"(Sreat Writers." 
 
 EDITED BY 
 
 ERIC ROBERTSON AND FRANK T. MARZIALS. 
 
 LIFE OF THOREAU. 
 
FOR FULL LIST OF THE VOLUMES IN THIS SERIES, 
 SEE CATALOGUE AT END OF BOOK. 
 
LIFE 
 
 OF 
 
 HENRY DAVID THOREAU 
 
 BY 
 
 HENRY S. SALT 
 
 OFTHE 
 
 UNIVERsr 
 
 LONDON 
 WALTER SCOTT, LIMITED 
 
 PATERNOSTER SQUARE 
 
 1896 
 (All rights reserved] 
 
OFTHE 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 952 
 
 TYS? 
 
 PREFATORY NOTE. 
 
 A FEW words of preface are needed to explain the relation 
 of this Life of Thoreciu to the original edition issued by 
 Messrs. Bentley in 1890. In that volume, which was 
 published in England only, and at a time when Thoreau s 
 writings, with the exception of Walden, were compara 
 tively little known, there were included a number of 
 quotations from the Letters, Diaries, Excursions, etc., 
 then inaccessible to the mass of English readers. In the 
 new form of the book, abridged to meet the requirements 
 of a popular series, most of these passages have been 
 omitted; but, on the other hand, I have been able to 
 make some important corrections and additions, thanks 
 to the courtesy of Mr. F. B. Sanborn and other American 
 friends, who have supplied me, during the past five years, 
 with a large amount of information. I am especially 
 indebted to Dr. S. A. Jones, of Ann Arbor, Michigan, 
 and Mr. A. W. Hosmer, of Concord, from both of whom 
 I have received most friendly aid and encouragement. 
 By his invaluable Bibliography, and other labours full of 
 sympathy and insight, Dr. Jones has earned the gratitude 
 of all Thoreau-students ; and to him, as a slight acknow 
 ledgment of personal obligation, I take the liberty of 
 inscribing this book. 
 
 11. S. S. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The artificial and the natural ; Henry Thoreau s birth and 
 parentage ; the village of Concord : its inhabitants, 
 scenery, climate, and traditions ; Thoreau s boyhood ; 
 influences of heredity and association ; the Thoreau 
 family ; his career at Harvard University : character and 
 appearance ; opinion of college system : early tendency* 
 to idealism ; devotion to* Concord . . . . .11 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 Choice of a profession ; keeps the Concord "Academy ; the 
 Transcendental movement ; effect on Thoreau ; abandon 
 ment of professional pursuits; adopts an open-air life;^ 
 early writings ; youthful love and self-sacrifice ; his 
 brother John ;" week on the Concord River ; friendship 
 with R. W. Emerson ; connection with the Dial : the 
 Concord transcendentalists ; Thoreau s residence with the 
 Emersons ; friendship with Alcott, Margaret Fuller, 
 Ellery Channing ; death -of John- Thoreatt . . 30 
 
8 CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 i A<;i 
 
 Influence of Emerson on Thoreau ; acquaintance with Haw 
 thorne ; contributions to the Dial; the "Walk to 
 Wachusett"; solitude and society; life in Emerson s*, 
 family; tutorship in Staten Island; letters to the Emer- ( 
 sons; visits to New York; new acquaintances; the Brook/ 
 Farm community; Thoreau s individualism j/" "plans for I 
 living in retirement; why he went to Walden . . 51 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 Walden Pond; site of Thoreau s hut ; building and furnishing; 
 mode of life in the woods; simplicity of dress and diet; 
 solitude; visitors from the village; fugitive slaves; refusaj-^* 
 
 to pay poll-tax; imprisonment: studies in natural history: 
 reasons for leaving Walden ; value of Thoreau s experiment 66 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 Thoreau s personal appearance ; mode of dress ; fitness of 
 body and mind ; keenness of senses ; idealism ; its effect 
 on his friendships ; dislike of society ; not a misanthrope ; * 
 sympathy with children ; a Yankee Stoic ; favourite 
 authors; Oriental books; Greek and Latin classics; 
 Indian studies ; love of the wild ; his walks ; familiarity 
 with wild animals ; a post-naturalist ; magnetism of his 
 character 86 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 Second residence with the Emersons ; publication of the 
 Week; domestic life at Concord ; friendship with Harrison 
 Blake ; pencil-making, surveying, and lecturing ; meets 
 A. II. Clough ; a fugitive slave assisted ; publication of 
 
CONTENTS. 9 
 
 PAGF 
 
 Walden; new friends, Thomas Cholmondeley, Daniel 
 Ricketson, F. B. Sanborn ; meeting with Walt Whit 
 man ; John Brown ; visits to " Brooklawn ; ; Mr. Ricket- 
 son s testimony . . . ...... .105 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 Thoreau s mode of travelling; excursions to Cape Cod; the 
 Yankee in Canada ; three excursions to the Maine Woods ; 
 letter to T. W. Higginson ; love of mountains ; the White 
 Mountains; Monadnock . . . . .122 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 Signs of ill-health ; relations with editors ; death of Thoreau s 
 father; the Harper s Ferry incident; Thoreau s " Plea 
 for John Brown " ; a touchstone of his character ; appre 
 ciated by his townsmen ; his confidence in the future ; 
 commencement of illness ; visit to Minnesota ; the Civil 
 War; Thoreau s last winter ; his courage and cheerfulness ; 
 his death ; burial in " Sleepy Hollow " . . . T 34 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 Thoreau s aversion to system ; idealism yombined with practi- f 
 calness; originality; optimistic nature- worship; views on / 
 religion; insistence on self-culture and self-respect; dislike 
 of "business"; a champion of individuality; his gospel -* 
 of Simplicity; his attitude towards civilisation, science, and - 
 art; misunderstandings of his doctrine; his tenderness; 
 humanitarian views; sympathy with animals; peculiar 
 position among naturalists; powers of observation ; ideal 
 ism the secret of his creed . . . . . . I5 2 
 
 
10 CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 f- A U EJ 
 
 Thoreau s disregard of "style"; combination of literary work 
 and manual ; conscientious workmanship ; idealisation of 
 common themes ; poetical images and metaphors : his love 
 of concentration and paradox ; his humour ; open-air 
 sketches; essays; diaries; letters; poems . . . 170 
 
 XT. 
 
 , - 
 
 Uniqueness of Thoreau s personality; compared J with o 
 
 naturalists; erroneous criticisms of his doctrines by Lowell 
 and others; their true significance; final estimate of hi 
 character 
 
 IXDEX 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
HENRY DAVID THOREAU. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 the various perils which beset the path of our 
 modern civilisation, none perhaps are more subtle 
 and dangerous than those which may be summed up 
 under the term artificiality. As life becomes more com 
 plex, and men of culture are withdrawn farther and 
 farther from touch with wild nature, there is a corre 
 sponding sacrifice of hardihood and independence there 
 is less individuality, less mastery over circumstance, less 
 probity of conduct and candour of speaking, less faith 
 in one s self and in the leading of one s destiny. These 
 may be but incidental disadvantages, outweighed by the 
 general improvement in the condition of the race ; yet 
 they are serious enough to demand thoughtful recog 
 nition, and to make us welcome any signs of a contrary 
 tendency. 
 
 The enormous increase which the present age has 
 witnessed in material wealth and mechanical invention 
 has accentuated both the magnitude of the evil and the 
 necessity of relieving it. A century ago, it might have 
 
12 LIFE OF 
 
 occurred to those who were living on the threshold of the 
 new era, and who foresaw (as some must have foreseen) 
 the coming rush of civilisation, with its fretful hurry and 
 bustle of innumerable distractions, to wonder whether 
 the very prevalence of the malady would work out its 
 own reformation. Must society ever be divorced from 
 simplicity ? Must intellect and wildness be incompatible? 
 Must we lose in the deterioration of the physical senses 
 what we gain in mental culture ? Must perfect com 
 munion with Nature be impossible ? Or would there 
 arise a man capable of showing us in his own character 
 whatever its shortcomings and limitations that it 
 is still possible and profitable to live, as the Stoics 
 strove to live, in accordance with Nature, with absolute 
 serenity and self-possession; to follow out one s own 
 ideal, in spite of every obstacle, with unfaltering devotion; 
 and so to simplify one s life, and clarify one s senses, as 
 to master many of the inner secrets of that book of 
 Nature which to most men remains unintelligible and 
 unread. Such anticipation if we may imagine it to 
 have been entertained was amply fulfilled in the life 
 and character of Henry David Thoreau. 
 
 In the year 1823 there was living in the village of 
 Concord, Massachusetts, with his wife and four children, 
 one John Thoreau, a pencil-maker by employment, 
 whose father, a younger son in a well-to-do Jersey family 
 of French extraction, had emigrated from St. Helier to 
 New England in 1773, married a Scotch wife, established 
 a mercantile business in Boston, and died at Concord in 
 iSoi. 1 John Thoreau, who at the time of which I speak 
 
 1 It is said that the name Thoreau was common in the annals 
 of Tours several hundred years ago. The earliest known ancestors 
 
THOREAU. 13 
 
 was thirty-six years old, had begun life as a merchant, 
 but having failed in business and lost whatever property 
 he inherited from his father, he had recently turned his 
 attention to pencil-making, a trade which had been in 
 troduced into Concord some ten or twelve years earlier, 
 from which he not only derived a competent livelihood, 
 but gained distinction by the excellence of his workman 
 ship. He is described by those who knew him as a 
 small, quiet, plodding, unobtrusive man, thoroughly 
 genuine and reliable, occupying himself for the most 
 part in his ow r n business, though he could be friendly 
 and sociable when occasion invited. His wife, whose 
 maiden name was Cynthia Dunbar, 1 was very different in 
 character, being remarkable, like the other members of 
 her family, for her keen dramatic humour and intellectual 
 sprightliness ; she was tall, handsome, quick-witted; she 
 had a good voice and sang well, and often monopolised 
 the conversation by her unfailing flow of talk. 
 
 Henry David Thoreau, the third child of these parents, 
 was bom at Concord, i2th July 1817, in a quaint, old- 
 fashioned house on the Virginia Road, surrounded by 
 pleasant orchards and peat-meadows, and close to an 
 extensive tract known as " Bedford levels." In this 
 
 of Henry Thoreau are his great-grandparents, Philip Thoreau and 
 Marie .le Calais, the parents of the emigrant above mentioned. The 
 family is now extinct both in Jersey and New England. 
 
 1 Her father, the Rev. Asa Dunbar of Keene, New Hampshire, 
 died in 1787, and his widow afterwards married a Concord farmer 
 named Minott. In Mrs. Thoreau s brother, Charles Dunbar, the 
 ready wit, characteristic of the Dunbar family, had run to eccen 
 tricity. He led a strange vagabond life, roving from town to town, 
 and winning a pot-house notoriety by his waggish speeches and 
 dexterity in wrestling and conjuring. 
 
14 LIFE OF 
 
 house, the home of his grandmother, Mrs. Minott, he 
 lived for eight months; then for another period of the 
 same length in a house on the Lexington Road, on the 
 outskirts of the village. In 1818 his parents left Concord 
 for five years, and lived first at Chelmsford, a town ten 
 miles distant, and afterwards at Boston, where Henry first 
 went to school But as their business did not prosper 
 in either place, the family returned in 1823 to Concord, 
 which thenceforth continued to be their home. They 
 little thought, however, that the name of Concord and 
 the name of Thoreau were destined in later years to be 
 so inseparably associated. 
 
 This village of Concord, which lies twenty miles to the 
 north-west of Boston, and must be distinguished from 
 the capital of New Hampshire, which bears the same 
 name, was at the time of Henry Thoreau s boyhood the 
 centre of a scattered township of about two thousand 
 inhabitants. Under the name of Musketaquid it 
 had been an ancient settlement of the Indians, its 
 attraction, in earlier as in later ages, consisting in 
 the rich meadows which border the Musketaquid, or 
 " Grass-ground " river. " When I walk in the fields of 
 Concord," so Thoreau afterwards wrote in his diary, 
 " I forget that this which is now Concord was once 
 Musketaquid. Everywhere in the fields, in the corn and 
 grain land, the earth is strewn with the relics of a race 
 which has vanished as completely as if trodden in with 
 the earth. Wherever I go I tread in the tracks of the 
 Indian." In 1635 tae district was purchased from the 
 Indians by the Massachusetts colony, which there made 
 its first inland plantation; and it was from the peaceful 
 settlement then effected that the place received its name 
 
THOREAU. 15 
 
 of Concord. At the beginning of the present century 
 Concord, though not yet associated with any of the great 
 literary names which have since made it famous, was not 
 unknown to the world; for there, in 1775, na< ^ been 
 struck the first blow for American independence, when 
 the English troops, after some desultory fighting, were 
 repulsed by the "rebel" farmers. Lafayette visited 
 Concord in 1824, and the following year, half a century 
 after the battle, there was a celebration of that event, at 
 which Henry Thoreau, then a child of seven, is said to 
 have been present. 
 
 The inhabitants of Concord were mostly agriculturists 
 sturdy farmers, living in comfortable old-fashioned 
 homesteads; but there was a considerable sprinkling 
 also of mechanics and men of business; and as the town 
 lay on the high-road between the uplands of New Hamp 
 shire and the port of Boston, it was to some extent a 
 centre of trade; it was also at that time one of the places 
 appointed for the holding of the county assizes. A 
 frank and natural equality was one of the traditional 
 characteristics of Concord society, extreme wealth and 
 extreme poverty being alike rare; so that its citizens, 
 a plain and frugal folk, quite unostentatious in their 
 manners and mode of life, yet prizing literature and 
 learning, were saved from the evils of either luxury or 
 destitution; while the well-known Concord families 
 the Hosmers and Barretts and Hey woods preserved and 
 handed on from generation to generation their sterling^ ^ 
 hereditary qualities. The two leading personages at 
 Concord at the time of Henry Thoreau s birth, and for 
 many years afterwards, were Dr. Ripley, the Unitarian 
 pastor of the village, who lived in the "old Manse" 
 
16 LIFE OF 
 
 which Hawthorne subsequently inhabited, and Samuel 
 Hoar, a man of senatorial rank, who exemplified in his 
 character some of the best New England qualities of 
 dignity, justice, and simplicity. Dr. Ripley, quaint, 
 humorous, and patriarchal, was minister at Concord for 
 over half a century, and was regarded by his parishioners 
 as a friend and teacher to whom they could look for 
 advice and assistance in all matters that concerned them. 
 Henry Thoreau was one of the many Concord children 
 who had been baptised by him into the Unitarian 
 Church, and in whose welfare the kindly pastor con 
 tinued to take an affectionate interest. 
 
 The dominant features of the natural scenery of 
 Concord are its waters and its woods; it has been 
 described as "a village surrounded by tracts of wood 
 land and meadows, abounding in convenient yet retired 
 paths for walking." The two rivers of Concord, the 
 slow-flowing Musketaquid and the swifter Assabet, which 
 meet close to the north of the village, have been immor 
 talised by both Hawthorne and Thoreau. "The sluggish 
 artery of the Concord meadows," says the latter, "steals 
 thus unobserved through the town, without a murmur 
 or a pulse-beat, its general course from south-west to 
 north-east, and its length about fifty miles; a huge 
 volume of matter, ceaselessly rolling through the plains 
 and valleys of the substantial earth, with the mocassined 
 tread of an Indian warrior, making haste from the high 
 places of the earth to its ancient reservoir." 1 As for 
 the Assabet, we have it on Hawthorne s authority that 
 " a lovelier stream than this, for a mile above its junction 
 
 1 Introduction to The Week. Compare Hawthorne s account in 
 Mosses from an Old Manse. 
 
THOREAU. 17 
 
 with the Concord, never flowed on earth nowhere, 
 indeed, except to lave the interior regions of a poet s 
 imagination." Of the Ponds, Walden, Sandy, and 
 White Pond to the south of the village, and Bateman s 
 to the north, are the most considerable; moreover, after 
 the heavy rains, which are usual at two periods of the 
 year, the lowlands adjacent to the river are converted 
 by the floods into a chain of shallow lakes; so that 
 there is no portion of the township of Concord which 
 is not more or less in proximity to some lake or stream. 
 
