
Concord Lyceum and by the college societies
that he joined. His first forensic which has been
preserved here follows (dated at Cambridge,

[78]

COLLEGE ESSAYS

September 2, 1835). It is marked "No. 2," but
its precursor seems to have perished.

VI. The Comparative Moral Policy cf Severe and Mild
Punishments ,

(This is the most noticeable, for thought and
maturity, of all these youthful essays, though
there is an inequality between its different parts
natural enough in a youth of eighteen. Very note-
worthy is his firm and concise grasp of the correct
principle of Penalty, which was about that time
getting stated by Edward Livingston in America,
and by Captain Maconochie in Australasia. It
was soon to be brilliantly and practically illus-
trated by Thoreau's younger contemporary, who
long outlived him, — Z. R. Brockway, of the
Ehnira Reformatory Prison, — now, February,
1917, ninety-two years old, but retired from
prison administration.)

The end of all punishment is the welfare of the
State, — the good of the community at large, — not
the suffering of an individual. It matters not to the
lawgiver what a man deserves; for, to say nothing of
the impossibility of settling that point, it would be
absurd to pass laws against prodigality, want of char-
ity, and many other faults of the same natiu-e, — as if
a man was to be frightened into a virtuous life, —
though these, in a great measure, constitute a vicious

[79]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

one. We leave this to a higher tribunal. So far only as
public interest is concerned, is punishment justifiable,
— if we overstep this bound, our own conduct becomes
criminal.

Let us observe, in the first place, the effects of sever-
ity. Does the rigor of the punishment increase the
dread Operating upon the mind to dissuade us from the
act? It certainly does if it be unavoidable. But where
death is a general punishment, though some advantage
may seem to arise from the severity, yet this will in-
variably be more than counterbalanced by the uncer-
tainty attending the execution of the law. We find
that in England, for instance, where, in Blackstone's
day, 160 offences were considered capital, — between
the years 1805 and 1817, of 655 who were indicted for
stealing, 113 being capitally convicted, not one was
executed: and yet no blame would attach to the con-
duct of the juries, — the fault was in the law. Had
death, on the other hand, been certain, the law could
' have existed but a very short time. Feelings of natural
justice, together with public sentiment, would have
concurred to abolish it altogether.

In fact, wherever those crimes which are made capi-
tal form a numerous class, and petty thefts and for-
geries are raised to a level with murder, burglary and
the like, the law seems to defeat its own ends. The
injured, influenced perhaps by compassion, forbear to
prosecute, and thus are numerous frauds allowed to
escape with impunity, for want of a penalty propor-
tionate to the" offence. Juries, too, actuated by the
same motives, adopt the course pointed out by their

[80]

COLLEGE ESSAYS

feelings. As long as one crime is more heinous and
more offensive than another, it is absolutely necessary
that a corresponding distinction be made in punishing
them. Otherwise, if the penalty be the same, men will
come to regard the guilt as equal in each case.

It is enough that the evil attending conviction ex-
ceeds the expected advantage. This, I say, is suflB-
cient, provided the consequences be certain, and the
expected benefit be not obtained. For it is that hope of
escaping punishment, — a hope which never deserts
the rogue as long as life itself remains, — that renders
him blind to the consequence, and enables him to look
despair in the face. Take from him this hope, and you
will find that certainty is more effectual than severity
of punishment. No man will deliberately cut his own
fingers. The vicious are often led on from one crime to
another still more atrocious, by this very fault of the
law; the penalty being no greater, but the certainty of
escaping detection being very much increased. In
this case they act up to the old saying, that "one may
as well be hung for stealing an old sheep as a lamb."

Some have asked, "Cannot reward be substituted
for punishment? Is hope a less powerful incentive to
action than fear? When a political pharmacopeia has
the command of both ingredients, wherefore employ
the bitter instead of the sweet?" This reasoning is
absurd. Does a man Reserve to be rewarded for re-
fraining from murder? Is the greatest virtue merely
negative, or does it rather consist in the performance
of a thousand everyday duties, hidden from the eye of
the world? Would it be good policy to make the most

[81]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

exalted virtue, even, a subject of reward here? Never-
theless I question whether a pardon has not a more
salutary effect, on the minds of those not immediately
affected by it, — vicious as well as honest, — than a
public execution.

It would seem then, that the welfare of society calls
for a certain degree of severity; but this degree bears
some proportion to the offence. If this distinction is
lost sight of, punishment becomes unjust as well as
useless. We are not to act upon the principle that
crime is to be prevented at any rate, — cost what it
may. This is obviously erroneous.

For years Thoreau lived in Concord Village in
the near vicinity of the county jail, and could see
the malefactors every few months brought there
to be tried for their oflfences, or punished imder
sentence, and occasionally executed for the higher
crimes. The ancient wooden jail of 1775-77, in
which his Tory kindred had been imprisoned, and
from which they escaped, stood twenty rods
farther west on the road to Acton and Keene,
across the road and a gunshot northeast from the
Town Library, in which hangs Wilson's pen-and-
ink sketch of that old prison. This was drawn
by the clerk of Sir Archibald Campbell, member of
Parliament and Colonel of a Highland regiment
which he raised among his own clan in Scotland,
and brought to the relief of Sir Henry Clinton, be-

[82]

COLLEGE ESSAYS

sieged in Boston by General Washington. But
Boston had been captured before Sir Archibald
got there, and he too was captured and brought
with a few of his officers to be held there till
exchanged.

On February 9, 1858, Thoreau entered in his
Journal (x, 279) : —

Saw at Simon Brown's a sketch ... on which was
written "Concord Jail, near Boston, America," and
on a fresher piece of paper . . . was written, "The

Jail in which General Sir Arch'"^ Campbell &

Wilson were confined when taken off Boston in
America by a French Privateer." A letter on the back
side, from Mr. Lewis of Framingham to Mr. Brown,
stated that he, Lewis, had received the sketch from
the grandson of Wilson, who drew it.

You are supposed to be in the jail-yard, or close to
it westward, and see the old jail, gambrel-roofed, the
old Hurd house (partly) west of the graveyard, the
graveyard, and Dr. Hurd house, and, over the last and
to the north of it, a wooded hill, apparently Windmill
Hill, and just north of the Hurd house, beyond it,
apparently the court-house and school-house, each
with belfries, and the road to the Battle-Ground,
and a distant farmhouse on a hill, French's or But-
trick's, perhaps.

This was the prison in which the Jones brothers
were confined. Its successor, where Thoreau spent

[83]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

a night, was a larger structure, built of heavy
stone, in the late eighteenth century, of which the
jailer for years in our time was Sam Staples,
who married the landlord's daughter. Miss Wesson.
The ceremony was by Emerson, and Alcott was a
witness.

Up to this time (1835) no distinct tendency
toward literature was noticeable in young Henry
Thoreau. His father and grandfather had been
mercantile or mechanical in their way of life;
the family in Jersey were by inheritance mercan-
tile, though well taught; and something like mer-
cantile methods were always visible in Henry's
character. His own accounts and those of the
Concord family were strictly kept, and frugality
was the rule in that household, though it was al-
ways hberal to the poor and hospitable to all
relatives and friends. Henry's maternal grand-
father, Asa Dunbar, had indeed been college-edu-
cated, and had been a clergyman for a dozen years;
and afterward (for political reasons, perhaps) a
practising lawyer in New Hampshire, with a turn
for oratory in both professions. It was from this
side, evidently, that literary inheritance came; but
Thoreau's style seems to have been affected by
that French elegance to which his Norman de-
scent entitled him; and an element of simpUcity,

[ 84 ]

COLLEGE ESSAYS

noticeable in that first "composition" of his, "The
Seasons," was characteristic of him, when not
perverted by his love of paradox and of punning —
which is itself a sbrt of paradox. At any rate, now,
in the autumn of 1835, the leading intellectual bent
of his life began to appear; and here is its first
extant manifestation in an essay: —

VII. The Literary Life

"1 live like a Prince: not,indeed, in the pomp of great-
ness, but in the pride of liberty; master of my
Books, master of my time. Speak of the Pleasures
and Privileges of a Literary Man."
Scriptorwn chorus omnis amat nemus, etfugtt urbes.*

This is as true of the literary man of the present day,
as it is descriptive of the habits of the same dass a
thousand years ago. This love of retiring from the
hurry and bustle of the world has, in all ages, closely
adhered to those minds most devoted to study and
elevated by genius. Such an one "will gladly snatch
an hour of retreat, to let his thoughts expatiate at
large, and seek for that variety in his own ideas which
the objects of sense cannot afford him."

Horace's passion for retirement, and fondness for
the country, are well known: leaving the bustling
streets of Rome, he was wont to amuse himself at his
retired villa in the Sabine territory, by coiomenting

^ The motto of Thoreau is from Horace, Epistles, 11. 77. By this
time (begimiing of his Junior year) he had read much of the witty
wisdom of Horace.

[85 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

upon the manners and characters of the age. It is to a
retirement which lasted ten years that we are indebted
for that celebrated work by Adam Smith, the "Wealth
of Nations." And so of ten thousand others.

This is pure enjoyment. But this path can only be
trodden by the enlightened and cultivated mind — it
is folly for him, whose intellect has not been trained to
study and meditation, to look for pleasure here; to
him the path is dark and dreary, barren and desolate.

"This art of meditation," says an author, "is the
power of withdrawing ourselves from the world, to
view the world moving within ourselves, while we are
in repose; as the artist, by an optical instrument, con-
centrates the boundless landscape around him, and
patiently traces all nature in that small space."

Innocent and easily procurable pleasures constitute
man's most lasting happiness: these are such as liter-
ature and imagination are both able and willing to
afford. That undefinable misery, that insupportable
tediousness, the curse of those who have nothing to
do, is inconsistent with that relish for literature and
science, which is a source of continual gratification to
the mind. He who is dependent upon himself alone
for his enjoyments, — who finds all he wants within
himself, — is really independent; for to look to others
for that which is the object of every man's pursuit,
is to live in a state of perpetual trust and reliance.
Happy the man who is furnished with all the advan-
tages to relish solitude! he is never alone, and yet may
be retired in the midst of a crowd; he holds sweet con-
verse with the sages of antiquity, and gathers wisdom

[86]

COLLEGE ESSAYS

from their discourse; he enjoys the fruit of their labors,
— their knowledge is his knowledge, their wisdom his
inheritance.

It is knowledge that creates the diflference between
man and man, — that raises one man above another.
The mind that is filled with this valuable furniture is
"a magazine richly furnished," a storehouse of the
wisdom of ages; from which Reflection, who is door-
keeper, and has charge of the keys, draws forth from
time to time, as the Mind, the proprietor, has need of
them. The sentiments of such a mind are sublime
truths, of a pure and noble cast; rising above what is
ignoble and mean, they breathe truth, "the essence of
good": thus, inspired with a presentiment of virtue,
man "is led through nature up to nature's God."

Many are the intimations of the future moral-
ist and essayist in this Junior essay. The style is
rather Johnsonian than Emersonian; but traces
of the Emersonian ideas already appear, and
also of "that bold reading in English poetry,
even to some portions or the whole of Davenant's
'Gondibert,*" of which Channing speaks. In the
allusion to the artist's instrument, by which he
"concentrates the boundless landscape aroimd
him," he means the camera obscura, as described
by Sir Henry Wotton in a letter to Lord Bacon,
in a volume of Wotton's poems and letters. This
reading he afterwards extended, so that he had

[ 87]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

(by 1843) a commonplace-book of extracts, chiefly
poetry, from Chaucer to Cowley. Emerson's
"Nature" was not yet published; but his Con-
cord address of 1835 was printed, and doubtless
Tljioreau heard him deliver it.

Another occupation, far from literary, but
tending to literature, was Thoreau's in 1835, and
in the "Shattuck house," later the Monroe house,
— the keeping of poultry. Among the Walden
manuscripts, for the "Village" chapter, I found
this passage, omitted in his printed volume: —

When I kept hens once in the Village, I remember
there one white rooster in one of the broods I reared,
that went much by himself, — a stately-faced young
cockerel, that still had a good deal of the pheasant in
him. The note of this once wild Indian pheasant is
certainly most remarkable. One night he was by
chance shut out of the hen-yard, and after long recon-
noitering and anxious going and coming, — with brave
thoughts exalting him, and fancies rushing thick upon
him, — crowing long, memoriter-wise of his Indian
origin and wild descent, — he flew, bird-like, up into
a tree and went to roost there. And I, who had wit-
nessed this passage in his private history, forthwith
wrote these verses and inscribed them to him: —

Poor Bird! destined to lead thy life
Far in the adventurous West,
And here to be debarred to-night
From thy accustomed nest:

188]

COLLEGE ESSAYS

Did Heaven bestow its quenchless inner light
So long ago, for thy small want to-night?
Why stand'st upon thy toes to crow so late?
The Moon is deaf to liy low, feathered fate.
Or dost thou think so to possess the Night,
And people the drear dark with thy brave sprite?

I fear, imprisonment has spoiled thy wit.
Or ingrained servitude extinguished it?
But no, — dim memory of the days of yore
By Brahmapootra and the Jumna's shore.
Where thy proud voice flew swiftly o'er the heath,
And sought thy food the jungle's shade beneath.
Has taught thy wing to seek yon friendly trees.
As erst by Indian banks of far Ganges.

This experience at hen-keeping was probably
while the Thoreaus of the younger branch —
Helen, John, Henry, atid Sophia — lived with their
parents in what had before 1835 been the home
of i Lemuel Shattuck, the first historian of Con-
cord, at the corner of Main Street and Academy
Lane. It was for many years the Monroe house,
but has now passed into other hands — the Mon-
roe family in Concord (of this branch) being ex-
tinct, as are the Thoreaus. This place, with its
large garden and its trees, was better adapted to
poultry-breeding than the house of Deacon Park-
man (occupied by the Thoreaus from 1837 to
1844, inclusive) with its narrower space and lack
of trees. Henry's " Gothic window " at the Monroe
house, of which he wrote in 1835 that it "over-

[89]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

looked the kitchen garden," would be a favorable
place for watching and listening to this brave
chanticleer. The verses are plainly of an early
period — perhaps earlier than the ballad of " God-
frey of Boulogne," to be given hereafter.

The love of retirement, eulogized in this essay
upon Professor Channing's text and Horace's
verse, was a native trait in Thoreau, and persisted
through life, though he was never a recluse, in the
strict sense, even while he dwelt by Walden.
Against a tendency that way there was always con-
tending within him a love of social life and a turn
for friendship. And his love of home and of fam-
ily was perhaps the strongest and most persistent
of his sentiments. Another native tendency, akin
to that taste for retirement, was his love of simplic-
ity in all the modes of life and in the style of writ-
ing. Upon this last topic I find a college "theme"
of 1835, as follows: —

VIII. The Simple Style

"The Ways in which a Man's Style may be said to
offend against Simplicity."
If we would aim at perfection in anything, Simplic-
ity must not be overlooked. If the author would
acquire literary fame, let him be careful to suggest
such thoughts as are simple and obvious, and to ex-
press his meaning distinctly and in good language.

[90]

COLLEGE ESSAYS /

To do this, he must, in the first place, omit all super-
fluous ornament, which, though very propef in its
place, — if, indeed, it can be said to have any iji good
composition, — tends rather to distract the min^, than
to render a passage more clear and striking, or^J^n idea
more distinct. I do not pretend to say that •v&.tever
adds to the grace, detracts from the simplicity M one's
style. The ancient robe ^ is the plainest dress magin-
able, yet where will you find one more truly beautiful?
It is equally so to the half-naked savage, and to the
foppish devotee of fashion.

Another very common fault is that of using uncom-
mon words, — words which neither render our mean-
ing more obvious, nor our composition more elegant.
In this case the reader's attention is withdrawn from
the subject, and is wholly employed upon the rare,
and for that reason offensive, expression, — offensive,
too, because it argues study and premeditation in the
author. Obscurity may properly be called the opposite
of simplicity. Hence, whatever contributes to this, as
far-fetched metaphors and images, — in fact, all that
kind of ornament that forms the characteristic of the
Florid Style, — is not merely superfluous, but abso-
lutely incompatible with excellence.

The style in question does not seem to be peculiar to
such topics as are common and familiar (as some have

* By " ancient robe " Thoreau evidently means the flowing
gannent of Greece and Rome, which at this time was brought
much in evidence by the taste for Greek designs, and by the
drawings of Retsch, Flaxman, and others, following the lead of
Goethe. Thoreau followed Milton all his days, in preference to
Shakespeare.

[91 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

affirmed) ; for the most sublime and noblest precepts
may be conveyed in a plain and simple strain. The
Scriptures afford abundant proof of this. What images
can be more natural, what sentiments of greater weight,
and at the same time more noble and exalted, than
those with which they abound? They possess no local
or relative ornament which may be lost in a transla-
tion; clothed in whatever dress, they will retain their
peculiar beauties. Here is simplicity itself. Every one
allows this, every one admires it, — yet how few at-
tain to it! What hosts of writers, hourly contending
for popularity, depend for success on their superior
simplicity of style alone? Shakespeare, they say, has
thus acquired immortal fame, and this is the dis-
tinguishing trait in his writings. The union of wisdom
and simplicity is plainly hinted at in the following lines
by Milton: —

"Suspicion sleeps

At Wisdom's gate, and to Simplioity

Besigns her charge."

Milton had long been a favorite among the
Puritans of New England; together with Watts,
he almost monopolized the religious interest of
New England in poetry, until the graceful and
witty common sense of Pope, and the serious sen-
timent of Young and Doddridge, in some degree
displaced their popularity. Thoreau's interest in
Milton, however, was largely a moral one, com-
bining with his sense of that poet's exquisite ap-
preciation of rural nature. A year or two later

I 92]

COLLEGE ESSAYS

than the essay just quoted Thoreau returned to
this poet with two essays (one a fragment) which
are worth quoting: —

IX. Characteristics of Milton's Poesy

"Point out particulars in the Speeches of Moloch and

the rest (P.L., Book ii) which appear to you

Characteristic."

"After short silence, then.
And summons read, the great consult began."

Satan, Moloch, Belial, Mammon, and Beelzebub,
"the flower of Heaven once" — but now the pride of
Hell, successively harangue the assembly.

First Satan, "author of all ill," takes it upon him-
self to comfort himself and his mates and followers,
by assuring them that all is not lost, that Heaven may
yet be regained. Fit ruler of such a host! By showing
them how good has already come out of evil, by re-
fraining to dwell on their misfortunes, and appearing
solicitous only to restore them to their former condi-
tion, — though in reality preferring "to reign in Hell
rather than serve in Heaven," — he effectually revives
their drooping energies, and proves himself the master-
spirit of the host.

From the contents of the preceding book we should
expect to observe in Satan's speech, ambition aided
by matchless cunning: the former it was, that first
suggested the revolt; and what but the latter could
have so far carried his plans into execution? The poet
has not failed to do his character justice in the present

[93]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

instance. His speech is marked throughout by superior
subtlety; and when at last the "devilish counsel," first
proposed and in part devised by hinaseU, is adopted, —
the spirit of revenge which first prompted the under-
taking, retires before self-interest, and gives place for a
while to ambition. Proud, as it were, of this new re-
sponsibility, he declares that "none shall partake with
him this enterprise"; and while they seek to render
Hell more tolerable, reserves to himself the glory of
their deliverance; thus proving himself both cunning
to devise and prompt to execute.

What a contrast does Satan afford to the exasper-
ated Moloch! Here is no dissimulation, no hellish
craft, no nice calculation of chances, no ambition to
shine; self-interest is swallowed up in revenge. Urged
by despair, he counsels to scale the walls of Heaven,
and oppose infernal thunder to the Almighty's en-
gines. Danger he sees none, — but perhaps >

"The way seems difficult, and steep to scale."

The diflBculty is to get at the enemy. He is a "plain,
blunt devil," who only speaks right on; no orator as
Satan is; easily exasperated, but not so easily pacified,
— the creature of impulse.

Next rose Belial, second to none in dissimulation,
"nor yet behind in hate." With a fair outside, all is
false and hollow within. As is often the case, his faint
heart suggests a wise and prudent course; but he is
none the less a devil, though a prudent one. DiflBcul-
ties and dangers innumerable beset his path, — he
thanks his stars that so much remains; dwells upon the

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COLLEGE ESSAYS

evils to be apprehended from obstinately persevering
in a bad cause; and, closing, touches upon the effect of
submission to appease the victor.

Next Mammon proves himself the same cool and
deliberate calculator, who engrosses so large a share of
Man's homage at the present day. War has no charms
for him. Deficient neither in courage nor cunning, he
is for adopting the readier and surer way to counteract
the Almighty's vengeance by seeking to compose the
present evils,

" Dismissing quite all thoughts of war."

Cui bono ? is his motto. Though he looks only upon
the dark side of the picture, when he speaks of the
project to "dethrone the King of Heaven," it is the
effect not of fear, or despair, but a worldly, or rather a
hellish policy.

Beelzebub resembles in many respects his infernal
master. His harangue breathes throughout a true Pan-
demonian spirit. The most consummate skill, the fierc-
est hate and a determined spirit of revenge mark him
the devil of devils. He is the cool, the deliberate, the
accompUshed villain. Mischief is his element; he loves
it for its own sake.

The skill with which Milton has adapted every part,
and especially the opening of each harangue to the
character of the speaker, is deserving of notice. In-
deed, the first two or three lines are characteristic
in each case, entirely, of the individual, — a perfect
sample of the whole speech. This may have been
the work of chance, but it certainly looks like design.

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

Satan begins his address in a formal and courtier-like
manner: —

"Powers and Dominions, Deities of Heaven!
For, since no deep within her gulf can hold
Immortal vigor, though oppressed and fallen,
I give not Hekven for lost."

Here is a set speech, cut and dried, as it were, for the
occasion. The commencement of the second line be-
trays a hidden purpose, — some proposition to be
made, or project to be unfolded. The very indirectness
with which the subject is introduced is a proof of
design, a warning of craft to be used in the pursuit of a
favorite object. Ag^n, —

"My sentence is for open war: of wiles.
More unexpert, I boast not."

Here is a straightforwardness and singleness of pur-
pose, a contempt of ornament and art. The first three
words argue a mind made up. The indicative is simply
declares his resolution; as if it only remained to make
known what was already resolved. How different the
following!

"I sho/vM he much for open war, 0 Peers!
As not behind in hate, if," etc.

A should and an if to begin with! The second word
should implies hesitation; the if in the next line is a
harbinger of fear and irresolution. Indeed, the whole
speech is one string of interrogatories, plentifully
sprinkled with words expressive of doubt and uncer-
tainty, — such as could, would, should, yet, a,nd or.
Timidity is the mother of inquisitiveness.

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COLLEGE ESSAYS
Next Mammon spoke, —

"Either to disenthrone the King of Heaven
We war, if war be best, or to regain
Our own right lost: — "

These words, it is true, express uncertainty as to
the course to be pursued, yet it is the uncertainty, not
of fear and despair, but of self-interest. The second
line will not admit of any -other interpretation. The
manner in which the all-absorbing subject, war, is in-
troduced, gives promise of a ready support in case war
should be declared.

Beelzebub's elaborate exordium would by no means
disgrace His Satanic Majesty, —

"Thrones and Imperial Powers! Offspring of Heaven,
Ethereal Virtues!"

He has evidently followed some such rule as that
laid down by Cicero, — "Not to compose the intro-
duction first, but to consider first the main argument,
and let that suggest the exordium." Even in these few
lines his resemblance to Satan, his ambitious master
and ruler, is sufficiently obvious.

This essay breaks off abruptly, as if it had been
left unfinished, or had lost portions of itself; as
happened with the next one, — of which only
those pages were left of which the author's later
judgment approved.

[97]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

X. Milton's U Allegro and II Penseroso
Fragments of a Volunteer Essay

(This seems to have been a paper written for
some college society, and not at the request of the
professor or class tutor. Of its fourteen pages only
the fifth and ninth, with the eleventh to the four-
teenth, inclusive (six in all), were left intact; the
first four pages have two thirds of their contents
torn away; while of the seventh and eighth more
than half is gone. Thus nearly a third is missing.
What remains runs well together and is worth pre-
serving, as a genial interpretation of the two charm-
ing youthful poems of Milton, and an indication
that Thoreau had read before January, 1837, the
other authors named, — or enough of them to un-
derstand their tone and drift. Six months before
graduating (the inscribed date), he was nineteen
and a haK years old.)

The precise date of these poems is not known; prob-
ably, however, they were, togethCT with his "Comus"
and "Lycidas," the fruit of those five years of literary
leisure, from 1632 to 1637, which our author is known
to have spent at Horton in Buckinghamshire. They
were first published in 1645; but for nearly a century
obtained but little notice from the lovers of polite lit-
erature, — the Addisons and Popes of the day. They
are thought by Dr. Warton to have been indebted

[98]

COLLEGE ESSAYS

to Handel's music for whatever notice they at last
obtained.

"L'Allegro" is not an efort of poetic genius; but
rather an outpouring of poetic feeling. We have here
a succession of pleasing and striking images, which are
dwelt upon just long enough. The metre is admirably
adapted to the subject. The reader can hardly believe
he is not one of the party tripping it over hill and dale
"on the light fantastic toe." A verse of poetry should
strike the reader as it did the poet, — as a whole, —
not so much the sign of an idea as that idea itself.

"As Imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the Poet's pen
Turns them to shapes."

The parts and members of his verses are equally
appropriate and striking. With the idea comes the
very word; if its sense is not wanted, its sound is.

Lo! the sun is up, the hounds are out; the plowman
has already driven his team afield, and as he gaily
treads the fragrant furrow, his merry whistle is heard
the fields around, responsive to the milkmaid's song, —
who now repairs with pail on head and quick elastic
step, to her humble toil. The mower, too, has com-
menced his labors in the meadow at hand, —

"And evesry shepherd tells his tale
Under the hawthorn in the dale."

Such a picture of rural felicity as is presented in
these and the following lines is rarely to be met with
even in poetry. Fancy has her hands full, -r- a thou-
sand images are flitting before her, bringing with

[99]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

them a crowd of delightful associations; and she is
forced, in spite of herself, to join the revel and thread
the mazes of the dance.

Johnson has well observed in his biographical notice
of Milton, — "No mirth can indeed be found in his
melancholy, but I am afraid that I always meet some
melancholy in his mirth." His mirth wears a pensive
hue; his melancholy is but a pleasing contemplative
mood. The transition from "L' Allegro" to "II Pen-
seroso" is by no means abrupt; the vain deluding joys
which are referred to are not those "unreproved
pleasures " which the poet has just recorded, — for
they are by no means inconsistent with that soft mel-
ancholy which he paints; but they are rather the fickle
pensioners of that Euphrosyne, whose sister graces are
Meat and Drink, — a very different crew from that
which waits upon the "daughter fair" of Zephyr and
Aurora. The latter are content with daylight and a
moderate portion of the night: when tales are done, —

"To bed they creep.
By whispering winds soon lulled asleep."

But the others proceed to evening amusements, and
even to the London theatres, and the "well-trod
stage," — but only

"If Jonson's learned sock be on.
Or sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy's child.
Warble his native wood-notes wild."

Beginning with the warning to idle joys, that they
depart and leave the poet to "divinest Melancholy,"
we soon come to that picture of her, perhaps the finest

[ 100]

COLLEGE ESSAYS

in the whole poenj. A sable stole drawn over her de-
cent shoulders, with slow and measured steps, and looks
that hold "sweet converse with the skies," reflecting
a portion of their own placidness, she gradually draws
near. But lo! the Cherub Contemplation delays her
lingering steps; her eyes upraised to Heaven, the earth
is for a space forgot. Time loiters on his coiu-se, were
it for but a moment; Past, Present, and Future mingle
as one.

[Here a lacuna.]

The picture of Morning in "II Penseroso" differs
greatly from that in "L' Allegro," and introduces that
mention of the storm-wind in a cloudy day, —
"When rocking winds are piping loud," —

a very poetic touch. A later poet, Thomson, attrib-
utes the melancholy sighing of the wind to "the sad
Genius of the coming storm." Gray, too, seems to
have been equally affected by it. "Did you never
observe," he writes, "that pause, as the gust is re-col-
lecting itself, and rising upon the ear in a shrill and
plaintive tone, like the swell of an ^olian harp? I do
assure you there is nothing in the world so like the
voice of a spirit."

We are told that it was while e3q)osed to a violent
storm of wind and rain, attended by frequent flashes
of lightning, among the wilds of Glen Ker, that Bums
compose^ his far-famed song, —

"Scots wha hae with Wallace bled."

Ossian was the child of the storm; its music was ever
grateful to his ear. Hence his poetry breathes through-

[101]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

out a tempestuous spirit, — when read, as it should
be, at the still hour of night, the very rustling of a leaf,
stirred by the impatient reader, seems to his excited
imagination the fitful meanings of the wind, or sigh-
ings of the breeze.

But if Milton's winds rock, they pipe also. Even the
monotony of a summer shower is relieved by the cheer-
ful pattering of "minute drops from off the eaves";
and if the heavens are for a few moments overcast, the
splendors of the succeeding sunshine are heightened
by the contrast.

It is amusing to know that Milton was a performer
on the bass-viol. He is said even to have been a com-
poser, though nothing remains to prove the assertion.
It was his practice, say his biographers, when he had
dined, to play on some musical instrument and make
his wife sing, or sing himself. She, he said, had a good
voice but no ear.

This partiality for the sister Muses is nowhere more
manifest than in these two poems. Whether in a
mirthful or a pensive mood, the linked sweetness of
"soft Lydian airs," the "pealing organ" or the "full
voiced quire," dissolves him into ecstasies.

These poems are to be valued, if for no other reason,
on account of the assistance they afford us in forming
our estimate of the man MUton. They place him in an
entirely new and extremely pleasing light to the reader
who was previously familiar with him as the author of
the "Paradise Lost" alone. If we venerated, we may
now admire and love him. The immortal Milton
seems for a space to have put on mortality; to have

[ 102 ]

COLLEGE ESSAYS

snatched a moment from the weightier cares of Heaven
and Hell, to wander for a while among the sons of
men. But we mistake; though his wings (as he tells us)
were already sprouted, he was content as yet to linger
awhile, with childlike affection, amid the scenes of his
native Earth.

The tenor of these verses is in keeping with the
poet's early life; he was, as he confesses, a reader of
romances, an occasional frequenter of the playhouse,
and not at all averse to spending a cheerful evening
now and then with some kindred spirits about Town.
We see nothing here of the Puritan. The "storied
windows," which were afterward such an abomination
in his eyes, admit a welcome, though sombre light.
The learning of Jonson and the wild notes of Shake-
speare are among the last resources of the mirthful
"L'Allegro."

The student of Milton will ever turn with satisfac-
tion from contemplating the stern nonconformist, and
the bold and consistent defender of civil and religious
liberty, engaged, but not involved, in a tedious and
virulent controversy, —

"With darkness and with dangers compassed round," —

his dearest hopes disappointed, and himself shut out
from the "cheerful light of day," — to these fruits of
his earlier and brighter years. Though of the earth,
yet were they the flights of one who was contemplating
to soar

"Above the Aonian mount," —

a heavenward and unattempted course.

[ 103 I

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

I have not undertaken to writfe a critique. I have
dwelt upon the poet's beauties, and not so much as
glanced at his blemishes. This may be the result of
pure selfishness. Poetry is but a recreation. A pleasing
image or a fine sentiment loses none of its charms,
though Burton or Beaumont and Fletcher, or Mar-
lowe or Sir Walter Raleigh, may have written some-
thing very similar, or even, in another connection,
have used the identical word whose aptness we so
much admire. That always appeared to me a con-
temptible kind of criticism, which can deliberately,
and in cold blood, dissect the sublimest passage, and
take pleasure in the detection of slight verbal incon-
gruities. It was, when applied to Milton, little better
than sacrilege; and those critics who condescended to
practise it, were to be ranked with the parish officers
who, prompted by a profane and mercenary spirit,
tore from their grave, and exposed for sale, what were
imagined to be the remains of Milton.

This is, in fact, an appreciation rather than a
criticism, and one of high merit. So far as it goes,
there are hardly better passages in the essays of
Dr. Channing and of Emerson on Milton, in this
same decade of 1830-40. Thoreau's mention in it
of the pseudo-Ossian of Macpherson, shows that
he, like Napoleon and Lamartine, was early inter-
ested in that mingling of sublimity and fustian
which the canny Highlander imposed on the
world, from his imperfect readings of Gaelic origi-

[ 104 ]

COLLEGE ESSAYS

nals among the folk-lore poems in Scotch and
Irish verse about Fingal and his heroes. While
living at New York in 1843 Thoreau found in a
library the "Genuine Remains" of Ossian. He
made much use of them in a lecture on Poetry
which he was then writing for the Concord Ly-
ceum, where he delivered it late in November,
1843. Some of this came out in the "Week" in
1849.

Once entered upon topics of literature, Thoreau
was in his right path; it was an easy one, and his
essays grew longer, as those of the Seniors are
wont to be. It was not so common then to crowd
the college course with electives, or "voluntaries"
as they were called in Thoreau's day; although he
appears to have chosen more than was then the
customary number. He left Ca,mbridge more or
less qualified to read and write Greek, Latin,
French, German, Italian, and Spanish; and his
English reading had become unusually extensive.
Here is an essay on a complex subject, .such as
Professor Channing delighted to give, — one,
too, that, if dealt with fairly, required much read-
ing by the student.

[105]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

XI. National and Individual Genius

"Show how it is that a Writer's Nationality and Indi-
vidual Genius may be fully manifested in a Play
or other Literary Work, upon a Foreign or Ancient
Subject, — and yet full Justice be done to the
Subject."
Man has been called "a bundle of habits." This
truth, I imagine, was the discovery of a philosopher, —
one who spoke as he thought and thought before he
spoke, — who realized it, and felt it to be, as it were,
literally true. It has a deeper meaning, and admits of a
wider application than is generally allowed. The vari-
ous bundles which we label French, English and
Scotch Tnen, differ only in this, — that while the first
is made up of gay, showy and fashionable habits, —
the second is crowded with those of a more sombre
hue, bearing the stamp of utility and comfort; and
the contents of the third, it may be, are as rugged and
unyielding as their very envelope. The color and tex-
ture of these contents vary with different bundles; but
the material is uniformly the same.

Man is an abstract and general term; it denotes the
genus, — French, English, Scotch, etc., — are but the
differentiae. It is with the genus alone that the philos-
opher and poet have to do. Where, then, shall they
study it? As well here as there, surely, if it be every-
where the same; one may as well view the moon from
Mount iEtna as from the Andes; her phenomena will
be equally obvious, his map equally correct, whatever
the point from which he observed her.

[106]

COLLEGE ESSAYS

But he must look through a national glass. It may
be desirable, indeed, to see clearly with the naked eye;
we should then need no astronomers; yet the same
glass, since a glass we must use, will afford us an
equally accurate view, whatever station we choose.
If our view be affected at all by the quality of the
instrument, the effect will be constant and uni-
form, though our observatories be rolled about upon
wheels.

It would seem then, that an author's nationality
may be equally obvious, and yet full justice be done
to his subject, whether that subject be an ancient or
modern, foreign or domestic one. By "full justice" I
mean that he may do all he intended to do, or that
any one can reasonably expect or require. Nay, fur-
ther, that nationality may be even more striking in
treating of a foreign than a domestic subject; since
what is peculiar and national in the writer, by the side
of what is real history and matter of fact in the de-
scription, will be made the more manifest by the con-
trast. What is peculiar in the French character will
sooner appear in a book of travels than a domes-
tic diary; in his descriptions of foreign scenes and
customs the Frenchman himself will be the most con-
spicuous object. Suppose him to weave these ma-
terials into a novel or poem, — to introduce his inn-
keeper or postilion, — he is fully adequate to his task;
he has only to learn particulars . His must be an induc-
tive method, — the phenomena he observes are to be
referred to a general law.

Is human nature our study, — the humanity of the

[ 107]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

Romans, for instance, — we ourselves, our friends, the
community, are our best text-books. We wish to paint,
perhaps, the old Roman courtier; so far as we know
anything of him, we know him as a man; as possessing
in a greater or less degree, the same faults and virtues
that we observe in men of modern times. Does he pos-
sess different ones, he is a sealed book to us. He is no
longer one of us; we can no more conceive of him, de-
scribe him, class him, than the naturalist can class or
conceive of, — he knows not what; an animal, it may
be, — but he neither walks, swims nor flies, — eats,
drinks nor sleeps, and yet lives.

I come now to speak of that peculiar structure and
bent of mind which distinguishes an individual from
his nation. Much that has already been said will apply
equally well to this part of our subject. In a play or
poem the author's individual genius is distinguished
by the points of character he seizes upon, and the
features most fondly dwelt upon, as well as the peculiar
combination he delights in, and the general effect of
his picture. Into his idea of his fellow enters one half
himself; he views his subject only through himself, and
strange indeed would it be, did not the portrait betray
the medium through which the original was observed.
As the astronomer must use his own eyes, though he
looks through a national glass, not only are we to con-
sider the quality of the lens, but also the condition of
the observer's visual organs. A defect in his sight will
not be made up for by distance, — will be equally
evident, whether it be the instrument itself or the star
to which it points, that is subjected to his scrutiny.

[ 108 ]

COLLEGE ESSAYS

To read history with advantage one must possess,
we are told, a vivid imagination, that he may in a
measure reah'ze and enter into the spirit of the story,
so as to make himself familiar with the scenes and
characters there described. Every one is differently
impressed, and each iinpression bears the stamp of the
individual's taste and genius. < One seizes greedily upon
circumstances which another neglects; one associates
with an event those scenes which witnessed it, — one
grasps the ludicrous, another the marvellous; and thus,
when the taste and judgment come to weave these
conceptions into poetry, their identity is not lost.
Here, then, surely, one's individual genius is fully
manifested.

The original "Sweet Auburn" has been ascertained
to be Lishoy in the county of Westmeath, Ireland.
Though Goldsmith intended to represent an English
village, he took from Lishoy, says his biographer, "only
such traits and characteristics as might be applied to
village life in England, and modified them accordingly.
He took what belonged to human nature in rustic life,
and adapted it'to the allbtted scene. In the same way a
painter takes his models from real life around him, even
when he would pallet a foreign or a classic group." We
may suppose Goldsmith to have written this justly
celebrated poem in the Irish village named, where he
passed his youth. Many of his observations apply
rather, in their full extent, to an Irish than an English
village; but this is a difference not in kind, but degree.
The desolation which was the subject of these verses
was by no means confined to his native country.

[109]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

"lU fares the land, to hastening ills a prey.
Where wealth accumulates and men decay," —

alas ! a truth but too universal in its application.

Has not this author done full justice to his subject?
Let the popularity of his poem answer. Goldsmith is
visible in every line. As to his nationality, I will only
add that the hypercritical have discovered that many
of his descriptions "savor more of the rural scenery
and rustic life of an English than an Irish village";
which is proof enough that what is national makes no
mean figure in the "Deserted Village." D'Israeli,
speaking of Dante, observes; "Every great genius is
influenced by the objects and feelings which occupy
his own times, — only differing from the race of his
brothers by the magical force of his developments; the
light he sends forth over the world he often catches
from the faint and unobserved spark which will die
away and turn to nothing in another hand."

So confident were his commentators that his "In-
ferno" was but an earthly hell after all, that the poem
had no sooner appeared than they set about tracing its
original; which, satisfactorily to their own minds, they
finally discovered. His biographer relates that in the
year 1304, among the novel and diverse sports on an
occasion of public rejoicing, one was, the representa-
tion of the Infernal regions upon a stage of boats on the
Arno at Florence. This, he adds, was the occasion of
the "Inferno." Dante himself has remarked, "I found
the original of my hell in the world which we inhabit."

Shakespeare is justly styled the "poet of nature";
here was the secret of his popularity. His was no ideal

[UO]

COLLEGE ESSAYS

standard, — man was his hobby. It was one of the
characteristics of his genius that it adapted itself to the
reaUty of things, and was on familiar terms with our
feelings. His characters are men, though historically
faulty, yet humanly true; domesticated at once, they
are EngUsh in all but the name.

Now this characteristic is capable of being made
equally manifest, whether his genius be employed
upon an ancient or modem, foreign or domestic sub-
ject. He is as much the poet of nature in the one case
as in the other, — in describing a Roman as a London
mob; in Antony's speech over the dead body of Caesar,
as in the character of Falstaff. Were Antony Percy,
and Percy Antony, —

"There were an Antony
Would ruffle up your spirits," —

and exert perhaps as magical an influence over the
wounds of Caesar and the stones of Rome as did the
true Roman orator.

^--We are told by one author (Pope) that "Invention
is one of the great characteristics of the genius of
Shakespeare." Yet he asks —

"What can we reason but from what we know ?"

This separating Invention from Imagination, as he
does, seems altogether unnecessary, — as another re-
marks," seems to be merely dividing the included from
the including term."

It may be, as Johnson has observed, that "Shake-
speare's adherence to the real story and to Roman
manners has impeded the natural vigor of his genius";

[1111

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

he may have been confined, but he was no less Shake-
speare; though chained he was not tamed. We are not
to compare Shakespeare chained with Shakespeare at
liberty, but Shakespeare in chains with others in the
same condition. A caravan is made up of animals as
distinct in their nature and habits as their fellows of
the forest. I question, in the next place, whether our
Poet's powers of Imagination are less manifest when
employed upon an ancient or foreign subject. Take,
for instance, one of the most powerful passages of his
" Juhus Caesar," beginning —

"But yesterday the word of Caesar might
Have stood against the world: now lies he there,
And none so poor to do him reverence.

0 masters! if I were disposed to stir

Your hearts and minds to mutiny and rage,

1 should do Brutus wrong, and Cassius wrong, —
Who, you all know, are honorable men," etc.

What is there foreign in the sentiment here? To be
sure, the word "Caesar" occurs thrice, "Brutus" and
"Cassius" each once; but they were no impediment,
— no more so, at least, than "Hotspur" or "Mac-
beth" would have been. The individual is merged in
the man.

Is it answered that in the latter case the character
will be well known, and therefore the poet will feel
more at ease, more at home, and under less restraint?
I answer, this very familiarity, though a desideratum
with the biographer, may prove a hindrance to the
poet; facts are so many guideboards, confining him to
a beaten track and leaving no room for Imagination.

Some talk as if this faculty, wearied by a flight to so

I 112]

COLLEGE ESSAYS

distant a scene, would be unable to exhibit its accus-
tomed fertility and vigor: or among so many strange
scenes and faces, being overcome by feelings of ^home-
sickness and loneliness, would lose a great portion of
its energy and creative power. But this objection is
far from applying to Shakespeare. He was, as^e say,
never less alone than when alone. FortunaWiy, his
familiarity with Roman history was not so remarkable
as to multiply guideboards to a troublesome degree; or
supersede the necessity of his judging for himself, or
hazarding a conjecture now and then. Shakespeare is
Shakespeare, whether at home or abroad.

This is what in the dialect of Harvard was
called a "forensic," — implying a discussion in
which the student took sides and argued a case;
and though the questions offered were frequently
trivial or fantastic, they would serve, as in this
example, to bring out the subtlety and love of
contradiction which mingled with Thoreau's clear,
analytic judgment and strong moral sense. It
is perhaps the longest essay in which he considered
Shakespeare, then, as now, a topic for many es-
says, and a favorite theme of the Concord au-
thors. Thoreau had also begun to read Italian,
and had strayed into Dante, though his favorite
poet then was Tasso.

The frequent quotations from Goldsmith and
Johnson show how completely the English liter-

( lis 1

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

ature of the eighteenth century was mastered by
New England; which was so little acquainted with
German books that neither John Adams nor Jef-
ferson, by 1820, knew Goethe even by name,
though John Quincy Adams had become so well
read in German that, a dozen years earlier, he
had versified in English the whole of Wieland's
"Oberon." A few young Americans — Edward
Everett, George Bancroft, George Ticknor, Wil-
liam Emerson, George Calvert, etc. — had made
German literature known at Harvard College and
the Round Hill School; and Carlyle and young
Henry Hedge and George Ripley had made the
study of German attractive to Mrs. Ripley and
Henry Thoreau in Waltham and Concord.

Before the forensic just noticed was written,
Thoreau had more concisely considered Imagina-
tion in its moral aspect as worthy or unworthy
of special culture; and had dwelt on the story-mak-
ing faculty, the "Lust zu fabuliren" so dear to
the childhood of men and of the race. Two rather
fragmentary essays follow.

XII. Imagination as an Element of Happiness

"Whether the Cultivation of the Imagination conduces
to the Happiness of the Individual?"
Man is an intellectual being. Without the least hesi-

[ Ui]

COLLEGE ESSAYS

tation, as well as from the most careful investigation
(if indeed there be any question about it), we are led to
conclude that the Intellect is to be cultivated. Indeed,
the doubt, if any exist, cannot be solved without the
exercise, and consequently the cultivation ofthe intel-
lectual faculties. We could not, if we would, put a stop
entirely and effectually, to their gradual expansion and
development, without offering violence to the organs
through which they act.

It is obviously inconsistent with the design of the
Creator, as observed in the works of creation, that
Man, made capable of comprehending the object of hi^
existence, and of understanding the relation in which
he stands to its Author, should so far neglect the cul-
ture of his peculiar faculties, as to lose his peculiar
privileges as a free agent. The wisdom of the Creator
has ever been the theme of the Christian's admiration
and praise; shall then wisdom for a man's self be re-
jected? In supplying his physical wants Man but
obeys the dictates of Nature's law; shall the intel-
lectual be neglected? If Reason was given us for any
one purpose more than another, it was that we might
so regulate our conduct as to ensure our eternal happi-
ness. The cijltivation of the mind, then, is conducive
to our happiness. But this consists in the cultivation
of its several faculties.

What we call the Imagination is one of these facul-
ties; hence does its culture conduce in a measure to the
happiness of the individual. The Imagination, says
Dugald Stewart, "is the power that gives birth to the
productions of the poet and the painter"; whose prov-

[115]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

ince it is, says another, "to select the parts of diflferent
conceptions, or objects of memory, to form a whole
more pleasing, more terrible, or more awful than has
ever been presented in the ordinary course of nature,"
— a power by no means peculiar to the poet or the
painter.

Whatever the senses perceive or the mind takes
cognizance of, affords food for the Imagination. In
whatever situation a man may be placed, to whatever
straits he may be reduced, this faculty is ever busy.
Its province is unbounded, its flights are not confined
to space; the past and the future, time and eternity all
come within the sphere of its range. This power, al-
most coeval with Reason itself, is a fruitful source of
terror to the child. This it is that suggests to his mind
the idea of an invisible monster, lying in wait to carry
him off, in the obscurity of the night. Whether ac-
quired or not, it is obviously susceptible of a high
degree of cultivation. This fact goes to prove what
was already so evident. Indeed, there are the same
objections to the cultivation of any other faculty of
the intellect as to the one in question.

The mind itself should receive only its due share of
attention; but should the physical powers be neglected,
the fault would rather be a negative than a positive
one. So, too, the mind alone should be well-balanced;
no one power should be cultivated to the neglect of
any power. It is no objection to the study of Mathe-
matics to say that an exclusive devotion to that branch
is sure to render one unfit for the duties of life. Prop-
erly speaking, a faculty of the mind cannot be culti-

[116]

COLLEGE ESSAYS

vated to excess, — the fault lies in the neglect of some
other power. The arm of the smith is not too strong
for his body; he would be wrong to lay aside the ham-
mer and relax the muscles, lest the right arm outstrip
the left.

There is one other consideration which seems to
affect this question. Unlike most other pleasures,
those of the Imagination are not momentary and
evanescent; its powers are rather increased than worn
out by exercise. The old, not less than the young, find
their supreme delight in the building of cob-houses and
air-castles out of these fragments of different concep-
tions. It is not so with the pleasures of sense.

XIII. The Story-Telling Faculty

"The Love of Stories, real or fabulous, in Young and
Old; account for it, and show what good use it
may serve."

One thing can hardly be called more curious than
another; yet all are not equally the objects of our
curiosity. The earth we tread upon is as curious as
the stars we gaze at. "To the thinking mind," says
Irving, "the whole world is enveloped in mystery, and
everything is full of type and portent." We are curi-
ously and wonderfully made, — yet how few, com-
paratively, see anything to admire in the structure
of their own bodies! How then shall we account for
this indifference to what is common, this appetite
for the novel?

By accident, through the medium of the senses

[ 117]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

first, the child is made acquainted with some new
truth. The acquisition of Knowledge (taking the
term in its widest sense) he finds is attended in this
first instance, by a pleasurable emotion. The wisdom
of this provision is obvious. Having experienced the
pleasure, and noted, whether voluntarily or other-
wise, the cause, he delights to examine whatever new
objects may fall in his way: and thus familiar things,
or such as he has already taken notice of, come to
lose their attractions, and grow in a measure disgust-
ing to him. Hence that love of novelty, that passion
for what is strange, or, as the phrase goes, remarkable,
whose influence may be discerned in almost every
act of our lives. But it by no means follows that those
topics most replete with instruction will afford us the
greatest pleasure.

The love of novelty grows with our growth. Not
satisfied with the world around us, we delight to revel
in a world of our own creation. The ideas afforded by
sensation and reflection are seized upon with avidity
by the Imagination, and so combined and arranged
as to form new wholes of surpassing beauty, awful-
ness or sublimity, — as the case may be. It is in the
exercise of this divine faculty that Age finds its readi-
est solace, and Youth its supreme delight. A mutual
interchange of imaginings serves not a little to enlarge
the field of our enjoyment. Tired of our own crea-
tions; too indolent to rear our own castles, the Tale
well told, —

" with many a winding bout
Of linked sweetness long drawn out," —

I 118]

COLLEGE ESSAYS

casts a luxurious, a delicious twilight over the rugged
scenes of life, — reconciles us to the world, to our
friends, — ourselves.

As that appetite is insatiable, so are the sources
whence it may be gratified inexhaustible. When
youth has ripened into manhood, and Care has
stamped the brow, — though the lay may have lost
its charm, which tells of curious things, —

How wise men three of Gotham, in a bowl

Did venture out to sea, —

And darkly hints their awful fate; —

though this be an old story,^ the page of History is
never closed, the Castalian Spring is never dry. The
volume of Nature is ever open; the story of the world
never ceases to interest. The child, enchanted by the
melodies of Mother Goose, — the scholar pondering
" the Tale of Troy Divine," and the historian breath-
ing the atmosphere of past ages, — all manifest the
same passion, are alike the creatures of curiosity.

In fine, the same passion for the novel (somewhat
modified, to be sure) that is manifested in our early
days, leads us in after-life, when the sprightliness
and credulity of youth have given way to the reserve
and skepticism of manhood — to the more serious,
though scarcely less wonderful annals of the world.

Whatever is said or done, seen or heard, — is in
any way taken cognizance of by the senses or the
understanding, — produces its effect, contributes its
mite, to the formation of the character. Every sen-
tence that is framed, every word that is uttered, is
* See the like thought on p. 59.
[119]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

framed or uttered, for good or for evil; nothing is lost.
No auldwife's story is so trivial or so barren as to lack
a moral; nor is the impression it makes as transitory
as "the tale that is told."

These trifling but oft-recurring contributions are,
so to speak, the principles of our principles, — the
underpropping of that moral edifice whose spire pierces
the clouds, and points the way to that glorious Elysium
beyond, the blessed habitation of the Immortals.

The love of Stories and of story-telling cherishes
a purity of heart, a frankness and candor of disposi-
tion, a respect for what is generous and elevated, —
a contempt for what is mean and dishonorable, — a
proper regard /or and independence of the petty trials
of hfe; and tends to multiply merry companions and
never-failing friends.

The fluency and enthusiasm of this essay recalls
to mind that accurate description by Channing
of Thoreau's personality, in which he specifies: —

Eyes expressive of all shades of feeling, but never
weak or near-sighted; the forehead, not unusually
broad or high, full of concentrated energy and pur-
pose; the mouth with prominent lips, pursed up with
meaning and thought when silent; and giving out
when open a stream of the most varied and unusual and
instructive sayings.

Such also was the nature of his writings — va-
ried, unusual, and instructive, beyond those of
most men of his time, and placing him in the same

[ 120 ]

iginality. How early tiiese traits snowea tnem-
ves in his youthful essays will be seen in this
lume, as distinctly, if not so constantly, as in
5 own later writings; comparatively few of which
d the advantage of his own editing. He began
edit early, by tearing out and destroying much
at he had carefully composed; but final editing
mainly missed.

CHAPTER IV

COLLEGE ESSAYS (cOTlcluded)

Literary and Moral, Including the Minor Morals
It is thus far evident that Henry Thoreau, from
his earliest years, had been interested in literature,
and had read copiously, with such access to books
as the small libraries in a small town like Concord,
eighty years ago, had been able to furnish. In
Harvard College he found a larger library, though
it was not to be compared with such as now exist
in our universities and cities. The early American
students at German universities had caused the
introduction in the Eastern States of the better
specimens of German literature; and exiles from
Germany and from Italy had imparted a taste for
the older literatures of the Continental countries.
Henry as a youth profited by this; but still more
by the reviving taste for the Elizabethan poetry
and drama, and the activity of the Scotch and Irish
writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centu-
ries. He used such libraries as he found, not to
cram for college rank, or for prizes at school or
university, — but because of his early and con-
stant devotion to general literature in its many

[ 122 ]

COLLEGE ESSAYS

branches. An essay written by him in March,
1837, will indicate how wide and general his
reading had become before he was twenty.

XIV. Books and. their TiOea

"Name and speak of Titles of Books, either as perti-
nent to their Matter, or merely Ingenious and
Attractive."

When at length, after infinite toil and anxiety, an
author has fairly completed his work, the next, and
by far the most important concern that demands his
attention is the christening. He is about to send forth
his bantling to seek its fortune in the world; and he
feels a kind of parental interest in its welfare, prompt-
ing him to look about for some expressive and euphonic
Title, which at least will secure it a civil treatment
from mankind, and may perchance serve as an intro-
duction to their sincere esteem and regard.

A Title may either be characteristic, consisting
of a single expressive word or pithy sentence, or in-
genious and amusing, so as to catch the fancy or
excite the curiosity. Some (such as "Ivanhoe," for
instance,) although familiarity with its contents may
impart to them an interest not their own, or other
associations render them pleasing to the ear, — seem
to have been adopted as merely or chiefly distinctive;
without any attempt to enlighten the reader upon the
nature of the subject, or to deceive him into a perusal
of the volume. In the infancy of a nation's litera-
ture, when books, like angel's visits, are "few and far

[ 123 1

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

between," their very rarity seems to require that they
should be distinguished by titles equally rare; and not
unusually does it happen that these prove so exceed-
ingly attractive as to cast quite into the shade the
humble volume which they were intended to usher into
notice.

The character of the contents is often quite over-
looked in the desire to make a favorable first impres-
sion; and the author's whole ingenuity is exerted in
the framing of some fanciful or dignified Title, which
will at once recommend his book to the favor of the
reading public. As some fond parents in the lower
walks of life are accustomed to ransack the long
list of departed worthies for sonorous and well-tried
names; or from the cast-off spoils of the novel-heroine
seek to swell the scanty portion which Fortune has
allotted to their offspring.

What can be more alluring than the following
tempting and somewhat luxurious display of verbal
delicacies?

"Paradise of Dainty Devices."

What may be the nature of these "Dainty Devices"
is left to be imagined by the reader, — it being safer
to leave him to his own vague conjectures than to
tell the plain truth at once. Robert Langland, a con-
temporary of Chaucer, taught the fundamental doc-
trines of Christianity in a voluminous poetical work,
entitled "Pierce the Ploughman's Crede." One Wil-
liam is overtaken by sleep among the Malvern Hills,
and in a dream beholds the different classes of society
pursuing their respective avocations upon a spacious

[ 124 ]

COLLEGE ESSAYS

plain before him. He is addressed by various alle-
gorical personages, among whom True Religion and
Reason are the most conspicuous. By Piers Plow-
man is sometimes meant the "true and universal
Church"; at others he is a mysterious personage who
undertakes to guide mankind to the abode of Truth,

— declaring that he has himself long been Truth's
faithful and devoted follower.

Where the uninitiated reader would expect a rude
pastoral or rural ditty, or perhaps an essay on hus-
bandry, nothing is found to repay him for the trouble
of a perusal but obscure and interminable allegories,

"In notes with many. a winding bout
Of liiiked didness long drawn out."

Southwell's " Funeral Tears " is another title of
the same description. The following gives one a slight
insight into the subject, "Abuses Stript and Whipt"

— being a volume of satirical essays; in later times,
"Heliconia," a selection of English poetry of the
Elizabethan agC;, and "Archaica," a reprint of scarce
"Old English Prose Tracts," by Sir Edgerton Brydges.
Davy's "Salmonia," which must have puzzled many,
is also of this description; Our early literature abounds
in such conceited titles as the following: "A Ladder
of Perfection," "A Looking-GlaSs for London and
England," "A Fan to drive away Flies," and "Matches
lighted by the Divine Fire."

One author, through an excess of modesty or
squeamishness, calls a discourse upon the life and
death of an individual, an "Epitaph"; another has

[ 125]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

packed off a quarto with an inexplicable (and there-
fore attractive) title, — "Prayse of the Red Her-
ring." Our ancestors were fond of regarding their
works as so many different centres, from which di-
verged rays of various hues, carrying light and heat
to every quarter, — as choice repositories of learning,
or perennial fountains of amusement; and therefore,
overlooking their general character, gave them col-
lective titles, taken, for the most part, from the anal-
ogy of matter. Some such have already been men-
tioned. "Painter's Palace of Pleasure," "Temple of
Memory," "Coryat's Crudities," etc., are other in-
stances. We may aFso add, "Mirror for Magistrates,"
— a rather odd title for a chronicle History, written
during the reign of Queen Mary, and embracing "The
Lives and untimely Falles of unfortunate Princes
and men of note," from Brutus down.

Not even sober philosophical and grammatical
works have escaped the absurdity of unintelligible
and affected titles. Home Tooke's "Diversions of
Purley" must have disappointed many a desultory
reader in search of amusement. The difficulty is not
removed by the addition of the poetical expletive,
"Epea Pteroenta."

The student has heard of this celebrated treatise,
and he feels a desire to examine it. He has recourse,
perhaps, to the catalogue of some library, which in-
forms him merely that John Home Tooke was the
author of a book called "The Diversions of Purley."
He is somewhat astonished that so learned a philolo-
gist as Mr. Tooke should have condescended to dab-

[ 126]

COLLEGE ESSAYS

ble in light literature, or have sacrificed a moment in
amusements or diversions of any kind.

It cannot be that he is mistaken. Mr. Tooke was
certainly the author of the work he is in quest of.
Perhaps those ill-starred Diversions, however, may
contain a biographical notice of their author, which
will throw some light upon the subject. He examines
and is undeceived. Instead of a Dictionary of Sports,
or a Panegyric on the Delights of Rural Life, he finds
a critical treatise on the English language, display-
ing no small degree of philological learning.

No people have been more prone to these extrava-
gances than the Persians. Mohammad Ebn Emir
Chowand Shah, who fiourished in 1741, was the author
of a voluminous historical work entitled "Hortus
Puritatis in Historia Prophetarum, Regum et Chali-
farum." A Persian-Turkish dictionary bears the
title of " Naamet Allah" or "Delight of Gods." "The
Gulistan," or "Flower-Garden," a collection of moral
fables and apophthegms, by Sheikh Sadi of Shiraz,
being written in an excessively florid style, may aptly
enough be compared to a garden of flowers, or a parcel
of nosegays. We next come upon the ground of the
"Lebtarik or Marrow of History," by the immortal
(so far as his name is conoemed) Al Emir Yahia Ebn
Abdolatif al Kaswini. Abu Said wrote a universal
history from Adam to his own time, under the title
of a "Historical Pearl Necklace."

Revolutions have not been confined to political
institutions and forms of government; not even old
Books nor old Clothes have escaped the all-grasping

[ 127 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

hand of reform. Men have learned that "All is not
gold that glisters." Books have cast off their gaudy
and cumbrous court dresses, and appear, in these
days, in a plain Republican garb. The works of the
philosopher, the poet and the statesman carry no
recommendation upon their backs; nor does a dis-
couraging array of clasps compel the faint-hearted
reader to rely upon outward appearances. Indeed
their Titles, should a perusal warrant it, are con-
cealed by an everyday dress of paper; while their con-
tents are equally accessible to all. It is not a Kttle
remarkable that so few really valuable works have
anything to recommend them in their externals.

Here we come upon the first indication of that
interest in Persian and Oriental literature which
for years was so noticeable in the writings of Tho-
reau, as in those of Emerson. Quite possibly Emer-
son had inspired this taste in his young townsman,
whom he in this year began to know as a keeper of
Journals and a thinker of thoughts. The anec-
dote is familiar, and I had it from more than one
authority, but I will relate it as Emerson himself
gave it to me, in one of those many conversations
in which Thoreau was the topic.

My first intimacy with Henry began after his grad-
uation in 1837. Mrs. Brown, Mrs. Emerson's sister
from Plymouth, then boarded with Mrs. Thoreau
and her children in the Parkman house, where the

[ 128 ]

LUCY C. (JACKSON) BROWN

COLLEGE ESSAYS

Library now stands, and saw the young people every
day. She would bring me verses of Henry's, — the
"Sic Vita," for instance, which he had thrown into
Mrs. Brown's window, tied round a bunch of violets
gathered in his walk, — and once a passage out of
his Journal, which he had read to Sophia, who spoke
of it to Mrs. Brown as resembling a passage in one of
my Concord lectures. He always looked forward to
authorship as his work in life, and fitted himself for
that. Finding he could write prose so well, — and he
talked equally well, — he soon gave up much verse-
writing, in which he was not patient enough to make
his lines smooth and flowing.

Thoreau's own opinion was not exactly the
same on that point. He told me in his last illness
that he had destroyed many of his early verses
because Emerson criticised them; this he had since
regretted, for perhaps they were better than his
friend had thought them. Some of these lost
verses seem to have been preserved by friends to
whom he had given them in their early forms; and
in different connections from those in which he
afterwards preserved stanzas that he thought good
enough to print; I shall have more to say on this
matter of verse-writing, when I come to speak
of his published verses, — many of which Emer-
son would have withheld from publication.

It may be remarked, in passing, that the Arabic
[ 129 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

or Persian custom of styling a collection of short,
serious pieces a "Flower-Garden" has its example"
in Greek literature, though perhaps borrowed
from the Semitic races. The famous Greek An-
thology was meant to be a flower-garland of
verses; and it began with a small collection made
by Meleager of Galilee; and that monk of the
Jordan Valley, John Moschus, who collected ten
score of monkish legends in the seventh Christian
century, called his quaint prose anthology a
" Leimonarion" or "Flowery Meadow," — in
Latin, "Pratum Spirituale"; a work as popular
before a.d. 1200, as the "Fioretti" of St. Francis
were after that date. Thoreau would have re-
joiced in John Moschus, if he had but known
him; and so would Emerson; they got no nearer
to him than to Synesius, who is 'one of the char-
acters in one of John's folk-tales of the fifth
Christian century.

A year before the essay last given (March,
1836) Thoreau produced and preserved an essay
on —

XV. American Literature

"Advantages and Disadvantages of Foreign Influence
on American Literature."
The nations of the Old World have each a litera-
ture peculiarly its own. Theirs is the growth of cen-

[ 130 ]

COLLEGE ESSAYS

turies; successive ages have contributed to form its
character and mould its features. They may be said
to have grown up and become matured; the early
centuries of our Era presided over their infancy; and
in some instances their origins may be traced back
far into the fabulous ages that precede the foundation
of Rome.

Spain is the land of Romance; the character of her
literature may be seen in that of almost every cen-
tury of her history; her youth was passed in deeds of
chivalry, or dozed away in the luxurious halls of the
Alhambra. The taste for knight-errantry, for adven-
ture and song, which forms the characteristics of her
maturer years, is but a spice of the Moorish charac-
ter. France has had her troubadours; and her vintager
still sings his evening hymn. The advancement of
her Uterary interests was made a public concern as
early as 1634, when Cardinal de Richelieu, the founder
of the French Academy, reigned with despotic sway,
not only over the King, court and people, but also
over the language.

We of New England are a peculiar people: we whis-
tle, to be sure, our national tune; but the character of
our literature is not yet established. Ours is still in
the gristle, and is yet receiving those impressions from
the parent literature of the mother-country which are
to mould its character. Utility is the rallying word
with us; we are a nation of speculators, stockholders
and money-changers. We do everything by steam,
because it is most expeditious, and cheapest in the
long run; we are continually racking our brains to

[131 J

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

invent a quicker way or a cheaper method of doing
this or that. The question with us is, whether a book
will take, — will sell well; not whether it is worth
taking or worth selling. The purchaser asks the price,
— looks to the binding, the paper or the plates, —
without learning the contents. The Press is daily send-
ing forth its thousands and tens of thousands; for the
publisher says 't is profitable.

To judge from appearances rather than facts, to
mistake the profitable for the useful, are errors inci-
dent to youth; but we are fast hardening into the
bone of manhood. Our literature, though now de-
pendant, in some measure, on that of the mother-
country, must soon go alone. Its future eminence
must depend upon its bringing-up; upon the impres-
sions it now receives, and the principles it imbibes:
how important, then, that these impressions and
these principles be of a manly and independent char-
acter!

We are, as it were, but colonies. True, we have de-
clared our independence, and gained our liberty; but
we have dissolved only the political bonds which con-
nected us with Great Britain: though we have re-
jected her tea, she still supplies us with food for the
mind. Milton and Shakespeare, Cowper and Johnson,
with their kindred spirits, have done and are still doing
for us as much for the advancement of literature and
the establishment of a pure and nervous language,
on this side, as on the other side of the water. They
are as much venerated, and their works are as highly
prized by us as by our English brethren: and who

[ 132 ]

COLLEGE ESSAYS

will say that the influence they have exerted has been
prejudicial to our literary interests?

Our national pride has been roused by the perusal
of sundry journals and books of travel, purporting to
contain faithful descriptions of men and manners in
America: the remarks of English and Scotch reviewers
have, in various instances, induced us to be more
careful in the use of language, and to discard much
that is superfluous or provincial in our vocabulary.
We are not totally indifferent with regard to the no-
tice which the soi-disant critics of Eiu"ope have con-
descended to take of our literature: and though we
may affect to overlook their cutting remarks, or re-
gard them but as the sallies of envy and calumny;
still we feel that they are not entirely without foun-
dation. The more cuffs and hard knocks we sustain,
the more robust and manly we grow. Each successive
defeat afforded the Carthaginians new lessons in the
art of war, till at length Rome herself trembled at
their progress.

Our respect for what is foreign, on the other hand,
has a tendency to render us blind to native merit,
and lead us into a servile adoration of imported genius.
We afford but little encouragement to that which is of
domestic manufacture, but prefer to send out our raw
material, that it may pass through a foreign mill.
The aspirant for fame must breathe the atmosphere
of foreign parts, and learn to talk about things which
the homebred student never dreamed of, if he would
have his talents appreciated, or his opinion regarded
by his countrymen. Then will they dwell on every

[ 133 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

word he utters, watch the cut of his coat, the cock of
his hat, — ape his pronunciation and manners, and
perhaps honor him with a public dinner.

Ours are authors 0/ the day; they bid fair to outlive
their works: they are too fashionable to write for
posterity: what the public seizes on with avidity to-
day, ceases to interest it to-morrow, when the charm
of novelty has worn off. Particular styles and sub-
jects have each in their turn engaged the attention
of the literati.

How much ink has been shed, how much paper
wasted, in imitations of Ossian, while the productions
of Macpherson lie neglected on our shelves ! The dev-
otee of literary fashion is no stranger to our shores.
True, there are some amongst us who can contem-
plate the babbling brook without (in imagination)
polluting its waters with a mill-wheel; but even they
are prone to sing of skylarks and nightingales, perched
on hedges, to the neglect of the homely robin-red-
breast, and the straggling rail-fence of their own na-
tive land.

Some triteness of phrase apart, it would be hard
for an American eighty years later to give a sounder
verdict than this one, which was rendered by a
youth not yet nineteen, in the days when Irving,
Cooper, Bryant, and the travelled exquisites
Longfellow and Willis were our popular authors;
with Bancroft and the Everetts, and a few clergy-
men in the background, and Hawthorne and Poe

[ 134]

COLLEGE ESSAYS

not yet attracting notice. With Emerson's "Na-
ture," issued in a small edition later in the year
1836, the "North American Review" dealing
with criticism, and Clay and Webster for orators,
the United States faced a frowning world, and
endured the assaults of Colonel Hamilton, Words-
worth's English neighbor, and Mrs. TroUope, the
mother of two good novelists. Lowell and Holmes
were yet scarcely known as poets; and Jefferson
and the Adamses with Madison and Alexander
Hamilton ranked high among political writers.
The Concord school of authors, along with those
extremes of the literary class. Dr. Channing and
the wayward Poe, were soon to declare boldly our
literary independence of England, making us
allies and no longer colonists.

It is now time to present some of those youth-
ful essays of Thoreau, in which his expanding
experience and his wider reading began to ex-
hibit those more virile intellectual traits which
have long been recognized in everything he pub-
lished, and in the wealth of his writings given to
the world in the half-century since he ceased to
write. The present essays were never designed
for publication, except on that limited scale which
college exercises then allowed; when college mag-
azines hardly existed, and prize essays seldom

[ 135 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

appeared in print. These manuscripts were pre-
served by the author, probably because he saw
in them some fitness for survival — some germs
or aspects of thought, to which he might need to
recur in later years. Out of less than fifty such
papers, which had accumulated during his last
three years at Cambridge, he kept by him and
left to his family about thirty; including his
Commencement Essay, which in its chirography
exhibited the greatest care and fastidious neat-
ness among some thousands of manuscript pages
that have passed under my eye, first and last,
from his pen. He wrote every word with those
untiring fingers; he never had an amanuensis un-
til in the last few weeks of his illness; and would
often write the same passage three and four times
over. Each one of these early essays — all writ-
ten before he was twenty, and the earliest ones
in the unformed handwriting of a boy — has
some merit, were it only a certain quaintness
peculiar to himself; while most of them show a
concise expression singular in one so young, and
so ready with tongue or pen. Here is a meta-
physical chapter which differs from anything'yet
presented. Its date is May 5, 1837, two months
before his college residence ended.

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COLLEGE ESSAYS

XVI. The Superior and the Common Man

"Paley, in his 'Natural Theology,' Chap. 23, speaks
of minds utterly averse to 'the flatness of be-
ing content with common reasons,' and consid-
ers the highest minds 'most liable to this repug-
nancy.'
"See the passage, and explain the moral or intel-
lectual defect."
Turgot has said, — "He that has never doubted the
existence of Matter, may be assured he has no apti-
tude for metaphysical inquiries." It would seem as if
doubt and uncertainty grew with the growth of the
intellect, and strengthened with its strength. The
giant intellect, it is true, is for a season borne along
with the tide; the opinion and prejudice of the mass are
silently acquiesced in; the senses are for a while the
supreme arbiters, from whose decision there is no ap-
peal. Mystery is yet afar off; it is but a cloud in the
distance, whose shadow, as it flits across the land-
scape, gives a pleasing variety to the scene. But as the
perfect day approaches, its morning light discovers the
dark and straggling clouds, which at first skirted the
horizon, assembling as at a signal, and as they expand
and multiply rolling slowly onward to the zenith; till
at last the whole heavens, if we except a faint glimmer-
ing in the east, are overshadowed.