 And if well watered, Concord is also well wooded, 
 its sandy soil being covered in almost every direction 
 by thick groves of oak, pine, chestnut, maple, and other 
 forest trees, which even to this day retain much of their 
 primeval severity. "I saw nothing wilder," wrote a 
 visitor to Concord, 1 " among the unbroken solitudes of 
 the Upper Ottawa tributaries than these woods that fringe 
 the bank of Walden. Not a human habitation, not a 
 cleared farm, not a sign of life or civilised occupation 
 anywhere broke the unvaried expanse of wild woodland. 
 The hills which surround Concord Anursack, Nashaw- 
 tuck, Ball s Hill, Brister s Hill, and the rest are of no 
 great height; but they command fine prospects, west 
 ward and northward, in the direction of loftier ranges, 
 Wachusett, Monadnock, and the White Mountains of 
 New Hampshire. 
 
 " Thoreau s country," says a picturesque writer, 2 " has the broad 
 effects and simple elements that compose well in the best 
 landscape art. It is a quiet bit of country that under the seeing eye 
 can be made to yield a store of happiness. Its resources for the 
 
 1 Grant Allen, in Fortnightly Review, May 1888. 
 
 2 "A. L.," in New Yo -k Evening Post t October loth, 1890. 
 
 2 
 
18 LIFE OF 
 
 naturalist, at first scarcely suspected, are practically inexhaustible. 
 It is not tame, as an English landscape is tame. It keeps its 
 memories and traditions of the red man along with his flint-flakes 
 and arrow-heads, and its birds and wild-flowers are varied and 
 abundant. A country of noble trees, wide meadow-expanses and 
 the little river, quiet almost to stagnation, with just current enough 
 to keep it pure, in places much overgrown with water- weed, in 
 other places thick strewn with lily-pads, the banks umbrageous and 
 grassy, fringed with ferns and wild-flowers, and here and there 
 jutting into a point of rocks, or expanding into placid lake-like 
 stretches these are the main elements of Thorcau s country. 
 Then we must add a clean, sandy soil, through which water per 
 colates with great rapidity, leaving paths pleasant to the feet. 
 Then come the low ranges of hills, the marshes, the ponds, and the 
 forests, fit home for a rich varied wild flora. And then the weather 
 influences must be taken into account. This small district of 
 country, though it feels the breath of the sea twenty miles away, is 
 still somewhat sheltered from the asperities of the east wind. The 
 summer nights are cool and refreshing, though the day may have 
 a heart of fire, and the autumn has stretches of bright, cool, 
 resplendent weather. Owing to the dry soil, the ways seem more 
 open and cheery in winter than in other places, and the roads are 
 good for walking all the year round." 
 
 Among such scenes and surroundings did Henry 
 Thoreau grow up and receive his earliest impressions of 
 nature and society. From the first he was inured to a 
 hardy outdoor life, driving his mother s cow to pasture 
 when he was a child of six, and going barefoot like the 
 other village boys. School games and athletic sports 
 formed no part of his youthful amusements, but at as 
 early an age as ten or twelve, after the habit of New 
 England boys, he was permitted to shoulder a fowling- 
 piece or fishing-rod and betake himself to the wildest 
 and most solitary recesses of wood or river. The 
 water-side seems to have had a special fascination for 
 
THOREAU. 19 
 
 him at an early date, one of his childish reminiscences 
 being a visit to Walden Pond, which excited a desire in 
 him to live there, and as he grew older he was fond of 
 bathing and boating on the Concord river in company 
 with his schoolmates, making himself acquainted with 
 all the rocks and soundings of that placid stream. Now 
 and then the news would spread like wildfire that a 
 canal-boat, laden with lime, or bricks, or iron-ore, was 
 gliding mysteriously along the river, and the village 
 children would eagerly flock out to gaze with wonder 
 on these " fabulous river-men," who came and went so 
 unaccountably. Still more interesting were the annual 
 visits of the remnants of some Indian tribes, who used 
 to pitch their tents in the rich meadows which had 
 belonged of old to their forefathers, and there string 
 their beads and weave their baskets, or initiate the 
 Concord youths into the art of paddling an Indian 
 canoe. 
 
 We are surprised to learn that, as a child, Henry 
 Thoreau was afraid of thunderstorms, and at such times 
 would creep to his father for protection; for most of the 
 anecdotes related of his school-days are indicative of the 
 fearlessness, self-reliance, and laconic brevity of speech \ 
 for which he was afterwards conspicuous. At the age of 
 three years he was informed that, like the godly men of 
 whom he read in his religious exercise-book, he too 
 would some day have to die; he received the news with 
 equanimity, asserting, however, that he " did not want 
 to go to heaven, because he could not carry his sled 
 with him, for the boys said it was not shod with iron, 
 and therefore not worth a cent" a characteristic re 
 nouncement of a paradise in which, as he surmised 
 
20 LIFE OF 
 
 outer appearances would be unduly regarded. When 
 charged with taking a knife belonging to another boy he 
 replied briefly, " I did not take it ;" and steadily refused 
 to exculpate himself by further explanation until after 
 the true offender was discovered. All being made clear, 
 the natural inquiry put to him was why he did not 
 sooner explain himself. " I did not take it," was again 
 his reply. ;When ten years old he carried some pet 
 chickens for sale to a neighbouring innkeeper, who, in 
 order to return the basket promptly, took them out one 
 by one and wrung their necks before the eyes of the 
 boy, who let no word betray the agony of his outraged 
 feelings. His gravity had already earned him among his 
 schoolfellows the title of "the judge"; of that spright- 
 liness of intellect which subsequently showed itself in 
 such a marked degree in his conversation and writings 
 there seems at this time to have been no trace, at any 
 rate no early instance has been recorded. 
 
 On the important question of Thoreau s hereditary 
 traits, I quote the following from an interesting article 
 by Dr. S. A. Jones on "Thoreau s Inheritance": 
 
 " liis inheritance included also the endowment of heredity: a 
 potent factor which has not yet had just and due consideration from 
 any of his biographers. A gentleman who attended the school 
 kept by the Thoreau brothers once wrote to me : Henry Thoreau 
 was not a superior scion upon an inferior stock, neither was he 
 begotten by a north-west wind, as many have supposed. There 
 were good and sufficient reasons for the Thoreau children s love of, 
 and marked taste for, Botany and Natural History. John Thoreau 
 and his wife were to be seen, year after year, enjoying the pleasures 
 of nature, in their various seasons, on the banks of the Assabet, at 
 Fairhaven, Lee s Hill, Walden, and elsewhere; and this too with 
 out neglecting the various duties of their humble sphere. Indeed, 
 
THOREAU. 21 
 
 such was Mrs. Thoreau s passion for these rambles that one of her / 
 children narrowly escaped being born in a favourite haunt on Lee s 
 Hill. \ 
 
 " The father was a very cautious and secretive man, a close 
 observer, methodical and deliberate in action, and he produced 
 excellent results. His marbled paper and his pencils were the best in 
 the market, while his stove polish and his plumbago for electrotyping 
 have never, to my knowledge, been excelled. He was a .French 
 gentleman rather than a Yankee, and once having his confidence, 
 you had a very shrewd and companionable friend to commune with. 
 Then, when there were no unauthorised listeners attout, the other 
 wise quiet man, who had such a faculty for "minding his own 
 business," would sit with you by the stove in his little shop and 
 chat most delightfully. " 1 
 
 The preponderance of the Saxon, the maternal ele 
 ment in Henry s character, was a matter of observation 
 and comment among his townsfolk. He was a complete 
 New Englander, and prided himself on being " autoch 
 thonous" at Concord. " I think the characteristics 
 which chiefly impressed those of us who knew Mrs. 
 Thoreau," says one who was intimate with her, "were 
 the activity of her mind and the wideness of her sym 
 pathy. She was an excellent mother and housewife. 
 In the midst of poverty she brought up her children to 
 all the amenities of life, and if she had but a crust of 
 bread for dinner she would see that it was properly 
 served. She was never so poor or so busy that she did 
 not find means of helping those poorer than herself." 2 
 
 We see then that Thoreau was indebted to both his 
 parents for some of his best qualities to his mother for 
 
 1 The Inlander, February 1893. 
 
 2 E. M. F., in Boston Daily Advertiser, February i8th, 1883. 
 I must plead guilty to having done less than justice to Thoreau s 
 parents in the first edition of this book. 
 
22 LIFE OF 
 
 a quick-witted spirit and passionate love of Nature, to 
 his father for the counterbalance of a calm, sane, indus 
 trious temperament, with absolute honesty of purpose 
 and performance. " The marriage of quiet John Thoreau 
 and the vivacious Cynthia Dunbar was a happy conjunc 
 tion (so it has been well said) of diverse temperaments 
 and opposite traits, of substantial virtues and of simple 
 habits; and with bodies undefiled by luxury, and minds 
 unsophisticated by social dissimulation, they made a 
 home, and its lowly hearth became a shrine whose 
 incense brought blessings to their offspring." It must 
 be added that they entered with such zeal into the 
 agitation for the abolition of slavery, that when that 
 question began to be debated in Massachusetts, they 
 were willing to make their house a rendezvous for 
 abolitionist conspirators. 
 
 The younger members of the Thoreau household were 
 also possessed of an unusual strength of will and serious 
 ness of purpose. Both his sister Helen and his brother 
 John, who were Henry s elders by five and three years 
 respectively, were earnest and lovable natures; so too 
 was his younger sister Sophia; and it was remarked by 
 those friends who were intimately associated with the 
 family, that they each possessed a distinctive and unmis 
 takable personality. At this period, when new ideas 
 were permeating American society and preparing men s 
 minds for the great intellectual and social awakening 
 that was shortly to follow, the Thoreaus had won 
 general respect among their neighbours at Concord by 
 their humanity, thoughtfulness, and unaffected simplicity 
 of living. 
 
 Here is an early glimpse of Thoreau. It seems that in 
 
THOREAU. 23 
 
 . 
 
 1828 they had a Concord Academic Debating Society, 
 
 and the report of the secretary for November 5th, 1828, 
 runs thus : "The discussion of the question selected for 
 debate next followed : Is a good memory preferable to a 
 good understanding in order to be a distinguished scholar at 
 school? E. Wright, affirmative; Henry Thoreau, negative. 
 The affirmative disputant, through negligence, had pre 
 pared nothing for debate, and the negative not much 
 more. Accordingly, no other member speaking, the 
 president decided in the negative. His decision was 
 confirmed by a majority of four." 
 
 In 1833, when sixteen years old, Henry Thoreau was 
 sent to Harvard University, 1 where he occupied a room 
 in Hollis Hall, in which, if we may trust a chance 
 reference in one of his volumes, he experienced the in 
 convenience of "many and noisy neighbours, and a 
 residence in the fourth storey." He had been prepared 
 for college at the Concord "Academy," an excellent 
 school famous for its successful teaching of Greek, 
 where he had already exhibited a strong liking for the 
 classics, though his reading was not confined to the 
 prescribed course, but began to embrace a considerable 
 extent of English literature. His expenses at Harvard 
 were a serious matter in a family whose means were very 
 limited; the difficulty, however, was surmounted partly 
 by his own carefulness and economy, partly by the help 
 of his aunts and his elder sister, herself a school-teacher 
 at this time. During the college vacations he took 
 pupils, or assisted in school-teaching in several country 
 
 1 He is entered in the Harvard register as he was christened, 
 David Henry Thoreau; but he afterwards put the more familiar 
 name first. 
 
24 LIFE OF 
 
 towns, one of those engagements being at Canton, near 
 Boston, where in 1835, his "sophomore year," he 
 boarded and studied German with a minister named 
 Brownson, at the same time teaching in the " district 
 school." Meantime his interests at Harvard were being 
 promoted by his future friend, R. W. Emerson, who in 
 1834 had gone to live at Concord, where his forefathers 
 had held the ministry for generations. Emerson pre 
 sumably was informed by Dr. Ripley, with whom he was 
 staying, of the promise shown by Thoreau, and it seems 
 to have been due to his good offices that the young 
 man received some small pecuniary assistance from the 
 beneficiary funds of the college. 
 
 We are fortunate in having a graphic account of 
 Thoreau s personal appearance and mode of life at 
 Harvard from the pen of one of his class-mates. 1 It 
 seems that he passed for nothing among his companions, 
 taking little share in their studies and amusements, 
 shunning their oyster suppers and wine parties, and 
 mysteriously disappearing from the scene when, as occa 
 sionally happened, the course of college discipline was 
 temporarily interrupted by a " rebellion." 
 
 " He was cold and unimpressible. The touch of his hand was 
 moist and indifferent, as if he had taken up something when he 
 saw your hand coming, and caught your grasp upon it. How the 
 prominent grey-blue eyes seemed to rove down the path, just in 
 advance of his feet, as his grave Indian stride carried him down to 
 University Hall. He did not care for people ; his class-mates 
 seemed very remote. This reverie hung always about him, and not 
 so loosely as the odd garments which the pious household care 
 furnished. Thought had not yet awakened his countenance ; it 
 was serene, but rather dull, rather plodding. The lips were not yet 
 
 1 Rev. John^^jss, Christian Examiner, Boston, July 1865. 
 
 "i Weiss, 
 
THOREAU. 25 
 
 firm ; there was almost a look of smug satisfaction lurking round 
 their corners. It is plain now that he was preparing to hold his 
 future views with great setness and personal appreciation of their 
 importance. The nose was prominent, but its curve fell forward 
 without firmness over the upper lip, and we remember him as look 
 ing very much like some Egyptian sculptures of faces, large-featured, 
 but brooding, immobile, fixed in a mystic egoism. Yet his eyes 
 were sometimes searching as if he had dropped, or expected to find, 
 something. In fact his eyes seldom left the ground, even in his 
 most earnest conversations with you. 
 
 " He would smile to hear the word collegiate career applied to 
 the reserve and inaptness of his college life. He was not signalised 
 by the plentiful distribution of the parts and honours which fall to 
 the successful student. Of his private tastes there is little of conse-^ 
 quence to recall, except that he was devoted to the old English 
 literature, and had a good many volumes of the poetry from Gower : 
 and Chaucer down through the era of Elizabeth. In this mine he \! 
 worked with a quiet enthusiasm." 
 
 These traits of aloofness and self-seclusion are attributed 
 by his class-mate not to any conceit or superciliousness, 
 still less to shyness, but to a sort of homely "com 
 placency," which, though quite natural and inevitable, 
 had the effect of putting him out of sympathy with his 
 surroundings at Harvard. His complacency was "per 
 fectly satisfied with its own ungraciousness, because that 
 was essential to its private business." This determined 
 concentration on his own life-course was, as we shall see, 
 very characteristic of Thoreau in his mature career, and 
 it is interesting to find that it was thus early developed. 
 