The earth was once firm beneath the feet; but, now
it affords only a frail support, — its solid surface is as
yielding and elastic as air. The grass grew and the
water ran, — and who so blind as to question their

[ 137]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

reality? A feeling of loneliness comes over the soul, —
for these things are now of the Past.

This is the season of probation; but the time ap-
proaches, and is now at hand, when the glorious bow
shall rise on the lurid rear of the tempest, — the sun
laugh jocundly abroad, and

"Every bathed leaf and blossom fair
Pour out its soul to the delicious air."

The embryo philosopher seeks the sunny side of the
hill, or the grateful coolness of the grove, — he in-
stinctively bares his bosom to the zephyr, that he may,
with the less inconvenience, discuss the reality of out-
ward existences. No proposition is so self-evident as
to escape his suspicion, nor yet so obscure as to with-
stand his scrutiny. He acknowledges but two distinct
existences. Nature and Spirit; all things else which his
obstinate and self-willed senses present to him, are
plainly, though unaccountably absurd. He laughs
through his tears at the very mention of a mathe-
matical demonstration. There is a flatness about what
is common that at once excites his ridicule or disgust.
He goes abroad into the world, and hears men assert
and deny in positive terms, — and he is astounded, he
is shocked, — he perceives no meaning in their words
or their actions. He recognizes no axioms, he smiles at
reason and common sense; and sees truth only in the
dreams and superstitions of mankind.

And yet, — he but carries out principles which men
practically admit every day of their lives. Most, nay,
all acknowledge a few mysteries; some things, they
admit, are hard to understand, but these are compara-

[138]

COLLEGE ESSAYS

lively few; and could they but refer them back one
link in the chain of causes and effects the diflBculty
would at once be removed. Our philosopher has a
reasonable respect for the opinions of men, but this
respect has not power to blind his judgment; taking,
as he does, an original view of things, he innocently
confounds the manifest with the mysterious. That
such was the common reason was, properly enough, in
the first place no recommendation with him, and is
now a positive objection.

What is more common than error? Some seeming
truths he has clung to, as the strongholds of certainty,
till a closer investigation induced mistrust. His confi-
dence in the infallibility of Reason is shaken; his very
existence becomes problematical. He has been sadly
deceived, and experience has taught him to doubt, to
question even the most palpable truths. He feels that
he is not secure till he has gone back to their most
primitive elements, and taken a fresh and unprejudiced
view of things. He builds for himself, in fact, a new
world.

For the opinions of the few, the persecuted, the
dreamers of the world, he has a peculiar respect; he is
prepossessed in their favor. Man does not wantonly
rend the meanest tie that binds him^to his fellows; he
would not stand aloof even in his prejudices, did not
the stern demands of Truth, backed by conviction,
require it. He is ready enough to float with the tide;
and when he does stem the current of popular opinion,
sincerity at least must nerve his arm.

He has not only the burden of proof, but that of

[139]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

reproof to support. We may call him a fanatic, an
enthusiast, — but these are titles of honor; they sig-
nify the devotion and entire surrender of himself to his
cause. Where there is sincerity is truth also. So far
as my experience goes, man never seriously maintained
an objectionable principle, doctrine or theory. Error
never had a sincere defender; her disciples were never
enthusiasts. This is strong language, I confess; but I
do not rashly make use of it. We are told that "to err
is human," but I would rather call it inhuman, —
if I may use the word in that sense. I speak not
of those errors that have to do with facts and occur-
rences, but rather, errors of judgment. Words, too,
I would regard as mere signs of ideas. That pas-
sage in the "Vicar of Wakefield" which Johnson pro-
nounced fine, but which Goldsmith was wise enough
to strike out, previous to publication, must be taken
in a very liinited sense. "When I was a young man,"
he wrote, "I was perpetually starting new propositions;
but I soon gave that over, for I found that, generally,
what was new was false."

At best, we can but say of a common reason, that
men do not dispute it. True, they defend it when at-
tacked, for if they did not, Beason never would. This
is well explained by Gray, when he undertook to ac-
count for the popularity of Shaftesbury; "Men are
very prone, " he says, "to believe what they do not
understand; they will believe anything at all, pro-
vided they are under no obligation to believe it; they
love to take a new road, even when that road leads
nowhere."

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COLLEGE ESSAYS

The mingling here of poetic thought with para-
doxical argument must have struck the ordinary
college professor with surprise and horror, per-
haps a little softened with amusement. It is a
good introduction to those deeper paradoxes
with which Thoreau afterwards startled and
stumbled his early readers. I ascribe this aroused
and confused condition of his mind to the atmos-
phere of Transcendentalism then beginning to
encircle a small part of New England; and to
the strong impression made on the young idealist
by a few persons, about this time; by Orestes
Brownson, for example, with whom he had lived
for some months the preceding winter in the sub-
urban town of Canton, where Thoreau taught a
village school during the long vacation, specially
arranged for college students to earn a little
money, by teaching here or there. Garrison, also,
whose anti-slavery doctrines Thoreau's family
had accepted already, and Emerson most of all
were influences.

Emerson's first book, "Nature," his young
townsman had read soon after it came out in
1836. The ferment in the mind of thoughtful
youth, something like that so passionately por-
trayed in Carlyle's "Sartor Resartus," must be
taken into account, in explaining the mental state

[ 141 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

of the contemporaries of such active agents in
putting old routine to flight, in the years from
1833 to 1840. The fondness of Thoreau for a
joke, a quiz, may also be considered in constru-
ing these astonishing phrases.

The next essay, written six weeks before that
which I have cited and commented, may be
called —

XVII. The Sublimity of Death

"The thunder's roll, the lightning's flash, the billow's
roar, the earthquake shock, all derive their dread
sublimity from Death. Examine this theory."

"Whatever," says Burke, "is fitted in any sort to
excite the ideas of pain and danger, — that is to say,
whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about
terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to
terror, — is a source of the Sublime. Indeed, terror is,
in all cases whatsoever, either more openly or latently,
the ruling principle of the Sublime."

Hence Obscurity, Solitude, Power, and the like, so
far as they are fitted to excite terror, are sources of the
Sublime. This is a theory far more satisfactory than
that which we are about to examine. Burke does not
make death the source of terror, but rather pain, —
using the word in its broadest sense.

Death itself is sublime. It has all the attributes of
sublimity, — Mystery, Power, Silence, — a sublimity
which no one can resist; which may be heightened, but

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COLLEGE ESSAYS

cannot be equalled by the thunder's roll or the can-
non's peal. But yet, though incomparably more awful,
this is the same sublimity that is ascribed to the tu-
mult of the troubled ocean, — the same in kind,
though different in degree, — depending for its effect
upon the same principles of our nature, though affect-
ing us more powerfully and universally. To attribute
the two to different principles is not only unphilosoph-
ical, but manifestly unnecessary.

We shrink with horror from attributing emotions so
exalted and unearthly and, withal, so flattering to our
natur^,n:o an abject fear of death. We would fain
believe that the immortals, who know no fear, nor ever
taste of death, can sympathize with us poor worldlings
in our reverence for the Sublime; that they listen to
the thunder's roar, and behold the lightning's flash,
with emotions similar to our own. We do believe it; we
have so represented it. The sublimity of the conflict
on the plains of Heaven, between the rebel angels and
the Almighty's loyal bands, as described by Milton,
was not lost upon the spirits engaged in it. Raphael,
who recounts the particulars of the fight to our fore-
father Adam, describes the Messiah as riding sublime
"on the wings of cherub" —

"On the crystalline sky, in sapphire throned.
Illustrious far and wide."

Nor could he have been entirely unconscious of the
emotion in question, when he compared the combat
between Satan and Michael to the meeting of two
planets; as if, to use his own expression, —

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HENRY DAVID THOREAU

"Among the constellations wax were sprung.
Two planets, rushing from aspect malign
Of fiercest opposition, in mid sky
Should combat, and their jarring spheres confound."

Who can contemplate the hour of his birth, or reflect
on the obscurity and darkness from which he then
emerged into a still more mysterious existence, without
being powerfully impressed with the idea of sublimity?
Shall we derive this sublimity from death?

Nay, further, — can anything be conceived more
sublime than that second birth, the Resurrection? It
is a subject which we approach with a kind of rever-
ential awe. It has inspired the sublimest efforts of the
poet and the painter. The trump which shall awake
the dead is the creation of poetry; but (to follow out
the idea) will its sound excite in us no emotion? or will
the Blessed, whom it shall summon to forsake the
mouldering relics of mortality, and wing their way to
brighter and happier worlds, listen with terror or indif-
ference? Shall he who is acknowledged while on earth
to have a soul for the sublime and beautiful in nature,
hereafter, when he shall be all soul, lose this divine
privilege? Shall we be indebted to the body for emo-
tions which would adorn Heaven? And yet there are
some who will refer you to the casting off of this "mor-
tal coil " as the beginning and, I may add, the consum-
mation of all this.

We can hardly say that fear is a source of the sub-
lime. It may be indispensable, it is true, that a certain
degree of awe should enter into the admiration with
which we listen to the billow's roar or the howling of

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COLLEGE ESSAYS

the storm. We do not tremble with fright; but the
calm which comes over the soul is like that which pre-
cedes the earthquake. It is a pleasure of the highest
kind to behold a mighty river, rolling impetuously, and
as it were blindly onward, to the edge of the precipice,
where for successive ages it plunges headlong to the
bottom, — roaring and foaming in its mad career, and
shaking the solid earth by its fall: but it is not ]*oy that
we experience: it is pleasure mingled with reverence,
and tempered with humility.

Burke has said that "terror is in all cases whatso-
ever, either more openly or latently, the ruling princi-
ple of the sublime." Alison says as much, but Stewart
advances a very different theory. The first would
trace the emotion in question to the influence of pain,
and of terror, which is but an apprehension of pain. I
would make that ruling principle an inherent respect
or reverence, which certain objects are fitted to com-
mand; which reverenqe, as it is altogether distinct
from, so shall it outlive that terror to which he refers,
and operate to exalt and distinguish us, when fear
shall be no more.

Whatever is grand, wonderful or mysterious may be
a source of the sublime. Terror inevitably injures, and
if excessive may entirely destroy its effect. To the
coward the cannon's peal, the din and confusion of the
fight, are not sublime, but rather terrible; the calm
and self-collected alone are conscious of their sub-
limity. Hence, indeed, are they supplied with courage
to sustain the conflict. To fear is mortal; angels may
reverence. The child manifests respect ere it has ex-

[ 145 1

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

perienced terror. The Deity would be reverenced, not
feared.

Hence it is that the emotion in question is so often
attended by a consciousness of our own littleness; we
are accustomed to admire what seemeth difficult or be-
yond our attainment. But to feel conscious of our own
weakness is not positively unpleasant, unless we com-
pare ourselves with what is incapable of commanding
our respect or reverence; and consequently is not a
source of the sublime. Grandeur, of some kind or
other, must ever enter into our idea of the sublime.
Niagara would still retain her sublimity, though her
fall should be reduced many feet; but the puny moun-
tain-stream must make up in depth of fall for what it
lacks in volume.

What is more grand than mystery? The darker it is,
the grander it grows. We habitually call it great.
Burke has well remarked that divisibility of matter is
sublime; its very infinity makes it so. Infinity is the
essence of sublimity.

Whatever demands our admiration or respect is in
a degree sublime. It is true nothing could originally
demand our respect which was not at the same time
capable in a greater or less degree, of exciting our fear;
but this does not prove fear to be the source of that
respect. Nothing, on the other hand, of which we
stand in awe, is an object of our contempt; yet the
source of our contempt is not, surely, indifference, or a
feeling of security. It will be enough merely to advert
to the immense influence which the association of
ideas exerts.

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COLLEGE ESSAYS

Burke's theory would extend the emotions which the
Sublime excites, to the brute creation. They suffer
pain, they experience terror, they possess the faculty
of memory; and philosophers have ascribed to them
imagination and judgment. Why may not, then, the
brute hearken with rapture to the thunder's peal, or,
in the depth of the forest enjoy the grandeur of the
storm? But the brute knows not that peculiar rever-
ence for what is grand, whether in nature or in art, or in
thought or in action, which is the exclusive birthright
of the lord of creation. There is an infinity in the
mystery, the power and grandeur, which concur in the
Sublime, — the abstract nature of which is barely
recognized, though not comprehended, by the human
mind itself. Philosophers, it is true, have ascribed to
brutes "devotion, or respect for superiors"; but, so to
speak, this is a respect grounded on experience. It is
practical or habitual, not the fruit of abstract reflec-
tion, nor does it amount to the recognition of any
moral superiority.

But to some it may appear that this reverence for
the Grand, if I may so style it, is not an original prin-
ciple of our nature, — that it originates in fear.

I answer, If this is not, neither is Fear. Nay, more,
— the former is a principle more universal in its oper-
ation, more exalting and ennobling in its influence : and
is, besides, so superior and at variance with fear, that
we cannot for a moment derive it from the latter.

The philosopher sees cause for wonder and aston-
ishment in everything, — in himself and in all around
him; he has only to reflect that he may admire. Terror

[ 147]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

avoids reflection, though reflection alone can restore to
calmness and equanimity. How regard, respect, rev-
erence can grow out of fear is, I must confess, incom-
prehensible. We reverence greatness, moral and inteh-
lectual; the giant intellect is no sooner recognized than
it demands our homage. Moral greatness calls for the
admiration of the depraved, even.

The emotion excited by the Sublime is the most un-
earthly and godlike we mortals experience. It depends
for the peculiar strength with which it takes hold on
and occupies the mind, upon a principle which lies at
the foundation of that worship which we pay to the
Creator himself. And is fear the foundation of that
worship? is fear the ruling principle of our religion? Is
it not, rather, the mother of superstition?

Yes, — that principle which prompts us to pay an
involuntary homage to the Infinite, the Incomprehen-
sible, the Sublime, forms the very basis of our religion.
It is a principle implanted in us by our Maker, — a
part of our very selves. We cannot eradicate it, we
cannot resist it; fear may be overcome, death may be
despised; but the Infinite, the Sublime, seize upon the
soul and disarm it. We may overlook them, or, rather,
fall short of them; we may pass them by, — but so
sure as we meet them face to face, we yield.

This is properly a forensic. In it young Tho-
reau argues, at first rather technically, but finally
with earnestness and conviction, for what was
through life the foundation of his philosophy and
his religion. He used here the language of the old

[ 148]

COLLEGE ESSAYS

believers, and the fictions of Milton, more fa-
miliarly than he would have done twenty years
later, because he was arguing in the midst of old
believers; but the fundamental ideas were those
which he steadfastly maintained, with or against
friend or foe. Channing said of him in 1873: —

The high moral impulse never deserted him, and he
resolved early (1851) to read no book, take no walk,
undertake no enterprise, but such as he could endure
to give an account of to himself.

In this essay, the longest of this moral and
religious sort which I find in these collegiate
papers, we see how early these serious questions
addressed therhselves to his conscience, and how
soon he settled the bases of his religion. This
turn of spirit drew from several of his family some
question and remonstrance, — from Helen, his
sister, perhaps first; but it was encouraged by
Emerson, with, whom about this time (March,
1837) his closer intimacy began. It was from
early intimacy with his young friend's spirit, as
well as from their long friendship in after years,
that Emerson said in his funeral eulogy, which he
insisted should be given in the parish church: —

He was a person of a rare, tender, and absolute reli-
gion; a person incapable of any profanation, by act or
by thought.

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HENRY DAVID THOREAU

Thoreau would not perhaps have used in later
years those forms of Miltonic expression that
came so naturally to his pen in these college years;
but surely there was in him that innate rever-
ence which was so marked a quality of his Greek
tutor at Harvard, Jones Very, the recluse poet,
whose religious verse has found a German trans-
lator and been published in Vienna, of all places
in the world. Conformity, to be sure, was much
more in Very's nature than in Thoreau's. How
Henry expressed himself about that decorous
virtue, may be seen in this short essay of May 15,
1837: —

XVIII. Conformity in Things Unessential

"The clock sends me to bed at ten, and makes me rise
at eight. I go to bed awake, and arise asleep; but
I have ever held conformity one of the arts of
life; and though I might choose my own hours, I
think it proper to follow theirs." (Mrs. E. Mon-
tagu's Letters.)
"Speak of the duty, inconvenience, and dangers of

Conformity, in little things and great."
Neither natural nor revealed religion affords any
rules by which we may determine the comparative
enormity of different vices, or the comparative excel-
lence of different virtues.

The Hebrew Code, which Christ came not to destroy
but to fulfil, makes no such distinction; vice, under

[ 150]

COLLEGE ESSAYS

whatever form, is condemned in positive and unquali-
fied terms. We are told, in our Savior's exposition of
the Law, that one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass
from the law until all be fulfilled; and "Whosoever
shall break one of the least Commandments, and shall
teach men so, shall be called least in the Kingdom of
Heaven."

So far, too, as man has deduced a moral code from a
philosophical study of Nature, her design and opera-
tions, — our remark will hold good of that also. The
idea appears to be a prevalent one that Duty consists
in certain outward acts, whose performance is more or
less obligatory under different circumstances, though
it can never be entirely neglected with impunity; and
consequently that one duty may interfere with an-
other; and that there may be situations in which a man
cannot possibly avoid the violation of duty. This
arises, I think, from confining duty to the outward act,
instead of making it consist in conformity to the dic-
tates of an inward arbiter, in a measure independent of
Matter, and its relations. Time and Space. Duty is one
and invariable; it requires no impossibilities, nor can
it ever be disregarded with impunity. So far as it ex-
ists, it is binding, and if all duties are binding, so as on
no account to be neglected, how can one bind stronger
than another?

So far, then, as duty is concerned, we may entirely
neglect the distinction of little things and great. Mere
conformity to another's habits or customs is never,
properly speaking, a duty, though it may follow as a
natural consequence of the performance of Duty.

[151]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

The fact that such is the general practice of mankind
does not affect a question of duty. I am required, it is
true, to respect the feelings of my neighbor, within the
limits of his own estate; but the fear of displeasing the
world ought not in the least to influence my actions.
Were it otherwise, the principal avenue to Reform
would be closed.

The italicized clause above is cancelled in the
copy before me, — the only one existing in Tho-
reau's manuscript, — which is a more careless
draft than usual, containing several emendations
in the text. These appear to have been made
after it was returned by the professor to the stu-
dent; and all the changes appear to be Thoreau's
own. It seems by this text that "Reform" had
become an important object in the view of this
young Senior Sophister; as it was in the fervent
thought of his friend Brownson, then a "Loco-
foco Democrat" and not yet a Catholic priest;
in that of Garrison, the friend of his family; and
in the musings of Bronson Alcott, who had
now begun to visit Emerson in his retirement at
Concord, and must soon have met this collegian
there. The first visit of Alcott to Concord was
in 1835, on the very day that Garrison was
mobbed at ScoUay Square in Boston, and com-
mitted to the county jail by Mayor Lyman, to

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COLLEGE ESSAYS

save his life from the mob. Returning in his
chaise from Concord that September evening,
Alcott went to call on his persecuted friend in
the Leverett Street jail — to renew the pledge
he had given Garrison in 1831, when he began
to publish the "Liberator," which weekly visited
the Thoreau household, wherever it might dwell
in the village.

Not long after the date of this brief essay,
Emerson wrote to President Quincy, of Harvard,
asking some favor from the dispensers of college
benefactions toward his young friend, who al-
ready had enjoyed the income of an old Chelsea
estate, whose rent had come successively to the
brothers William and Waldo Emerson while they
were in Harvard, fifteen or twenty years before.
It had been for a century or more in the gift of
the Second Church in Boston, of which Emer-
son's father had been the pastor; and the bene-
ficiary was expected to collect his own rents,
unless a deacon of the church volunteered to do
that. Thoreau explained to me one day at his
mother's table through what obstacles of dogs
and delays he had gathered in his rents at Rom-
ney Marsh, the old name of that seashore dis-
trict. Emerson's request to Quincy was for
something other than this, and resulted in an

[ 153]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

"exhibition" (the technical term) of $25, which,
said the old President, was "within $10, or at
most $15, of any sum he would have received,
had no objection been made." This objection
showed that Thoreau had been less attentive to
college requirements than the immediate watch-
men of his college life thought needful. When
I asked Marston Watson, of Plymouth, who was
Sophomore while Thoreau was Senior, what he
knew of the Concord youth in college, he replied
that he remembered him at the Chapel in a
green coat, "green, I suppose, because the rules
required black," — implying that even then he
was, like my clerical ancestor in England under
Laud, a "notorious inconformist."

Earlier in the year (February, 1837) and while
Caleb Cushing and the Whig Party in Massa-
chusetts were still passing anti-slavery resolu-
tions at the State House, with the approval of
Daniel Webster, Thoreau discussed in an essay
the issue of sectional versus national politics,
which had roused debate at Washington, and
called forth the stubborn independence of John
Quincy Adams, then a Congressman from the
Quincy district. Here it is: —

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COLLEGE ESSAYS

XIX. Provincial Americans

"Speak of the Characteristics which, either humor-
ously or reproachfully, we are in the Habit of
ascribing to the People of different Sections of our
own Country,"
Nationality is not necessarily nor strictly speaking
an aggregate of individualities, — any further than
words are concerned. A people, to be sure, may
be peculiarly industrious, — distinguished from their
neighbors in that respect, in the same manner that an
individual is; but usually, when we reckon industry
among the characteristics of a people, we refer not to
any peculiarity in that industry, but to its prevalence.
When, on the other hand, we say of an individual that
he is a shrewd man, no peculiarity is implied; so that
unless we coin an epithet for the occasion, we are fain
to call him a peculiarly shrewd man. This may teach
us how far the knowledge of a nation's characteristics
should influence our judgment of individuals. In the
first place we are to consider that the individual before
us may be one of the few who, constituting but a small
item in the national character, were not taken into the
account; and in the second place, that, of the majority,
not a single individuality can be embraced or implied.
Add to this the fact that such characteristics may gen-
erally be traced to the Journal of some traveller, who
has taken a hasty and partial survey of but one
section of a country, and are often the mere echo
of previous prejudices, — and we shall be able to
judge how slight the probability is that the so-called

[ 155 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

characteristics of a people have any foundation in
truth.

It is not a little curious to observe how Man, the
boasted Lord of Creation, is the slave of a name, — a
mere sound. Cassius was not the first to note this. The
distinction of classes in a college affords an instance of
it. If a multitude be collected from all quarters, and
of every condition, and a common name be given them,
a powerful sympathy will immediately spring up ; which
in time will generate a community of interests. In this
light, man is properly enough called a gregarious ani-
mal ; but it appears to me the common epithet is as often
the connecting link, as it is the result of such a unit.

Rome had never been the mistress of the world, had
not the distinction of allies been merged in the title of
"Roman Citizen." They were Romans who con-
quered the world: so many Latins, Apulians, and Cam-
panians, had they stood in other respects in precisely
the same relative situations, would sooner have gone
to war with each other.

How much mischief have those magical words.
North, South, East, and West occasioned! Could we
not rest satisfied with one mighty, all-embracing West,
leaving the other three cardinal points to the Old
World? — methinks we should not have cause for
so much apprehension about the preservation of the
Union. When in addition to these natural distinctions,
descriptive and characteristic epithets are applied, by
their own countrymen, to the people of different sec-
tions, though in a careless and bantering manner, the
patriot may Well tremble for the Union.

[ 156 ]

COLLEGE ESSAYS

A sound, impartial judgment is less to be esteemed
for the evident good consequences it leads to, than
prejudice is to be feared for the incalculable evil it
engenders. It is easier to convince a man's reason than
to regulate his feelings. There are certain principles
implanted in us which, independently of the will, teach
us the consistency and inconsistency of things, when
viewed in certain relations. By operating upon these
principles, through the medium of certain definite
propositions, corresponding invariable results in the
mind of each one, of necessity follow. That these con-
clusions as invariably affect the conduct, I do not pre-
tend. The feelings, on the other hand, are not at the
mercy of any such definite law which regulates and
disposes them. The eloquence which at one time
touches with a master's hand the chords of human
sympathy, and raises almost to a pitch of phrenzy the
rapt and excited multitude, at another, perhaps, falls
powerless and ineffectual; or excites those very feelings
it was its object to soothe and allay.

There is the same diflSculty in dissipating those prej-
udices already formed. The sober truth may be recog-
nized, the false judgment admitted, — but a crowd of
associations has so confounded error with the most
palpable truths, that the evil can be but partially, if
ever, eradicated. What once floated harmlessly upon
the surface, in time commingles with and becomes a
part of the mighty element, which at first barely
afforded it a resting-place.

This disquisition, profound to the verge of
[ 157]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

obscurity, without once touching practicality,
must have fatigued the professor, as it still does
the casual reader. Its deep truth is apparent,
notwithstanding, — and also the whimsical per-
versity or paradoxicality which inspired its com-
position. About this time (February, 1837) Tho-
reau's manifest turn for paradox was showing
itseK more and more in company with that feli-
city of phrase and occasional originality that
contrasted sharply with a few habits of rhetoric,
caught from his companions, or from some aged
professor. It is said that the HoUis Professor of
Divinity,' the elder Henry Ware, had special
tricks of speech (such as "on the one hand," "on
the other hand") which the graceless students
caught at and satirized. Thus the artist Chris-
topher Cranch, who graduated in 1835, along
with Thoreau's correspondent and editor Harrison
Blake, used to feign Dr. Ware arrived in the
Kingdom of Heaven, looking about him over his
spectacles, and exclaiming, "While on the one
hand we must admit that no merit of our own has
availed to bring us to this desirable place, — on
the other hand, we are bound to praise the good-
ness of our Lord, who hath, in spite of our un-
worthiness thus filled all our desires." Thoreau
may have fallen unconsciously into this measured

I 158]

COLLEGE ESSAYS

way of speaking and writing. No such formality
restrains him in the next fragmentary essay: —

XX. Various Means of Public Influence

" Compare some of the Methods of gaining or exercis-
ing PubUc Influence: as Lectures, the Pulpit,
Associations, the Press, PoUtical Oflfice."
Inveterate custom, as well as the respect with which
most men regard his sacred office, secure to the
Preacher a certain, though limited influence. He is the
shepherd of a flock, — the infallible guide and arbiter
in spiritual affairs. His parish is his kingdom, where he
rules with an almost despotic sway; the young, even
from the cradle, are taught to value his approving
smile, and tremble at his frown : the aged despise not
his teachings, nor are the vicious backward to respect
those virtues which yet they fail to imitate. At church
he can depend upon an orderly, if not an attentive
audience; the great truths and principles which are
there expounded, equally concern the highest interests
of all. Criticism has no place there; the peculiarities
and failings of the preacher are overlooked, or, if
noticed, are willingly pardoned by his indulgent hear-
ers. The character of the day, as well as the sanctity of
the place, are the source of a thousand associations,
which impart a degree of solemnity and weight to his
words, — scarcely to be attained by the most labored
style, aided by all the arts of eloquence.

"Truth from his lips prevails with double sway.
And fools who came to scoff remain to pray."

[ 159 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

Yet the sphere of the Preacher's influence is com-
paratively narrow and circumscribed. His own little
flock alone acknowledge his sway: the village spire
overlooks his puny territories, while the sound of the
"church-going bell" is heard in their remotest corner.
To respect his person and venerate his teachings, from
a duty degenerates into a habit, which, from the very
nature of its origin, too often opposes an insuperable
barrier to a further increase of his authority.

He, on the other hand, who addresses his fellowmen
through the medium of the Press, is so far a stranger to
the mass of his readers as not to be exposed to the mass
of those prejudices with which a personal acquaintance
would be inevitably attended. His field of labor is the
universe. The thousands of newspapers that circu-
late throughout the United States develope different
sorts of editors. One sort gives his readers conclusions
at which he had previously arrived, without troubling
them with a formidable list of propositions and con-
necting links; here are the facts, — let them "pepper
and dish as they choose." Another editor is by far
more sophistical; in his articles not a single term, prem-
ise or mode but is subjected to the severest scrutiny.
He goes on very well till he comes to the inference: but
then, alas! after all this display, he is wont to draw his
fnference by main force from some other quarter. One
editor is disposed to show all he knows, if not to know
all he shows. Another is so overwhelmed with particu-
lars that he is unable to wield them all. His inference
may be so unwieldy that he is unable to start it. An-
other takes but a partial view of things, and is very

[ 160]

COLLEGE ESSAYS

much in the situation of one who looks through a
microscope, and thus obtains a correct idea of the
minute parts of an object; but is apt to lose sight of its
outward bulk and more obvious qualities.

In authorship, as we see it in America to-day, there
are at least two distinct varieties, the Travelling
Author and the Native Author. The first lands on our
shores with all the prejudices of the old countries fresh
in his mind; and prepares to criticise our manners, our
customs, and our country, by comparison with those
paragons which he has left at home. Fully impressed,
as every honest citizen should be, with the superiority
of his own country, and the preeminent perfection of
her government and institutions, he judges of what is
right and wrong, good and bad (for these are but rela-
tive terms), by comparison with those fixed and fault-
less standards, to distrust which is to him worse than
sacrilege. Be he ever so free from prejudice, ever so
liberal a cosmopolite (in the broadest sense), the pro-
fessed journalist and travelling bachelor is too tender
of the bantling on his hands, — his respectable duo-
decimo that is to be, •— too solicitous for the popular-
ity of his book, — to withhold the "sugared Gates" so
temptingly offered at every turn; or, when he has done,
to offer the needed cathartic. In despair of acquiring a
vigorous and healthy fame, he is fain to content him-
self with a shortlived and bloated reputation, though
at the expense of truth.

Not so with the Native Author. He feels that he is
writing the biography of a family of which he is himself
a member. It is the broad and flourishing homestead

[ 161 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

that he describes; the faults and blemishes in the pic-
ture he has never attended to, — or else the whim-
whams and oddities of his brothers and sisters have
become so familiar to him as no longer to seem such.
He remarks in them those peculiarities alone from
which he is free, and which, to the eye of a stranger,
have nothing in common with habits of mind which
are said to "run in the family." The one, in fine, knows
too much, and the other too little, of the country he
would describe, and the manners he pretends to
portray.

Here the fragment ends. In his Preacher,
Thoreau was drawing a sketch of Dr. Ripley,
who baptized and catechized him, and to whose
sermons he listened for years. In the second
chapter of the "Week" this pastor of half a cen-
tury is briefly remembered in verse: —

" Here then an aged Shepherd dwelt.
Who to his flock his substance dealt.
And ruled them with a*vigorous crook.
By precept of the sacred Book;
But he the pierless bridge passed o'er.
And solitary left the shore."

He was living when John and Henry Thoreau
passed and repassed along the river at the foot
of the orchard of the old parson; but in 1849,
when the volume was printed, he had been dead
eight years, and Hawthorne, who had succeeded

[162]

COLLEGE ESSAYS

him in the Old Manse, had also "left the shore,"
and was living at Lenox. The Manse reverted
to the Ripley family who owned it, and the
learned Mrs. Ripley, a widow, was housekeeper
there until her death in 1867.

It may be added, in correction of an error which
Emerson never corrected in successive editions
of his "Poems," that it was not on April 19, 1836,
but on July 4, 1837, the year of ThoreaU's grad-
uation, that the celebrated "Hymn" was sung
"at the completion of the Battle Monument."
Delay in 'the stone work had carried the date
beyond that originally fixed, and even a year
afterward, and so the next patriotic holiday was
chosen. The inscription, in the mean time, had
also been writtea by Emerson; but his elders in
the village thought they could better his EngUsh,
and threw it into its present form. A-choir from,
the churches sang the immortal poemjtp the tune
of "Old Hundred," anHTThoreau, who was then
habitually a singer, as well as a flute-player,
joined in the choir.

Thoreau's powers of analysis and classifica-
tion, and his methodical reasoning on most sub-
jects, indicate that his paradoxes were rather a
sport of his humor, or a freak of fancy, inherited
from one of that very dissimilar group of ances-

[ 163 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

tors and ancestresses of whom he descended. But,
like all young persons, he had much to learn,
even along the hne of his inherited bent of mind;
and the next essay, which I have deferred till
now, will show how much he had profited by
Harvard training, self-culture, and Emersonian
influences, in the intervening two years. This
essay is one of the earliest in date. Though dated
late in 1835, I have reasons for thinking it be-
longs in the Sophomore year, 1834-35, and dates
from the late autumn of 1834: —

XXI. Mankind. Classified

"Explain the phrases, a Man of Business, a Man of
Pleasure, a Man of the World."

To say of one that he is a Man of Business, according
to the general acceptation of the phrase, seems not
merely to imply that he is engaged in business, but also
that he is an energetic, persevering man; one who is
ever on the lookout, ever awake to his interest, — well
calculated to get along in the world. A man may be an
excellent calculator, he may form the best of plans, hut
fail in the execution of them. And, on the other hand,
many who have no fixed plans, who are incapable of
looking far into futurity, and of forming and abiding
by any fixed rules of conduct, may in the end succeed
better than the former.

Nothing can be of more advantage in business than a
t 164]

COLLEGE ESSAYS

habit of despatch; and what contributes more to that
than method? In fine, let one possess method and per-
severance, industry and activity, — united with pru-
dence and foresight, and a competent knowledge of
human nature, — and you may justly call him a Man
of Business.

A large portion of mankind are wrapped up in the
pursuit of what they imagine to be pleasure; which,
like their own shadows, is always within a certain dis-
tance, but which no effort on their part can bring
nearer; so that their only real enjoyment lies in the
anticipation of pleasure. The fault seems to lie not so
much in the object, as in the means employed. They
have a false idea of pleasure; with them, as far as a thing
is useful, so far is it devoid of pleasure; hence they
"forsake what may instruct for what may please."

"Whom call we gay? That honor has been long
The boast of mere pretenders to the name:
The innocent are gay."

Hence we perceive that the phrase "a Man of
Pleasure" is generally applied to those who in fact
enjoy the least.

Avoid a Man of the World as you would avoid a
viper! for, like the viper in the fable, he will sting the
hand that has nourished him. Sheridan has observed
with regard to this class, that they have become so
polished and refined that their Maker's inscription is
worn from them, and when he calls in his coin, he wUl
not know them for his own. This man is your friend so
long as it serves his interest; he is well acquainted with
men and manners, and by means of his art passes, per-

[m ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

haps, for a true gentleman, — for an honorable and
benevolent man; but in truth his honor and morality
are regulated by the fashion of the times. His principal
object is to turn everything to his advantage; and for
this purpose he endeavors to gain the respect or good
will of all around him.

The unworldly tone and the unformed hand-
writing, which yet is Henry's own unmistakably,
confirm the suspicion that it is one of the earliest
of these essays preserved. It is numbered 11 —
but we do not know when the numbering began.
Immediately preceding it in assumed date, and
equally unformed in chirography and knowledge
of the world, yet quaint and entertaining, is this
comment on —

XXII. Social Forms and Restraints

"On what Grounds may the Forms, Ceremonies and
Restraints of Polite Society be objected to? Speak
of some of them. What Purposes are they in-
tended to answer? "
In a primitive state of society, where man is buried
in ignorance, and the arts and refinements of civilized
life are neglected — or rather, unknown — but few
forms or ceremonies exist: while, on the other hand, as
civilization advances, and the pursuits and studies of
mankind assume a nobler and more elevated character,
— in that proportion does Man, in this intercourse with
his fellows, comply with certain rules, which serve in a

[ 166]

COLLEGE ESSAYS

measure to preserve a just balance between the differ-
ent classes of society. I say in a measure only; for most
are apt to go to excess in this particular. If one wishes
to obtain their good opinion, he must go through a long
catalogue of useless forms, and sacrifice truth, sincerity
and candor to politeness.

A friend is invited to dine, — each dish is excellent,
the very dinner he could have desired, neither too rare
nor overdone. Are the contents of his neighbor's glass
unluckily transferred to his dress? O, 't is of no con-
sequence ! he had already determined to send it to the
dye-house; and, moreover, had previously fixed upon
the very color which will conceal its present defect-
Thus are these petty evils beauties in his eyes (those
eyes which for the time, he uses), — and himself, per-
haps, in the eyes of his host, what is still more estima-
ble, — a perfect gentleman, truly a pattern of poKte-
ness. After much bowing and scraping he is released,
— yes, released, — for, during the last hour or two, he
has been under a certain restraint, and is now as glad
to be liberated as the prisoner whose term has expired.

Here is a touch of everyday life, drawn from
observation, and not from Cooper's novels nor
Sheridan's comedies. The old wooden county
prison, in which Henry's great-uncles, Josiah and
Simeon, had been confined in the Revolution,
had now been long replaced by a strong granite
dungeon, with rings and staples for the chaining
down of murderers and maniacs, built in 1797,

I 167]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

in which afterward Thoreau himself, in 1845,
was briefly imprisoned; it stood behind the
sheriff's house and was usually well filled with
short-sentence prisoners, who were employed to
reclaim the jailer's peat-bog and alder-swamp.
These hard-worked, and occasionally hanged,
prisoners were objects of curiosity to the boys
and youth of the village; and Henry had often
seen them released at the expiration of their
term. The polite dinner-party may have also
been witnessed by him at Major Hosmer's, the
High Sheriff's, or Squire Hoar's, the leader of the
bar, or Colonel Whiting's, the commander of
the local regiment. We resume the sketch by this '
young Theophrastus or La Bruyere: —

Perhaps on his way home he meets his friend G.
There is no escape, the road is straight, he must there-
fore summon up courage and press onward. "How do
you do? I am heartily glad to see you, — have been
penned up at my friend R.'s these three hours; hope
you will honor me with a call immediately! (Aside)
Fortunately I 'm about to leave town."

This is carried too far; it is beneath the dignity of a
true gentleman to be tied down by such restraints. To
be sure, ceremony may serve as a barrier against im-
pertinence, but it also hides a multitude of sins. Far
from estimating a man's character by the degree of
attention he bestows upon this point, you may rest

[ 168]

COLLEGE ESSAYS

assured that, the more extensive the outworks, the
wider and deeper the moat, the more insignificant is
the garrison within. Like the Romans who, half fam-
ished with hunger, in order to deceive the enemy, cast
forth that bread which was so scarce, — so do the
ceremonious deceive those around them with regard
to their true characters, by an occasional display of
that wisdom which they so much need.^

To conclude, — as an eminent writer has remarked,
— " Ceremony is the superstition of good breeding, as
well as of religion; but yet, being an outwork of both,
should not be absolutely demolished." It must to a
certain degree be complied with, though ia itself a
very silly thing.

I have introduced these rather boyish essays
out of their true date, partly by way of contrast
to the serious writing that here precedes them,
and also because they illustrate a vein of hu-
mor and juvenility in Thoreau that, until his
last illness, he never quite outgrew. EUery Chan-
ning, who, of all his companions, best knew the

* The phrase "that wisdom which he so much needs" is from the
prayer of the eccentric parson William Swett, son of Colonel Swett>
of Lexington, for the President of the United States, after General
Jackson had removed the deposits from his antagonist Biddle's
United States Bank; in the national controversy over that organ
of the plutocracy of the period, which secured the allegiance and
"ruined the careers of Henry Clay and Daniel Webster. "O Lord,
bless the President of these United States," prayed the parson at
the Cattle-Show dinner; "Grant him that wisdom which he so
much needs." ¥01 Thoreau's description of this Cattle Show, see a
later page.

[ 169]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

intricacies and contrasts of his nature, has
twice in his books touched on this juveniHty of
the grave moralist and poet-naturaUst — in his
"Wanderer" and in his Life of Thoreau. The
latter, in its first form, he began to publish in the
"Boston Commonwealth," while I was its editor,
in 1863-64, and before he published it in book
form, made serious omissions and additions in
1873. He styled his "Wanderer" a "colloquial
poem," and in the canto about Monadnoc, de-
scribing that mountain and its Concord visit-
ants, Channing wrote, —

" Hither not often wandered
Up from the vale a sportive lad, whose lessons
Rightly learned and brought from out-door science,
Required all growths of Nature, new or old.
So strangely was her general current mixed
With his vexed native blood, in its crank wit,
That as a mirror shone this common world
To this observing youth: whom noting, thence
I called Idolon, — ever firm to mark
Swiftly reflected in himself the Whole:
Whereat Dame Natm-e smiled, to see her boy
An individual life, prepared to be
Her mirror, by his notions, if he may."

The Greek noun Eidolon was thus a term for
Thoreau, not ill-chosen, though a mystical one.
"The Wanderer" was printed in 1871. In the
[ 170]

COLLEGE ESSAYS

first chapter of the Life of Thoreau (1873) he
said, — and this is in the original manuscript
sketch of 1864: —

He was one of those who keep so much of the boy in ,
them that he could never pass a berry without picking*^
it. I, being gifted with a lesser degree of this edible
religion, frequently had to leave him in the rear, pick-
ing his berry, while I sat looking at the landscape, or
admiring my berry-loving lad. In his later articles he
rubbed out as perfectly as he could the more humorous
parts, — originally a relief to their sterner features.
He said to me, "I cannot bear the levity I find." To
which I replied, I hoped he would spare them, — even
to the puns, in which he sometimes indulged. As to
his laughing, no man did that more or better.

Quite apart from this jesting vein is the next
forensic to be cited (April 28, 1837) : —

XXIII. The Morality c^ Lying

" Question the Opinions of J. Dymond and Mrs. Opie,
respecting the general Obligation to tell the
Truth: are they sound and applicable? (Vide
Dymond's 'Essays on Morality' and Mrs. Amelia
Opie's 'Illustrations of Lying.')"
I shall confine myself to the examination of Mr.

Dymond's opinions, without pretending to offer any of

my own.

He defines a lie to be "uttering what is not true,

when the speaker professes to utter truth, or when he

/ [ 171 1

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

knows it is expected by the hearer." We are to bear in
mind that whether the term is to be used in a good or
bad sense, must depend upon the definition assigned it.
As here used it is altogether arbitrary. Mr. Dymond
does not tell us that this or that is a lie, but finds
it necessary to first define the term, — to inform us
what, in the following essay, is to be understood by the
term lie.

This being premised, let us inquire whether a man
may, under any circumstances conceivable, tell a lie
without the infraction of the moral law. May we not
lie to a robber, to preserve our property? Our author
thinks not. K we may lie to preserve our property,
says he, we may murder; and as it would be wrong to
murder in such a case, so would it be wrong to lie. But
this reasoning is by no means conclusive; for who can
say what constitutes a lie? Dymond applies the term
arbitrarily to certain forms of speech; suppose we do
the same. To lie, we will say, is "to utter what is true
when the speaker professes to utter truth, or when he
knows it is expected by the hearers."

To lie, then, in this sense would be immoral, because
to murder with the same view, would be immoral. It
is the similarity of purpose, and not of means, which
constitutes the immorality in this case. This method
of reasoning amounts in fact to a manifest petitio
prineipii.

But further, may we not tell a falsehood to a mad-
man for his own advantage? Dymond's answer
amounts to this: It would not be for his advantage,
and hence it would be morally wrong to commit so

[ 172 ]

COLLEGE ESSAYS

egregious a blunder. Indeed, this is the only sign of an
argument adduced to prove this particular point.
This, surely, is founding the guilt of lying upon its ill
effects, which procedure our author condemned in the
outset.

In the second place, are those untruths (sometimes
amounting to lies in the sense in which Dymbnd uses
the term) which custom has sanctioned, in any way
defensible.? We must here have some regard to the
effects of the practice, — the motives and expectations
of the parties being unknown. If these are not lies, they
are evidently gratuitous; for where is the use of telling
an untruth to one who receives it as such? if it is not a
fiction calculated to please and instruct. Might not
one as well remain silent.

But what is useless is never harmless. If, on the other
hand, these are lies, — the speaker "utters what is
untrue, when he professes to utter truth, or when he
knows it is expected by the hearer," his conduct is
certainly to be condemned.

As for those cases in which it is impossible to be
deceived, — the compliments which bring up the rear
in a dedication or epistle, — we can at best say no good
of them. To excuse them because they are taken for
what they are worth, would be like pardoning the vices
of a dangerous member of society, because his charac-
ter is properly estimated, — the very fact of its being
understood implying its condemnation.

This seems to be a grave jest, aimed at the lack
of humor in the excellent Quaker, J. Dymond;

[ 173 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

and, by its silence about Amelia Opie, implying
a snub to her.

In July, 1835, when he had been two years in
college, David Henry Thoreau, at the close of
his Sophomore year, took part at a college "exhi-
bition" along with Manlius Clarke, in a Greek
dialogue, "Decius and Cato"; Thoreau taking
the appropriate part of Cato. In the preceding
May, Jones Very, still an undergraduate, but
soon to be a Greek tutor, had a Greek version, —
both assignments indicating the specialty of the
two students in the language of Athens. It is
fair to infer that Very influenced Thoreau in his
fondness for Greek, and it is true that of all the
Concord authors, Thoreau was the best versed
in Greek. Mrs. Ripley alone exceeded him in
the amount of her Greek reading; but she had
more years at her disposal for that study. In the
spring of 1836, before leaving college as an in-
valid, — during which vacation he built and
sailed his rude Argo with its Indian name, —
Thoreau took up in the following essay the grave
question of Fate, as understood by the ancients,
— a frequent subject with him.

[174]

COLLEGE ESSAYS

XXIV. Fate among the Ancients

"What is the Meaning of Fate in the Ancient Use of
the Word? What is its popular Significance now? "

No language is so meagre or so imperfect as not to
contain a term very nearly if not exactly synonymous
with our word "Fate." This proves the universality of
the idea. But men in different ages, and under differ-
ent circumstances, have attributed to various causes
the same or similar phenomena. Although the works
of Fate have been the same, yet fate itself has un-
dergone an almost infinite variety of modifications.
Whereas we read that in old times a certain inexorable
trio, called Moirai, commencing with the raw material,
spun out and finally severed the thread of human life,
— in these days of innovation, one is compelled to do
the work of three.

I have said that the idea is universal. Though many
deny that there is any such thing as fate, and others
differ in the views they take of it, yet we all have a
suflSciently clear idea of what it is, to write about it.
(I say about it, if not upon it.) Some would at once
reject the term; while others would modify its signifi-
cance, to adapt it to their own opinion.

There appear to have been those, of every age and
nation, who have risen above the sensuous conceptions
of the multitude; who, satisfied if they could search
out the causes of things, by the mental eye alone, have
thus, from time to time, rescued small fragments of
truth from the general wreck. According to the belief
of the mass of the Greeks, three sisters, Clotho,

[ 175 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

Lachesis and Atropos, presided over the destinies of
men. They were acquainted with the Past, the Pres-
ent and the Future, and are represented with spindles,
which they keep constantly in motion, — spinning the
fate of mortals. The Romans had their Parcse, and
the Northerns their Nornen. These sisters were either
regarded as independent powers, — the originators as
well as executors of certain inevitable, though not im-
mutable laws; or, as some supposed, were the daugh-
ters of Jove, and acted in obedience to his commands.

Plato's views appear to have been more correct.
"All things," says he, "are in fate, i.e., within its
sphere or scheme, — but all things are not fated: it is
not in fate that one man shall do so and so, and another
suffer so and so; for that would be the destruction of
our free agency and liberty : but if any one should choose
such a life, and do such and such things, — then it is
in fate that such or such consequences shall ensue upon
it." That Socrates did not adopt the popular opinion
is evident from these words of Cicero: "Esse Divinum
quoddam, quod Socrates doemonium appellat; cui semper
ipse paruerit, — nunquam impellenti, sape revocanti"
(Something Divine existed which Socrates styled his
Daemon and ever he obeyed its voice, — never urging
him on, and often calling him back.)

It is difficult to say whether in the popular use of the
word at the present day, any peculiar or even precise
meaning is attached to the word Fate. Many employ
it to signify the necessary, inevitable operation of cer-
tain fixed laws, which were originally imposed by the
Deity. This definition corresponds to what has been

[ 176]

COLLEGE ESSAYS

;rmed Physical Fate, The ancients never lost sight of
Q invisible agent or power, independent of the laws of
fature. The point at issue among the moderns is,
hether the Deity fore-ordained, or merely fore-knew
jefore the world was created) what was to happen to
is creatures, — whether Man is a free agent. Such
as effatum (decreed), and therefore unavoidable, said
le ancients. Though fated, it was by no means un-
voidable, say we. Whatever is effatum is fated, said
ley. Everything or nothing is fated, — yet ftothing
I, say we.

This is as clear a statement as could be expected
■om a Junior of eighteen in college, on a subject
lat has divided the beards of the sages for thou-
mds of years. Thoreau returned to it from year
) year, and in those meditations of 1839-40
'hich he sent to Margaret Fuller for her " Dial,"
1 December, 1840, only to be declined with
iianks, he said: —

Necessity is my eastern cushion, on which I recline,
fy eye revels in its prospect, as in the summer haze,
ask no more but to be left alone with it. It is the
osom of Time, and the lap of Eternity. To be neces-
iry is to be needful; and necessity is only another
ame for inflexibility of good. How I welcome my
rim fellow, and walk arm in arm with him! Let me,
)0, be such a Necessity as he. I love him, he is so
Bxible, and yields tq me as the air to my body. I greet
lee, my elder brother, who with thy touch ennoblest
[ 177 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

all things. The Romans made Fortune surname to For-
titude; since Fortitude is that alchemy which turns all
things to good fortune. Musi it be so? then it is good.

Tumble me down, and I will sit
Upon my ruins, smiling yet.

In October, 1836, he took up a topic less diffi-
cult, and wrote on —

XXV. Compulsory Education

"Whether the Government ought to educate the
Children of those Parents who refuse to do it
Themselves?"
I maintain that the Government ought to provide
for the education of all children who would otherwise
be brought up — or rather grow up — in ignorance.
In the first place, the welfare of the individual, and in
the second, that of the community, demands it. It is as
much the duty of the parent to educate, as to feed and
clothe the child. For on what, I would ask, depends
that last duty? Why is the child to be fed and clothed,
if not to enable him to receive and make a proper use
of an education? an education which he is no better
able to obtain for himself than he is to supply his
physical wants. Indeed, the culture of the physical is
important only so far as it is subservient to that of the
intellectual man.

, No one disputes this. Should, then, poverty or
neglect threaten to deprive the child of this right, — a
right more dear and more worthy to be cherished and
defended than any he can enjoy, — in such a case it

[178]

COLLEGE ESSAYS

appears to me to be the duty of that neighbor whose
circumstances will allow of it, to take the part of the
child, and act the part of the parent. The duty in this
instance amounts to a moral obligation, and is as much
a duty as it is to preserve the life of the infant whose
unnatural parents would suffer it to starve by the
roadside. What can it profit a man that he hath
enough to eat and to drink, and the wherewithal he
may be clothed, — provided he lose his own soul?

But as these wealthy neighbors can accomplish more
good by acting in concert, — can more effectively
relieve the unfortunate by a community of good offices,
— it is their duty, or in other words the duty of the
community, so to do. Thus much for the welfare of the
child.

That such a course, in the second place, is consistent
with, nay, necessary to, the greatest good of the com-
munity, scarcely admits of a doubt. I shall not under-
take to prove that the community ought to do what
is for its own good; this is entirely unnecessary, since
the welfare of posterity is certainly to be consulted.

With the progress of opinion in the fourscore
years since this argument was framed, all theo-
retic objection to it has been withdrawn in lands
truly civilized; but the duty is practically evaded
in many lands with regard to the races held to be
inferior or secondary, like the Negroes at the
South, and the Indians in Mexico. If any fault
were found with the reasoning, all would allow

[ 179]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

the literary form to be good; all is forcibly and
concisely set forth. Not less is this true of the
more radical thesis which follows.

XXVI. Barbarism and Civilization

"The Mark or Standard by which a Nation is judged
to be Barbarous or Civilized. Barbarities of
Civilized States."

The justice of a nation's claim to be regarded as
civilized seems to depend mainly upon the degree in
which Art has triumphed over Nature. Civilization is
the influence of Art, and not Nature, on Man. He
mingles his own will with the unchanged essences
around him, and becomes in his turn the creature of
his own creations.

The end of Ufe is education. An education is good
or bad according to the disposition or frame of mind it
induces. If it tend to cherish and develope the religious
sentiment, — continuously to remind man of his mys-
terious relation to God and Nature, — and to exalt
him above the toil and drudgery of this matter-of-fact
world, it is good.

Civilization we think not only dbes not accomplish
this, but is directly adverse to it. The civilized man is
the slave of Matter. Art paves the earth, lest he may
soil the soles of his feet; it builds walls that he may not
see the Heavens; year in, year out, the sun rises in vain
to him; the rain falls and the wind blows, but they do
not reach him. From his wigwam of brick and mortar
he praises his Maker for the genial warmth of a sun he

[180]

COLLEGE ESSAYS

never saw, or the fmitfulness of an earth he disdains
to tread upon. Who says that this is not mockery?
So much for the influence of Art.

Our rude forefathers took liberal and enlarged views
of things, — rarely narrow or partial. They surren-
dered up themselves wholly to Nature; to contemplate
her was a part of their daily food. Was she stupen-
dous? so were their conceptions. The inhabitant of a
mountain can hardly be brought to use a microscope;
he is accustomed to embrace empires in a single glance.
Nature is continually exerting a moral influence over
man; she accommodates herself to the soul of man.
Hence his conceptions are as gigantic as her mountains.
We may see an instance of this if we will but turn our
eyes to the strongholds of Liberty, — Scotland, Swit-
zerland and Wales. What more stupendous can Art
contrive than the Alps? What more sublime than the
thunder among the hills? The savage is far-sighted;"
bis eye, like the Poet's, —

"Doth glance from Heaven to Earth, from Earth to Heaven."

He looks far into futurity, wandering as familiarly
through the Land of Spirits, as the civilized man
through his woodlot or pleasure-grounds. His life is
practical poetry, a perfect epic. The earth is his hunt-
ing-ground; he lives summers and winters; the sun is
tiis time-piece, — he journeys to its rising or its setting;
to the abode of Winter, or the land whence Summer
jomes. He never listens to the thunder but he is re-
minded of the Great Spirit, — it is his voice. To him
Lhe lightning is less terrible than it is sublime; the

[181]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

rainbow less beautiful than it is wonderful; the sun less
warm than it is glorious.

The savage dies and is buried; he sleeps with his
forefathers, and before many winters his dust returns
to dust again, and his body is mingled with the ele-
ments. The civilized man can scarce sleep even in his
grave. Not even there are the weary at rest, nor do
the wicked cease from troubling. What with the ham-
mering of stone, and the grating of bolts, the worms
themselves are wellnigh deceived. Art rears his monu-
ment. Learning contributes his epitaph, and Interest
adds the "Carey fecit" as a salutary check upon the
unearthly emotions which a perusal might otherwise
excite.

A nation may be ever so civilized, and yet lack wis-
dom. Wisdom is the result of education; and education
being the bringing-out or development of that which
is in man, by contact with the Not-me, — that is by
Life, — is far SEufer in the hands of Nature than of
Art,

The savage may be, and often is a sage. Our Indian
is more of a man than the inhabitant of a city. He
lives as a man, he thinks as a man, he dies as a man.
The latter, it is true, is learned. Learning is Art's
creature, but it is not essential to the perfect man; it
cannot educate. A man may spend days in the study
of a single species of animalculoe, invisible to the
naked eye, and thus become the founder of a new
branch of science, — without having advanced the
great objects for which life was given him, at all. The
naturalist, the chemist, the mechanist is no more a

[ 182 ]

COLLEGE ESSAYS

man for all his learning. Life is still as short as ever,
death as inevitable, and the heavens as far off.

Here in 1837 we have a vivid glimpse of the

later Thoreau — reviling the very art that has

given him the rhetoric with which to denounce

Art.

"Lowliness is young Ambition's ladder,
Whereto the climber upward turns his face;
But when he once attains the upmost round.
He then unto the ladder turns his back,

scorning the base degrees

By which he did ascend."

He has mastered his art at last, has caught his
stride, as they say, and has entered fully into the
goodly land of paradox.

In contrast with this glorification of the sav-
age, and criminal indictment against civilization,
ancient and modern, take this fragment, com-
posed at the very close of his college life and en-
dorsed, "Thoreau, June 10, 1837": —

XXVII. Titus Pomponius Attkus, as an Example

One cannot safely imitate the actions, as such, even
of the wise and good. Truth is not exalted, but
rather degraded and soiled by contact with hutoanity.
We may not conform ourselves to any mortal pattern,
but should conform our every act and thought to
Truth.

[183]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

Truth is that whole of which Virtue, Justice, Benev-
olence and the like are the parts, the manifestations;
she includes and runs through them all. She is con-
tinually revealing herself. Why, then, be satisfied
with the mere reflection of her genial warmth and
light? why dote upon her faint and fleeting echo, if
we can bs&k in her sunshine, and hearken to her reve-
lations when we will? No man is so situated that he
may not, if he choose, find her out; and when he has
discovered her, he may without fear go all lengths
with her; but if he take her at second hand, it must
be done cautiously ; else she will not be pure and
unmixed.

Wherever she manifests herself, whether in God, in
man, or in nature, by herself considered, she is equally
admirable, equally inviting; though to our view she
seems, from her relations, now stem and repulsive,
now mild and persuasive. We will then consider
Truth by herself, so that we may the more heartily
adore her, and more confidently follow her.

Next, how far was the life of Atticus a manifestation
of Truth? According to Nepos, his Latin biographer:
" He so carried himself as to seem level with the lowest,
and yet equal to the highest. He never sued for any
preferment in the State, because it was not to be ob-
tained by fair and honorable means. He never went
to law about anything. He never altered his manner
of life, though his estate was greatly increased. His
complaisance was not without a strict regard to
truth."

Truth neither exalteth nor humbleth herself. She is

[ 184 ]

COLLEGE ESSAYS

not too high for the low, nor yet too low for the high.
She never stoops to what is mean or dishonorable. She
is persuasive, not litigious, leaving Conscience to de-
cide. Circumstances do not aflfect her. She never sac-
rificeth her dignity that she may secure for herself a
favorable reception. Thus far the example of Atticus
may safely be followed. But we are told, on the other
hand: "That, finding it impossible to live suitably to
his dignity at Rome, without offending one party or
the other, he withdrew to Athens. That he left Italy
that he might not bear arms against Sylla. That he so
managed by taking no active part, as to secure the good
will of hoih Caesar and Pompey. Finally, that he was
careful to avoid even the appearance of crime."

It is not a characteristic of Truth to use men tenderly,
nor is she over-anxious about appearances. The hon-
est man, according to George Herbert, — is

"He that doth still and strongly good pursue.
To God, his neighbor and himself most true;

Whom neither fear nor fawning can
Unpin, or wrench from giving all their due.

Who rides his sure and even trot.
While the World now rides by, now lags behind.

Who, when great trials come.
Nor seeks nor shuns them, but doth always stay
Till he the thing, and the example weigh;

All being brought into a sum.
What place or person calls for, he doth pay."

Atticus seems to have well understood the maxim ap-
plied to him by his biographer, — " Sui cuique mores
fingunt fortunam." (Character shapes his lot for each
of us.)

[185]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

It seems odd that Henry Thoreau, poor, ob-
scure, in a small Puritan village, should have
looked to see how a Roman plutocrat, living in
luxury and by usury, waited upon by slaves,
and more Epicurean than Stoic, could serve as an
example for one who went to prison rather than
pay a small tax for the indirect support of Ameri-
can slavery. But, no doubt, Atticus, with all
his defects, was a more suitable model for an out-
door life than Red Jacket, Black Hawk, Massa-
soit, or Tecumseh. The ideal Red Man of Henry
and John Thoreau was a panegyrized Tahatta-
wan. Sachem of the Musketaquid, to whom they
erected a cenotaph on Fairhaven Hill, near the
present villa of Mr. Thompson, with this inscrip-
tion in questionable Latin: —

Siste, qui conscendis! Hie Filius Naturae, Tahatta-
wan, Sachimaupan, extremus Indorum, venatus, resi-
piscatus est. Per agros, prata, coUemque regnavit.
At, si f amse credendum est, manus non longas habuit.
Homo, Princeps, Christianus, quamvis incultus, non
indeploratus. In moribus scilicet austerus, et sine
levitate; sermone grandis, venustus, immo etiam modi-
cus!! Integritate, fortitudineque explorata, praeclarus.

Hie Scopulus ejus est Cenotaphium.

Should a statue of Thoreau ever be erected in
Concord, these cliflfs, where the brothers com-

l 186 1

COLLEGE ESSAYS

memorated their Indian ideal, would be the
proper place for it, and the rock itself might be
carved into his aquiline features.

No such encomium on the American Indian
appeared in the last of Thoreau's college essays,

— his Commencement Part, which was an analy-
sis of the American commercial spirit given as
3ne half of a "Conference" on that topic, of
wrhich his roommate, Henry Vose, gave the other
ialf. The greater portion of Thoreau's half is
printed in his volume of "Famihar Letters";
3ut a few passages may be quoted to show his
settled and serious style at the age of twenty.
[t was given August 16, 1837: —

The characteristic of our epoch is perfect freedom,

— freedom of thought and action. It has generated
m unusual degree of energy and activity; it has gen-
erated the Commercial Spirit. Man thinks faster and
reer than ever before; he moves faster and freer. He
s more restless because he is more independent thai^
!ver. . . . We are to look chiefly for the origin of the
iommercial spirit, and the power that still cherishes
md sustains it, in a blind and unmanly love of wealth.
iVherever this exists, it is too sure to become the ruling
pirit; and as a natural consequence, it infuses into all
»ur thoughts and affections a degree of its own selfish-
less; we become selfish in our patriotism, selfish in our
lomestic relations, selfish in our religion. . . . Yet it is

[187]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

not altogether and without exception bad. We rejoice
in it as one more indication of the entire and universal
freedom of the age in which we live, — an indication
that the human race is making one more advance in
that infinite series of progressions which awaits it.
Man will not always be the slave of Matter; but ere
long, casting off those earth-born desires which iden-
tify him with the brute, shall pass the days of his
sojourn in this his nether paradise, as becomes the
Lord of the Creation.

With this glowing anticipation of an age which
has not yet arrived, Thoreau withdrew to Con-
cord, whither a letter from James Richardson,
an equally enthusiastic classmate, followed him
three weeks later, with this bit of information: —

I hear that you are comfortably located in your
native town, as the guardian of its children, in the
immediate vicinity of one of our most distinguished
apostles of the Future, R. W. Emerson, and situated
under the ministry of our old friend. Rev. Barzillai
Frost. I hear also that Concord Academy ,'lately under
the care of Mr. Phineas Allen of Northfield, is now
[Sept. 7] vacant of a Preceptor.

For this vacancy Richardson offers himself,
" should Mr, Hoar find it diflBcult to get a scholar
college-distinguished." For this vacancy Tho-
reau was not even considered, probably; for he
had just taken charge of the Town Grammar

I 188 ] •

COLLEGE ESSAYS

School, and given it up because he was unwill-
ing to punish its pupils by whipping. The
Academy building soon became available for
the private school of John and Henry Thoreau;
but in the interval Henry sought occupation as
a teacher elsewhere.

CHAPTER V

PENCIL-MAKING SCHOOLMASTERS AND THElB
SCHOOL r

It has been the direction of many wise and
careful fathers that their sons, even if destined
for the governing class, or the learned professions,
should also have a handworking occupation, to
fall back upon in an emergency or for the inci-
dental discipline that it gives. The original needs
of the Thoreau family gave a pencil-making trade
to both John and Henry, as boys; and during the
decade 1830-40 the trade name of these pencil-
makers was "J. Thoreau and Sons." John hap-
pened to be also a natural teacher and an agree-
able head of a school; in the latter capacity more
naturally gifted than Henry; so that when John
withdrew in ill health from their Concord School
(1841), in the large building on Academy Lane,
Henry also gave it up. Before it was begun, how-
ever, in 1838, and at intervals after its close, both
brothers engaged in pencil-making, in which ^
Henry had great skill and much chemical knowl-
edge. But Henry had tried for a school in Maine
on several occasions, and the two brothers had

[ 190]

PENCIL-MAKING TEACHERS

planned an excursion westward, as far as Ken-
tucky, hoping either for a joint school, such as
they taught in Concord for three years, or for
separate schools not far apart, such as Carlyle
and his friend Edward Irving had for a time near
Edinburgh.

Henry left college with his spirit of independ-
ence and opposition more fully developed than
when he entered. In this particular he differed
much from his seniors, Alcott and Emerson; and
it gave to his conversation a tone that his ortho-
dox sister Helen thought required some soften-
ing. Her remarks led Henry to suspend his let-
ters to her, which he thus explained in a letter
of October, 1837, which Emerson copied for his
volume of Thoreau's " Letters and Poems," but
omitted to print, and turned it and some of the
poems over to me. Henry wrote: —

For a man to act himself he must be perfectly free;
otherwise he is in danger of losing all sense of responsi-
bility or self-respect. When such a state of things ex-
ists that the sacred opinions one advances in argu-
ment are apologized for by his friends, before his face,
lest his hearers receive a wrong impression of the man;
— when such gross injustice is of frequent occurrence,
- — where shall we look, and not look in vain, for men,
deeds, thoughts? As well apologize for the grape that

[191]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

it is sour, or the thunder that it is noisy, or the light-
ning that it tarries not.

Yet this gentle elder sister had brought his
young disciple to Emerson's intimacy by showing
him (through another, Mrs. Emerson's sister)
a passage in her brother's new Journal of 1837
which indicated "the same thought, the same
'^spirit" that was naturally in both the Poet-
Philosopjier and the younger Poet-Naturalist.
That Journal, begun October 20, 1837, ran to
546 pages, and was .long since destroyed, after
excerpts from it had been made for "The Ser-
vice." the "Raleigh," the "Week," and "Wal-
den." It did not, seemingly, contain many of
the original verses; these were probably entered
in a "long Red Book," of which no index survives.
But I have the index of this prose Journal, of
which I give here some specimens: —

Oct. 24. The Mould our Deeds leave. Every part of
nature teaches that the passing away of one life is the
making room for another. The Oak dies down to the
ground, leaving within its rind a rich virgin mould,
which will impart a vigorous life to an infant forest.
The pine leaves a sandy and sterile soil; the harder
woods a strong and fruitful mould. So this constant
abrasion and decay makes the soil of my future
growth.

[ 192 ]

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HELEN THOREAU

PENCIL-MAKING TEACHERS

Oct. 29. Two Ducks at Goose Pond, of the summer
or wood species, which were merrily dabbling in their
favorite basin, struck up a retreat on my approach,
paddling off with swan-like majesty. They dove every
minute or two, and swam several feet under water, to
escape our attention. They seemed to give each other
a significant nod, — and then, as if by a common un-
derstanding, 't was heels up and head down in the
shaking of a duck's wing. When they reappeared, it
was significant to observe with what a self-satisfied,
" darn-it-how -he-nicks-'em " air, they paddled off to
repeat the experiment.

Nov. 3. Sailing with and against the Stream. If one
would reflect, let him embark on some placid stream,
and float with the current. As we ascend the stream,
plying the paddle with might and main, snatched and
impetuous thoughts course through the brain. We
dream of conflict, power and grandeur. But turn the
prow down stream, and rock, tree, kine, knoll, assum-
ing new and varying positions, as wind and water
shift the scene, favor the liquid lapse of thought, far-
reaching and sublime, but ever calm and gently undu-
lating.

Sunday, March 4. Here at my elbow sit five notable,
or at least noteworthy representatives of this 19th
century, of the gender feminine. One a sedate, inde-
fatigable knitter, not spinster [Mrs. Colonel Ward], of
the old school, who had the supreme felicity to be
born in days that tried men's souls. . . . Opposite,

[ 193 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

across this stone hearth, sits one of no school, but one
who schools [Louisa Dunbar] — a spinster who spins
not, with elbow resting on the Book of Books. I
marked how she spurned that innocent everyday
book, " Germany, by De Stael," as though a viper had
stung her; — better to rest the elbow on The Book than
the eye on such a page.

(The other three were probably Miss Prudence
Ward, Mrs. Thoreau, and Maria.)

In 1837 Henry had one or two of his vexatious
affairs with some of his townsmen, if we may
trust the not always exact statements of Chan-
ning. Thoreau himself wrote in his Journal for
December, 1855, "Kept town school for a fort-
night in 1837 (?)," which must have been in
September. Channing writes: —

An early experience was the Town School, which he
took after leaving college, announcing that he should
not flog, but would talk morals as a punishment in-
stead. A fortnight sped glibly along, when a knowing
Deacon, one of the school committee, walked in and
told him that he must use the ferule, or the school
would spoil. So he did, — feruling six of his pupils
after school; one of whom was the maid-servant in his
own house. But it did not suit well with his conscience;
and he reported to the Committee that he should no
longer keep their school if they interfered with his
arrangements; they could keep it.

[ 194 ]

PENCIL-MAKING TEACHERS

Naturally this would excite unfavorable com-
jnt, as his accidentally setting Deacon Wheel-
's woods on fire did in 1844, and his refusal to
y taxes to support slavery did in 1846; and as
1 doubt he did when he "signed ofif" from Dr.
pley's First Parish, and thus exempted him-
[f from church attendance and church taxes.
lis was that same eventful year, 1837-38, when

sang Emerson's Hymn at the dedication of
e Battle Monument, July 4; had a part at
)mmencement; became intimate with Emer-
a; began to keep a regular journal; and had
her native experiences.
His first real business after leaving college was

aid his father in the pencil-factory, as he had
me in some way in 1836. But then it became
5ar to him that, of several vocations that he
ight practise, and afterwards did, teaching came
siest to him, and he began to look for a school.

one of his collegiate paradoxes he had written:

What we regard as a tendency to extremes is often a
idency to the extremely true. This is peculiarly the
36 when men, having discovered a truth, fear to
low it out, lest they go to extremes. The truth is,
uth is extremely far from Falsehood; and as mankind
mage to preservea happy medium between the two,
jy are at a considerable distance from either.
[ 195 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

But Truth leads directly to action; she calls for a
practical application. In satisfying this demand, men
are most likely to err. Truth pursues so straight a
course in the outset, that men take it for granted she
never deviates from a right line. The human mind,
with Truth in prospect, may be likened to a vibrating
pendulum. A perpendicular position was to be at-
tained; but such was the impulse originally given, that
it continues for a long time to assume an infinite vari-
ety of positions, each successively nearer the required
one, ere the force of gravity can overcome the foreign
influence, and induce rest.

This is an ingenious parable, foreshowing the
successive positions in life assumed by Henry
Thoreau, before he reached that one best adapted
to his peculiar genius, and giving him the exact
blend of activity and leisure that his health re-
quired. Far from being the robust person that
Emerson's view of his spiritual strength implies,
he was of rather a frail constitutioij, and was
often ill, as we see by his letters and diarfes. After
a boyhood of domestic industry and active sport,
he took up school-teaching (as so many men of
letters have done); on which he thus expressed
himself in the script just quoted: "If we engage
in teaching from proper motives, we shall invari-
ably make it a permanent profession; those who
do otherwise regard it as a means. And this they

[ 196 ]

PENCIL-MAKING TEACHERS

lay safely do, if as a means to something higher,
•ut no, — their end is within, not beyond their
leans; the end was soon attained, and the means
egleeted." This is a short history, but not the
'hole story of the Thoreau school-keeping.