 " In college Thoreau had made no great impression," 
 says another of his contemporaries; 1 "he was far from 
 being distinguished as a scholar, was not known to have 
 
 1 The Rev. D. G. Haskins, in his Ralph Waldo Enter son, 
 Boston, 1887. 
 
26 LIFE OF 
 
 any literary tastes, was never a contributor to the college 
 periodical, Harvardiana ; he was not conspicuous in 
 any of the literary or scientific societies of the under 
 graduates, and withal was of an unsocial disposition, and 
 kept himself very much aloof from his class-mates. At 
 the time we graduated, I doubt whether any of his 
 acquaintances regarded him as giving promise of future 
 distinction." Against this, however, must be set what 
 the historian of Thoreau s college class wrote in 1887, 
 that "notwithstanding what he himself says of his entrance 
 to the college, and the impression that one gets from 
 some of his biographers that he was rather under the 
 ban of the authorities, Thoreau maintained a very fair 
 rank in his class, and at graduation took part in a Con 
 ference on the Commercial Spirit of Modern Times. "* 
 This was somewhat of an honour ; and there is no reason 
 ta suppose that Thoreau had any part in the " rebellions " 
 and other irregularities of the students, as has sometimes 
 been suggested. 
 
 We can well believe, however, that his strong indi 
 vidualist tendencies had even now begun to manifest 
 themselves ; indeed it is apparent from his youthful 
 "themes" that he was already a fearless thinker and 
 
 i questioner on various matters, social and religious a 
 quality which would not be likely to conciliate the good 
 opinion of the college authorities. His integrity, how 
 ever, and high moral principle were clearly recognised ; 
 and from the first he seems to have practised a simple 
 and abstemious mode of living. " He had been so 
 wisely nourished at the collegiate fount," says Channing, 
 
 1 ^Memorials of the Class of 1837, by Henry Williams, Boston, 
 1887. 
 
THOREAU. 27 
 
 " as to come forth undissipated, not digging his grave in 
 tobacco and coffee those two perfect causes of paralysis." 
 Thoreau has himself stated that he never smoked any 
 thing more noxious than dried lily-stems, from which 
 indulgence he had a faint recollection of deriving pleasure 
 before he was a man. 
 
 It has been said that Thoreau s debt to his College 
 was important ; but this is a statement which it will be 
 prudent to accept with some reservation. It is true 
 that although not " successful," in the ordinary sense of 
 the word, he had become a good classical scholar, and 
 had derived intellectual benefit from the teaching of at 
 least one of the lecturers, Professor Channing, whose 
 nephew, Jjllery Channing, afterwards became his most 
 intimate friend. He himself says in a letter of 1843 that 
 what he learned in College was chiefly " to express him 
 self," and this, in his case, was certainly no unimportant 
 gift. But, on the whole, we shall probably be safe in 
 concluding that the advantages which Thoreau obtained 
 from his college career were mainly of the indirect kind, 
 and that he profited far less by the actual instruction 
 there given him than by the opportunities afforded for 
 wide reading and self-culture. 
 
 Meantime his love of outdoor life and open-air pur 
 suits had in nowise diminished during his residence at 
 Harvard ; on the contrary, he was as diligent a student 
 of natural history as of rhetoric or mathematics, and felt 
 as much veneration for Indian relics as for Greek classics; 
 more so, if we are to believe what he wrote subsequently 
 in a letter to the Class Secretary. "Though bodily I 
 have been a member of Harvard University, heart and 
 soul I have been far away among the scenes of my boy- 
 
28 LIFE OF 
 
 hood. Those hours that should have been devoted to 
 study have been spent in scouring the woods and explor 
 ing the lakes and streams of my native village. Immured 
 within the dark but classic walls of a Stoughton or a 
 Hollis, my spirit yearned for the sympathy of my old and 
 almost forgotten friend, Nature." It is stated that his 
 first experiment in camping-out took place during his 
 senior year at college, when he made an excursion of 
 this sort to Lincoln Pond, a few miles from Walden. On 
 this occasion his companion was Stearns Wheeler, one of 
 his school-mates both at Concord and Harvard, whose 
 early death in 1843 is lamented in one of his letters. 
 
 But undoubtedly it was in his conception of ethical 
 principles, together with a kind of .mystic nature-worship, 
 that he had made the greatest progress towards maturity 
 of thought. We are told that he resolved at an early 
 period of his life, probably during his college career, " to 
 read no book, take no walk, undertake no enterprise, but 
 such as he could endure to give an account of to him 
 self; and live thus deliberately for the most part." When 
 only seventeen he had become convinced of the utility 
 of *" keeping a private journal or record of thoughts, 
 feelings, studies, and daily experience," with a view to 
 settling accounts with one s mind" an introspective 
 tendency which grew stronger and stronger with increas 
 ing years. Already, too, his intense ideality of tempera 
 ment was clearly developing itself; while still a boy he 
 had written that " the 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 was his delight, as he tells us, to monopolise a little 
 Gothic window overlooking the garden at the back of his 
 
THOREA U. 29 
 
 father s house, which stood on the main street of Concord 
 village, and there, especially on Sunday afternoons, to 
 muse in undisturbed reverie. Often in the early dawn 
 he would stroll with his brother John, to whom he was 
 devotedly attached, to the u Cliffs," a rocky ridge which 
 overhangs the river Concord, and there watch the sunrise 
 over the expanse of Fairhaven Bay. 
 
 His devotion to Concord was already a fixed and 
 unalterable sentiment, which sometimes showed him in 
 a softer and more emotional mood than was usual to his 
 self-repressed nature. While he was still at college he 
 happened one day to ask his mother what profession she 
 would advise him to choose. She replied that he could 
 buckle on his knapsack and roam abroad to seek his 
 fortune in the world. The tears rose to his eyes at this 
 suggestion, and his sister Helen, who was standing by, 
 tenderly put her arm round him, and said, " No, Henry, 
 you shall not go ; you shall stay at home and live with 
 us." So fully were these words verified that twenty years 
 later we find him still living at Concord, and writing to 
 one of his friends that he had " a real genius for staying 
 at home." 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 YVTHEN Thoreau left the University he was just twenty 
 years old, and the first question which occupied 
 his mind was naturally the choice of a profession by which 
 he might gain his living. Like the other members of 
 his family he became a teacher, an occupation of which 
 he had, as we have seen, already made trial during his 
 vacations at college. In the spring of 1838 he went on 
 a visit to Maine, where his mother had relatives, on the 
 look-out for some educational appointment, bearing with 
 him testimonials signed by Dr. Ripley, R. W. Emerson, 
 and the President of Harvard University, all of whom 
 spoke in the highest terms of his intellectual and moral 
 character. He seems, however, to have been unsuccess 
 ful in this particular quest; for in the same year we find 
 him engaged with his brother in keeping the "Academy" 
 at Concord, the private school for boys and girls at 
 which he himself had been educated, and which had 
 been established about twenty years before by some of 
 the leading Concord citizens. How long Thoreau held 
 this post is not precisely recorded, but it is evident that 
 he did not find his tutorial position at all congenial to 
 his tastes indeed, it is difficult nowadays to conceive of 
 this champion of individuality discharging the functions 
 of teacher under the supervision of a visiting committee. 
 
LIFE OF THOREAU. 31 
 
 If we may trust the humorous account given by Ellcry 
 Channing of Thoreau s pedagogic experiences, the im 
 mediate cause of the resignation of his office was the 
 question of corporal punishment. He at first announced 
 that he should not flog, but should substitute the punish 
 ment of " talking morals " to his pupils ; but after a 
 time one of the School Committee remonstrated against 
 this novel system, and protested that the welfare of the 
 school was being endangered by the undue leniency of 
 its master. Mr. Thoreau must use the ferule, or the 
 school would spoil. "So he did, by 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, as they interfered 
 with his arrangements." School-keeping seems to have 
 been practised by Thoreau for about two years in all ; 
 then, as more congenial subjects occupied his attention, 
 he gave it up altogether, and betook himself to his fore 
 ordained and inevitable profession := the study of nature. 
 The ferule of the schoolmaster was laid by for theTier- 
 barium and spy-glass of the poet-naturalist. 
 
 This brings us to the mention of a movement which 
 was gathering force in New England during Thoreau s 
 youth and early manhood, and had a marked influence 
 on the whole development of his character. Trans 
 cendentalism (i.e., the study of the pure reason which 
 transcends the finite senses, the "feeling of the infinite," 
 as Emerson expressed it), which originated in the philo 
 sophy of Kant, and was revived by Coleridge and 
 Carlyle in England, had now begun to be a disturbing 
 and regenerating power in American thought, and to 
 
32 LIFE OF 
 
 find its chief exponents in such men as George Ripley, 
 Alcott, and Emerson ; though there had long before 
 been a vein of native transcendentalist doctrine in the 
 quietism and quakerism of Penn, John Woolman, and 
 others. The transcendentalism of New England was 
 simply a fresh outburst of ideal philosophy; it was a 
 renaissance in religion, morals, art, and politics ; a 
 period of spiritual questioning and awakening. " The 
 transcendental movement," says Lowell, "was the pro- 
 testant spirit of Puritanism seeking a new outlet and an 
 escape from forms and creeds which compressed rather 
 than expressed it." The " apostles of the newness," 
 or " realists," as the transcendentalists were variously 
 styled, aimed at a return from conventionality to nature, 
 from artifice to simplicity; they held that every one 
 should not only think for himself, but should labour 
 with his own hands ; and the exaltation of the individual, 
 as opposed to the State and the territorial immensity of 
 America, was one of their most cherished purposes. 
 
 It was not to be expected that this transcendentalist 
 revival, which by its very nature was vague, misty, and 
 ill-defined, would be exempt from the extravagances and 
 absurdities which almost inevitably accompany such a 
 movement. But if certain members of the transcendent 
 alist party were deservedly the butt for a good deal of 
 ridicule, the main purpose of the movement was too 
 important to be laughed down, and fully justified itself 
 in the light of subsequent events. Originating in the 
 meetings of a few friends, of whom Emerson was one, at 
 George Ripley s house in Boston, this New England 
 transcendentalism proved to be one of the most power 
 ful forces in American literature and politics. 
 
THOREAU. 33 
 
 Concord, where Thoreau was bom and bred, became, 
 as we shall see, one of the centres of the transcendental 
 movement, which aimed at carrying its doctrines into 
 every branch of social life ; it is not surprising, therefore, 
 that a mind already naturally predisposed to idealism 
 should have been strongly affected by the congenial 
 gospel of an inner intellectual awakening. His diaries, 
 poems, and early letters are full of this transcendental 
 tone; and it was doubtless in great part owing to the 
 same influence that he felt so marked a disinclination to 
 settle down in the ordinary groove of business. 
 
 It was not only school-keeping that was given up by 
 Thoreau, under the stress of this new faith. In 1838, 
 or thereabouts, while he was still a school teacher, he 
 had quietly but definitely seceded from Dr. Ripley s 
 congregation, to the grief and disappointment, it must 
 be feared, of the venerable pastor, who looked with 
 suspicion and alarm on the gospel of the transcendent- 
 alists, which he saw promulgated all around him towards 
 the close of his long career. The youthful secessionist 
 had moreover run the risk of imprisonment by his 
 refusal to pay the church-tax, on the ground that he did 
 not see why the schoolmaster should support the priest 
 more than the priest the schoolmaster. The difficulty 
 was finally settled by his signing a statement in which he 
 testified that he was not a member of any congregational 
 body. That so fearless and independent a thinker as 
 Thoreau should maintain his adherence to any religious 
 formula was not to be expected, for the very reason that 
 the natural piety of his mind was so simple and sincere. 
 If a name be sought for the faith which he henceforth 
 held and practised, he should probably be styled a 
 
 
34 . LIFE OF 
 
 pantheist. Never was there a more passionately devout 
 worshipper of the beauty and holiness of Life, and it 
 was on this instinctive belief in the eternal goodness of 
 Nature that he based the optimistic creed which we shall 
 find to be the central point of his philosophy. 
 
 School-keeping being abandoned, the question of a 
 profession, it may well be supposed, was still pressed on 
 the youthful enthusiast by anxious relatives and friends. 
 As we have already seen, pencil-making was the regular 
 employment of the Thoreau family, and Henry, like his 
 father, had acquired much skill in this handicraft, to 
 which, for a time at any rate, he applied himself with 
 great diligence. Mr. John Thoreau s secret consisted in 
 his process for making the lead. The levigated plum 
 bago was made into a paste by using Fuller s earth and 
 water. This ingredient was John Thoreau s device. 
 The paste was rolled into sheets, cut into strips, and 
 burned. Henry Thoreau made the levigated plumbago 
 long after the pencil-making had ceased. The story 
 goes that when he had entirely mastered the secrets of 
 the trade, had obtained certificates from the recognised 
 connoisseurs in Boston of the excellence of his work 
 manship, and was being congratulated by his friends on 
 having now secured his way to fortune : he suddenly 
 declared his intention of making not another pencil, 
 since " he would not do again what he had done once." 
 True or not, the anecdote is happily characteristic of 
 Thoreau s whimsical manner of expressing his most 
 serious convictions. 
 
 He had early discovered, by virtue of that keen 
 insight which looked through the outer husk of con 
 ventionality, that what is called " profit " in the bustle 
 
THOREA U. 35 
 
 of commercial life is often far from being, in the true 
 sense, profitable; that the just claims of leisure are 
 fully as important as the just claims of business; and 
 that the surest way of becoming rich is to need little : 
 in his own words, "a man is rich in proportion to the 
 number of things which he can afford to let alone." 
 This being so, why should he, at the outset of his 
 career, pledge himself irrevocably, after the manner of 
 young men, to some professional treadmill, and for the 
 sake of imaginary "comforts" sacrifice the substantial 
 happiness of life? "No, no," he exclaims, at a later 
 period, in reply to a well-meant suggestion that, being 
 without a definite profession, he should engage in some 
 commercial enterprise; "I am not without employment 
 at this stage of the voyage. To tell the truth, I saw an 
 advertisement for able-bodied seamen, when I was a 
 boy, sauntering in my native port, and as soon as I 
 came of age, I embarked." This enterprise was none 
 other than the study of wild nature ; his " business " 
 was to be a professional walker or " saunterer," as he 
 called it; to spend at least one half of each day in the 
 open air; to watch the dawns and the sunsets; to carry 
 express what was in the wind; to secure the latest news 
 from forest and hill-top, and to be "self-appointed 
 inspector of snow storms and rain storms." These 
 duties he subsequently declared that he had faithfully 
 and regularly performed; if his friends were disappointed, 
 he at least was not. Witness his own lines in his 
 " Prayer " 
 
 " 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. 
 
36 LIFE OF 
 
 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. 
 
 Idleness, however, formed no part of Thoreau s 
 "loitering"; he was not one who would permit himself 
 to be dependent on the labour of others; for he was 
 well aware that one of the most significant questions as 
 to a man s life is "how he gets his living, what pro 
 portion of his daily bread he earns by day labour or job 
 work with his pen, what he inherits, what steals." Apart 
 from the chosen occupation of his lifetime, to which he 
 devoted himself with unflagging industry and zeal, he 
 conscientiously supported himself by such occasional 
 labour as his position required, toiling from time to time 
 (to quote an illustration which he was fond of using) 
 like Apollo in the service of Admetus. During the first 
 ten years of his mature life, that is from 1837 to 1847, 
 he earned what little he needed chiefly by manual work, 
 his remarkable mechanical skill enabling him to do this 
 with readiness. At the family business of pencil-making, 
 in spite of his reported youthful abjuration, he worked at 
 intervals during the greater portion of his life, chiefly by 
 way of rendering aid to his father and sisters. Land- 
 surveying was another employment in which he incident 
 ally busied himself; and here too, owing to his adroit 
 ness in mensuration, and his intimate acquaintance with 
 the Concord hill-sides and " wood-lots," his services were 
 highly valued. 
 
 He also began at this time, though but slightly and 
 tentatively at first, to give his attention to lecturing and 
 literary work. His first lecture, the subject of which 
 
THOREA U. 37 
 
 was "Society/ was delivered in April 1838, at the 
 Concord " Lyceum," where he afterwards lectured 
 almost every year during the remainder of his life. His 
 earliest poems were composed about 1837. While in 
 residence at Harvard University he had been a constant 
 reader of verse, had mastered Chalmers Collection, and 
 become acquainted with a quaint and old-fashioned 
 school of poetry little known. to his neighbours and con 
 temporaries. The influence of Herbert, who was one 
 of his early favourites, is very discernible in Thoreau s 
 youthful poems, and Cowley, Davenant, and Donne 
 were most attentively studied by him, Quarles also at 
 a somewhat later period. One of the most remarkable 
 of these early poems is the piece entitled "Sic Vita," 
 of which the first stanza runs thus 
 
 ; I am a parcel of vain strivings, tied 
 
 By a chance bond together, 
 Dangling this way and that, their links 
 Were made so loose and wide, 
 
 Methinks, 
 For milder weather." 
 
 This poem was written on a strip of paper which bound 
 together a bunch of violets, and so thrown in by 
 Thoreau at the window of Mrs. Brown, of Plymouth, 
 a lady with whom he corresponded, and who was the 
 means, as will be related, of his being introduced to 
 Emerson. In 1837 a strong stimulus was given to his 
 prose writing by the commencement of a regular series 
 of diaries, the first of which, the Red Journal, ran on to 
 some six hundred long pages in less than three years. 
 Here he systematically noted his daily walks, adventures, 
 
38 LIFE OF 
 
 and meditations, so that as the diary was revised and 
 corrected with considerable minuteness, its author was 
 able to draw direct from this literary store whenever he 
 needed the materials for a poem or essay. This was 
 the case with his contributions to the Dial, when that 
 transcendentalist organ was started in 1840 by certain 
 of Thoreau s friends. 
 
 At this time there were living in the Thoreaus house 
 at Concord a Mrs. Ward, widow of Colonel Joseph 
 Ward, an officer who distinguished himself in the War of 
 Independence, and her daughter, Miss Prudence Ward, 
 who is referred to in an early passage of Thoreau s first 
 volume, The Week, as the friend to whom the two 
 voyagers sent news of the whereabouts of the rare 
 hibiscus. The Wards and the Thoreaus had been old 
 friends in Boston, when both families were living; there ; 
 and Mrs. and Miss Ward had come to Concord in 1833, 
 living first with Henry Thoreau s aunts, Jane and Maria 
 Thoreau, and afterwards at the house of his father. 
 This led to an incident which must have affected 
 Thoreau very deeply at the time, and may possibly 
 furnish a key to some otherwise obscure traits in his 
 writings his love for the girl to whom his brother John 
 is also said to have been attached. This was Ellen 
 Sewall, a granddaughter of Mrs. Ward, and daughter of 
 the Rev. E. Sewall, pastor of Scituate. Her brother, 
 then a boy of eleven, was at school at Concord under 
 John and Henry Thoreau, and Ellen, a beautiful girl of 
 seventeen, used to visit the Thoreaus in order to be 
 near her relatives. These visits were much enjoyed by 
 all the party, as the four younger members of the 
 Thoreau household were then at home ; and many 
 
THOREAU. 39 
 
 hours were pleasantly spent in long country walks or 
 boating-excursions, or in reading aloud and discussing, 
 according to a custom then popular in Concord, some 
 book in which they were interested. 
 
 Hence it happened that the two brothers fell in love 
 with Miss Sewall; and the story has been told that 
 Henry, in a rare spirit of self-sacrifice, abstained from 
 urging his own claims, so as to avoid placing himself in 
 any rivalry with his brother. There is, however, no 
 reason to believe that the girl felt anything more than 
 friendship for either of them, and shortly after John 
 Thoreau s death she married the man of her choice, a 
 clergyman, with whom she lived happily to a good old 
 age. Thoreau s elegiac stanzas, published in the Dial 
 in 1840 under the title of "Sympathy," are said, on 
 Emerson s authority, to contain a reference, under a 
 thin disguise, to his love for Ellen Sewall, the "gentle 
 boy" of the poem being in truth a gentle girl; but, 
 according to another statement, the verses were dedicated 
 to her brother, a boy of great promise and most lovable 
 disposition, who bore a strong likeness to his sister. 
 At any rate it seems probable that Ellen Sewall was to 
 some extent in Thoreau s mind when he wrote the poem 
 "Sympathy," and it is said that certain sonnets which 
 he addressed to her will some day see the light. It is 
 to be regretted that, from a false notion of propriety, 
 such extreme reticence has so long been maintained 
 concerning the story of Thoreau s love, and that facts 
 which have much interest for his readers, and can cause 
 no pain to his survivors, should even now be very 
 imperfectly known. 
 
40 LIFE OF 
 
 " Irately, 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. 
 
 So was I taken unawares 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. 
 
 Each moment as we nearer drew to each, 
 * A stern respect withheld us further 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 bliss irrevocably gone." 
 
 To those who are acquainted with even the outline of 
 this story of Thoreau s youthful passion, it becomes less 
 difficult to understand the somewhat severe and remotely 
 ideal tone that pervades his utterances on friendship 
 and love. "In the light of this new fact," says Mr. 
 R. L. Stevenson in his essay on Thoreau, " those pages, 
 so seemingly cold, are seen to be alive with feeling.." 
 In this relation we see that there is a peculiar appro 
 priateness in the title which Emerson first applied to 
 Thoreau the " Bachelor of Nature." 
 
 That Thoreau would have been willing to make any 
 sacrifice of his personal happiness for the sake of his 
 brother, we can well believe j for this brother was, as he 
 has gratefully recorded, his " good genius," a " cheerful 
 spirit " by whose sunny presence he was ever invigorated 
 
THOREAU. 41 
 
 and reassured. The two had been intimately associated 
 from childhood, had worked together and played to 
 gether, and roamed in company over all the hills and 
 woodlands of Concord. It was with his brother John 
 that Henry made, in 1839, that famous holiday-trip 
 on the waters of the Concord and Merrimac rivers, an 
 account of which was published, ten years later, in The 
 Week. Starting from Concord on the last day of 
 August, in their boat, the Musketaquid^ which they 
 had made with their own hands in the spring, and 
 taking with them their tent, and guns, and fishing- 
 tackle, and various provisions for the voyage, they 
 journeyed down the slow-flowing Concord river, till 
 they came to its confluence with the larger and swifter 
 Merrimac at Lowell. Thence they rowed up the stream 
 of the Merrimac, which, by comparison with that which 
 they had left, seemed like "a silver cascade which falls 
 all the way from the White Mountains to the sea," until 
 they arrived within a few miles of the New Hampshire 
 capital, which bears the same name as their native 
 village. Here they were compelled to leave their boat, 
 while they proceeded on foot along the bank of the 
 narrowing stream, and so traced the Merrimac river to 
 its source among the White Mountains. This was one 
 of the first of the " Excursions " to which Thoreau was 
 afterwards so much addicted, and from which he often 
 derived benefit both in health and enlarged experiences. 
 The boat in which the brothers made their voyage 
 came subsequently into the possession of Nathaniel 
 Hawthorne, and is the one referred to in the Introduc 
 tion to the Mosses from an Old Manse. 
 
 Up to the date of which we are speaking Thoreau 
 
42 LIFE OF 
 
 no very intimate companion except his brother 
 (John, for he had made no close friendships at college, 
 ^such as should last him for a lifetime. One friendship, 
 however, had already commenced, which was of extreme 
 importance to him both in itself and as being the means 
 of introducing him to a larger circle of friends. Emerson, 
 as has been stated, had settled in Concord in 1834, and 
 had at once manifested a kindly interest in the welfare 
 of his young neighbour, fifteen years his junior, who was 
 then studying at Harvard University. It was probably 
 in 1837 that their first personal meeting, which could 
 not long have been delayed, was brought about through 
 the agency of a lady who was a relative of Emerson s 
 family and a friend of the Thoreaus, the Mrs. Brown to 
 whom the stanzas headed "Sic Vita" were dedicated by 
 their youthful author. This lady, having been informed 
 by Helen Thoreau that there was a passage in her 
 brother Henry s diary which contained some ideas 
 similar to those expressed by Emerson in a recent 
 lecture, reported the matter to Emerson, and at his 
 request brought Henry Thoreau to his house. Thus 
 began an intercourse which continued unbroken during 
 the rest of Thoreau s life, and was productive of much 
 pleasure and profit on both sides, to the elder man 
 as well as to the younger. "I delight much in my 
 i young friend," wrote Emerson in 1838, "who seems to 
 \ have as free and erect a mind as any I have ever met." 
 \ The value to Thoreau of this admission into the 
 Emersonian circle, exactly at the time when he was able 
 to derive from it the most advantage and encouragement, 
 can hardly be over-estimated; for not only did it draw 
 out the latent energies of his character, but gave him an 
 
THOREAU. 43 
 
 opportunity of expressing and publishing his thoughts. 
 A periodical which should be the accredited organ of 
 the new ideas had for some time been in contemplation 
 among the members of the transcendental " symposium," 
 and in 1840 this project was carried into effect by the 
 establishment of the quarterly Dial, the management of 
 which was chiefly in the hands of Emerson, Margaret 
 Euller. and George Ripley. Its chances of success, in 
 the commercial sense, were from the first very precarious, 
 for the number of original subscribers was small, and a 
 transcendental magazine was not likely to attain to much 
 popularity; but the Dial was nevertheless the means of 
 uniting the advocates of the new philosophy, and of 
 affording an opening for many writers of merit who had 
 been hitherto unknown. Commencing in July 1840, it 
 continued to be issued for four years, the editorship 
 during the first half of that time being entrusted to 
 Margaret Fuller and George Ripley, while among the 
 contributors were Emerson, Alcott, Margaret Fuller, 
 Ripley, Theodore Parker, Elizabeth Peabody, Lowell, 
 Thoreau, Ellery Channing, Jones Very, W. H. Channing, 
 and many others of more or less note. Each of the 
 four volumes of the Dial contained essays and poems 
 from Thoreau s pen, his poem on "Sympathy" in the 
 first number being his earliest appearance in print. 
 This, however, was but his novitiate in literary work, 
 and several of his papers were rejected by Margaret 
 Fuller, during the term of her editorship, with a candid 
 criticism of what she judged to be their crudities and 
 defects. 
 
 The presence of Emerson at Concord, to which place 
 he was bound by family ties and early associations 
 
44 LIFE OF 
 
 four of his ancestors having been Concord ministers and 
 Dr. Ripley being his step-grandfather was an event 
 of no slight importance in the history of that some 
 what secluded township. After resigning his Unitarian 
 pastorate at Boston in 1832, and spending the next 
 year in England, he had married his second wife, Miss 
 Lydia Jackson, and taken up his permanent residence 
 at Concord in 1835, where he was so clearly recognised 
 as its most illustrious citizen that in 1836, when a 
 monument was erected on the site of the battlefield of 
 1775, he was chosen to commemorate the occasion by 
 those stanzas which have since become celebrated 
 
 " By the rude bridge that arched the flood, 
 
 Their flag to April s breeze unfurled, 
 Here once the embattled farmers stood, 
 And fired the shot heard round the world." 
 
 Through the rise of transcendentalism and the rapid 
 spread of Emerson s literary fame, Concordsuch is the 
 attraction of genius became more and more a place of 
 note and the resort of poets and philosophers; it was 
 the beginning of a new era for the quiet country town 
 whose sturdy farmers were no longer to be its most 
 prominent representatives, but were to see their placid 
 region invaded by a host of eager enthusiasts from every 
 part of New England. 
 
 But of far more importance than these restless visitors 
 was the permanent circle of friends and fellow-workers 
 who, as old Dr. Ripley was passing away from his ministry, 
 were gathering round the acknowledged seer of Concord. 
 Prominent among these was Amos Bronson Alcott, who 
 came to Concord with his wife and daughters in 1840, 
 
THOREAU. 45 
 
 tall, slender, white-headed, one of the gentlest and most 
 lovable of men, and highly valued by Emerson, as by all 
 who knew him (smile though they might at his mysticism 
 and lack of worldly prudence), for his lofty aims and 
 disinterested zeal for humanity. Two years later came 
 Nathaniel Hawthorne, a mystic of a gloomier type, who 
 brought his bride, Sophia Peabody, to the seclusion of 
 the Old Manse which had been Dr. Ripley s residence. 
 Hawthorne s sister-in-law, the talented Elizabeth Peabody, 
 had already settled in Concord; and Margaret Fuller, 
 the Zenobia of his famous romance, plain indeed in her 
 personal appearance as compared with that brilliant 
 heroine, yet exercising no less marvellous fascination by 
 her learning, genius, versatility, and rich sympathetic 
 nature, was a frequent visitor for weeks together in the 
 village, where her sister, Ellen Fuller, who had married 
 Ellery Channing, the poet, was then living. Here too 
 resided Elizabeth Hoar, another of those earnest, 
 thoughtful women by whom the Concord society was 
 rendered remarkable. 
 
 These, with Henry Thoreau, were the chief members 
 of that transcendentalist company of which Concord was 
 the meeting-place, and it cannot be doubted that the 
 course of his speculations, however stubborn his in 
 dividuality, must have been appreciably affected by his 
 introduction into so distinguished a group. As early 
 as 1840 he was fully admitted into the inner circle 
 of which Emerson, Alcott, and Margaret Fuller were the 
 chief representatives, and used to be present at Alcott s 
 philosophical " conversations," held at Emerson s house, 
 which were attended by many advanced thinkers from 
 Boston, Cambridge, and other neighbouring towns. 
 
46 LIFE OF 
 
 Early in 1841 Thoreau was invited by Emerson to 
 become an inmate of his household, and for two years 
 from that time he lived under his friend s roof. " He is 
 to have his board, etc., for what labour he chooses to 
 do," wrote Emerson, "and he is thus far a great bene 
 factor and physician to me, for he is an indefatigable and 
 skilful labourer." Emerson s house was a square, sub 
 stantial building on the Boston Road, at the outskirts 
 of the village. The ground was low-lying, and at first 
 somewhat bare and open, but some fruit-trees were 
 planted by Thoreau in which Emerson afterwards 
 delighted. Emphatic testimony to Thoreau s helpfulness 
 and kindness of heart has been borne by Emerson s son 
 in some recently published memoirs of his father. 1 " He 
 was as little troublesome a member of the household, 
 with his habits of plain living and high thinking, as could 
 well have been, and in the constant absences of the 
 master of the house in his lecturing trips, the presence 
 there of such a friendly and sturdy inmate was a great 
 comfort. He was handy with tools, and there was no 
 limit to his usefulness and ingenuity about the house 
 and garden." That Emerson at times felt a little out of 
 sympathy with the rather pugnacious and contradictory 
 temperament of his young friend, as shown in his 
 suggestive remark, "Thoreau is, with difficulty, sweet," 
 is probable enough, and does not necessarily conflict 
 with the above statement. It appears that John Thoreau, 
 Henry s brother, was also intimate with Emerson s family 
 at this time, and was in the habit of performing similar 
 friendly services. On one occasion he fixed a blue-bird s 
 box on Emerson s barn, a gift which remained for years, 
 1 Emerson in Concord \ 1889, by Dr. E. W. Emerson. 
 
THOREA U. 47 
 
 as Emerson notes, c< with every summer a melodious 
 family in it, adorning the place and singing his praises." 
 It was by John Thoreau s arrangement, too, that a 
 daguerreotype portrait was taken of little Waldo Emerson 
 only a few months before the child s death. 
 