The four sons and daughters of this rare house-
old were naturally teachers, — Henry less gifted
1 that way, perhaps, than his brother John, or
is elder sister Helen. Grace of manner was
ardly a trait of Henry at any time, though he
as of inbred courtesy and gravely considerate,
3 I have seen in many instances. Helen, who
jsembled in aspect her aunt Louisa Dunbar,
as noted for the grace of her manners and her
)cial gift — which Sophia had in a less degree.
1 Concord, Helen taught music, in which all
le household were gifted — Henry and his
lother both singing a godd part in youth. The
arents of Helen's pupils valued her also as an
cample to them in politeness. John, next in age
> Helen, was a person of afifable and attractive
lanners, though direct and frank of speech, and
Ldependent in opinion.

I have had in my hands for years, through

le kindness of the Ward family of Spencer,

[assachusetts, the correspondence of Mrs. Col-

lel Joseph Ward, widow of a Boston Revolu-

[ 197]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

tionary officer, and her daughter. Miss Prudence
Ward. These ladies were for more than a dozen
years, after 1833, residents of Concord Village,
and intimate with all branches of the Thoreau
family; with some of whom they usually resided
and whose political views they shared. From
1835, when John Thoreau left the Shattuck
house, he and his children lived in the family
house on the Square, and it was from the bridge
on the Lowell road that Henry made his early
voyage in the Red Jacket, in August, 1836. When
they moved into the Parkman house, at the Sud-
bury Corner the Wards went with them. There
Henry planted melons and made pencils, in the
sale of which he had visited New York with his
father in 1836. In the autumn of 1837 he stayed
at home and journalized, indexing his thoughts
in the Journal above mentioned, his first large
manuscript volume, as thus: —

Reflection in still water, P. 10; Our action relieved
against the sky, 11; Value of the Actual, 12; Approach
of Evening on the Water, 15; A day in a Swamp, 16;
Landscape through a Tumbler, 17 ; Sphericity, 19 ; Chief
stress on Likeness, 23; The meeting of Men, 25; Books
and History, 26; Friendliness of Music, 31; The Drum
at night, 31; Tent life, 38; Dogs baying the Moon, 42;
Inspiration of the Body, 43, 48; etc.

[ 198]

PRUDENCE BIRD AVAKD (MRS. J(.)SE[*H AVARD) AT TWEXTY-OXE
From u INLiniature

PENCIL-MAKING TEACHERS

This passage, no doubt, answered in the Jour-
nal to the index of "Sphericity": —

The brave man is a perfect sphere, which cannot fall
on its flat side, and is equally strong every way. The
coward is wretchedly spheroidal at best, too much edu-
cated or drawn out on one side, and depressed on the
other. . . . We shall not attain to be spherical by lying
on one or the other side for an eternity, but only by
resigning ourselves implicitly to the law of gravity in
us, shall we find our axis coincident with the celestial
axis; and by revolving incessantly through all circles,
acquire a perfect sphericity. Mankind, like the Earth,
revolve mainly- from west^to east, and so are flattened
at the poles. But does not Philosophy give hint of a
movement commencing to be rotary at the poles too,
which in a millennium will have acquired increased
rapidity, and help restore an equilibrium?

This appears in my edition of the "Service"
(1902) and was a part of that manuscript which
I read to the School of Philosophy, and to an
audience at my house, in 1881, at which, for the
last time, met Alcott, Emerson, Louisa Alcott,
and Walt Whitman, — the latter visiting me
that September. The letter of Margaret Fuller
praising and rejecting it from the "Dial" in
January, 1841, was also read on that occasion.

In March, 1838, Thoreau was looking toward
[ 199 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

Kentucky for a place to find pupils, and wrote
to his brother at Taunton: —

Suppose we should start in company for the West
and there either establish a school jointly, or procure
ourselves separate situations. Go I must, at all events.
It is high season to start. The canals are now open,
and travelhng comparatively "cheap. I think I can
borrow the cash in this town. There's nothing like
trying.

This Kentucky adventure was suggested by
Dr. Edward Jarvis, a physician of Concord birth
and education, who had settled at Louisville, as
a good place for a family doctor; but who soon
became a specialist in nervous and mental dis-
ease, and had much fame as a statistical author.
The journey was never taken, for reasons that
may be found in Miss Ward's letters to her sis-
ter, Mrs. Edmund Sewall, of Scituate, who, as
Caroline Ward, had married a first cousin of Mrs.
Bronson Alcott, not yet a resident of Concord: —

March, 1838. Mrs. John Thoreau's children are
soon to leave her; Helen and Sophia to keep school in
Roxbury, and John and Henry to go West. They pur-
pose instructing there, but have no fixed plan. They
will go as far as Louisville in Kentucky, unless em-
ployment can be found nearer. . . . To-day, April 13,
Henry has had a letter from President Quincy, of

[ 200 ]

PENCIL-MAKING TEACHERS

larvard, speaking of a school in Alexandria, Virginia,
o be opened the 5th of May. He is willing to take it,
,nd if accepted, this may alter or delay their journey.
May 2.) Mr. Thoreau has begun to prepare his gar-
len, and I have been digging the flower-beds. Henry
las left us this morning, to try and obtain a school at
he eastward (in Maine). John has taken one in West
loxbury. Helen is in another part of Roxbury, estab-
ishing herself in a boarding and day-school. Sophia
fill probably be wanted there as an assistant; so the
amily are disposed of. I shall miss the juvenile mem-
»ers very much; for they are the most important part
>f the estabUshment.

Henry's trip to Maine was interesting to him
n its incidents, and as making him better ac-
juainted with his cousins at Bangor, the Lowells
md Thatchers, descendants of John Thoreau the
Ferseyman and Jeanie Burns, of Scotch Stirl-
ngshire. But no school could be found there,
md the two brothers decided to open a private
school in their father's Parkman house, which
Nas spacious and central in the village. It began
mth. a few pupils before John returned from West
Roxbury, but was under his direct charge, while
Henry taught Latin, Greek, and French, and the
higher mathematics, if called for. It increased
In numbers so fast that the next year it was re-
moved to the building in Academy Lane, the

[ 201 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

regular school in which was given up, when Mr.
Allen, who had taught there, took charge of a
school at Northfield in the Connecticut Valley.
An important person as it proved. Miss Ellen
Sewall, a niece of Miss Ward, visited her aunt
and grandmother at Concord, in the summer of
1838, and her brother Edmund became a pupil
of the Thoreaus that year. The next year (April
5, 1839) in a letter to one of his aunts, he makes
the first mention I have seen of the famous
boat: —

I am going to school in Concord to a Mr. Thoreau,
who is a very pleasant schoolmaster. Saturdays we do
nothing but write compositions. I have been out to
sail once in Mr. Thoreau's boat. He has a very good
boat, which he and his brother built themselves. The
river was high, and we sailed very fast a part of the
way.

The school had begun in June, 1838, with four
boys from Boston, boarding at the Parkman
house. On June 29, Miss Ward wrote: —

There are four boys from Boston boarding with us.
I want Ellen Sewall should make us a visit of a week or
two. Henry's melons are flourishing; he has over 60
hills, and we are likely to have an abundance. Our
flower-garden looks very gay.

[ 202 ]

MISS TRI'DEXCE \\'ARD

PENCIL-MAKING TEACHERS

July 8, Henry wrote offering to take a vaca-
tion when John had his, the first of August, —
showing that his reputation, rather than John's,
set the school going and that there was a fifth
boy engaged; adding this: —

I am in school from 8 to 12 in the morning, and from
2 to 4 P.M. After that I read a little Greek or English,
or for variety, take a stroll in the woods. We have not
had such a year for berries this long time, — the earth
is actually blue with them. High blueberries, three
kinds of low, thimble and raspberries constitute my
diet at present. Among my deeds of charity I may
reckon the picking of a cherry-tree for two helpless
single ladies who live under the hill.

This may illustrate what Channing afterward
said of " Henry's edible religion."

It was a school only for boys, and it adopted
some of Mr. Alcott's new rules with regard to
amusements, walks, and punishments. One of
the Concord boys, the late Henry Warren, in
later years at Chicago, has preserved for me many
memories of this Thoreau School, which he en-
tered at the age of twelve. It soon became popu-
lar, and received all the pupils there was space
for in the rooms of the Academy but a few rods
from the home of the instructors. When a boy
applied for admission, John Thoreau would ques-

[ 203 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

tion him thus, " You say you would Uke to enter
our school; why do you wish that?" The boy
would reply that he wished or his father wished
him to study Latin, Greek, algebra, geometry,
surveying, etc., which he heard were taught there.
John would then say, " If you really wish to study
those things, we can teach you, if you will obey
our rules and promise to give your mind to your
studies; but if you come to idle and play, or to
see other boys study, we shall not want you for a
pupil. Do you promise, then, to do what we re-
quire.? if so, we will do our best to teach you what
we know ourselves."

The boy would promise; then if he was idle or
mischievous, he was reminded that he had broken
his word; but physical penalties were but little
resorted to. One new feature was a weekly walk
in the woods or pastures, or a sail or row on the
river, or a swim in one of the ponds of the town-
ship, Walden or White or Bateman's Pond; and
there was much instructive talk about the In-
dians who formerly lived or hunted there. The
large boat which the brothers had built in the
early spring of 1839, near the steam mill, not far
from my present house and garden, was often
used in these excursions.

In one of the voyages downstream toward

[ 204 ]

PENCIL-MAKING TEACHERS

Ball's Hill and Carlisle Bridge, Mr. Warren re-
membered an instance of Henry's close observa-
tion in the matter of Indian antiquities, of which
both brothers early became connoisseurs. As
they were sailing through the Great Meadows,
past Ball's Hill, where Mr. Brewster has since
made his woodland preserve for migrating birds,
Henry Thoreau called attention to a spot on the
river-shore, where he fancied the Indians had
made their fires, and perhaps had a fishing vil-
lage. There, he said, if he had a spade, he could
perchance uncover one of their rude fireplaces.
"We cannot find one to-day, for we have no
spade; but the next time we come I will see if
that was the place of habitation." Coming to
land there the next week, they drew the boat to
shore, and moved up the bank a little way. " Do
you see," said Henry, " anything here that would
be likely to attract Indians to this spot?" One
boy said, "Why, here is the river for their fish-
ing"; another pointed to the woodland near by,
which could give them game. "Well, is there
anything else?" pointing out a small rivulet that
must come, he said, from a spring not far off,
which could furnish water cooler than the river
in summer; and a hillside above it that would
keep off the north and northwest wind in winter.

[ 205 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

Then, moving inland a little farther, and look-
ing carefully about, he struck in his spade several
times, without result. Presently, when the boys
began to think their young teacher and guide was
mistaken, his spade struck a stone. Moving for-
ward a foot or two, he set his spade in again,
struck another stone, and began to dig in a circle.
He soon uncovered the red, fire-marked stones
of the long-disused Indian fireplace; thus proving
that he had been right in his conjecture. Having
settled the point, he carefully covered up his find
and replaced the ttirf , — not wishing to have the
domestic altar of the aborigines profaned by
mere curiosity.

On another walk he suddenly stopped, knelt
down, and examined the ground with some care;
then, plucking a minute something, he asked
Henry Warren if he could see that? "Yes, —
but what about it?" Drawing his microscope,
Thoreau showed the boy that, thus magnified,
this little thing was a perfect flower, just then
in the season of its blossoming; and he went on
to say that he had become so well acquainted
with the flowers, large and small, of Concord and
Acton and Lincoln, that without looking in the
almanac, he could tell by the blooming of the
flowers in what month he was. All this with no

[ 206 ]

PENCIL-MAKING TEACHERS

evident wish to display his own superior knowl-
edge, but only to impress on the youthful mind
how immense is the sum of Nature's activities,
and to impart to others his own skill in such mat-
ters.

This trait could not fail to be noticed by the
friendly pen of Channing, who, in that wonder-
book of quotations, his final Life of Thoreau,
says: —

Never in too much hurry for a dish of gossip, he
could sit out the oldest frequenter of the barroom [so
could Hawthorne] and was alive from top to toe with
curiosity. But if he learned, so he taught, and says, "I
could take one or twenty into partnership, gladly shar-
ing my gains." On his return from a journey, he not
only emptied his pack of flowers, shells, seeds, and
other treasures, but liberally contributed every fine or
pleasant or desirable experience to those who needed,
as the milkweed distributes its lustrous, silken seeds.
Connected with this was his skill in asking questions,
— a natural talent, long cultivated. Ever on the search
for knowledge, he lived to get information; and as I
am so far like Alfieri that I have almost no curios-
ity, I once said to him how surprised I was at the per-
sistence of this trait in him. "What else is there in
life?" was his reply. He did not end in this search
with farmers, nor the broadcloth world; he knew
another class of men, who hang on the outskirts of
society, — those who love grog and are never to be

[ 207 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

seen abroad without a fishpple or a gun in their hands,
— with elfish locks and of a community with Nature
not to be surpassed. They lived more outdoors than
he did, and faced more mud and water without flinch-
ing; sitting all day in the puddles like frogs, with a line
in the river, catching pouts, or wading mid-leg in
marshes to shoot woodcock. I never knew him to go
by this class without the due conversation. They had
a sort of Indian or gypsy life, and he loved to get this
at second hand. He had sufficient innocence for both
sides in these interviews.

Mr. Warren went on to say that, out of school,
and for years after, he would take the trouble to
answer any question of his pupils whom he might
meet with their problems; and if he could not
solve them at once, he would take the question
home, and give them the answer the next time
he met the young inquirer. Being asked why
so interesting a school was given up, Mr. Warren
said that the health of John Thoreau began to
fail, in the family pulmonary disease, and he
withdrew on that account from the school in the
Academy, which could not be carried on without
him, who was its real head; although Henry, from
his collegiate studies, taught the more advanced
pupils. Both were equally interested in Indian
life, and John had made many collections of im-
plements, weapons, etc.,, at Taunton in the Old

[ SOS ]

PENCIL-MAKING TEACHERS

lolony, where they were as abundant as in Con-
ard, and in which region fragments of the Indian
:ibes much longer remained — indeed, are yet to
e found there.

In September, 1838, the two brothers were
caching together, in great amity, as they always
ved; but in the village there was a prejudice,
ight or strong, against a youth like Henry, just
ne-and-twenty, who had so much independence
E thought and action. The number of pupils
ained under John; fox it was found that a boy
jarned more in a month at the Thoreau School
ian at the Town School under the Freemasons'
lOdge, where inattention, mischief, and whip-
ing were in vogue. It was no uncommon thing
)r three or four boys there to be "kept after
;hool" for idleness or roguery, and to be soundly
hipped by the strong-armed master, selected,
I part, for his muscular potency. The Thoreaus
ever whipped; they made the "recess" half an
our long, instead of the traditional ten minutes;
ley opened the school windows and ventilated
le room, so that the boys came back to fresh
ir, after, playing heartily with one of the teachers,
^pon occasion, John or Henry stopped the duU
;citation, and told a story, or conveyed a pleas-
ig moral lesson, at which John was as apt as
[ £09 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

Henry, though less learned and paradoxical. So
the minds of the boys were kept open and awake;
they cooperated in the school discipline, instead
of resisting it, as schoolboys are wont to do; and
they were found by their parents to have ac-
quired much general knowledge, as well as that
conveyed in their textbooks, many of which I
have seen. Consequently, it was soon needful for
the school to leave the Parkman house, spacious
as it was, and to engage one of the' two large
rooms at the Academy — not, yet removed to a
houselot on the new Middle Street, where it was
turned into two tenements, and in 1866 bought
by EUery Charming and occupied by him for
twenty-five years. There every green desk was
soon filled with pupils, and boys were required
to wait for a vacancy from term to term, before
they could be admitted. There were four terms
in a year which was longer than the present school
year; the tuition was but five dollars a term
unless advanced studies were pursued; the full
number of pupils, Mr. Warren thought, was
twenty-five.

While in the full tide of this success, modest
and deserved, it was announced in 1841 that it
would be closed in a few days on account of the
ill health of John Thoreau, then twenty-six years

[ 210 I

PENCIL-MAKING TEACHERS

old, who seems to have had warning of that in-
sidious family malady (consumption) of which
his grandfather, John, the Jersey immigrant,
and fom* of his eight children, had already died,
— Mary, Nancy, David, and Sarah, — usually
before the age of thirty. When asked why longer
notice had not been given of so important a
matter, John replied that if it had been given,
none of the pupils would have studied; for it was
with much' regret that these lively and instruc-
tive classes were closed. The next winter, in Feb-
ruary, in consequence of a slight accident, John
died of lockjaw, to the inconsolable grief of his
brother and the family. He was a flowing and
generous spirit, as one friend described him, and
seems to have won the first aflfections of Ellen
Sewall, who did not engage herseK to Rev. Joseph
Osgood, of Kensington and Cohasset, until after
John Thoreau's death.

The comparative pecuniary prosperity of the
Thoreau family had begun some years before
Henry graduated, with their skill in making lead
pencils — an art introduced in Concord about
1812 by the Monroes. William Monroe (father
of the giver of the fine library and art building
now standing where the Thoreaus began their
school) was the inventor of a process that proved

[211 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

successful; and from 1812 to 1833 he was the
principal maker of the article in Concord. John
Thoreau took up the manufacture before 1830,
and carried it to higher perfection, aided by the
chemical and mechanical skill of his sons. At the
outset he employed the same miller (Ebenezer
Wood) to grind his plumbago whom Mr. Mon-
roe had set up in his business; and when Mr.
Monroe wished to shut out his competitor from
the use of the mill, in the town of Acton, he was
not able to do so, and the mill went into the
sole employ of the Thoreaus. They continued to
make pencils until 1853, and Henry was active
in the manufacture and sale from 1836 for almost
twenty years. Then the business changed form,
and became the preparation of fine plumbago for
electrotyping. It was carried on by Henry in
this form for the family, after his father's death in
1859, and by Sophia after Henry's death in 1862.
Finally it passed into the hands of two brothers,
Marshall and Warren Miles, and gradually ceased
to be so profitable as when Henry and his father
were active in it.

The anecdote for which Emerson in 1862 made
himself responsible — that Henry, having made a
pencil as good as any sent over from Europe,
declined to go on with the process — lacks a

[ 212 ]

PENCIL-MAKING TEACHERS

basis in fact, though it may have some warrant in
Thoreau's petulant expression. He replied, says
Emerson, "that he should never make another
pencil; why should I?" This remark was not later
than 1850, and probably was made before 1845.
Yet he says in his published Journal (November,
1853), "I was obliged to manufacture a thousand
dollars' worth of pencils and slowly dispose of and
finally sacrifice them, in order to pay an assumed
debt of a hundred .dollars." His improvements
in the art were probably all in the way of grinding
the plumbago finer, and reducing its grittiness
by new ingredients, better than the bayberry
wax used by the Monroes. Add to this the fact
of access to a superior mine of black lead in Can-
ada, and we have the secret of the success that
certainly attended the business from 1840 onward.
All the memories of John Thoreau the younger
are pleasing, if pathetic. He held himseK less
aloof from society than Henry did afterward,
and had little of his brother's censoriousness. He
was intimate with the printer and editor William
Robinson, afterwards better known by his as-
sumed name of "Warrington" as a witty news-
paper correspondent. In 1842 Robinson was absent
from Concord, and a friend wrote to him these
particulars of John's short illness and death: —

[ 213 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

I cannot close without referring to the sudden death
of our friend John Thoreau, whom you knew and loved
so well. In the evening of Saturday, January 29, he
went to Dr. Bartlett, who dressed his wounded finger;
and with no apprehension of further diflBculty, he
walked home. On the way he had strange sensations, —
acute pains in various parts, and was hardly able to
get home, though but a short distance. Sunday night
he had violent spasms, and lockjaw set in. Being told he
must die a speedy and painful death, he was unmoved.
"Is there no hope?" he asked. "None," said the doc-
tor. Then, although his friends around him were al-
most distracted, John was calm, saying, "The cup
that my Father gives me, shall I not drink it?" He
bade his friends all good-bye; and twice he mentioned
your name. Not long before death he thought he had
written something; and he said, "I will carry it down
to Robinson, — he will like to read it." He died Tues-
day afternoon, with as much cheerfulness and com-
posure as if only going a short journey.

It is singular that few letters or essays of his
have been preserved; all that we find now are
letters and two stanzas of religious verse, in the
handwriting of his younger sister, Sophia: —

I will not lead a feverish life.
To pleasure and to folly given.

And sink the soul in petty strife
The Father calls to Heaven.

[214]

PENCIL-MAKING TEACHERS

Be this the Eden of my soul, —

A second Adam's paradise.
When I obey Jehovah's call, —

Nor shrink with dread that comes of vice.

On the reverse of the page where Henry had
written his "Voyager's- Song," another hand
inscribed this poem, which may have been meant
for John: —

Change Not

Be ever thus! though years must roll

And add their wrinkles to thy cheek:
Still let thy ever-youthful soid

In word and action live and speak!
Unknowing of a wicked thought.

Untouched by any act of sin.
And all ungovemed and untaught

Save by the Monitor within.

Thou shalt know nothing of the things
That breed Earth's countless quarrellings:
Yet of the harmony of the Sage,
The Poet's rhyme, the Scholar's page.
All that is pure and true shall be
A gift of instinct unto thee.
And so, as guileless and as wild.
Thou shalt live on and die, — a Child.

Letter of John Thoreau, Jr.

CoKCOBD, Od. 18, 18S3.
Friend Steakns: —

You will see by this epistle that I am in the land of
Harmony; yea, verily, I am a sojourner in the tents of

[«15 J

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

the peaceful. I intended to have written you last
week, but was not well. I had the nose bleed (ignoble
complaint) on cattle-show day to such an extent that
I fainted from loss of blood, and was not able to par-
ticipate in the festivities of the day. I have since been
rather weak, and have not taken much exercise. I am
now gaining fast, and contemplate many pedestrian
excursions. . . .

I received your letter, and was extremely shocked
at your vituperation of "Nature's first, best gift to
man": you called the portion under your immediate
observation, flat & insipid. . . .

Perhaps these damsels are not so bad as you imagine;
you know the poet says " Women should have a win-
ning softness." You must have more charity. The
world is under an obligation to women which it can
never repay; although some have the audacity to assert
that a considerable portion of womankind are engaged
in liquidating it at this present time, yet I consider it
as base calumny and slander.

When I recommend to you the exercise of more char-
ity, I do not mean that charity which is without dis-
cretion. "That thou mayst regard discretion; and that
thy lips may keep knowledge; for the lips of a strange
woman are as a honeycomb, and her mouth is smoother
than oil." . . .

For my part I am exempt from all such tempta-
tions; as there is naught here save a few antiquated
spinsters, or December virginsi if you will; and well
may 1 sing, "What's this dull town to me? no girls
are here."

[ 216 ]

PENCIL-MAKING TEACHERS

S[arah] & E[Iizabeth] Hoar are in the city still, Sarah
is coming up to enliven this wilderness in about six
weeks; and as I shall probably be here, I shall, as I
said before, take every opportunity of testifying my ad-
miration of your choice. Jealousy is tormenting one's
self for fear of being tormented by another; have none
of it, my dear fellow. You must not suppose that while
you slumbered, "the enemy came and sowed tares";
no, my dear Othello, I claim her by right of a first dis-
coverer: though perhaps you think that this may ter-
minate like the discovery of our Continent, in being
discovered by one, and named after another.

In this respect I presume you have faith; we read
it is the substance of things Jwped for. (Hope you'll
swallow this last morceau, as a corrective of the pills;)
and I pray, George, you will not suffer these intima-
tions to disturb your equanimity. I exhort you to pa-
tience; for I beg it may not be said of me, as was said
of the immortal Gilpin : " ' So ! fair and softly 1 ' John he
cried, but John he cried in vain."

Henry and Stearns Wheeler walked up from Cam-
bridge last week. Henry blistered his feet very badly;
he said he walked two miles in his stockings; he was
three hours coming from Lincoln; he made quite a
short visit.

Mr. [Phineas] Allen's school is quite full; he has over
fifty scholars, mostly small, however. Perhaps you are
aware he has engaged Miss Lucy F. Barrett as an
assistant.

A Temperance Society was formed here about a week
since, Rev. Dr. Ripley, President.

[ 217 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

Is your situation in any degree rendered pleasanter?
I hope it will be such as to admit of your writing to me
frequently. You must excuse my writing, as I have no
lines; and our accommodations for [such] efifusions
are very poor. (See P. B.)

I shall not promise you much satisfaction in perusing
my letters, and news is actually obsolete in this place. I
hope you will conclude to pay us a visit soon. So, wish-
ing you escape from certain green-eyed monsters, I
shall, until some refulgent orb (in the shape of a bevy of
fair damsels) shines upon this deserted land, subscribe
myself,

Yours from Sahara

John Thoreaxi.*

P.S. Please present my respects to your Brothers,
and write soon.

Mr. George Stearns, Wobitrn, Mass.

* John was two years younger than Helen, and three years older
than Henry, being at this date nineteen. Naturally, at that age,
the thoughts of young men lightly turn to love; and the young ladies
here mentioned, the daughters of Samuel Hoar, Esq., leader of the
Middlesex Bar, and granddaughters of Roger Sherman, lately grad-
uates of Mr. Allen's Concord Academy, where probably George
Stearns, of a clerical family, had also been a pupil, with John and
Henry Thoreau, were the most desirable matches in town. Not that
such gossip as in this correspondence was anything more than par-
donable comphment. So far as John Thoreau's attentions were
directed to any one damsel in the village, until they were attracted
by Ellen Sewall, they seem to have fallen on another young lady
less eligible. But, by the easy code of civility in this Puritan Dem-
ocracy, any youth, admitted to the schools, balls, and parties,
might "pay attentions" to any damsel he met there. The weekly
Lyceum, the Masonic balls, and the parties of the Concord Artil-
lery, and many other social opportunities were afforded for the
natural meeting of the sexes.

CHAPTER VI

THE WEEK ON THE RIVEES

Although it was ten years after the river
voyage was made that its story was made pubhc,
it had yet served as a step in the progress of
Thoreau toward his life work — that of an ob-
server and recorder of outward nature, and a
censor of human nature in himself and others.
Long before September, 1839, when he had
reached the age of two-and-twenty, he had ac-
customed himself to observe closely all the phe-
nomena of earth and sky, and had been a consid-
erable traveller. In 1836 he had gone with his
father to New York, selling their wares,, which
at that time were pencils. He had probably been
on a visit to his cousins in Bangor, before that
journey which he made in May, 1838, in quest
of a school; and the towns about Concord were
familiar to him from his excursions with his gun
in quest of game. He began to note for descrip-
tion poetic aspects of the landscape as early as
1835, and a few such passages have been preserved.
Regular journalizing, on the scale followed by him
in after years, began in 1837, and the index pre-

[ 219 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

served from this lost volume shows that it was
in the same fashion of unseparated mingling of
'description with reflection, which surprises the
reader of existing volumes of the Journal. His
mode of recording these remarks and reflections
is different from the common practice among
those who keep journals, and indicates a pur-
pose which he methodically followed in all his
after life. What this practice was, and the mo-
tive for it, were curiously noted by Channing,
whose statement is here copied. It was not made
until some years after the river voyage; but must
have been much the same from 1837 until the
Minnesota journey; after which his health did not
allow him to pursue this elaborate system of
notes, copies, records, and indexing. Channing
says: —

His habit was to go abroad a portion of each day, to
fields or woods or the Concord River. "I go out," he
said, "to see what I have caught in my traps, which I
set for facts." He looked to fabricate an epitome of
creation, and give us a homeopathy of Nature. , . .
He used the afternoon for walking, and usually set forth
about 2.30, returning at 5.30; this three hours was the
average length of his walk. In these walks his pockets
must accommodate his notebook and spy-glass. The
notebook was a cover for some folded papers, on which
he took his out-of-door notes; this was never omitted,

[ 220 ]

THE WEEK ON THE RIVERS

rain or shine. He acquired great skill in conveying by a
few lines or strokes a long story, which in his written
Journal might occupy pages. Into the notebook must
go all measurements with the f ootrule which he always
carried, or the siu^eyor's tape; also all observations
with his spy-glass, — an invariable companion; all
conditions of plants, spring, summer and fall; the depth
of snows, the strangeness of skies, — all went down.
To his memory he never trusted for a fact, but to the
paper and the pencil. I have seen bits of this notebook,
but never recognized any word in it; and I have read its
expansion in the Journal to many pages, of that which
occupied him but five minutes to write in the field.
"Have you written up your notes in your Journal?"
was one of his questions. . . . He brought home from
his walks objects of all kinds, — pieces of wood or
stone, lichens, seeds, nuts, apples, or whatever he had
found; for he was a vigorous collector.

The idea he conceived was, that he might, upon a
small territory like Concord, construct a chart or
calendar of the phenomena of the seasons in their
order, and give their general average for the year.
Nothing should be taken on hearsay. How vast a
work this is ! he could only have completed some por-
tion of it in a long lifetime. His calendar embraced
cold and heat, rain and snow, ice and water; he had his
gauges on the river, which he consulted, winter and
summer; he knew the temperature of all the springs in
town; he measured the snows when remarkable. I
never heard him complain that the plants were too
many, the hours too long. . . . Insects were fascinating,

[221 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

from the first gray little moth, the Perla, born in F^-
ruary's deceitful glare, to the last luxuriating Vanessa
antiope, that gorgeous purple-velvet butterfly of No-
vember. Hornets, wasps, bees and spiders and their
several nests, he carefully attended. Hawks, ducks,
sparrows, thrushes and migrating warblers, in all their
variety, he carefully perused with his field-glass. He
"named all the birds without a gun," — a weapon he
never used in mature years. He neither killed nor im-
prisoned any animal, unless driven by acute needs. He
brought home a flying-squirrel, to study its mode of
flight; but quickly carried it back to the wood. His
study (a place in the garret) held its dry miscellany of
botanical specimens, its corner of canes, its cases of
eggs and lichens, and a weight of Indian arrow-heads
and hatchets, — besides a store of nuts, of which he
was as fond as squirrels are.

The excursion which gave occasion for his first
book, the "Week," was suggested by the boat
which he and his brother built in the spring of
1839, and the tent which they added for voy-
ages of more than one day. It extended from
Concord to the top of Mount Washington, and
was the first of those mountain visits which were
afterward a part of his summer life. Occasionally
he visited Monadnoc earlier or later in the year;
and he spent more hours on that moimtain than
on any other. Wachusett, a nearer mountain,

[ 222 ]

THE WEEK ON THE RIVERS

he several times visited; and he had tried his
hand at descriptions of nature in the "Dial"
and other magazines, before he could get his first
book printed — which was at his own expense
in 1849. It omitted many of the details of the
fortnight whose hours by day and night it occu-
pied; but he wove into its earlier substance the
diary of tours he had afterwards taken to the
Uncanoonucs, to Greylock, to the Catskills, and
to Monadnoc. He first appeared as an author
in print, in the " Dial " (its first number, July,
1840), in a poem entitled "Sympathy," which
professed to lament a "gentle boy," but did in
fact celebrate, in unaccustomed fashion, the sis-
ter of one of his pupils in the school of the two
brothers. Other verses and prose essays followed;
but that rhapsody on courage, soldiership, and
music, which I printed in 1902, as "The Ser-
vice," did not get admission to the "Dial," be-
cause Margaret Fuller did not think it quite
good enough. After giving a general view of the
thirteen days' tour, condensed by him into a
week of seven days, I give some omitted por-
tions of the Journal (long since destroyed) from
which about half the volume was taken, with
modifications and insertions, — Thoreau's con-
stant habit, when preparing a book for the press.

[ 223 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

y' The Actual Tour of September, 1839

On Saturday, August 31, the new boat was
freighted with the tent, blankets, instruments
of precision, food, Hterature, etc., thought to be
needful or convenient for the brothers; and it
dropped down the Sudbury to its junction with
the Assabet, constituting the larger stream known
as Concord River; and it passed under the Red
Bridge, and the Battle-Ground Bridge, gliding
by the Parsonage, not yet known as the "Old
Manse," under the new North Bridge, through
the meadows at the foot of Ponkawtassett, and
onward toward Bedford, Billerica, and Lowell.
By September 1 the brothers were enjoying Sun-
day quiet on the broad stream of the Merri-
n(iac, and the journalizing had begun. Monday
morning they were rowing their boat through an
early fog between Dunstable and Nashua in New
Hampshire, "advancing farther into the country
and into the day, — the slight bustle and activ-
ity of Monday being added to the Sundayness of
Nature." Henry says: —

Occasionally one of us would run along the shore for
a change; examining the country and visiting the near-
est farm-houses; while the other followed the windings
of the river alone, with a view of meeting his companion

[ 2S4 ]

• THE WEEK ON THE RIVERS

at some distant point, and hearing the report of each
other's adventures; — how the farmer praised the
coolness of his well, and his wife offered the stranger a
draught of milk. For though*the country was so new,
and the inhabitants unobserved and unexplored by us
(shut in between steep banks, that still and sunny day),
we did not have to travel far to find where men in-
habited like wild bees, and had sunk wells in the loose
sand and loam of the Merrimac. All that is told of
mankind, — of the inhabitants of the Upper Nile, and
the Sunderbunds, and of Timbuctoo and the Orinoko,
is experience there. And there have lived original
arid free-thinking men, perhaps, — those men of whom
we read in the history of New Hampshire., While we
were engaged in these reflections, and thought ourselves
the only navigators of these waters, suddenly a canal-
boat, like some huge river-horse, with its large sail set,
glided round a point before us, and changed the scene in
an instant. And then another and another glided into
sight, and we found ourselves once more in the current
of commerce. . . . Then we turned our prow ashore,
to spend the remainder of the day under the oaks of a
retired pasture, sloping to the water's edge, and bor-
dered with hazel, in the town of Hudson.

This was Monday night, September 2. Tues-
day night they were at Coos Falls in the New
Hampshire town of Bedford, chatting with some
masons, whom they saw again Wednesday morn-
ing, as they were striking their tent, — a passage

[ 225 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

omitted from the volume, but showing how they
camped: —

We supposed we had selected a retired part of the
shore; but we discovered this morning that we had
pitched our tent directly in the path of the masons,
whom we had seen crossing the Merrimac in their boat
the evening before. And now, going to their work
again, they came upon us as we were rolling up our
tent; and tarried to examine our furniture and handle
our guns, which were leaning against a tree. This was
the first and only time that we were observed in our
camping-ground by any one, — though our white tent
on an eminence must have been a conspicuous ob-
ject. So much room is there still in Nature, and so easy
would it be to travel the length and breadth of the land
without the knowledge of its inhabitants. Thus with-
out skulking, far from the dust and din of travel, we
had beheld the country at our leisure, by daylight and
by night, — secure of the best introduction to Nature.
All other roads intrude and bring the traveller to a
stand; but the river has stolen into the scenery it
traverses without intrusion, — watering and adorn-
ing it; atid is as free to come and go as the zephyr.

That day, September 4, they sped on upstream,
past Manchester, toward Hooksett, and in sight
of the Pinnacle, a picturesque mountain-spur;
and passed the night near where they left their
boat for a week, while they pushed on by land
to Concord, Sanbornton, and the White Moun-

[ 226 ]

THE WEEK ON THE RIVERS

tains. The description of this last stretch of
their voyage up shows clearly the completeness
of their preparation for such a tour: —

We presently came upon several canal-boats, at in-
tervals of a quarter-mile, standing up to Hooksett
with a light breeze; and one by one they disappeared
round a point above. With their broad sails set, they
moved slowly up the stream in the sluggish and fitful
breeze, as if impelled by some mysterious counter-cur-
rent, like antedUuvian birds; a grand motion, slow and
steady. One steersman offered to take us in tow, but
when he came alongside we found that he intended to
take us on board, boat and all. As we were too heavy
to be lifted aboard, we left him and proceeded up the
stream half a mile, to the shade of some maples, to
spend om" noon. In half an hour several boats passed
up the river, and among them the boat mentioned,
keeping the middle of the stream with a fair wind.
The steersman called out ironically that if we would
come alongside he would take us in tow. We made no
haste to give chase till they were a quarter-mile ahead.
Then, with all our sails set, and plying our four oars,
we shot swiftly up the stream, and, one after the other,
we overtook them. As we glided under the side of our
acquaintances, we quietly promised, if they would
throw us a rope, to take them, in tow. Thus we gradu-
ally overhauled each boat in succession, until we had
the river to ourselves again.

This shows they had more than one sail, and

[ 227 ]

HENRY DAVID ^THOREAU

were the fastest boat on the river. Thursday
proved rainy, and they set out on foot for Ply-
mouth, where dwelt their friend N. P. Rogers,
an anti-slavery lecturer and editor, on whom
they called, and then walked on through Hol-
derness, Lincoln, Franconia, and Bethlehem, to
the Crawford Notch and the summit of Mount
Washington; which Thoreau, like Emerson, calls
Agiocochook. In a fragmentary diary which I
have seen, Henry says that they left their boat
at Hooksett, Thursday, September 5, walked to
Concord, New Hampshire, that night; on the 6th
took the stage-coach for Plymouth, and thence
on foot to Tilton's Tavern in Thornton. He
notes that "the mountain scenery begins on
Sanbornton Square." On the 7th they were at
the Franconia Notch, gazing on the "Old Man
of the Mountain," — ^ Hawthorne's "Great Stone
Face," — and on the 8th in Tom Crawford's
Tavern at the Great Notch; from which they
made excursions down the Notch and in other
directions. They seem to have rested on Sun-
day, and did not ascend the highest peak until
Tuesday, September 10; and they retixrned by
stage-coach from North Conway, and were at
Hooksett, Thursday night, September 12, after
a week's absence from their boat, which they

[ 228 ]

THE WEEK ON THE RIVERS

found in good condition. Miss Prudence Ward,
writing to her brother, September 30, said: —

The young gentlemen returned from their expedi-
tion to the White Mountains in less than a fortnight,
having gone nearly to Concord, New Hampshire, in
their boat; from there they travelled most of the way
on foot, retiuTiing- to their boat by stage. Their re-
turn was very expeditious, — coming in the boat fifty
miles the last day (Friday, September 13). Having so
much of his vacation left, John thought he would visit
his sisters at Roxbury; and also go to Scituate. We
knew not for certain whether Mr. Sewall would be gone.
It seems he had set off that very day. John enjoyed
himself, however, very well with Ellen and the boys.
Caroline told you of the very pleasant visit we had
from Ellen; and we have also heard directly from there
by John Thoreau.

A slight notice of John's visit came also from
Ellen Sewall to her aunt; accompanying some
flowers pressed in a pamphlet sermon, on the in-
side cover of which the maiden wrote, "I have
enjoyed Mr. John's visit exceedingly, though
sorry that father and mother were not at home."
Before the river voyage, Henry had probably
learned that his brother was preferred to himself
in that quarter; for his poem in the "Dial" was
dat6d June 24, 1839. Other verses of the period

[ 229 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

would seem to have had this maiden in view —
particularly —

The Breeze's Invitation

Like two careless swifts let's sail,

(Zephyrus shall think for me,)
Over hill and over dale.
Riding on the easy gale.

We will scan the earth and sea.

Yonder see that willow tree.

Winnowing the buxom air!
You a gnat and I a bee.
With our merry minstrelsy

We wUl make a concert there.

One green leaf shall be our screen

Till the sun doth go to bed;
I the king and you the queen
Of that peaceful little green.

Without any subject's aid.

To our music Time shall linger.

And Earth open wide her ear;
Nor shall any need to tarry.
To inunortal verse to many

Such sweet music as he'll hear.

Like much of Thoreau's verse, this is oracular
or mystical; and such was often his prose when
Music was his theme. Thus, in a long passage
from the Journal of the river voyage, only a small
part of which appeared in the "Week," I find
this: —

[ 230 ]

THE WEEK ON THE RIVERS

Music at Night (Septemher 3, 1839)

I shall not soon forget the sounds which we heard
as we were falling asleep this night on the banks of the
Merrimac. Far into the night we heard some tyro
beating a drum incessantly, in preparation for a coun-
try muster in Candia, as we learned, and we thought
of the line, —

" When the drum beat at dead of night."

The very firmament echoed his beat, and we could
have answered him that it would be answered, and the
forces be mustered. Fear not, thou drummer of the
night, we too will be there! And still he drummed on
alone in the silence and the dark. This stray sound
from a far-off sphere came to our ears from time to
time, to remind us of those fabulous Arabian notes we
had almost forgotten. It was as if our shoulders jogged
the stars.

Occasionally we hear a remote sound from a distant
sphere, with so unprejudiced a sense for the sweet and
significant, that we seem for the first time to have heard
at all; and then the cheapest sound has a Ikrger mean-
ing and a wider undulation than we know. When we
hear any musical sound in Nature, it is as if it were a
bell ringing; we feel that we are not belated, but in
season wholly, and enjoy a pensive and leisure hour.

What a fine and beautiful communication is Music,
from age to age, of the fairest and noblest thoughts, —
the aspirations of ancient men preserved, — even such
as were never communicated by speech! It is the
flower of language, — thought colored and curved,

[ 231 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

tinged and wreathed, — fluent and flexible : its crystal
fountain tinged with the sun's rays, and its purling
ripples reflecting the green grass and the red clouds. It
teaches us again and again to trust the remotest and
finest as the divinest instinct; and it makes a dream our
only real experience.

Each more melodious note I hear

Brings this reproach to me, —
That I alone afford the ear.

Who would the music be.

The brave man is the sole patron of music : he recognizes
it for his mother-tongue, — a more mellifluous and
articulate language than words; in comparison with
which, speech is recent and temporary. His language
must have the same majestic movement and cadence
that philosophy assigns to the heavenly bodies. The
steady flux of his thought constitutes tinie in music.
The universe falls in aiid keeps pace with it, — which
before proceeded singly and discordant.

Hence are Poetry and Song. When Bravery first
grew afraid and went to war, it took Music aldng with
it. The soul is still delighted to hear the echo of its
own voice. It was the dim sentiment of a noble friend-
ship for the purest soul the world has seen, that gave
to Europe a crusading era. If the soldier marches to
the sack of a town, he must be preceded by drum and
trumpet, to identify his cause with the accordant uni-
verse.

There is as much music in the world as virtue. In a
world of peace and love music would be the universal
language; and men would greet each other in the fields

[

THE WEEK ON THE EIVERS

in such accents as a Beethoven now utters at rare in-
tervals, from a distance. All things obey music as they
obey virtue; it is the herald of virtue; it is God's
voice.

As polishing brings out the vein in marble and the
grain in wood, so music brings out what of heroic lurks
anywhere. It is either a sedative or a tonic to the soul.

A sudden burst from a horn startles us, as if one had
rashly provoked a wild beast; he dares wake the echoes
which he cannot put to rest. The sound of a bugle in
the stillness of the night sends forth its voice to the
farthest stars. Instantly it finds its sounding-board in
the heavens. A man's life should be a stately march
to an unheard music; and when to his fellows it may
seem irregular and inharmonious, he may be stepping
to a livelier measure, which only his nicer ear can
detect. . . . Let not the faithful sorrow, that he has no
ear for the more fickle and subtile harmonies of crea-
tion, if he be awake to the slower measure of virtue and
truth. If his pulse does not beat in unison with the
musician's quips and turns, it may accord with the
pulse-beat of the ages.

These are not the vagaries of imagination,
but the versatile thoughts of a sensitive and musi-
cal youth, who seeks to show his subtile fancies in
all their variety. Such refined speculations alter-
nate, in these early Journals, with the plainest
practical observations, and cool statements of
everyday fact, concerning the American Indian,

[ 833 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

the passenger pigeon, or the wood duck or wild
goose. In closing this voyage in the colder at-
mosphere of mid-September, the two brothers
note with interest the scenes they beheld with
keen curiosity as they toiled upstream with sail
and oar, in a summer climate.

Hooksett, Thursday, Sept. 12, 1839. Finding our boat
safe in its harbor under the Uncannunuc Mountain,
with a fair wind and the current in our favor, we com-
menced our return voyage at noon; sitting at our ease
and conversing, or in silence watching for the end of
each reach in the river, as a bend concealed it from
view. As the season was now farther advanced, the
wind blew steadily from the north, and we were en-
abled to lie upon owe oars, without much loss of time,
when it pleased us. By this time we had become known
as a strange craft upon the river, and had acquired the
nickname of the "Revenue Cutter." With this pro-
pitious breeze we soon reached the Falls of Amoskeag,
and recognized, as we passed rapidly by, many a fair
bank and islet upon which our thoughts had rested
on the upward passage. Without any design or effort
of ours, the ripples curled away in the wake of our
boat, like ringlets from the head of a child; while we
went serenely on our way. We passed in broad day-
light the scene of our night's encampment at Coos
Falls, and at last pitched our camp on the west bank,
in the northern part of Merrimac, opposite to the large
island on which we had spent our noon, on our way up
the river.

[ 234 ]

THE WEEK ON THE RIVERS

The next morning at five o'clock they h^d
still fifty miles to run before the wind, which had
shifted to northwest and was blowing coldly au-
tumnal.

So they sped alpng past all their camping-
places, until they were passed through the locks
at Cromwell's Falls in Lowell, about noon, and
soon launched on the adverse but gentle current
of the Concord, or Musketaquid. Up this they
pressed through the meadows, with oar and sail,
until, late in the evening of September 13, the
boat was " grating against the bulrushes of its
native port," somewhere near the mouth of the
Mill Brook. They drew it up and fastened it
by its chain to the wild apple tree, where it
was easily reached from the Parkman house, to
which they hastened home. They had success-
fully achieved an adventure as widely known
now as Jason's voyage in his Argo; and their vil-
lage is now more famous than Jason's lolchos.

When Hawthorne came, three years later, to
bring his bride to the Old Manse, for a few years,
he desired a boat for his excursions, and the death
of John Thoreau, early in 1842, had made this
boat a cause of grief to Henry. In the spring of
1843 he made it over to Hawthorne and Chan-
ning, who had then come to live and die in Con-

[ 235 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

cord; and he became the most intimate friend of
these two men of kindred genius.

At this point of time we are fortunate in having
a sketch of Thoreau's physical, intellectual, and
moral nature, drawn by one of his neighbors in
Concord, singularly gifted in fathoming the souls
of men, and not too favorable in his verdicts —
Hawthorne himself. After the close of their
school, and before his brother's death, Thoreau
had gone, by invitation of Emerson, to live in his
family and assist him in the care of his garden and
woodlands, with some care also of the publica-
tion of the "Dial," which had by 1841 fallen
mainly upon Emerson, assisted by several of his
friends. Thoreau as gardener and mechanic had
achieved a reputation, and it was he, most likely,
with some aid from George Bradford (the brother
of Mrs. Ripley, whose husband leased the Manse
to Hawthorne), who put the garden of the old
parsonage into readiness for Mrs. Hawthorne,
when she should come to it as a bride in July,
1842. Accordingly, Thoreau was one of the first
of the new neighbors of the Hawthornes to dine
with them (August 31, 1842). This visit drew
out this entry in Hawthorne's notebook: —

/ Mr. Thoreau is a singular character; a young man
with much of wild, original Nature still remaining in

[ 236 ]

THE WEEK ON THE RIVERS

him; and so far as he is sophisticated, it is in a way and
method of his own. He is as ugly as sin; long-nosed,
queer-mouthed, and with uncouth and somewhat rus-
tic manners, — though courteous, — corresponding
with such an exterior. But his ugliness is of an honest
and agreeable fashion, and becomes him much better
than beauty.

He was educated at Cambridge, and formerly kept
a school in this town; but for two or three years back
he has repudiated all regular means of getting a living,
and seems inclined to lead a sort of Indian life. He has
been for some time an inmate of Mr. Emerson's family,
Wd in requital he labors in the garden, and performs
such other offices as may suit him : being entertained
by Mr. Emerson for the sake of what true manhood
may be in him.

He is a keen and delicate observer of Nature, — a
genuine observer, which I suspect is almost as rare a
character as even an original poet. And Nature, in
return for his love, seems to adopt him as her especial
child; and shows him secrets which few others are al-
lowed to witness. He is familiar with beast, fish, fowl
and reptile, and has strange stories to tell of adventures
and friendly passages with these lower brethren of
mortality. Herb and flower, likewise, wherever they
grow, whether in garden or wildwood, are his familiar
friends. He is on intimate terms with the clouds also,
and can tell the portents of storms. He has a great re-
gard for the memory of the Indian tribes, whose wild
life Would have suited him so well; and, strange to say,
he seldom walks over a plowed field without picking

[ 237 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

up an arrow-point, spearhead, or other relic of the red
man. With all this he has more than a tincture of
literature; a deep and true taste for poetry, especially
■^OT the elder poets; and he is a good writer. At least
he has written a good article, — a rambling disquisi-
tion on Natural History, in the last "Dial," which, he
says, was chiefly made up from journals of his own
observations. Methinks this article gives a very fair
image of mind and character, — so true, so innate and
literal in observation, — yet giving the spirit as well
as the letter of what he sees; even as a lake reflects its
wooded banks, showing every leaf, — ^^yet giving the
wild beauty of the whole scene. There is a basis of good
sense and moral truth, too, which is a reflection of his
character.

Considering how little Thoreau had published
at this time, and that Hawthorne had hardly
heard of him before, this is a singularly apt ver-"
diet. Six months later, with that perception of
repulsions which Hawthorne so keenly had, he
adds in his notebook — what time had perhaps
already justified : —

Mr. Emerson seems to have suflPered some incon-
venience from his experience of Mr. Thoreau as an
inmate. It may well be that such a sturdy, uncom-
promising person is fitter to meet occasionally in the
open air than to have as a permanent guest at table
and fireside.

[ 238 ]

.THE WEEK ON THE RIVERS

A few years after this, when Charles Malloy, a
young Emersonian from Limerick, in Maine, had
come up to Boston to hear Emerson lecture, and
to borrow his copy of the old English version of
the Bhagavat Ghita, he had a long talk with the
Concord poet, in which he asked, with some curi-
osity, about Thoreau, whose papers in the " Dial"
he had seen. Emerson " spoke of him kindly, as if
he liked him"; but added: —

He is a man of incorruptible integrity, and of great
ability and industry; and we shall yet hear much more
of him. But he affects manners rather brusque, does
not think it worth while to use the cheap service of
courtesy; is pugnacious about trifles; likes to contra-
dict, likes to say No, and to be on the other side. You
cannot always tell what will please him. He was ill,
and I sent him a bottle of wine, which I doubt if he
ever tasted. I regret these oddities. He needs to fall
in love, to sweeten him and straighten him.

«

'A pleasant medicine, I thought" reflected
Malloy, "but it does n't always cure."

Before the summer of 1842, when Hawthorne's
verdict was rendered, it had become evident to
a few others, as well as to himself, that Thoreau's
vocation was to literature rather than to science
or to a professorship. In their school, while Henry
was the more exact and widely read scholar,

[ 239 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

John was the affable and persuasive schoolmaster.
John's withdrawal by reason of health in 1841 con-
vinced Henry that teaching was for him a means
rather than an end; a more active life suited him
better, and he chose one that did not involve him
so closely in those social engagements which he
chose to meet on his own terms. Mr. Emerson's
offer of a home met these wishes seasonably; and
the "Dial," for which he now wrote often, and
aided in editing, gave him a means of publishing,
although no pecuniary profit. He felt no distaste
or disgust at manual toil, to which he had been
bred as well as to learning. In a letter to Horace
Greeley, with whom he soon became intimiate,
Henry some years later thus declared himseff on
this point: —

Scholars are apt to think themselves privileged to
complain, as if their lot was a particularly hard one.
How much we have heard of knowledge under difficul-
ties — of poets starving in garrets, depending on the
patronage of the wealthy, and finally dying mad! It
is time that men sang another song. There is no rea-
son why the scholar, who professes to be a little wiser
than the mass of men, should not do his work in the
dirt occasionally; and by means of his superior wisdom
make much less suffice for him. A wise man will not be
unfortunate, — how then would you know but that
he was a fool?

[ 240 ]

THE WEEK ON THE KIVERS

He was always scrupulous about receiving fa-
vors without returning an equivalent, and it was
his habit to pay board at his father's house.
Among the many Thoreau manuscripts that have
accumulated with me in the half-century that I
have been one of his biographers, I found this cal-
culation, entered on the back of one of his poems,
showing how much he owed and paid for board
and borrowings, during the winter months of
1840-41, while he was still teaching in Academy
Lane, and a little before he went to live at Mr.
Emerson's: —

Dec. 8, 1840, Owe Father $41.73

" 17, Paid. 6.00

Setded up to March 22, 18^1. Jan. 1, 1841, Paid, 15.00

Feb. 2, 1841, Borroved 1.3S

" 8, 1841, Paid, 10.00

To use the back of a poem for this entry shows
how frugal of paper he was, while making such
constant and repeated use of it as he did in jour-
nalizing; and still more in transcribing and revis-
ing for the printer, making two or three drafts of
many passages — as, for instance, in these en-
tries for the "Week."

CHAPTER VII

THOREAU IN LITERATURE

The school survived the river voyage more
than a year and a half — from September 15,
1839, to April 1, 1841. It closed, as already men-
tioned, because of the failing health of John.
Among the later pupils was Senator Hoar, who
read Greek with Henry, and afterwards with
Mrs. Ripley, before entering Harvard in 1842. In
his Autobiography he speaks very pleasantly of
Henry, as his brother Edward and his sister Eliz-
abeth always did. But their mother, the young-
est daughter of Roger Sherman, with something
of her father's overplus of the practical, found
fault with Henry for his oddities; and about this
time said, "Henry talks about Nature just as if
she had been born and brought up in Concord."
Emerson never complained of that, but even he
was a severe critic of Thoreau's verse, as will pres-
ently appear. In his own opinion, Thoreau's
"first printed paper of consequence" was that on
Persius, which came out in the "Dial" and was
written early in 1840; but many of the best parts
of the "Week" and of "Walden" appear in their

[ U2 ]

THOREAU IN LITERATURE

original form in the two earliest Journals, the
"Red Book" from October 22, 1837, to June 11,
1840, and one of 396 pages that immediately fol-
lowed it. From the first "The Service" was al-
most entirely made up; and in it were found these
passages, of the same period: —

We must live on the stretch, retiring to our rest like
soldiers on the eve of a battle, looking forward with
ardor to the strenuous sortie of the morrow. To the
brave soldier the rust and leisure of peace are harder
than the fatigues of war. As our bodies court physical
encounters, and languish in the mild and even climate
of the tropics, so our souls thrive best on unrest and
discontent. The soul is a sterner master than any King
Frederick; for a true bravery would subject our bodies
to rougher usage than even a grenadier could with-
stand. We too are dwellers within the purlieus of the
camp. When the sun breaks through the morning
mist, I seem to hear the din of war louder than when
his chariot thundered on the plain of Troy. The thin
folds of vapor, spread like gauze over the woods, form
extended lawns whereon high tournament is held: —

" Before each van
Prick forth the aery knights and couch their spears,
Till thickest legions close."

Of such sort, then, be our Crusade; which, while it
inclines chiefly to the hearty good will and activity of
war, rather than to the insincerity and sloth of peace,
will set an example to both of calmness and energy; —
as unconcerned for victory as careless of defeat, — not

[ 243 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

seeking to lengthen our term of service, nor to cut it
short by a reprieve, — but earnestly applying our-
selves to the campaign before us. Nor let our warfare
be a boorish and uncourteous one; but let a higher
courtesy attend its higher chivalry, — though not to
the slackening of its rougher duties and severer dis-
cipline. So our camp may be a palaestra, wherein the
dormant energies and affections of men may tug and
wrestle; not to their discomfiture, but to their mutual
exercise and development.

What were Godfrey and Gonsalvo unless we breathe
a life into them? and enacted their exploits as a prel-
ude to our own? The Past is the canvas on which our
idea is painted, —

" The dim prospectus of our future field."

We are dreaming of what we are to do. Methinks I
hear the clarion sound, and the clang of Corslet and
buckler, from many a silent hamlet of the Soul. The
signal gun has long since sounded, and we are not yet
on our posts. Let us make such haste as the morning,
and such delay as the evening.

This was the young Thoreau's theory of spirit-
ual war and peace, framed with little relation to
the commonplace details of practical life, but an
idealist's chart for great-circle sailing among the
isles and mainlands of Philosophy, wherein Tho-
reau's guidebook just then was Emerson's trea-
tise entitled "Nature." Under a new heading, he
went on in his "Service" to describe —

[244 ] "

THOREAU IN LITERATURE

The Qualities of the Recruit
Spes aibi quisque. (Each one his own hope.) Vibgil.

The brave man is the elder son of creation, who has

stept buoyantly into his inheritance; while the youiiger,

who is the coward, waiteth patiently till he decease.

He rides as wide of the Earth's gravity as a star; and

by yielding incessantly to all the impulses of the Soul,

is constantly drawn upward, and becomes a fixed star.

His bravery deals not so much in resolute action as

in healthy and assured rest; its palmy state is a staying

at home and compelling alliance in all directions. The

brave man braves nothing, nor knows he of his bravery.

He is that sixth champion against Thebes,^ whom,

when the proud devices of the rest have been recorded,

^schylus describes as

" Bearing a full-orbed shield of solid brass.
But there was no device upon its qircle:
For to be just, not seem so, is his wish."

All omens are good to the brave man; the spilling of
salt, the standing-up of a fork portend good to him;
for he feels the simplest law of Nature to be the war-
rant of universal innocence. All her phenomena con-
sent with him. His breath is the moving air, his mood
is the Seasons. Can he live in the midst of Nature and
not be as serene as she? The greatness of the hero is
not stretched; he does not stand on tiptoe, but on the

* This is from the "Seven against Thebes," which Thoreau not
only read in college, but afterwards made of it a literal version,
which has never been printed. His like translation of the "Prome-
theus Bound" is printed. For his wide readings in Chreek, Latin,
and other tongues, see pp. 260, 261.

[245]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

soles of his feet. He is not acting as if he were tall; his
nerves are unstrained; he reposes by as many points
as a sick man on his couch. How many wait for health
and warm weather to be heroic and noble! Not he who
procures a substitute to go to Florida,^ is thus exempt
from the service; he is to gather his laurels in another
field.

The religion we now have is very laic; as little does
it creep into the sermon of the preacher as does poetry
into the lecture of the Professor. The life which will
best bear to be considered may be not only without
religion, but even without morality. Occasionally we
rise above the necessity of virtue, into an unchange-
able morning light, in which we have not to choose,
(as in a dilemma) between right and wrong; but may
live right on, and breathe the circumambient air. This
is the very vitality of life; no moral discourse has ever
aimed so high as this level. The preacher is silent about
it, and silent must ever be; for he who knows it will not
preach. For the most part the best man's spirit makes
a fearful sprite to haunt his tomb. The ghost of a
priest is no better than that of a highwayman. It is
pleasant even to hear of one whose life has been such
that, after death, his grave blesses the region round-
about, — who has profaned or tabooed no place by
being buried in it.

* The Florida War was an ignoble campaign, carried on by our
small army under Jackson and Van Buren, against the Seminole
Indians and the runaway slaves of Georgia and Carolina, whom the
Indians protected. It went on for years, but ended about 1840. In
that period several young men went to the army from West Point,
to which they were sent as pupils from Concord.

[ 246 ]

THOREAU IN LITERATURE

I like those men who do their Maker the compliment
not to fear Him; who grow bolder as great crises ap-
proach; who sit, even in the presence of the gods, and
shrink not: and are timid, if it must be so, in the pres-
ence of mean men; who literally neither fear God nor
the Devil, but love and respect the one while they hate
the other.

How all the world takes care of a great man's repu-
tation but himself! Pity that man "who "has a char-
acter to support," — it is worse than a very large
family. We seem to linger in manhood but to tell the
dreams of our childhood; and they vanish out of
memory ere we have learned their language. When,
then, shall we execute them? Alas! now is never the
time.

The moral aspect of the universe is, after all, but a
jaundice imported into it by the degeneracy of man.
I like the frankness of my neighbor, who said that his
hill-farm was "poor stuff, — just fit to hold this world
together," — and whom no religious scruples could
induce to retract what he had said. No doubt the lean
soil had sharpened his wits; and he saw the heavens at
a lesser angle from the hill than from the plaia.^ The
gods would not be pleased, though a man were dis-

• This may have been the'owner of the "HoUowell Farm," a
small demesne on the ridge overlooking the Musketaquid, near
the "caterpillar bridge" leading toward Nine-Acre Corner, not faf
from the toot of Fairhaven Hill, near the summit of which are the
"Cliffs," much visited by Emerson in his afternoon walks. Al-
though Thoreau had much to say in reproach of the self-seeking
fanners of Concord, he was on good terms with the small farmers
and farm laborers, whom he daily met.

[ 247 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

satisfied with their gifts, if he clearly demanded greater.
It would be worth while to remember, daily, that we
are to make great demands on Heaven and on our-
selves.

After contemplating a nobler life than usual, the
question arises. What are we to do? The relation or
sight of any noble life unfits us for all common work.
It subsides into our very bones, and excites us to
muscular exertion; we are stronger in the knees. The
past then seems but a dim prospective of our future
field.-' We feel our future deeds bestir themselves within
us, and move grandly to a consummation, — as ships
go down the Thames. Alas ! is all to be in vain? What
we really need to know is very simple. The course of
our lives lies plain before us, as that river's valley; we
need only know the highland from the main, — on this
side the mountains, and on that the sea. We have but
to try; really nothing stands in the way to success, —
everything in the way to failure. In the least swing of
the arm, in indignant thought, in stern content, we
conquer our foes.

It is astonishing how fatal is every step, — even a
step forward. It seems a miracle that we ever take an-
other, — so rigid and unyielding do our muscles in-
stantly become. When we are wisest, we are the great-
est bigots. We do not stand still for a moment, but
a crust forms over us* like ice on still water. We do
not believe that we shall, even in a serener and wiser
hour, ever see ourselves: we are never visionary enough
to be prepared for what the next hour may bring forth.
* A verse, repeated in prose from p. 244.
[ 248 ]

THOREAU IN LITERATURE

In these gleanings from the earlier Journals, long
since destroyed, we see comparativfely little of
that intimacy with outward nature which makes
the charm of the only two finished books that
Thoreau compiled in his lifetime from the Jour-
nals while they existed. It was not until after
leaving college that he had that continuous in-
timacy by day and by night which appears in his
mature writings. His college course had been
studiously prepared for in the public schools of
Concord and its Academy, the teachers of which
were apt to be either youths in Harvard College,
or recent graduates; and the course of study was
strenuous. Moreover, the Thoreau family was
hard-working; their pencil industry employed both
the father and the sons until they could be better
employed in more intellectual tasks. Hence there
was the less leisure for the study of nature.

What we suppose to be the earliest sample of
Thoreau's verse that has been preserved, is a bal-
lad, written in his college period, and perhaps the
only ballad he ever attempted. It savors both of
Tasso and of Mrs. Hemans, whose poems were
even more popular in America than in England;
was never oflfered for printing anywhere, but was
cherished by some aunt or cousin, and remained,
like much of his later verse, in possession of the

[ 249 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

Thatcher family at Bangor, where Mr. Bixby, an
unwearied Thoreau collector, found it in 1906.
In Thoreau's "Service" appear traces of his early
interest in the Crusades, and the contests between
Christian and Moor in Spain; some of which will
be quoted hereafter. The following ballad cele-
brates Tasso's hero —

Godfrey of Boulogne *

The moon hung low o'er Provence vales,

'T was night upon the sea;
Fair France was wooed by Afric gales.

And paid in minstrelsy.
Along the Rhone there moves a band,

Their banner to the breeze.
Of maU-clad men with iron hand.

And steel on breast and knees.
The herdsman following his droves

Far in the night alone,
Read faintly through the olive groves, —

'T was Godfrey of Boulogne.

The mist still slumbered on the heights.

The glaciers lay in shade.
The stars withdrew their faded lights.

The moon went down the glade.

' The plot of this ballad is good, — a series of pictures at all
seasons of the day, with appropriate indications of the hour, — and
the Crusaders' army hastening on to rescue the Holy Sepulchre.
Nor is the manner bad.

[ 250 ]

THOREAU IN LITERATURE

Proud Jura saw the day from far,

And showed it to the plain;
She heard the din of coming war.

But told it not again:
The goatherd seated on the rocks.

Dreaming of battles none.
Was wakened by his startled flocks, —

'T was Godfrey of Boulogne.

Night hung upon the Danube's stream,

Deep midnight on the vales.
Along the shore no beacons gleam.

No soimd is on the gales.
The Turkish lord has banished care.

The harem sleeps profoimdj
Save one fair Georgian sitting there

Upon the Turkish ground.
The lightning flashed a transient gleam,

A glancing banner shone,
A host swept swiftly down the stream, —

'T was Godfrey of Boulogne.

'T was noon upon Byzantium,

On street and tower and sea.
On Europe's edge a warlike hum

Of gathering chivalry.
A troop went boldly through the throng

Of Ethiops, Arabs, Hims,
Jews, Greeks and Turks, — to right the wrong;

Their swords flashed thousand suns :
Their banner cleaved Byzantium's dust.

And like the sun it shone;
Upon their armor was no rust, —

'T was Godfrey of Boulogne.

[251 1

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

Here was no implied moral, and scarcely any
symbolism; it was a series of pictures vividly ex-
pressing the movement of an armed host to battle
for the Lord. But in his prose, some years after
this spirited verse was written, the warfare cele-
brated had become symbolic — a martial attitude
in a civil life, mingled in its expression with fan-
ciful and paradoxical allegations. In that rather
ill-arranged essay called "The Service," which
Thoreau offered for the "Dial," late in 1840, there
appeared, along with magnificent pictures of morn-
ing and night, seen in the rambles of a poet, such
appeals for war as these: —

Not How Many, hut Where the Enemy Are

We look in vain over earth for a Roman greatness,
to take up the gantlet which the heavens throw down.
Idomeneus would not have demurred at the freshness
of the last morning that rose to us, as unfit occasion to
display his valor in; and on some such evening as this,
methinks, that Grecian fleet came to anchor in the bay
of Aulis. Would that it were to us the eve of a more
than ten years' war, — a tithe of whose exploits and
Achillean withdrawals, and godly interferences, would
stock a library of Uiads.

Better that we have some of that testy spirit of
knight-errantry; and (if we are so blind as to think the
world is not rich enough nowadays to aiford a real foe
to combat) with our trusty swords and double-handed

[ 252 ]

THOREAU IN LITERATURE

maces, hew and mangle some unreal phantom of the
brain. In the pale and shivering fogs of the morning,
gathering themselves up betimes, and withdrawing
sluggishly to their daylight haunts, — I see Falsehood
sneaking from the full blaze of Truth; and with good
relish I could do execution on their rearward ranks,
with the first brand that came to hand.

We too are such puny creatures as to be ptit to
flight by the sun, and suffer our ardor to grow cool as
his increases; our own short-lived chivalry sounds a
retreat with the fumes and vapors of the night; and we
turn to meet mankind, with a meek face preaching
peace, and such non-resistance as the chaff that rides
before the whirlwind. Let not our peace be proclaimed
by the rust upon our swords, or our inability to draw
them; but let Peace at least have so much work on her
hands as to keep those swords bright and sharp.

The very dogs that bay the moon from farmyards
o' these nights, do evince more heroism than is tamely
barked forth in all the civil exhortations and war-
summons of the age. That day and night, which should
be setdown indelibly in men's hearts, must be learned
from the pages of our almanack. And so the time
lapses without epoch or era, and we know some half-
score of mornings and evenings by tradition only.
Men are a circumstance to themselves, instead of caus-
ing the Universe to stand around, the mute witness of
their manhood. . . .

"Discretion is the wise man's soul," says the poet;
so does his discretion give prevalence to his valor. His
prudence may safely go many strides beyond the

[ 253 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

utmost rashness of the coward; for while he observes
strictly the golden mean, he seems to run through all
extremes with impunity. The golden mean in ethics,
as in physics, is the centre of the system, and that
about which all revolves; and though to a distant and
plodding planet it be the uttermost extreme, yet one
day, when that planet's year is complete, it will be
found central. They who are alarmed lest Virtue
should so far demean herself as to be extremely good,
have not yet wholly embraced her. . . .

The coward wants resolution, which the brave man
can do without. He recognizes no faith, but a creed;
thinking this straw, by which the coward is moored,
does him good service, because his sheet anchor does
not drag. In his religion the ligature, which should be
muscle and sinew, is rather like that thread which the
accomplices of Cylon held in their hands when they
went out from the temple of Minerva; the other end
being attached to the statue of the goddess. But fre-
quently, as in their case, the thread breaks, and he is
left without an asylum.

In the meanest are all the materials ot manhood;
only they are not rightly disposed. We say justly that
the weak person is "flat," — for, like all flat sub-
stances, he does not stand in the direction of his
strength, that is, on his edge. Most things are strong
in one direction, — a straw longitudinally, a board in
the direction of its edge, a knee transversely to its
grain. But the brave man is a perfect sphere, which
cannot fall on a flat side, and is equally strong every
way. The grand and majestic have always somewhat

[ 254 ]

THOREAU IN LITERATURE

of the undulatoriness of the sphere. It is the secret of
majesty in the rolling gait of the elephant, and of all
grace in action and in Art. Always the line of beauty
is a curve.

When with pomp a huge sphere is drawn along the
streets, by the eflforts of a hundred men, I seem to dis-
cover each striving to imitate its gait and keep step
with it, — if possible, to swell to its own diameter.
What shame then, that our lives, which might so well
be the source of planetary motion, and sanction the
order of the spheres, should be full of abruptness and
angularity, so as not to roll nor move majestically.

There is often a sly humor in what Thoreau seri-
ously wrote, of which here is i>erhaps an instance.
He seems to be upholding the paradox of his friend
Alcott, that the human, individual, soul has origi-
nated nature, which is gravely stated as poetic
doctrine in Emerson's first book. But the illus-
tration comes from the grotesque performance of
Thoreau's Whig seniors in Concord, a month be-
fore this essay was finished, — when the village
squires, with the noisy assistance of the boys,
rolled a huge ball, on Bunker Hill Day, from Con-
cord to Charlestown, as a symbol of the pop-
ular movement against President Van Buren in
that presidential election of 1840. Fancy Colonel
Whiting and Major Barrett, with the Brooks and
Hoar families, thus engaged and chanting —

[ 255 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

" It is the Ball a-roUing on
For Tippecanoe and Tyler too."

Youhg Thoreau must have seen the joke of it, and
the corpulence of Major Barrett may have sug-
gested the majestic motions of the elephants. In
contrast to this grave burlesque, take this speci-
men of his poetic prose, from the same unequal
essay: —

When my eye falls on the stupendous masses of the
clouds, tossed into such irregular greatness across the
cope of my sky, I feel that their grandeur is thrown
away on the meanness of my employments. In vain
the sun, through morning and noon, rolls defiance to
Man; and as he sinks behind his cloudy fortress in the
west, challenges him to equal greatness in his own
career. But from his humbleness Man looks up to the
domes and minarets and gilded battlements of the
Eternal City, and is content to be a suburban dweller
outside the walls. But true Art is not merely a sublime
consolation and holiday labor, which the gods have
given to sickly mortals: it is that masterpiece, a human
life, wherein you might discover more than the fresh-
ness of Guido's Aurora, or the mild light of Titian's
landscapes. No bald imitation, nor even rival of Na-
ture; but rather^the restored original of which she is the
reflection. For such a masterpiece as this, whole gal-
leries of Greece and Italy are a mere mixing of colors,
and quarrying of marble.

Yet, as this very essay proves, Thoreau did
[ 256 1

THOREAU IN LITERATURE

not undervalue Greece, and in some lines written
not much later he said: —

" I thank the gods for Greece,
That permanent realm of peace;
For as the rising moon, far in the night.
Chequers the shade with her forerunning light,
So in my darkest hour my senses seem
To catch from her AcropoHs a gleam." *

From Plutarch, whom he early and extensively-
read, as most of the Concord circle did, he drew
out of its obscurity this passage: —

It was a conceit of Plutarch, — accounting for the
preference given to signs observed on the left hand,
— that men may have thought "things terrestrial
and mortal directly over against heavenly and divine
things; and do conjecture that the things which to us
are on the left hand, the gods send down from their
right hand." ^^

The passage from the Morals is in those singu-
lar " Romika " (Roman questions, 113 in num-
ber) which Plutarch tried to answer. This one
is, " Why omens that are called sinister in taking
auspices are reckoned favorable? " He answers,
" Perhaps 't was because men think that earthly
and mortal things lie opposite to heavenly and

* These lines were first printed from a copy given me by So-
phia soon after Henry died.

[ 257 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

divine things; and thus conjecture that the gods
send forth from their right hands what to us is
on the left hand."

The citation shows with what thoroughness our
young philosopher read Plutarch.

Thoreau's constant habit was contrast, — an
oxymoron in rhetoric which would scarcely have
occurred to any other, and often appeared ex-
treme to Emerson, though fond himself of what he
calls "the stairway of surprise." This principle
of contrast is at work in the prose passage from
the manuscript of the "Winter Walk" now be-
fore me: —

From our comfortable pillows we lend our warm sym-
pathy to the Siberian traveller, on whose morning
route the sun is rising, and in imagination frequent the
encampment of the lonely fur-trader on Lake Winni-
peg; and climb the Ural or the Jura, or range the Andes
and the Rocky Mountains, or traverse the shaggy soli-
tudes of the glaciers, — in our dreams hugging the
furs about us. Or perhaps we have visions of Greece
and Italy, the iEgean Sea and the Sicilian coast; or
anticipate the coming in of Spring like a pomp, through
the gate of a city.

This passage, written about 1842, shows, as do
many of his college essays, how early Thoreau
possessed that grace of style, that felicity in the

[ 258 ]

THOREAU IN LITERATURE

choice of words, for which many toil in vain.
Channing, with his usual acuteness, somewhere
says, "In much that Thoreau wrote there was a
philological side; this needs to be thoughtfully
considered." It was a natural result of his acquisi-
tion of many languages, and his notice of their
relation one to another. But I have imputed this
elegance to the mixture of French and Scottish
blood in his ancestry; both those nations having,
by long descent, graceful rhetoric without con-
scious art, far beyond the Anglo-Saxon, with all
his vigor, imagination, and resource. Thoreau
had the vigor of one line in his mixed pedigree and
the grace of another. As he went on writing, —
his chief business in life, — he brought this magic '
of style more and more into his pages; thus to
equalize what had been at first (as with most
young authors) an unequal and fitful manner of
expressing profound thought. In his frequent
verse, much of which he destroyed after Emer-
son's unfavorable criticism, this inequality and
fitfulness was never quite overcome. Like Chan-
ning, who wrote much more verse, he did not seem
capable of passing judgment on his own diction
and rhythm in poetry. Poets by nature, the whole
science of poetic diction was not revealed to them,
though they had the full range of it-

[ 259 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

Thoreau took the Plutarch passage from the
old translation of Dryden's day, since revised
and edited by Professor Goodwin, of Harvard,
with an introduction by Emerson. How wide was
his self-assigned course of reading in poetry,
philosophy, and history, among the ancient clas-
sics, was revealed to me by his autograph list
of such books, found among his papers of the
"Dial" period, and which includes fifty authors,
Greek and Latin, and a few in other languages than
English. It would not be safe to say that he had
read all these authors before he was thirty —
that is, in 1847; but he had then certainly read
and translated some of the most difficult. When
I first knew him, at seven-and-thirty, he read
Latin and French as readily as English; Greek
without difficulty; German, Italian, and Spanish
more or less; and had some knowledge of sev-
eral dialects of the American Indians. Without a
knowledge of Persian, Sanscrit, or Chinese, he had
much acquaintance, through translations, either
French or Latin, of writers in those languages,
and could have competed with J. R. Lowell at
the same age. He was at forty-four a much bet-
ter scholar, in the classic sense, than Emerson,
Channing, or Hawthorne; but as Channing out-
lived him by nearly thirty years, extending his

[ 260 ]

THOREAU IN LITERATURE

reading all that time, he was, before his death in
1901, more fully informed on most of Thoreau's
subjects than his friend was in 1861, when he vis-
ited Ohio, Illinois, and Minnesota, with some
journeys through Wisconsin and Michigan.

I will give the list of old authors in the Appendix ;
but in advance may say that among them were
most of the Greek poets, whom he had read in the
original; the Greek historians and orators, read
either in Greek or in versions; the Fables trans-
mitted by Babrius and Phsedrus; Plato, Aristotle,
Theophrastus, Plutarch, Lucian, Epictetus, in the
original or translated; much ascribed to Pythag-
oras, Epicurus, Synesius, and the Neo-Platonists;
most of the Latin poets down to Claudian, whom
he quotes; Cicero, Caesar, Sallust, Livy, Seneca,
the two Plinys, Tacitus, Josephus, Boethius, the
"Confessions" of St. Augustine; Stanley's quaint
"History of Philosophy," and a French version
of the "Morals of Confucius."

From many of these he has quoted in some of
the thirty volumes in which more or less of his
writings now appear.

In a very different measure from the ballad al-
ready given were other verses excluded by Emer-
son from the "Winter Walk" when he printed
it in the "Dial." They are these: —

[ 261 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

A Winter and Spring Scene

The willows droop.
The alders stoop.
The pheasants group

Beneath the snow;
The fishes glide
From side to side.
In the clear tide.

The ice below.

The ferret weeps.
The marmot sleeps.
The owlet keeps

In his snug nook.
The rabbit leaps.
The mouse out-creeps.
The flag out-peeps

Beside the brook.

The snowdust falls.
The otter crawls.
The partridge calls

Far in the wood;
The traveller dreams,
The tree-ice gleams.
The blue jay screams

In angry mood.

The apples thaw,
The ravens caw.
The squirrels gnaw
The frozen fruit;

[ 262 I

THOREAU IN LITERATURE

Tp their retreat
I track the feet
Of mice that eat
The apple's root.

The axe resounds.
And bay of hounds.
And tinkling sounds

Of wintry fame;
The hunter's horn
Awakes the dawn.
On fields forlorn,

And frights the game.

The tinkling fair
Doth echo bear
To rabbit's lair.

With dreadful din;
She scents the air.
And far doth fare,
Returning where

She did begin.

The fox stands still
Upon the hill, —
Not fearing ill

From trackless wind;
But to his foes
The still wind shows
In treacherous snows.

His tracks behind.

Now melts the snow
In the warm sun;

[ 363 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

The meadows flow.

The streamlets rim.
The Spring is bom.

The wild bees bum,

The insects hum.

And trees drop gum.
And winter 's gone,

And summer's come.

The chic-a-dee
Lisps in the tree.
The winter bee

Not fearing frost;
The small nuthatch
The bark doth scratch.
Some worm to catch

At any cost.

The catkins green
Cast o'er the scene
A summer sheen,

A genial glow.

I melt, I flow,
And rippling run.

Like melting snow
In this warm sun.

This also, like the ballad, is in a vein of verse
that Thoreau seldom attempted; but it is very
descriptive, and worth preserving, in spite of cer-
tain defects of rhyme and metre. Here, too, as in
the ballad, there is little symbolism — all is plain
and slightly grotesque fact. But in my next selec-

[ 264 ]

THOREAU IN LITERATUR|;

tion, which dates back to the river voyage of
1839, though revised since, the symboUc and orac-
ular are the main substance of a form of verse
somewhat resembhng the last poem.

Our Country Neighbors

The respectable folks, —
Where dwell they?
They whisper in the oaks,
And they sigh in the hay;

Summer and winter, night and day.

Out on the meadow, there dwell they.

They drink at the brooks with the pilgrim's cup.

And with the owl and the nighthawk they sup;

They suck the breath of the morning wind.

And they make their own all the good they find.

They never die.

Nor snivel nor cry.

For they have leased Immortality.

A sound estate forever they mend, —

To every asker readily lend, —

To the ocean, wealth.

To the meadow, health,

To Time his length.

To the rocks, strength;

To the stars, light.

To the weary, night,

To the busy, day, '

To the idle, play, —

And so their good cheer never ends,

For all are their debtors and all their friends.

[ 265 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

This enigma is on a par with that concerning
which Edward Watson, of Clark's Island, ques-
tioned Thoreau when he landed on that poet's
domain, after starting to wade over from Dux-
bury at low tide, and being rescued and set on
shore by Mr. Watson's handy boat. Thoreau hav-
ing mentioned in "Walden" three things that he
had lost and never found, Mr. Watson inquired
into the meaning of that passage — to which the
author evasively replied, "Have you never lost
things?" Upon this the puzzled old gentleman
mused thus: "A pretty answer to give a fellow."
There are charades that have a varying answer —
a different one for every type of guesser ; and thei^e
we may leave the most obscure of Thoreau's prob-
lems, given out for others to solve. Thus in Feb-
ruary, 1841, he wrote in his Journal: "Silence has
no end; speech is but the beginning of it."

CHAPTER VIII

SYMBOLISM AND PARADOX

The most symbolical and mystical of all Tho-
reau's poems, and the one from which Emerson
quoted with the most satisfaction, was brought
to me for publication in the "Boston Common-
wealth" in the spring of 1863, and I printed it
there in full, as Sophia gave it, wholly, I think, in
his handwriting, and of an arrangement for which
Thoreau himself must have been responsible. It
had been growing into that form for years, and
portions of it exist in other connections. Where
it varies from the form in which Emerson printed
parts of it, the variations may be Thoreau's own,
or may be Emerson's emendations. I here give
it as it was handed me by Sophia: —

Inspiration '

Whate'er we leave to God God does.
And blesses us:

The work we choose should be our own,
God lets alone.

* In this poem it is best to attend to the profound and inner
meaning of words, — their p^ihlogical sense, as Channing said.

[ 267 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

If with light head erect I sing.
Though all the Muses lend their force,

From my poor love of anything, —
The verse is weak and shallow as its source.

But if with bended neck I grope.

Listening behind me for my wit.
With faith superior to hope, —

More anxious to keep back than forward it;

Making my soul accomplice there

Unto the flame my hfeart hath lit, —
Then will the verse forever wear;

Time cannot bend the line which God hath writ.

Always the general show of things

Floats in review before my mind.
And such true love and reverence brings.

That sometimes I forget that I am blind.

But now there comes, imsought, unseen.

Some clear, divine electuary.
And I, who had but sensual been.

Grow sensible, — and as God is, am wary.

I hearing get, who had but ears.

And sight, who had but eyes before;
I moments live, who lived but years.

And Truth discern, who knew but Learning's lore.

I hear beyond the range of sound,

I see beyond the range of sight.
New earths and skies and seas aroimd;

And in my day the sun doth pale his light.

[ 268 ]

SYMBOLISM AND PARADOX

A clear and ancient harmony

Pierces my soul through all its din.

As through its utmost melody, —

Farther behind than they, — farther within.

More swift its bolt than lightning is.
Its voice than thunder is more loud;

It doth expand my privacies
To all, and leaves me single in the crowd.

It speaks with such authority.

With so serene and lofty tone.
That idle Time runs gadding by.

And leaves me with Eternity alone.

Then chiefly is my natal hour.

And only then my prime of life;
Of Manhood's strength it is the flower, —

'T is Peace's end, and War's beginning strife.

It comes in summer's broadest noon.
By a grey wall, or some chance place;

Unseasoning Time, insulting June, —
Vexing the day with its presuming face.

Such fragrance round my couch it makes,
More rich than are Arabian drugs.

That my soul scents its life, and wakes
The body up beneath its perfumed rugs.

Such is the Muse, — the heavenly maid.
The star that guides our mortal course;

Which shows where Life's true kernel 's laid.
Its wheat's fine flour, and its imdying force.

[ 269 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

She with one breath attunes the spheres.

And also my poor human heart;
With one impulse propels the years

Around, — and gives my throbbing pulse its start.

I will not doubt, forever more.

Nor falter from a steadfast faith;
For though the System be turned o'er,

God takes not back the word which once he saith.

I will then trust the love untold.

Which not my worth nor want hath bought,
Which wooed me young, and woos me old,

And to this evening hath me brought.

My memory I'll educate

To know the one historic truth;
Remembering to the latest date

The only true and sole immortal youth.

Be but Thy inspiration given, —
No matter through what danger sought, —

I '11 fathom Hell, or climb to Heaven, —
And yet esteem that cheap which Love hath bought.

Fame cannot tempt the bard
Who's famous with his God,

Nor laurel him reward

Who hath his Maker's nod.

Now Emerson's abridgment of this confession
of faith is doubtless a finer poem than this longer,
irregular version; but I believe this has the merit

[ 270 ]

SYMBOLISM AND PARADOX

that we find in Herbert and Donne, of the quaint-
ness that distinguishes so many mystics. There is
a prayer of Thoreau's which Emerson introduced
in a brief essay on "Prayers" in the "Dial," and
only known to be Thoreau's after his death,
twenty years later, though often quoted: —

Great God! I ask thee for no meaner pelf
Than that I may not disappoint myself:
That in my action I may soar as high
As I can now discern with this clear eye;

And next in value, which thy kindness lends.
That I may greatly disappoint my friends;
Howe'er they think or hope that it may be.
They may not dream how Thou 'st distinguished me;

That my weak hand may equal my firm faith.
And my life practice more than my tongue saith;
That my low conduct may not show.

Nor my relenting lines.
That I Thy purpose did not know.
Or overrated Thy designs.

It was this mystical side of his nature (on an-
other side so practical in its endowment) which
gave him an early familiarity with the Bhagavat
Ghita and other books of Oriental devotion.
Emerson showed him the way, and Alcott en-
couraged this tendency; but Thoreau went a little
farther than either in this direction. Many ex-
pressions of this piety occur in his writings,

[ 271 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

printed or unprinted, — for I have read most of
his manuscripts, — and I have by me an unpub-
lished fragment on "Gratitude," dated February
24, 1838, a few months earUer than he first ap-
peared as an author, before his townsmen, at the
Lyceum, in his twenty-first year: —

Gratitude *

As in his strength, so in his weakness does Man's di-
vinity appear. For he is not denied the heavenly satis-
faction of beneficence; to him is given, be he high or
low, not only well to wish but well to do to his meanest
fellow-men: in this, his chief prerogative, partner of
God, though far behind in it. And if his hand be weak,
and his faint word is not enough to conjure into life the
immortal deed — in his good toill is more divinity. For
with the Almighty, willing is doing — the gracious
deed forth-springing into life and light as soon as willed.
Such is Man's privilege that, if not the source, yet is he
oft the channel through which God's blessings flow on
all mankind. Solely his is heaven-born Gratitude, twin
sister of Benevolence; of Heaven born, though bred on
earth; rare ornament that exalts the lowly mind to a
level with its proudest benefactor, oft cancelling the
debt with coin from Heaven's own mint. The noble
soul, itself in turn made debtor, shrinks to accept so
rich a recompense; and hence comes angelic strife, con-
tention without war, — a spectacle for Heaven, or
rather, Heaven on earth.

' Possibly from Henry More.
[ 272 ]

SYMBOLISM AND PARADOX

We have seen how Thoreau composed litera-
ture; but he was also its critic; and I find in stray
sheets of his Journal of 1843 a specimen of his criti-
cism. He was reading in a New York library, while
living at Staten Island, the Elizabethan poets,
and the prose of Sir Walter Raleigh and others,
and he wrote this: —

It is one great and rare merit of the old tragedy that
it says something. The words slide away very fast, but
toward some conclusion. It has to do with things and
not words ; and the reader feels as if he were advancing.
It does not seem to make much odds what the author
has to say, at this distance of time, if he only deliver
himself of it in a downright and manly way. We like
Marlowe because he is so plain-spoken and direct, and
does not waste the time. . . . Though we discover in
Raleigh's verses the vices of the courtier, and they are
not equally sustained, — as if his genius were warped by
the frivolous society of the Court, — he was capable of
rising to unusual heights. His genius seems to have
been fitted for short flights of unmatched sweetness and
vigor, but by no means for the sus,tained loftiness of the
epic poet. One who read his verses would say that he
had not grown to be the man he promised. They have
occasionally a strength of character and heroic tone
rairely expressed or appreciated; powers and excel-
lences so peculiar as to be almost unique specimens of
their kind in the language. He anticipated the judg-
ment of posterity with respect to Spenser's "Faerie
Queene," and by his sympathy and advice, encoiuaged

[ 273 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

the poet to go on with his work, which he had laid
aside. In Raleigh's own poems, though insignificant in
number and length, his life naturally culminates, and his
secret aspirations appear. For poetry is a piece of very
private history, which unostentatiously lets us into
the secret of a man's life. Poetry is always impartial
and unbiassed evidence. The misfortune and incon-
gruity of the man appear in the fact that he was at
once the author of the "Maxims of State," and "The
Soul'g Errand." With all his heroism he was not
heroic enough; with all his manliness he was servile and
dependent, with all his aspirations he was ambitious.

But alas! What is Truth.'' That which we know not.
What is Beauty? That which we see not. What is
Heroism? That which we are not.

Donne was not a poet, but a man of strong sense, —
a sturdy English thinker, full of conceits and whimsi-
calities; hammering away at his subject, be it eulogy
or epitaph, sonnet or satire, with the patience of a day-
laborer; without the least taste, but with an occasional
fine distinction and poetic utterance of a high order.
He was rather Doctor Donne than the poet Donne.
He gropes, for the most part; his letters are perhaps
best.

Daniel the poet does really sometimes deserve praise
for his moderation; and yau find him risen into poetry
before you know it. Some strong sense appears in his
Epistles; but you have to remember too often in what
age he wrote; yet Shakespeare was his contemporary.
He strikes us as a retired scholar, who has a small vein
of poesy, which he is ambitious to work.

[ 274 ]

SYMBOLISM AND PARADOX

Lovelace is what his name expresses — of slight
material to make a poet's fame. His goings and
comings are of no great account. His taste is not
so much love of the good as fear of the bad; though
in one or two instances he has written fearlessly and
memorably.

In contrast with this delicate discrimination,
take this meditation of Thoreau at Staten Island
in November, 1843, upon a topic of which we
have heard much and seen much fulfilled in the
seventy-odd years since. The man here cited
was one of the founders of the woodland dem-
ocracy of early Wisconsin — a little older th^n
my original, generous, and humorous old friend,
Andrew Elmore, of Green Bay, or' than General
Dodge and Alexander Mitchell. He was Moses
Strong, an Eastern man transplanted to the region
west of Milwaukee. How Thoreau became ac-
quainted with his name is unknown — possibly
from his friend Channing, who had lived on a
prairie of Illinois, near the Wisconsin border, for
a year or two. But here is the passage: —

American Literature at the West

Saturday, November 4, 1843. We must look to the
West for the growth of new literature, manners, archi-
tecture, etc. Already there is more language there tiian
here which is the growth of the soil. Good Greekish

[ 275 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

words are there in abundance, — good because neces-
sary and expressive; 'diggings' for instance. K you an-
alyze a Greek word you will not get anything simpler,
truer, more poetical: many others also, which now
look so ram-slang-Kke and colloquial when printed,
another generation will cherish and affect, as genuine
American and standard. Read some Western stump-
speech, and though it be untoward and rude enough,
there will not fail to be some traits of genuine eloquence,
and some original and forcible statement, which will
remind you of the orators of antiquity. I am already
inclined to read the stump-speeches of the West,
rather than the Beauties of our Atlantic orators.

Here is an extract from the speech of a (Wisconsin)
man named Strong, whom the reporter understood "to
live somewhere over near the Mississippi, in the min-
ing country. He had a pitcher of whiskey brought into
the court-room and set on the table before him, from
which he drank long and frequently." It was a speech
in defence of a member of the Legislative Council of
the Territory, who had shot a fellow-member in a dis-
pute in the Council-chamber. This is a part of Moses
Strong's address to the jury: —

"Gentlemen of the Jury: I don't know what your
religion is, nor I don't care. I hain't got much myself,
— though Jesus Christ was a mighty good man. Now,
gentlemen, I am one of those kind of men who live
pretty fast. I believe men generally live over about
the same surface: some live long and narrow, and
others live broad and short."

(Adverting to an old gentleman, one of the witnesses,

[ 276 ]

SYMBOLISM AND PARADOX

he said:) "I would not like to charge him with perjur-
ing himself, because he and I were members of the
Council together. We were tolerable good friends,
though always quarreUing. He was always on one
side; he was just like the handle of this pitcher" (tak-
ing up the pitcher and pointing to the handle). "Here
gentlemen, this was him, and here" (pointing to the
nose of the pitcher), "this was the estimable Moses,
and these were oxu* relative positions. I believe we never
got so near as to drink a glass of water together, — but
I'll drink his health now, anyhow" (catching up the
pitcher and pouring down a "strangler" of whiskey).
"As for the murdered man, he is dead; there is no
doubt of it: he is dead! — dead! — dead as a smelt;
in the language of Tippecanoe and Tyler too, he is a
' gone coon.' " And before he concluded, he reeled with
intoxication.

The speech of the Secretary of State, which followed,
is said to have been "dignified, able, and suited to the
occasion, — as was also the closing argument for the
prosecution." Perhaps it is needless to add that the
defendant was acquitted.

There was humor in this citation; but Tho-
reau could take a broad and serious view of our
national situation, — in the days of Tippecanoe
and Tyler too, when the country seemed given
over to riot and noise in its politics, — as this
poem evinces, sent to the "Dial," but never
prmted there: —

[ 277 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

Our Country

It is a noble country where we dwell.

Fit for a stalwart race to summer in,

From Madawaska to Red River raft.

From Florid Keys to the Missouri Forks

See what unwearied and what copious streams

Come tumbliag to the East and Southern shore.

To find a man stand on their lowland banks:

Behold the innumerous rivers and the lakes

Where he may drink to quench his summer thirst;

And the broad rice and com fields yonder, where

His hands may gather for his winter's store.

See the fair reaches of the northern lakes.
To cool his summer with their inland breeze,
And the long slumbering Appalachian range.
Offering its slopes to his unwearied knees.
See what a long-lipped sea doth clip the shores.
And noble strands where navies may find port:
See Boston, Baltimore and New York stand
Fair in the simshine on the eastern sea, —
And yonder, too, the fair green prairie.

See the Red race with sullen step retreat.
Emptying its graves, striking the wigwam tent.
And where the rude camps of its brethren stand.
Dotting the distant green, — their herds abound, —
In serried ranks, and with a distant clang.
Their fowl fly o'er, botmd to the northern lakes.
Whose plashing waves invite their webbM feet.

Such the fair reach and prospect of the land;

The journeying Summer creeps from south to north

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SYMBOLISM AND PARADOX

With wearied feet, resting in many a vale.

Its length doth tire the seasons to o'ercome,

Its widening breadth doth make the sea-breeze pause

And spend its breath against the mountain's side:

StUl serene Summer paints the southern fields.

While the stern Winter reigns on northern hills.

Look nearer; know the lineaments of each face, —
Learn the far-travelled race, and find here met
The so-long gathering congress of the world!
The Afric race, brought here to curse its fate, —
Erin to bless, — the patient German too, —
Th' industrious Swiss, the fickle, sanguine Gaul,
And manly Saxon, leading all the rest.
All things invite this Earth's inhabitants
To rear their lives to an unheard-of height.
And meet the expectation of the land:
To give at length the restless race of men
A pause in the long westering caravan.

This is not a great poem, surely; but it has good
poetical features, and might well have been ad-
mitted to the "Dial." An examination of the
manuscript shows where Thoreau made slight
pencil corrections; but these did not avail to make
it pass the Emersonian tests. Possibly it was
Margaret Fuller who rejected it, as she had in
December, 1840, the "Service" essay, concern-
ing which she wrote to the young author: —

The essay is rich in thoughts, and I should be pained
not to meet it agaiQ. But then the thoughts seem to

[ 279 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

me so out of their natural order that I cannot read it
through without pain. I never once feel myself in a
stream of thought, but seem to hear the grating of tools
on the mosaic. It is true, as Mr. Emerson says, that
essays not to be compared with this have found their
way into the "Dial." But then, these are more xmas-
suming in their tone, and have an air of quiet good-
breeding which induces us to permit their presence.
Yours is so rugged that it ought to be commanding.

What she said of it in December, 1840, had
much truth; and so had her remarks on Tho-
reau's genius in a letter written some months
later: —

He is healthful, rare, of open eye, ready hand and
noble scope. He sets no limits to his life, nor to the
invasions of Nature; he is not wilfully pragmatical,
ascetic or fantastical. But his thought lies too de-
tached; truth is seen too much in detail; there is a want
of fluent sense.

These defects were soon overcome.

Thoreau was a good reader of human nature;
a little more turned aside in his judgment by
whims and caprice than Emerson; but when his
eye fell on his brother man or sister woman, he
saw their true character, and sometimes revealed
it to them, for their astonishment, as Jones Very
did. Among the Walden manuscripts I found this

[ 280 ]

SYMBOLISM AND PARADOX

passage, written a few years after his Staten Is-
land experiences: —

Visitors in WcMen Woods

Sometimes there would come to my house at once
half a dozen railroad repairers, healthy and sturdy
working-men, descended from sound bodies, and still
transmitting them from remote days to more remote.
Some of them had got a rude wisdom withal, and a
courtesy which I love, — thanks to their dear-bought
experience. I met them so often in the woods that they
began to look upon me at last as one of their kin. One,
a handsome young sailor-like man, says to me to-day,
— "Sir, I like your notions; I think I shall live-so my-
self. Only I should like a wilder country, where there
is more game. I have been among the Indians near
Appalachicola. I have lived with them. I like your
kind of life. Good-day. I wish you success and hap-
piness." [This was evidently one of those naturally
polite Southern youths, Uke the Kentuckian I met on
the Missouri River steamboat ten years later.] They
came in troops on Sundays, in clean shirts, with
washed hands and faces, and fresh twigs in their hands.
Circumstances and employments affect but slowly the
finer qualities of our nature. I observed in some of
these men an inextinguishable and ineradicable re-
finement and delicacy of nature (older and more worth
than the sun and moon) which are commonly thought
to adorn the drawing-room only. Sometimes I fan-
cied a genuine magnanimity, — more than Greek or
Roman, — equal to the least occasion of unexplored

[ 281 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

and uncontaminated descent. Greater traits me-
thought I noticed in the shortest intercourse than are
recorded of any of the worthies — Epaminotidas,
Socrates or Cato. They had faces homely, hard and
seamed, like the rocks; but human and wise; embrac-
ing Copt and Mussulman, all races and nations, —
pacha or Sultan, — Selim, Mustapha, or Mahmoud in
disguise. Under some of the ancient and wrinkled, al-
most forlorn visages, as of an Indian chieftain, slumber
the world-famous hiunanities of man. You can tell a
nobleman's head among a thousand, — though he may
be shoveling gravel six rods off, in the midst of a gang,
with a cotton handkerchief tied about it. Such a one is
to succeed the worthies of history.

It was this gift of insight which made Thoreau
and Emerson recognize the heroism of John
Brown, under his "rustic exterior."

CHAPTER IX

THOREAU AS FRIEND, NEIGHBOR, AND CITIZEN

Writing his book of "Sonnets and Canzonets,"
twenty years after Thoreau's death, Bronson
Alcott had this to say of a common libel upon the
poet-naturalist — that he was a recluse, misan-
thropic anarchist, aiming to overturn the foun-
dations of human society and government: —

" Much do they wrong our Henry, wise and kind.
Morose who name thee, cynical to men.
Forsaking manners civil and refined
To build thyself in Walden woods a den, —
There flout society, flatter the rude hind:
We better knew thee, loyal citizen!
Thou, Friendship's all-adventuring pioneer.
Civility itself would civilize." '

His friends often encountered this misconcep-
tion of his true character, especially after the
School of Philosophy opened at Concord in 1879,
when the Hegelians from St. Louis and its region
appeared in force, and must have all characters
tested by the Prussian standard, which has been
for some years making much mischief in the
world. The mistake grew partly out of tis humor-
ous way of expressing himself, and partly from

[ 283 ] •

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

the dulness of his hearers and readers. He had a
mind truly independent, and in youth was per-
haps rather too frequent ^in declaring his inde-
pendence, either in prose or verse. For exam-
ple:—

Ye princes, keep your realms

And circumscribed power;
Not wide, as are my dreams.

Nor rich, as is this hour.
What can ye give which I have not?
What can ye take which I have got?

Can ye defend the dangerless?

Can ye inherit nakedness?

What is your whole Republic worth?

Ye hold out vulgar lures;
Why will ye be disparting earth,

Whein all of Heaven is yours?

'T is easier to treat with kings.

And please our country's foes.
Than treat with Conscience of the things

Which only Conscience knows.

Then there was a lurking humor in almost all
that he said — a dry wit, often expressed, but
not always understood. Of his fidelity in friend-
ship, Channing as usual has said the best thing: —

It is needless to dwell on the genial and hospitable
entertainer he always was. His readers came many
miles to see him, attracted by his writings. Those who

[ S84 ]

FRIEND, NEIGHBOR, CITIZEN

came when they could no more see him, as strangers
on a pilgrimage, seemed as if they had been his inti-
mates, so warm and cordial was the sympathy they re-
ceived from his letters. No whim of coldness, no ab-
sorption of his time by public or private business, de-
prived those to whom he belonged of his kindness and
affection. He was at the mercy of no caprice; of a firm
will and uncompromising sternness in his moral na-
ture, he carried the same qualities into his relation with
others, and gave them the best he had without stint.
He loved firmly, acted up to his love, was a believer
in it; took pleasure and satisfaction in abiding by it.
There was no affectation or hesitancy in his dealing
with, his friends. He meant friendship, and meant
nothing else, and stood by it without the slightest
abatement; not veering as a weathercock with each
shift of a friend's fortune; or like those who bury their
early friendships in order to gain room for fresh
corpses.

His quick and self-sacrificing friendship for
John Brown, of Kansas, was a case in point. He
had met him but twice, for a few hours each time,
but he had fathomed his character and main pur-
pose, without knowing or being curious about
his plans. The promptness and moral courage
with which he made himself the champion of
Brown after his capture at Harper's Ferry, and
long before the popular voice declared him the
people's hero, would have made Thoreau a famous

[ 285 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

leader in times of revolution had he ever chosen
that path to fame. When the news from Vir-
ginia came, and the true nature of Brown de-
veloped itself through the providential presence
and uncensored accuracy of the reporter of the
"New York Herald," at the colloquy with the
magnates of the Old Dominion, Thoreau, already
prepared, as Emerson was, by what he had seen
of the man, was excited to an unwonted degree
by the daily bulletins. He said of those thrilling
days: —

If any one who has seen Brown in Concord can now
pursue any other train of thought, I do not know what
he is made of. If he gets his usual allowance of sleep,
I will warrant him to fatten easily, under any circum-
stances which do not touch his body or purse. I put a
piece of paper and a pencil under my pillow, and when
I could not sleep, I wrote in the dark.

(He had been in the habit of this in his nightly
rambles.)

From these notes he made up his "Plea for
Captain John Brown," which he read to his
townsmen in the church vestry, where Wendell
Phillips had confronted the conservatism of
Concord many years before, supported by the
younger Thoreaus, one of whom reported Phil-
lips in the "Liberator." On this new occasion

[ 286 j

FRIEND, NEIGHBOR, CITIZEN

Henry summoned his village audience himself,
without waiting to be invited. He then hastened
away to Worcester, to read the si>eech to his
friends, Blake, Higginson, and Brown, where it
was reported; finally, and all within a fortnight
from the capture of Brown, he gave it to Theo-
dore Parker's great audience at the Fraternity
Lectures in Boston; and it went over the country
in newspaper columns. What was first note-
worthy in this impassioned address was the com-
plete absence of any apology for the hero; quite
the contrary was his tone: —

For once we are lifted out of the dust of politics into
the region of truth and manhood. No man in America
has ever stood up so persistently and effectively for the
dignity of human nature, — knowing himself for a
man, and the equal of any and all governments. He
could not have been tried by a jury of his peers, be-
cause his peers did not exist. When a man stands up
serenely against the condemnation and vengeance of
mankind, the spectacle is a sublime one, and we be-
come criminals in comparison. Do yourselves the
honor to recognize him; he needs none of your respect.
I rejoice that I live in this age, — that I am his con-
temporary. When were the good and the brave ever
in a majority? Would you have had him wait till that
time came, till you and I came over to him?

Ethan Allen and Stark, to whom he may in some
respects be compared, were rangers in a lower and less

[ 287 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

important field. They could bravely face their coun-
try's foes, but he had the courage to face his country
herself when she was in the wrong. A Western writer
says, to account for his escape from so many perils,
that he was "concealed under a rural exterior," as if,
in that pirairie land, a hero should, by good rights, wear
a citizen's dress only.

Later in the year that saw the emancipation
of the slaves begun, — and in three years it was
accomplished, — Thoreau wrote other pages on
Brown in his Journal, and they were read by
Browm's grave in the Adirondac forest the next
Fourth of July. In them he said: —

What avail all your scholarly accomplishments and
learning, compared with wisdom and manhood ? To
omit his other behavior, see what a work this com-
paratively unread and unlettered man wrote within
six weeks. He wrote in prison, not a History of the
World, like Raleigh, but an American book which I
think will live longer than that. I do not know of
such words, uttered under such circumstances, and so
copiously withal, in Roman or English or any -his-
tory. The art of composition is as simple as the dis-
charge of a bullet from a rifle, and its masterpieces
imply an infinitely greater force behind them. This
unlettered man's speaking and writing are standard
English. Some words and phrases deemed vulgarisms
and Americanisms before, he has made standard
American. "•

[ S88 ]

FRIEND, NEIGHBOR, CITIZEN

Of all the men who were said to be my contempora-
ries, it seemed to me that John Brown was the only one
who had not died. I meet him at every turn. He is more
alive than ever he was. He has earned immortality.
He is not confined to North Elba nor to Kansas. He is
no longer working in secret. He works in public, and in
the clearest light that shines on this land.

Brave words! of which Thoreau did not live
to see even the near fulfilment; for he died before
the tide of defeat in the Civil War had turned;
and Lincobi, the disciple of John Brown, had not
issued his first Emancipation Decree. But it
followed the foray in Virginia as naturally as
consequent follows antecedent; and Thoreau im-
j>Iicitly foretold it.

A minor incident followed closely upon the
memorial meeting for Brown at Concord, in
which Thoreau took an active part — finding in
Andrew Marvell a verse none had noted before,
which fitted the occasion: —

" When the sword glitters o'er the judge's head.
And fear has coward churchmen silenced,
'T is then the Poet's time; 't is then he draws,
And singly fights forsaken Virtue's cause.
He, when the wheel of empire whirleth back.
And though the world's disjointed axle crack.
Sings still of ancient laws and better times;
Seeks suffering Good, arraigns successful crimes.'
[ 289 ]

>

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

The incident is this, and it well illustrates the
friendliness and neighborliness of Thoreau. I
had received a visit from an enthusiastic but
feeble youth, a grandson of Francis Jackson, the
friend and partisan of Garrison and Phillips (as
I was), who had somehow heard of Brown's secret
plans and wished to join him and carry him a
sum of money, of which Brown always stood in
need. I advised him to send the money, but not
to go himself; for I doubted if his weak frame and
impulsive spirit could carry him through so hard
a campaign as Brown had entered on. Young
Meriam went, however, and by a sort of mira-
cle, and by the care taken of him by Owen
Brown, he escaped through Pennsylvania and
Ohio to Canada. But in early December he had
found his way back to Boston, and was consulting
Phillips and his other friends, urging a new foray
on slavery, in which he was wildly ready to take
part. A large reward was offered for his capture,
and there were plenty of scoundrels in Boston
who would delight to earn it by waylaying him.
He was at the house of his physician, near Mrs.
Phillips's home on Harrison Avenue, and Dr.
Thayer joined me in the advice I gave him to
return, that very night, to Canada, before the
rogues got on his trail. He promised to do this,

[ 290 ]

FRIEND, NEIGHBOR, CITIZEN

and I returned to Concord. But in his half-in-
sane statfe, he missed the train that would have
taken him to Montreal the next forenoon and
got into a local train that only ran to Concord.
He therefore came to my house, and in my absence
(making a call in one of the two Thoreau houses),
my sister gave him his supper and sent him to
bed to keep him out of sight. On my return,
before eight o'clock, my sister met me at the door
and told me that Meriam was my guest, but had
been told that he could not see me that night. I
said: "Nor in the morning either, for^ if he hap)-
pens to be arrested, I shall not be a witness against
him. He must go early in the morning to South
Acton, to take the first train for Canada, and I
must get him transportation."

I at once went to Mr. Emerson's house, and
said to him, "I would like to borrow your mare,
Dolly, early to-morrow morning for a drive to
Acton; and if you will favor me so far I will ask
Mr. Thoreau to call for it." He replied, "Cer-
tainly, and James Burke shall harness her into
the carriage at the hour named." I then called
on Henry Thoreau, to whom I imparted the mat-
ter more fully. " There is a friend at my house
who is to take the first train for Canada at South
Acton to-morrow, without fail. Mr. Emerson

[291 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

will lend me Dolly and the carriage; will you
oblige me by calling for it, driving it to my door,
and taking in my friend? His name is Lockwood,
and if he thinks he has any other name, you must
not believehim ; he has some queer fancies." " Cer-
tainly," said Thoreau; he would be there and
drive the carriage to and from South Acton. I
then returned home, went to bed, and stayed in
my chamber while my sister gave Mr. Lockwood
his breakfast, and had him in readiness when
Thoreau, who was a good driver, appeared and
took his passenger, placing him on the back seat,
to be less visible should they meet any inquisi-
tive persons on the rather lonely drive of four
miles. In an hour or two Thoreau came back,
reporting that Mr. Lockwood caught the train,
and was well started for Montreal. Neither the
driver nor the driven knew who the other really
was; but no questions were asked until two years
later. Then, in his last illness, Thoreau told me
some incidents of the drive. Meriam was in an
excited state of mind; and though he wished to
go to Canada, and had promised to go, he could
not keep to his purpose. He insisted he must see
Mr. Emerson before leaving Concord; he had im-
portant plans to lay before him; besides, he wished
to consult him on some moral and religious

[ 292 1

FRIEND, NEIGHBOR, CITIZEN

doubts he had. Thoreau listened with grave
poUteness, and drove the faster toward Acton.
Meriam grew more positive and suspicious. "I
never saw Mr. Emerson; perhaps may never have
another chance: I must go there now. Ah! per-
haps you are Mr. Emerson. You look like one
of his portraits." "No," said the imperturbable
charioteer — urging Dolly to a quicker gait.
Thereupon the impetuous youth cried, "Well, I
am going back to Concord"; and flung himself
from the carriage.

How Thoreau got him in again he never told
me; but I always suspected a judicious use of
force, such as I should have used on the feeble
youth, for his own good; together with that
earnest, persuasive speech, natural to the phi-
losopher; for then they fell into discussing some
moral issue, and there was no more insurrection
till they reached the Acton station, and Thoreau
saw his man on board the arriving train, unsus-
pected by the few observers on that mild winter
morning. Driving leisurely back through the
township and village, he returned Dolly and the
wagon to James Burke, and called at my door,
as he walked home to his own late breakfast,
to tell me what had happened. The subject was
then dismissed, and no explanation was asked

[ 293 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

or given until more than two years later, after his
return from Minnesota, when, in one of my calls
on the invalid, he asked me who my fugitive
friend was. Meriam being then out of danger,
except as a soldier in the Union army (for the
Civil War was well begun), I told Thoreau that
it was the grandson of his mother's old friend
Francis Jackson whom he had removed from
the risk of arrest; and in turn he gave me, with
some amusement, the incidents just related. Not
till then, did he communicate to his mother and
sister the errand upon which he had gone that
winter morning, to guard an unknown and not
very attractive person from risks to which he
was exposing himself. My reason for not seeing
Meriam was, of course, to have no testimony
against him to give in case of his capture, which
seemed not unlikely from his thoughtlessness.
I never saw him afterward.

I gave shelter to another of the Harper's Ferry
fugitives the next spring — C. P. Tidd, then
passing by the name of Plumer, who had ven-
tured to Concord to see his old captain's daugh-
ter, Anne Brown, a pupil of mine at the time.
In the excitement after my own arrest and re-
lease, — the latter following my rescue from the
kidnappers by a writ of habeas corpus, and my

[ 294 ]

FRIEND, NEIGHBOR, CITIZEN

discharge by Chief Justice Shaw, in April, 1860,
— Thoreau, with other friends, was active in
my sister's behalf, during my brief absences; and
indeed he was apt at all neighborly service for his
friends, or for the poor, to whom the Thoreaus
were ever kind.

Emerson said of Thoreau at his funeral in
May, 1862, in the parish church, where it was
held, like Hawthorne's, Emerson's, and Chan-
ning's, afterwards, — rather against the wish of
his mother and sister: —

A truth-speaker he, capable of the most strict and
deep conversation; a physician to the wounds of any
soul: a friend, knowing not only the secret of friend-
ship, but almost worshiped by those few persons who
knew the deep value of his mind and great heart. His
inexorable demand on all for exact truth gave an aus-
terity which made this willing hermit more solitary
even than he wished.

In saying this, Emerson may have been think'
ing of that short, painful period, about five years
before his death, when Thoreau felt himself es-
tranged from Emerson, so long his dearest friend ;
and gave expression to his sorrow in his Diary fc
February, 1857. In accounting for it, he used'
striking language, — applicable to Emerson in cer-
tain moods, and with certain qualifications : —

[ 295 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

I perceive that some persons are enveloped and con-
fined by a certain crust of manners, which, though it
may sometimes be a fair and transparent enamel, yet
only repels and saddens the beholder, since by its-
rigidity it seems to repress all further expansion. They
are viewed as at a distance, or like an insect under a
tumbler.^ This is to stand upon your dignity. I say in
my thought to my neighbor, who was once my friend,
"It is of no use to speak the truth to you, you will not
hear it. What, then, shall I say to you?"

Why this doubleness, these compliments? They are
the worst of lies. A lie is not worse between traders than
a compliment between friends. ... I have not yet
known a friendship to cease, I think. I fear I have ex-
perienced its decaying. Morning, noon, and night, I
suffer a physical pain, an aching of the breast which
unfits me for my tasks. It is perhaps most intense at
evening.

This last word is pathetic; it was at evening
in those later years that he saw most of Emer-
son. The estrangement passed away, not without
leaving some trace in the more sensitive heart of
Thoreau.

I once sought to explain this episode by the
inscrutable working of heredity, in these two
friends of such diverse ancestry. To his inheri-
tance Emerson owed his matchless propriety

* Channing, in his Life of Thoreau, quoted this, evidently know-
ing its cause.

[ 296 ]

FRIEND, NEIGHBOR, CITIZEN

and decorum — a sense of what was fitting in
all the occasions of life, and a consideration for
the tastes and feelings of others, which made him
unique among reformers. Thoreau inherited a
trenchant individualism, scanty of respect for the
merely conventional, and little disposed to make
those concessions, in small matters, which the
daily intercourse of life requires. At heart pro-
foundly unselfish and courteous, he was on the
surface brusque and pugnacious; and at times,
in spite of his distinction, a little too plebeian in
his bearing; while Emerson was the gentle pa-
trician. Whether strictly true or not, this may
serve as a clue to the incident.

Among some notes of Emerson's table-talk
during my acquaintance both with him and
Thoreau, I find this said of his friend, which may
give the other side of the story: —

My children think Henry rather snubs them. He
said the Linncea borealis did not flower in Concord, till
E. carried it to him, gathered near one of our paths in
the Park. Why is he never frank? That was an excel-
lent saying of Elizabeth Hoar's — "I love Henry, but
I can never like him." What is so cheap as politeness?
Never had I the least social pleasure with him, though
often the best conversation; in which he goes along
accumulating one thing upon another so lavishly —
when he is not pugnacious.

[ 297 ]

HENRY DAVID THOEEAU

And in matters practical he makes it worth my while
to pay him surveyor's wages for doing other things
[the occasion being his planting a pine wood on Emer-
son's knoll near Walden, where Thoreau's beanfield
had been in the Walden days]. He is so thoughtful; has
such a conscience about it, and does so much more
than he bargained to do. When he undertakes any-
thing you may be sure the thing will be done: he has
the common sense of Shakespeare.

The early relations with Hawthorne which
Thoreau held during the first residence of. Haw-
thorne in Concord, and with Channing at his
first arrival there in the spring of 1843, have al-
ready been mentioned. With Hawthorne those
relations were never very intimate, but there was
much mutual respect one for the other. The skat-
ing trio of Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau,
in the winter of 1843-44, has been well described,
— but perhaps with too evident though natural
partiality. Mrs. Hawthorne wrote: —

One afternoon Mr. Emerson and Mr. Thoreau went
skating down the river from the Old Manse with Mr.
Hawthorne. Henry Thoreau is an experienced skater,
and was figuring dithyrambic dances and Bacchic
leaps on the ice — very remarkable, but very ugly,
methought. Next him followed Mr. Hawthorne, who,
wrapped in his cloak, moved like a self-impelled GrC'
cian statue, stately and grave. Mr. Emerson closed the

[ 298 ]

FRIEND, NEIGHBOR, CITIZEN

line — evidently too weary to hold himself erect, pitch-
ing head-foremost, half lying on the air. He came into
the Manse to rest himself; and said to me that Haw-
thorne was a tiger, a bear, a lion, — in short a satyr,
and there Was no tiring him out; he might be the death
of a man like himself. And then, turning upon me that
kindling smile for which he is so memorable, he added,
"Mr. Hawthorne is such an Ajax, — who can cope
with him?"

I have occasionally skated with Emerson on
Walden, and found him a good, but quiet skater
— not too energetic, as Thoreau and Channing
were, being younger men; and probably less grace-
ful than Hawthorne, who had manifest advan-
tages of face and figure. But all the Concord au-
thors, including Alcott, were equal to most physi-
cal exigencies, and, with the exception of Emer-
son, rather fond than otherwise of manual labor.
Alcott and Thoreau were good mechanics, and
could build houses if needful. Thoreau, to be sure,
criticised Alcott's picturesque summer-house —
built for Emerson while he was lecturing in Eng-
land in the autumn of 1847. Thoreau had then
left his Walden cabin to take charge of the
Emerson household during its owner's absence;
and could not avoid witnessing the slow progress
of the "arbor," as Thoreau styled it. Channing

[ 299 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

was also looking after his own household at the
Ponkawtassett height of land, a mile or two to
the westward; but his daily walks brought him
often past the Emerson house, and he, too, had
his jest at the Alcott edifice. A little before the
middle of November, 1847, it seems to have had
its roof put on, and the jests began to wound
the sensibilities of the philosopher. Thoreau and
Channing both wrote to London by the same mail,
and Thoreau said : —

Alcott has heard that I laughed, and so set the people
laughing at his arbor; though I never laughed louder
than when I was on the ridgepole. But now I have not
laughed for a long time, it is so serious. He is very
grave to look at., Not knowing all this, I strove in-
nocently enough, the other day, to engage his atten-
tion to my mathematics.

"Did you ever study geometry, the relation of
straight lines to curves? the transition from finite to
the infinite? Fine things about it in Newton and
Leibnitz." But he would have none of it; men of
taste preferred the natural curve. Ah, he is a crooked
stick himself.

Channing in his letter dwells on the small size
of the summer-house, in contrast with the time
and pains expended on its construction; it is a
Cathedral of Cologne, even a St. Peter's edifice
at Rome; and, like Thoreau, he hints that it will

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FRIEND, NEIGHBOR, CITIZEN

not stand for many years. It was not framed from
timbers, but built of a set of branches, young
trees, and natural curves, pickgd up in the woods,
and held together by nails and spikes. But it
lasted many years, sat for its picture to several
artists, and I have often sat in it, sheltered from
the sun, and even ascended to its second story, for
it was safe and strong. It fulfilled its purpose,
which was to be ornamental, and to give useful
employment to Mr. Alcott, who then had many
unused powers. These three or four friends were
so friendly that they could laugh at one another
in the intervals of their serious thought, and no
bitter drop be left in the cup of their mirth.

A friend who came into the Concord circle late,
attaching himseK specially to Thoreau, was the
English scholar, colonizer, and country gentle-
man Thomas Cholmondeley, who happened upon
Thoreau by accident, as it were, and was so
much affected by him as to live for a time with
him, visit him again from the ends of the earth,
present him with a small library of rare books,
and correspond with him for a time. He was the
grandson of a Shropshire squire, the son of a
clergyman at Hodnet, the nephew of Bishop
Heber; an Oxford graduate, a sheep-farmer in
New Zealand for some years, a volunteer for the

[ SOI ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

Crimean war, without coming into action; and
finally the heir of an old property, and the hus-
band of a lovely bride. He died when the sub-
stance of his life was just beginning. He had been
twenty years preparing for it, aind was carried to
the grave before he had fairly entered on it. He
had many friends in America, more in England,
and seems to have had no enemies. His letters to
Thoreau, and a few of Thoreau's to him have been
printed; here a few facts and particulars can be
put together which will connect his memory with
the more permanent fame of Thoreau.

In one of his regular letters to his chief corre-
spondent in mature life, Harrison Blake of Wor-
cester, Thoreau casually mentioned (October 1,
1854), "A young Englishman, Mr. Cholmondeley,
is just now waiting for me to take a walk with
him." It was the first of many walks, in course
of which he became almost as much interested in
his late-found friend, as Cholmondeley had been
interested in him. His new friend had urged him
to visit England, as the youijg student who after-
wards became a Catholic priest, Father Hecker,
had done ten years before; and had Thoreau lived
to be fifty, and his friend contin,ued in life and
in England, they would doubtless have met and
rambled there. But the Concord friend died be-

t S02 ]

THOMAS CHOLMOXUELEY

FRIEND, NEIGHBOR, CITIZEN

fore he reached forty-five, and Thomas Chohnon-
deley died at Florence on his wedding journey,
in 1864, when he had just reached forty. He had
gone out to New Zealand in 1851,^ with a party
of religious colonists (for he had been religiously
educated, and two of his brothers were clergymen),
and on returning to England a year later, he pre-
pared a volume on the island, which he called
"Ultima Thule"; and then, with a few letters of
introduction, he came to the United States in the
summer of 1854, to see what sort of a common-
wealth we had established here. He found that
Thoreau, whom he so much admired, had been
protesting against our national polity by refusing
to pay taxes, making emancipation speeches, and
other conduct which must have startled the Ox-
ford graduate not a little. As time went on, be-
fore he came over again (partly to visit Tho-
reau, and partly to see the West Indies), he found
that his friend had been upholding John Brown
of Osawatomie in his warfare against slavery in
Kansas, and was soon to be his champion in the
desperate foray at Harper's Ferry. All this did
not mitigate in the least his admiration for Tho-
reau; indeed, he gave hospitality to Edwin Mor-
ton, who had been fully cognizant of Brown's

' In the Charlotte Jane, a ship of Lord Lyttelton.
[ 303 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

general plan for freeing the slaves, and was then
in England to avoid giving testimony against
persons suspected of being Brown's supporters.
Morton had been with me in college, had with me
made the acquaintance of Cholmondeley, and had
met Thoreau in Concord, where, after his return
from England in 1860, he had frequently visited
me. In his company Thoreau had been my guest
at "a dinner-party, and there we heard him sing
his one song of those later years, "Tom Bow-
line," in memory of his lost brother John. Con-
sequently Morton had been an agreeable guest
to our English friend, who had himself been here
again.

Late in November, 1858, he had written to
Concord from Montreal that he was in Canada,
and on his way to the West Indies; that he would
soon come to Concord, and urged Thoreau to go
with him to the tropics. In his father's last illness,
this the faithful son could not do; but he detained
Cholmondeley a few days in town, and took him
on a trip to New Bedford, to show him a whaling
town, as New Bedford then was, and introduce
him to Daniel Ricketson, his intimate friend and
Channing's. To Blake he gave this estimate of
his English friend, "He is rather more demonstra-
tive than before, and, on the whole, what would be

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FRIEND, NEIGHBOR, CITIZEN

called 'a good fellow,' — a man of principle, and
quite reliable; but very peculiar."

Mr. Ricketson gave this brief analysis of his
visitor, on that eventful day: —

He is a tall, spare man, thirty-five years of age, of
fair and fresh complexion, blue eyes, light brown and
fine hair, nose small and Roman, beard light and worn
full, with a mustache. A man of fine culture and re-
finement of manners, educated at Oriel College, Ox-
ford, of an old Cheshire family by his father, a clergy-
man.

From his first visit to America he returned to
England in January, 1855, and at once busied
himself in collecting a library of Oriental books
for Thoreau, which he sent over in the autumn.
They arrived, November 30, 1855, and I saw them
soon after, in a new case which Thoreau had just
made for them, out of driftwood that he brought
home from his afternoon voyages on the river. He
wrote to Blake: "They are in English, French,
Latin, Greek, and Sanscrit. One is splendidly
bound and illustrated." Several of them, and
their cases are now mine.

More exactly Thoreau described these books as
"a royal gift in the shape of twenty-one distinct
works (one in nine volumes — forty-four volumes
in all)^lmost exclusively relating to Hindoo liter-

1,305;

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

ature, and scarcely one of them to be bought in
America. I am familiar with many of them," he
adds, "and know how to prize them." To this
his friend replied: "I had indeed studied your
character closely and knew what you would like.
Besides, I had, even from our first acquaintance,
a previous memory of you, like the vision of a
landscape a man has seen, he cannot tell where."
Trusting to this previous acquaintance, Chol-'^
mondeley, writing from Rome in December, 1856,
proceeded to give his friend some good advice.

Counsels of a Wise Friend

You are not living altogether as I could wish. You
ought to have society. A college, a conventual life is
not for you. You should be the member of some so-
ciety not yet formed. You want it greatly, and with-
out this you will be liable to moulder away as you get
older. Forgive my English plainness of speech. Your
love for and intimate acquaintance with Nature is
ancillary to some affection which you have not yet dis-
covered. The great Kant never dined alone. Once, when
there was danger of an empty dinner-table, he sent
his valet out, bidding him catch the first man he could
find, and bring him in. So necessary was the tonic, the
effervescing cup of conversation, to his deeper labors.

Laughter, chatter, politics, and even the prose of
ordinary talk is better than nothing. Are there no
clubs in Boston? The lonely man is a diseased man, I

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FRIEND. NEIGHBOR, CITIZEN

greatly fear. See how carefully Mr. Emerson avoids it!
and yet who dwells, in all essentials more religiously
free than he? Now I would have you one of a well-
knit society or guild, from which rays of thought and
activity might emanate, and penetrate every corner of
your country. By such a course you would not lose
Nature. Take up every man as you take up a leaf, and
look at him attentively. This would be easy for you,
who have such powers of observation, and of attracting
the juices of all you meet to yourself. Even I, who have
no such power, somehow find acquaintances, — and
nobody knows what I get from those about me. They
give me all they have, and never suspect it. What
treasures I gleaned at Concord! I wish I lived near
you, and that you coidd somehow originate some such
society as I have in my head.

What you are engaged in I suspect to be Meditations
on the Higher Laws, as they show themselves in Com-
mon Things.

This, if well weaved, may become a great work; but
I fear this kind of study may become too desultory.
Try a history. How if you could write the sweet, beau-
tiful history of Massachusetts? Positively,, there is an
immense field open. Or take Concord, — still better,
perhaps. Take the spirit of Izaak Walton, with a spice
of Gilbert White! It would be a great labor, and a grand
achievement, — one for which you are singularly quali-
fied. . . ."He is beginning to preach now," you will say.
Well, then, let us have a turn at politics and litera-
ture. I was certain, from the first, that Buchanan
would be President, because I felt sure the Middle

[ 307 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

States are not with the North. Nor is the North itself
yet in earnest. You are fond of humanity, — but you
like commerce and a great heap, and a big name bet-
ter. Besides, your principle and bond of union ap-
pears to be most negative; you do not like slavery. Is
there any positive root of strength in the North? Where
and what? You have indeed in New England the genius
of liberty, and for construction and management; you
have a wonderful aplomb, and are never off your feet.
But when I think of your meagreness of invention, yoiur
absurd whims and degraded fancies of spirit-rapping,
etc., and the unseemly low ebb of your ordinary litera-
ture, I tremble. You have one Phoenix — the greatest
man since Shakespeare, I believe; but where is the rest
of the choir? It is the same as in England — all is
fragmentary, poor and draggletail. I have seen some
fragments by a certain W. Whitman, who appears to
be a strong man. But why write fragments? it is not
modest. There is a man we both of us respect and
admire, — Carlyle, — but has he not damaged his
hand beyond cure? He drives a cart, and strikes
against every stone he sees. He has no "perception" of
the highest kind. A good preacher, — but, after all, a
creaking, bumping, tortuous, involved, and visionary
author.

This was good advice and sound opinion, with
most of which Thoreau agreed, but what could
be done? The time was not yet ripe; and when the
hour had come, the men were gone. Thoreau, in
return for his gift, sent him American books —

[ 308 ]

FRIEND, NEIGHBOR, CITIZEN

among them Whitman's "Leaves of Grass," which
came out in the summer of 1855. His friend re-
sponded from London (May 26, 1857) : —

Walt Whitman's poems have only been heard of in
England to be laughed at and voted offensive. Here
are Leaves indeed! which I can no more understand
than the Book of Enoch, or the inedited poems of
Daniel. I cannot believe that such a man lives, unless
I actually touch him. He is further ahead of me in
yonder West, than Buddha is behind me in the Orient.
I find reality and beauty, mixed with not a little vio-
lence and coarseness, — both of which are to me effem-
inate. I am amused at his views of sexual energy,
which, however, are absurdly false. The man appears
to me not to know how to behave himself. I find the
gentleman altogether left out of the book! Altogether
these Leaves completely puzzle me. Is there actually
such a man as Whitman? Has any one seen or handled
him? His is a tongue "not understanded " of the Eng-
lish people. It is the first book I have ever seen which
I should call a "new book," — and thus I would sum
up the impression it makes upon me.

At his visit to Concord the next year (Novem-
ber, 1858) he learned by conversation with Tho-
reau, Emerson, Alcott, and perhaps others who
had seen Whitman, that he was a real person, not
without great qualities; thou^ repulsive to Jhe
great mass of h^s compatriots, especially tfi,:Mfc,
men; who, at firstj, jn^Conj^^d. refuSsd.iQ.§SSOci:;„

[ 309 I

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

gjtewitiUiimJJ i Whitman's Concord friends wished
to invite him to their houses; but in the spring of
1860, when he was in Boston, printing a new edi-
tion of his "Leaves," npjtliPr C^npTiia TTirtrpgn pnr .

Mrs. Alcgt£jaor;^__as J_^m told, Mrs^^JEmerson,
^ould allow him to be invited. So he never came
1^ twenty-one years later, when he visited me for
af^ days, and dined at the Emersons' — having
met them the night before, along with Mr. Alcott
and Louisa, at my house by the river. Thoreau
and his sister and Mrs. Alcott had died, or they
also would have been present; for Whitman's
course in the Civil War, and a greater familiarity
with his books, had mainly removed the original
impression. That impression I was bound to dis-
regard; for I had first seen him at the trial of my
case in the Boston Court House in April, 1860, —
sitting near the entrance in a green jacket, pre-
pared, as I heard afterward, to join with others in
rescuing me from the kidnappers if the court
(which I did not expect) should decide against
me. jThoreau was not then present; but he would
have joined in the same eflfort, to the extent of his
power, and have classed it under his title of "Civil
Disobedience." At Christmas, 1859, when our
friend Morton dined at Hodnet in the Rectory,
with Rev. Zachary Macaulay, who had married

[ 310 ]

FRIEND, NEIGHBOR, CITIZEN

the widow of his predecessor, Chohnondeley's
mother, and with that lady herself, lie heard from
Chohnondeley how the Hodnet Rectory had re-
ceived the readings from Whitman in 1856: "I
began to read a good passage, but did not get far
when Mr. Macaulay said, 'I'lLjoot lisien^to-tbat
stu5j_rrJi^oii#3^-on-^H^h,iJt, J^I^^^ the

firgjj.' This, of course, put a stop to any further
acquaintance in that house with "Walt Whitman,
a Kosmos." But Miss Mary Cholmondeley, the
novelist, a niece of Thomas, probably ventured
to peruse him in after years. We have lived to
see him much commended in England since, and
verses written in his manner by several reputable
Englishmen. Cholmondeley himself must have
modified his opinion a little, after hearing what
Thoreau had to say in Whitman's favor in 1859.
Long intervals passed between letters of these
transatlantic correspondents, and the letters writ-
ten by Thoreau have not all been recovered from
the accumulations at Condover Hall, the last
residence of Thomas Owen, by which name he
inherited that Elizabethan house, afterward the
residence of his brother Reginald Cholmondeley.
His last letter to Thoreau was dated April 23,
1861, and was answered by me before forwarding
it to Henry in Minnesota. Two years later, almost

[311]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

to a day (April 20, 1863) Mr. Owen, then newly
married to Miss Victoria Cotes, died at Florence
of a malignant fever, and was carried back to
Shropshire for burial in Condover churchyard.
His last letter contained this passage: —

The last I heard from you all was from Edwin Mor-
ton, who was in England about a year ago; and I hope
that he has got over his difficulties, and is in his own
country again. I think he has seen rather more of Eng-
lish country life than most Yankee tourists; and ap-
peared to find it curious, though I fear he was dulled by
our ways. He was too full of ceremony and compU-
ments and bows, which is a mistake here, though very
well in Spain. But he made a splendid speech at a vol-
unteer supper; and indeed, the very best, some said,
ever heard in this part of the country [Shrewsbury].
Give my affectionate regards to your father, mother
and sister; and to Channing, Sanborn, Ricketson,
Blake; and Morton, Alcott and Parker. A thought
arises in my mind, — whether I may not be enumerat-
ing some dead men. Perhaps T. Parker is dead?

He certainly was, and it was strange that Owen
did not hear of it. John Thoreau, Sr., had died too,
a few weeks after Cholmondeley left Concord.
Speaking of the wars then threatened in Europe
he wrote: —

These rumors of war make me wish that we had got
done with the brutal stupidity of war altogether; and I

I 312 ]

FRIEND, NEIGHBOR, CITIZEN

believe, Thoreau, that the human race will at last get
rid of it, though perhaps not in a creditable way. But
such powers will be brought to bear, that it will become
monstrous, even to the French.

After fifty-five years, we seem farther from that
goal than ever. Thoreau at once wrote to me from
Red Wing in Minnesota, at the end of the longest
letter I ever got from him, "I am glad to hear that
you have written to Cholmondeley, as it relieves
me of some responsibility."

Of the persons named in this friendly message,
I am now the only survivor. Theodore Parker had
died at Florence in May, 1860, and is buried there
under a headstone modelled by the sculptor Story.
Alcott lived until 1888, and, with Thoreau and
Channing (who died in 1901) is buried in Con-
cord. Morton, for whom some concern is ex-
pressed, returned to Plymouth, but was so ill of
fever during the Civil War that he had never
health enough afterward to warrant his serving in
the army, but remained a semi-invalid till his
death at Morges on Lake Geneva in 1900, where
he had spent many years. All these and many
more were attached friends and admirers of Henry
Thoreau, and had watched with confidence his
rise in reputation ever since the publication of his
"Walden" in 1854.

CHAPTER X

THOREATJ AS MAN OF LETTEBS AND OF AFFAIRS

Although Thoreau regarded authorship as his
special function in life, prepared himseW for that
industriously and skilfully, and now has nearly
thirty volumes standing against his name in the
lists of libraries, he did not expect literature to
support him pecuniarily. For that he had other
resources, which, in fact, never failed him, until
illness deprived him of the power of self-support
except with the pen. As schoolmaster, private
tutor, pentil-maker, gardener, lecturer, land-sur-
veyor, editor, and general utility man, he was
always careful to support himself, and was neither
dependant on his family nor on any patron for his
daily bread. He arranged a plan of life for him-
self,^ usually with the cooperation of his family

* This has always been known to those who knew the facts of his
early life, though often ignored or misrepresented by persons who
undertook to write about him without learning the true state of
the case. He was in truth the "superior man" of whom he had
occasion to write so often, — that is, he was a sample of that small
class, throughout the world, of whom Homer in the Odyssey speaks
when relating how Hermes and Calypso recognized each other: —

"The goda are to each other not unkoown,
Though tat apart they dwell."

[314]

MAN OF LETTERS

and his imniediate friends, and was most industri^
ous in carrying it forward.

He was sometimes looked down upon by resi-
dents of his township as an idle person; there were
a few such within its thirty square miles — but he
was not one of those. I have lived there, off and
on, for more than sixty years, and when not re-
siding there have kept note of the transactions of
the town in all its industries, and I have never
seen or heard of a more industrious resident. His
tasks began before the earUest haymaker or wood-
chopper went to his work, and were continued after
the latest evening seamstress had set her last
stitch. He had many occupations, and was expert ^
in all. He risked no large investments, which
might put the small family estate to hazard;
for after his brother John's lamented death in
1842, he was the main hope of the family. His in-
vestment in his first volume, the "Week," was the
largest that he madfe, I suppose; and for that he
paid by the toil of his hands in pencil-making, or
by kindred labors. His "Walden" — the only
other book he published — paid for itself, and has
always continued to sell well. For his eighteen
lectures at the Lyceum in Concord, he charged
and received nothing; it was the custom of the
town to render that service gratis. He went much

[S15 1

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

further, and was inclined to boast that he, as
Curator of the Lyceum, had provided his towns-
men, for one hundred dollars, with a remarkable
course of winter lectures by the best lecturers
attainable. It was during the winter of 1843-44,
when the young citizen was approaching his twenty-
seventh year; and this is his account of it: —

How much might be done for Concord with $100 ! I
myself have once provided a select course of twenty-
five lectures for a winter, together with rent, fuel, and
lights, with that sum; which was no inconsiderable
benefit to every inhabitant. With $1000 I could pur-
chase for Concord a more complete and select library
(in my opinion) than exists in the State, outside of
Cambridge and Boston; and perhaps a more available
one than any.

This he did as "Curator" of the Lyceum, an
institution now nearly ninety years old, in which
he was for ten years very active. He received
from the citizens in that winter, a year and a half
before he went to live by Walden Pond, $109;
of that he left the nine dollars in the treasury as
a nest-egg for the next winter, and for the rest he
did procure excellent .lectures in the vestry of the
First Parish Church, from Emerson, Theodore
Parker, Horace Greeley, George Bancroft, James
Freeman Clarke, Henry Giles, Dr. E. H. Chapin

[316]

MAN OF LETTERS

(then a popular orator preaching at Charlestown),
and enough others, including himself, to bring
the number of lectures up to twenty-five. The
highest price paid by him was ten dollars each to
Mr. Bancroft and Mr. Giles; to Dr. Chapin eight
dollars, to Parker three dollars, and to Emerson,
who lectured three times, — nothing. It was eti-
quette to give your lecture, if you had the honor
to live in the town. Wendell Phillips was another
of this Spartan band, and Thoreau gave more
than one lecture himself.

For all the needs of Concord it was convenient
to have a Greek scholar, a land-surveyor, an ex-
pert in fish and birds, in soils and insects, in floods
and storms, to whom to make appeal in case of
need. Thoreau practised surveying for more than
ten years, and left a valuable set of maps of the
farms he surveyed; he laid out the shorter road to
Bedford, over which the trolley car now trundles;
and he did extensive land-surveying in other
places; for example, at Marcus Spring's large es-
tate in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, where he spent
a week in the autumn of 1856, with an occasional
visit to New York and Brooklyn, to call on his
old friend Greeley or his new acquaintance Walt
Whitman, whose "Leaves of Grass" had inter-
ested him.

[317]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

His ventures in writing for the magazines and
in editing the "Dial" were instructive, but not
profitable pecuniarily. From the "Dial" he got
nothing but the labor and the experience; though
his papers and verses there first made him known
and esteemed as an author. From the " Boston
Miscellany," the "Democratic Review," from
Griswold and Sartain and the Philadelphian mag-
azinists to whom Greeley introduced him, he got
payment after long delays; from the " New York
Tribune" he received occasionally prompt and
liberal payment. "Putnam's Monthly" and the
"Atlantic" began with him, but insisted on alter-
ing his essays, which he did not allow; and he with-
drew his manuscripts, certain to find a place for
them ultimately. He carefully preserved most of
them, and they have been printed since his death
— often being purchased for large prices. One
such came under my notice so peculiarly that the
story may here be given.

About the time, in 1904, when I was called upon
to examine the three drafts of the manuscript of
Thoreau's "Raleigh," Mr. John P. Woodbury, a
diligent reader and collector of the printed writ-
ings of Thoreau, showed me a letter-sheet of four
pages, of which the fourth was partly blank, de-
siring to know if that was in Henry's handwriting.

[318]

MAN OF LETTERS

I assured him it was, and that, so far as I knew,
it had never been printed — in this respect like
the " Raleigh," which had only been read as a lec-
ture at the Concord Lyceum, and was in prepara-
tion for a place in Emerson's " Dial." This shorter
essay was on "Conversation" and was evidently,
from the handwriting and the puns, of the earlier
period to which "The Service," long in my j^osses-
sion, belonged. Had not the Journal in which it
was originally entered been destroyed, it might
have been discovered in its original entries there.

Having answered Mr. Woodbury's questions,
I then said: "May I ask you a question? "Where
did you find this, and what did it cost you?" He
said, "I bought it of your friend Mr. Goodspeed
iuTark Street; he asked me fifty dollars, and I
paid him forty dollars." As the weight of the let-
ter-sheet did not exceed a quarter-ounce, and
forty dollars represents two ounces of gold, my
friend had paid for this fragment eight times its
weight in gold. Relatively to other essays of
Thoreau it is inferior, and would be so regarded
by his lovers. Portions of it have appeared in
other connections.

In writing about "Conversation," even at an
early period in his authorship, Thoreau was deal-
ing with a familiar subject, with which he was

[ 319 ]

HENRY, DAVID THOREAU

every day at home brought face to face. Mrs.
Thoreau, his mother, was, next to Madam Hoar,
the mother of the Judge and the Senator, the most
talkative person in Concord in my time — a very
good talker, too, if there was time to listen. Tho-
reau always found time. Often have 1 sat at the
family dinner-table engaged in talk with the son,
as we sat on opposite sides of the board, facing
each other, with the silent father between us at
the head of the table, which, as the room was fur-
nished, was the east end. Mrs. Thoreau, who
helped to the puddings at the west end, catching
some word in our conversation which interested
her, would take up that theme and go on with it;
often relating things to the credit of her son or
other members of her family. Henry would sit
silent and attentive, during the long interruption;
then, as the last period closed, he would bow
slightly to his mother, and resume our dialogue
exactly where it had been stayed.