 Thoreau s friendship with Alcott, though less intimate 
 than with Emerson, was very constant and sincere, and 
 Alcott himself has borne grateful testimony to the worth 
 of Thoreau as a friend. Margaret Fuller, whose con 
 nection with the Dial brought her into association and 
 correspondence with Thoreau, also seems to have felt 
 considerable interest in his character at this time, and 
 expressed herself in her letters with her wonted candour 
 and freedom. In rejecting some verses which Thoreau 
 had offered for publication, she thus sketches the out-/ 
 lines, as they appear to her, of his personality : 
 
 " He is healthful, rare, of open eye, ready hand, and noble scope. 
 He sets no limit to his life, nor to the invasions of nature ; he is 
 not wilfully pragmatical, cautious, ascetic, or fantastical. But he 
 is as yet a somewhat bare hill, which the warm gales of spring have 
 not visited. Yet what could a companion do at present, unless to 
 tame the guardian of the Alps too early? Leave him at peace amid 
 his native snows. He is friendly ; he will find the generous office 
 that shall educate him. It is not a soil for the citron and the rose, 
 but for the whortleberry, the pine, or the heather." 
 
 In this same year Thoreau made another acquaintance 
 which soon ripened into the warmest and most intimate 
 friendship of his life. Ellery Channing, the nephew of 
 the great Unitarian minister, Dr. W. E. Channing, and 
 the brother-in-law of Margaret Fuller, came to Concord 
 in 1841, and lived for a time in a cottage near Emerson s 
 house. He was a poet and a man of genius, though of 
 
48 LIFE OF 
 
 so whimsical, moody, and unstable a character that 
 he never won the popularity which his friends were 
 constantly anticipating for him. " Could he have drawn 
 out that virgin gold," says Hawthorne of Channing s 
 talent, "and stamped it with the mint-mark that alone 
 gives currency, the world might have had the profit and 
 he the fame." Between him and Thoreau, whose junior 
 he was by one year, there was quickly established a 
 strong bond of sympathy and mutual understanding, 
 which perhaps originated in the fact that each stood in 
 a position of antagonism towards the canons of society. 
 Channing, who was as impatient of routine as Thoreau 
 himself, had not graduated at the University ; and while 
 his new friend had been keeping school at Concord he 
 had been living in a log-hut in the wilds of Illinois. In 
 his unwearying devotion to nature and natural scenery 
 his tastes exactly coincided with Thoreau s, and many 
 were the rambling walks and talks they had together at 
 all hours and seasons, while the good folk of Concord 
 were intent on their more sober business. 
 
 It was well for Henry Thoreau that at this period of his 
 early manhood he had formed these lasting friendships 
 with such men as Emerson, Alcott, and Channing; for 
 a blow was impending which might otherwise have left 
 him lonely and friendless on the very threshold of active 
 life. We have seen how his natural self-control and 
 fortitude of character enabled him to perform an act of 
 self-renunciation for the sake of the brother to whom he 
 was so closely attached; he was now to be subjected 
 to a still severer trial by the unexpected death of the 
 companion of his youthful days. In February 1842 
 John Thoreau died from lock-jaw, caused by an injury 
 
THOREA U. 49 
 
 done to his hand in shaving a death so sudden and 
 painful that his brother could rarely endure to hear 
 mention of it in after-life, and is said to have turned pale 
 and faint when narrating the circumstances to a friend 
 more than twelve years later. " After the sad and un 
 fortunate death of his brother," says one who knew them 
 both, "he seemed to have no earthly companion in 
 whom he could confide and love; he appeared in 
 different to all about him, and sometimes I thought he 
 even hated himself." When he visited,Cohasset in 1849, 
 and witnessed a terrible death-scene After the shipwreck 
 of an Irish brig, he remarked that if he had found one 
 body cast upon the beach in some lonely place it would 
 have affected him more. " A man," he adds, " can 
 attend but one funeral in the course of his life, can 
 behold but one corpse;" in which saying there is a 
 reference to his own bereavement. It is noticeable that 
 in his Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers, his 
 brother, though necessarily often alluded to, is not once 
 mentioned by name. 
 
 For this heavy blow Thoreau sought and found the 
 needed comfort in that strong belief in the immutable 
 goodness ot isature, which was the basis of his whole 
 intellectual creed. " I find these things," he wrote, 
 " more strange than sad to me. What right have I to 
 grieve, who have not ceased to wonder ? " He had lost 
 the loved companion of his daily pilgrimage ; but one 
 effect of his brother s death was to incline him still more 
 strongly towards a close study of nature and the trans 
 cend e ntaj_niannrj^ 
 
 in danger of lapsing into that vague mysticism which was 
 the besetting weakness of some of the transcendentalists, 
 
 4 
 
50 LIFE OF THOREAU. 
 
 had it not been for the sound practical frame of mind 
 which was as much a part of him as his idealism. It 
 was this solid element of good sense that kept the balance 
 in his character; soar as he might in his transcendental 
 reveries, and scoff as he might at the absurdities of con 
 ventional habit, he never lost hold on the simple essential 
 facts of everyday life. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 A FTER his brother s death in 1842, Thoreau con- 
 tinued to live in Emerson s house, the bereavement 
 which each of the two friends had recently undergone 
 (for little Waldo, Emerson s favourite child, had died 
 early in the same year) being doubtless instrumental in 
 bringing them more closely together. Thoreau s regard 
 for Emerson and Mrs. Emerson was very deep, and it 
 was natural that a young man, even when possessed of 
 Thoreau s strength of character, should be lastingly in 
 fluenced by so commanding a personality as Emerson s. 
 It has been remarked by several of those who knew both 
 men, that Thoreau unconsciously caught certain of the 
 traits of Emerson s voice and expression, and even of 
 his personal appearance that he deliberately imitated 
 Emerson is declared on the best authority to be an "idle 
 and untenable" assertion. The following account of 
 Thoreau s receptivity in this respect is given by one of 
 his college class-mates, whom I have already quoted : 
 
 "Not long after I happened to meet Thoreau in Mr. Emerson s 
 study at Concord the first time we had come together after leaving 
 college. I was quite startled by the transformation that had taken 
 place in him. His short figure and general cast of countenance 
 were of course unchanged; but in his manners, in the tones of his 
 voice, in his modes of expression, even in the hesitations and 
 
52 LIFE OF 
 
 pauses of his speech, he had become the counterpart of Mr. 
 Emerson. Thoreau s college voice bore no resemblance to Mr. 
 Emerson s, and was so familiar to my ear that I could have readily 
 identified him by it in the dark. I was so much struck by the 
 change that I took the opportunity, as they sat near together 
 talking, of listening with closed eyes, and I was unable to deter 
 mine with certainty which was speaking. I do not know to what 
 subtle influences to ascribe it, but after conversing with Mr. 
 Emerson for even a brief time, I always found myself able and 
 inclined to adopt his voice and manner of speaking." 1 
 
 The change noticed in Thoreau was not due only 
 to the stimulating influence of Emerson s personality, 
 though that doubtless was the immediate means of 
 effecting his awakening. Underneath the sluggish and 
 torpid demeanour of his life at the University there had 
 been developing, as his school-mates afterwards recog 
 nised, the strong stern qualities which were destined to 
 make his character remarkable, and these had now been 
 called into full play both by the natural growth of his 
 mind, and by the opportunities afforded in the brilliant 
 circle of which he was a member. " In later years," 
 says John Weiss, who knew him well at Harvard, " his 
 chin and mouth grew firmer, as his resolute and audacious 
 opinions developed, the eyes twinkled with the latent 
 humour of his criticisms of society." It was a veritable 
 transformation an awakening of the dormant intellectual 
 fire and it has been ingeniously suggested that the 
 "transformation" of Donatello in Hawthorne s novel may 
 have been founded in the first place on this fact in the 
 life of Thoreau. 
 
 So too with regard to his social and ethical opinions; 
 it would have been strange if the youth of twenty-five 
 1 Ralph Waldo Emerson, by Rev. D, G. Haskins. 
 
THOREA U. 53 
 
 had not been in some degree affected and influenced by 
 the philosopher of forty; but the freshness and originality 
 of his genius, in all essential respects, is none the less 
 incontestable. Thoreau, in fact, was one of the very 
 few men by whom Emerson was himself in some degree 
 impressed. We are told by Dr. E. W. Emerson that 
 his father " delighted in being led to the very inner 
 shrines of the wood-god by this man, clear-eyed and 
 true and stern enough to be trusted with their secrets;" 
 and there is no doubt that Thoreau influenced him per 
 ceptibly in the direction of a more diligent and minute 
 study of nature, and a simpler and austerer mode of life. 
 He differed in one important respect both from Emerson 
 and from the other members of the Emersonian circle 
 of transcendentalists in his aboriginal hardihood and__ 
 vigour. To them Concord was a suitable place of 
 adoption; to him it was the place of his birth. The 
 simplicity of living, personal independence, and intimacy 
 with wild nature, which to the others involved more or 
 less a deliberate effort, were in his case an innate and 
 unconscious instinct. 
 
 With Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was the latest 
 addition to the society of Concord, Thoreau had 
 perhaps little in common except his friendship with 
 Ellery Channing, though courteous relations seem to 
 have subsisted between them. Some of the references 
 to Thoreau in Hawthorne s journal have a touch of the 
 petulance and harshness of judgment to which Hawthorne 
 was rather prone when recording his impressions of his 
 acquaintances; but on the whole he speaks of Thoreau 
 with unusual admiration and respect. " Mr. Thoreau 
 dined with us yesterday," he writes on ist September 
 
54 LIFE OF 
 
 1842. " He is a singular character a young man with 
 much of wild original nature still remaining in 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 rustic 
 though courteous manners corresponding very well with 
 such an exterior. But his ugliness is of an honest and 
 agreeable fashion, and becomes him much better than 
 beauty." No reliance is to be placed in some further 
 remarks of Hawthorne s, to the effect that Thoreau s 
 sojourn in Emerson s household had been burdensome 
 to his host, for all the facts point strongly in the other 
 direction. 
 
 On another occasion we learn that Thoreau rowed 
 Hawthorne on the Concord river in the boat built and 
 used by himself and his brother in their week s excursion 
 to the Merrimac in 1839, and Hawthorne, delighted at 
 Thoreau s skill in paddling, decided to purchase the 
 boat and change its name from Musketaqnid to Pond- 
 lily. But the art of managing a canoe, which Thoreau 
 had learnt from some Indians who had visited Concord 
 a few years previously, was not to be acquired in a 
 day. " Mr. Thoreau had assured me," writes Hawthorne 
 plaintively, " that it was only necessary to will the boat 
 to go in any particular direction, and she would immedi 
 ately take that course, as if imbued with the spirit of the 
 steersman. It may be so with him, but it is certainly 
 not so with me." The difficulty once mastered, Haw 
 thorne took much pleasure in his new purchase, and 
 seems to have been inspired by something of Thoreau s 
 enthusiasm for the wildness of open-air life. " Oh that 
 I could run wild," he exclaims, when recording his first 
 
THOREA U. 55 
 
 successful voyage in the Pond-lily ; "that is, that I could 
 put myself in a true relation with nature, and be on 
 friendly terms with all congenial elements." 
 
 By the middle of 1842 the Dia! y which had never 
 been prosperous from a pecuniary point of view, was in 
 severe straits, and the editorship having been resigned 
 by Margaret Fuller, was undertaken by Emerson himself, 
 in which work he was largely assisted by Thoreau, who 
 was then living in his house. It is said that Thoreau 
 not only canvassed for new subscribers, read proof- 
 sheets, and selected passages from the " Ethnical Scrip 
 tures" of the Oriental philosophers, which formed one 
 of the features of the Dial under Emerson s manage 
 ment, but also acted as sole editor on one or two 
 occasions during his friend s absence. 1 A large number 
 of Thoreau s writings were inserted by Emerson, whose 
 estimate of his ability was far higher than that held by 
 Margaret Fuller; so that the young author was now 
 becoming recognised as one of the leaders of transcen 
 dental thought. The D. al for July 1842 contained his 
 delightful essay on "The Natural History of Massa 
 chusetts," to which Emerson prefixed an introductory 
 note in which he hinted that Izaak Walton and 
 White of Selborne had now a worthy successor. The 
 "Winter Walk," another essay of the same character 
 and of almost equal merit, appeared in the Dial a 
 year later. 
 
 In July 1842 Thoreau, accompanied by a friend, 
 
 went on a three days excursion to Wachusett, a 
 
 mountain to the west of Concord ("the blue wall," he 
 
 calls it, "which bounds the western horizon"), which, 
 
 1 Vol. iii., No. 3, is said to have been edited by Thoreau. 
 
\ 
 
 56 LIFE OF 
 
 from its isolated position, forms a conspicuous feature 
 in the landscape, and is familiar by name to all readers 
 of his writings. More than once he expresses a feeling 
 of sympathy with this solitary height 
 
 " But special I remember thec, 
 Wachusett, who like me 
 Standest alone without society." 
 
 His account of the walk, and how they camped a night 
 on the mountain, was published the following year in 
 the Boston Miscellany, under the title of "A Walk to 
 Wachusett" "Wachusett," he wrote, in describing the 
 view from the summit, "is, in fact, the observatory of 
 the State. There lay Massachusetts spread out before 
 us in length and breadth like a map." Thoreau s love 
 of mountains is exemplified in many passages of his 
 diary, and the occasional excursions which he made to 
 the lofty outlying ranges visible from the Concord hills 
 formed some of the most pleasing episodes in his life. 
 " A mountain chain," he says, "determines many things 
 for the statesman and philosopher. The improvements 
 of civilisation rather creep along its sides than cross its 
 summit. How often is it a barrier to prejudice and 
 fanaticism ! In passing over these heights of land, 
 through their thin atmosphere, the follies of the plain 
 are refined and purified; and as many species of plants 
 do not scale their summits, so many species of folly no 
 doubt do not cross the Alleghanies." 
 
 Thoreau s predilection for solitude, and indifference 
 or dislike to "society," in the ordinary sense of the 
 word, may be gathered from a good deal of what has 
 already been related of him. There was an aloofness 
 
THOREA U. 57 
 
 and reserve in his nature which, together with his stern 
 and lofty ideals, made him appear at times somewhat 
 unbending and unapproachable. It was no question of 
 being better, or worse, than the generality of men he 
 was different ; and the sympathy which he could not 
 find in civilised man he sought in wild nature, though 
 well aware that Nature herself is nothing except in her 
 relation to man. "I feel," he said, "that my life is 
 very homely, my pleasures very cheap. Joy and sorrow, 
 success and failure, grandeur and meanness, and indeed 
 most words in the English language, do not mean for 
 me what they do for my neighbours. I see that my 
 neighbours look with compassion on me, that they think 
 it is a mean and unfortunate destiny which makes me to 
 walk in these fields and woods so much, and sail on this 
 river alone. But so long as I find here the only real 
 Elysium, I cannot hesitate in my choice." To say, as 
 is often said, that Thoreau was unsocial is, however, 
 incorrect, except in a limited and qualified degree. 
 "He enjoyed common people," says Channing; "he 
 relished strong acrid characters." The rough honest 
 farmers of Concord were his especial favourites, and in 
 their company he could show plenty of that good fellow 
 ship of which he appeared, under some conditions, to 
 be deficient. The impression which he left on his 
 friends in Emerson s household, after his two years 
 residence there, was a wholly agreeable one. " He was 
 by no means unsocial," says Dr. E. W. Emerson, " but 
 a kindly and affectionate person, especially to children, 
 whom he could endlessly amuse and charm in most 
 novel and healthful ways. With grown persons he had 
 tact and high courtesy, though with reserve. But folly, 
 
58 LIFE OF 
 
 or pretence, or cant, or subserviency, excited his formid 
 able attack." 
 