Satirical disquisitions on human frailties or
vices make no small part of Thoreau's six volumes,
authentically published or republished in various
parts of the globe since his death. This satire or
moral censure is also largely represented in the
fourteen volumes of the Journals printed in Bos-
ton. It was such passages, or the accurate reports

[ 320 ]

MAN OF LETTERS

by Thoreau of conversations on Cape Cod, as he
and Channing walked its beaches and lodged in
its cabins, which at first gave the residents there
a prejudice against the author as his chapters
came out in "Putnam's Magazine." But now, in
contrast with such censure, take a few passages
from the lost Journals, which deal with what is
usually thought to be his best hold on literature

— the poetic prose describing aspects of outward
Nature, with which he was so intimately convers-
ant.

Autumn and Winter Scenes^

Summer passes into autumn in some unimaginable
epoch and point of time, like the turning of a leaf. It is
pleasant to hear once more the crackling flight of grass-
hoppers amid the stubble. It is pleasant, when sum-
mer is drawing to a close, to hear the cricket piping a
Niebelungen Lied in the grass. The feathered race are
perhaps the truest heralds of the season, since they ap-
preciate a thousand delicate changes in the atmosphere
(which is their own element) of which man cannot be
aware. The occasional and transient notes of such birds
as migrate early, heard in midsummer or later, are
among the earliest indications of the advancing year,

— plaintively recalling the Spring. The clear whistle
of the oriole is occasionally heard among the elms at
this time, as if striving to reawaken the love-season;

> Journals of 1843.
[ 321 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

or as if, in the long interval since the spring, it had
but paused a moment to secure its prey. It har-
monizes with the aftermath springing under our
feet.

The faint, flitting note of the goldfinch marks the
turning-point of the year, and, is heard in the gardens
by the middle of August; as if this little harbinger of
the Fall were prompting Nature to make haste. Its
lisping, peeping note, so incessant and universal that
it is hardly distinguished more than the creak of the
crickets, is one of Nature's ground-tones, and is asso-
ciated with the rustling of leaves, and the swift lapse of
time. The lark, too, sometimes sings again down in the
meadow, as in the spring; and the robin peeps, and the
bluebirds, old and youn^, revisit their boxes and hol-
low trees, as if they would fain repeat the summer,
without the intervention of winter.

Dense flocks of bobolinks, russet and rustling, like
seeds of the meadow grass floating on the wind, or
as if they might be ripe grain thrashed out by the gale,
rise before us in our walk. Each tuft gives up its bird.
The purple finch, our American linnet, is seen early in
October moving south in straggling flocks, and alight-
ing on the apple trees; reminding us of the pine and
spruce, cedar and juniper, on whose berries it feeds.
In its plumage are the crimson hues of October even-
ings; as if it had caught and preserved some of their
beams. Many a serene evening lies snugly packed
under its wing. Then, one after another, these little
passengers wing their way seasonably to the haunts of
summer, with each a passing warning to man; —

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MAN OF LETTERS

Until at length the north winds blow.
And, beating high mid ice and snow.
The sturdy goose brings up the rear, —
Leaving behind the cold, cold year.

Silently we unlatch the door, letting the drift fall
inward, and step forth like knights encased in steel, to
sport with the cutting air. Still through the drifts I see
the farmer's early candle, — like a paled star, — emit-
ting a lonely beam from the cottage indoors, as, one by
one the sluggish smokes begin to ascend from the
chimneys of the farm-houses, midst the trees. Thus
from each domestic altar does incense go up each morn-
ing to the heavens. Once the stars lose some of their
sparkle, and a deep-blue mist skirts the eastern hori-
zon, a lurid and brazen light foretells the approaching
day. You hear the sound of woodchopping at the
farmer's door, the baying of the housedog, and the
distant clarion of cocks. The frosty air seems to con-
vey, only and with new distinctness, the finer particles
of sound to our ears. It comes clear and round like a
bell, as if there were fewer impediments than in the
green atmosphere of summer, to make it faint and
ragged. And besides, all Nature is tight-drawn and
sonorous, like seasoned wood.

Sounds now come to our ears from a greater distance
in the horizon than in the summer. For then Nature is
never silent, and the chirp of crickets is incessant; but
now the farthest and faintest sound takes possession
of the vacuum. Even the barking of dogs and lowing
of cattle is melodious. The jingling of the ice on the
trees is sweet and liquid. I have heard a sweeter music

[ 323 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

in some lone dale, where flowed a rill released by the
noonday sun from its oWn frosty fetters, while the
icicles were melting upon the apple trees, and the ever
present chic-a-dee and nuthatch flitted about.

To this winter picture should be added — for
it cannot be too often quoted — the lines which
expand this thought of the domestic altar, lighted
each morning in homage to the beneficent deities,
and which adorn a picturesque page in "Wal-
den": —

When the villagers were lighting their fires beyond
the horizon, I too gave notice to the various wild in-
habitants of Walden vale, by a smoky streamer from
my chimney, that I was awake. —

Light-winged Smoke, Icarian bird.
Melting thy pinions in thy upward flight,
Lark without song, and messenger of dawn.
Circling above the hamlets as thy nest;
Or else, departing dream, and shadowy form
Of midnight vision, gathering up thy skirts;
By night star-veiling, and by day
Darkening the light and blotting out the sun;
Go thou my incense upward from this hearth.
And ask the gods to pardon this clear flame.

It was of this epigram that Emerson said,
"His classic poem on 'Smoke' suggests Simonides,
but is better than any poem of Simonides."
Better than ^ny extant epigram of Simonides,
perhaps; but the quality which in that poet gave
him his fame for capacity, would forbid ranking

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MAN OF LETTERS

Thoreau, with such fitful, unequal talent, beside
the minstrel who wrote the epitaph for the Spar-
tans at Thermopylae.

Long after Thoreau's death, and some years
after he had published his volume "Thoreau'
the Poet-Naturalist," by which Channing fas-
tened on his friend the epithet that best describes
him, EUery Chanmng, then living with me, be-
gan one evening to talk about his dearest Henry,
of whom he could but seldom bring himself to
speak. Presently he came to the topic of the fam-
ily industry (pencil-making at first, and, finally
preparing fine plumbago for the electrotypers),
about which he had known a dozen years before
I did; having resided in Concord after April, 1843,
and having been from the first intimate with
Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau. It would
be hard to say with which he was the most
friendly, though in a different way with each.
He said: —

This plumbago industry gave the Thoreaus con-
trol of a good mine in Canada, and they ground dt in
a mill of their own on the Fort Pond Brook in Acton.
It was carried on by a process which Henry's father in-
vented; there was some secret about it, and they kept
persons away from the Acton mill, where the graphite
was groimd and mixed. All that was done in the home
shop, attached to the house on the Main Street, was

[ 325 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

to pack and box the article for transportation, after
pencil-making ceased (about 1850), Henry managed
the business during his father's last illness in 1859, and
at his death in February, soon after Thomas Chol-
mondeley's second visit to Concprd.^

He never gave up pencil-making because he had
once made a perfect pencil (as Emerson declared) for
he never did make a perfect pencil, nor say that he
had. And he made and sold pencils long after the time
when Mr. Emerson places that romance.

Land-surveying next became Henry's principal way
of earning money for himself and his family; and it was
industriously followed, in good weather or bad. All the
household were industrious and frugal; Mrs. Thoreau
was a good manager, who often had boarders, like Rowse
the engraver, and Cholmondeley, and some of your
students. Helen had been a teacher, and so was Sophia,
was she not?

' After this business had been transferred by Sophia Thoreau,
who carried it on for some years after her brother's death, I learned
from the brothers Warren and Marshall Miles how much they
netted from it. This appeared to have been between $1500 and
$1800 a year. Probably the Thoreaus earned less — say from $1000
to $1500; but that sum, before the Civil War, would have gone far
in support of a frugal Concord household. As already said, the
Qrst American John Thoreau had left to his family in 1801 about
$25,000; but the care and breeding of his eight children consumed
so much of it that the younger children never inherited much of
this estate except the two houses in Boston and Concord, and the
land adjacent. In one house, on the Village Square in Concord,
they lived as a family; the other they leased and mortgaged from
time to time, for many years. At the death of Sophia in 1876, and
of her aunt Maria five years later, their united property was just
about what the ancestor had bequeathed eighty years before.

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o

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O
K
H

W

K

MAN OF LETTERS

Henry was very strict in money matters. He wrote
something, as your book shows, for " Putnam's Maga-
zine," as he had for "Graham's," and the "Boston
Miscellany," edited by Nathan Hale, the brother of
Edward and Charles Hale; and when he did not get
prompt payment, he was much offended. He always
insisted on being paid for the work he had done.

[Mrs. Sanborn.] That does not seem in keeping with
his character. I thought he despised money, and did
not work for that.

[Channing.] It was just what he did work for; he in-
sisted on payment for everything he did, — land-
surveying or whatever. Nobody could be stricter than
he in requiring money when he worked for money.

Channing is also my authority for most of the
statements that f oUox^, in regard to matters that
passed under his own eye : —

After Henry's return from Staten Island in Novem-
ber, 1843, he entered his father's shop for a time, and
made pencils there in 1844. The shop was then at the
end of a long out-building near the Parkman house;
where the Library and Art-Gallery were to stand. It was
not thought the proper thing to enter it or be too curious
about it. The same was true of the large pencil-shop
attached to the Thoreau-Alcott house in which Henry
and his father and mother all died. That building was
brought there in 1850, from the "Texas" house, which
Henry and his father had built in 1844, and where the
family lived for five or six years. The shop was built
out of the timbers and boards of the Irish cabins of the

[ 327 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

railroad builders on the Fitchburg line, when working
through the " Deep Cut " of which Henry had so much
to say in his Journals, and in " Walden." After the road
was opened, the cabins were sold at auction by Sam Sta-
ples, the village auctioneer and sheriff; the materials
were good and cheap. For the Texas house Henry dug
and stoned the cellar with his own skilful hands, as he
did afterwards for his hut by the Walden Cove. It stood
on a back street south of the new railroad, and rather
out of the way — hence playfully called "Texas."

The family left this hand-made home in Au-
gust, 1850, for the larger house on the Main
Street, and this was about the time when Chan-
ning, with his wife and young family, came down
from

" His small cottage on the lonely hill "

(Ponkawtassett), where he was living when he
sailed for Italy, and Muring Thoreau's abode at
Walden. This residence near each other, from
1850 onward, brought the two friends much to-
gether in their daily walks, which nobody could
describe better than Channing, for no one was
so often Henry's companion, whether on land or
water. A story characteristic of each was told
me by a friend of the Thoreaus in 1895, while
Channing was living with me and giving me
many particulars of his long friendship with the

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MAN OF LETTERS

other Concord authors. Its date must have been
1843-44, while the Channings were Uving in a
small red cottage on the Cambridge Turnpike
near Emerson's garden and orchard: —

J. H., then a child of ten, perhaps, going home with
her brother at noon from the village school to her home
en the same Turnpike, and passing Mrs. Channing's
cottage, was asked by the young wife to go through the
woods to Walden, tell her husband that Mr. So-and-So
had come up from Cambridge to make a call, and ask
him to come home and meet him. The boy and girl
soon reached Walden, where Thoreau and Channing
were out in a boat. The boy shouted from the shore the
message of Ellen Channing to her spouse; who made
some indifferent reply. Thoreau, however, who under-
stood the domestic proprieties and was scrupulous
about them, turned his boat to the shore, and returned
alone to the Emersons', where he was then living. He
left word with Mrs. Channing that her husband would
return soon. This was before he had built his hut at
Walden.

In the gift copy of "Walden" which came to
him from Thoreau, and from Channing to me
(with some four thousand other books), the poet
had made these entries: —

This engraving of the Walden hut is but a feeble cari-
cature of the true house. It was moved in 1847—48, and
still stands (in 1868). June 4 in that year Henry's
house, next above Old Clarke's on the Deserted Road,

[ 329 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

was abandoned by a new occupant of the place. I saw
the posts hewn by Henry out of the pines that grew
directly in its rear at Walden; and the old shanty
boards put together by him with the old nails; and
himself putting on the plaster, in the summer of 1845,
twenty-three years ago. They had served Henry for
only two of all these years; and for the rest had stood
unknown and deserted on a by-road — only visited con-
tinually by myself. Such is fame.

The house stood and fronted there very much as at
Walden. It was first bought and moved to the Lincoln
road from its pine wood, by a non-compos, who thought
he would live in it, but instead went to live at the Poor
Farm near by.

Thoreau was indeed both a scholar and a man
of affairs, supporting himself during his whole
life by his own industry; and was never "aim-
less or listless," as some ignorant young critic
may have fancied him. But had the hopes of
his ancestry on either side — the mercantile,
adventurous Thoreaus of Jersey, or the land-
owning, fortune-seeking Jones family of the Old
Colony — been crowned with success, and had a
fortune of thousands come to this heir of those
thwarted founders of a Boston family, as it did
to his English friend in Shropshire, Thoreau
might have fulfilled a dream of his youth; of
which at the age of eight-and-twenty, he made

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MAN OF LETTERS

this record in his Journal for Saturday, August
23, 1845, during an afternoon in what is now the
estate of one of the Adams famiUes, at Baker
Farrd, lying on Fair Haven Bay: —

When on my way this afternoon, "Shall I go down
this long hill in the rain to fish in the Fair Haven
pond?" I ask myself. And I say to myself: "Yes,
roam far, grasp life and conquer it! learn much and
live! Your fetters are knocked off; you are really free.
Stay till late in the night; be unwise and daring."

Again I remember — ^as I was leaving the Irish-
man's roof after the rain, and bending my steps again
to the shore of Fair Haven Bay — my haste to catch
pickerel, wading in retired meadows, in sloughs and
bogholes, in remote and savage plkces, seemed for an
instant trivial to me, who had been sent to school and
college.

But then, in an instant, my Genius said from the
western heaven: "Go fish and hunt far and wide,
day by day; and rest thee by many hearthsides with-
out misgiving! Rise free from care before the dawn,
and seek adventures ! Let the noon find thee by other
brooks, and the night overtake thee always at home.
Lead such a life as the children that chase butterflies
in the meadow.

"There are no larger fields than these, no nobler
games, no more extended earth. With thy life unin-
sured, Uve free and forever as you were planned. Grow
wild according to Nature, like these ferns and brakes,
which study not morals nor philosophy; nor strive to

[ 331 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

become a cultivated grass for cattle to eat; or like these
bulrushes, behind which you see the reddening sky-
over the lake, as if they were the masts of vessels in a
crowded Venice harbor.

"Let the thunder rumble in thy own tongue; what
if it brings rain to farmers' crops? that is not its errand
to thee. Take shelter under the cloud, while others fly
to carts and sheds. Enjoy thy dominion, and waive
men, the fowl and the quadruped, and all creeping
things. Seek without toil thy daily food; thy suste-
nance, is it not in nature? Through want of confidence
in the gods men are where they are; buying and sell-
ing, owning land, following trade, — and spending their
lives ignobly."

This was a counsel of perfection for the "su-
perior man" to follow — ^that person of whom
Thoreau often spoke, and whom he in some im-
portant ways represented in this corner of the
habitable world. He could have been trusted to
traverse the whole world, a "pilgrim of Eter-
nity," as Shelley rather prematurely styled his
friend Byron; and he would not have misused his
opportunities as Byron did. Thoreau was the
servant of moral principle, not of caprice.

His occupation as land-surveyor was exactly
the same as that which Hector St. John pursued
at times, in his quarter-century's life in Colonial
America, before he returned to his father's house

[ 332 ]

MAN OF LETTERS

in Normandy and resumed natural relations with
his native France. In several points there is a
resemblance between the two writers; in others
the widest unlikeness. Both were lovers of Na-
ture and an outdoor life; both were philanthro-
pists, though Thoreau diso'ivned the name; both
came into popularity by a single book, which
the twentieth century is now reading for St.
John, as the eighteenth did; while the nineteenth
century gradually forgot St. John, when it was
learning to admire Thoreau. Both were mercan-
tile in their methodical habits, and both had that
native and occasional elegance which French
descent seems to carry with it. But Thoreau
was all his life training for literature; while St.
John was turning away from it, in despite of his
talents and tastes in that direction.

In land-surveying Thoreau was merely making
that his business which had been his pleasure. It
kept him in the pastures, woods, and fields, and
exercised that mechanical skill which, like Alcott,
he had by nature and training, while it was de-
nied to the other Concord authors. Surveying gave
Thoreau companions in his outdoor life — land-
owners and chainbearers, as well as the hunters
and fishermen and woodcutters in whom his
heart delighted; and whom he certainly did not

[ 333 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

"disdain," as Whitman thought he held the whole
race of man in contempt. It was a form of cen-
sure often misapplied to the Transcendentalists.
The wife of George Ripley, the founder of Brook
Farm, while he was pastor of a Boston church,
wrote to one of her friends, before Emerson left
the pulpit, saying, "Waldo Emerson was here
yesterday, preaching for George — with his chin
in the air, in scorn of the whole human race."

It was misjudgment in such instances — an
effect of manner rather than want of heart;
something like that alleged account of Carlyle
by Emerson, when he returned from England
in 1848, "He sits in his fourth-story study and
sneers," was the reply said to have been made
to one who inquired of Emerson what his friend
Carlyle was doing at Chelsea.

In whatever active pilrsuit Thoreau engaged,
he gave his close attention to it; and followed the
Yankee injunction "Mind your own business"
with assiduity. Orford, near Dartmouth College,
bred a yeoman who was driving his oxen with a
haycart into that village, when it was still a small
college town — without his shoes and stockings.
An inquisitive or supercilious college professor,
meeting him, said, " Do the folks over in Orford
all go barefooted?" "Wal," was the sedate an-

[ 334 ]

MAN OF LETTERS

swer, " some on 'em doos — and the rest on 'em
minds their own business." Something of this
Yankee character was certainly in Thoreau,
along with that high-spirited turn of mind that
in youth would have taken him roaming, like a
gypsy or an English lord, wandering at will over
the ecumenical earth. The "superior man" is
wont to be of two or three natures, and to con-
sult his own will about his own conduct. Such,
at any rate, was Henry Thoreau, in his active
pursuits.

CHAPTER XI

THOREAU AS AUTHOR IN PROSE AND VERSE

"Walden" has thus far been, and perhaps will
always be, Thoreau's best-read book, — ^ though
he is now represented in literature and biography
by more than thirty volumes, all containing sam-
ples of his sententious, humorous, and paradoxi-
cal wisdom. First in date, though unpublished
until he had been forty years in his grave, is the
little book which he named "The Service," and
left/ incomplete. For it is evident that he meant
to make it a manual for the spiritual Soldier,
such as he hoped himself to be, and to find fit
comrades, if but few, among his contemporaries.
Walt Whitman, who seems now to be held in
some such estimation by a numerous and in-
creasing class of followers, and with whom three
of the Concord authors had a slight but agreeable
acquaintance, thought he had found the weak
spot in Thoreau's armor as a Recruit, and said
to his friend Traubel: —

His great fault was disdain for men, — for Tom,
Dick and Harry; inability to appreciate the average
life, even the exceptional life. It seemed to me a want

I 336 ]

AUTHOR IN PROSE AND VERSE

of imagination. He could not put his life into any other
life, or realize why one man was so, and another man
was not so; was impatient with other people. It was a
surprise to me to meet in Thoreausuch a case of super-
ciliousness.

This was a misapprehension by Whitman,
whom I knew well. Thoreau's disdain was as
much for himself as for the man in the street;
it was his way of speaking that was at fault. The
best of his poems are free from this blemish,
which we must admit it was, in a certain sense.
Emerson recognized it and sometimes spoke of
it; though he usually overlooked it, in the bright
light of Thoreau's better qualities. He touched
on it in his early acquaintance with Charles Mal-
loy, one of the gentlest and most receptive of
Emerson's rustic disciples, and a good inter-
preter of the Master to other followers. To
EUery Channing, much later, Emerson said: —

Longfellow and Lowell have not appreciated Tho-
reau as a thinker and writer; and Judge Hoar has con-
firmed them in their skepticism. Henry makes an
instant impression, one way or the other. He met
Cholmondeley in my house, who was at once pleased
with his nonchalant manner; and his admiration grew
greater by daily contact. Thoreau did not at first ap-
preciate his Shropshire friend, but came to value him
highly.

[ 337 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

"Walden" deals far less in paradoxes than does
"The Service," and much more with the plain
facts of Nature and human nature, which Tho-
reau quite profoundly understood. He omitted
much of the matter he had collected, at Walden
and long before that, when finally making selec-
tions for its publication. I happen to have seen
the final "revise" of the first edition of "Wal-
den" in 1854, which is now, like most of the
Walden manuscripts, among the treasures of
Mr. Bixby at St. Louis. In correcting the proof
carefully, Thoreau first criticised the cut of his
cabin drawn by his sister Sophia. He must have
noticed that her trees were firs and not pines,
with a few deciduous trees that did not then grow
there; but it did not disturb him. He wished to
have the hut just right, and wrote: —

I would suggest a little alteration, chiefly in the
door, m the wide projection of thereof at the front; and
that the bank more immediately about the house be
brought out more distinctly.

On page 58 he made an odd note, changing
70 to 90 cents, in the raihoad fare to Fitchburg,
adding at the bottom, "They have raised the
fares within a week."

Among "dead matter," on page 274, is a pas-
[ 338 ]

SOPHIA THOEEAU

AUTHOR IN PROSE AND VERSE

sage on architecture from the "Lay of the Last
Minstrel" beginning —

" The keystone that locked each ribbM aisle."

It had no special pertinence, but is mentioned
here as showing that Thoreau had read Scott,
which hardly appears elsewhere.

From the same proof, this mystical passage
was dropped in revision: —

If we traverse the earth, we shall discover no insti-
tution which Friendship has established. It has no
temple, no column. It governs nowhere. It is as a
thing unheard of; if you inquire of it, you may not hear.
It has no gallery, no school, no church. It is not recog-
nized in any creed, nor by any religion. The wisest
books of the ancient world — the Scriptures even — do
not contain its code, nor inculcate its maxims.

Why will we always be trading and never conclude a
bargain? There goes a rumor that the earth is in-
habited; but not yet have we seen a footprint on the
shore. How very remotely allied to us are our brothers
and sisters !

It is hard to see the reason for omitting many
things in printing the "Walden" manuscripts.
Why, for instance, should the last dying speech
of Tom Hyde the tinker have been shortened?
"Tom added, 'You Boston folks and Roxbury
people will want Tom Hyde to mend your ket-
tles.' " The passage was in the Journal of 1849

[ 339 1

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

(p, 383), which, no longer exists. Can Tom have
been an early imported English gypsy, like him
who in New Hampshire founded the family of
Leathers, celebrated by Whittier, of whom one
illustrious descendant was Henry Wilson, who
became Vice-President of the United States?

With all his natural history, in "Walden" and
elsewhere, Thoreau appears averse from science.
Channing tried to explain this: — ■

I have known so many and so long studies of his over
his admired birds, that I was surprised to hear him
decry the usual method of studying them. It was con-
nected with his dislike of Science in general. For in-
stance; a very well-known savant had spent maiiy
years in looking at the eggs of bats, beetles, frogs, and
the like, to find how they begin and end; he printed an
enormous book about Turtles. Here was a case in point.
If there was a subject with which Henry was familiar, it
was Turtles. He had spent days and nights in watch-
ing them; had caught them, hatched them, noted down
on the spot the whole process of laying their eggs, —
and probably knew more about this creature, as it ap-
pears in the mud-puddles and to men's eyes, than all
the titled naturalists in Massachusetts. But in this
great microscopic folio, after reading it, he told me he
did not find one single, solitary hint or word as to the
habits or life of any species of turtle, any more than if
he who wrote it had never seen a specimen of that
reptile.

[ 340 ]

AUTHOR IN PROSE AND VERSE

I do not think he relished Science in long words. To

pry into Nature, to steal her fine secrets with a series

of skilfully ground watch-glasses, was not agreeable to

Thoreau. He was not the thing Wordsworth calls

"Philosopher! a fingering slave,

One that would peep and botanize
Upon his mother's grave."

He loved Nature in the lump. He had the filial feeling,
the veneration of a son for his mother. He thought she
had her veils, which should be respected ; that we should
not too narrowly pry, nor too much anatomize.

He was not a believer in the things he did not know
about. With the Christian Church and its fatalities it
fared no better than with the medical men. When he
was once ill and suffering, I said, in my way, — not al-
ways serious, — " You will need a father-confessor."
He replied, "I have nothing to confess." For the
doctors he had compassion; he looked on them as de-
luded; but not so with the clergy. His trouble with the
priests was that they were not alone ignorant of the
oracles, but ignorant of their ignorance, — the most
fatal of all delusions, says Coleridge. The priests read
out of a book detailing the acts of a Jewish youth,
poor, ill-fed, without even a fox-hole to crawl to; while
their building was the most costly in the village.

These peculiarities of his friend were care-
fully noted by Channing. On a point that has
been far too much dwelt on, he said to me: —

In Emerson's mode of writing out from his Journals,
Thoreau imitated him; and yet there was no such thing

[341 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

as conscious imitation in him. His handwriting, too,
had such a resemblance to Emerson's that I could
hardly tell them apart. It was very strange; for Henry
never imitated anybody. There was nothing but orig-
inality in him, as I know from my many hours with
him. In all my walks with Emerson, — not less than
a thousand, — I seldom heard him mention a person
by name. He had singular titles for Thoreau and others,
and avoided their personal appellation. Henry had
usually the same habit; nor did he reply directly to any
observation or question of mine, but went on with
original remarks of his own. He had the habit not to
dwell on the past. He rarely read a book over twice,
'^d he loved not to repeat a story after its first f resh-
^Hess. His talent was vigorous, onward, in the moment,
— which was perfectly filled; and then he went to the
next with great speed.

He took daily walks to the post-ofl&ce after the death
of his father, three years before his own; this for the
benefit of the family, for he was a martinet in the
family service. He had three varieties of boots for
winter walking, one of ten-pound India-rubber size, in
which he seemed lost. In summer he used low shoes,
coarse and substantial, with nails in the toes, and
leathern strings, tied in a "hard knot."

It must not be considered that Channing is
infallible, though he is so good a witness — the
best of the single witnesses in Thoreau's case —
as to matters of fact. Matters of opinion are
variable; the same witness has not always held

[ 342 ]

AUTHOR IN PROSE AND VERSE

to the same opinion. What Thoreau said himself
about his extravagance of remark, when Chan-
ning was his interlocutor, is worth citing: —

My companion tempts me to certain licenses of
speech, i.e. to reckless and sweeping expressions which
I am wont to regret that I have used. That is, I find
that I have used more harsh, extravagant, and cyni-
cal expressions concerning mankind and individuals
than I intended. I find it difficult to make to him a
sufficiently moderate statement. I think it is because
I have not his sympathy in my sober and constant
view. He asks for a paradox, an eccentric statement,
and too often I give it to him. ^

t

At this date he was sending his "copy" for
"Walden" to the printer. A few days later
(March 31) he wrote: —

In criticising your writing, trust your fine instinct.
There are many things which we come very near
questioning, but do hot question. When I have sent
oflF my manuscripts to the printer, certain objection-
able sentences or expressions are sure to obtrude
themselves on my attention with force, though I had
not consciously suspected them before. My critical
instinct then at once breaks the ice and comes to the
surface.

' It was a very acute appreciation by Chahning
which made him say of Thoreau that his task was

* Journal of March 12, 1854.
[343 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

to show the multum in the parvo, — "to boil up
the little into the big." But this may have been
caught from an expression of Thoreau's own,
uttered in that last year, 1861, when he felt the
shadow of death creeping over him, but was still
equal to a walk with his dear friend: "To elevate
the little into the great is genius." Quoting this,
Channing says: "I remember well the exact spot
where he said this. He was then in his last sick-
ness, and said that he could never feel warm." In
the next year (1862), when these much prized
walks must be given up, and Thoreau was con-
fined to the house, except as some friend's carriage
took him for a short drive, Channing records
this: —

He said to me once, standing at the window, — "I
cannot see on the outside at all. We thought our-
selves great philosophers in those wet days when we
used to go out and sit down by the wall-sides." This
was absolutely all he was ever heard to say of that
outward world during his illness; neither could a
stranger in the least infer that he had ever a friend in
wood or field.

Among the papers left to me by Channing, who
died in my house, where he had long lived as one
of my family, I found an unfinished Journal, kept
for some months, five years after Thoreau's death,

[ 344 ]

AUTHOR IN PROSE AND VERSE

which recorded chiefly his lonely rambles where he
had walked with Henry, and the reflections his
reading and observation gave him; as if he were
seeking to follow that patient example in journal-
izing each day's experience. In this manuscript
Channing wrote: —

Henry once said, speaking of some minute thing,
that " the art of genius was to raise the little into the
large." It was one of the last times we were out to-
gether, near Flint's Bridge. How far it was from true is
another matter. He had a taste for exaggeration that
was remarkable. He loved to wonder; and the more
usual the matter was, the more he wondered. He ex-
aggerated the little; made much out of nothing al-
most; and had a way of always being surprised at
things that were certain to come. Henry thought and
said a great deal about the coming of the first bluebird,
the piping of the hylas, the appearance of the turtle
and the first plants. He could never sufficiently wonder
at these things. But the thing that occurs twice is not
wonderful.

Whether a customary thing is wonderful or not,
depends on the person wondering. To Thoreau
life was a daily miracle; he admired the repetition
which did not quite reproduce the previous expe-
rience, and yet blissfully recalled it; as we may take
pleasure in a remembered strain of music, heard
from a new performer. Mere repetition is happi-

[ 345 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

ness to a child; and Thoreau had retained, far
beyond most men, the sensibility of childhood to
the events of Nature. " He exaggerated the per-
manence of everything but what men do," said a
friend. " A picture, a novel, a piece of music did not
affect him in that fashion. This was his special
trait, and as pleasing as possible to his companion."
Behind and beyond all his jests and paradoxes
was his sincere love of a simple life, freed from the
encumbrances which he found all about him, even
in the comparatively simple surroundings of Con-
cord, where most of his thoughtful days were
spent, He early found the work he had to do —
to investigate Nature under the light of idealism,
and to report what he saw. Edward Hoar, who
rambled much with him when a boy, and in later
years went with him to the Maine woods and to
Moimt Washington, said of him to me: —

Realism in description was Henry's great forte;
in that respect I compare him to Dante. Emerson sees
through other men's eyes; Thoreau always with his
own eyes, and makes his own description. Also, he had
inherited a French mind and mode of writing, with an
elegance seldom found in American authors.^

* Edward Hoar wa^ one of three brothers, in age between Judge
Rockwood Hoar, his elder, and G. F. Hoar, the younger, both more
publidy known; but in Nature-study and literary appreciation
excelling both. Elizabeth was their sister.

[ 346 ]

AUTHOR IN PROSE AND VERSE

We are apt to speak of persons whom we ad-
mire for firmness and courage as of Roman or of
Spartan mould. Occasionally a person so recalls
the "sweetness and light" of the best Grecian
types that we call him "a true Greek." Such was
Charles Emerson in the early poem of Dr. Holmes;
and such, in some aspects, was Bronson Alcott.
Thoreau, of all the Concord authors most familiar
with Greek and Roman literature, had close rela-
tions with several of the philosophers of antiquity.
In his constant practice and inculcation of the
simple life, he resembled Socrates; and equally in
his moral courage and his love of gossip. But there
were likewise points of resemblance to the Cynic
Diogenes, and to the greater Stoics; so that Emer-
son chose to consider him as a Stoic and little else
— a classification his family wovdd not accept.
In the mass of his character he was best depicted
by Channing, in a poem (" Near Home ") written at
Concord,Plymouth,NewBedford,andother haunts
of the two friends, and dedicated to Thoreau: —

"Henry! though with thy name a nobler verse
Might fitlier blend, inspire and lead the way
To more sublime emotions, that entrance
The listening city and the landward town, —
Still let thy name stand here, — of one the name
Who to no meaner service nobly walked
Than Virtue's service.

[ 347 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

Modest, mild and kind.
Who never spurned the needing from thy door, —
(Door of thy heart,, which is a palace gate;)
Temperate and faithful, in whose word the world
Might trust, sure to r^pay; unvexed by care,
Unawed by Fortune's nod, slave to no lord.
Nor coward to thy peers; long shalt thou live!
Not in this feeble verse, this sleeping age, —
But in the roll of Heaven, and at the bar
Of that high coiu^; where Virtue is in place."

This prediction of sixty years ago is now amply
fulfilled.

But what title had Thoreau or Alcott, or even
Emerson, to be called philosophers? Many who
call themselves by that name have denied it to
these three; and some have been unwilling to allow
that they were poets. Poetical they admit, but
not poets; wise, in odd ways and at odd times, but
philosophers — never! Perish the thought! they
had no system, they developed no dialectic, they
were ignorant of metaphysics. But they were
Lovers of Wisdom, which the Greek term signifies.
And what is Wisdom.? An ancient book, debarred
from general reading, by calling it " apocryphal,"
thus defines it: —

Wisdom knoweth things of old, and doth conjecture
what is to come; she hath the subtil ties of speech, and
can expound dark sentences; she foreseeth signs and

[ 348 ]

AUTHOR IN PROSE AND VERSE

wonders, and the event of seasons and ages; she
teacheth temperance and forethought, justice and for-
titude; than which men can have in their life nothing
more profitable.

In this way the Concord authors earned and
merited the name of philosophers. Truth comes
by insight and in flashes; it is a datum and not a
logical inference. You can afterward connect its
elements by the steps of a syllogism, or a score of
syllogisms; but that is a concession to human
frailty; it came at first from that mystical Wisdom
celebrated in our Apocrypha. Thoreau, apart
from his recognition of this source, had also in
Aristotelean strictness a more practical and every-
day means of verifying his data. He was a better
geometer than Plato or Pythagoras, and as good
an observer as any of the ancients.

The copious Journals, now printed nearly in
full, so far as preserved, are an invaluable record,
not only of events and observations, but of char-
acter. They disclose varying moods, but one fixed
and unchanging character, of a very high order.
They show, too, how his forms of expression
changed, and what a deep insight he had into
human nature. With a spirit essentially poetic,
he lacked the constant sensibility to rhythmical
form, which persons much less poetical often have

[ 349 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

and employ. His first verse printed (in the
"Dial") was that confession of love for Ellen
Sewall, the mention of which found very late
access to his biographies — partly because the
earliest Journals and poems were destroyed by
Thoreau himself. Like much of his poesy, it is
too long, and with stanzas of very unequal merit;
but here are some of the best: —

Lately, alas, I knew a gentle boy, <

Whose features all were cast in Virtue's mould,

As one she had designed for Beauty's toy,

But after manned him for her own stronghold.

On every side he open was as day.

That you might see no lack of strength within.
For walls and ports do only serve alway

For a pretence to feebleness and sin.

Say not that Csesar was victorious.

With toil and strife who stormed the House of Fame,
In other sense this youth was glorious, —

Himself a kingdom wheresoe'er he came.

He forayed like the subtile haze of Summer,
That stilly shows fresh landscape to the eyes.

And revolutions works without a murmur,
Or rustling of a leaf beneath the skies.

So was I taken imawares by this,

I quite forgot my homage to confess;
Yet now am forced to know, though hard it is,

I might have loved him, had I loved him less.

I 350 ]

AUTHOR IN PROSE AND VERSE

Each moment as we nearer drew to each,
A stem respect withheld us farther yet;

So that we seemed beyond each other's reach.
And less acquainted than when first we met.

Eternity may not the chance repeat.
But I must tread my single way alone.

In sad remembrance that we once did meet,
And know that bhss irrevocably gone.

The spheres henceforth my elegy shall sing.

For elegy has other subject none;
Each strain of music in my ears shall ring

Knell of departure from that other one.

Is't then too late the damage to repair?

Distance, forsooth, from my weak grasp hath reft
The empty husk, and clutched the useless tare.

But in my hands the wheat and kernel left.

If I but love that virtue which he is,
Though it be scented in the morning air.

Still shall we be truest acquaintances,
Nor mortals know a sympathy more rare.

On the testimony of both Emerson and Theo-
dore Parker, and of other persons who knew the
facts, this "gentle boy" was Miss Ellen SewaJl,
then of Scituate, where her father was the village
pastor, — a first cousin of Mrs. Alcott, and a de-
scendant of the old Puritan justice Samuel Sewall,
and also a granddaughter of Mrs. Colonel Ward,
intimate in the Thoreau family. Her aunt. Miss

[351]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

Prudence Ward, writing to her sister, Mrs. Sewall,
at Scituate (June 29, 1838), said: —

Mr. Thoreau's potatoes and squashes [at the Park-
man house] look finely, and Henry's melons are flour-
ishing. He has over sixty hills, and we are likely to
have an abundance. John's school is flourishing; there
are four boys from Boston boarding with us. I want
Ellen Sewall should make us a visit of a week or two.
Tell little Mary Ward that we have a little black kitten,
and that the martins have driven away the bluebirds
and taken possession of their box. Our flower-garden
looks very gay. It is more forward than our neighbors',
and filled with a variety of roses and other flowers.

Into this summer paradise came the fair Ellen,
and her brother, Edmund Quincy Sewall, who be-
came a pupil of John and Henry Thoreau, in the
school already described. Both the brothers fell
in love with her, but John seems to have been her
favorite. He was a gentler person then, and more
acceptable, both as teacher and lover, than the
more assertive Henry. She remained unwedded
until after John's death, early in 1842, but after-
wards became the wife of a clergyman. Rev.
Joseph Osgood, preaching at Cohasset near Scit-
uate. The Thoreaus continued to visit her, and
at Sophia's death she left Mrs. Osgood a legacy.

No other love afifair of Henry's is on record,
and he may be supposed to have withdrawn his

[ 352 ]

AUTHOR IN PROSE AND VERSE

suit to the fair maid, in deference to his elder
brother, whom he dearly loved. Channing, who
must have known of this episode in the youth of
his friend, wrote in his Journal of March, 1867,
this passage: —

Henry was fond of making an ado, a wonder, a sur-
prise, of all facts that took place out of doors; but a
picture, a piece of music, a novel, did not affect him in
that fashion. This trait of exaggeration was as pleasing
as possible to his companions. Nothing wa*s more de-
lightful than the enormous curiosity, the effervescing
wonder, of this child of Nature — glad of everything
its mother said or did. This joy in Nature is something
we can get over, like love. And yet love, — that is a
hard toy to smash and fling under the grate, for good.
But Henry made no account at all of love, apparently;
he had notions about friendship.

It was under friendship alone that must be
classed those charming verses that he addressed

To the Maiden in the East

Low in the eastern sky
Is set thy glancing eye;
And though its gracious light
Ne'er rises to my sight.
Yet every star that climbs
Above the gnarled limbs
Of yonder hill *
Conveys thy gentle will.

» Bare HiU by Walden.
[ 353 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

Believe I knew thy thought.
And that the zephyrs brought
Thy kindest wishes through,
As mine they bear to you;
That some attentive cloud
Did pause amid the crowd

Above my head,
While gentle things were said.

Believe the thrushes sung.
And that the flower-bells rimg;
That herbs exhaled their scent,
And beasts knew what was meant;
The trees a welcome waved,
And lakes their margins laved.
When thy free mind
To my retreat did wind.

It was a summer eve.
The air did gently heave.
While yet a low-hung cloud
Thine eastern skies did shroud:
The lightning's silent gleam.
Startling my drowsy dream.

Seemed like the flash
Under thy dark eyelash.

From yonder comes the sun;
But soon his course is rim.
Rising to trivial day
Along his dusty way;
But thy noontide completes
Only auroral heats.

Nor ever sets.
To hasten vain regrets.
[ 354 ]

AUTHOR IN PROSE AND VERSE

Direct thy pensive eye
Into the western sky,
And when the evenLag star
Doth glimmer from afar,
Upon the momitain line.
Accept it for a sign

That I am near,
And thinking of thee here.

I'll be thy Mercury,
Thou Cjrtherea to me;
Distinguished by thy face,
The Earth shall learn my place;
As here beneath thy light
Will I outwear the night.

With mingled ray
Leading tie westward way.

Still will I strive to be
As if thou wert with me;
Whatever path I take,
It shall be, for thy sake.
Of gentle slope and wide.
As thou wert by my side.

Without a root
To trip thy gentle foot.

I'll walk with quiet pace.
And choose the smoothest place;
And careful dip the oar.
And shun the winding shore;
And gently steer my boat
Where water-lilies float.

And cardinal flowers
Stand in their sylvan bowers.
[ 355 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

This was plainly written at Walden, after Miss
Russell had returned to Plymouth, her home,
whence she had visited Concord to reside with her
Plymouth neighbor Mrs. Waldo Emerson. She
soon after married Marston Watson, and became
for many years the hostess at Hillside, where the
Concord circles frequently visited. For his friend
Watson, Thoreau surveyed the park and orchards
in that sylvan retreat, where Alcott carried the
surveyor's chain, and even planned a cottage for
his own family there, after his own Concord "Hill-
side" was sold to Hawthorne in 1852, and took its
new name of "Wayside."

These astronomical loves of Henry and Mary
remind one of the "vegetable loves" of Andrew
Marvell, who wrote, — to one of the Fairfaxes, per-
chance: —

* 'Our vegetable loves should grow
Vaster than empires and more slow;

I would

Love you ten years before the Flood,
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the Conversion of the Jews."

The quarterly "Dial" for four years, and the
Concord Lyceum for twenty-five, gave publica-
tion to Thoreau's writings in his journeyman
years of literature; but his first volume, the
"Week," came out, at his own expense, in 1849.

[ 356 ]

AUTHOR IN PROSE AND VERSE

Neither "The Service" nor the "Raleigh" got
into the " Dial," for which they were written; but
the latter was heard as a lecture at the Lyceum
in 1843, as much of the " Week" and of " Walden"
was so heard from 1838 to 1850. By 1850 he had
become a contributor to several magazines for
very small pay; and, through his acquaintance
with Horace Greeley, was a contributor to the
"Tribune" occasionally, as Margaret Fuller had
been for some years, till her shipwreck near New
York in 1850. Thoreau represented Emerson and
Mrs. Channing, Margaret's sister, in the search
for the bodies and the effects at Fire Island, af-
ter that tragedy. Writing to Marcus Spring at
Eagleswood, New Jersey (Jxily 23, 1850), Emer-
son gave this testimonial to Thoreau's compe-
tence at such crises: —

At first I thought I would go myself, and see if I could
help in the inquiries at the wrecking-ground, and act
for the friends. But I have prevailed on my friend, Mr.
Thoreau, to go for me and all the friends. He is the
most competent person that could be selected; and in
the dispersion of the Fuller family, and our uncertainty
how to communicate with them, he is authorized by
Mr. EUery Channing to act for them all. He is pre-
pared to spend a number of days in this object, and you
must give him any guidance or help you can. If his
money does not hold out, I shall gladly pay any drafts

[357]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

he may make on you in my name. And I shall cordially
unite with you in any expense that this painful calamity
shall make necessary.

Soon after this first break in the circle of the
Concord Transcendentalists, the system of public
lectures became so general in New England that
Thoreau received invitations to read his essays
in other towns than Concord; and even Channing
tried his fortune as a lecturer. He already had
tried it as a journalist in Boston, Cincinnati, and
New York. Thoreau heard him in Concord, and
gave this sketch of it (January 29, 1852) : —

I heard Channing lecture to-night. It was a bushel
of nuts. Perhaps the most original lecture I ever heard.
Ever so unexpected? not to be foretold, and so senten-
tious that you could not look at him and take his
thought at the same time. You had to give your
undivided attention to the thoughts, for you were
not assisted by set phrases or modes of speech inter-
vening. It was all genius, no talent. For, well as I
know C, he more than any man disappoints my ex-
pectation. When I see him in the desk, hear him, I
cannot realize that I ever saw him before. He will be
strange, unexpected, to his best acquaintance. I can-
not associate the lecturer with the companion of my
walk. The lecture was full of wise, acute, and witty
observations, yet most of the audience did not know
but it was mere incoherent and reckless verbiage and
nonsense.

[ 358 ]

WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNIXG

AUTHOR IN PROSE AND VERSE

This lecture of Channing's was given at the Con-
cord Lyceum, of which Thoreau had long ceased
to be "Curator," as he had been at'thetime of the
controversy over Phillips, but where he lectured
gratuitously every winter, giving there, and at
Salem and elsewhere, chapters i from the record
of his life at Walden, before the book itself
was printed. Among its manuscript pages I
found some that had served for his readings be-
fore audiences.

It was the golden age of lyceum lectures when al-
most every town in New England had its lectures
by famous authors. EUery Channing, who be-
longed to a family famed for public eloquence, had
avoided its practice; but this winter he set himself
resolutely to train for a popular lecturer, with very
scanty success. His correspondence with Emer-
son, which I have, tells the brief tale. He had
several lectures written out, the manuscripts of
which he left to me, among his other papers.
Writing to Emerson at various dates in February,
1852 (1, 7, 10, and 17), he gives the record of his
attempts and failures. He read in Boston, Provi-
dence, Worcester, Fall River, Plymouth, and pos-
sibly Greenfield. From Providence, where he had
Charles Newcomb and Mrs. Sarah Whitman for
friends, he wrote Emerson: —

[ 359 1

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

I am reading my lectures in Providence to full houses
(bating accidents) ; the receipts of my last being $1, —
or barring one Quarter, which was a twenty-cent
piece. I am going to Fall River to-day, and may read
there, if the individuals are as great as they are here.
Mrs. Whitman told me at ten last night, that lam
exactly like yourself — like by the very gait, air, voice,
turning of the eyebrow, etc. Here's a flea in your ear,
with your one auditor planting such a side-blow as
that! To be a mere wretched imitator of you — to
have written some bad lectures, and then read them
with your voice, air, tone, etc. ! It is really a trick of
fortune, or of fate, I did not in the least look out for. I
am usually content to believe that I am not a mimic;
but this woman is clear-sighted and superior; and the
case must be undoubtedly as she says. What am I to do
about it? I think I shall have to give up lecturing, and
betake myself to

" Some hermit's shady cell."

One more course on my account will teach me how to
read lectures — any lectures. The money cost is con-
siderable; but never having been to college, or spent a
sixpence on my education, I thought I must do this.
I had no way to learn how to read but to read. To
wait for an invitation? I have waited precisely ten
years now.

Mrs. Whitman thinks there is too much thought in
my first lecture. Thoreau did too. But I have omitted
almost one half already. This seems enough for a be-
ginning.

[ 360 ]

AUTHOR IN PROSE AND VERSE

He never repeated the experiment.

In that same winter Thoreau had a different
lecturer to deal with at the same Lyceum, when
Mrs. Elizabeth Oakes Smith, in the last night of
1851, gave a discourse on "Womanhood," Par-
son Frost, of the First Parish, a good man who
heard her, did not like what she said about the
clergy; "It was too transcendental for me."
Thoreau was more specific: —

The most important fact was that a woman said it;
in that respect it was suggestive. My interview added
nothing to the previous impression, rather sub-
tracted. She was a woman in the too common sense
after all. You had to substitute courtesy for sense and
argument. It requires nothing less than a chivalric
feeling to sustain a conversation with a lady. I carried
her lecture for her in my pocket wrapped in her hand-
kerchief; my pocket exhales cologne to this moment.

A little before this (November 13) he had
called on Miss Mary Emerson (aunt of Waldo),
then seventy-seven, and spent two hours; she was
very different: — •

The wittiest and most vivacious woman that I know,
whom it is most profitable to meet, the least frivolous,
who will the most surely provoke to good conversation
and the expression of what is in you. She is singular in
being really and perseveringly interested to know what
thinkers think. In spite of her own biases, she can

[361]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

entertain a large thought with hospitaHty. . , . Read-
ing from my manuscripts to her, and using the word
" god " in perchance a merely heathenish sense, she
inquired hastily in a tone of dignified anxiety, "Is that
god spelt with a little jrF" Fortunately it was. (I had
brought in the word " god " without any solemnity of
voice or connection.) So I went on as if nothing had
happened.

This fruitful winter, also, he made the acquaint-
ance of a younger sage whom he admired: —

They showed me little Johnny Riordan, as bright a
boy of five years as ever trod our paths, whom you
could not see for five minutes without loving and honor-
ing him. He had on, in the middle of January of the
coldest winter we have had for twenty years, one thick-
ness only of ragged cloth sewed on to his pantaloons
over his little shirt, and shoes with large holes in the
toes, into which the snow got, as he was obliged to con-
fess,''he who had trodden five winters under his feet.
Thus clad, he walked a mile to school every day, over
the bleakest of railroad causeways — all to get learning
and warmth, and there sit at the head of his bench.
These clothes, with countless patches, which had for
vehicle — O shame, shame! — pantaloons that had been
mine, they whispered to me, set as if his mother had
fitted them to a tea-kettle first. He revived to my mind
the grave nobility and magnanimity of ancient heroes.

A little out of date, but worthy to be included
here, are verses sent in as a Rhapsody by Thoreau

[ 362 ]

AUTHOR IN PROSE AND VERSE

for the "Dial," — never published, but endorsed
by Emerson, from whom they came to me, "H.
D. Thoreau, 1843."

The Just Made Perfect

A stately music rises on my ear.
Borne on the breeze from some adjacent vale;
A host of knights, my own true ancestors.
Tread to the lofty strains and pass away
In long procession; to this music's sound
The Just move onward in deep serried ranks.
With looks serene of hope, and gleaming brows,
As if they were the temples of the Day.

GUt by an unseen sun's resplendent ray
They firmly move, sure as the lapse of Time;
Departed worth, leaving these trivial fields
Where sedate valor finds no worthy aim.
And still is Fame the noblest cause of all.

Forward they press and with exalted eye.

As if their road, which seems a level plain.

Did still ascend, and were again subdued

'Neath their proud feet. Forward they move, and leave

The Sim and moon and stars alone behind:

An4 now, by the still fainter strains, I know

They surely pass; and soon their quivermg harp.

And faintly clashing cymbal, will have ceased

To feed my ear.

It is the steadiest motion eye hath seen,
A Godlike progress; e'en the hills and rocks^
[ S63 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

Do forward come, so to congratulate
Their feet; the rivers eddy backward, and
The waves recurl to accompany their march.

Onward they move, like to the life of man.

Which cannot rest, but goes without delay

Right to the gates of Death, not losing time

In its majestic tread to Eternity,

As if Man's blood, a river, flowed right on

Far as the eye could reach, to the Heart of hearts,

Nor eddied round about these complex limbs.

'T is the slow march of life, — I feel the feet
Of tiny drops go pattering through my veins;
Their arteries flow with an Assyrian pace.
And empires rise and fall beneath their stride.

StiU, as they move, flees the horizon wall;
The low-roofed sky o'erarches their true path;
For they have caught at last the pace of HeaVen,
Their great Commander's true and timely tread.

Lo ! how the sky before them is cast up

Into an arched road, like to the gallery

Of the small mouse that bores the meadow's turf:

Chapels of ease swift open o'er the path.

And domes continuous span the lengthening way.

It will be seen that this mystical poem is a
kind of sequel to the long unpublished "Ser-
vice," which Goodspeed printed in 1902. Why
it did not appear in the "Dial" I cannot say;
there are defects in its poetic form, which may

[ 364 ]

AUTHOR IN PROSE AND VERSE

have seemed reason enough with Emerson for
withholding it; or it may only have been over-
looked by him, as it was by me when furnishing
Mr. Salt with the verses in my possession for the
London edition of Thoreau's "Poems." I have
slightly corrected some of these defects; and I
have broken it up into stanzas in copying, —
not always with deference to Thoreau's punctua-
tion, though that was commonly very exact,
except that he overworked the comma, without
suflScient recourse to the colon and semicolon,
or the comma and dash. In date it is three years
later than "The Service," and when Thoreau
had much given up writing verse. When he told
me that he had destroyed many verses because
Emerson said they were not good, he then said,
"Perhaps they were better than Emerson thought
them." Like other mystics, Thoreau is hard to
follow and comprehend.

CHAPTER Xn

THE JOUENETINGS OF THOREAU

Thottgh twice invited by friends to visit Eu-
rope (by Isaac Hecker, when both were young,
and by Thomas Cholmondeley in later years),
Thoreau never crossed the Atlantic, nor left his
native land except for a brief tour in Canada.
Yet he was, like St. Paul, whom he did not
otherwise much resemble, "in journeyings often,"
and that from infancy. Born in Concord, he re-
moved to Chelmsford, then to Boston, and back
to Concord Village, before he was six years old.
He remembered the first time his infant eyes
rested on Walden Pond, when he thought to his
little self that he should like to live there — as
he afterwards did. He made short journeys with
his father and his brother John before leaving
Harvard College; and the brothers planned a
journey to Kentucky together the next year after
graduating; but Henry changed his mind, and
visited his cousins in Maine, instead. He was
then in search of some school to teach, as Bron-
son Alcott had been, at a younger age, when with
his cousin, William Alcott, he went sailing off

[ 366 ]

JOURNEYINGS OF THOREAU

from New Haven to South. Carolina. Thoreau,
more wisely, decided to stay in Concord, and
do his schoolkeeping there for a few years; mean-
while, to make himself more familiar with the
region of his birth before journeying extensively
elsewhere. This he did in daily walks. His voy<-
age on the two rivers in 1839 was his first intro-
duction to mountains; for the two brothers left
their home-made boat at Hooksett, and spent
most of their second week in a tour to Franconia
and the White Mountains — omitting Monadnoc
till after years, when Henry several times cataped
there. In the volume describing that riparian
romance, he introduced some notice of moun-
tain-ascensions made later — to Wachusett, Grey-
lock, and the CatskiUs, which he also mentions
in "Walden." The walk to Wachusett he had
described in the short-lived "Boston Miscel-
lany" in 1842, for Mr. Hale, its editor. The Cats-
kill Range, Greylock, and the Hoosac Moun-
ta,in he climbed in 1844. Between the two he had
made his first considerable sojourn away froni
Concord — six months in New York City and
its vicinity, living as tutor in the family, at Staten
Island, of Mr. William Emerson. It was note-
worthy to Thoreau from his first acquaintance
there witji Horace Greeley, and the elder Henry

[ 367 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

James, with whom afterwards he had much to
do. His tours on Cape Cod and in Canada were
after his residence by Walden — from 1849 on-
ward, for the Cape, and in Canada in 1850. Many
pages in the Journal, describing this Canadian
tour, exist among the manuscripts owned by Mr,
Bixby, but were omitted by Sophia and Chan-
ning in making up the printed record. Some omis-
sions, but not so many, were made in editing the
" Cape Cod"; but those were largely left out by
Thoreau himself, in shortening his papers for
"Putnam's Magazine." Channing had visited
the Cape before Thoreau, but also went with
him on two of Thoreau's visits there — in 1849
and 1855; in both 1850 and 1857, Thoreau went
alone. Of Cape Cod he made a more extended
study than of any of his mountains; though not
more than of the Maine woods. His longest
visit to Monadnoc was in the late summer of
1860, before the attack of bronchitis came on
which never really left him until it occasioned
his death. Between these dates (December 3,
1860, and May, 1862), he made the longest of
his journeys, to Minnesota and return, in which
he kept no regular journal, and had no time
afterward to write out his notes in full. Of this
experience, therefore, there is no complete rec-

[ 368 ]

JOURNEYINGS OF THOREAU

ord, the only one accessible being the volume
which I edited for the Bibliophile Society in
1905, from papers in Mr. Bixby's possession (by
purchase from Mr. Russell, of Worcester) or in
mine. The journey extended from May 11 to
July 10, 1861, two months, and we find in the
later Journal a few entries concerning it. For
companion on this latest tour he was to have
been accompanied, as on so many before, by
Ellery Channing; whose courage, his spirits, or
his money gave out at the last, and Channing
failed to meet him at Niagara, as he had given
Thoreau to understand he might do. His friend
was much disappointed, and had to fall back on
the companionship of young Horace Mann, a
student of natural science, modest and good-
natured, but not very conversible, and without
the lively wit and Shakespearean versatility of
Channing, in which Thoreau delighted and found
, refreshment.

The Maine woods were another serious propo-
sition, like Cape Cod and Monadnoc, and in-
volved more than one visit. His first one was in
May, 1838, but did not include camping in the
forest, as in later years. His aunt Mrs. Billings
(Elizabeth Thoreau) had died years before,
leaving in Bangor daughters who had married

[ 369 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

into the families of Thatcher and Lowell; and
these relatives frequently interchanged visits. I
met some of each family in Concord, during the
residence of the Thoreaus there, from 1855 to
1873, and one of the Thatchers was the executor
of the wills of Sophia and of Maria Thoreau. I
met him at the grave of Sophia in Concord in
October, 1876. Of Henry's first visit in Bangor
in 1838 some mention has been made. He had
been there again before I made his acquaintance
in 1855, and he printed accounts of two excur-
sions, in 1846 to Ktaadn, and in 1853 to Chesun-
cook. The first was placed in Horace Greeley's
hands for sale, and appeared in the "Union
Magazine" of 1848 — putting in Thoreau's pocket
fifty dollars, and leaving to Greeley twenty-five
dollars for his brokerage in selling it and getting
paid; "the latter" Greeley wrote, "being by
far the most difficult part of the business." He
had sold other essa;ys for Thoreau to Graham and
to Sartain, magazine-publishers, and his twenty-
five dollars coyiered the whole transaction. The
Chesuncook paper began in the "Atlantic" in
1858; a third essay, "The AUegash and East
Branch," described his last excursion, in which
he was accompanied, in 1857, by Edward Hoar,
brother of the Senator, who is said to have been

[ 370 ]

JOURNEYINGS OF THOREAU

his comrade in the excursion of 1844 up the Mus-
ketaquid, which resulted so unluckily in the forest
fire of Concord on Town-Meeting day, and sadly
damaged Thoreau's reputation among the owners
of Concord woodlots, of which he surveyed and
mapped so many afterwards. He never pubhshed
his account of this adventure, but carefully wrote
it out, and it will be found in my next chapter,
with explanations.

Thoreau's visit to Fire Island in 1850, to col-
lect what could be found of the effects of Mar-
garet Fuller (the Marchioness d'OssoU) and her
Italian husband, took him, among other odd
places to Patchogue, where he found the drunken
Dutchman so feUcitously described by him in
Channing's biography. He did not visit Cape
Ann till September, 1858, spending three days
in that region; earlier in the same year, while
lecturing at Lynn, he heard the evidence in favor
of the sea-serpent seen at Nahant in 1819-20. In
1857 he had heard from his friend Marston Watson
at Plymouth the story of the sea-serpent seen by
Daniel Webster in returning from Manomet to
Marshfield, but which Webster would not allow to
be related, lest he " should never hear the last of it. "
\ Early readers of the "Atlantic Monthly" will
recall that Thoreau was a contributor to its first

[ 371 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

volume; but there, and in the second volume,
completing the Chesuncook paper, he ceased, and
did not reappear for years. In the ninth volume,
a few weeks after his death in 1862, his pleasing
essay on "Walking" came out, followed by other
essays in the tenth, twelfth, and fourteenth vol-
umes. Why this long silence at his most pro-
ductive period? Because he refused to send his
manuscripts to be docked and mutilated by J. R.
Lowell, the first editor of the "Atlantic." In his
"Chesuncook," eulogizing the pine tree of the
Maine woods, he had written, "It is as immor-
tal as I am, and perchance will go to as high a
heaven, there to tower above me still." What he
meant by this is hard to say; but Lowell struck it
out, exercising a similar discretion to that which
Emerson had used in omitting portions of Tho-
reau's "Winter Walk" in the "Dial." But the
author objected to Lowell's excision, and would
send nothing more to that editor, whom probably
he had come to dislike for other sins of commis-
sion or omission — as in the admission to the
"Atlantic" of Charles Norton's wholly inade-
quate notice of John Brown, in 1860. l!n 1862
Thoreau lay slowly dying in his mother's house
at Concord, and the magazine had a new editor,
J. T. Fields, the publisher, who saw the merits

[ 372 ]

JOURNEYINGS OF THOREAU

of this scrupulous man of genius as an attraction
for his magazine.

The same year that he visited Chesuncook
(1853) he first visited the Wayside Inn (Howe
Tavern), then still open as a tavern, as it was in
1851 when I was first there; and Haverhill, with
its old "houses of refuge" from Indian attack.
In 1856 he made two or three noteworthy jour-
neys, between September 5 and 12 to Vermont
(Brattleboro and Bellows Falls), and to Wal-
pole, New Hampshire, where the Alcotts were
then living for a year, and where he learned the
story of Colonel Bellows, from whom, he says,
most of the Walpole people are descended. This
was chiefly a botanical excursion, and he enu-
merates some fifty plants of which he obtained
fresh specimens, and fifteen pressed specimens,
given him by the Misses Brown, of Brattleboro.
He ascended the Fall Mountain at Bellows Falls,
and examined the celebrated falls in the Connec-
ticut, beneath it, quoting what the Tory histo-
rian of Connecticut says of the river there. This
book of Peters, full of fables and prejudices,
pleased him by its style, and he says of it: — ^,^

It did me good to read the wholesale, hearty state-
ments of Peters — strong, living, human speech, so
much better than the emasculated modem histories,

[ 373 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

like Bancroft's and the rest, cursed with a style. I
would rather read such histories, though every sen-
tence were a falsehood, than our dull emasculated re-
ports which bear the name of histories. The former,
having a human breadth and interest behind them,
are nearer to nature and to truth after all. The his-
torian is required to feel a human interest in his sub-
ject, and to so express it.

After this excursion into literary criticism,
Thoreau, as always, picks up pertinent facts
which will sometime be of use to somebody,
though perhaps never to himself. After reaching
the temporary home of the Alcotts he sets down
this piece of information: —

Rode the last mile into Walpole with a lumberer,
who said that when he commenced operations at Bel-
lows Falls he thought there was not more than 100,000
feet of lumber there, but they had already got out four
millions. He also imported some of those masts from
Canada West that I had seen go through Concord to
Boston. They were rafted along Lake Erie (jNIr. Dorr *

* This was Captain Dorr, of the steamboat service on Lake Erie,
whose son was a pupil of mine, and who boarded at Mrs. Thoreau's,
where his father visited him. In the late summer of 1856, on my
excursion to Niagara, Chicago, Iowa, and Nebraska City, on the
business of Kansas freedom, Captain Dorr poUtely escorted me
from Buffalo to Niagara, sitting beside me in the train, at my left,
and emphasiziag his remarks by jogging my ribs with his right
elbow. Years after, at the funeral of Garrison in Roxbury, the poet
Whittier, in the pew at my left, repeated this gesture — an old-
fashioned Yankee trait.

[ 374 ]

JOURNEYINGS OF THOREAU

of Buffalo afterward told me that he did this part on
the lake Vfith steamers, — merely running an inch chain
through the butt of each log, and fastening the ends to
a boom, which surrounded the whole, leaving the small
ends to play in the lake) , and in small rafts by canal to
Albany, and thence by railroad via Rutland to Port-
land or Boston, for the navy; it cost only one third
more to get them to the seacoast from Canada than
from Bellows Falls. Remembering the diflBculty in old
times of loading one of these masts in New Hampshire
for the King's Navy, this seemed to me the greatest
triumph of the railroad.

Thus did our botanist pass, in a few pages of
his Journal, from Linnaeus and Gerard and the
writers of modern history to the practical achieve-
ments of lumberers, timber-raftsmen, and rail-
road hands, — men with whom he loved to talk
better than with the men pragmatically learned,
which Lowell was, for all his wit and poesy.

The Vermont Botanical Excursion

This visit to Brattleboro in September, 1856,
is one of the few distinctly botanical trips away
from Concord, of which I find a definite record
and result; but it was combined with a visit to
friends who were also botanists. Mr. and Mrs.
Addison Brown, of Brattleboro, were of the liberal
reforming element in New England; their daugh-

[375 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

ter, Miss Frances Brown, I had met at the house
of friends in Boston; she was, I think, one of
the pupils of George B, Emerson, a cousin of
the Concord Emersons, and a good naturalist,
as well as a good teacher, in Pemberton Square,
Boston. Rev. John W. Brown, one of the pioneers
in Kansas, and the first Unitarian minister in
Lawrence, Kansas, was a kinsman of the Brattle-
boro family. The younger Miss Brown, now Mrs.
Dunton, of Sheboygan, Wisconsin, in a letter of
1908, said: —

Henry Thoreau was the guest of Rev. Addison
Brown's family in their house on Chase Street. At
that time none of the family had met him, but my father
had corresponded with him, and had invited him to our
home, if he should come to Brattleboro. When he did
(September 5, 1856) it was to look up an Aster which did
not grow in Concord. He struck me as being very odd,
very wise, and exceedingly observing. He roamed about
the country at will, and I was fortunate enough to be
his companion on a walk to our mountain. I was well
acquainted with the flora, and could meet him under-
standingly thereupon; but was abashed at the numer-
ous questions he asked, about all sorts of things, to
which I could only reply, " I do not know." It appealed
to my sense of humor that a person with such a fund of
knowledge should seek information from a young girl
like myself; but I could not see that he had any fun in
him. The only question I now recall is this: as we stood

[ 376 ]

JOURNEYINGS OF THOREAU

on the summit of Mount Wantastiquet, he fixed his
earnest gaze on a distant point in the landscape [per-
haps Mount Ascutney], asking, "How far is it in a
bee-line to that spot?"

Thoreau's own comment was more specific: —

This mountain is the most remarkable feature here.
The village is peculiar from the nearness of the prim-
itive wood and this mountain. Within three rods of
Brown's house was excellent botanical ground on the
side of a primitive wooded hillside. Above all is this
everlasting mountain, forever lowering over the vil-
lage, shortening the day and wearing a misty cap each
morning. Its top is covered with wood. We saw
Ascutney, between forty and fifty miles up the Con-
necticut River; but not Monadnoc, on account of
woods.

Mrs. Dunton adds: —

Among my cherished possessions are three letters
from him. The first (March, 1857), on sending me the
Climbing Fern, gave directions for opening and mount-
ing it, and added, *' Climbing Fern would have been a
pretty name for some delicate Indian maiden." The
second was to thank me for a box of Mayflowers (Epi-
gaea repens) . "I think they amount to more than those
that grow in Concord. Your Bloodroot, too (which we
have not at all), had not suffered in the least; part of
it is transferred to my sister's garden. Preserving one
splendid vase-full, I distributed the rest of the May-
flowers among my neighbors, Mrs. R. W. Emerson,

[ 377 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

Mrs. Ripley, Mr. Edward Hoar, and others. They
have sweetened a good part of the town ere this."

Having reached hoine, September 11, Thoreau
says: —

No view I have had of the Connecticut Valley, at
Brattleboro or Walpole, is equal to that of the Concord
from Nawshawtuct. Here is a more interesting hori-
zon, more variety and richness. Up there it is nothing
but river-valley and hills. Here there is so much more,
that we have forgotten we live in a valley.

He then in his Journal copies the names of
forty-seven plants collected by him on this excur-
sion, besides fifteen pressed specimens given him
by the Brown family. In May, 1859, thanking
Mrs. Dunton for another box' of Mayflowers,
Thoreau said: —

It chanced that on the very day they arrived, while
surveying in the next town [Acton], I found more of
this flower than I had ever seen hereabouts, and I have
therefore named a certain path "Mayflower Path" on
my plan. But a botanist's experience is full of coin-
cidences. If you think much about some flower which
you never saw, you are pretty sure to find it some day,
actually growing near by you. In the long run we find
what we expect. We shall be fortunate, then, if we ex-
pect great things.^

* Copied from the yearly Bulletin of the Vermont Botanical
Club for 1908.

[ 378 1

JOURNEYINGS OF THOREAU

I was dining every day with the Thoreau fam-
ily in this September, and heard Thoreau's ac-
count of his Vermont visit when he returned just
before the middle of September; and far more
about the Eagleswood and New York visits soon
after, which are described in the "Familiar Let-
ters." At this period Thoreau seemed to be in
the best health in which I had ever seen him, and
was very active, as he was in both these consid-
erable journeys.

The last excursion or journey in 1856 was far
more important, and kept Thoreau away from
his beloved Concord a month, from October 24,
when he started for Worcester, to November 25,
when he got home from Eagleswood and Perth
Amboy, New York, Brooklyn, and Greeley's
country residence at Chappaqua. In this month
he had surveyed and mapped Marcus Spring's
large estate at Eagleswood; had lectured to
the guests and tenants there; had renewed his
old acquaintance with Greeley, become intimate
with Walt Whitman, seen Bamimi's Museum,
and heard an opera in company with Greeley.
Little mention of this adventure appears in the
Journals, but the story was told (to me) on his
return, and in his "Letters."

These excursions, though full of interest to
t 379 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

Thoreau, and adding in many ways to his vast
stock of knowledge and to the growing circle
of his friends, were begrudged by him, unless
they were accompanied by invitations to lec-
ture or to follow up his later pursuit of land-
surveying. In visiting Plymouth in October,
1854, he both lectured for his friend Watson and
surveyed his park and gardenl He had visited
Marcus Spring in 1850, as one of the most inti-
mate friends of Margaret Fuller, — as also was
Horace Greeley. In November, 1856, Mr. Alcott
was with the Springs at vEagleswood, and hold-
ing conversations there, at a school in which the
Springs were interested, and which was taught
by an acquaintance of mine in college, who was
the class poet of his class at Harvard, that of
1853, of which Dr. C. W. Eliot was a member.
Mr. Spring, in October, wrote to Concord, inviting
Thoreau to be his guest at Eagleswood to give
lectures and survey and map the two hundred
acres of land in which he was an owner, and
which had been the seat of a Community, in the
years when Brook Farm flourished and .faded
and Fruitlands failed. Reaching New York,
by way of Worcester and Norwich, too late for
the steamer running to Perth Amboy, thirty
miles from New York, in the morning, he spent

[ 380 ]

JOURNEYINGS OF THOREAU

that part of the day calling at the "Tribune"
office, the Astor Library and the studio of an
English artist, Bellew, who had visited him in
Concord. He reached the landing at Perth Am-
boy at 5 p.m. on a Saturday, and rode to Eagles-
wood along with Miss^ Elizabeth Peabody, who
had been visiting there. He said in a letter of
November 1, to his sister: —

Perth Amboy is a city, about as big as Concord; and
Eagleswood is a village a mile and a quarter southwest
of it, on the Raritan Bay side. It is a queer place.
There is one large, long, stone building, which cost
some $40,000, a few shops and offices, an old farm-
house, and Mr. Spring's perfectly private residence,
within twenty rods of the main building. Its central
fact is Mr. Theodore Weld's school, recently estab-
lished, around which various other things revolve.

Mr. Weld was the well-known anti-slavery
orator, who had married one of the Grimke sis-
ters from South Carolina, and was intimate with
J. G. Birney, a Kentucky planter who had freed
his slaves at Huntsville, in Alabama, and was
the anti-slavery candidate for President in 1844,
— thereby preventing New York from voting
for Henry Clay, and giving the election to Polk,
the pro-slavery candidate, who brought on the
Mexican War. Mr. Birney lived at Eagleswood;

[381 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

so did Mrs. Spring's father, Arnold Buffum, an
uncle of my friend ,Dr. Pliny Earle, Rhode Is-
land and Massachusetts Quakers, Mrs. Caroline
Kirkland, an author of some distinction then,
had just come to live at Eagleswood, and Gerrit
Smith and his family visited there; while the
Greeleys were friendly, though then living at Chap-
paqua, instead of at their comfortable old home
in a suburb of New York, where MargaretFuUer
had lived with them.

It was a convenient station between New
York and Philadelphia, to which latter city, then
Quakerish, Thoreau went to lecture, with no
marked success, while visiting Mr. Spring. He
also made several visits to New York and Brook-
lyn, in one of which he called on Whitman, in
company with Mr. Alcott. On Saturday, No-
vember 8, they had visited Greeley at his farm,
thirty-six miles north of New York; on the 9th,
Sunday, they heard Henry Ward Beecher in his
Brooklyn church; and on the 10th they found
Whitman at his mother's in Brooklyn.^ Mr.
Alcott had seen him before; and both of them

* From Mr. Alcott's diary I have taken a more detailed sketch of
these hours with Thoreau and Greeley and Whitman in the early
days of that busy November; five months after which they were
again together at Brooklawn, Daniel Ricketson's country house in
New Bedford.

[ 382 ]

JOURNEYINGS OF THOREAU

spoke of him to me, on their return to Concord,
with some enthusiasm, as Emerson had done the
year before, when he gave me my copy of the
first edition of "Leaves of Grass." Years after,
Emerson said in his funeral eulogy on Thoreau
(which I heard), "Three men have of late years
strongly impressed Mr. Thoreau, — John Brown
(in 1857 and 1859), his Indian guide in Maine,
Joe Polis (1857), and a third person, not known
to this audience." He meant Whitman, whom
Thoreau only met, I think, on this Brooklyn
occasion; though they may also have met at
Boston when Whitman was there in the spring
of 1860. Thoreau thus described him, a week
after, to Harrison Blake: —

He is apparently the greatest democrat the world
has seen. Kings and aristocracy go by the board at
once, as they have long deserved to. A remarkably
strong though coarse nature, of a sweet disposition,
and much prized by his friends. Though peculiar and
rough in his exterior, he is essentially a gentleman. I
am still somewhat in a quandary about him. I feel that
he is essentially strange to me, at any rate; but I am
surprised by the sight of him. He is very broad, but,
as I have said, not fine.

He said that I misapprehended him. I am not quite
sure that I do. He told us that he loved to ride up and
down Broadway all day on an omnibus, sitting beside

[ S83 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

the driver, listening to the roar of the carts, and some-
times gesticulating and declaiming Homer at the top
of his voice. He has long been an editor and writer for
the newspapers — was editor of the "New Orleans
Crescent" once; but now has no employment but to
read and write in the forenoon and walk in the after-
noon, like all the rest of the scribbling gentry.

November 7, Thoreau came in from Eagles-
wood to Mr. Alcott's room at 15 Laight Street
in New York, and there met one of Whitman's
friends, John Swinton, of whom he learned some-
thing about Whitman. Mrs. Botta, who then
held receptions in New York, which Emerson
attended with pleasure, had invited Thoreau with
Alcott for that day, but Henry declined. He slept
there that Friday night as Alcott's guest, and the
next day, Saturday, the two met Greeley at the
Harlem station, and went by train with him to
his farm, where they spent the day; but came
back to New York at evening, accompanied by
Greeley and Miss Alice Gary, the poet, with
whom, no doubt, Thoreau went to the opera.
Sunday morning they crossed the ferry to hear
Beecher at his Plymouth Church. As usual, they
found it crowded. Alcott says: —

It was a spectacle; so was himself, the Preacher, —
if preacher there be anywhere now in pulpits. His

[ 384 ]

JOURNEYINGS OF THOREAU

hearers had to weep, had to laugh, under his potent
magnetism; but his doictrine of justice to all men, bond
and free, was grand. Thoreau called it pagan, but I
pronounced it good, — very good, — the best sight I
had witnessed for many a day, and hopeful for the com-
ing time.

They dined at Mrs. Manning's, where was a
young lady curious to see Thoreau. Sunday af-
ternoon they called on Whitman, but, finding
him out, they "got all they could from his mother,
a stately, sensible matron, believing absolutely
in her Walter, and telling us how good he was,
and how wise as a boy; how his two sisters and
four brothers loved him, and still take counsel
of him." She said Walt would be glad to see them
Monday forenoon; when, accompanied by Mrs.
Tyndale, of Philadelphia, they sat with him for
two hours. Thoreau said afterward: —

I did not get far with him in conversation, for two
others were present. His book is wonderfully like the
Orientals; though when I inquired if he had read them,
he said, "No; tell me about them." Answering some
remark of his aboutAmerican politics, I chanced to say
that I did not think much of the present America, nor of
politics, — which may have been a damper to him. Since
seeing him I am not disturbed by any brag or egotism
in "Leaves of Grass." He may turn out the least of a
braggart of any of us, with a better right to be confident.

[ 385 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

Thoreau seems, too, to have thought that Em-
erson made rather too much of Whitman's print-
ing the Concord letter in his second edition,
a copy of which he gave to his visitors. Tho-
reau disliked two or three pieces in it which he
found disagreeable, but on the whole found it
"very brave and American, after whatever de-
ductions."

That seems to have been the verdict of the
past sixty years.

Thoreau's next considerable journeying was
around New Bedford, where he met his Concord
friends Alcott and Channing, April 2, 1857, and
remained in that region until April 15, the guest
of Daniel Ricketson, at Brpoklawn, where he
sang "Tom Bowline" and danced to the music
of Mrs. Ricketson's piano.

In the summer of 1857 he went on what he
regarded as his most valuable journey to and
through the Maine woods, because in it he had
the company of Edward Hoar, an elder brother
of the Senator, and a former resident in California,
and he made the acquaintance of his most ac-
complished Indian, Joe Polls, of whom he has
much to say in his published account, and some
few things also in those parts of the Journal which
did not get into the magazine or the volume. I

[ 386 ]

DANIHL RICKETSON
111 isi;^'

JOURNEYINGS OF THOREAU

was dining daily at the table of Mrs. Thoreau
when this excursion was planned, and heard it
much discussed. The summer visit to Cape Cod
had been for Henry's health, more than for sight-
seeing. He had visited Plymouth and Clark's
Island on his way to Sandwich and the Cape,
and was improved by his journey. He therefore
sent the following letter to a cousin at Bangor: —

^ ^ CoNCOBD, July 11, 1857.

Deab Cousin, —

Finding myself somewhat stronger than for two or
three years past, I am bent on making a leisurely and
economical excursion into your woods; say in a canoe,
with two companions, through the Moosehead to the
Allegash Lakes; and possibly down the river to the
French settlement, and so homeward by whatever
course we may prefer.

I wish to go at an earlier season than formerly, or
within ten days, notwithstanding the flies, etc. and we
should want a month at our disposal.

I have just written to Mr. Loomis (one of the Cam-
bridgeport men who went through Bangor last year and
called on you), inviting him to be one of the party; and
for a third have thought of your son Charles, who has
had some fresh as well as salt water experience.

The object of this note is to ask if he would like to
go, and you woidd like to have him go, on such an
excursion. If so, I will come to Bangor, spend a day or
two with you, on my way, buy a canoe &c., and be
ready by the time my other man comes along.

[ 387 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

If Charles cannot go, we may find another man here,
or possibly take an Indian. A friend of mine would
like to accompany me, but I think he has neither
woodcraft nor strength enough.

Please let me hear from you as soon as possible.

Father has arrived safe and sound, and he says the
better for his journey; though he no longer has his
Bangor appetite. He intends writing to you.
Yours truly,

Heney D. Thoreatt,

I had met the Lowells and Mr. Loomis at Con-
cord, and Henry's father, as appears from this
letter, had lately returned from his last visit to
his Bangor nephews and nieces, Thatchers and
Lowells and their children, descendants of his
elder sister Elizabeth, who had long been dead.^
At this time only his sisters Jane and Maria were
living; and they spent much time in Concord,
though their home was in Cambridgeport, where

' Her daughters were living. One of them had married a
Thatcher, of the Admiral's family, and her sons were intimate
with the Concord family. Mr. Loomis was a mathematician,
astronomer, and poet, who had married Miss Wilder, of Cam-
bridgeport, and she was the mother of a daughter Mabel, now the
wife of Professor Todd, of Amherst College, and herself an artist,
author, and astronomer. I had met him and her at the Thoreau
house, and Mr. and Mrs. Loomis took tea there, with EUery Chan-
ning, the evening after Henry's funeral at the Concord Church.
Mr.Loomis also arrived in Concord accidentally the day of Sophia's
funeral in October, 1876. Her letters show her beautiful spirit, and
that of her aunt Maria.

[ 388 ]

JOURNEYINGS OF THOREAU

the family of Rev. John Wilder resided. Mr.
Loomis soon after married a daughter of Mr.
Wilder, and their daughter is the accomphshed
Mrs. Mabel Loomis Todd, of Amherst, who as
a child was a favorite of Sophia Thoreau, and of
her aunt Maria, as their letters show. The per-
son whom Thoreau thought not strong enough
for the excursion I take to have been Harrison
Blake, who in this same year did join Thoreau
and Edward Hoar in a sojourn at Mount Wash-
ington, of which much is said in the "Familiar
Letters." There were also one or two trips to
Monadnoc with Blake and with Channing, of
which the poet had much to say in his volume
"The Wanderer," and which Thoreau describes
in the later Journals.

The Mississippi River and Minnesota Journey

This was the last and longest journey of Tho-
reau's ever- journeying life. It took him away
farther from his dear Concord hills, Nashawtuct,
Anursnac, and Ponkawtassett, than he had ever
been before, — nearly two thousand miles, — and
occupied his time for two months of the year
1861. It had been planned and debated long in
advance, for the benefit of his failing health; and
was particularly urged by Channing, who, more

[ 389 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

than twenty years earlier, had lived on an Illinois
prairie not far from the southern border of Wis-
consin, and had visited those regions once or
twice since. It had been as good as settled that
Channing should accompany him. This would
have had the great advantage for the invalid,
that he would have been with his best and most
familiar friend, outside of his own household,
and a companion acquainted with the country
and the modes of travel and of living. But every-
thing was uncertain which depended on Chan-
ning's variable mood, and in this case, possibly,
on the state of his purse, for his income was
then small. Consequently Thoreau wrote on May
3, 1861, to another intimate comrade, Harrison
Blake, of Worcester, with whom he had been
corresponding and rambling for a dozen years,
intimating a wish that Blake should go. This
was his plan, as explained to Blake: —

I have concluded it will be most expedient for me to
try the air of Minnesota, say somewhere about St.
Paul. I am only waiting to be well enough to start.
I hope to get ofif within a week or ten days. I shall
have to study my comfort in travelling to a remarkable
degree, — stopping to rest, etc., if need be. I think to
get. a through ticket to Chicago, with liberty to stop
frequently on the way: at Niagara Falls several days
or a week, at a private boarding-house; then a night or

[ 390 ]

JOURNEYINGS OF THOREAU

day at Detroit; and as much at Chicago as my health
may require. At Chicago I can decide at what point —
Fulton, Dunleith,^ or another — to strike the Missis-
sippi, and take a boat to St. Paul. I expect to be gone
three months, and would like to return by a different
route, perhaps Mackinaw and Montreal.

I have thought, of course, of finding a companion;
yet not seriously, because I had no right to offer myself
as a companion to anybody; having such a peculiarly
private and all-absorbing but tniserable business as my
health, and not altogether his to attend to. Neverthe-
less I have just now decided to let you know of my
intention, thinking it barely possible that you might
like to make a part or the whole of the journey at the
same time; and perhaps that your own health may be
such as to be benefited by it.

Mr. Blake could not then go, but asked Tho-
reau to spend a day at Worcester with him on
his way, which was done on Sunday, May 11-12,
1861. It was finally arranged, as he thought, that
Channing should meet him at Niagara, where
he would make his first long halt; he then had
his list of clothes made out by his mother and
sister; it was this: ^

A half -thick coat, a thin coat, "best pants," three
shirts, a flannel shirt, three pairs of socks, slippers,

* Now East Dubuque, in Illinois.

* Pencilled on a scrap of a letter from Chauncey Smith, a Boston
patent lawyer, enclosing an endorsed note of hand, for $100, pay-
able April 23, 1860.

[ S91 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

underclothing, five handkerchiefs, a waistcoat, towels
and soap.

With such little articles as he might need, in-
cluding medicines. Then his compass and mi-
croscope, a plant-book, for specimens, a botany-
book (no doubt, Gray), insect boxes, twine and
cards, writing and blotting paper, tape; and a
dipper and bottle for foot-journeys.

On another scrap of paper are a few figures,
giving the different pockets in each of which he
has a sum of money; the total of the sums being
one hundred and eighty dollars. The details of
his expenses, to be given hereafter, amount to
less than this, — about one hundred and fifty
dollars. We may assume the total cost for two
months as between one hundred and fifty and
one hundred and eighty dollars.

From Worcester to 'Suspension Bridge, on the
Boston and Albany and New York Centrat Rail-
roads, Thoreau made these notes: —

May 13. Hills near the railroad between Westfield
and Chester Village, and thereafter in Massachusetts,
may be as high or higher but more sincere, or less
modish. Leafing in Western Massachusetts more ad-
vanced; apple-trees greenish, red elderberry just be-
ginning. {May 14.) From Albany to Schenectady,
Level, in pine plains; white pine and white birch;

[ 392 ]

JOURNEYINGS OF THOREAU

shadbush in bloom; with hills at last. No houses, only
two or three huts in edge of woods on our road. . . .
The Mohawk at Schenectady; stream yellow or clay-
colored, bordered with willows and maples. Above
Schenectady the Mohawk valley is more than half a
mile wide; low bank, with interval on each side,
bounded by hills 200 and 300 feet high. On north side
they begin to flat off at Palatine Bridge. Most strik-
ing rough scenery at Little Falls. Pine uplands; coun-
try spreads out wide this side of Utica. Yet more
high flats beyond Rome, and very wet. Syracuse with
lakes and salt-works. Considerable cedar swamps thus
far, and farther. In Syracuse, large, city-Hke streets.
Country between Syracuse and Rochester more di-
versified, or hill and plain. Afterwards flat again, and
probably at last descending. Rochester, with interest-
ing river and Falls dividing it. Arrived at the Suspen-
sion Bridge for the night.

On the 15th he had his first view of the Falls,
and, like everybody, was much impressed by it.
In the afternoon he was at Goat Island. He
wrote: — •

The most imposing sight as yet was the sight of the
Rapids from the upper bridge, like the sea off Cape
Cod. The great apparent height of the waves tumbling
over the immense ledges at a distance, while the water
view is broad and boundless in that direction, as if you
were looking out to sea. Yet the distances are very
deceptive; the most distant billow was scarcely more
than a quarter of a mile off, though it appeared two

[ 393 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

miles or more. Many ducks were constantly floating a
little way down from the Rapids, — then flying back
and alighting again. The water farther up was broken
into lengths of four to six rods, more, probably. There
were masses of ice under the edge of the cliff.

Horace Mann asked me if I had not heard the sound
of the Falls, as we went last night from the Suspension
Bridge depot to the New York Central hotel; but I
had not, though it was certainly loud enough. I had
probably mistaken it for the soimd of a train coming
in, or a locomotive letting off steam, — of which we
have so much in Concord. It sounds hardly so loud
this morning, though now, at Niagara town, we are only
a third of a mile off; the impression is as if I were sur-
rounded by factories.^

The days spent at Niagara were well em-
ployed, gathering and noting down plants, ob-
serving birds, measuring the girth of trees, etc.
May 17, he made this entry: —

Go to Suspension Bridge and walk up on the Cana-
dian side. Pestered by coachmen, etc. The completest
view of the Falls is from that side. The "Clifton
House" commands the best view of any public house.
Afternoon to the river above the Falls. I find Indian
pottery. A man says he calls the ducks in the river
"coween," and that they and other ducks, both wild

1 There were none in Niagara then, but now a great many, be-
sides the use made of this immense water-power to turn mill-
wheels at a distance. These first observations, written out at his
hotel, show how original and close were his observations.

[ 394 ]

JOURNEYINGS OF THOREAU

and tame, alight in the mist, and are often carried over
the Falls. Says that here they catch with a seine black
and white bass, pickerel, muskellonge, etc., and below
the Falls eels, catfish, etc. In the woods east of Niagara
Town is the red-headed woodpecker. The ducks in
the Rapids are apparently the long-tailed duck or "old
squaw."

May 18. Measure the trees on Goat Island. The
bass (two of them), 14 feet 4 inches, and 13 ft. 5 in.;
two beeches, 8 ft. 6, and 7 ft. 7. This was the circum-
ference. (Measuring the girth with a string is the com-
mon method.)

Sunday, May 19, there is no entiy in the Notes.

May 20. Niagara to Detroit. Canada agreeably di-
versified, i.e., more, as compared with New York;
with a view of Lake Ontario, quite sea-like. Decidedly
more level west of London, and wet, — but probably
rich. Great fern with bulrush; wild fowl east of Lake
St. Clair, of which a long and fine view on each side of
the Thames. The one-dollar houses in Detroit are
"The Garrison" and "The Franklin."

May 21. Detroit to Chicago. Very hilly to Ypsilanti,
then hilly to Ann Arbor, then less hilly to Lake Michi-
gan. All hard wood, or no evergreen except some white
pine when we struck Lake Michigan (on the sands from
the Lake), and some larch before. Phlox, varying from
white to bluish, and painted cup, deep scarlet, and also
yellow (?), or was this wallflower (?) — all very com-
mon through Michigan, and the former, at least, earlier
than with us. The prevailing shade tree in Chicago is

[ 395 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

the Cottonwood. Chicago is about 14 feet above the
Lake, — sewers and main drains fall but two feet in a
mile.

May 22. Saw last evening high dune hills along the
Lake, and much open oak wood, low, but old (?) with
black trunks but light foliage. Rode down Michigan
Avenue. Men sometimes see the land loom across the
Lake 60 miles. The city is built chiefly of limestone
from 40 miles southwest. Lake Street is the chief busi-
ness one. The water is milky.

May 23. From Chicago to Dunleith [East Dubuque].
Very level the first 20 miles; then considerably more
imdulating; the greatest rolling prairie without trees
is just beyond Winnebago. The last 40 miles ia
the northwest of Illinois quite hilly. The Mississippi
causes backwater in the Galena River for 8 miles back
from its mouth on the east bank of the Mississippi.
The water is high now; the thin woods flooded, with
open water behind.

Here was Thoreau's first view of the great
river, on which he embarked. May 24, for a two
days' voyage to St. Paul in Minnesota. His notes
are full of interest; everything was novel.

There is only one boat up daily by this line, — ^^in no
case allowed to stop on the way. Small houses, without
barns, surrounded and overshadowed by great stacks
of wheat-straw. It is being thrashed on the ground.
The distances on the prairie are deceptive: a stack
looks like a hill in the horizon, a quarter or half mile

[ 396 1

JOURNEYINGS OF THOREAU

off, — it stands out so bold and high. The inhabitants
remind me of mice nesting in a wheat-stack, which is
their wealth.

I see the marsh pink, and apples on a flowered,
apple-like tree (thorn-like) through Illinois, which may
be the Pyrus coronaria. Women are working in the
fields quite commonly. Some wood is always visible,
but generally not large. The fences are of narrow
boards; the towns are, as it were, stations on a railroad.

Sights along the Mississippi {May 2^-26, 1861)

Steaming up the River, here sixty rods wide, but
three quarters of a mile between the bluffs. The bluffs
are (say) 150 to 200 feet high. Rarely is there room for
a village at the foot of the cliffs. The broad, flooded low
intervale is covered with the willow in bloom (20 feet
high), rather slender, and probably other kinds, —
elm and' white maple and cottonwood. Now boatable
between the trees; and probably many ducks are there.
There are oaks on the top of the bluffs, ash, elm, aspen;
bass on the slopes and by the shore. The birds are
kingfishers, small ducks, jays, etc. The river banks are
in their primitive condition between the towns, which
is almost everywhere. Occasionally a little lonely
house stands on a flat or slope, often deserted. We see
holes in the sides of hills at Cassville, where lead has
been dug out. Occasionally there are low islands.
There are great rafts of boards and shingles, four or
five rods wide and fifteen or twenty rods long; but very
few small boats.

Passengers land on the shore, oftentimes with a

[ 397 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

plank. Twenty men in ten minutes load us with some
80 or 90 cords of wood at one landing, — disturbing
a bat, which flies aboard of us. A willow-tree is shown
floating horizontally across the river.

We got to Prairie du Chien the evening of May 24,
and to Brownsville about six the next morning. Mac-
gregor is a new town in Iowa, opposite Prairie du
Chien, The latter is "the smartest town on the river";
it exports the most wheat of any town between St.
Paul and St. Louis. There is wheat in sacks, great
heaps of them at Prairie du Chien, covered at night,
and all on the ground. We reached Fountain City
about noon on the 25th. White pines began a half
dozen miles above La Crosse, a few birches com-
mon. The cliffs here are high, and interrupted, or in
promontories. The bluffs grow farther apart, and the
rain channels more numerous than yesterday; some-
times there are two or three miles from bluff to bluff.
We take a wood-boat along with us. Oaks, commonly
open, — on both sides of the river. We see Indians
encamped below Wabasha, with Dakota-shaped wig-
wams; also a loon on a lake, and fish leaping.

Every town has a wharf, with one storage build-
ing (or several) on it, and as many hotels; this is
everything except commission merchants. " Storage,"
"Forwarding," or "Commission," — one or all these
words are on the most prominent new buildings, close
to the waterside. Perhaps there will be a heap of sacks
filled with wheat on the natural jetty or levee close by;
or, above Dubuque and Dunleith, a blue staqk of pig
lead, which is in no danger of being washed away. We

[ 398 ]

JOURNEYINGS OF THOREAU

see where they- have dug for lead in the sides of the
bluffs for many miles above Galena.

The steamer approaching whistles, then strikes a bell
about six times funereally, with a pause after the third
bell; and then you see the whole village making haste
to the Landing, — commonly the raw, stony or sandy
shore; the postmaster with his mailbag, the passenger,
and almost every dog and pig in town. That is com-
monly one narrow street with backyards, at an angle of
about 45 degrees with the horizon. If there is more
flat space between the water and the bluff, it is almost
sure to be occupied by a flourishing and larger town.
We deserted the outside of the steamboat at a few
miles above Red Wing, where there was a remarkable
bluff, standing apart before the town, as we approached
it. We reached St. Paul at two or three o'clock in the
morning of May 26. The bluffs are here very much
lower; and even below Red Wing they had been far
more interrupted by hollows. We wooded up again
before reaching Lake Pepin, taking the woodboat along
with us, now on this side, now on that.

May 26. Sunday. Breakfast at the American House
in St. Paul, and come on by stage in the rain to St.
Anthony, nine miles over the prairie in the rain, — the
road muddy and sandy. At St. Paul they dig their
building stone out of the cellar; but it is apparently
poor stuff. We had towed a flatboat-load of stone pots
from Dubuque to Winona, — the latter a pretty place.

Remaining at St. Anthony and Minneapolis
a week or more, Thoreau noted all things note:;;;

[ 399 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

worthy there — among others, the welcome pres-
ence of a naturaUst, Dr. Charles L. Anderson,
who gave him companionship and information.
He reminds himself: —

St. Anthony was settled about 1847, Minneapolis in
1851. Its main streets are the unaltered prairie, with
bur and other oaks left standing. The roads on the
prairie are a mere trail, more or less broad and distinct.
Fort Snelling is thirty years old, and there was an ac-
count of it in the old "New England Magazine." It
retains but three or iour acres of the great unbroken
prairie that formerly belonged to the Fort; near which
is a red oak, the largest oak I have seen here. The Mis-
sissippi is at its highest stage, but is running off. I
notice how the ferry across the Mississippi is worked
by the stream itself.

A slight pencil sketch, such as often appears in
his Journal, here illustrates this device. He wit-
nessed a regimental drill at this fort, where volun-
teers for the Union army in the Civil War were
received daily and sent forward to serve under
Grant and other generals who had served in the
Mexican War. He notes, "Some 600 volunteers
are there; about 300 had left that morning."

Writing to me some weeks later, from Red
Wing, he said: —

The people of Minnesota have seemed to me more
cold — to feel less implicated in the war — than the

[ 400 ]

JOURNEYINGS OP THOREAU

people of Massachusetts. However, I have dealt partly
with those of Southern birth, and have seen but little
way beneath the surface. I was glad to be told yester-
day that there was a good deal of weeping here at Red
Wing when the volunteers at Fort Snelling followed the
regulars to the seat of war. They do not weep when
their children go wp the river to occupy the deserted
forts, though they may have to fight the Indians there.
It has chanced that about half the men I h^ve spoken
with in Minnesota, whether travellers or settlers, were
from Massachusetts. It is apparent that Massachu-
setts, for one State at least, is doing much more
than her share in carrying the war on.

This activity was wholly approved by Thoreau,
who believed from the beginning that it would
prove a war for emancipation, which he foresaw
and predicted.

Fort Snelling is built of limestone (tawny or butter-
ish) ten feet high, at an angle of the two rivers, St.
Peter's and the Mississippi. I overlook the broad val-
ley of the St. Peter's River, bounded on the south,
as I look, by a long range of low hills. The govern-
ment buildings are handsome; there was a mill here
before the settlement. Steamers go up to the Sauk
Rapids, above the Falls of St. Anthony, near a hun-
dred miles farther, and then you are fairly in the
pine woods and the lumbering country. The St.
Paul Mission to the Indians was not far south of
the Fort.

[ 401 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

On May 28 he went botanizing with Dr. An-
derson to Lake Calhoun, and found many plants
new to him. While gathering them he notes,
"The rose-breasted grosbeak very abundant in
the woods of the Minnehaha, singing robin-like
all the while"; and that "acorns are full as scarce
as with us in Concord, picked up by the Spermo-
phili, and no doubt planted by them." He con-
tinues: "A man>5ustained himself one winter on
the spermophiles which he shot with a pistol,
— a little flavored with slippery-elm bark." This
tree, which is rare in Concord, he found common
in Minnesota. His "spermophile" was a prairie
squirrel, of whom he noted the habits, in these
days of rambling round St. Anthony and its vi-
cinity. He is the SpermOphilus tridecemlineatus,
"erect, making a space look like a glove over his
hole, with the nest of the gopher hursarius or
pouched," says Anderson, A distinction is here
properly drawn between the Missouri "gopher"
(Geomys hursarius) and the Wisconsin prairie
squirrel. The name "gopher" describes the bur-
rowing of the creature, and signifies a gray squir-
rel in Canada, a striped squirrel in Minnesota,
and a pouched rat in Missouri; also a snake in
Georgia, and a turtle in Florida. Thoreau de-
scribed his find thus: —

[ 402 ]

JOURNEYINGS OF THOREAU

Dirty grayish-white beneath, — above, dirty brown,
with six dirty, tawny or clay-colored, very light-brown
lines, alternating with broad, dark-brown lines or
stripes (three times as broad), — the last having an
interrupted line or square spot of the same color with
the first-mentioned, running down their middle; re-
minding me of the rude pattern of some Indian work,
— porcupine quills, "gopher-work" in baskets and
pottery.

The other, apparently the Missoiiri gopher,
is thus described: —

Larger, — and indistinctly or finely barred or
spotted with dark and light brown, — the hairs being
barred so, — dark — light — dark. Both have feet
hke a marmot, and large pouches, and sit up by their
holes like a woodchuck; the first is not shy.

At St. Paul he early called on one of the
Thatchers, of Bangor, where he received letters
from home; and he remained in that vicinity for
three weieks, and then joined in an expedition up
St. Peter's River to the Lower Sioux Agency, to
see the Sioux receiye their annual payment from
the United States. He started on the 17th of
Jime, and on the 23d was at Red Wing below St.
Paul, on his return homeward. But before going up
the Minnesota River, he had various adventures
and discoveries. In his notes I find these facts : —

[ 403 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

General Pike's Journal for 1805 tells in a few words
the story of the Lover's Leap, and says that his was
the first white man's canoe that crossed the portage at
St. Anthony's Falls. Catlin, a later writer, disappoints;
it is only with his pencil that he is good. In 1823 the
first steamer came up as far as Fort Snelling. I find
that Frank Steele, for whom our steamer to Redwood
is named, was in 1837 the first white man who "fleshed
his axe in the unbroken wilderness," and commenced
improvements in Minnesota; then he built a house in
St. Anthony. Carver was on the Minnesota River in
1775, General Cass in 1820, and Schoolcraft in 1832.
But La Hontan in the end of the seventeenth century
described that river, without visiting it, — for it seems
to be his Riviere longue. He related things so im-
probable that his letter has been regarded as pure
fiction. But after sailing on it I am now inclined to
reconsider the matter.

La Hontan's book was written between 1684
and 1695, though not published in Holland and
England till 1703 and later. He was certainly at
Mackinaw; and, having an idle winter there, he
may have journeyed through Green Bay and the
Wisconsin River, and made up, from his Indian
guides and others, his fables about the Long
River. He was an observer as exact as Thoreau,
or as Hector St. John, when he chose to be vera-
cious. By his full name he was Louis de L'Arce,
a Gascon baron, lord of Hontan and Erleich,

[ 404 1

JOURNEYINGS OF THOREAU

and his account of Thoreau's puzzle, the ground
squirrel, which he terms "the Swiss squirrel," is
worth quoting: —

They are little animals resembling rats. The epithet
of "Swiss" is bestowed upon 'em in regard that the
hair which covers their body is streaked with black
and white, and resembles a Switzer's doublet; while the
streaks make a ring on each thigh which bears a deal of
resemblance to a Swiss cap.

Thoreau says on another subject: —

On June 5 1 went to Mrs. Hamilton's near -Lake Har-
riet; the house (in Richfield) built seven years ago, in
1854. Around it was abimdance of wild artichoke. She
says the wild apple grew then about her premises; her
husband first saw it on a ridge by the shore of Lake
Harriet. They had dug up several trees and set them
out, but all died. The settlers also set out the wild
plum, thimbleberry, etc. So I went and searched in
that very unlikely place, but could find nothing like it;
though Hamilton said there was one there three feet
higher than the lake. I brought home a thorn in
bloom, and asked if that was it? Mrs. H. then gave
me more particular directions, and I searched again
faithfully; and this time I brought home an amelanchier
as the nearest of kin, — doubting if the apple had ever
been seen there; but she knew both those plants. Her
husband had first discovered it by the fruit; she had
not seen it in bloom.

We then called in Fitch and talked about it; he said

[ 405 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

it was found, and the same they had in Vermont (?)
and directed me to a Mr. Grimes as one who had found
it. He was gone to catch the horses, to send his boy
six miles for a doctor on account of a sick child. The
boy showed me some of the trees he had set out this
spring; but they had all died, having a long tap-root,
and being taken up too late. Then I was convinced,
by the sight of the just expanding though withered leaf;
and I plucked a solitary withered flower, the better to
analyze it. Finally I stayed, and went in search of the
tree with the father, in his pasture, — where I found it
first myself,' quite a cluster of them.

This is a good instance of the persistence of a
botanist in finding what he is searching for. Be-
fore leaving Mrs. Hamilton's, June 14, he inves-
tigated the prairie squirrel more closely, along
with Dr. Anderson; and noted another minute
discovery: —

I saw a scum on the smooth surface of Lake Harriet,
three or four feet from the shore, of the color of the .
shore-sand, like pollen and lint, which I took it to be.
Taking it up in my hand, I was surprised to find it was
shore-sand; sometimes pretty large grains, a tenth of
an inch in diameter, but mostly a twentieth or less.
Some were dark-brown, some white or yellowish, —
some minute but perfectly regular pebbles of white
quartz. I suppose the water, rising gently, lifts up a
layer of sand, slightly cemented by some glutinous

* See footnote to p. 427.
[ 406 1

JOURNEYINGS OF THOREAU

matter; for I felt a slight stickiness in my hand after
the gravel or sand was shaken off. It was in ir-
regular oblong patches of scum, three or four inches
long.

June 6, he was bird's-nesting, — a favorite oc-
cupation: —

I find a wild pigeon's nest in a young bass tree, ten
feet from the ground, four or five rods south of Lake
Calhoun. It was built over a broad fork of the tree,
where a third slender twig divided it, and a fourth
forked on it.

To make this clearer he drew on the page a
slight sketch of the branching basswood, and
then went on: —

Built of slender hard twigs only, so open that I
could see the eggs from the ground, and also so slight
that I could scarcely get to it without upsetting it.
The bulk of the nest was six inches over; the ring of
the concavity three quarters of an inch thick, but
irregular. At first, seeing the bird fly off, I thought it
an unfinished nest.

On June 9 he was rejoiced by finding a nest of
the rose-breasted grosbeak: —

It was ten feet high up in a young bass, and had four
eggs in it, — green, spotted with brown, the larger end
of some almost all brown. The whole nest was six to
eight inches in diameter, and about four inches high;

[ 407 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

the inside diameter about three inches, and its inside
depth two inches. The outside was built of coarser
weed-stems, and some climbing herbaceous vine; the
rest was made of finer brown weed-stems, at last quite
fine like root-fibres within. The male bird was on the
nest, and when scared off kept within three or four
feet. The eggs were fresh.

By the lake in a scarlet oak eight feet up, I found a
pigeon's nest like the former one, but more stable, con-
taining one young bird three inches long, of a dirty
yellowish, and leaden color, with pinfeathers, and with
a great bill, bare at the base, and a blackish tip. An-
other young bird slipped to the ground, fluttering as if
wounded, two or three times, as she went off amid the
shrubs.

One afternoon, going over to the Old Prairie
Fort, he found a nighthawk's nest with two eggs
in it, "well advanced toward hatching." The
loons "are said to nest in old muskrat houses,
and elsewhere around Lake Harriet"; where, on
June 9, he had finally found the Pyrus coronaria,
or wild apple tree. Of this he says: —

They have a long tap-root going down into the clay
beneath; I could not pull up a small one. One or two
hundred trees were there, and among them the yellow
lady's-slipper.

It was in this region that Thoreau tested the
unusual faculty of scent which he possessed, and

[ 408 ]

JOURNEYINGS OF THOREAU

which made tobacco and other common odors
offensive to him. He says: —

Going over a low hill which had its wood cut oflE a
year or two since (and the fire had run over it after-
ward), I stooped to pluck a flower, and smelled the
spring fragrance I have so often perceived here, but
now stronger and nearer than ever. So, going on and
breaking off plants that were freshly leaved and vigor-
ously growing, and smelling at them, I found at last a
square-stemmed one which yielded the strong anise
scent that I had noticed, especially when bruised.
But then it was far from being so agreeable as when
perceived floating in the air. This seems to be the
Lophanthus anisatus, which must yield the fragrance
mentioned. Parry calls it "a characteristic north-
western species." [Now known as Agastache Fwni-
culum, fragrant giant hyssop.]

Of these species Thoreau made long lists,
which may be found in the story of his last
Journey printed by the Boston Bibliophile So-
ciety. As numbered, they count up to more than
a hundred, with mention of the places where he
found them.

His excursion on the Frank Steele to Redwood
on the Minnesota River was more closely de-
scribed than that up the Mississippi, but it fur-
nished him little new knowledge about the In-
dians; for he gave but one day to Redwood, either

[ 409 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

from frugality of expense or from failing health —
perhaps exhausted by his weeks around St. An-
thony and the twin cities.

Scenes on the Long and Crooked River (June 17-23)

June 17, 6 p.m. We start up the Minnesota River in
the Frank Steele. Till nine o'clock the river valley
very broad between the bluffs and hills. The banks are
some six feet high, with much handsome but weedy
grass, mixed with roses; but they soon slope to low,
wet and reedy meadows, or shallow lagoons behind the
river, which is some ten rods wide, fringed with black
willows. The large trees occasionally were Cottonwood
and elm. The cottonwood is shaped somewhat like
our ash. At 9 p.m. we are near Shakopee.

At five in the morning we are said to be in the big
woods; all alive with pigeons, and they flying across
our course. Here the river is often only eight rods wide
and quite snaggy. Abput 7.30 we pass a beautiful open
intervale of native grass on the right; many Erigerons
in the grass. Many large turtle-tracks on the shore.
Muddy-looking water, with soft-shelled and snap-
ping turtles in it. Swallows, kingfishers, blue jays and
warbling vireos along the shores, and in the river some
young ducks. See a turkey-buzzard and blue herons.
The black willows are often quite tall (35 feet) slender
and straight too. The small Salix longifolia is beneath
it, quite common, and there is a dense growth of up-
right weeds. Very crooked stream; acres of roses in the
intervale. We often strike the shore with our stern, or

[ 410 ]

JOURNEYINGS OF THOREAU

stop and back to get round snags and bars. Grape-
vines in blossom are climbing on the Cottonwood.
Note the big wood near Henderson. Usually these
woods are fringed with low intervale and meadow be-
hind. Great bends in this river; by the channel as we
sail it is 250 or 300 miles from St. Paul to Redwood,
but not more than 120 by land in a straight Une. It is
good sailing from New Ulm, a German settlement, for
some distance. We reach Fort Ridgely by evening.
Much more bare bluff and plain to-day. La Hontan
spoke of a great river coming in from the west, like
this; it is indeed very long and navigable. The navi-
gation is very novel to me. The water is rather low
now; it has been 15 feet higher. In making a short turn
round a bend, we often and designedly run into the
steep and soft bank, taking in a cartload of earth. This
fetches us about quicker than the rudder could. There
was not a straight reach a mile long; generally you
coidd not see a quarter-mile ahead, and our boat was
constantly turning this way or that. At the Traverse
des Sioux, some passengers were landed and walked
across the neck of the isthmus, to be taken in on the
other side, after the boat had sailed from one to three
miles round.

The deep water was often so narrow and close to the
shore that I could pluck almost any plant on the bank
from the boat. New Ulm was the last of the little
settlements, 100 miles south of Redwood. We left the
Germans there 100 barrels of salt, which will be at a
higher price when the water is lowest. Our boat was
160 feet long and drew three feet of water only, often

[411 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

water and sand. We frequently got aground, and then
drew ourselves along by a windlass and a cable hitched
to a tree. Sometimes we swung round and blocked up
the stream, one end of the boat resting on each shore.
Once we ran into a concealed rock with a great shock;
and the mate went below with a lamp, expecting to
find a hole, but did not. Snags and sawyers were com-
mon; but so long as our boiler did not burst, no serious
accident was likely to happen. ^

Redwood, when we got there on the 20th, at the
Lower Sioux Agency, was a mere locality, scarcely an
Indian village, with a storehouse and some houses for
the Indians. Landing, we were fairly on the great bare
plains. Looking south, and walking three miles in that
direction, we could see no tree in that horizon. The
buflFalo was said to be feeding within twenty-five or
thirty miles, but we saw none.

A regular Council was held on the 20th of June, and
continued for three days, but our boat only waited a
little more than a day. The Indians had come in on
their ponies, and speeches were made on both sides; the
Indians having the advantage in truth and earnestness,
as usual. The most prominent Sioux chief was Little
Crow. In the afternoon the half-naked Indians gave a
dance at the request of the Governor of Minnesota, for
our amusement and their profit. In it were 30 men
dancing, and twelve musicians with drums; others
struck their arrows against their bows. Some dancers
blew flutes and kept good time, moving their feet or
their shoulders, — sometimes one, sometimes both.
They wore no shirts.

[ 412 ]

JOURNEYINGS OF THOREAU

Thoreau does not seem to have been so much
interested in these Indians as in those of Maine.
Almost the only mention of them except the above
was to describe their way of lighting their pipes.
He had a friend, an "Illinois man," on the steamer
who gave him this recipe: —

Indian strikefire: Take a little punk, — the Illinois
man says from the white maple, — and hold it flat
against a flint; then strike across the edge with a steel
ring, and put the ignited punk in the pipe. "y

It was hardly worth coming two hundr^d^nd
fifty miles to learn so little as this. Five bands of
Indians had come in on June 20, the day of the
dance, and were feasted on an ox, cut into five
parts, one for each band. That night the steamer,
on her return trip, lay haKw^-y between Redwood
and Fort Ridgely, and on the 21st lay half the
night fifteen miles above Mankato, near which
was the rock on which the boat struck. On the
22d they reached Red Wing and there botanized
for a few days, while awaiting letters from Con-
cord. Thoreau says: —

At Red Wing, sixty-four miles below St. Paul on the
Mississippi, I was told that a hundred rattlesnakes a
day could have been killed about Barn BlufiF, six or
seven years ago. They were very thick on the hillsides
then — three kinds in all, my informant said. Yet

[413]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

nobody had been killed that he knew of, though several
were bitten. They were made sick for some time — a
squaw there, for instance, the very last summer.

It does not appear that Thoreau saw a rattle-
snake during his tour, though so much on the
prairie and about the lakes.

June 26. At two P.M. We leave Red Wing in the
War Eagle for Prairie du Chien, some 200 miles dis-
tant. Mrs. Upham, of Clinton, is with us; she has a
cousin at Bedford near Concord. Our steamer draws
two and one-half feet of water. The grand feature
hereabout is the Mississippi River. Too much can
hardly be said of its grandeur, and of the beauty of this
portion of it from Rock Island to Red Wing. St. Paul
is near the head of uninterrupted navigation on the
main stream, about 2000 miles from its mouth. It is
almost as wide in the upper as in the lower part of its
course. Thus it' flows from the pine to the palm. We
reached Prairie du Chien down the Mississippi, about
3 A.M., June 27. Thence by cars to Milwaukee across
Wisconsin, and there embarked on a steamer for
Mackinaw. Milwaukee, of all the settled places, has
the best harbor on Lake Michigan.. The lake is ninety
miles wide, and we cannot see across it; but we see the
land loom sometimes, on each side from our steamer
in the middle. We reached Mackinaw at 2 a.m. on
June 30.

Thoreau remained in Mackinaw resting, ob-
serving, botanizing, and querying, for five days.

[ 414 1

JOURNEYINGS OF THOREAU

The summer there was cold, and he sat by his fire,
July 2, at the "Mackinaw House" chatting with
one person and another about the climate and
customs of the region, as his custom was wher-
ever he might be. The ice in those upper lake
waters forms, he finds, about the middle of Janu-
ary, and lasts till May ; indeed, in June, " quite
recently," ice had been seen at a bend of Lake
Superior. He got away from this chilly northwest
passage, July 4, spent Sunday at Toronto, sailed
for Ogdensburg on the 8th, and thence by rail he
came through Vermont and New Hampshire to
Concord, — fatigued, and after a shorter absence
than he had planned. Five weeks later, he wrote
to Daniel Ricketson: —

I returned a few weeks ago, alter a good deal of
steady travelling, considerably, yet not essentially
better. I will pay you a visit next week, and take such
rides and sauntering walks as an invalid may.

CHAPTER XIII

VILLAGE SKETCHES, CHIEFLY FROM THE
JOURNALS

The Fire in the Woods of AprU, 1844
The most serious offence that Thoreau ever
gave to the fanners and landowners of his native
town was on Town-Meeting Day, in April, 1844,
when he was six-and-twenty; and, according to
their view of his rights and obligations, should
have been making speeches, or voting on motions
for the raising of taxes, and debating appro-
priations for town expenses. Instead of this, he
and his younger companion, Edward Hoar, one of
the three sons of the village magnate, jurist, and
former Congressman, Samuel Hoar, were spend-
ing the day on the Sudbury River, and meant to
explore its sources beforethey returned. Edward
Hoar was in Harvard College, and graduated that
year. Thoreau had graduated seven years earlier,
had been teaching school and writing a book; but
his latest occupation had been to assist his father
in digging a cellar and building a house in the vil-
lage corner known as "Texas." Some years after-
ward he wrote this story of the day's adventures,

[ 416 ]

VILLAGE SKETCHES

but never published it; so that the date was rather
in dispute, when, long after his death, it appeared
in the "Atlantic Monthly." Here it is, with com-
ments:—

I once set fire to the woods. Having set out, one
April day, to go to the sources of Concord River in a
boat, with a single companion, meaning to camp on
the bank at night, or seek a lodging in some neighbor-
ing country inn or farmhouse, we took fishing-tackle
with us, that we might fitly procure our food from the
stream, Indian-like. At the shoemaker's near the river
we obtained a match, which we had forgotten.

(Where they took boat is not remembered. It
was not the boat in which John and Henry made
their voyage of 1839, for that had been made over
to Hawthorne at the Old Manse, who was mak-
ing in it those fishing-trips with EUery Channing
which are commemorated in the "Mosses" by
Hawthorne. When Hawthorne left Concord, he
gave the boat over to Channing, in whose hands it
remained Channing was himself in New York at
this time, and was soon to meet Thoreau in Berk-
shire and make a trip with him to the Catskills.)

Though it was thus early in the spring, the river was
low, for there had not been much rain; and ipe suc-
ceeded in catching a mess of fish sufficient for our
dinner before we had left the town; and by the shores

[417]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

of Fair Haven Pond we proceeded to cook them. The
earth was uncommonly dry, and our fire, kindled far
from the woods in a sunny recess in the hillside on the
east of the pond, suddenly caught the dry grass of the
previous year which grew about the stump on which
it was kindled.

We sprang to extinguish it, at first with our hands
and feet, and then we fought it with a board obtained
from the boat; but in a few minutes it was beyond our
reach. Being on the side of a hill, it spread rapidly up-
ward, through the long, dry, wiry grass interspersed
with bushes. "Well, where will this end?" asked my
companion. I saw that it might be bounded by Well
Meadow Brook on one side; but would perchance go to
the village side of that brook. " It will go to town," I
answered. While my companion took the boat back
down the river, I set out through the woods, to inform
the owners, and to raise the town.

The fire had already spread a dozen rods on every
side, and went leaping and crackling wildly and irre-
claimably toward the wood. That way went the flames
with wild delight; and we felt that we had no control
over the demonic creature to which we had given
birth. We had kindled many fires in the woods before,
— burning a clear space in the grass, — without ever
kindling such a fire as this.

As I ran toward the town through the woods, I
could see the smoke over the woods behind me mark-
ing the spot and the progress of the flames. The flrst
farmer whom I met (driving a team), after leaving the
woods, inquired the cause of the smoke. I told him.

[418]

VILLAGE SKETCHES

"Well," said he, "it is none of my stuff," and drove
along. The next I met was the owner in his field, with
whom I returned at once to the woods, running all the
way. I had already run two miles. When at length we
got. into the neighborhood of the flames, we met a
carpenter who had been hewing timber, an infirm
man, who had been driven off by the fire, fleeing with
his axe. The farmer returned to hasten more assistance.
I, who was spent with running, remained. What could
I do alone against a front of flame half a mile wide?

(The farmer must have been Deacon W., who
owned many acres of woodland in the low plateau
between Fair Haven Pond and Fair Haven Cliff.
Much of it had been cut over the previous winter,
and there were said to be 100 cords ready for mar-
ket, worth, even at the prices of that day, from
$300 to $450. Many good trees were left standing,
whose value the fire would greatly injure, if not
destroy. Other owners had adjoining woodlots,
and which would be swept and which spared by
the blaze, nobody could say. The course then
taken by the unlucky cause of the calamity, was
probably the wisest he could take. He had given no-
tice, and the villagers were coming to the rescue.)

I walked slowly through the wood [and up a tall hill]
to Fair Haven Cliff, climbed to the highest rock, and
sat down upon it to observe the progress of the flames,
which were rapidly approaching me, now about a mile

[ 419 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

distant from the spot where the fire was kindled. Pres-
ently I heard the sound of the distant bell giving the
alarm, and I knew that the town was on its way to
the scene. Hitherto I had felt like a guilty person —
nothing but shame and regret. But now I settled the
matter with myself shortly. I said to myself: "Who
are these men who are said to be the owners of these
woods, and how am I related to them? I have set fire
to the forest; but I have done no wrong therein; and
now it is as if the lightning had done it. These flames
are but consuming their natural food."

(It has never troubled me from that day to this more
than if the lightning had done it. The trivial fishing
was all that disturbed me, and disturbs me still.) So
shortly I settled it with myself, and stood to watch
the approaching flames. It was a glorious spectacle,
and I was the only one there to enjoy it. The fire now
reached the base of the Cliff, and then rushed up its
sides. The squirrels ran before it in blind haste, and
three pigeons dashed into the midst of the smoke. The
flames flashed up the pines to their tops, as if they were
powder. When I found I was about to be surrounded
by the fire, I retreated, and joined the forces now ar-
riving from the town.

It took us several hours to surround the flames with
our hoes and shovels and by back fires subdue them.
In the midst of all I saw the farmer whom I first met,
who had turned indifferently away, saying it was none
of his stuff, striving earnestly to save his corded wood,
— his stuff, — which the fire had already seized, and
which it after all consumed.

[ 420 ]

VILLAGE SKETCHES

It burned over one hundred acres or more, and de-
stroyed much young wood. When I returned home late
in the day, with others of my townsmen, I could not
help noticing that the crowd, who were so ready to con-
demn the individual who had kindled the fire, did not
sympathize with the owners of the wood, but were in
fact highly elate, and, as it were, thankful for the op-
portunity which had afforded them so much sport;
and it was only half a dozen owners (so called), though
not all of them, who looked sour or grieved, and I felt
that I had a deeper interest in the woods, knew them
better, and should feel their loss more, than any or all of
them. The farmer whom I had first conducted to the
woods was obliged to ask me the shortest way back,
through his own lot.

Why, then, should the half-dozen owners and the
individuals who set the fire alone feel sorrow for'the
loss of the wood, while the rest of the town have their
spirits raised? Some of the owners, however, bore
their loss like men; but other some declared, behind
my back, that I was a "damned rascal"; and a flib-
bertigibbet or two, who crowed like the old cock,
shouted some reminiscences of "burnt woods" from
safe recesses, for some years after. I have had noth-
ing to say to any of them. The locomotive engine
has since burned over nearly all the same groftnd and
more; and in some measure blotted out the memory
of the previous fire. To be sure, I felt a little ashamed
when I reflected on what a trivial occasion this had
happened — that at the time I was no better employed
than my townsmen.

[ 421 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

That night I watched the fire, where some stumps
still flamed at midnight in the midst of the blackened
waste; wandering through the woods by myself; and
far in the night I threaded my way to the spot where the
fire had taken, and discovered the now broiled fish, —
which had been dressed, — scattered over the burnt
grass.

When the lightning burns the forest, its Director
makes no apology to man; and I was but His agent.
Perhaps we owe to this accident partly some of the
noblest ^latural parks. It is inspiriting to walk amid the
fresh green sprouts of grass and of shrubbery pushing
upward through the charred surface with more vigor-
ous growth. > i

This is probably the most important transac-
tion between Thoreau and his townsmen during
his first thirty years. It had something to do with
his retirement to the Walden woods the next year
(1845), and it left shades of regret and animosity
in certain families for years; and in Thoreau's own
just soul more remorse than he here expresses. I
have been told that the fact of Edward Hoar's
being equally guilty (or innocent) with himself
prevented following up the accident with a legal
prosecution. So utterly had it been generally for-
gotten, twelve years after, when I became a resi-
dent of the town, that I never heard a whisper of
it till this passage was found among his manu-

[ 4^2 ]

VILLAGE SKETCHES

scripts, and printed in the "Atlantic." But for
the seventy years since the locomotives have been
scattering sparks through the Concord woods,
such forest fires have been of frequent occurrence,
and have called out the help of Emersbns, Tho-
reaus, Channings, and everybody else to check
them. I saw Thoreau plant for Emerson, his Wal-
denbeanfield with pine trees, and fifty years later
I saw a forest fire from the railroad destroy most
of them.

George Minott, a Poetical Farmer

Minott is perhaps the most poetical farmer, who
most realizes to me the poetry of the farmer's life, that
I know. He does nothing with haste and drudgery, but
as if he loved it. He makes the most of his labor, and
takes infinite satisfaction in every part of it. He is not
looking forward to the sale of his crops, or any pecuniary
profit, but is paid by the constant satisfaction which
his labor yields him. He has not too much land to trou-
ble him, — too much work to do, — no hired man nor
boy; but simply to amuse Hmself and live. He cares
not so much to raise a large crop as to do his work well.
Farming is an amusement which has lasted him longer
than gunning or fishing. He is never in a hurry to get
his garden planted; and yet it is always planted soon
enough, and none in the town is kept so beautifully
clean.

He handles and amuses himself with every ear of his
corn crop as much as a child with his playthings; and

[ 423 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

so his small crop goes a great way. The seed of weeds
is no longer in his soil. He loves to walk in a swamp in
windy weather and hear the wind groan through the
pines. He indulges in no luxury of food or dress or fur-
niture, — yet he is not penurious, but merely simple.
If his sister dies before him, he may have to go to the
almshouse in his old age; yet he is not poor, for he
does not want riches. With never-failing rheumatism
and trembhng hands, he seems yet to enjoy perennial
health.

Though he never reads a book, — since he has fin-
ished the "Naval Monument," — he speaks the best of
English. He used the word "gavel " to describe a parcel
of stalks cast on the ground to dry. His are good old
English words, and I am always sure to find them in
the Dictionary, though I never heard them before in
my life.

This was written in October, 1851; in 1856 he
added this: —

Minott said he saw Emerson come home from lec-
turing the other day with his "knitting-bag" (lecture-
bag) in his hand. He asked him if the lecturing business
was as good as it used to be. Emerson said he did n't
see but it was as good as ever; guessed the people
would want lectures "as long as he or I Uved."

March 19, 1861, Thoreau wrote to Daniel
Ricketson: —

You remember Minott's cottage on the hillside near
Emerson's? The little gray hip-roofed cottage was

[ 424 ]

VILLAGE SKETCHES

occtipied at the beginning of February, this year, by
George Minott and his sister Mary, respectively
seventy-eight and eighty years old, and Miss Potter
seventy-foiu:. These had been permanent occupants
for many years. Minott had been on his last legs for
some time; at last off his legs, expecting weekly to take
his departure, — a burden to himself and friends, —
yet dry and natural as ever. His sister took care of him,
and supported herself and family with her needle, as
usual. He lately willed his little property to her, as a
slight compensation for her care. February 13, their
sister, eighty-six or eighty-seven, who lived across the
way, died. Miss Minott had taken cold in visiting her,
and was so sick that she could not go to her fimeral.
She herself died of lung fever on the 18th (which was
said to be the same disease that her sister had), having
just willed her property back to George, and added her
own mite to it. Miss Potter, too, had now become ill,
— too ill to attend the funeral, — and she died of the
same disease on the 23d. All departed as gently as the
sun goes down, leaving George alone.

I called to see him the other day, the 27th of Feb-
ruary, — a remarkably pleasant spring day, — and
as I was climbing the sunny slope to his strangely de-
serted house, I heard the first bluebirds upon the elm
that hangs over it. They had come as usual though
some who used to hear them were gone. Even Minott
had not heard them, for he was thinking of other
things. Perhaps there will be a time when the birds
themselves will not return any more.

I hear that George, sitting on the side of his bed, a

[ 425 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

few days after this, called out to his niece, who had
come to take care of him, and was in the next room, —
to know if she did not feel lonely? "Yes, I do," said
she. "So do I," added he. He said he was like an old
oak, all shattered and decaying. "I am sure, Uncle,"
said his niece, "you are not much like an oak." "I
mean," said he, "that I am like an oak or any other
tree, inasmuch as I cannot stir from where I am."

George Minott was the nephew of that Captain
Minott who was the second husband of Mary
Jones, Thoreau's grandmother, in whose farm-
house Henry was born. He (George) was Tho-
reau's "Old Man of Verona"; and Channing,who
called him "Angelo," had much to say of him;
describing him as "native and to the manor born,
who was never away from home but once, when he
was drafted as a soldier in the last war with Eng-
land, and went to Dorchester Heights."

George Melvin and the Pink Azalea

Equally keen as a sportsman, but not so esti-
mable in character, was George Melvin, with whom
Thoreau had much intercourse* and by whom he
was introduced to the Azalea nudiflora, in the
woods on the Lee Farm, which in Thoreau's time
had been the estate of Major Barrett, and then
of a New York broker named Wheeler, whom

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VILLAGE SKETCHES

Thoreau did not admire. He thus describes, in
May, 1853, this incident of the azalea, and his
puzzle over it: —

Some incidents in my life have been more allegorical
than actual. That is, I have been more impressed by
their allegorical significance and fitness; they have been
like myths or passages in a myth, rather than mere
incidents of history which have to wait to become
significant. (Quite in harmony with my subjective
philosophy.)

This, for instance: that when I thought I knew the
flowers so well, the beautiful purple azalea or pinxter-
flower should be shown me by [Melvin] the hunter who
foxmd it. Such facts are lifted quite above the level of
the actual; perfectly in keeping with my life and char-
acter. Ever and anon something will occur which my
philosophy has not dreamed of. The boundaries of the
actual are no more fixed and rigid than the elasticity of
our imaginations. The fact that a rare and beautiful
flower which we never saw, perhaps never heard of, —
for which, therefore, there was no place in our thoughts,
— may at length be found in our immediate neighbor-
hood, is very suggestive.^

' The tone here savors a little of mortification that others should
know more of rare flowers than himself, the one special botanist of
the town. Miss H. reported the same thing about the hepatica
which she showed him; and the Emerson children about the flower
of the Linusea, which they found in the part. Of the characters in
this village drama, Stedman Buttrick and F. R. Gourgas were
Democratic officials; George Brooks and his father were "Whig
leaders; and Mrs. Brooks the head of the anti-slavery women.

[ 427 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

May 31, 1853.

Afternoon. I am going in search of the Azalea nvdi-
flora. Sophia brought home a single flower from Mrs.
Brooks's last evening, who has a large twig in a vase of
water, still pretty fresh, which she says George Melvin
gave to her son George Brooks. I called at his office.
He says that Melvin came in to Mr. Francis Gourgas's
office, where he and others were sitting, Saturday eve-
ning, with his arms full, and gave each a sprig, but he
doesn 't know where he got it. Somebody, I heard, had
seen it at Captain Jarvis's; so I went there. I found
they had some, still pretty fresh, in the house. Melvin
gave it to them Saturday night, but they did not know
where he got it. A young man at Stedman Buttrick's
said it was a secret; there was only one bush in the
town; Melvin knew of it, and Stedman knew; when
asked, Melvin said he got it in the swamp, or from a
bush, etc.

The young man thought it grew on the Island across
the Assabet on the Wheeler Farm. I went on to Mel-
vin's house, though I did not expect to find him at
home at this hour, so early in the afternoon. At length
I saw his dog by the door, and knew he was at home.
He was sitting in the shade, bareheaded, at the back
door. He had a large pailful of the azalea, recently
plucked, and in the shade behind his house; which he
said he was going to carry to town at evening. He had
also a sprig set out. He had been out all the forenoon,
and said he had got seven pickerel, perhaps ten. Ap-
parently he had been drinking, and was just getting

[ 428 ]

VILLAGE SKETCHES

over it. At first he was a little shy about telling me
where the azalea grew; but I saw that I should get it
out of him. He dilly-dallied a little; called to his neigh-
bor, Jacob Farmer (whom he called "Razor"), to
know if he could tell me where that flower grew. He
called it, by the way, the " red honeysuckle." This was
to prolong the time and make the most of his secret.

I felt pretty sure the plant was to be found on the
Wheeler Farm, beyond the river, as the young man had
said; for I had remembered how, some weeks before
this, when I went up the Assabet after the yellow
rocket, I saw Melvin, who had just crossed with his
dog; and when I landed, to pluck the rocket, he ap-
peared out of the woods, said he was after a fishpole,
and asked me the name of my flower. Did n't thitik
it was very handsome, — "not so handsome as the
honeysuckle, is it?" And now I knew it was his "red
honeysuckle" and not the columbine he meant.

Well, I told him he had better tell me where it was;
I was a botanist, and ought to know. But he thought
I could not possibly find it by his directions. I told
him he'd better tell me and have the glory of it, for I
should surely find it if he didn't; I'd got a clue to it,
and should n't give it up. I should go over the river for
it. "I can smell it a good way, you know." He thought
I could smell it half a mile; and he wondered that I or
Channing had n't stumbled on it. " Channing did come
close by it once, when it was in flower, and I thought
he'd surely find it then; but he did n't, and I said noth-
ing to him." He told me he found it about ten years
ago, and went to it every year since. " It blossoms at

[ 429 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

the old election time, last o' May, and is the hand-
somest flower that grows."

In the meanwhile Farmer, who was hoeing, came up
to the wall, and we fell into a talk about Dodge's
Brook, near by, which runs through his farm. A man
in Cambridge, he said, had lately written to old Mr.
Monroe (a neighbor) about it, but he did n't know why.
All he did know about the brook was that he had seen
it dry, and then again, after a week of dry weather, it
would be full again; and either the Cambridge man or
Monroe said there were only two such brooks in all
North America. One of its sources — he said the prin-
cipal one — is in his land. We all went to it. It was in
a meadow, rather a dry one, once a swamp. He said it
never ceased to flow at this head now, since he dug it
out; and never froze there. Farmer ran a pole down
eight or nine feet into the mud, to show me the depth.
He had minnows there in a large, deep pool, and he
cast an insect into the water, which they presently rose
to and swallowed. Fifteen years ago he dug it out nine
feet deep, and found there spruce logs as big as his
leg, which the beavers had gnawed, with the marks of
their teeth very distinct upon them; but they soon
crumbled away on coming to the air.^

• This conversation, very well and colloquially reported, is typi-
cal of hundreds such that Thoreau held with the farmers, laborers,
and sportsmen of Concord and its region. " Old Mr. Monroe" was
the person who introduced skilful pencil-making into Concord;
he was then living near Jacob Farmer's farm, which was in a ham-
let where there had been a hatter's shop, a shoemaker's, the good
brick house of the Hildreths, and George Melvin's homely abode.
Later it was the site of a schoolhouse, and Mr. Farmer was the

[ 430 ]

VILLAGE SKETCHES

Melvin, meanwhile, was telling me of a pair of geese
he had seen which were breeding in the Bedford Cedar
Swamp; he had seen them within a day. Last year he
got a large brood of black ducks there, — eleven, he
said. Melvin and I and his dog went on down the
brook, and crossed the Assabet in his boat, and he
conducted me to where the Azalea nudiflora grew, —
it was a little past its prime, perhaps, — and showed
me how near Channing came to it. ("You won't tell
him what I said, will you?") I offered to pay him for
his trouble, but he would n't take anything. "I'd just
as lief you'd know as not." It is a conspicuously
beautiful flowering shrub, with the sweet fragrance of
the common swamp-pink; but the flowers are larger,
and in this case, a fine, lively rosy pink, not so clammy
as the other; and, being earlier, it is free from the in-
sects which often infest and spoil the first. Growing in
the shade of large wood, like the laurel, with a broader,
somewhat downy pale green leaf. Melvin says the
gray squirrel nests are made of leaves, the red squir-
rel's of pine stuff. Jarvis tells me that Stedman But-
trick once hired Melvin to work for him, on condition
that he should not take his gun into the field; but he
had known him to do so when Buttrick was away, and

resident committeemati. At a school examination where I was pres-
ent officially, as secretary of the School Committee of 1859, when
Mr. Alcott was our School Superintendent, I heard Jacob Farmer
make this speech: "Children, we were here a year ago, and we
looked over your writin' books; and we thought some flies had got
into your inkstands, and crawled over your books. We've been
looking at your books to-day, and we conclude that you've catched
them flies."

[431 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

earn two or three dollars with his game, beside his
day's work; but of course that was neglected.

June 10, 1853. What shall this great wild tract over
which Channing and I strolled to-day be called? Many
farmers have pastures there, and woodlots and or-
chards. It consists mainly of rocky pastures. It con-
tains what I call the Boulder Field, the Yellow Birch
Swamp, the Black Birch Hill, the Laurel Pasture, the
Hog Pasture, the White Pine Grove, the Easterbrooks
Place, the Old Lime Kiln, the Lime Quarries, Spruce
Swamp, the Ermine Weasel Woods; also the Oak
Meadows, the Cedar Swamp, the Kibbe Place, and the
old place northwest of Brooks Clark's. Ponkawtassett
bounds it on the south. There are a. few frog-ponds
and an old mill-pond within it, and Bateman's Pond
on its edge. Channing proposes to call it the Melvin
Preserve, for it is favorite hunting-ground with George
Melvin. It is a sort of Robin Hood Ground. The old
Carlisle Road, which runs through the middle of it, is
bordered on each side with wild apple pastures, where
the trees stand without order, having sprung up by
accident, or from pomace sown at random, and are for
the most part concealed by birches and pines. Many
of these apple-trees, growing as forest trees, bear good
crops. It is a paradise for walkers in the fall. It would
make a princely estate in Europe; yet it is owned by
farmers who live by the labor of their hands, and do
not esteem it much.

This was written in 1853. Four years later, he
still called it "Melvin's Preserve," and there met

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VILLAGE SKETCHES

Melvin, not gunning nor fishing, but nutting and
barberrying.

Oct. 20, 1857. He had got two baskets, one in each
hand, and his game-bag, which hung from his neck, all
full of nuts and barberries; and his mouth full of to-
bacco. Trust him to ^<d where the nuts and berries
grow. He is hunting all the year, and he marks the
bushes and the trees which are fullest; and when the
time comes, for once he leaves his gup, though not his
dog, at home, and takes his baskets to the spot. It is
pleasanter to me to meet him with his gun or his bas-
kets, than to meet some portly caterer for a family,
basket on arm, at the stalls of Quincy Market in Boston.

What a wild and rich domain that Easterbrooks
Country! Think of the miles of huckleberries, and of
barberries and of wild apples, so fair both in flower and
fruit, resorted to by men and beasts! There are bar-
berry bushes or clumps there, behind which I could
actually pick two bushels of berries, without being seen
by you on the other side. And they are not all picked
at last, by all creatures together. I walk for two or
three miles, and still the clumps of barberries, — great
sheaves with their wreaths of scarlet fruit, — show
themselves before me and on every side; seeming to
issue from the pines and other trees, as if it were they
that were promenading there, not I. Melvin tells me
that S. thinks he heard a wildcat scream in Ebby Hub-
bard's Wood, by the Close.

My own relations were not very close either
with George Melvin or with George Minott,—

[ 433 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

the double t in this name seems to be optional, for it
is written both ways. But I was introduced to two
of the cronies of Thoreau and Channing by one or
both of my new friends, when I first went to live
in Channing's house, and to dine daily with Tho-
reau. One of these was Ebby Hubbard, just men-
tioned, aged owner of some of the finest oak and
pine forest in Concord, of whom they told me I
should buy the best white-oak tordwood — as
I did, for fuel in Channing's stoves. The other
was Michael Flannery, industrious Irishman from
Kerry, who would honestly saw it for me, and do
any other work I needed; and whom I continued
to employ for twenty years. Hubbard was another
type of the old farmer from either George Minott
or Jacob Farmer; he was a crooked, crusty old
curmudgeon, seldom seen except in a blue frock,
and living in one of the oldest village houses, with
a carpenter's shop attached, in which he seemed
to pass most of the time he was not working in
the open air, cutting or carting wood from his
park, near Walden; which was a favorite walk of
Emerson and his children, and was bought by his
daughter Mrs. Forbes, to prevent the cutting-off
of noble trees, — so that it is still, in verity, a
preserved park. Penurious as he was, Mr. Hub-
bard left by will one thousand dollars toward a

[ 434 ]

VILLAGE SKETCHES

monument to the patriots in the Concord Fight,
to be placed on the Concord River bank where
they actually stood when they

" Fired the shot heard round the world."
This bequest was the nest-egg out of which was
hatched the world-famed statue of the Minute
Man by French.

Flannery, on the other hand, was the spade-
laborer who took the prize at the cattle show, and
had it taken away from him by his employer, an-
other Concord farmer; which so incensed Thoreau
that he collected the sum among his neighbors and
paid it to Mike, whom the Thoreaus ever after-
ward befriended. When Sophia left Concord to
live and die in Bangor, among her cousins, she
gave me a small note of hand, which Flannery had
signed for money lent him in some pinch, with in-
structions to receive payment if he was able to
pay, but in any case to give him up the note,
which I did. This is a sample, one of many, of the
relations of the Thoreaus with the poor; and those
of Channing, though more capricious, were no less
generous.

A Fluvial Walk in the Assabet Stream

The Concord River is formed by the confluence,
at the promontory of Egg Rock, of the Assabet,

[ 435 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

or North Branch, sometimes called by Thoreau
the "North River," and the longer and more navi-
gable Sudbury River, in which, under Lee's Cliff,
and lying between Baker Farm and Conantum, is
Fair Haven Pond, a bay or widening of the stream.
For sailing, the Sudbury answered best, but for
rowing and retirement, the Assabet; in itself also
more picturesque, and in Thoreau's time little de-
filed by sewage or the waste of woolen factories.
It was so httle boated then, except by Thoreau
and Hawthorne or Channing, that it gave quiet
bathing in three or four places of deep water. At
one point, behind the Indian Hill which Thoreau
carefully spells "Nawshawtuct," is a ford at which
these walkers crossed it in going to the more dis-
tant Anursnack, and if it were summer, we often
stripped for a bath, carrying our clothes across to
the northwestern shore, and dressing there for
the farther walk. On July 10, 1852, a very hot
day, Thoreau and Channing set forth "to the
North River in front of Major Barrett's." This
village magnate, who had been State Treasurer,
and had hired Alcott as a haymaker, had owned
the great Lee farm, now broken up into home-
steads and pastures. The Journal of that date
now goes on: —

[ 436 ]

VILLAGE SKETCHES

The long, narrow, open intervals in the woods near
the Assabet are quite dry now. One of these meadows,
a quarter-mile long by a few rods wide, narrow and
winding and bounded on all sides by maples, is a very
attractive place to walk in. We undressed on the south
side, carried our clothes down in the stream a consid-
erable distance, and finally bathed in earnest from the
opposite side. The heat tempted us to prolong this
luxury. I think I never felt the water so warm, yet it
was not disagreeably so. The river has here a sandy
bottom, and is quite shallow. I made quite an excur-
sion up and down in it — a fluvial walk. It seemed the
properest highway for this weather; now in water a
foot or two deep, now suddenly descending through
valleys up to my neck, but all alike agreeable. When
I had left the river and walked in the woods for some
time, then jumped into the river again, I was surprised
to find how warm it was, — as it seemed to me, al-
most warm enough to boil eggs, — like Water that has
stood in a kettle over a fire.

There are many interesting objects of study as you
walk up and down a clear river like this, in the water,
where you can see every inequality in the bottom, and
every object on it. There are weeds on the bottom
which remind you of the sea, — the radical leaves of
the "Floating-heart," which I have never seen men-
tioned; very large, five inches long and four wide, dull
claret, and green where freshest, pellucid, with waved
edges, in large tufts or dimples on the bottom. It is
also scored by clams moving about, with furrows
sometimes a rod long; and always the clam lies at one

[ 437 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

end. So this fish can change its position and get into
deeper and cooler water. I was in doubt before whether
the clam made these furrows; but these, which were
very numerous, had living clams at the end.