 Early in 1843 Thoreau ceased to live in Emerson s 
 house, having accepted the offer of a tutorship in the 
 family of Judge Emerson, the. brother of the Concord 
 philosopher, who was then living in Staten Island, near 
 New York. Before leaving Concord to take up this 
 duty, he wrote as follows to Emerson, who was lecturing 
 at New York : 
 
 "At the end of this strange letter I will not write what alone 
 I had to say to thank you and Mrs. Emerson for your long 
 kindness to me. It would be more ungrateful than my constant 
 thought. I have been your pensioner for nearly two years, and 
 still left free as the sky. It has been as free a gift as the sun or the 
 summer, though I have sometimes molested you with my mean 
 acceptance of it I, who have failed to render even those slight 
 services of the hand which would have been for a sign at least; 
 and, by the fault of my nature, have failed of many better and 
 higher services. But I will trouble you no more with this, but for 
 once thank you and Heaven. " 
 
 It is probable that some stanzas of Thoreau s entitled 
 " The Departure " were written about this time, when he 
 had just left with regret the friends whose house had for 
 two years been his home. 
 
 Several months were spent by Thoreau in Staten 
 Island. Here, in his spare hours during the spring 
 and summer of 1843, he continued his walking ex 
 cursions as regularly as at Concord, and was frequently 
 mistaken by the inhabitants for a busy surveyor, who 
 was studying every yard of the ground with a view to 
 some extensive speculation. From an old ruined fort 
 he used to watch the emigrant vessels pass up the 
 
THOREA U. 59 
 
 narrow channel from the wide outer bay and go on their 
 course to New York, or, as the case might be, remain in 
 quarantine at Staten Island, when the passengers would 
 be allowed to go ashore and refresh themselves on that 
 "artificial piece of the land of liberty." From the low 
 hills in the interior of the island, among the homesteads 
 where the Huguenots had been the first settlers, he 
 could see the long procession of out-going ships, stretch 
 ing far as the eye could reach, "with stately march and 
 silken sails," as he describes it; at other times he roamed 
 along the desolate sandy shore, where packs of half-wild 
 dogs were on the look-out for carcases of horses or oxen 
 washed up by the tide. " An island," he says, in his 
 Week, "always pleases my imagination, even the smallest, 
 as a continent and integral portion of the globe. I have 
 a fancy for building my hut on one. Even a bare, 
 grassy isle, which I can see entirely over at a glance, has 
 some undefined and mysterious charms for me." 
 
 It was at Staten Island that Thoreau wrote those 
 beautiful and highly characteristic stanzas on the sea : 
 
 " My life is like a stroll upon the beach, 
 
 As near the ocean s edge as I can go ; 
 My tardy steps its waves sometimes o erreach, 
 Sometimes I stay to let them overflow. 
 
 My sole employment tis, and scrupulous care, 
 To place my gains beyond the reach of tides, 
 
 Each smoother pebble, and each shell more rare, 
 Which Ocean kindly to my hand confides. 
 
 I have but few companions on the shore : 
 
 They scorn the strand who sail upon the sen ; 
 
 Yet oft I think the ocean they ve sailed o er 
 Is deeper known upon the strand to me. 
 
60 LIFE OF 
 
 The middle sea contains no crimson dulse, 
 Its deeper waves cast up no pearls to view ; 
 
 Along the shore my hand is on its pulse, 
 And I converse with many a shipwrecked crew." 
 
 During the sojourn in Staten Island, Thoreau was 
 frequently in New York, where he made the acquaint 
 ance of W. H. Charming, Edward Palmer, Lucretia 
 Mott, Henry James, Horace Greeley, and other persons 
 of note. "In this city," he wrote to his sister on 2ist 
 July, " I have seen, since I. last wrote, W. H. Charming, 
 at whose house in Fifteenth Street I spent a few pleasant 
 hours, discussing the all-absorbing question what to 
 do for the race. Also Horace Greeley, editor of the 
 Tribune, who is cheerfully in earnest at his office of 
 all work, a hearty New Hampshire boy as one could 
 wish to meet, and says, Now be neighbourly. " With 
 Greeley, who was at this time preaching Fourierism in 
 the New York Tribune, in conjunction with Margaret 
 Fuller and George Ripley, Thoreau established a firm 
 friendship; and it will be seen that Greeley was able, 
 a few years later, to render him valuable service in 
 securing publication for his writings. In a letter 
 addressed to Emerson from Staten Island, 23rd May 
 1843, Thoreau thus relates his impressions of New 
 York : 
 
 " You must not count much upon what I can do or learn in New 
 York. Everything there disappoints me but the crowd, rather, I 
 was disappointed with the rest before I came. I have no eyes for 
 their churches, and what else they have to brag of. Though I 
 know but little about Boston, yet what attracts me in a quiet way 
 seems much meaner and more pretending than there libraries, 
 pictures, and faces in the street. You don t know where any 
 
THOREAU. 61 
 
 respectability inhabits. The crowd is something new and to be 
 attended to. It is worth a thousand Trinity Churches and 
 Exchanges, while it is looking at them ; and it will run over them 
 and trample them underfoot. There are two things I hear and am 
 aware I live in the neighbourhood of the roar of the sea and the 
 hum of the city." 
 
 Though literary work had not yet come to be regarded 
 by Thoreau as his principal employment, his pen was 
 not idle during his visit to Staten Island. He wrote 
 some articles for the Democratic Revieiv and Dial, and 
 made some translations from the Greek of .^schylus 
 and Pindar. The Dial, in spite of the fact that its con 
 tributors wrote gratuitously, was unable to pay its way, 
 and the difficulties in which it was already involved led 
 to its discontinuance in the spring of 1844. But although 
 the transcendentalist organ thus failed to win the neces 
 sary public support, transcendentalism as a movement 
 was now in the heyday of its vigour. It was, as we 
 have seen, part of the creed that every one should 
 labour with his own hands, and that men should 
 endeavour to revert, as much as possible, from an 
 artificial to a simple mode of living. When these 
 thoughts began to be embodied in deeds the move 
 ment took two directions, the one towards collective 
 action, and the other towards individualism. It was in 
 reference to the former that Emerson wrote to Carlyle 
 in 1840: "We are all a little wild with numberless 
 projects of social reform; not a reading man but has a 
 draft of a new community in his waistcoat pocket." 
 The most important of such communal projects was the 
 famous Brook Farm experiment, which was commenced 
 in the spring of 1841, and came to an end in 1847, on 
 
62 LIFE OF 
 
 which subject the opinion of the chief transcendcntalists 
 was divided, Margaret Fuller and George Ripley joining 
 in the enterprise, while Emerson, Alcott, and Thoreau 
 stood aloof. The spread of Fourierism in New England 
 during these same years had led to the establishment of 
 " Phalansteries," in which Horace Greeley and W. H. 
 Channing took a leading part. Yet another attempt at 
 transcendental colonisation was that made by Alcott 
 and one or two friends in 1843, on an estate near 
 Harvard, which was purchased by them and named 
 " Fruitlands." This small colony, to which Thoreau 
 paid a visit, though he declined the offer of membership, 
 was, like most of the rest, a failure; and in less than a 
 year Alcott gave it up and returned to Concord. 
 
 Of the second, or individualist, method of practising 
 the "return to nature," Thoreau himself was destined to 
 be the most successful exponent, his utter dislrtrsfof 
 ^mmnnitips is vory characleTretic of his independent 
 and self-assertive temperament. " As for these com 
 munities/ 1 he wrote 111 IJIA journal, " I think I had rather 
 keep bachelor s hall in hell than go to board in heaven." 
 But, though he had no intention of sacrificing one iota 
 of his individuality by joining a community at Brook 
 Farm or elsewhere, he had for some time been con 
 sidering the feasibility of putting his principles into 
 practice by a temporary and tentative withdrawal from 
 the society of his fellow-townsmen, a plan which was 
 possibly suggested to him by his friend Stearns Wheeler, 
 who lived for some months, in 1841 or 1842, in a hut 
 near Flint s Pond, where he was visited by Thoreau. 
 This desire appears in his journal as early as 1841. " I 
 want to go soon and live away by the pond," he wrote 
 
THOREAU. 63 
 
 on December 24th, " where I shall hear only the wind 
 whispering among the reeds. It will be success if I 
 shall have left myself behind. But my friends ask what 
 I will do when I get there. Will it not be employment 
 enough to watch the progress of the seasons?" A 
 couple of months before the date of this entry Margaret 
 Fuller had written to Thoreau : "Let me know whether 
 you go to the lonely hut, and writero* me jbuiU Sl ujjkt^ 
 speare if you read Will LlleTe. it has already been 
 mentioned that vvaiden rona was associated with his 
 earliest reminiscences ; as a child he had thought he 
 would like to live there, and as a boy he had been 
 accustomed to come to its shores on dark nights, and 
 fish for the "pouts" which were supposed to be attracted 
 by the glare of a fire lit close to the water s edge, or, on 
 a summer morning, to sit and muse for hours in his 
 boat, as it drifted where the wind took it. 
 
 There was, however, another spot with which he was 
 also familiar, which came very near being the scene of 
 his projected hermitage. In his youthful voyages up 
 the Concord river he had noticed, at a distance of about 
 two miles from the village, an old-fashioned ruinous 
 farm-house, concealed behind a dense grove of red 
 maples, through which was heard the barking of the 
 house-dog. This was the Hollowell Farm, the seclusion 
 of which, if we may trust a passage in Walden^ so 
 tempted Thoreau that, at some period in his early man 
 hood, he actually agreed to become its possessor. But 
 before the purchase was effected and the contract signed, 
 the owner of the place changed his mind, and had no 
 difficulty in inducing Thoreau to release him from the 
 bargain. 
 
64 LIFE OF 
 
 We may surmise that in 1844, after the conclusion of 
 his educational engagement in Staten Island, he was 
 still more decidedly bent on putting his favourite plan 
 into execution; and that his thoughts now reverted to 
 Walden woods as the place most suitable for his pur 
 pose. Alcott s experiment at "Fruitlands," although 
 unsuccessful in a pecuniary sense, had doubtless stimu 
 lated Thoreau s inclination to a forest life; and Emerson 
 himself, while sceptical, in the main, as to the wisdom 
 of such enterprises, had bought land on both sides of 
 Walden Pond, with the idea of building a summer-house. 
 Ellery Channing, who in his youth had made trial of a 
 rough backwoods life, was of course taken into his 
 friend s confidences respecting this retirement to the 
 woods. " I see nothing for you in this earth," he 
 wrote in 1845, "but that field which I once christened 
 Briers ; go out upon that, build yourself a hut, and 
 there begin the grand process of devouring yourself alive. 
 I see no alternative, no other hope for you. Eat your 
 self up; you will eat nobody else, nor anything else." 
 
 Encouraged by these exhortations, and firmly trusting 
 the promptings of his own destiny, Thoreau determined 
 in the spring of 1845, being now in his twenty-eighth 
 year, to build himself a hut on the shore of Walden 
 Pond and there live for such time, and in such a 
 manner, as might best conduce to his intellectual and 
 spiritual advantage. The objects of his retirement have 
 been so often misunderstood that they will bear repeti 
 tion in his own words : 
 
 " Finding that my fellow-citizens were not likely to offer me any 
 room in the court-house, or any curacy or living anywhere else, but 
 that I must shift for myself, I turned my face more exclusively than 
 

 THOREAU. 65 
 
 ever towards the woods, where I was better known. I determined 
 to go into business at once, and not wait to acquire the usual 
 capital, using such slender means as I had already got. My purpose 
 in going to Walden Pond was not to live cheaply nor to live dearly 
 there, but to transact some private business with the fewest obstacles. 
 ... I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to 
 front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what 
 it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had 
 not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; 
 nor did I wish to practise resignation unless it was quite necessary. 
 I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so 
 sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to 
 cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and 
 reduce it to its lowest terms, and if it proved to be mean, why then 
 to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its mean 
 ness to the world ; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, 
 and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion." - 
 
 Walden was, in fact, to Thoreau what Brook Farm 
 was to others of the transcendentalists a retreat suitable 
 for philosophic meditation, and the practice of a simpler, 
 hardier, and healthier life. 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 WfALDEN POND, on the shore of which Thoreau 
 ** determined to make his hermitage, is a small 
 lake, about a mile and a half south of the village of 
 Concord, surrounded by low thickly-wooded hills. Its 
 water, which is of a greenish-blue colour, is so brilliantly 
 transparent that the bottom is visible at a depth of thirty 
 feet, in which respect it is unrivalled by the other ponds 
 of the neighbourhood, except by White Pond, which lies 
 some two miles westward, on the other side of the 
 Concord river. Walden had doubtless in primitive ages 
 been frequented by the Indians, as was testified by 
 arrow-heads discoverable on its shores, and by dim 
 traces of a narrow shelf-like path, " worn by the feet of 
 aboriginal hunters," which ran round the steeply-sloping 
 bank. In the early days of the Massachusetts colony, 
 the dense woods, which even in Thoreau s memory com 
 pletely surrounded the pond, had been the haunt of 
 fugitives and outlaws; but, at a later period, the road 
 from Concord to Lincoln, which skirts the east shore of 
 Walden, had been dotted by the cottages and gardens of 
 a small hamlet, and had resounded, as Thoreau tells us, 
 " with the laugh and gossip of inhabitants." Drink had 
 been the ruin of these former settlers; and the hardy 
 water-drinker who no\v came to make his home in- 
 
LIFE OF THOREAU. 67 
 
 Walden woods took care to choose a new and unpol 
 luted spot for his dwelling. 
 
 The ground chosen by Thoreau for the building of 
 his hut was on a wood-lot belonging to Emerson a 
 sloping bank at the outskirts of the forest, on the north 
 shore of the pond, and some thirty or forty yards from 
 the water-edge. No house could be seen from this" 
 point, the horizon being bounded by the woods on the 
 opposite shore, half a mile distant; and although the 
 village was within easy reach, and the newly-constructed 
 railway was visible on one hand, and the woodland road 
 on the other, there was no neighbour within a mile, and 
 the solitude was usually as complete as the strictest 
 anchorite could have desired. This position exactly 
 suited Thoreau s requirements, since he could either 
 pursue his meditations undisturbed, or, if the mood took 
 him, pay a visit to his friends in the village, from whose 
 society he had no intention of permanently banishing 
 himself. 
 
 So one morning towards the end of March 1845, 
 when the approach of spring was already heralded by 
 the voice of song-birds and the thawing of the ice on 
 Walden, the " Bachelor of Nature " addressed himself to 
 the pleasurable task of "squatting" on the selected spot. 
 Having borrowed the favourite axe of his friend Alcott, 
 who warned him that it was " the apple of his eye," he 
 began to cut down pine-trees and hew the timber into 
 shape for the frame of his hut, working leisurely each 
 day, so as to get the full enjoyment of his occupation, 
 and returning betimes to the village to sleep. After two 
 or three weeks spent in this labour, when the house was 
 framed and ready for raising, he dug his cellar in the 
 
OS LIFE OF 
 
 sand of the sloping hank, six feet square by seven deep; 
 and having bought the planks of a shanty belonging to 
 an Irishman who worked on the Fitchburg railroad, he 
 transported them to the site of the hut. Early in May 
 he set up the frame of his house, on which occasion 
 for ithe sake of neighbourliness, as he is careful to tell us, 
 rather than of necessity he accepted the assistance of 
 some of his friends, among whom were Alcott (to whom 
 he returned the axe sharper than he had received it), 
 George William Curtis, 1 who was then spending a year 
 or two at Concord, having hired himself out as an agri 
 cultural labourer, and Edmund Hosmer, one of the 
 leading farmers of Concord, with whom Thoreau was 
 on intimate terms. The hut, which was ten feet wide 
 by, fifteen long, with a garret and a closet, a large 
 window at the side, a door at one end, and a brick fire 
 place at the other, was then boarded and roofed so as to 
 be quite rain-proof, but during the summer months it 
 remained without plastering or chimney. It was the 
 4th of July, or Independence Day a significant and 
 auspicious date for the commencement of such an 
 undertaking when Thoreau, who previously had been 
 owner of no habitations but a boat and a tent, took up 
 his residence in this house, which he could call his own 
 property, and which, as he proudly records, had cost 
 him but twenty-eight dollars in the building. 
 
 The question of " furnishing," which is a cause of 
 such anxious consideration to so many worthy house- 
 
 1 In his contribution to Homes of American Authors he refers 
 to Thoreau s hut. "One pleasant afternoon a small party of us 
 helped him raise it a bit of life as Arcadian as any at Brook 
 Farm." 
 
THOREAU. 69 
 
 holders, was solved by Thoreau with his usual boldness 
 and expedition. "Furniture!" he exclaims, in an" out 
 burst of pitying wonder at the spectacle of men who are 
 enslaved by their own chattels. " Thank God, I can sit 
 and I can stand without the aid of a furniture warehouse." 
 His furniture at Walden, which was partly of his own 
 manufacture, consisted of a bed, a table, a desk, three 
 chairs, a looking-glass three inches in diameter, a pair of 
 tongs and andirons, a kettle, a skillet, and a frying-pan, 
 a dipper, a wash-bowl, two knives and forks, three plates, 
 one cup, one spoon, a jug for oil, a jug for molasses, and 
 a japanned lamp. Curtains he did not need, since there 
 were no gazers to look in on him except the sun and 
 moon, and he had no carpet in danger of fading, nor 
 meat and milk to be guarded from sunshine or moon 
 beam When a lady offered him a mat, he declined it 
 as being too cumbrous and troublesome an article; he 
 preferred to wipe his feet on the sod outside his door. 
 Finding that three pieces of limestone which lay upon 
 his desk required to be dusted daily, he threw them out 
 of the window, determined that if he had any furniture 
 to dust, it should be " the furniture of his mind." With 
 a house thus organised, housework, instead of being an 
 exhausting and ever-recurring labour, was a pleasant 
 pastime. 
 
 " When my floor was dirty I rose early, and setting all my 
 furniture out of doors on the grass, bed and bedstead making but 
 one budget, dashed water on the floor, and sprinkled white sand 
 from the pond on it, and then with a broom scrubbed it clean and 
 white ; and by the time the villagers had broken their fast, the 
 morning sun had dried my house sufficiently to allow me to move 
 in again, and my meditations were almost uninterrupted. It was 
 pleasant to see my whole household effects on the grass, making 
 
70 LIFE OF 
 
 a little pile like a gipsy s pack, and my three-legged table, from 
 which I did not remove the books and pen and ink, standing amidst 
 the pines and hickories." 
 
 Having thus chosen his surroundings, he was free to 
 choose also the most congenial manner of life. He 
 rose early, and took his bath in the pond, a habit which 
 he regarded as nothing less than "a religious exercise." 
 After the morning bath came the work or the leisure 
 of the day. In the early summer, before the building 
 was finished, he had ploughed and planted about two 
 and a half acres of the light sandy soil in the neighbour 
 hood of his hut, the crop chiefly consisting of beans, 
 with a few potatoes, peas, and turnips; and during this 
 first summer at Walden the bean-field was the chief 
 scene of his labours, from five o clock till noon being 
 the hours devoted to the work. Day after day the 
 travellers on the road from Concord to Lincoln would 
 rein in their horses and pause to look with wonder on 
 this strange husbandman, who cultivated a field where 
 all else was wild upland, who put no manure on the soil, 
 and continued to sow beans at a time when others had 
 begun to hoe. 
 
 Meantime the husbandman himself was deriving from 
 his rough matter-of-fact occupation a sort of sublime 
 transcendental satisfaction; it was agriculture and mys 
 ticism combined to which he was devoting his bodily and 
 mental energies. What matter if, when the pecuniary 
 gains and losses of the season came to be estimated, he 
 found himself with a balance of but eight dollars in his 
 favour, which represented his year s income from the 
 farm? Was he not less anxious and more contented 
 than his fellow-agriculturists of the village ? The follow- 
 
THOREAU. 71 
 
 ing season he improved on these results by cultivating 
 only a third of an acre, and using the spade instead of 
 the plough. Whatever money was further needed for 
 his food and p3rsonal expenses, he earned by occasional 
 day-labour in the village, for he had, as he tells us, " as 
 many trades as fingers." 
 
 After a morning thus spent in work, whether manual 
 or literary, he would refresh himself by a second plunge 
 in the pond, and enjoy an afternoon of perfect freedom, 
 rambling, according to his wont, by river or forest, 
 wherever his inclination led him. He had also his entire 
 days of leisure, when he could not afford "to sacrifice 
 the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether 
 of the head or hands." " Sometimes," he says, " in a 
 summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I 
 sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in 
 a reverie, amidst the pines, and hickories, and sumachs, 
 in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sang 
 around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by 
 the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of 
 some traveller s waggon on the distant highway, I was 
 reminded of the lapse of time." He was well aware 
 that these day-dreams must be accounted sheer idleness 
 by his enterprising townsmen ; but of that he himself 
 was the best and only judge. On moonlit evenings 
 he would walk on the sandy beach of the pond, and 
 wake the echoes of the surrounding woods with his 
 flute. 
 
 We have seen what amount of shelter Thoreau thought 
 needful for his comfort ; his estimate of what is necessary 
 in the way of food and clothing was conceived in the 
 same spirit. His costume was habitually coarse, shabby, 
 
72 LIFE OF 
 
 and serviceable ; he would wear corduroy, Charming tells 
 us, but not shoddy. His drab hat, battered and weather- 
 stained, his clothes often torn and as often mended, his 
 dusty cow-hide boots, all told of hard service in field 
 and forest, and of the unwillingness of their wearer to 
 waste a single dollar on the vanities of outward appear 
 ance. He wished his garments to become assimilated 
 to himself, and to receive a true impress of his character; 
 he would not be, like some king or nobleman, a wooden 
 horse on which clean clothes might be hung for a day s 
 ornament. His diet was fully as simple and economical 
 as his clothing ; his food, while he stayed at Walden, 
 consisted of rice, Indian meal, potatoes, and very rarely 
 salt pork, and his drink was water. He baked his own 
 bread of rye and Indian meal, at first procuring yeast 
 from the village, but afterwards corning to the conclusion 
 that it was "simpler and more respectable" to omit the 
 process of leavening. He had a strong preference at all 
 times for a vegetarian diet, though he would occasionally 
 catch a mess of fish for his dinner from Walden Pond, 
 and pleads guilty on one occasion to having slaughtered 
 and devoured a wood-chuck which had made inroads on 
 his bean field. 
 
 Here is an anecdote of Thoreau, by one who visited 
 him at Walden : 
 
 " One of the axioms of his philosophy had been to take the life of 
 nothing that breathed, if he could avoid it ; but it had now become 
 a serious question with him whether to allow the wood-chucks and 
 rabbits to destroy his beans, or to fight. Having determined on the 
 latter, he procured a steel trap, and soon caught a venerable old 
 fellow to the manor born/ and who had held undisputed posses 
 sion there for all time. After retaining the enemy of all beans in 
 durance vile for a few hours, he pressed his foot on the spring of 
 
THOREAU. 73 
 
 the trap and let him go expecting and hoping never to see him 
 more. Vain delusion ! 
 
 "A few days after, on returning from the village post-office and 
 looking in the direction of his bean field, to his disgust and 
 apprehension he saw the same old grey-back disappear behind some 
 brush just outside the field. Accordingly he set the trap and again 
 caught the thief. 
 
 " Now it so happened that those old knights of the shot-gun, hook 
 and line, Wesson, Pratt and Co., were on a piscatorial visit to the 
 Pond. A council of war was thereupon held to determine what 
 should be done with the wood-chuck. 
 
 "A decision was rendered immediately by the landlord of the 
 Middlesex Hotel in his terse and laconic manner : Knock his 
 brains out ! 
 
 "This, however, was altogether too severe on the wood-chuck, 
 thought Henry; even wood-chucks had some rights that Squatter 
 Sovereigns should respect. Was he not the original occupant 
 there; and had not he jumped the wood-chuck s claim, de 
 stroyed his home and built the hut upon the ruins? 
 
 "After considering the question carefully he took the wood-chuck 
 in his arms and carried him some two miles away, and then, with a 
 severe admonition at the end of a good stick, he opened the trap 
 and again let him depart in peace, and he never saw him more." x 
 
 In November, when the summer weather was ended 
 and frost coming on apace, he put the finishing touches 
 to his house by shingling its sides, building a fire-place 
 and chimney, and finally plastering the walls. Hardly 
 was this last process over when the winter set in with full 
 severity, and by the middle of December the pond was 
 completely frozen and the ground covered with snow. 
 He now began, in the full sense, to inhabit his hermitage, 
 his outdoor employments being limited to collecting and 
 chopping firewood, while during the long evening hours 
 
 1 Some Recollections and Incidents concerning Thoreau, by Joseph 
 Hosmer. 
 
74 LIFE OF 
 
 he occupied himself with the journal, which he still kept 
 with unfailing regularity, and which formed the basis of 
 his Wai den and the Week on the Concord and Merrimac 
 Rivers, the latter of which was now in course of pre 
 paration. Now, too, he had full leisure to weigh the 
 respective merits of society and solitude. Of the solitude 
 thus offered him he availed himself with gratitude and 
 profit; it was during this period that he matured his 
 thoughts and perfected his literary style, so that having 
 come to Walden with still somewhat of the crudeness of 
 youth, he might leave it with the firmness and dignity of 
 manhood. 
 
 In this connection may be quoted the pleasant stanzas 
 of the " Winter Walk," written at Walden, though at a 
 somewhat earlier date : 
 
 " When Winter fringes every bough 
 
 With his fantastic wreath, 
 And puts the seal of silence now 
 Upon the leaves beneath ; 
 
 When every stream in its pent-house 
 
 Goes gurgling on its way, 
 And in his gallery the mouse 
 
 Nibbleth the meadow hay ; 
 
 Methinks the summer still is nigh, 
 
 And lurketh underneath, 
 As that same meadow-mouse doth lie 
 
 Snug in that last year s heath. 
 
 Eager I hasten to the vale, 
 As if I heard brave news, 
 
 How nature held high festival, 
 Which it were hard to lose. 
 
THOREA U. 75 
 
 I gambol with my neighbour ice, 
 
 And sympathising quake, 
 As each new crack darts in a trice 
 
 Across the gladsome lake. 
 
 One with the cricket in the ground, 
 
 And fagot on the hearth, 
 Resounds the rare domestic sound 
 
 Along the forest path." 
 
 It is, however, a mistake to suppose that Thoreau was 
 entirely isolated from society during his seclusion at 
 Walden such had never been his intention, and such 
 was not, in fact, the case. Every day or two, in winter 
 as well as in summer, he strolled to the village to see his 
 relatives and friends, and to hear the gossip of the hour, 
 sometimes returning late at night after supper at a friend s 
 house, and steering his way with difficulty through the 
 darkness of the Walden woods, i The Fitchburg railroad 
 often provided him with a pathway on these occasions ; 
 indeed, so well known was he along the line, that the 
 drivers of the trains were accustomed to bow to him as 
 to an old acquaintance. Nor was the visiting altogether 
 on Thoreau s side ; for, as may well be believed, the 
 news of his strange retirement brought him. numerous 
 unbidden guests, whom he received with such hospitality 
 as was possible in his sylvan abode. To the simple 
 holiday folk, who came to enjoy themselves and make 
 the best of their time, such as children and railroad 
 men, wood-choppers, fishermen, hunters, and even idiots 
 from the almshouse, he seems invariably to have extended 
 a hearty welcome and good fellowship ; not so, perhaps, 
 to the dilettante reformers, prying gossips, and sham 
 philanthropists, whose advances he characteristically 
 
76 LIFE OF 
 
 resented, men who " did not know when their visit had 
 terminated," though he sought to indicate this fact to 
 them by going about his business again, and answering 
 them " from greater and greater remoteness." 
 
 He also received welcome visits from Emerson, on 
 whose land he was "squatting," and from his other per 
 sonal friends. Ellery Charming spent a fortnight with 
 him in his hut at Walden, at the time when he was 
 building his fireplace, and was a frequent visitor at all 
 seasons of the year. Alcott was another of his regular 
 guests, and it is he who is referred to in the pages of 
 Walden as " one of the last of the philosophers," the 
 man "of the most faith of any alive." On a Sunday 
 afternoon he would sometimes be cheered by the approach 
 of the " long-headed farmer," Edmund Hosmer, one of 
 the firmest and heartiest of his friends, arid the talk 
 would then be of "rude and simple times, when men 
 sat about large fires in cold bracing weather, with clear 
 heads." 
 
 The following is a record of a visit paid to Thoreau 
 by Joseph Hosmer, the son of his farmer friend : 
 
 " Early in September 1845, on his invitation, I spent a Sunday at 
 his lake-side retreat. His hospitality and manner of entertainment 
 were unique, and peculiar to the time and place. The cooking 
 apparatus was primitive, and consisted of a hole made in the earth 
 and inlaid with stones, upon which the fire was made, after the 
 manner at the sea-shore when they have a clam-bake. When suffi 
 ciently hot, remove the embers and place on the fish, frog, etc. 
 
 " Our bill-of-fare included horned pout, corn, bread, beans, salt, 
 etc. The beans had been previously cooked. The meal for our 
 bread was mixed with lake water only, and when prepared it was 
 spread upon the surface of a thin stone used for that purpose, and 
 baked. When the bread had been sufficiently baked the stone was 
 
THOREAU. 77 
 
 removed, then the fish was placed over the hot stones and roasted 
 some in wet paper and some without and when seasoned with salt 
 they were delicious." 
 
 It will be seen from these instances that Thoreau was 
 by no means the misanthropic anchorite that some have 
 imagined him, He well knew the value of social inter 
 course ; but, on the other hand, he knew also that 
 " society is commonly too cheap"; he loved at times to 
 be alone, and confesses that he " never found the com 
 panion that was so companionable as solitude." 
 
 It has been supposed that the Walden hermitage wasi 
 occasionally a refuge to quite other visitors than those ; 
 who have been enumerated, and that Thoreau s hut was \ 
 a station in the great "Underground Railway" for run- \ 
 away slaves, though Thoreau himself only mentions one 
 visitor of this kind, whom he had helped " to" forward 
 toward the north star." 
 
 I am informed, however, on good authority, that of 
 Colonel Wentworth Higginson, that Thoreau s hut can 
 have had little, if anything, to do with the Underground 
 Railway. " Massachusetts did not, like Ohio, lie in the 
 shortest line between the slave-states and Canada ; hence 
 fewer fugitives passed through, and those who did were 
 less hotly pursued, so that the Underground Railway, 
 which was a pretty definite chain of houses in Ohio, was 
 rather a vague figure of speech hereabouts. In one or 
 two cases fugitives were expressly taken to Concord, and 
 may have been in Thoreau s hut, but it must have been 
 quite exceptional." " I have made this a matter of 
 special investigation," says Dr. S. A. Jones, 1 "and the 
 
 1 Lippincotfs Magazine, August 1891. In the first edition of this 
 book I was in error on this point. 
 
78 LIFE OF 
 
 truth is that there were specially prepared houses in 
 Old Concord which afforded infinitely more secure 
 resting and hiding-places for the fugitive slave. More 
 over, the survivors who managed Concord station 
 declare that Thoreau s hut was not used for such a 
 purpose." 
 
 It was in connection with Thoreau s abolitionist enthu 
 siasm that a remarkable incident befell him during his 
 first autumn at Walden. His individualistic view of life 
 had naturally led him, as it led Alcott and some other 
 transcendentalists, to the adoption of anarchist doctrines, 
 and he heartily accepted and endorsed the dictum that 
 " that government is best which governs not at all." His 
 deep disapproval of the foreign policy of the United 
 States in their war with Mexico, and his still stronger 
 detestation of the sanction given by Government to 
 negro slavery at home, had the effect of spurring his 
 latent discontent into a sense of active personal anta 
 gonism to the State and its representatives, and he felt 
 that something more than a verbal protest was demanded 
 from those who, like himself, were required to show their 
 allegiance in the form of taxes. " I meet this American 
 Government, or its representative the State Government, 
 directly, and face to face, once a year no more in the 
 person of its tax gatherer. . . . If a thousand men were 
 not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a 
 violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, 
 and enable the State to commit violence and shed inno 
 cent blood." 1 
 
 So when his " civil neighbour," the tax-gatherer, came 
 to Thoreau for the poll-tax, it was refused (as the church- 
 1 Essay on Civil Disobedience, 1849. 
 
THOREAU. 79 
 
 tax Mrf KpAn refused by him in 1838) on the ground that 
 he dS not care to trace the course of his dollar " till it 
 buysvaman, or a musket to shoot one with." To the 
 the tax-gatherer what he was to do 
 under these perplexing circumstances, the answer returned 
 was that if he really wished to do anything, he should 
 resign his office. The first difficulty of this kind had 
 arisen in 1843, when Alcott, who was probably acting in 
 conjunction with Thoreau, was arrested for his refusal to 
 pay the tax ; but it was not till I845 1 that the State pro 
 ceeded against the younger and, as it was presumably 
 thought, less important offender. One afternoon, when 
 Thoreau chanced to have gone in from Walden to the 
 village to get a shoe from the cobbler s, he was inter 
 cepted and lodged in the town gaol. " Henry, why are 
 yoir here ? " were the words of Emerson, when he came 
 to visit his friend in this new place of retirement. " Why 
 are you not here ? " was the significant reply of the 
 prisoner, in allusion to the characteristic caution of 
 Emerson. A humorous account of the night he spent 
 in prison, and of the fellow-criminals he met there, was 
 afterwards written by Thoreau. " It was like travelling," 
 he tells us, "into a far country, such as I had never 
 expected to behold, to lie there for one night. It seemed 
 to me that I had never heard the town-clock strike before, 
 nor the evening sounds of the village, for we slept with 
 the windows open, which were inside the grating. It 
 was a closer view of my native town. I was fairly inside 
 of it. I never had seen its institutions before. I began 
 to comprehend what its inhabitants were about." The 
 next morning he was discharged, his mother and aunts 
 1 The date is wrongly given in Emerson s Memoir as 1847. 
 
80 LIFE OF 
 
 having paid the tax without his consent a somewhat 
 tame conclusion of the dispute on which he had not 
 reckoned. 1 He proceeded straight from the prison door, 
 among the meaning glances of his fellow-townsmen, to 
 finish the errand in which he had been interrupted over 
 night, and having put on his mended shoe, was soon in 
 command of a huckleberry party, on a hill two miles 
 from Concord, from which spot, as he characteristically 
 remarked, "the State was nowhere to be seen." 
 
 During all his walks over the fields and forests of the 
 Walden neighbourhood, in which he was absent for hours, 
 and sometimes days together, he never fastened the 
 door of his hut ; yet he never missed anything but a 
 volume of Homer, and "was never molested by any 
 person but those who represented the State." His 
 longest absence from Walden seems to have been the 
 fortnight he spent in Maine, in September 1846, when, 
 in company with a cousin who was residing at Bangor, 
 he explored the recesses of the Maine woods, ascended 
 the mountain Ktaadn, and made personal acquaintance 
 with some of the native Indian hunters, whose habits 
 he was never weary of studying. 
 
 In 1847 he had some correspondence and personal 
 intercourse with Agassiz, who had come to the States 
 in the preceding autumn, and paid more than one 
 visit to Concord. On several occasions collections of 
 fishes, turtles, and various local fauna were sent to 
 
 1 The payment of the tax has been wrongly ascribed to Emerson. 
 The money was actually handed to the gaoler by Miss Maria 
 Thoreau, disguised by wrapping something round her head. The 
 gaoler, who is still living (1894), says that the payment made 
 Thoreau " mad as the devil." 
 
THOREAU. 81 
 
 Agassiz by Thoreau, of whose knowledge and observa 
 tion the great naturalist formed a high opinion. In 
 one way, however, Thoreau differed widely from other 
 members of the same profession, for, though a naturalist, 
 he had discarded the use of the gun and the trap before 
 he lived in the woods, his field -glass being the sole 
 weapon of attack which he now carried in his excursions. 
 Fishing was the only sport which he did not abandon, 
 and even on this point his conscience was already 
 uneasy, and he had discovered that he could not fish 
 "without* falling a little in self-respect." 
 
 Thus two summers and two winters passed by, 
 fruitful in quiet meditation and ripening experience, 
 though offering few incidents which call for special 
 remark. When the summer of 1847 had arrived, he 
 began to feel that the ojpject for which he retired to 
 Walden was now sufficiently accomplished, and that 
 it was time for him to return to the more social atmo 
 sphere of the village. His period of retirement had 
 not been wasted or misspent, for he had learnt by his 
 experiment two great lessons concerning the practical 
 life and the spiritual. First, "that to maintain one s 
 self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if 
 we will live simply and wisely," it being his own ex 
 perience that he could meet all the expenses of the year 
 by six weeks of work. Secondly, "that if one 
 advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, 
 and endeavours to live the life which he has imagined, 
 he will meet with a success unexpected in common 
 hours ; in proportion as he simplifies his life the laws 
 of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude 
 will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness 
 
82 LIFE OF 
 
 weakness." He had put his transcendental philosophy 
 to the test, and the result had not disappointed him; he 
 was no longer the " parcel of vain strivings " which he 
 had pictured himself in his youthful poem, but he had 
 now firm ground beneath his feet, and a clear object 
 towards which to direct his course in the future. 
 
 On 6th September 1847 he left Walden, and again 
 took up his residence in his father s household at 
 Concord. The hut in which he had spent so many 
 pleasant hours became the habitation of a Scotch 
 gardener ; a few years later it was bought by a farmer, 
 and removed to another quarter of the Concord 
 township, where it was used as a small granary and 
 tool-house till some time after the death of its architect 
 and original inhabitant. 
 
 "I left the woods," he says, "for as good a reason as I went 
 there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to 
 live, and could not spare any more time for that one." "Why 
 did I leave the woods ? " he wrote in his journal a few years later. 
 " I do not think that I can tell. I do not know any better how I 
 came to go there. I have often wished myself back. Perhaps I 
 wanted change. There was a little stagnation, it may be, about 
 two o clock in the afternoon. Perhaps if I lived there much longer, 
 I might live there for ever. One might think twice before he 
 accepted heaven on such terms." 
 
 Walden^ the most famous of Thoreau s volumes, which 
 contains the account of his life in the woods, was not 
 published till 1854. That this most characteristic 
 episode of his life should be a cause of wonder and 
 misunderstanding to the majority of his readers and 
 fellow-citizens, was, perhaps, only to be expected. Men 
 tion is made in one of the later diaries of an acquaintance 
 
THOREA U. 83 
 
 of Emerson s, who was much interested in Walden, but 
 who was convinced that the book was nothing more than 
 a satire and jeu tfesprit, written solely for the amuse 
 ment of the passing moment, a misconception of the 
 whole spirit of Thoreau s life, which is scarcely more 
 wide of the mark than are some of the judgments passed 
 on the Walden experiment in more recent criticism. 
 "His shanty life," says Mr. Lowell, "was a mere im 
 possibility, so far as his own conception of it goes, as an 
 entire independency of mankind. The tub of Diogenes 
 had a sounder bottom." l But there is not a word to 
 indicate that Thoreau was thinking of an " entire in 
 dependency of mankind," or of abjuring a single product 
 of civilisation which is of real use to men. The fact i 
 that this enterprise of Thoreau s, as described in his 
 Walden, has been an encouragement and help to many 
 persons, both in America and England, to live a simpler 
 and saner life, is of itself sufficient testimony to the 
 success of his endeavours. Yet Mr. Lowell s most un 
 justifiable confusion of simplicity with barbarism has 
 again and again been quoted by later critics as an 
 exposure of Thoreau s fallacies ! 
 
 "Thoreau," says Dr. E. W. Emerson, "is absurdly 
 misconceived by most people. He did not wish that 
 every one should live in isolated cabins in the woods, 
 on Indian corn and beans and cranberries. His own 
 Walden camping was but a short experimental episode, 
 
 1 The author of the article on Thoreau in the Encyclopedia 
 Britannica falls into a similar error, when he states that Thoreau 
 was "desirous of proving to himself and others that man could be 
 as independent of mankind as the nest-building bird." So, too, 
 Professor Nichol, in his American Literature. 
 
84 LIFE OF 
 
 and even then this really very human and affectionate 
 man constantly visited his friends in the village, and was 
 a most dutiful son and affectionate brother. It is idle 
 for cavilling Epicureans to announce as a great discovery 
 that he sometimes took supper comfortably at a friend s 
 house, or was too good a son to churlishly thumb back 
 the cake that his good mother had specially made for 
 him. He was not like the little men of that day who 
 magnified trifles of diet until they could think of little 
 else." 
 
 It is necessary, if we would understand Thoreau aright, 
 to appreciate carefully the importance of his sojourn at 
 Walden in relation to the rest of his career. It seems to 
 be sometimes forgotten that the period of his retirement 
 was only two years out of the twenty of his adult life, 
 and that it is therefore an injustice to him to connect 
 his work too exclusively with Walden, or to speak 
 of that episode as containing the sum and sub 
 stance of his philosophical belief. It was a time of 
 self-probation rather than an attempt to influence 
 others, a trial rather than an expression of his trans 
 cendental ideas ; he was under thirty years of age when 
 he went to Walden, had published no volumes, and was 
 altogether upknown except to a limited circle of his 
 fellow-townsmen. On the other hand, it must be noted 
 that this was the time when his thoughts ripened, and 
 his ethical creed assumed a definite form, and that his 
 residence in the woods was not only the most striking, 
 because the most picturesque, incident in his life, but 
 also gave a determining direction to his later career. 
 He was a student when he came to Walden ; when he 
 returned to Concord he was a teacher. 
 
THOREAU. 85 
 
 And now, at this critical point in Thoreau s story, it 
 may be well to interrupt for a time the external narrative 
 of his life, in order to show what manner of man he was, 
 in appearance, character, sympathies, studies, and other 
 personal traits, when he thus came forward to preach to 
 an inattentive world his gospel of simplicity. 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 "PHE personality of Thoreau was one which seldom 
 failed to arrest the attention of those who met him. 
 " He was short of stature," says Mr. Moncure Con way, 
 who visited him a few years after he left Walden, "well 
 built, and such a man as I have fancied Julius Caesar to 
 have been. Every movement was full of courage and 
 repose ; the tones of his voice were those of Truth her 
 self ; and there was in his eye the pure bright blue of 
 the New England sky, as there was sunshine in his flaxen 
 hair. He had a particularly strong aquiline Roman 
 nose, which somehow reminded me of the prow of a 
 ship." This description is fully corroborated by that 
 given in Thoreau^ the Poet-Naturalist, by Ellery Charming, 
 who, from his long and intimate acquaintance with 
 Thoreau, could speak with peculiar authority : 
 
 " His face, once seen, could not be forgotten. The features were 
 quite marked : the nose aquiline, or very Roman, like one of the 
 portraits of Caesar (more like a beak, as was said); large overhanging 
 brows above the deepest-set blue eyes that could be seen, in certain 
 lights, and in others grey eyes expressive of all shades of feeling, 
 but never weak or near-sighted ; the forehead not unusually broad 
 or high, full of concentrated energy or purpose ; 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. His whole figure had an active earnestness, 
 
LIFE OF THOREAU. 87 
 
 as if he had no moment to waste. Even in the boat he had a wary, 
 transitory air, his eyes on the outlook perhaps there might be 
 ducks, or the Blondin turtle, or an otter, or sparrow." 
 
 From 1840 to 1860 Thoreau s figure must have been 
 a very familiar one to nis fellow-townsmen of Concord, 
 since he was abroad in all weathers and at all hours, a 
 noticeable man with his sloping shoulders, " his eyes 
 bent on the ground, his long swinging gait, his hands 
 perhaps clasped behind him, or held closely at his side, 
 the fingers made into a fist." The indomitable spirit 
 that animated his whole character was written unmistak 
 ably in his personal appearance. " How deep and clear 
 is the mark that thought sets upon a man s face !" was 
 the exclamation of one who saw him for the first time. 1 
 
 The homeliness of Thoreau s mode of dress has 
 already been noticed, and this, during his more lengthy 
 walks or excursions, often led to strange errors as to his 
 object and vocation. In Cape Cod and elsewhere he 
 was several times mistaken for a pedlar, and on board a 
 steamboat on the Hudson river he was once asked for a 
 "chaw o baccy" by a bystander, who took him for a 
 
 1 There are three portraits of Thoreau which have been repro 
 duced in various forms, (i; A crayon done by S. W. Rowse (a 
 young artist who stayed with the Thoreaus) in 1854, before the 
 time when Thoreau wore a beard. (2) A photograph by Critcher- 
 son, taken at Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1857 or 1858 (not in 
 1 86 1, as has been wrongly stated). Thoreau here appears with a 
 fringe of beard on his throat. (3) An ambrotype photograph, 
 taken by Dunshee at New Bedford, at the request of Mr. Daniel 
 Ricketson, in August 1861, when Thoreau was wearing a full 
 beard and moustache. From this photograph a bas-relief medallion 
 head, in profile, life-size, was produced by Mr. Walton Ricketson, 
 the son of Thoreau s friend. 
 
88 LIFE OF 
 
 shipmate. It is said that his speech " had always a bitrr 
 in it," owing to his peculiar pronunciation of the letter r , 
 but all his oddities of appearance and manner were soon 
 forgotten under the singular charm of his conversation, 
 the power of which is attested by all who knew him. 
 He himself says, in a passage of his diary, that his bon- 
 mots were the "ripe, dry fruit of long past experience," 
 which fell from him easily without giving him either pain 
 or pleasure. This experience was not gathered, as is 
 usually the case, by foreign travel or a varied manner 
 of life, but by shrewd native sense and keen practical* 
 insight. There was a wonderful fitness, Emerson tells 
 us, between his body and mind. He was expert as a 
 walker, swimmer, runner, rower, and in all outdoor 
 employments; he could measure any given distance or 
 height by foot or eye with extraordinary precision, could 
 estimate the exact weight of anything put into his hands t 
 and from a box containing a bushel or more of loose 
 pencils could take up just a dozen pencils at every 
 grasp. 
 
 In 1847, in answer to a circular which was issued at 
 the time for the purpose of collecting facts in the lives 
 of the Harvard class of 1837, Thoreau wrote the follow 
 ing highly characteristic letter : 
 
 "Am not married. I don t know whether mine is a profession, 
 or a trade, or what not. It is not yet learned, and in every instance 
 has been practised before being studied. The mercantile part of it 
 was begun by myself alone. It is not one but legion. I will give 
 you some of the monster s heads. I am a Schoolmaster, a private 
 Tutor, a Surveyor, a Gardener, a Farmer