There are but few fishes to be seen. They have, no
doubt, retreated to the deepest water. In a muddier
place, close to the shore, I came upon an old pout
cruising with her young. She dashed away at my ap-
proach, but the fry remained. They were of various
sizes from a third of an inch to an inch and a half long,
— quite black and pout-shaped, except that the head
was most developed in the smallest. They were con-
stantly moving about in a circular or rather lenticular
school, fifteen or eighteen inches in diameter; and I
estimated there were at least a thousand. Presently
the old pout came back and took the lead of her brood,
which followed her, or rather gathered about her, like
chickens round a hen; but this mother had so many
children she did n't know what to do. Her maternal
yearnings must be on a great scale. When one half of
Tier divided school found her out, they cam^down
upon her and completely invested herjike a small
cloud. She was soon joined by another smaller pout,
apparently her mate; and all, both old and young,
began tojbe very familiar with me; they, came 'round
my_legs_ and felt themjwith their feelers, and~tEe old
pouhs-nibbted my toes, while' tte^fv~faalf'"conce^led
my feet. Probably if I had been standing on thelBank
with my clothes on they would have been more shy.
Ever and anon the old pouts dashed aside to drive
away a passing bream or perch. The larger one kept

[ 438 ] — -

VILLAGE SKETCHES

circling about her charge, as if to keep them together.
The young pouts are protected thus for a season by
the old. Some had evidently been hatched before the
-(jtitefsT^

I wonder if any Roman emperor ever indulged in
such luxury as this? walking up and down a river in
torrid weather, with only a hat to shade the head.
What were the baths of Caracalla to this? Now we
traverse a long water-plain, some two feet deep: now
we descend into a darker river-valley, where the bot-
tom is lost sight of; now we go over a hard iron pan,
now we stoop, and go under a low bough of the Salix
nigra; now we slump into soft mud amid the pads of
the Nympkcea odorata, at this hour shut. On this road
there is no other traveller to turn out for. We finally
return to the dry land, and recline in the shade of an
apple tree on a bank overlooking the meadow.

July 12,2 p. u. Now for another fluvial walk. There
is always a current of air above the water, blowing up
or down the course of the river; so that this is the
coolest highway. Divesting yourself of all clothing
but vour shirt and hat which are to protect you from
the sun, you are prepared for the excursion. You
choose what depths you like, tucking your toga higher
or lower, as you take the deep middle of the road, or
the shallow sidewalks. Here is a road where no dust
was ever known, no intolerable drouth. Now your feet
expand on a smooth sandy bottom, now contract
timidly on pebbles, now slump in genial fatty mud,
amid the pads. You scare out whole schools of small
breams and perch, and sometimes a pickerel, which

[ 439 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

have taken refuge from the sun under the pads. Or
you^meet with_fl.TiH intPirrupt. ^ tiirtje, taking a more
lei^ur^X^jalkjiELjke-stpeam. Ever and anon you cross
some furrow in the sand made by a muskrat, leading
off to their galleries in the bank; and you thrust your
foot into the entrance, which is just below the surface
of the water, and strewn with grass and rushes, of
which they make their nests. In shallow water near
the shore your feet at once detect the presence of
springs in the bank emptying in, by the sudden cold-
ness of the water. TViprg^f ynn ^vp. tiiirstyi you dig a
little well in the sand,JEith yoyr hands, and when you
returoi,. after JtJiaa, settled and.clarifieditag]i,,3MU.get a-
draught o£ pure cpld water, there. ,,
^ It is an objection to walking in the mud, that from
time to time you have to pick the leeches off you. I
noticed a large snapping turtle on one of the dark-
brown rocks in the middle of the river (apparently for
coolness) in company with a painted tortoise, — so com-
pletely the color of the rock, that if it had not hfigDU
for his .head, curyed upwardl.Q,q,j)9mt from anxiety. I
should not have detected him. Thus Nature subjects
them to the same circumstances with the stones, and
paints them alike, as with one brush, for their safety.
That this luxury of walking in the river may be perfect,
it must be very warm, such as are few days even in this
July; so thd,t the breeze on those parts that have just
>been immersed may not produce the least chilliness.

)

Socrates, Jbaxefootj paddling in the shallow
Ilissus at Athens,_was not more a philosopher

[ 440 ]

VILLAGE SKETCHES

thanthis surveyor of the roads of clams and
muskrats.

Family Memories C

Like most of us, Hemy Thoreau had a very
mixed ancestry, which has not yet been traced
very far back. His aunt Maria, the last American
Thoreau, gave me by letter in 1878 the names of
such forefathers as she had heard of in the eight-
eenth century, when she was herself born. Her
great-gi'andmother Tillet, who seems to have been
of Huguenot descent, married a Boston Quaker,
David Orrok, and her daughter, Sarah Orrok,
married a Scotchman from Stirlingshire named
Burns, who died in Scotland. Jane Burns, his
daughter, married the first American Thoreau in
Boston (John, the grandfather of Henry), in 1781,
dnd died there in 1796, leaving eight children, of
whom Maria was the youngest. Jane Bums was
bom in 1754, the same year with her husband,
who outlived her by five years, and died in Con-
cord when his son John, father of Henry, was
fourteen; who therefore remembered him well, as
did Henry's aunt Elizabeth, who was older. On
his mother's side Henry could trace descent far-
ther back, through Joneses and Dunbars, of the
Old Colony of Plymouth; but not, like his friend

[ 441 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

John Brown, of Mayflower ancestry. The Tillets
had been slave-owners, like many persons of prop-
erty in Massachusetts before the Revolution; and
by both sides Henry inherited traditions of gen-
tility. His grandfather's cousin, John Thoreau,
was an officer in the British army, and one of his
grandmother's brothers, Jonas Jones, died as an
officer of that army in England, after our Revolu-
tion. With this premised, I quote some of the
memories preserved in the Journals: —

Jan. 23, 1858. Mrs. William Monroe ^ told Sophia
last evening that she remembered our grandfather
Thoreau very well; he was taller than Father, and used
to ride out to their house when they made cheeses, to
drink the whey. She was a Stone, and lived where she
and her husband did afterward, now Darius Meri-
am's. She said she remembered Grandmother, too,
Jennie Bums, — how she came to the schoolroom in
Boston, once (perhaps in Middle Street), leading her
little daughter Elizabeth, the latter so small that she
could not tell her name distinctly, but spoke thick
and lispingly, — "Elizabeth Orrok Thoreau."

Feb. 7, 1858. Aunt Louisa Dunbar has talked with
Mrs. Monroe, and I can correct or add to my account.
She says that she was then only three or four years old,
and that she went to school somewhere in Boston, with

* This was the wife of "old Mr. Monroe" mentioned on pp. 211,
212, and the mother of William Monroe, who gave the library and
art gallery to Concord.

[ 442 ]

VILLAGE SKETCHES

Aunt Elizabeth and one other child, to a woman
named Turner, who kept a spinning-wheel a-going
while, she taught these three little children. She re-
members that one sat on a lignum-vitse mortar, turned
bottom upward, another on a box, and the third on a
stool; and then she repeated the story of Jennie Burns
bringing her little daughter to the school, as before.

Feb. 8. Mrs. Monroe says that her mother, Mrs.
Stone, respected my grandfather Thoreau very much,
because he was a religious man. She remembers his
calling one day and inquiring where blue vervain grew,
which he wanted to make a syrup for his cough; and
she, a girl, happening to know, ran and gathered some.

October, 1856. Father told me about his father the
other night, who died in 1801, aged forty-seven. When
the Revolutionary war came on, he was apprentice
or journeyman to a cooper in Boston, who employed
many hands. He called them together and told them
that, on account of the war, his business was ruined,
and he had no more work for them. So my father
thinks he went into privateering. Yet he remembers
his telling him of being employed digging at some de-
fences, when a cannon-ball came and sprinkled sand
all over them.^ After the war he went into business as

* This may have been at the earthworks thrown up around Bos-
ton here and there, after the Concord Fight, in which several of
Henry's Jones uncles took part on the Tory side. The "cooper"
was an outfitter for vessels, and it was the closing of the port of
Boston by the British navy, before active hostilities, that ruined
his business, and furnished the Colonies with experienced priva-
teersmen. Mention has already been made of John Thoreau as a
privateer; he laid the foundation of his small fortune in that sort
of piracy, for he inherited nothing from his family in Jersey, save,

[ 443 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

a merchant, commencing with a single hogshead of
sugar. His shop was on Long Wharf. He was a short
man, a little taller than Father, stout, and very strojag
for his size. Levi Melcher, a powerful man, who was
his clerk or tender, used to tell my father that he did
not believe himself so strong a man as Grandfather,
who would never give in to him in handling a hogshead
of molasses, — setting it on its head, or the like. Father
remembers his father used to breakfast before the
family at one time, and he with him, on account of his
business. His father used to eat the undercrusts of
biscuits, and the boy the upper.

Dec. 28, 1858. Father says that he and his sisters
except Elizabeth, were born in a house in Richmond
Street, Boston, between Salem and Hanover Streets,
on the spot where a Bethel now stands, on the left hand
going from Hanover Street. They had milk of a neigh-
bor, who used to drive his cows to and from the Com-
mon every day. Aunt Jane says that she was born on

Christmas Dav, and. they called her a Christmas gift.

. *" — ^' ■ ■ -'•' — — ~ -^.-i.'- — — ^ — -~ ^ ° .

She remembers hearing that her aunt, Hannah Orrok,
was so disconcerted by the event that she threw all the
spoons outdoors, after she had washed them, or with
the dishwater.

Feb. 3, 1859. After a sickness of some two years,

possibly, some advantages in his subsequent trading. His clerk,
Levi Melcher, of an old New Hampshire family in Rockingham
Comity, was one of my mother's uncles, whom I remember well.
He made a fortune in the same business as John Thoreau did, and
could he have bfeen spared a few years longer, the Thoreaus might
have been among the wealthy Boston families. His early death and
his large family consumed his wealth, but his children inherited his
frugality.

[ 444 ]

JAM>: THOREAU

VILLAGE SKETCHES

going down town in pleasant weather, doing a little
business from time to time, hoeing a little in the gar-
den, etc., Father took to his chamber January 13, and
did not come down again. He died five minutes before
3 P.M., February 3, Most of the time previously he had
coughed and^expectorated a great deal; latterly he did
not cough. He continued to sit up in his chamber till
within a week before he died. He sat up for a little
while on the Sunday four days before he died. Gen-
erally he was very silent for many months. He was
quite conscious to the last, and his death was so easy
that we should not have been aware that he was dying,
though we were sitting around his bed, if we had not
watched very closely.

I have touched a body that was flexible and warm,
yet^SSTess — warmed by what fire.? WEenthe spirit
that animated some matter has left it, who else, what
dse, can animate it? The matter which composed the
body of our first human father stiU exists under another i
name. When in sickness the expression of the face in
various ways is changed, you perceive unexpected re-
semblances to other members of the same family; as if
within the same family there was greater general
similarity in the framework of the face than in its fill-
ing up and clothing.

Father came to this town to live with his father and
stepmother, just after the close of the last century,
when he was upwards of twelve years old. Afterwards
he went to the Lexington Academy a short time, per-
haps a year; then into Deacon White's store as clerk;
then learned the dry-goods business in a store in

t 445 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

Salem. Aunt Jane shows me a letter from him, di-
rectly after his going there, dated 1807. He was then
with a Hathaway. He came of age in 1808, and soon
after opened a store for himself, on the corner where
the Town House now stands, in a yellow building since
moved and altered into John Keyes's house. He did so
well there that Isaac Hurd went into partnership with
him, to his injury. They soon dissolved partnership,
but could not settle without going to law, when my
father gained his case, bringing his account books into
court. Then, I think, he went to Bangor and "set up"
with Billings, selling to the Indians among others;
married here [1812], lived a while in Boston, wrote
thence to the aunts at Bangor in 1815, with John on
his knee. He moved to Concord, where I was born;
tiien to Chelmsford, to Boston, to Concord again, —
and here remained. Mother first came to Concord
with her mother about the same age and time that
Father did, but a little before him.^

As far as I know. Father, when he died, was not only
one of the oldest men in the middle of Concord, but the
one perhaps best acquainted with the inhabitants, and
the local, social, and street history of the village for the
last fifty years. He belonged in a peculiar sense to the
village street; loved to sit in the shops or at the post-
office, and read the daily papers. I think that he re-
membered more about the worthies (and unworthies) of

' We have more exact dates now than Henry had in noting down
these facts in his father's life. The courts and the record of wills
and mortgages supply us with the chronology. John Thoreau had
married the widow Kettell, before migrating to Concord from the
North End of Boston, in search of health, in 1800.

[ 446 ]

VILLAGE SKETCHES

Concord Village, forty years ago — both from dealii
as a trader, and from familiar intercourse with them
than any one else. Our neighbors, now living or ve
recently dead, have either come to the town more i
cently than he, or have lived more aloof from the ma
of the inhabitants.

Writing to Daniel Ricketson, who had writt(
that he much respected John Thoreau, and w
"much impressed with his good sense, his fi]
social nature, and his genuine hospitality," Th
reau replied: —

I am glad to read what you say of his social natui
I think I may say that he was wholly unpretendin
And there was this peculiarity in his aim, that thou|
he had pecuniary difificulties to contend with t
greater part of his life, he always studied how to ma!
a good article, pencil or other (for he practised vario
arts) and was never satisfied with what he had pr
duced. Nor was he ever disposed in the least to p
off a poor one for the sake of pecuniary gain. As I s
in a circle the other evening with my mother ai
sister, my mother's two sisters, and my father's t^
sisters, — it occurred to me that my father, thouj
71, belonged to the youngest four of the eight wl
recently composed our family.

Charles Dunbar: Thoreau' s Uncle

An entirely different element from the qui(
conservative, serene element of the Thoreau n

[ 447 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

ture, was that of the loud-voiced, eccentric Dun-
bars, mingling with the genteel, acquisitive Jones
strain, which combined in the union of Mary
Jones with Asa Dunbar in the Revolutionary era,
at Salem, Weston, and Keene; and found its gro-
tesque culmination in Charles Dunbar, the only
brother of Thoreau's mother, Cynthia DUnbar.
Everybody has remarked on the paradoxical mind
and utterances of Thoreau; but the paradox ex-
isted in his heredity, before it displayed itself in
his thinking.

Charles Dunbar, the first surviving child of
Rev. Asa Dimbar's marriage to Colonel Jones's
only daughter in 1772, was born at Weston in
1780, but spent his boyhood in Keene, New Hamp-
shire, in Maine, and in Concord, after his mother
remarried Captain Jonas Minot there at the end
of the eighteenth century. His nephew said of
him: —

March 2&, 1856, Uncle Charles buried at Haverhill.
He was bom in February, 1780, the winter of the Great
Snow, and he died in the winter of another great snow,
— a life bounded by great snows. He grew up to be a
remarkably eccentric man, of large frame, athletic,
and celebrated for his feats of strength. His limgs were
proportionably strong. A man heard him named once,
and asked if it was the same Charles Dunbar whom he
remembered when he was a little boy, walking on the

[ 448 ]

VILLAGE SKETCHES

coast of Maine. A man came down to the shore and
hailed a vessel that was sailing by. He should never
forget that man's name.

I remember Charles Dunbar in his old age,
seventy-five, at his sister's table in Concord, an
amusing guest, whom his nephew plied with ques-
tions. According to Thoreau in "Walden" /then
a new book), he_went_ to sleep shaving hirnsdf,
and was obliged to sprout potatoes in a cellar
Sunday, in order to keep awake and keep the Sab-
bath. It was the era of Potter, the ventriloquist
and magician, who settled at Andover, New
Hampshire, and seems to have been an illegiti-G
mate scion of the family of Sir Charles Frankland,
a descendant of Oliver Cromwell. Charles Dun-
bar emulated Potter, and was known by his jug-
gler's tricks. Thoreau says of him: —

Ever since I knew him he could swallow his nose.
One of his tricks was tq_sv£alkisK-the-kBJwes_a»drf orks
anfaomP! Q£..t,he-platesLatjaJ:ja.vpr.n-tablgj. and offer to
giveJ;hemji£J^t^»4l0id-«ouJjixhai®&,i^^
his meal. He could do anything with cards, yet did not
gamble. Uncle Charles should have been in Concord
in 1843, when Daniel Webster was there. What a
whetter-up of his memory that event would have been!
[Imitates his uncle] : "And Seth Hunt and Bob Smith,
— he was a student of my father's and where 's Put
now? Webster's a smart fellow, — bears his age well.

[ 449 I

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

How old should you think he was? Does he look as if
he were two years younger than I?"

Such was the fact — and somewhere the jug-
gling grandson of Colonel Jones, of Weston, and
the statesman son of Captain Webster, of Salis-
bury, had associated in youth. Thoreau wrote
in 1853: —

Jan. 1. After talking with Uncle Charles the other
night about the worthies of the country, Webster and
the rest, as usual, — considering who were genuine
and who not, — I showed him up to bed; and when I
had got into bed myself, I heard his chamber door
open after eleven o'clock; and he called out, in an earn-
est, stentorian voice, loud enough to wake the whole
house, — "Henry! was John Quincy Adams a genius?"
"No, I think not," was my reply. "Well, I didn't
think he was," answered he.

Polyphemus Goodwin and George Melvin

Thoreau's collection of river driftwood for fuel
and for bookcases to hold his Oriental volumes
from Cholmondeley is well-known. But the hint
of it seems to have been taken from the similar
industry of John Goodwin, of dubious reputation
among men, the one-eyed hunter and fisher, whom
Channing called "Polyphemus," and George
Melvin "Pinkeye"; of whom in October, 1853,
Thoreau had this to say: —

[ 450 ]

VILLAGE SKETCHES

Yesterday, toward night, I gave Sophia and Mother
a sail as far as the Battle-Ground. One-eyed John
Goodwin, the fisherman, was loading into a handcart
and conveymg home the piles of driftwood which of
late he had collected with his bo£|,t. It was a beautiful
evening, and a clear amber sunset lit up all the eastern
shores; and that man's employment, so simple and di-
rect (though he is regarded by most as a vicious char-
acter), whose whole motive was so easy to fathom, —
thus to obtain his winter's wood, — charmed me un-
speakably. So much do we love actions that are sim-
ple. They are all poetic. We too would fain be so em-
ployed. So unlike are the pursuits of most men, so
artificial or complicated.

Consider how the broker collects his winter's wood,
— what sport he makes of it, — what is his boat and
handcart! Postponing instant Ufe, he makes haste to
Boston in the cars, and there deals in stocks (not quite
relishing his employment), and so earns the money
with which he buys his fuel. And when by chance I
meet him about this indirect and complicated business,
I am not struck with the beauty of his employment.
It does not harmonize with the sunset. How much more
the former consults his genius, — some genius, at any
rate! Now I should love to get my fuel so; I have got
some so : but though I may be glad to have it, I do not
love to get it in any other way less simple and direct.
No trade is simple, but artificial and complex. It post-
pones life and substitutes death. I will never believe
that it is the descendants of tradesmen who keep the
state alive, — but of simple yeomen or laborers. This

I 451 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

simplicity it is, and the vigor it imparts, that enables
the simple vagabond, though he does get drunk and is
sent to the House of Correction, so often, to hold up
his head among men.

Goodwin is a most constant fisherman. When I can
remember to have seen him fishing almost daily for
some time, if it rains I am surprised, on looking out, to
see him slowly wending his way to the river in his oil-
cloth coat, with his basket and pole. I saw him the
other day fishing in the middle of the stream, the day
after I had seen him fishing on the shore; while by a
kind of magic I sailed by him, and he said he was
catching minnow for bait in the winter. When I was
twenty rods off he held up a pickerel that weighed
two and one-half pounds, which he had forgot to show
me before; and the next morning, as he afterwards
told me, he caught one that weighed three pounds.
If it is ever necessary to appoint a committee on fish-
"ponds and pickerel, let him be one of them. Surely he
is tenacious of life, — hard to scale.

Nov. 1, 1858. As I stood on Poplar Hill, I saw a man
far off, by the edge of the river, splitting billets off a
stump. Suspecting who it was, I took out my glass,
and beheld Goodwin, the one-eyed Ajax, in his short
blue frock, getting his winter's wood; for this is one of
the phenomena of the season. As surely as the ants
which he disturbs go into winter quarters in the stumps,
when the weather becomes cool, so does G. revisit the
stumpy shores with his axe. As usual, his powder flask
peeped out from a pocket on his breast, his gun was
slanted over a stump near by, and his boat lay a little

[ 45^ ]

VILLAGE SKETCHES

further along. He had been at work laying wall still
further off, and now, near the end of the day, betook
himself to those pursuits which he loved better still.
It would be no amusement to me to see a gentleman
buy his winter wood. It is to see Goodwin get his. I
helped him tip over a stump or two. He said the owner
of the land had given him leave to grub up those
stumps; but it seemed to me a condescension for him
to ask any man's leave. The stumps to those who can
use them, I say, — to those who will split them. Near
by were large hollows in the ground, now grassed over,
where he had got out white oak stumps in previous
years. But, strange to say, the town does not like to
have him get his fuel in this way. They would rather
the stumps would rot in the ground, or be floated
down stream to the sea. They would have him stick
to laying wall, and buy corded wood as they do.

I guessed at Goodwin's age. He is hale and stout,
and looks younger than he is, and I took care to set
him high enough. I guessed he was fifty-five, and he
said that if he lived two or three months longer he
would be fifty-six. He then guessed at my age; thought
I was forty, [Really forty-one.] He thought Emerson
was a very young-looking man for his age [fifty-five].
"But he has not been out o' nights as much as you
have." [Nov. 8.] Goodwin, laying wall at Miss Ripley's,
observed to me going by, "Well, it seems [a ras-
cal] thought he had lived long enough." He had lately
committed suicide in Sudbury. In revenge for being
sent to the House of Correction, he had set several fires.

Goodwin cannot be a very bad man, he is so cheery.
[ 453 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

It is evident that Thoreau was truly friendly
with these hunters; they sympathized more than
they disagreed. Mrs. Thoreau once described her
son as "very tolerant," and that perhaps was as
near a description as a single adjective could bring
you. It requires a long list of them to portray
him fully.

Friendship Analyzed

Of all the thousand topics about which he
thought and wrote, in the rich wilderness of his
twenty volumes as they stand on the shelves
of his principal publisher, none returned to his
thought and his anxieties so often as Friendship.
A few of the many forms in which he sketched
that fascinating torment, that unsatisfied ideal,
may here be given: —

Nov. S, 1858. How long we toill follow an illusion !
On meeting that one whom I call my friend, I find I had
imagined something that was not there. I am sure to
depart sadder than I came. Nothing makes me so de-
jected as to have met my friends; for they make me
doubt if it is possible to have any friends. I feel what
a fool I am. I cannot conceive of persons more strange
to me than they actually are: not thinking, not be-
lieving, not doing as I do, — intenrupted by me. My
only distinction must be, that I am the greatest bore
they ever had. Not in a single thought we agreed,

[ 454 ]

VILLAGE SKETCHES

regularly balking one another. But when I get far
away, my thoughts return to them. That is the way
I can visit them. Thus I am taught that my friend is
not an actual person. When I have withdrawn and am
alone, I forget the actual person and remember only
my ideal. Then I have a friend again.

I am not so ready to perceive the same illusion that
is in Nature. I certainly come nearer, to say the least,
to an actual and joyful intercourse with her. Every
day I have more or less communion with her, — aa
I think. At least I do not feel as if I must withdraw
out of Nature. I feel like a welcome guest. Yet,
strictly speaking, the same must be true of Nature
and of Man, our ideal is the only real. It is not the
finite and tempora^ that satisfies or concerns us in
either case.

I associate the idea of Friendship, methinks, with
the person the most foreign to me. We are attracted
toward a particular person; but no one has discovered
the laws of this attraction. When I come nearest to
that other actually, I am wont to be surprised at my
selection. It may be enough that we have met some
time, and now can never forget it. Some time or other
we paid each other this wonderful compliment, — :
looked largely, humanly, divinely on one another; and
now are fated to be acquaintances forever.^ In the case
of Nature I am not so conscious of this unsatisfied
yearning.

This may be called the profoundest analysis
of friendship that has yet been published; yet

[ 455 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

the simplest expression of the sentiment is as
suggestive. He returned to the subject the next
February, after reading Miss Shepard's " Counter-
parts," which Emerson thought might have been
written by his fanciful friend, Charles Newcomb,
in Paris : —

Its illustration of Love and Friendship is very inter-
esting, as showing how much we can know of each
other through sympathy merely, without any of the
ordinary information. You know about a person who
interests you deeply more than you can be told. A
look, a gesture, an act, which to everybody else is
insignificant, tells you more about that one than words
can. If he wished to conceal something from you, it
would be apparent. It is as if a bird told you. Your
friend designs that it shall be a secret to you. Vain
wish! You will know it, — and also his design. He
says consciously nothing about it; yet as he is neces-
sarily afPected by it, its effect is visible to you. From
this effect you infer the cause. You unconsciously
make the right supposition; no other will account for
precisely this behavior. Your knowledge exceeds the
woodcraft of the cunningest hunter. It is as if you had
a sort of trap, knowing the haunts of your game, what
lures attract it, and its track. You have foreseen how
it will behave when it is caught; and now you only
behold what you anticipated.

Sometimes from the altered manner of our friend,
which no cloak can possibly conceal, we know that
something has happened, and what it was — all the

[ 456 1

VILLAGE SKETCHES

essential particulars, though it would be a long story
to tell. You are the more sure, because in the case of
Love, effects follow their causes more inevitably, —
this being a controlling power, A friend tells all with
a look, a tone, a gesture, a presence, a friendliness.
He is present when absent.

Subtilty is here more subtly expressed than in
the novel itself, because the words of Thoreau are
more expressive than hers, and his imagination
more vivid. In November, eight years earlier, he
had like thoughts (1851): —

I love my friends very much, but I find it is no use
to go and see them. I hate them commonly when I
am near them. They belie themselves and deny me
continually, I have certain friends whom I visit
occasionally, but I commonly part from them early,
with a certain bitter-sweet sentiment. That which we
love is so mixed and entangled with what we hate in
one another, that we are more grieved and disap-
pointed — aye, and estranged from one another — by
meeting than by absence. Some men may be my ac-
quaintances merely; but one whom I have been accus-
tomed to regard, to idealize, to have dreams about, as a
friend, can never degenerate into an acquaintance. I
must know him on that higher ground, or not know
him at all. Our friend must be broad. His must be an
atmosphere coextensive with the universe, in which
we can expand and breathe. For the most part we are
smothered and stifled by one another. I go to see my

[ 457 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

friend and try his atmosphere. If our atmospheres
do not mingle, — if we repel each other strongly, — it
is of no use to stay.

Perhaps the most striking passages, after all,
— certainly the most quoted, — are those written
at some uncertain date before the publication of
the "Week" in 1849; some of which date back
even before the actual Merrimac voyage in 1839.
Alcott's diary shows that the chapter on Friend-
ship in that volume was completed in 1847, and
in that appeared the verses: —

" There's nothing in the world I know
That can escape from Love;
For every depth it goes below.
And every height above.

" Implacable is Love, —
Foes may be bought or teased
From their hostile intent;
But he goes unappeased
Who is on kindness bent."

\^illage Culture

Aug. 29, 1852. We boast that we belong to the
Nineteenth Century, and are making the most rapid
strides of any nation. But consider how little this vil-
lage does for its own culture. We have a comparatively
decent system of common schools, — schools for in-
fants only, as it were; but, excepting the half-starved

I 458 ]

VILLAGE SKETCHES

Lyceum in the winter, no schools for ourselves. It is
time that we had uncommon schools, — that we did
not leave off our education when we begin to be men.
It is time that villages were universities, and their
elder inhabitants the Fellows, with leisure — if they
are indeed so well off — to pursue liberal studies as
long as they live. Comparatively few of our townsmen
evince any interest in their own culture, however
much they may boast of the school-tax they pay. In
this country, the Village should take the place of the
Noble, who has gone by the board. It should be the
patron of the fine arts. It is rich enough; it only wants
the refinement. It can spend money enough on such
things as farmers value; but it is thought Utopian to
propose spending money for things which more intelli-
gent men know to be of far more worth.

If we live in the Nineteenth Century, why should
we not enjoy the advantages which the century has
to offer? Why should our lite be in any respect pro-
vincial? As the nobleman of cultivated taste sur-
rounds himself with whatever conduces to his culture,
— books, paintings, statuary, etc., — so let the village
do. This town of Concord, — how much has it ever
spent directly on its own culture? To act collectively
is according to the spirit of our institutions; and I am
confident that, as our circumstances are more flourish-
ing, our means are greater. New England can hire all
the wise men in the world to come and teach her, and
board them round the while, — and not be provincial
at all. That is the uncommon school we want. The
$125 which is subscribed in this town every winter

[ 459 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

for a Lyceum is better spent than any equal sum.
Instead of noblemen, let us have noble towns or vil-
lages of men. This town has just spent $16,000 for a
Town House. Suppose it had been proposed to spend
an equal sum for something which will tend far more
to refine and cultivate its inhabitants, — a Library,
for instance. We have sadly neglected our education.

It was five years after this that Concord found
public employment for Alcott, one of the most
refined and original men, who, with his daughters,
has made the name of Concord known to more
millions, the world over, than all other Concord
authors. The next year (August 9, 1853), after
selling his house to Hawthorne, with thirty acres
of land, for one thousand five hundred dollars, in
1852, he called on Thoreau, who made this note
of their conversation: —

Alcott spent the day with me yesterday. He spent
the day before with Emerson. He observed that he
there got his wine, and now had come after his venison.
Such was the compliment he paid me. The question
of a livelihood is troubling him. He knew of nothing
he could do for which men would pay him. He could
not compete with the Irish in cradling grain. His early
education had not fitted him for a clerkship. He had
offered his services to the Abolition Society, to go
about the country as their agent and speak for free-
dom; but they declined him. This is very much to

[ 460 1

VILLAGE SKETCHES

their discredit; they should have been forward to se-
cure him. Such a connection with him would confer
unexpected dignity on their enterprise. But they can-
not tolerate a man who stands by a head above them.
They require a man who will train well under them.
Consequently they have not in their employ any but
small men.

Thoreau as a Workingman {1845-47)

While I lived in the woods I did jobs about town, —
fence-building, painting, gardening, carpentering, etc.
I built six fences, — the common slat-fence for $1.50
a rod, or else I worked for $1 a day. I contracted to
build a wood-shed of no mean size for exactly six dol-
lars; and I cleared about half of that by a close calcu-
lation and swift working. The tenant wanted me to
throw in a gutter and latch; but I carried off the board
that was left over, and gave him no latch but a button.
It stands yet (1857) behind the Kettle house. Going
home to Walden with what nails were left in a flour-
bucket on my arm in a rain, I was about getting
into a hay-rigging, when my umbrella frightened the
horse, and he kicked at me over the fills [shafts],
smashed the bucket on my arm, and stretched me on
my back. But while I lay on my back (his leg being
caught over the shaft), I got up to see him sprawling
on the other side. This accident — the sudden bend-
ing of my body backward — sprained my stomach so
that I did not get quite strong there for several years;
but had to give up some fence-building and other work,
undertaken from time to time.

[ 461 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

One day a man came from the east edge of the town
and said that he wanted me to brick up a fireplace for
him. I told him I was not a mason; but he knew that
I had built my own house entirely, and would not take
no for an answer. So I went. It was three miles off,
and I walked back and forth each day, arriving early
and working as late as if I were living there. The man
was gone away most of the time; but had left some
sand dug up in his cowyard for me to make mortar
with. I bricked up a fireplace, papered a chamber,
etc., but my principal work was whitewashing ceilings.
I took my meals there, sitting down with my employer
(when he got home) and his hired men. I worked hard
there three days, charging only a dollar a day.

July, 1852. There is a coarse, boisterous, money-
making fellow, who is going to build a bank-wall under
the hill along the edge of his meadow, and he wishes
me to spend three weeks digging there with him. Now
if I do this, the community will commend me as an
industrious and hard-working man; but as I choose to
devote myself to labors that yield more real profit,
though but little money, they regard me as a loafer.
I prefer to finish my education at a different school.

Sept. 16, 1859. I am invited to take some party of
ladies or gentlemen on an excursion, — to walk or
sail, or the like; but by all kinds of evasions I omit it,
— and am thought to be rude and unaccommodating
therefor. They do not consider that the wood-path
and the boat are my studio, where I maintain a sacred
solitude, and do not admit promiscuous company. I
will see them occasionally, however, in an evening or

[ 462 ]

VILLAGE SKETCHES

at the table. They do not think of taking a child away
from its school, to go a-huckleberrying with them.
Why should not I, then, have my school and school-
hours to be respected? Ask me for a certain number of
dollars if you will, but do not ask me for my after-
noons.

Thoreau made no objection to spending four
hours of his morning, in the early December fol-
lowing, in taking a himted fugitive to a place of
safety. Here is his note of the drive with yoimg
Meriam, already described: —

X. [Meriam] was betrayed by his eyes, which had a
glaring film over them, and no serene depth into which
you could look. Said, "I know I am insane," — and
I knew it too. Inquired particularly the way to Emer-
son's, and the distance; and when I told him, said he
knew it as well as if he saw it, — wished to turn and
proceed to his house. Told me one or two things which
he wished me not to tell Sanborn. At length, when I
made a certain remark, he said, "I don't know but
you are Emerson; are you? You look somewhat like
him." He said as much two or three times, and added
once, "But then Emerson would n't lie." Finally he
put his questions to me, of Fate, etc., as if I were Emer-
son. Getting to the woods, I remarked upon them,
and he mentioned my name, but never to the end sus-
pected who his companion was. Then he "proceeded
to business, since the time was short," — and put to
me the questions he was going to put to Emerson. His

[ 463 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

insanity exhibited itself chiefly by his incessant, ex-
cited talk, scarcely allowing me to interrupt him; but
once or twice apologizing for his behavior. He also
called his manner "nervous excitement." What he
said was for the most part connected and sensible
enough. He said, among other things, that if he did
not clean his teeth when he got up, it made him sick
all the rest of the day; but he had found by late expe-
rience that when he had not cleaned his teeth for sev-
eral days, they cleaned themselves. I told him that
such was the general rule, — when from any cause we
were prevented from doing what we had commonly
thought indispensable for us to do, things cleaned or
took care of themselves.

Melvin, a Foil to Meriam

Three years before, almost to a day, Thoreau had
met George Melvin again, and thus lauds him: —

Saw little in this walk. Saw Melvin's lank, bluish-
white, black-spotted hound, and Melvin with his gun
near, going home at eve. He follows hunting, — praise
be to him! as regularly in our tame fields, as the
farmers follow farming. Persistent Genius! How I
respect him, and thank him for him ! I trust the Lord
will provide us with another Melvin when he is gone.
How good in him to follow his own bent, and not con-
tinue at the Sunday School all his days ! What a wealth
he thus becomes in the neighborhood! I thank my
stars for Melvin. I think of him with gratitude when I
am going to sleep, grateful that he exists, — that

[ 464 ]

VILLAGE SKETCHES

Melvin who is such a trial to his mother, — he is agree-
able to me, as a tinge of russet on the hillside. He is
my contemporary and neighbor. He is one tribe, I am
another, — and we are not at war. . . . How I love the
simple, reserved countrymen, my neighbors, who mind
their own business and let me alone; who never way-
laid nor shot at me (to my knowledge) when I crossed
their fields, though each one has a gun in the house.
For nearly twoscore years I have known, at a distance,
these long-suffering men, — whom I never spoke to,
who never spoke to me, — and now I feel a certain
tenderness for them, as if this long probation were but
the prelude to an eternal friendship. I am not only
grateful because Veias, and Homer, and Christ, and
Shakespeare have lived; but I am grateful for Minott
and Rice, and Melvin and Goodwin, — and Puffer
even. I see Melvin all alone, filling his sphere, in russet
suit, which no other could fill or suggest. He takes up
as much room in nature as the most famous.^

* There was a kind of humor in these remarks; but it was a good
humor. He truly felt a kindly interest ia such neighbors, and so
did they in him. Few writers have better portrayed them. They
did not misunderstand him so strangely as did Lowell the poet, and
Snider the Hegelian, and Bowen the college professor, and even
Whitman the Kosmos.

CHAPTER XIV

SLAVERY AND JOHN BROWN

It would be hard to say how early Henry Tho-
reau became concerned on the subject of slavery
in America. His friend John Brown, at the age
of twelve, when driving herds of cattle in southern
Ohio and western Virginia, for the food of ^he
United States Army in the War of 1812 against
England, swore eternal war against slavery; and
Thoreau may have hated it as a boy, because
his family and their visitors held it in aversion.
His Jones ancestors in Weston had owned a
few slaves, but the Revolution had obliterated
slaveholding in Massachusetts; the slave-trade
was held in abhorrence, and was legally piracy
after 1808, when John Thoreau came of age; and
in his merchandising he had no temptations to
trade with slaveholders, as the kinsmen of his
mother's friend, Mrs. Brooks, the daughter of a
Concord Merrick, were doing in South Carolina
when Henry was born. Soon after Garrison opened
his agitation in Boston, and began to edit the
"Liberator," in 1831, a Woman's Anti-Slavery
society was organized in Concord, of which Mrs.

[ 466 ]

SLAVERY AND JOHN BROWN

Colonel Ward, widow of a Revolutionary Boston
officer, became an active member, and also, after
1832, an intimate of both branches of the Tho-
>vreau family. Her daughter. Miss Prudence Ward,
aunt of the "gentle boy," Ellen Sewall, was also
a member, and a zealous botanist, artist, and
letter-writer, corresponding with the Thoreau sis-
ters, and instructing them in botany. When Mrs.
Ward died in 1844, one of the aunts of Henry
Thoreau seems to have written this notice of her
philanthropies : —

Mrs. Ward has for many years been a resident of
Concord, and has greatly endeared herself to many
friends by the urbanity of her manners, the kindness
of her heart, and that candor and charity which, while
it passed over the defects of her associates as things not
to be observed, at the same time sought with eagerness
the bright sides to their characters. This made us
always feel safe and happy in her society.^

* A most amiable trait, which was not always found among her
friends the Thoreaus and Miss Mary Emerson (then Hving at
Concord, and perhaps also a member of this Anti-Slavery Society).
Its president was Mrs. Brooks, the mother of George Brooks (after-
wards Congressman and judge), who had persuaded Emerson to
write his letter to President Van Buren, and to give his First of
August Address on West India Emancipation, in 1844. It contin-
ued in existence till Lincoln's final Emancipation, and at Mrs.
Brooks's table I dined with Phillips, Garrison, and most of the
distinguished fugitive slaves who reached Concord. The rescued
Shadrach, in 1851, was aided by her, and left Concord by night for
Canada, wearing one of her husband's discarded hats, and possibly

[ 467 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

The eulogy of Mrs. Ward went on: —

She had a heart full of compassion for the suffering
and the tried, which was the cause of her deep interest
in the deeply injured, weary, heart-broken slave. For
many years she has been a member of our Society,
always aiding us by her purse, her sympathies and her
labors. She uniformly, and consistently stood by the
principles of the old pioneer Society; and we feel that
indeed a great void is made in our much thinned
ranks.

This implies that the Concord society was
purely Garrisonian, and had resisted the argu-
ments of votihg abolitionists like Whittier, Bir-
ney, and Elizur Wright. This may have been
one reason why Thoreau, as he came to the voting
age, in 1838, abstained from voting; but it was
more likely to have been the result of his own
strict logic. So long as Massachusetts, even pas-
sively, sustained negro slavery, Thoreau would
neither vote nor pay taxes. He had in col-
lege probably been an antWackson Whig, like
John Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster, and Caleb
Cushing, who all opposed slavery in Congress,
— as, indeed, the whole party in State Conven-
tion did in 1837. He early explained his own
ground of opposition to the pro-slavery govern-

an overcoat (for it was winter), and was driven in a carriage by her
neighbor, Bigelow, the blacksmith.

[ 468 ]

SLAVERY AND JOHN BROWN

ment in his "Civil Disobedience" of 1847, which
Miss Peabody first printed in her "^Esthetic
Papers," along with papers by Emerson, Haw-
thorne, and S. G. Ward, in 1848. Thoreau is
said to have rung the bell .for Emerson's Eman-
cipation Address of 1844; and he was active in
making arrangements for the memorial service for
John Brown, on the afternoon of his execution,
December 2, 1859. It was soon after this that he
aided the escape of Meriam to Canada, as he had
that of several fugitive slaves in former years.

In his place as Curator of the Concord Lyceum
in 1842 and later, he promoted free discussion
of the slave question in public, and helped organ-
ize the band of young members of the Lyceum
that voted down the conservative seniors of the
village who strove to keep Wendell Phillips from
addressing the fortnightly Lyceum on Slavery.
The story is an interesting one, and is not too well
known. It exists in letters chiefly of the Thoreau
families, and two or three of these are by Helen
and Maria Thoreau, and Miss Prudence Ward.

The Thoreau Family and ihe Concord Lyceum
Soon after his return from the voyage on the
Merrimac in 1839, Henry was chosen Secretary
of the Village Lyceum, and held that or a similar

[ 469 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

place for five or six years, lecturing himself every
year. When in 1842 it was announced at the de-
bating session, in alternate weeks, that Wen-
dell Phillips would lecture the next week, an
elderly member, John Keyes, moved as a resolve,
"That as this Lyceum is established for social
and mutual improvement, the introduction of
the vexed and disorganizing question of AboU-
tionism or Slavery should be kept out of it." The
motion failed, and Phillips lectured as announced.
The same winter Mr. Alcott returned from
England with his English friends Charles Lane
and Henry Wright, who spent the winter and
spring with the Alcotts, in the Hosmer cottage,
before going in May to open their rural Elysium
at Harvard. Writing to her brother, George
Ward, in New York (December 8, 1842), Miss
Ward said: —

We find the Englishmen very agreeable. We took
tea with them at Mrs. Brooks's, and they have passed
one evening here at Mrs. Thoreau's (in the Parkman
house). They and Mr. Alcott held a talk at the Marl-
boro Chapel in Boston, Sunday evening. Doubtless
you, George, would consider them "clean daft"; for
they are as like Mr. Alcott in their views as strangers
from a foreign land well can be. I should like to have
them in this vicinity. It makes a pleasant variety (to
say no more) to have these different thinkers near us;

[ 470 ]

SLAVERY AND JOHN BROWN

and Mr. Lane, we are all agreed in liking to hear talk.
Our Lyceum has opened, and last evening we had
"The Philosophy of Slavery."

This may have been the title of Phillips's lec-
ture. At any rate, he spoke that winter, in his
usual quiet manner, but uttering extreme opin-
ions; favoring disunion as the best antidote
for slavery, and denouncing the Constitution of
1787 as the protector of that national curse. Be-
ing invited to lecture the next winter (January,
17, 1844), the same old citizen. Squire Keyes,
moved that he be asked to choose some other
topic than Slavery; alleging that his sentiments
of last winter had been "vile, pernicious, and
abominable." The Lyceum, well filled with young
people, voted to hear him on his own subject.
He came, and spoke for an hour and a half, "a
magnificent burst of eloquence from beginning
to end," as one of his hearers (possibly Miss
Helen Thoreau) wrote in the "Liberator." H.
M. went on: —

He charged the sin of slavery upon the religion of
the country, with its 20,000 pulpits. The Church had
charged Mr. Garrison with being an infidel to its
teachings, — and there was some truth in it. "I love
my Master too well to be anything but infidel to the
religion of my country." Of the State he said, "The

[471 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

curse of every honest man should be upon its Consti-
tution. Could I say to JeflFerson, Hancock, and Adams,
after the experience of the past fifty years, 'Look at
the fruits of your work' — they would bid me crush
the parchment under my feet."

This was too much for the civil-suited conserv-
atism of Concord, and an evening was appointed
to discuss and censure the orator.

The mover of the vote of censure [the same John
Keyes, says H. M.] talked an hour quoting St. Paul
about "leading captive silly women, etc."

Another senior, Samuel Hoar (father of the late
Senator), occupied an hour more with like sever-
ity, saying, "It requires not a little arrogance in
a stripling to assert such monstrous doctrines."
He complimented Phillips on his oratory, but sol-
emnly warned the young persons present against
such exciting utterances. As he went on, he kept
asking, "What would our young Cicero say to
this.? How would he explain this? " etc.

Phillips, who had been warned by the Thoreaus,
Colonel Whiting, or some other abolitionist, of the
attack to be made on him, was quietly present in
the back part of the old vestry of the First Parish
Meeting-House of Whiting, Emerson, and Dr.
Ripley, and now stepped forward. "Would the
gentleman like an answer here? and now? " That

[ 472 ]

SLAVERY AND JOHN BROWN

was not the gentleman's wish at all, — but there
was no help against it. Phillips said: —

I agree with the last speaker that this is a seri-
ous subject; otherwise I should not have devoted my
whole life to it. Stripling as I am, I but echo the
voice of the ages, — of our venerable fathers, — of
statesmen, poets, philosophers. . . . The gentleman
has painted the dangers to life, liberty, and happiness
that might be the conseqnence of doing right; the
dangers he dreads are now legalized at the South. I
would not so blaspheme God as to doubt that I shall
be safe in obeying Him. Treading the dust of statute
law beneath my feet, I enter the Holy of Holies, and
there I find written, "Thou shalt not deliver unto his
master the servant which is escaped from his master
unto thee; he shall dwell with you, even among you."
I throw myself on the bosom of Infinite Wisdom.

Our pulpits are silent. Who ever heard our subject
presented, before this movement began, of the silly
women and the striplings? The first speaker [Keyes]
accused me of ambitious motives. Had I been ambi-
tious, I should have chosen an easier path to fame. Yet
I would say to you, my young friends, who have just
been cautioned against excitement, and advised to fold
your hands in selfish ease, — "Throw yourself upon
the altar of some noble cause! enthusiasm is the life of
the soul." To rise in the morning only to eat and drink
and gather gold, is a life not worth living.

This expressed the aspirations of Henry Tho-
reau, his sisters, and his younger friends. They

[ 473 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

applauded the orator and voted to hear him
again on the same theme. He came in March,
1845, a dozen years before John Brown was first
seen and heard in Concord, and Thoreau re-
ported both for the pubhc press. But Miss Ward,
who had gone to visit a nephew at Spencer in
1845, must be informed of the great event; and
so Helen Thoreau wrote to tell her : ^

I wish to remind you of the Anti-Slavery Society at
the Tabernacle in New York, on the 6th of May. You
must not fail to attend; and I hope to meet you at the
New England Convention. Can you not visit here
about that time?

Aunt Maria has kept you informed of our contro-
versy with the Lyceum. A hard battle, — but victory
at last; next winter we shall have undoubtedly a free
Lyceum. Mr. Emerson says that words cannot ex-
press his admiration for the lecture of Mr. Phillips.
Did you receive the paper ("Liberator") containing
Henry's article about it?

I am glad that you liked the Hutchinsons. One of
our evening meetings last May was closed with their
Emancipation Song, — the whole audience rising and
joining in the last stanza. Ten of the Hutchinson
family sung. George Thatcher happened to be present,
and was highly delighted. We are making great efforts
to get them here in Concord. I long to see you in Con-

* This is one of the few letters of Helen Thoreau's that have been
preserved. She died in June, 1849, not quite thirty-seven years
old. More of Sophia's exist.

[ 474 ]

MATJA THOREAU

SLAVERY AND JOHN BROWN

cord again. We always have something stirring here.
Aunt Maria will of course tell you all the news.

Maria Thoreau, the last survivor of the Ameri-
can branch of the family that retained the name,
died at the house of her kinsman George Thatch-
er, just mentioned, in 1881. She and her two chief
correspondents. Miss Ward and Miss Laura Har-
ris, kept up a lively interchange of letters for
some forty years, in which Henry Thoreau was
often mentioned. He shared some of their opin-
ions, but not all; and this mention of the Ward
family, with branches in New York and in Spen-
cer, near Worcester, will explain allusions to them
in Thoreau's letters.

At this date (1845-46) the early Journals had
mostly been destroyed, and the Fugitive-Slave
Act of 1850 had not been passed, nor had Daniel
Webster given his unlucky March speech in that
year, which so injured his reputation as a far-
seeing statesman. Three weeks before he made
that speech (February 15, 1850) he had written
to Dr. Fiu-ness at Philadelphia: —

From my earliest youth I have regarded slavery as a
great moral and political evil. I think it unjust,
founded only in superior power, a standing and per-
manent conquest of the stronger over the weaker. All
pretences of defending it on the ground of difference

[ 475 ]

HENEY DAVID THOREAU

of races I have ever condemned. ' If the black race is
weaker, that is a reason against, not for, its subjection
and oppression. Slavery is a continual and permanent
violation of human rights.

The opinions, and even the expression of them
by John Brown and by Thoreau did not much
differ from these of Webster. But he went on to
say:—

In my judgment, confusion, conflict, embittered
controversy, violence, bloodshed, and civil war would
only rivet the chains of slavery the more strongly.

This was a short-sighted view; it was not that
of John Quincy Adams, nor was it that of Tho-
reau or of John Brown; or of those few men
who secretly supported Brown and gave him
the money and the arms to make his attack on
this "permanent violation of human rights," this
"subjection and oppression of a weaker race by
a stronger," which Webster abhorred.

Webster's policy was one of despair and com-
promise; that of Thoreau, of Brown, and his
friends, was a policy of hope and faith; and they
understood, as few Americans seemed then to
understand, the force of a noble example, which,
in Brown's case, converted more men and women
to his view of slavery than all the orators and
moralists and novelists had been able to convert

[476]

SLAVERY AND JOHN BROWN

in the thirty years since Andrew Jackson came
to the Presidency. That miracle happened which
Emerson had chronicled, in the liberation of
Europe from the fetters of the Holy AlKance, —
"The astonished Muse finds thousands at her side."

And the "Touchstone" of Allingham, first made
famous by Emerson in one of his eulogies on
Brown, pointed symbolically to the same truth
of human nature more sharply: —

"A man there came, — whence none could tell, —
Bearing a Touchstone in his hand:
He tested all things in the land

By its unerring speU.

A thousand transformations rose

From fair to foul, from foul to fair:
The royal crown he did not spare,

Nor scorn the beggar's clothes.

"Of heirloom jewels, prized so much.

Were many changed to chips and clods;
Nay — even statues of the gods
Crumbled beneath its touch.
Then angrily the people cried,

'The loss outweighs the profit far, —
Our goods suffice us as they are;
We will not have them tried.'

"But though they slew him with the sword, /
And in the fire the touchstone burned.
Its doing could not be o'ertumed.
Its undoings restored.

[ 477 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

And when, to stop all future harm.

They strewed its ashes on the breeze,
They little guessed each grain of these

Conveyed the perfect charm."

In his essay on "Civil Disobedience" (1846),
Thoreau had said, philosophically foreshadow-
ing Brown, and setting Webster aside by his own
principles: —

Statesmen are apt to forget that the world is not
governed by policy and expediency. They speak of
moving society, — but have no resting-place without
it. Webster never goes behind government, and so
cannot speak with authority about it. Truth is always
in harmony with herself; and is not concerned chiefly
to reveal the justice that may consist with wrong-
doing. For eighteen hundred years the New Testament
has been written: yet where is the legislator who has
wisdom and practical talent enough to avail himself
of the light it sheds on the science of legislation?

Such a legislator, proclaiming his law from the
dungeon and the scaffold, Thoreau at last saw
appear in Brown, who said to the court which
sentenced him: —

I see a book kissed here which I suppose to be the
Bible, or at least the New Testament. That teaches
me that "whatsoever I would that men should do unto
me, I should do even so unto them." It teaches me
further to "remember them in bonds, as bound with

[ 478 ]

SLAVERY AND JOHN BROWN

them." I endeavored to act up to that instruction.
I say that I am yet too young to understand that God
is any respecter of persons, I believe that to have in-
terfered, as I have done, in behalf of His despised poor,
was not wrong, but right.

To his questioners, the rulers of the slave-
cursed State of Virginia, he had, weeks before,
repeated the warning which Jefferson had given
them from Paris, at the close of the eighteenth
century; that they must emancipate their slaves,
and not wait for Abraham Lincoln to do it for
them, by force: —

You had better — all you people at the South —
prepare yourselves for a settlement of this negro ques-
tion, — that must come up for settlement sooner than
you are prepared for it. The sooner you are prepared
for it the better. You may dispose of me very easily;
I am nearly disposed of now. But this question is still
to be settled; the end of that is not yet.

It came even quicker than Brown himself, or
Lincoln, or Thoreau, had imagined; though Tho-
reau did not live to see it. In less than four years
after Brown's death, emancipation was decreed
by the head of the nation, and in less than ten
years the Union, for which Brown fought, was
reconstituted on the basis of emancipation, as
Adams had foretold.

[ 479 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

Although Thoreau had rendered many services
to the cause of human freedom for many years,
and had looked after more than one fugitive slave
who made his way to Concord, either for escape
to Canada, or for enlightening his countrymen,
of both races, on the actual character of Ameri-
can slavery, yet his chief service was in the in-
stant and eflfective championship given to the
slandered character of Brown, when his foray
in Virginia met with the immediate and inevi-
table defeat which Brown's own providential
mismanagement occasioned. Along with Emer-
son and Phillips, Thoreau saw at once what
this startling demonstration signified. They had
known nothing of Brown's secret and long-cher-
ished plans for making slave property unsafe;
but they knew what he had done in Kansas and
Missouri, and what the capacity and mood of the
man were; and they felt sxire, as I did, that the
nation would respond, in no short time, to such
heroic and unselfish mood. It did so respond be-
fore his death, and still more signally during the
early Civil War. The John Brown Song, a gen-
uine creation of the camp in Boston Harbor, was
sung in Boston, where I heard it, in the late sum-
mer of 1861, and by the marching soldiers of a
regiment commanded by the son of Daniel Web-

[ 480 ]

SLAVERY AND JOHN BROWN

ster; and before Brown had been two years in
his grave among the mountains, Mrs. Howe's
"Battle Hymn of the Republic" had translated
his meaning into those memorable verses that
have gone in music roxmd the world. Thoreau
had said at Framingham in 1854: —

The law will never make men free; it is men who
have got to make the law free. They are the lovers
of law and order who observe the law when the gov-
ernment breaks it.

Five years later, having come to the acquaint-
ance of John Brown, Henry said to a far wider
audience than he had ever addressed before: —

No man has appeared in America as yet who loved
his fellow-man so well and treated him so tenderly.
He Uved for him. He took up his life and laid it down
for him. He has liberated many thousands of slaves.
North and South.

Of the execution he added : —

I foresee the time when the painter will paint that
scene, no longer going to Rome for a subject; the poet
will sing it; the historian record it; and, with the Land-
ing of the Pilgrims and the Declaration of Independ-
ence, it will be the ornament of some future National
Gallery, when at least the present form of slavery shall
be no more here. We shall then be at Uberty to weep
for Captain Brown. Then, and not till then, we will
take our revenge.

[481 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

How tenderly Thoreau himself could treat Lis
unhappy fellow men was seen by Moncure Con-
way (that generous Virginian who emancipated
his own slaves) in the second interview he ever
had with the Concord hermit. It was in 1853,
when Conway was opening his acquaintance with
Concord and its men of genius. He had made an
appointment to walk in the woods with Thoreau,
but something had happened in the interval: —

I found the Thoreaus [at their new house near the
railroad station] agitated by the arrival of a fugitive
from Virginia, who had come to their door at day-
break. Thoreau took me to a room where his excellent
sister, Sophia, was ministering to the fugitive, who
recognized me as one he had seen in Virginia. He was
alarmed, but his fears passed into delight when, after
talking with him about our County, I certified his
genuineness. I observed the tender and lowly devo-
tion of Thoreau to the African. He now and then drew
near to the trembling man, and with a cheerful voice
bade him feel at home, and have no fear that any
power should again wrong him. That whole day he
mounted guard over the fugitive, for it was a slave-
hunting time. The next day the fugitive was got off
to Canada, and I enjoyed my first walk with Thoreau.

When Conway visited Concord in late July
immediately after the Union reverse at Bull
Run, the town was sad over the defeat of its first

[ 482 ]

SLAVERY AND JOHN BROWN

volunteers, and, as he said, "optimism had fled
even from the home of Emerson. Thoreau, sadly
out of health, was the only cheerful man in Con-
cordia; he was in a state of exaltation about the
moral regeneration of the nation."

Thoreau had lately returned from the Minne-
sota journey, a little better in health; and three
weeks later (August 19) he visited the Ricket-
sons at New Bedford, driving and walking about
the old haunts there for five days. Then Mr.
Ricketson returned his visit, for three days, walk-
ing with Thoreau to the Battle-Ground and to
Waiden, and bathing with him in those hallowed
waters. Thoreau soon grew weaker, and Waiden
was too far for a walk; but he drove there with
Sophia on a fine September day in the first year
of the war, of which she wrote, "While I sat
sketching, Henry gathered grapes from a vine
dropping its fruit into the green waters which
gently laved its roots."

Gradually he bade farewell to all his outdoor
activities as the stern winter came on, without
attracting him to a milder climate; and he gave
up even his active interest in the freedom of the
slave, — feeling confident, apparently, that since
the demonstration of John Brown, the cause of
the oppressed was in sure hands, as most of those

[ 483 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

who had aided that martyr came early to believe.
Of this, Chamiing says: —

For Captain John Brown, from the first, he had mi-
divided respect and esteem; nor had that devoted man
at his death a sincerer mourner. We took our usual
walk after his affecting funeral ceremony in Concord,
and the cocJ twilight cast its reproach over that trag-
edy, as there fell on the events that followed a twi-
light of terror, succeeded by a resurrection of peaceful
and serene freedom. Thoreau had never faltered, but
lived and worked a faithful friend to the American
slave.

CHAPTER XV

DEATH AND LITERARY REBIRTH OF THOREAU

To those who really knew Thoreau, his last
illness and death revealed the profound strength
and sweet earnestness of his character. Well as
we had observed the foundation of moral great-
ness on which it was built, it required the crisis
in Virginia which preceded and brought on the
Civil War to show all its virtue, which a certain
drapery of paradox and levity had veiled with
provoking contradictions. With the eye of a seer
and the voice of a prophet, he placed himself at
the bar beside his heroic friend, and told the
startled world the truth of the situation, and
the doom of a national and commercial crime,
which at last had come up for sentence and exe-
cution. He stood also beside Abraham Lincoln
in those revelations of divine justice which con-
trast so forcibly with the political sagacity and
expedients in which that statesman's genius was
so fertile, and which he was so ready to abandon
in moments of divine illumination. Said Lincoln to
Moncure Conway in January, 1862, when he was
urged to proclaim emancipation, as Fremont had:

[ 485 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

The position in which I am placed brings me into
some knowledge of opinions in all parts of the country,
and of many different kinds of people; and it appears
to me that the great masses of this country care little
about the negro, and are anxious only for victory.

Adding, however: —

We shall need all the anti-slavery feeling in the
country, and more; you can go home and try to bring
the people to your views; and you may say anything
you like about me, if that will help. Don't spare me!

With a smile. Then he added, very gravely: —

When the hour comes for dealing with slavery, I
trust I will be willing to do my duty though it cost
my life. And, gentlemen, lives will be lost.

This remark prefigured that stern passage in
one of his last pubHc addresses, when he said: —

K God wills that this mighty scourge of war con-
tinue until all the wealth piled by the bondman's two
hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be
sunk; and until every drop of blood drawn with the
lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword,
— as was said three thousand years ago, so still it
must be said, "The judgijaents of the Lord are true'
and righteous altogether."

Nothing said or written by Thoreau or John
Brown is more tragic or portentous than this.

[ 486 ]

DEATH AND REBIRTH

Yet each of the three, on the background of such
gloomy imaginations, traced the most tender
sentiments and the most humorous pictures of
ordinary life. They are three striking and search-
ing examples of moral genius, perhaps the most
profound that ever appeared on our American
stage; yet each of them was looked upon, by un-
observant or indiscriminate contemporaries, as
trifling, or merely eccentric, persons.

Toward the close of his remarkable funeral
oration on Thoreau, Emerson, who insisted that
the ceremony should take place in the village
church, — as Hawthorne's had, and as his own and
Channing's afterward did, — said with great truth :
"The country knows not yet, or in the least
part, how great a son it has lost." Time has
supplied that knowledge; and the singular dis-
paragement of Thoreau's genius which began with
the educated seniors of his own village, and was
spread and exaggerated by the alumni of his own
college, — Holmes, Lowell, J. F. Clarke, Alger, and
others, — had begun to cease before his lamented
death. The editor of the "Atlantic Monthly,"
Mr. Fields, who had succeeded to the able but
rather indolent editorship of J. R. Lowell, had a
publisher's instinct for what his readers would
like; and persuaded Thoreau, in his long illness, to

[ 487 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

promise him those later essays which began to
come out in the year of his death. They had been
written earlier, but were buried in the rich luxuri-
ance of his thirty volumes of the Journals. He
now took them up anew, and with patient indus-
try prepared them to refute, after his decease,
the ungenerous and undiscriminating verdicts
that had been registered against him, and con-
tinued for some years longer. This accounts
for the uncalled-for sharpness of Ellery Chan-
ning's note to me, in the year following our friend's
death (November, 1863), in which he said: —

My plan is to prepare a sketch of Mr. Thoreau's
life, — perhaps to make a book of 300 pages. I sup-
pose I could complete it, so that it might be printed
in 1864. . . . That justice can be done to our deceased
brother by me is something I do not think of. But to
you and me is entrusted the care of his immediate fame.
I feel that my part is not yet done. My sketch must
only serve as a note and advertisement that such a
man lived, — that he did brave work, which must yet
be given to the world. In the midst of all the cold
and selfish men who knew this brave and devoted
scholar and genius, why should you not be called on
to make some sacrifice, — even if it be to publish my
sketch? There might be persons who, if they were
to surmise that we two had this object in view, would
hire some literary jackal to dig up and befoul our
brother's corpse. With this, then, let us conclude:

[ 488 ]

.DEATH AND REBIRTH

About January 1st, expect my "copy," — with no
shadow of patronage or request in it, but your own
and mine.

Although I saw no occasion for so much as-
perity, and my turn was to avoid controversies,
yet, as I had a new weekly then at my disposal
(the "Boston Commonwealth") with room for
literary matter of some extent, I assented to this
proposal, and began to print the manuscript of
my friend, in whose house I had lived for three
years, and who afterwards lived ten years in
mine, with much amity and confidence.

This went on for several weeks, and the early
chapters began to attract some attention. I re-
member, in particular that Charles Sumner, then
in the midst of his great career in the Senate, at
the head of the Committee on Foreign Affairs,
and in the crisis of the Civil War, expressed a real
interest in the biography. But in some pique or
caprice, characteristic of his literary work, Chan-
ning soon withdrew the manuscript, and its print-
ing was not renewed for several years. Then it was
taken up by Miss Alcott's publisher, Thomas Niles,
of Roberts Brothers, and completed in a volume
which was thought by the publisher not to be so
thick as the custom of booksellers required; and
he requested the author, through me, to give him

[ 489 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

two or three more chapters. To do this, Chan-
ning resorted to an odd expedient. He had ar-
ranged with his friends Emerson and Thoreau,
twenty years earlier (in 1852), to prepare a manu-
script made up from the conversations and Jour-
nals of the three friends, which should present the
table-talk of the few past years, and might be
printed if, when completed, it seemed best to
make it public. This was Channing's request,
and at his instance Emerson gave him a copy of
portions of his Journals previous to 1852, and
Thoreau allowed him to copy passages from such
of the Thoreau Journals as were then in exist-
ence.^ From this manuscript, never completed,
and to the publication of which Emerson never

' I speak in this matter from positive knowledge, having had in
my possession the manuscript volume in Emerson's and Channing's
handwriting, which contained passages copied by Emerson himself
(mostly), but sometimes by Channing, from the original Emerson
Journals of 1843-48, and a few others. It also had remarks made
in conversation by Emerson, copied in by Channing, and verses and
epigrams. I have also the letters, on Chaiming's side, relating to
this proposed book, — "Country Walking," — but not Emerson's
replies. Those, if preserved, are probably in the large mass of Em-
erson's letters, of which comparatively few have been printed,
except the correspondence with Carlyle, Sterling, S. G. Ward,
and Thoreau. Occasionally Emerson spoke of this matter to me; but
at a time when his memory for recent events was much impaired;
and though I think he took an active and decisive part in suppress-
ing the publication of the book, it is quite likely that he valued
some parts of the manuscript, which came to me after his death,
but with no comment from him.

[ 490 ]

DEATH AND REBIRTH

consented, Channing took "copy" enough to
make eighty pages in my reprint of his book in
1902, and sent it to be embodied in the midst of
his first edition of 1873, — but without indicat-
ing which of the three walkers was the spokes-
man. I supplied the omission, partly by conjec-
ture, and indexed the whole work in the second
edition.

Although this capricious mode of treating his
biographical subject confused the order of the
book, and lessened its value, yet this volume of
1873, by the merit of its descriptions and the
care with which selections were made from the
then unknown pages of the Journals, has become
the indispensable guide to all who would get to
the secret of the charm which Thoreau exercises
over a constantly increasing number, and a bet-
tering quality of readers. For the careful, logical
analysis of Thoreau's mental and moral quali-
ties, no book is better or fairer than Mr. Salt's
first of two biographies, published by Bentley at
London in 1890.

Channing's pathetic description of his friend's
last illness has often been quoted, and a few lines
may be cited here: —

No man had a better unfinished life. His anticipa-
tions were vastly rich; more reading was to be done in

[491 1

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

Shakespeare and the Bible; more choice apple-trees to
be set in uncounted springs; for his chief principle was
faith in all things, thoughts and times. He ^pected,
as he said, to live for forty years. . . . With an unfalter-
ing trust in God's mercies, and never deserted by his
good genius, he most bravely and unsparingly passed
down the inclined plane of a terrible malady, — work-
ing steadily at the completing of his papers, to his last
hours, or so long as he could hold the pencil in his
trembling fingers. He retired into his inner mind, —
into that unknown, unconscious, profound world of
existence, where he excelled; there he held inscrutable
converse with just men made perfect, absorbed in
himself.

From a different and nearer point of view, —
though few were nearer than Channing, — his
sister Sophia wrote, a month before his death :i —

Since the autumn he has been gradually failing, and
is now the embodiment of weakness; still, he enjoys
seeing his friends; and every bright hour he devotes to
his manuscripts, which he is preparing for publication.
For many weeks he has spoken only in a faint whisper.
Henry accepts this dispensation with such childlike
trust, and is so happy, that I feel as if he were being
translated, rather than dying in the ordinary way of
mbrtals. It was not possible to be sad in his presence.
No shadow of gloom attaches to anything connected
with my precious brother. His whole life impresses me
as a grand miracle. I always thought him the most
1 [Thoreau died May 6, 1862.]
[ 492 }

DEATH AND REBIRTH

upright man I ever knew; and now it is a pleasure to
praise him.

With this conception and this memory of
Henry Thoreau, it was with indignation that his
family and friends read the misconceptions of
him published by Lowell and others. Time has
set them all aside, — as will be seen by citing
them: —

He was not by nature an observer; he had no power
of generalization from outside of himself; he discovered
nothing; neither his attention nor his genius was of the
spontaneous kind; intellectual selfishness becomes al-
most painful in reading him. An itch of originality
infects his thought and style. He confounded physical
with spiritual remoteness from men. He had not a
healthy mind; his whole life was a search for the
doctor. He had no humor, and was a sorry logician.
His shanty life was a mere impossibility. He was a
skulker.

All this absurdity is Lowell's, with the excep-
tion of the last insult, which was the ignorant
assumption of Stevenson.

Vrime and the verdict of mankind, "after some
time be past," settle many questions about which
men dispute. St. Augustine said, " Securus judi-
cal orhis terrarum"; the round world has taken
Thoreau's case in hand; and while his country-

[ 493 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

men have printed or mean to print every word
he wrote or said, if they can get a copy of it, he
has been translated in bits into many foreign
languages, and is an essential chapter in that
practical-mystical philosophy miscalled Transcen-
dentalism. Few writers have seen the invisible
more clearly, or transcribed it more legibly into
the language of common life. He was a student
in Emerson's school, a brother to Emerson's
thought; but never an imitator of him or of other
men. The distinction between these two was
justly stated by the elder brother, when Emer-
son said: —

In reading Thoreau, I find the same thoughts, the
same spirit that is in me; but he takes a step beyond,
and illustrates by excellent images, that which I should
have conveyed by a sleepy generalization. He has
muscle, and ventures on and performs feats which I am
forced to decline. 'T is as if I went into a gymnasium,
and saw youths leap and climb and swing, with a force
unapproachable, though their feats are only a continua-
tion of my initial grapplings and jumps.

A point which is apt to be overlooked in por-
traying the Concord authors was yet an essen-
tial feature of their individual characters — their
effect on each other by reason of their daily inter-
course. It modified in each the otherwise too per-

[ 494 ]

DEATH AND REBIRTH

sonal quality of his intellect; and when they were
separated for a long interval, that good efifect
was in some degree lost. Emerson himself points
out the efifect Alcott had upon him when he says
in his Journal of 1857: —

Alcott is good as a lens, or mirror, — a beautiful
susceptibility, every impression on which is to be ac-
counted for, and until accounted for, registered as an
addition to our catalogue of natural facts. It needs one
acquainted with the lens by frequent use to make al-
lowance for defects; but 't is the best instrument I ever
met with.

What Emerson acquired thus from Alcott was
more than Alcott derived from him; and it is
quite possible that the same was as true of Tho-
reau and of Channing; for Emerson had greater
powers of assimilation than these younger and
more wilful friends. It was even more true in the
relation between Emerson and Carlyle.

However he came by it, the reading world soon
discovered for itself a forcible quality in Tho-
reau which could not have been learned from
Emerson, because it did not exist even in that
rich and varied intellect. His humor was not ex-
actly Emerson's humor; his accuracy went be-
yond Emerson's; his curiosity and his patience
went beyond Emerson's. His conception of beauty

[ 495 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

was perhaps more profound, yet his taste was not
so perfect; his relation to music, and, in a general
way, to the objects of the five senses, was keener
and more intimate: for he saw and heard and
tasted, touched and smelt with a greater sensi-
tiveness. Possibly this accounts for his more pro-
voking censoriousness; for it was this defect that
threw him so much and so early into opposition
to the world of men around him. He needed more
than most to remember that wise maxim, —

" Men should be taught as though you taught them not,
And things mikno:wn proposed as things forgot."

Particularly he needed to act upon this hint in a
community of which intolerance was a chief and
profound characteristic. It was in excess even in
the real urbanity of Thoreau's nature — a qual-
ity in which Emerson far excelled him. Will and
affection — two qualities that, where they exist
strongly, are wont to polarize each other, or else
to double the force of each — reigned alternately
in Thoreau's nature; and their interaction ac-
counts for those pathetic seasons when he felt
estranged from those few superior persons with
whom he formed leagues of friendship. With
all his philanthropy, and his acute sense of jus-
tice, he was apt to be exclusive; as when he said,
"Nature meant kindly by us when she made our

[ 496 ]

DEATH AND REBIRTH

brothers few." And he meant kindly by man-
kind when he did not expect them to come too
near. He was not so great an admirer of Bacon
as of Raleigh;' yet what Bacon said of philan-
thropy must have pleased him, for he exemplified
it in action: —

I take Goodness in this sense — the affecting of the
weal of men; which is that the Grecians call Philan-
thropia; and the word "humanity," as it is used, is a
Uttle too light to express it. Goodness I call the habit,
and goodness of nature the inclination. This, of all
virtues and dignities of the mind, is the greatest, being
the character of the Deity: and without it man is a
busy, mischievous, wretched thing, no better than a
kind of vermin.

Having this quality, and beiiig, indeed, a "uni-
versal lover of mankind," the human race found
it out, and began to reciprocate in kind. They
read him more and more, because they found
that he cared for them too much to flatter them.
Hence what I call his literary rebirth. When the
critics, who are apt to fancy that literature exists
by their patronage (a superstition as rife as any-
where in the Cambridge of the "North Ameri-
can Review"), thought they were giving Thoreau,
at his death, his proper place, the rest of the
world said to itself, "We will look into this;

[ 497 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

there is something about this writer that seems
to be attractive"; and they read him all the more
for this dispraise. He is now probably more read
by the unlearned, and more appreciated by the
learned, than ever before. My purpose in this
volume has been to show how he cooperated in
his own posthumous fame; how he built himself
up in literature from boyhood, and that without
becoming a pedant, or trying to form a school,
or even a class. Along with this conception of him
may go likewise what I personally feel, that there
was a religious and a moral element in his nature
which awaits the future for its full development,
as Channing intimates in one of his final pages: —

Possibly the future may determine that our village
life, imknown and unnoticed, without name and in-
fluence in the present, was essential and vital, — as
were the realities he affected, the immutable truths he
taught. Endowed with unusual force and sagacity, if
he did not shine in public council, or lead the State, he
yet defended the right, and was not the idle spectator
of wrong and oppression. He showed that the private
man can be a church and state and law unto himself.
In a possible New England, he may stand for the type
of coming men, who shall invent new forms and truer
modes of mortal society.

It must have been of his vanished friend, too,
that this poet was musing, when he wrote in his

[ 498 ]

DEATH AND REBIRTH

colloquial poem "The Wanderer," of this rural
Scholar: —

"Be his the Good to teach, more than the Old;
Revolving new society, new laws.
Where'er the face of things smiles or grows sad.
While far below, beyond, the sandy lake
Bears her retreating skies, and clouds the earth, —
The Scholar gleans, his f aithf id eye profoimd
To read the secret in each thing he sees, —
To love, if not to know."

There is an early poem of Thoreau's, without
date, and which few of his friends had seen until
after his death, when Sophia gave it to me, along
with others, for printing in the "Boston Common-
wealth" in the autumn of 1863. Upon showing it
in print to Marston Watson, of Plymouth, who
had married the "Maiden in the East" (Miss
Mary Russell), he wrote me that it had been cop-
ied by her into a collection of verses made by her
while she lived in Concord, or soon after, — he
thought as early as 1843. If so, it must have had
reference to his first residence with the Emerson
family, and his leaving there before going to reside
for a few months in the family of William Emerson
at Staten Island, in the spring of 1843; to which
he had never so intimate a relation as with the
Emersons in Concord.

But it is a symbolical poem, like many that he
[ 499 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

wrote, both finished and unfinished; and may well
portray incidents in his whole Voyage, of Life,
viewed by him imaginatively as his wont ever was.
I called it, when first giving it to the public, —

The Departure

I

In this roadstead I have ridden.
In this covert I have hidden:
Friendly thoughts were cliffs to me.
And I hid beneath their lee.

This true people took the stranger.
And warm-hearted house the ranger;
They received their roving guest.
And have fed him with the best;

Whatsoe'er the land afforded
To the stranger's wish accorded,
Shook the olive, stripped the vine.
And expressed the strengthening wine.

And by night they did spread o'er him
What by day they spread before him;
That good-will which was repast
Was his covering at last.

The stranger moored him to their pier
Without anxiety or fear:
By day he walked the sloping land, —
By night the gentle heavens he scanned.

[ 500 ]

DEATH AND REBIRTH
II

When first Ms barque stood inland
To the coast of that far Finland,
Sweet-watered brooks came tumbling to the shore,
The weary mariner to restore.

And still he stayed from day to day, —
If he their kindness might repay:
But more and more
The sullen waves came rolling toward the shore.

And still the more the stranger waited.
The less his argosy was freighted;
And still the more he stayed,
The less his debt was paid.

Ill

So he unfurled his shrouded mast
To receive the fragrant blast, —
And that same refreshing gale
Which had wooed him to remain

Again and again
It was that filled his sail
And drove him to the Main.

All day the low-hung clouds
Dropped tears into the sea.
And the wind amid the shrouds
Sighed plamtively.

Let US accept these quaint stanzas now, with
their haunting melody and their youthful sad-

[501 ]

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

ness, — so much at variance with his habitual
good cheer and his sober beatitudes, — as his
log-book of the Voyage of Life, reduced to one
brief page. His sailing directions were copied in
his own hand, and long since printed by his friend
Emerson, thus: —

Great God! I ask thee for no meaner pelf
Than that I may not disappoint myself;
That in my action I may soar as high
As I can now discern with this clear eye;

And next in value, which Thy kindness lends.
That I may greatly disappoint my friends;
Howe'er they think or hope that it may be,
They may not dream how thou'st distinguished me;

That my weak hand may equal my firm faith.
And my life practice more than my tongue saith;
That my low conduct may not show.

Nor my relenting lines,
That I Thy purpose did not know.
Or overrated Thy designs.

And the final issue of that voyage cannot better
be summed up than in the words spoken by Emer-
son over his coffin: —

His soul was made for the noblest society; he had in
a short life exhausted the capabilities of this world;
wherever there is knowledge, wherever there is virtue,
wherever there is beauty, he will find a home.

THE END

APPENDIX

APPENDIX

LIBRARY OF HENRY D. THOREAU

Three lists of his books seem to have been made out by
Thoreau, — the first in 1836, the second in 1840, and the
third from time to time, but completed late in his life, since
it contains books only printed in 1860-61. As it stands in
this Index Rerum it is wholly in his handwriting. His books
were scattered at his death, many volimies being given to
his friends and to the Town Library, at his selection; others
were given away by Sophia, and a few sold at the small auc-
tion of her furniture, etc., as she was leaving Concord for
Bangor about 1873-74. She died in October, 1876, and
doubtless the books she carried to Bangor were there given
away, or left at her death to her cousins Lowell and
Thatcher. None remained in her house at Concord, in
which I succeeded her, as her tenant, in the autumn of 1873;
but Thoreau's Journals were there, until she had them re-
moved to the Town Library in 1874, fearing that Ellery
Channing would have access to them if they remained with
me.

The second list is as follows: —

1840. List of books belonging to H. D. T.
{Enlarged from one of a.d. mdcgcxxxvi)

1. Byron's Works. New York edition by Halleck 1 v.

2. Coleridge, Shelley & Keats. Philad. ed 1 v.

3. Aikin's British Poets. Piiilad. ed 1 v.

4. Burns. London, diamond ed 2 v.

[ 505 ]

APPENDIX

5. Fables &c. De La Fontaine. [French ?] 1 v.

6. Tasso's Gerusalemme Lib. Firenze ed 2 v.

7. Hoole's Aiiosto. Loudon ed 1 v.

8. Juvenalis at Persii Delphini. Philad. ed 1 v.

9. Ovid Delphini. Philad. ed 1 v.

10. Virgilii Delphini. PhUad. ed 1 v.

11. Horatius, ex ed. J. C. Zeunii. Londini-Novo-Eboraci

{London & N. Y.] 1 v.

12. Horatius, Cura B. A. Gould, Bostonise 1 v.

13. Homeri Hias. Felton ed. Boston 1 v.

14. Dante. Avignone ed 3 v.

15. Dryden's Virgil. Philad. ed. [A "pony"?] 2 v.

16. Marmion. Baltimore ed 1 v.

117. Wordsworth's Poetical Works, ed. Henry Reed,

Philad 1 V.

[Li a later hand] "New and Old." 1 v.

18. Virgilius. Londmi, 1822 1 v.

[The next 14 titles in the later hand, not num-
bered.]

Milton's Poetical Works. [Boston edition probably.] . . 3 v.

Pope's Works (2nd stolen) 5 v.

2 cops. Virgilii Delphini. [Probably Helen's copy.] 1 v.

The Woodman and Other Poems. [Channing's, 1849.] 1 v.

Pindar, Anacreon, etc. [Probably from Greaves Lib-
rary.] 1 V.

Orpheus. [Probably from Greaves Library.] 1 v.

Poetse Minores Grseci. [Probably from Greaves Lib-
rary.] 1 V.

Emerson's Poems. [Edition of 1847.] 1 v.

Dante's Inferno, John Carlyle 1 v.

Airs of Palestine, Pierpont 1 v.

In Memoriam, Tennyson 1 v.

Prelude or &c. Wordsworth 1 v.

Poems of Ossian 1 v.

Wild Flowers, Rouquette. [Probably French-Canadian.] 1 v.

[Here the unnumbered volumes end for the present, —
Channing's "Near Home" of 1858 being pencilled in,
but effaced, because entered below.]

[ 506 ]

APPENDIX

DRAMA
[The word "Drama" is crossed out in pencil]

1. Shakespeare, ed. Stevens, Hartford 2 v.

2. Maria Stuart, Stuttgart und Tubingen ed. [German.] 1 v.

3. British Drama. Philad. ed. .. .'. 2 v.

4. Teatro Scelto Italiano. Cambrigia ed 1 v.

5. Medea, ed. C; Beck, Cambridge. [Seneca ?] 1 v.

6. Sophocles' Tragoed. Lipsise ed 1 v.

7. Tasso. Ein Schauspiel von Goethe 1 v.

8. Euripides' Tragoedise. Lipsise ed., 4 vols in 1858 2 v.

[Here comes, in the later hand (pencil), after 1858.]

Poems by W. E. Channmg. [Ed. 1843.] 1 v.

Poems by W. E. Channing, 2nd series. [1847.] 1 v.

Leaves of Grass. [1st ed., 1855.] 1 v.

Cowper's Task. [Perhaps given by D. Ricketson.]. ... 1 v.
The Music Master, etc. AlUngham. [From Emerson?] 1 v.
Leaves of Grass, 2nd edition [1858.] [1 v., but not so

entered.]
Near Home, by W. E. C.
Percy's Reliques 1 v.

[Here the later hand ceases again. In addition to
the above Poems, Thoreau had a commonplace book,
chiefly of poetry, 300 manuscript pages, copied in the
Harvard College Library and at New York before
1844.]

HISTORY AND GEOGRAPHY

1. History of Concord [Shattuck's] 1 v.

2. History of Haverhill. By B. L. Mirick, Haverhill 1 v.

[This was Whittier's. Did Thoreau know it? Not
in 1840.]

3. History of the United States 1 v.

4. Guthrie's Grammar. London ed. 1787 1 v.

5. Tytler's History. Concord, N.H., ed 1 v.

6. Indian Wars. By William Hubbard. Worcester ed .. . 1 v.

7. Caesar's Commentarii, Lipsise ed 1 v.

8. Sewel's Hist, of the Quakers. Burlington, N.J. ed.,

1774 1 V.

[ 507 ]

APPENDIX

9. New Hampshire Historical Collections 3 v.

10. Schiller's Dreyssigjariger Krieg. Leipzig ed 2 v.

11. Winthrop's Journal. [Savage's edition.] 1 v.

12. Athens, its Rise and Fall. By E. L. Bulwer, New

York 2 V.

13. Morse's Geography. Boston ed 1 v.

14. French Revolution. By T. Carlyle, Boston, 3 vols, in 2 v.

15. New England Gazetteer. By Hayward, Concord, N.H. 1 v.

16. Q. Curtius Rufus, Hist. Alex. Mag. Lipsiee 1 v.

17. Hist, de Russie sous Pierre-le-Grand. Par Voltaire.

Paris 2 V.

18. RoUin 4 V.

[In a later hand, without numbers.]

Finley's Atlas 1 v.

Hist, of the Old Township of Dunstable 1 v,

[This was G. J. Fox's book, bought at a door in
Nashua, as related by Channing in his Life of Tho-
reau.]

Morse's Am. Gazetteer 1 v.

Froissart. Lond. Bohn. [Given to Channing.] 2 v.

Canadian Guide Book 1 v.

Church's History of King Philip's War 1 v.

Mineral Region of Lake Superior. [Cabot's?] ., 1 v.

La Decouverte des Sources du Mississippi 1 v.

Long's Classical Atlas 1 v.

Literature of Am. Local History 1 v.

Documentary Hist, of New York. [The earlier vols.] . 4 v.

Hist, of New Bedford. [By D. Ricketson.] 1 v.

[Now resumes the list of 1840, numbered.]

BIOGRAPHY

1. Hutchinson's Xenophon, Philad 1 v.

[This is not the whole of Xenophon, but only his dull
novel, the Cyropsedia in Greek and Latin, edited by
Thomas Hutchinson, A.M. "Editio Prima Ameri-
cana." Cura Johannis Watts, Philadelphise, 1806.
Impressis Wm. Poyntrell et Soc.]

2. Life of Cowper. By Hayley. Boston 2 v.

3. Life of Newton, Fam. Lib. New York 1 v.

[ 508 ]

APPENDIX

4. Life of Charlemagne. Fam. Lib. New York 1 v.

5. Life of George IV. Fam. Lib. New York 1 v.

6. Life of Cromwell. Fam. Lib. New York 2 v.

7. Franklin. By Himself. Salem 1 v.

8. Charles Douze. Par Voltaire. . [Famous Charles XIL] 1 v.

9. Plutarch's Lives. New York. [Langhorne's transla-

tion cheap.] 1 V.

10. Life of Schiller. By Carlyle. New York 1 v.

11. Biographical Dictionary. J. L. Blake 1 v.

[In a later hand.]

Belknap's Am. Biography. 2nd vol 1 v.

John Churchman, Ac. of 1 v.

Hist, of the Ojibway Nation 1 v.

Life of John Brown. [Redpath's, 1860] 1 v.

[Thoreau was urged by Mrs. G. L. Stearns to write
a better Life of Brown, but was so occupied with
his Indian collections that he declined. He has con-
tributed much to the later lives, as may be seen in his
Journals.]

MATHEMATICS PURE AND MIXED

1. Mechanics. By Farrar. Cambridge. [Thoreau's Pro-

fessor.] 1 V.

2. Optics. By Farrar. Cambridge 1 v.

3. Elec. Magnet and Elee. Magneticism. By Farrar.
Cambridge 1 v.

4. Astronomy. By Farrar. Cambridge 1 v.

5. Grund's Geometry. [F. J. Grund, a German.] 1 v.

6. Euler's Algebra. Boston 1 v.

7. Logarithms. Boston 1 v.

8. Smyth's Algebra. Portland 1 v.

9. Emerson's Arithmetic, 3rd p't 1 v.

10. Key to 2nd and 3rd parts do 1 v.

11. Atkinson's Epitome of the Art of Navigation. London,

1758 1 V.

[This was probably a book belonging to the first
John Thoreau in America, who was a seaman from
Jersey, and sailed vessels, as well as privateered and
traded in Boston. He died at Concord in 1801.]

[ 509 ]

APPENDIX

[In a later hand.]

Legendre's Geometry 1 v.

Davies' Surveying 1 v.

Davies' Grammar of Arithmetic 1 v.

Bache's Report on the Coast Survey ('51) 1 v^

Bailey's Algebra 1 v.

Colburn's Algebra ^r 1 v.

Report of Coast Survey for '52. 2 copies 1 v.

Report of Coast Survey for '53, '50 & '54. '55, '56. '57, '58 3 v.

[In all five volumes of these Reports, sent him by his
friend Loomis, who married Miss Wilder and is the
father of Mrs. Todd of Amherst.]

Am. Ephemeris and Nautical Ahnanac 1 v.

Sketches Ac. Coast Survey Rep. for '51 1 v.

[Both the last were sent by Mr. Loomis, then in the
Nautical Almanac Office at Washington.]

PHILOSOPHY, METAPHYSICS. THEOLOGY

1. Paley's Philosophy, 2 vols. London — 1st v 1 v.

2. Paley's Works. Philad 1 v.

3. Stewart's Philosophy. Cambridge 2 v.

4. Butler's Analogy. Cambridge 1 v.

6. Locke on the Human Understanding. Philad 1 v.

6. Whately's Logic. Cambridge 1 v.

7. Whately's Rhetoric. Cambridge 1 v,

8. Bible. New York 1 v.

9. Greek Testament. Worcester? 1 v.

10. Smellie's Philosophy 1 v.

11. Emerson's Nature. [The rare first edition, of course.]

Boston 1 v.

12. Blair's Sermons. Boston 2 v.

13. Zimmerman on SoUtude. Albany 1 v.

14. Abercrombie on the Intel. Powers. Fam. Lib 1 v.

15. Massillon's Sermons. Brooklyn. Tr. by Dickson 2 v.

La Th6baide en Amerique 1 v.

Spiritual Science 1 v.

Bible, folio. Grandfather's 1 v.

[Which Grandfather? Most likely Rev. Asa Dunbar,
not John Thoreau.]^

[510 ]

APPENDIX

PHILOLOGY

1. Ainsworth's Latin Dictionary, Abridged. Philad 1 v.

2. Latin Grammar. By Adam. N.Y 1 v.

S. Latin Grammar. By Gould -. 1 v.

4. German Dictionary. Philad 1 v.

5. German Reader. By Follen. Boston 1 v.

6. German Grammar. By Follen. Boston 1 v.

7. Pickering's Greek Lexicon. Boston 1 v.

8. Greek Grammar. By Buttmann. Boston 1 v.

9. Boyer's Dictionary [French]. Boston 1 v.

10. French Grammar. By Surault. Boston 1 v.

11. Gruglia's Dictionary. Boston 1 v.

12. Italian Grammar. By Bachi. Boston 1 v.

13. Spanish and English Dictionary. By Neuman 2 v.

14. Spanish Grammar. By Sales. Boston 1 v.

15. Spanish Grammar. _By Bachi. Boston 1 v.

16. Bailey's Dictionary 1 v.

17. Johnson and Walker's Dictionary, Abridged. Boston. . 1 v.

18. Murray's Grammar. Hallowell. 2 copies 1 v.

19. Kirkham's Grammar. Baltimore 1 v.

20. Comprehensive Grammar &c. By Felch, Boston 1 v.

Goldsbury's Seq. to Com. School Grammar 1 v.

Significance of the Alphabet (Kraitsir) 1 v.

Webster's Dictionary, Unabridged 1 v.

Grammar of Arithmetic 1 v.

Roget's Thesaurus 1 v.

Bartlett, Dictionary of Americanisms 1 v.

Wright's Provincial Dictionary 2 v.

Oswald's Etymological Dictionary 1 v.

Andrew's Latin-English Lexicon 1 v.

MISCELLANEOUS

1. Curiosities of Lit. By D' Israeli. N. Y 1 v.

2. Ciceronis Orationes 1 v.

8. Grund's Chemistry. Boston 1 v.

4. Lord Bacon's Essays. Boston 1 v.

5. T616maque. Besangon 1 v.

6. McLellan's Journal 1 v.

[511 ]

APPENDIX

7. Beauties of Chesterfield. Boston 1 v,

8. Hawes' Lectures. Hartford 1 v.

9. Ware on the Formation of the Christian Ch. Boston. . 1 v.

10. A Discourse by the Rev. David Clarkson. Lend. 1688.. 1 v.

11. The Universal Preceptor. Greenfield 1 v.

12. Gonzalve De Cordove. Par Florian. Paris 1 v.

13. Goldsmith's Miscellaneous Works. Philad 1 v.

14. Lempriere's Clas. Diet. New York 1 v.

15. Say's Political Economy. Philad 1 v.

16. Prose Italiane. By Bachi. Cambridge 1 v.

17. Iriarte. Moratin. Boston 1 v.

18. Cartas Marruecas y Poesias. Boston 1 v.

19. Foster's Essays on Decision of Character. Boston .... 1 v.

20. Story's Commentaries, Abridg. Boston 1 v.

21. Discourses, Reviews and Miscellanies. By W. E.

Channing, Boston 1 v.

22. American First Class Book 1 v.

23. First Class Reader. By Emerson. Boston 1 v,

24. Introduction to the National Reader. Pierpont. Boston 1 v.

25. Beauties of Sterne 1 v.

26. Milton's Prose Works. Selected. Boston 2 v.

27. Carlyle's Miscellanies. Boston 4 v.

28. Tatler. 2nd vol. London, 1723 1 v.

29. Conversations on the Gospels, Boston. [Alcott's vol-

umes.] 2 v.

30. Record of a School. [Miss Peabody's Report of Al-

cott's School.] Boston 1 v,

31. Goethe's Wilhelm Meister. Boston 5 v.

32. GUnderode. (From the German.) ._ 1 v.

33. Guizot's Essay on Washington 1 v.

34. New Views by Brownson [Orestes A. — friend of Tho-

reau then] 1 v.

35. Verplanck's Lit. and Hist. Discourses 1 v.

36. Spectator [Addison's] ■ 1 v.

37. Report on Fishes, Reptiles, and Birds. [Of Massachu-

setts?] 1 v.

38. How to Observe. Miss Martineau 1 v.

39. Esthetic Papers. [Miss Peabody's Collection of 1849.] . 1 v.

40. Emerson's Nature. [Probably a reprint] 1 v.

[In the above numbering 32 became blank by the

[512]

APPENDIX

erasing of "Sixty Maps," to which that number was
prefixed, — so that my numbers dififer from Thoreau's.
The old handwriting ceases with "Gunderode," but
the numbering runs on in pencil to Miss Martineau's
book. No. 39. I carry it one farther. Thoreau met
Harriet Martineau when she visited Emerson in Con-
cord. Miss P.'s "Esthetic Papers" contained Tho-
reau's "Resistance to Civil Government," — his first
account of his night in the old Concord jail. When his
mother heard of his arrest, she hastened to the jail,
then to the Thoreau house in the Square, at which
Misses Jane and Maria Thoreau then lived, and one of
the latter, putting a shawl over her head, went to the
jailer's door, and paid the tax and fees to Ellen Staples;
her father the jailer being absent. So says Miss Jane
Hosmer.]
Emerson's Nature, Addresses and Lectures [1849] .... 1 v.

Emerson's Representative Men [1850] 1 v.

Emerson's Essays, 1st. Series [1841] , 1 v.

Carlyle's Past and Present 1 v.

Hitchcock's Geology of Mass 1 v.

American Almanack. 1849 1 v.

Appleton's Railroad and Steamboat Companion 1 v.

Transactions of Agricultural Soc. Mass. 1847 1 v.

Dial [1840-41, 42, 43, 44] 4 v.

Scarlet Letter [cancelled; because given away?] 1 v.

Builder's Companion 1 v.

Reports on Herb. Plants & on Quad[rupeds] of Mass. . 1 v.
Ultima Thule. [T. Gholmondeley's book on New Zea-
land.] 1 V,

Oneota [a serial] 5 nos.

N.Y. State Cabmet of Nat. History 1 v.

Sterne's Sentimental Journey 1 v.

Documents Relating to N.E. Boundary 1 v.

Report on the Trees & Shrubs of Mass. [G. B. Emer-
son.] , 1 V.

College Question 1 v.

Gray's Botany (Manual) '47 1 v.

Wilson's Am. Ornithology 1 v.

White's Selbome (Jesse). Bohn 1 v.

[513 ]

APPENDIX

Bechstein's Cage Birds and Sweet Warblers 1 v.

Lyon's Journal. [I think Capt. L., afterwards General.] 1 v.

Sitgreaves' Exped. Zuni & Colorado Rs 1 v.

Sickness on Emigrant Ships 1 v.

Exploration of Red River, Louisiana. Marcy 1 v.

Maps to do 1 V.

Exploration in Valley of the Amazon, P. 2 1 v.

Maps to last 1 v.

Penal Codes in Europe 1 v.

Compend, U.S. Census. [1860, 1 fancy.] 1 v.

Japan (Perry). [Expedition of Commodore Perry.] .. . 1 v.

Patent OfiSce Report (Agriculture), '53 • 1 v.

Patent Office Report (Agriculture), '54 1 v.

Vlth An. Report, Regents of Smithsonian Inst 1 v.

Vllth An. Report, Regents of Smithsonian List 1 v.

IXth An.-Sicport, Regents of Smithsonian List ■. 1 v.

Laman Blaochard's Sketches 2 v.

Dictionary of Quotations 1 v.

Business Man's Assistant 1 v.

Peter Gott. [This was a dull novel of Cape Ann, by Dr.

Reynolds.] 1 v.

Gray's Manual of Botany, ed. '56. $2.00 1 v.

Gray's Text Book. .75 1 v.

Hunter's Narrative. $1.75 1 v.

McCulloh's Researches in America 1 v.

Carver's Travels 1 v.

Lisect Architecture, Lib. Ent. Knowledge 1 v.

Insect Transformations, Lib. Ent. Knowledge 1 v.

Insect Miscellanies, Lib. Ent. Knowledge 2 v.

Macgillivray's Rapacious Birds 1 v.

Harlan's Fauna 1 v.

Journal of a Naturalist 1 v.

The Eggs of British Birds 1 v.

Quadrupeds of N. America, Audubon &c. Vol. Ist. . . . 1 v.

British Quadrupeds. Bell 1 v.

Harris's Treatise on Insects. [By the College Libra-
rian.] ■ 1 v.

[It was this Dr. Harris who said to Alcott, " If Emer-
son had not spoiled him, Thoreau would have made a

good naturalist."]

[ 514 ]

APPENDIX

Cours d'Histoire Naturelle 1 v.

Patent Office Report (Agriculture), '55 1 v.

McKenney's Memoirs & Travels, &c., &c. [About

Indians.] 2 v. in 1

Kirby and Spence's Entomology 1 v.

Life of N. Am. Insects (Prov. ed.) 1 v.

Fitch's Noxious Insects of N.Y 1 v.

Jackson's 2nd Report on Geology of Maine 1 v.

Jackson's 3rd Report on Geology of Maine 1 v.

Jackson's 2nd Report on Public Lands of Maine & Mass. 1 v.

[This was Dr. C. T. Jackson, Mrs. Emerson's brother,
and the real discoverer of the anaesthetic properties of
sulphuric ether, utilized by Morton.]

Patent Office Report for '56 1 v.

Agriculture of Mass. Flint on Grasses 1 v.

Mineral Region of Lake Superior. [Also in History and

Geography list.] 1 v.

Principles of Geology, Agassiz & Gould 1 v.

Buchanan's Sketches 1 v.

Incidents in White Mountain History 1 v.

Pike's Expeditian. [Into Mexico, — Gen. Z. Pike,

kiUed at York.] 1 v.

Emerson's Essays, 2nd Series. [1845.] 1 v.

Seaman's Friend 1 v.

The Mountain, 1st part. [Uncompleted or not found.] 1 v.

A Manual of Coal and its Topography 1 v.

The Life of N. American Insects (Harper's ed.) 1 v.

LoveU's Complete Herball 1 v-

A Plea for the Indians. By John Beeson 1 v.

Zoological Notes. London • ■ 1 v.

Corinthian Lodge, Concord. [Annals of the Masonic

Lodge in Concord.] 1 v.

[Thoreau's grandfather. Rev. Asa Dunbar, had been
a Freemason, and the Master of a Lodge in Keene,
New Hampshire, where he died in 1787, just before
the birth of his youngest child, Mrs. Thoreau. In
June, 1781, he delivered the customary sermon before
Trinity Lodge of Lancaster, Massachusetts, which has
twice been printed, — the last time in 1896, by Judge
Smith of CUnton in his History of Old Trinity Lodge,

[ 515 ]

APPENDIX

Clinton, Massachusetts. No Thoreau, so far as known,

was a Mason.]

Travels in Peru. Tschudi 1 v.

Peruvian Antiquities 1 v.

Franchore's Narrative 1 v.

Indian Narratives 1 v.

Ancient Monasteries [in the Levant]. Curzon 1 v.

Rocky Mountains. Lewis & Clarke 2 v.

Plinii Hist[oria Naturalis]. 3 vols. 1593. [Elder Pliny.] 3 v.

Discovery on the N.W. Coast of America 1 v.

Birds of Long Island 1 v.

Abbot's Scripture Nat. Hist 1 v.

Vegetable Kingdom, Handbook of Plants 1 v.

British Ferns 1 v.

Hist, of the Ojibway Nation. [Duplicate?] 1 v.

Patent OflSce Report for '57 > 1 v.

Patent Office Report for '58 (Mechanics) 3 v.

Echoes of Harper's Ferry. [By J. Redpath, I860.] 1 v.

Loudon's Encyclopedia of Plants, $13.00 1 v.

Report on the Flowage of [Concord & Sudbury] Mea-
dows, etc. [1861] 1 V.

Leaves from the Note-Book of a Naturalist 1 v.

Arctic Searching Expedition 1 v.

Pat. O. Reports, — Agriculture, '58 & '59, or now from

'53-59 (inclusive) 7 v.

"The Mountain" by Jackson, 1860 1 v.

Harper's Ferry Report [of Mason's Senate Committee,

1860] 1 V.

Our Woodlands &c. W. S. Coleman 1 v.

British Butterflies, W. S. Colemstn 1 v.

Popular British Conchology. Sowerby 1 v.

Popular Mineralogy. [Given to EUen Emerson.] 1 v.

Popular Hist. Brit. Lichens. Lindsay 1 v.

Popular Hist. Brit. Mosses. Stark ' 1 v.

Popular Hist, of Mollusca. Roberts 1 v.

Gould's Report on the Invertebrate Animals of Massa-
chusetts 1 v.

Pat. O. Report on Agriculture, '51 1 v.

New Mexico and California by Emory, &c. &c 1 v.

Smithsonian Reports for '65 & '56 2 v.

[516 ]

APPENDIX

Herndon's Amazon, Part 1 1 v.

With maps separate 1 v.

Andrews' Report on the Colonial and Lake Trade 1 v.

And two copies of maps separate 2 v.

Foster and Whitney's Report, 1850 1 v.

Loudon's Arboretum et Fruticetum (15 J^ dolls.) 8 v.

Emerson's Conduct of Life 1 v.

Colorado Exploring Expedition, [Li Sophia's hand.] . . 1 v.

This closes the catalogue of 395 volumes, with two or
three duplicates. It had been accumulating for some thirty
years in 1861, and includes many of his school and college
textbooks, with others that he used as a teacher. A few had
come down to him from ancestors; many had been given
tim, — notably those sent over from London in 1855, from
T. Cholmondeley, — a list of which follows, not generally
included in the above list: —

LIST OF BOOKS

{made up in one parcel) for Henry D. Thoreau Esq. enclosed by John
Chapman to Messrs. Crosby, Nichols & Co., Boston, U.S.A.

Wilson's Rig Veda Sanhita, vols. 1 & 2. 8vo; Translation of
Mandlikya Upanishads, 2 v.; Nala Damyanta, by Milman, Rl.
8vo; Vishnu Furana by Wilson, 4to; Houghton's Institutes of
Menu, 4to; Colebrooke's Two Treatises, 4to, bds.; Sankya Earika,
4to; Aphorisms of the Mimasma, 8vo.; do. do. of the Nayaya (4
books), 8vo; Lecture on the Vedanta, 8vo; Bhagavat Gheeta &
translation, 2 vols, square 8vo; Wilson's "Theater of the Hin-
doos," 2 volumes, 8vo; Williams's Translation of "Sakoontala"
or The Lost Ring, 4to, gilt. [This went to Mr. Alcott.]

Following the catalogue of the library of Thoreau was a
sheet mainly in his handwriting, containing, shortly before
his death in the spring of 1861, his designation of the friends
who were to receive from his shelves books as souvenirs, —
the list sometimes indicating what books. This is: —

[ 517 ]

APPENDIX

In Sophia's hand

Mr. [Edmund] Hosmer,
Mr. Alcott,

Mr. [Ellery] Channing,
Mr. Sanborn,
Judge Hoar,
Elizabeth Hoar,
Edward Hoar,
Town Library,

Natural History Society of Bos-
ton,
Mrs. Ripley,
Horace Mann, Jr.,
IMward Emerson,
Mr. Blake,
Mr. Theo. Brown,
Ellen Emerson,

Ricketson,
Edith Emerson,
Aunt Louisa Dunbar,

In Thoreau'a hand

Plan of his Farm?

Four volumes

Froissart's Chronicle

Seven volumes of Bunsen

[No books indicated]

[No books indicated]

Grasses and Sedges

Mill's History of British India, 9

vols. & Coast Survey Reports
Herbarium, Birds and Eggs &

Indian Rehcs
[No books named]
[Nothing named]
Microscope
[Nothing indicated]
Percy's Reliques
Mineralogy [in Sophia's hand;

also all the rest]
[No indication]
Conchology

Initials and figures in the lower margin show the number
of volumes actually given, after Thoreau's death, thus: —

Mr. Emerson, 20 vols; Mr. Alcott, 4; Mr. Sanborn, 7; Mr.
Channing, 2; Mr. Ricketson. 2; Ellen and Edith, 2; The Aunts,
2; P. [unknown], 1.

A small volume. Index Rerum, belonged in early 1836 to
",D. H. Thoreau, Cambridge," as a mixture of commonplace
book, journal, library catalogue, and special index to some
manuscript hard to designate. The volume is wholly in
Thoreau's hand and includes dates from March, 1836, to late
in 1860 or even in 1861. It therefore shows the whole varia-
tion of his handwriting, from the rather unformed and flour-
ishing script of his college days to the rapid and almost

[518]

APPENDIX

illegible hand of 1860. The first pencil entries (pencil, a
companying a glove-sketch in ink) are titles of early mam
script Essays, as —

Merrimack and Musketaquid
Sound and Silence
Concord
; Bravery
Friendship

Books and Style. Seeing
Obligation. Dying. Devil

Several of these were included in the Week, but not as
whole; this is true of "Friendship," portions of which t
Bibliophiles afterwards printed. "Bravery" makes pj
of The Service.

A pencil index to some destroyed journal runs to page 2^
It related to a book that existed in 1843, but perhaps m
used up in writing the Week.

B

A LIST OF AUTHORS READ OR TO BE READ
BY H. D. THOREAU

Authors

(See page 261)

Worka

Comments

Orpheus.

ArgoQautica and other poems.

tThe Fseudo-O^heus.]

Homer.

Iliad, Odyssey, etc. H. N.

Coleridge.

INot the best t&ts.J

Heaiod.

Works & Days, Theogony,

, Shield of Hercules.

Sappho.

Two Fragments, translated in Spectator by

Phillips.

Pindar.

Odes.

[Some versions by H. D. T.)

2E)schylus.

Seven Tragedies.

(Two translated by H.

D.T.I
IThe ordinary Pseudo-

Anacreon.]
IBacchylides not discov-

Anacreon.

Odes.

Simonides.

Fragments, Inscriptions.

ered then.]

Sophocles.

Seven Tragedies.
Nineteen Plays.

All the common ones.

Euripides.

Not all Tragedies.

Aristophanes.

Eleven Comedies.

Callimachus.

Some Hymns on the gods.

Epigrams.

One Elegy.

Bion.

Idyllia.

[Nothing but the common

Moschus.

Fragments.

30 Idyllia and some Epigii

remains of both.]

Theocritus.

ims.

HcTodotus.

History and Translations.

[Mostly in English.]

Thucydides.

" *' "

<1 (1 K

Xenophon.

Anabasis, Cyropcedia, Hellenica.

MSmorabilia of Socrates

Plato.

Dialogues and Letters.
Translated.

and Apology;
[Nearly all, fjudge.]
[Latin, English, fVench.]

Aristotle.

Demosthenes.

The Orations, translated.

iEsehines.

Archimedes.

Passim.

[In other authors here and
there.]

Laiin Authors

Flautus.

20 Comedies.

Terence.

The Extant Plays.

Cicero.

Opera omnia. Middleton's

Life.

[Not in good modern

Cesar.

Commentaries.

editions.]
[Gaul, of course^ others

Nepos.

Lives.

probably.]
(Specifying Miltiades,
Themistocles, Aristides,

Alcibiades, Epaminon-

das, Phocion, Hanni-

Livy.

History, 26 Books.

bal, Cato Major.)

\

Seneca.
Epictetus.
Joseph us.
Lucretius.

Treatises and Tragedies.
Enchiridion.

[No mention of S. Major.]

History of Jews and Jewish Antiquities.
Poem "De Rerum Natura."

(English of course.]

Catullus.

Epigrams.

[Probably aU the verse.]

[ 520 ]

APPENDIX

Avihors

Ovid.

Virgil.

Horace.

TibuUus.

Fersiua.
I Juvenal.
Claudian.
Pliny.

Tacitus.

Boetbius.

Augustine.

Lucian.

Plutarch.

Confucius.

Works

Metamorphoses, Fasti, 6 books o! IS, Tristia,

Elegies, etc.
Eclogues, Georg., .^hieid.
Odes, Satires, Epistles, Ara Poet.
Poems.

Satires.
Satires.
Poems.
Letters, etc.

Histories.

Consolations of Philosophy,

Confessions.

Dialogues.

The Morals. Of the Lives: Lycur^, Miltiades,
Themistocles, Coriolanus, Aristides, Pericles,
Omon, Alcibiades, Epaminondas, Phocion,
Alexander (Family Idbrary), Catos, Pompey,
and Aratus.

Commenls

[All but the Amorea.]

[Probably the others.]

[No mention of Proper-

tius.]
[Essay on P. in **Dial."l

[Old Man of Verona, etc.]
[The two Plinys, doubt-
less.]
[Also Annals and Agri-
cola, doubtless.]

[Greelc or English.]

[But doubtless he read all.]

(In Stanley's Hist, of
Philosophy he rekd,
Thales, An^imander
and Plato, iBsopus
(Fables), Anaximenes,
Pythagoras (Golden
Verses), Democritus,
Anaxagoras, Socrates
(Xenophon and Plato),
Diogenes, Zeno, Xeno-
crates, Aristippus, The-
ophrastus.]

The authors and their works are in Thoreau's autograph;
a few of the comments also; but mo^ of those are my
Several of these Greek authors were first read in

own.

copies bought by Mr. Alcott at London in 1842, or brought
to Concord by Charles Lane from the Greaves Library at
Alcott House in England. Stanley's History was in Emer-
son's library, and also the Confessions of Augustine.

ASA DUNBAR: PARSON, FREEMASON, AND
ATTORNEY

This grandfather of Henry Thoreau graduated at Har-
vard in 1767, with forty-one classmates, among whom he was
eminent and a hero of their rebellion. His grandson grad-
uated in 1837, and so little had the college grown in the
seventy years between, that his classmates numbered but
forty-six, among whom Thoreau seems to have had Uttle
eminence.

Hardly had Dunbar completed his studies in divinity and
begun to preach when there began for him more serious
troubles than those of the college rebellion. He had wooed
and won Mary Jones, the only daughter of Colonel Elisha
Jones of Weston (she had eleven brothers then living), and
they were married at her father's fine house in Weston,
October 22, 1772, and soon went to live in his parish at
Salem. But the dispute of the Colonies with George IH was
growing warm; and Colonel Jones (a man of estate, with
two negro slaves), who had for ten years represented his
town in the Provincial Assembly, took sides with the king.
In January, 1774, Colonel Jones and such of his sons as re-
mained in Weston, at a special town meeting had been able
to prevent Weston from adopting Samuel Adams's plan for
Committees of Correspondence and a Continental Con-
gress; and Jones himself was chosen in May, as before, to
represent the town in the Assembly called in Boston by
General Gage, then Acting Governor of the Province. This
was his last gleam of popularity; in September his patriotic

[ 522 ]

APPENDIX

rival, Bradyll Smith, was chosen in his stead to sit in the
Assembly that met m Salem; and late in 1774 Colonel Jones
took up his abode in Boston, under the protection of the
British troops. He was there in January, 1775, and in July
was appointed, said the patriotic Boston Gazette, " overseer
of Gage's haymakers upon Bunker HiU," a few weeks after
the battle. That famous date (June 17, 1775) was well
marked in the annals of the Jones family.^ Mrs. Dunbar
had come back from Salem to be housekeeper in the mansion
at Weston, and on that day carried food (a basket of cher-
ries, her daughter, Mrs. Thoreau, told me) to her brother.
Dr. Jones, in the blockhouse jail at Concord; while her hus-
band, setting out for Salem with another horse from Weston,
found the country so disturbed by the battle going on in
Charlestown that he had to return to Weston.

The style of Dunbar may be seen in the apology made by
him at Weston, September 8, 1775, which was printed in
the Oazette of Cambridge at the time: —

^ Having been acquainted by the gentlemen the Committee of
Correspondence in Weston with some uneasiness arising in the
minds of people, from the conduct of myself and family upon Fast
Day, the 20th of last July; and having a desire to live in good
fellowship with every friend to American liberty, I beg leave
pubhcly to declare,

1 The same Oazette, of August 7, has this to say of a younger Tory, then
in Boston; "Dummer Rogers, Esq., late attorney at Littleton [Mass.], is
appointed superintendent of Gage's grog-shops at Charlestown." This
gentleman fled to England, like Governor Hutchinson, John Wentworth,
Judge Curwen, and others; and late in the eighteenth century was of some
service to the boy Byron, in his fragmentary education, and was affection-
ately remembered by the poet in after years. Jonas Jones, youngest
brother of Mrs. Dunbar, being an oflScer in the British army, lived and
died in England after the Revolution. Stephen, another brother, visited
England in the interest of the family in 1778, and returned as cornet in
Colonel Thompson's (Count Rumford's) King's American Dragoons, and
fought against Marion in Carolina.

[ 523 ]

APPENDIX

That the part I bore in those transactions that gave offence was
dictated solely by the principles of religion and humanity, with
no design of displeasing any one; and that I am sorry that it was
in the eyes of one of my fellow-countrymen attended with any
disgusting circumstances. As it has been suspected that I despised
the day, and the Authority that appointed it, I must, in justice
to myself, and from the love of truth affirm, that I very highly
respect and revere that authority; and were it not from the
appearance of boasting, could add that I beUeve no person ob-
served it with greater sincerity than

Asa Dunbar

It must indeed have been a time of fasting, humiliation,
and prayer to a pious minister at that time. Separated from
his parishioners, who seem to have been fond of him, and
from the family of his wife (who were in prison or in block-
ade, or dispersed about the land), under suspicion of trea-
son, it was a period of anxiety and of doubt what a friend of
American liberty ought to do and say. He seems in 1776 to
have continued to preach at Salem, but to have fallen into
ill health; and in 1779 to have withdrawn into Worcester
county, and studied law with Joshua Atherton, who hke
himself was under suspicion of Toryism, but was afterwards
Attorney-General of New Hampshire. Mr. Dunbar with-
drew to Keene in that state, not far from his brother-ia-law
Daniel Jones, of Hinsdale, and practised law and Freema-
sonry there for years with general respect, but without ac-
quiring much money. In the interval between Salem and
Keene he delivered at Lancaster an address on Masonry,
which has been reprinted of late years by the members of
the Lodge before which it was given, and is probably the
longest specimen of his style that now exists in print.

This Concord prison, in which in 1777 Sir Archibald
Campbell was confined, though a prisoner of war, colonel
of a regiment, and member of Parliament, was not a pleas-

[ 524 ]

APPENDIX

ant residence, and Sir Archibald complained much about it
to General Washington, who finally got him released, and
exchanged for Colonel Ethan Allen, captured by the British
in Canada. It was sketched by Sir Archibald's clerk, Wilson,
and his drawing of it has long hung in the Concord Public
Library. It stood on the main street in the midst of the vil-
lage, near the oldest cemetery, and nearly opposite the
present Library. The family tradition on these imprison-
ments, written down by Henry Thoreau in one of the
Journals before 1846; since destroyed, was in some points
incorrect.

The fine old house of Colonel Jones, where Rev. Asa Dun-
bar much resided in 1775, is stiU standing in good condition
at Weston, but removed from the estate on which it stood to
be the residence of Mr. Charles Fiske, the nephew of Mrs.
Ripley of the Old Manse. The estate was confiscated in the
Revolution, and sold by Massachusetts in 1788. It is now
a part of the estate of the late General Charles Paine, a
veteran of the Civil War, who sold the house to Mr. Fiske.
In a meadow of this estate, some twenty years ago, Mr.
Alfred Hosmer, of Concord, found the English cuckoo-plant,
often mentioned by Shakespeare, growing wild, — appar-
ently brought over for the Jones garden, but escaped, and
growing wild, as in England. Mr. Hosmer brought it to
Concord, where it now grows wild in several places.

In this mansion of the Joneses, Rev. A. Dunbar wrote and
i^sued his explanation of his clerical conduct, which the
Weston Committee (B. Pierce, Moderator) " receive as sat-
isfactory, and think it ought to release him from any un-
favorable suspicions that have arisen to his disadvantage."

D

THE BOSTON HOME OF THE THOREAUS
IN PRINCE STREET

This was a house in Prince Street built and inhabited be-
fore 1738; for in that year (January 20) it was bought by
David Orrok, mariner, of Nathaniel and Susanna Loring,
for £ll8. It became the property of Sarah Orrok, the daugh-
ter of David and Sarah (Tillet) Orrok: this Sarah Orrok
married a Scotch gentleman named Burns, probably about
1750. As she had been bred a Quaker, her granddaughter
Maria Thoreau wrote me ia 1878, " To gain the consent of
her Quaker parents, Mr. Burns, my grandfather, was
obliged to doff his rich apparel of gems and ruffles, and con-
form to the more simple garb of his Quaker bride." The
house became the inheritance of Jane Burns, his daughter,
whom John Thoreau, a mariner, married in 1781, when she
was joint heir with her aunts, Ann and Hannah Orrok,
whose rights were bought in 1795 by Jane's husband, —
who at marriage was, like his wife, twenty-seven years old.
She died in 1795, in this house, which then was the sole
property of her husband and children, and at his death in
1801, it became the sole property of the eight children. In
1808, when John Thoreau, the eldest son, came of age, he
mortgaged his eighth part to his stepmother Thoreau, for
one thousand dollars, — showing that it was then valued at
about ten thous'and dollars. The mortgage was not re-
corded till 1811, when the father of Henry Thoreau was in
financial difficulties; nor was it paid until about the date of
Henry's birth, in the summer of 1817.

[ 526 ]

APPENDIX

The house then became the property of the other heirs,
and, David and Sarah being dead, it was mortgaged by
Elizabeth, Maria, and Jane to Isaac Dupee, in 1825; and
again, in 1832, to the Fireman's Insurance Company, each
time for one thousand dollars. This mortgage was not re-
leased till November 27, 1868, six years after the death of
Henry. At that time the house was at least one hundred and
thirty years old, and still a valuable piece of property,
though perhaps worth less than it had been when Henry
entered college in 1833.

E

THE JONES FAMII^Y AND THEIR PROPERTY

One of the fourteen sons of Colonel Elisha Jones, of Wes-
ton, grandfather of Cynthia Dunbar, the mother of Henry
Thoreau, was Isaac Jones, of Adams, in western Massachu-
setts, near Pittsfield, where another son of Colonel Jones
had an estate which was confiscated. Isaac was not one of
the eight banished sons; but in 1823 he wrote the following
account of the property and activities of his father and
brothers, copying from Josiah. The first brother quoted in
this document was the one first imprisoned in the Concord
jail for aiding the enemy in Boston, Josiah Jones, who was
bred a physician, but in Nova Scotia practised law, after
his banishment. Being under oath, he testified as follows: —

He and his brothers Claim as Heirs to his Father who died in
1776. He died without a Will, leaving eleven Children. Nathan,
the eldest Son, now living in Maine. Elisha, who died in Nova
Scotia, leaving a Widow and children. Israel now living in Massa-
chusetts. Daniel who lived in New Hampshire, now dead, having
left a Widow and children. Elias in Massachusetts. Claimant
Josiah in Nova Scotia. Ephraim now in Canada, who served in
the British Army the whole War. Josiah who now appears and
Uves at Sisseboo. Simeon who Uves in New Brunswick. Stephen
who Uves at Sisseboo. Jonas who lives in England. He left also
one daughter married to Asa Dunbar who lives in New Hampshire.

Claimant says his Mother also is living and now lives in Massa-
chusetts. His Father had a considerable landed Estate in Massa-
chusetts. By his dying without a Will his Estate goes amongst
all his children, two shares to the eldest son. His Mother has no
Jointure, but is entitled to her Dower.

Says his Father Elisha Jones was a native of America. He had

[ 528 ]

APPENDIX

always been a friend to British Government. Opposed all their
Town meetings. Declared his sentiments openly. In 1775 he was
Colonel of Militia and raised the Militia in order to oppose the
violent measures of the Insurgents. He was obliged to keep a
guard of Militia round his own House for fear of being attacked.
His Life was in Danger which was the Reason that he kept this
Guard. Before Hostilities began, the Mobs had come so often
against him that he was obliged to leave home, and went to Bos-
ton in the Fall of 1774. Continued there to declare the same senti-
ments. Three of his sons were with him in Boston, and after the
Battle of Lexington (they) served in the Militia under General
Ruggles — Josiah and Stephen, two of the Claimants and Elisha
who is dead.

His Father continued in the same Loyal Principles till his Death.
General Gage always consulted him and placed the greatest con-
fidence in him. He died in 1776.

The Claimant, Josiah, lived in New Hampshire when Troubles
began. Always took the part of the Government. Left home on 19
April, 1775. Was obliged to go, as he was then so persecuted by
Mobs, the whole Family having made themselves obnoxious by
their Loyalty. Went to his Father at Boston. Continued under
Protection of British Arms. Was sent to Nova Scotia by Gen-
eral Gage to procure Forage for the Army. In coming to this
Province was taken Prisoner but made his escape, and in 1776
served in the Militia under General Buggies. They consisted of
Loyalists who were embodied at Boston. Served till Boston was
evacuated. Went with the Army to Halifax, then to New York,
having an employment in the Secretary's oflSce under Captain
Mackenzie. Continued in this employment till the year follow-
ing then was employed in the office of the Inspector of Provisions,
Francis Rush Clarke. Went with the Army to Philadelphia;
afterwards employed in the Commissary's Line at New York.
Was then in Governor Wentworth's Volunteers and served till
the Fall 1782, then came to this Province, k

The above examination was held by a Parliamentary
Commission in Canada in 1786, preliminary to a grant of
British money to the Jones survivors, for their losses in the
Revolution by confiscation, and for services in the war.
Josiah Jones (whose escape was from the Concord jail)

[

APPENDIX

went on before the Commission to give a statement of his
father's property, and that of some of the sons. Colonel
Jones owned two thousand acres in the town of Adams,
Massachusetts; six hundred and seventy-four acres in Pitts-
field and Washington, Massachusetts; five thousand two
hundred acres in Partridgefield; and smaller estates in the
towns nearer Boston. His homestead estate in Weston,
inherited from his father, was seventy-five acres, "all the
land clear and improved, an elegant mansion house, and
various outbuildings," the whole valued at one thousand
pounds sterling. There were ako three outlying farms, —
Allen's Farm, of seventy acres in Weston, valued at three
hundred and fifty pounds sterling; Jericho Farm, of forty-
four acres, valued at one hundred and fifty pounds, " chiefly
mowing land, fifteen miles from Boston"; and Nonsuch
Farm, eighty-five acres, chiefly in Weston, Natick, and
Sudbury.

This home estate consisted then of some two hundred
acres, and was valued at about nineteen hundred pounds.
In Princeton, near Mount Wachusett, was a farm of sixty
acres, bought for Isaac, one of the colonel's sons, and in
1786 intended for Josiah, who had unfortimately been ban-
ished. He said that in 1786 his mother had made applica-
tion for her thirds, but had received nothiug; his brothers
who were not banished (Nathan, Israel, Daniel, and Isaac)
"have got nothing except what was given them by their
father " before his death in January, 1776. They were in
hopes of recovering some lands not included in the confisca-
tions.

Here, then, were landed properties amounting in the
aggregate to more than eight thousand two hundred acres,
and probably worth, at the colonel's death, at least twelve
thousand dollars, — or half as much as John Thoreau's
estate was at his death in 1801, — yet mainly lost to the

[ 530 ]

APPENDIX

heirs of Mrs. Dunbar, who, when left a second time a widow,
by the death of Captain Minot, had Uttle but her widow's
thirds of the Minot estate to depend upon. Her son-in-law,
the second John Thoreau, was farming those lands in Con-
cord when his famous son was bom.

Colonel Jones had a son Elisha, named for him, who re-
ceived from his father a farm of one hmidred and sixty-five
acres in the present town of Adams, but was banished and
lost it by confiscation. He died in Nova Scotia in January,
1783, leavmg seven children, of whom the eldest was at St.
John in 1786, being then twenty-one years old.

The Royal Commission reported in that year that the
Joneses were a very meritorious family, and the report had
been hastened in order to serve them as much as possible.
Josiah, Simeon, Stephen, and the widow of Elisha received
one hundred poimds each, and Stephen an extra hundred
for expenses. He had joined the British army on the day of
the Concord Fight, — meeting Earl Percy as he came to the
aid of Colonel Smith, retreating from Concord. Stephen
also carried to General Gage the first certain news of the
numbers collecting, at Concord and elsewhere, to fight the
British; whereupon Gage ordered another brigade to support
Earl Percy. Evidently the Jones family did all they could
in aid of King George.

F

LETTER OF Z. R. BROCKWAY

EiiMiBA, N.Y., January 28, 1917.

Rtjmmaging amongst my preserves, I find your letter of
September 7, 1901, with its interesting enclosure, — your
type-written copy of a Forensic by Henry Thoreau, at
Harvard College, September 2, 1835, entitled " The Com-
parative Moral PoUcy of Severe and Mild Punishments."

Thoreau's philosophic insight, — college student of
eighteen as he was, — as depicted in the first sentence and
paragraph of the " Forensic," seems to me now unusual and
remarkable, viz: —

" The end of all punishment is the welfare of the state, the
good of the community at large; not the suffering of the in-
dividual. It matters not to the lawgiver what a man de-
serves, etc."

This shows that as early as 1835 this youth had emerged
from the superstitious stage of civilization; from the ortho-
dox theologic concept; though environed within the ortho-
dox. New England intellectual atmosphere. Indeed, it sug-
gests that, youth as he was, he had extricated himself from
the next stage, the metaphysical one, with its fascinating
maze of perplexities; whether wittingly or unwittingly, he
was firmly planted within the advanced rationality of the
Practical, as the true realm of governmental moral policy.

It has lately seemed to me that a failure to recognize the
supreme demand of the public welfare over momentary sen-
timentality in the treatment of convicted offenders Ues at the
root of the common faultiness in that respect. Not to men-

[ 532 ]

APPENDIX

tion other considerations, we are, by our foolish philanthropy
towards the individual, breaking down a salutary public
opinion that criminal behavior is disreputable and damaging
to the offender.

The substitution, both in theory and practice, of treatment
for ■punishment as the term to designate the consequence
of crimes, is now much prevented by a reaction from the
false orthodox conception of abstract universality, and the
superficial infused notion of free will and responsibility, and
certain punishments thus demanded. The demand of the
pubUc welfare to govern the kind and the degree of restraint
and compulsion must replace the suggestions and systems
that root in erroneous theological dogmas.

INDEX

INDEX

Adams, John Quincy, an Anti-
Mason, SO.

Alcott, A. Bronson, 162, 153, 199;
his verse on Thoreau, 283; 299-
301, 313, 460, 461. 495.

Alcott, Louisa M., 199.

AUingham. William, poem quoted,
477, 478.

Anderson, Dr. Charles L., 400, 402.

Assabet River, a fluvial walk in the,
435-40.

AtlarUic Monthly, 318.

Authors, foreign and native, 161,
162.

Azalea, pink, 427-31.

Battle Monument, 163.
Beecher, Henry Ward, 384, 386.
Bigelow, Dr. Henry, 58.
Billings, Elizabeth Thoreau (aunt of

Henry Thoreau), 5.
Bixby, W. K.. 338, 369.
Blake. Harrison G. O., 302, 304-06,

383, 390, 391.
Books in Thoreau's library, 606-17;

a list of books left to friends, 518;

Thoreau's reading list, 520, 521.
Boston Commonwealih, 170.
Boston home of the Thoreaus, 626,

627.
Boston MisceUany, 318.
Bravery, observations on. 245. 246.

254. 256.
Brockway, Z. E., 79;' letter from,

632, 633.
Brown, K«v. Addison, 375-77.
Brown, Miss Frances, 376-78.

[ 537 ]

Brown. John. 286-89.-383. 478-81,

484, 486, 487.
Brownson, Orestes, 141, 152.

Cabot. George, 8.

Capital punishment, 80.

Gary, Alice. 384.

Channing. WiUiam Elleiy. 236. 321.
329. 330. 368-60, 389. 390, 432, 488-
90; quotation from "The Wan-
derer," 170; quotations from his
Journals and his Life of Thoreau,
41, 42, 52, 53, 120, 149, 171, 194,
207, 220-22, 284, 285, 325-28.
340-45, 353, 484, 491, 492; his
poem "Near Home," 347, 348.

Character and reputation, 246-48.

Chelmsford. 33. 36.

Cholmondeley. Mary, 311.

Cholmondeley, Thomas, 301-13,
337.

Civil War, 400, 401.

Civilization, the influence of art,
180.

Columbus, cited as an example, 69.

Concord Academy, 42.

Concord jail, 13, 82. 83.

Concord Lyceum, 47, 48, 78, 316,
317, 470.

Concord Village, 34; recollections
told to Thoreau by Miss Anna
Jones, 37, 38.

Contrast, Thoreau's use of, 258.

Conway. Moncure D.. 482, 483.

Cranch, Christopher P., 158.

Criticism, a contemptible kind of,
104.

INDEX

Dante, 110.

Davy Club, 67.

Democratic Review, 318.

Dial, The, contributions to, 223,242;

318.
Disconnection in Thoreau's writing,

63.
D'Israeli, observation on Dante, 110.
Dorr, Captain, 374, 375.
Dunbar, Rev. Asa (grandfather of

Thoreau), 6-8, 9, 16-20, 522-26.
Dunbar, Charles (uncle of Thoreau),

448-50.
Dunbar, Cynthia (mother of Tho-
reau), 5, 20, 32, 320.
Dunbar, Louisa (aunt of Thoreau),

converted by Daniel Webster, 46;

194, 442.
Dunbar, Mary Jones (grandmother

of Thoreau), 5. 6, 11, 12, 20, 24, 26;

married Jonas Minot, 23.
Dunbars, of Bridgewater, 25.
Duty, observations on, 151.

Education, the end of life, 180; com-
pared with learning, 182.

Elizabethan writers, criticism of,
273-75.

Emerson, Miss Mary, 861, 362.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 1, 40, 47, 58,
141, 149, 163, 163, 199, 236-40,
295, 296, 298-300, 324, 334, 337,
341, 342, 357, 487, 490, 494; first
intimacy with Thoreau, 128, 129;
opinion of Thoreau, 239; com-
pared with Thoreau, 495, 496; his
words at Thoreau's funeral, 602.

Fields, James T., 372.
Fire in the woods, 417-22.
Flannery, Michael, 434, 435.
Francis I and Charles V, compared

by Thoreau, 72, 73.
French character, 107.
French literature, 131.

Friendship, 339, 464-58.
Frost, Rev. Barzillai, 361.
Fuller. Margaret, 199, 223, 279, 280,
357.

Garrison, William Lloyd, 162, 163,

466.
Genius, 344, 346.
German Uterature, little known in

New England, 114.
Goldsmith, Oliver, 109, 110.
Goodwin, John, 450-53.
Greece, 257.

Greeley, Horace, 240, 317, 367.
Gunning, 40.

Harris, Miss Laitta, 475.

Harvard College, rebellion at, 6-8.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 236, 236,
298, 299; his description of Tho-
reau, 236-38.

Hill, Edwin B., 61, note.

Hoar, Judge Ebenezer Rockwood,
337.

Hoar, Edward, 346, 870, 371, 386,
416, 422.

Hoar, George F., 242.

Hoar, Samuel, 472.

Hosmer, Alfred W., 61, note; 525.

Hubbard, Ebby, 434, 435.

Hurd, Dr. Isaac, 36, 446.

Hurd, Joseph, guardian of John
Thoreau's children, 30-32.

Indians, Thoreau's knowledge of,
205, 206, 412, 413.

James, Henry, Sr., 367, 368.

Jarvis, Dr. Edward, 200.

Jones, Colonel Elisha (great-grand-
father of Thoreau), 6, 6, 9, 14; old
mansion at Weston, 16, note; 22,
522, 523.

Jones, Dr. Josiah (great-uncle of
Thoreau), a Tory, 9-12, 14, 21, 22.

[ 538 ]

INDEX

Jones, Stephen and Simeon (great
uncles of Thoreau), Tories. 12, 13,
14, 21, 22.

Jones family, the, S28-31.

Knowledge, raises one man above
another, 87.

Languages, Thoreau's acquaintance

with, 260, 261.
Le Galais, Marie (great-grandmother

of Thoreau), 3.
Liberator, The, 286.
Liberty and equal rights, 76, 77.
Lincoln, Abraham, 485-87.
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 337.
Lowell, James Eussell, 337, 372, 493.

Malloy, Charles, 239, 337.

Man, the slave of a name, 156; in
social relations, 166, 167; to be
himself must be free, 191; the
brave man a perfect sphere, 199.

Mann, Horace, Jr., 369, 394.

Manse, Old, 163.

Masonry and the Anti-Masons, 48, 49 .

Masons in Concord, 49, 50.

Melvin, George, 426-33, 464, 465.

Meriam, Francis Jackson, 290-94,
463, 464.

Milton, Thoreau's interest in, 91,
note; 92.

Mince pies, 62.

Minot, George, 40, 423-26. _

Minot, Captain Jonas, 20, 23.

Money, 76.

Monroe, William, 211, 212.

Monroe, Mrs. William, 442.

Morton, Edwin, 303-04, 310. 312.

Mount Monadnoc, 222.

Music, 231-33.

Nature, efifect on man, 181, 256.
Necessity, another name for inflexi-
bility of good, 177, 178.

Negative virtue, 81.

New England, worship of utility,
131, 132; literature 131-34; re-
spect for what is foreign, 133, 134.

Orrok, David, 441, 526.
Orrok, Hannah, 444.
Orrok, Sarah. 441.

Patriot, a true, 77, 78.

Peabody, A. G., 57.

Peace and nou-resbtance, 253.

Persians, 127.

Peters, Samuel Andrew, 373, 374.

Phillips, Wendell, 470-73.

Philosophers, 138-39, 147, 348, 349.

Plumbago industry, 325.

Plutarch, study of. 257.

Poetry, a recreation, 104.

Polis, Joe, 383, 386.

Poverty in Concord, 42, 43.

Preachers, observations on, 169, 160,

341.
Prejudice, 68.

Press, observations on the, 160, 161.
Prussian standard, the, 283.
Pvinam's Monthly, 318.

Quincy, Josiah, 58.

Reason and feelings contrasted, 157.
Recruit, the qualities of the, 245-

48.
Religion, 150, 341.
Rice, Charles Wyatt. letters from

Thoreau to, 59, 60, 62, 63.
Richardson, James, 188.
Ricketson, Daniel. 304, 305, 386,

416, 447.
Riordan, Johnny, 362.
Ripley, Dr. Ezra, 31, 33, 39, 47, 49;

described in verse, 162.
Robinson, William, 213.
Rogers, N. P., 228.
Russell, Elias Harlow, 369.

[ 539 ]

INDEX

Sailing with and against the stream,

193.
St. John, Hector, 332, 333.
Salt, Henry S., 365.
Sanborn, F. B., 290-94, 463.
Satan, Moloch, Belial, Mammon,

and Beelzebub, compared in essay

on "Milton's Poesy," 93-97.
Scholars, not privileged to complain,

240.
Science, Thoreau's aversion to, 340,

341.
Sentiment, alone immortal, 62.
"Service, The," 243-48, 252-55, 336.
SewaU, Miss Ellen, 202, 211, 229,

350-52, 467.
Sh'akespeare, 110-13.
Skating, 298, 299.
Slavery, 466-84.

Smith, Mrs. Elizabeth Oakes, 361.
Solitude, 86, 87.
Spanish literature, 131.
Speech the beginning of "silence, 266.
Spring, Marcus, 357, 380-82.
Strong, Moses, 275-77.
Swett, Rev. WilUam, 169, note.

Tahattawan, 186.

Tasso, 113.

Teaching, motives in, 196, 197.

Terror, and the Sublime, 142.

Thoreau, Elizabeth Orrok (aunt of
Henry), 442, 443.

Thoreau, Helen, 191, 192, 197, 474.

Thoreau, Henry David, birth, 2; pa-
ternal ancestry, 2-5, 441-47; ma-
ternal ancestry, 5-28, 447-60
inherited traits, 27, 28; name, 35
begins school in Boston, 35, 39
incidents of childhood, 41, 42;
member of Concord Lyceum, 47,
48; early writing, 51, 62, 54; enters
Harvard, 54; earUest dated letter,
66; illness, 68, 59; log-book of \he
Red Jacket, 60; boats, 64; hand-

writing, 65; college essays quoted,
66-120; first literary tendencies,
84, 85; keeps poultry, 88, 89; love
of retirement, not unsocial, 90; pre-
ferred Milton to Shakespeare, 91,
note; education in languages, 105;
taste for reading, 122; early po-
etry; 129; financial help in college,
153, 154; versed in Greek, 174;
keeping the Town School, 194;
pencil-making, 190, 195, 211-13;
school in Academy Lane, 201-11;
curiosity, 207; early travels, 219,
220; the week on the rivers,
222-41; first published poem, 223;
gives up teaching, 239, 240 ; scrupu-
lous about favors, 241; his sly hu-
mor, 255; influence of ancestry on
his style, 269; knowledge of hu-
man nature, 280-82; not a mis-
anthrope, 283-84; fidelity in
friendship, 284, 285; misunder-
standing with Emerson, 295-97;
industry and public services, 314-
17, 325-28; as a surveyor, 317,
333; strict about money, 327; the
"Texas" house, 327, 328; obser-
vations on women, 361, 362; trav-
els, 366-416, failing health, 389,
390; botanical and geological ex-
cursions, 405-08; as a working-
man, 461-63; abolition activities,
468, 469, 480-82; last days, 491-
93; Emerson and Thoreau com-
pared, 495, 496; his "literary re-
birth," 497-601.

Essays (quoted): "Following
the Fashion," 66; "Anxieties and
Delights of a Discoverer," 68;
"Energy in Men," 70; "Shall We
Keep Journals?" 73; "Varying
Pursuits of M«n," 76; "Punish-
ments," 79; "The Literary Life,"
85 ; " The Simple Style," 90; " Chai^
acteristics of Milton's Poesy," 93;

[ 540 1

INDEX

"L' Allegro and II Penseroso," 98;
"National and Individual Gen-
ius," 106; "Imagination aa an
Element in Happiness," 114; "The
Story-Telling Faculty," 117;
"Books and their Titles," 123;
"American Literature," 130;
"The Superior and the Common
Man," 137; "The Sublimity of
Death," 142; "Conformity in
Things Unessential," 150; "Pro-
vincial Americans," 165; "Various
Means of Public Influence," 159;
"Mankind Classified," 164; "So-
cial Forms and Restraints," 166;
"The Morality of Lymg," 171;
"Pate among the Ancients," 175;
"Compulsory Education," 178;
"Barbarism and Civilization,"
180; "Titus Pomponius Atticus,"
183; "Gratitude," 272; "Civil
Disobedience," 478.

Journals (quoted), 14, 16, 21,
23-25, 26, 83, 192-94, 224-27,
231-33, 234, 273-77, 281, 282, 288,
289, 296, 321-24, 331, 332, 343,
437-40, 442-47.

Letters (quoted), 66, 67, 69, 60,
62, 63.

Poems (quoted): "The White
Rooster," 88; "The Breeze's Invi-
tation," 230; "Godfrey of Bou-
logne," 250; "Winter and Spring
Scene," 262; "Our Country Njeigh-
bors," 266; "Inspiration," 267;
"A Prayer," 271; "Our Country,"
278; "Ye princes, keep your
reahns," 284; "I knew a gentle
boy," 350; "To the Maiden in
the East," 363; "The Just Made
Perfect," 363; "The Departure,"
600; "I ask no meaner pelf,"
602.
Thoreau, Jane (aunt of Henry), 388,
444.

[ 541 ]

Thoreau, Jane Burns (grandmother
of Henry), 4, 28, 441, 442.

Thoreau, John (brother of Henry),
39, 190, 197, iilO, 211, 213-18, 235,
240.

Thoreau, John (father of Henry), 5,

31, 32, 34, 36, 443-47.
Thoreau, John (grandfather of

Henry), 3, 4. 5, 26, 28, 29, 30, 441,
443.
Thoreau, Maria (aunt of Henry), 28,

32, 388, 441, 474, 476.
Thoreau, Philippe (great-grand-
father of Henry), 3.

Thoreau, Rebecca Hurd (second

wife of John Thoreau of Jersey),

29-31.
Thoreau, Sophia, 310, 326, 338, 435,

492, 506.
Thoreaus of Jersey, 2, 3, 4.
Todd, Mabel Loomis, 388, note; 389.
"Touchstone," by Alliugham, 477.
Traubel, Horace, 336.
Truth, observations on, 183-86; 196,

193.

Unitarian controversy in Concord,
44, 45.

Very, Jones, 150, 174.
Village culture, 458-60.
Vose, Judge Henry, 66.

Walden, 324, 338.

"Wanderer, The," Thoreau de-
scribed in, 170.

War, spiritual, 243, 244; 312, 313.

Ward, Mrs. Colonel, 467, 468.

Ward, Miss Prudence, 197, 198, 467,
474, 475; quotations from letters,
200, 202, 229, 352, 470, 471.

Ware, Dr. Henry, 158.

Warren, Henry, a pupil at Thoreau's
school, 203, 206, 206, 208.

Watson, Marston, 154, 366, 371,499.

INDEX

Wealth, love of. 187. 188.

Webster, Daniel, and Louisa Dun-
bar, 46; views on slavery, 47S. 476.

Webster, Prof. J. W., 58.

Weld, Theodore, 381.

Western literature and language,
comments on, 275-77.

Whiting, Colonel, 84.

Whitman, Mrs. Sarah, 359, 360.
Whitman, Walt, 199, 308-11, 317,

336, 337, 382, 383, 385.
Williams, Henry, 57.
Woodbury, John P., 318, 31,9.

Zeal and enthusiasm not accurate
calculaters, 70, 71.

CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS
U . S . A

THE WORKS OF

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

Ralph Waldo Emerson said: "Wherever there is knowl-
edge, wherever there is virtue, wherever there is beauty,
Thoreau will find a home."

John Burroughs said : "There runs through his works a
vein of the purest and rarest poetry and the finest wis-
dom. . . . Time will enhance rather than lessen the
value of his contributions."

The Encyclopcedia Britannica : "Thoreau holds a unique
place. He was a naturalist, but absolutely devoid of the
pedantry of science ; a keen observer, but no retailer
of disjointed facts. He must always be read, whether
lovingly or interestedly, for he has the variable charm,
the strange saturninity, the contradictions, austerities
and delightful surprises of Nature herself."

His Works:

A Week on the Concord and Merri- Summer,

mack Rivers. Autumn.

Walden : or, Life in the Woods. Winter.

The Maine Woods. Excursions.

Cape Cod. Miscellanies.

Early Spring in Massachusetts. Familiar Letters of Henry David
■' Thoreau.

Riverside Pocket Edition. With photogravure frontispieces, ii vols. Flex-
ible leather. Each, J1.50 net. The set, boxed, ;?i6.S0.

For details of other editions, write the publishers.

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY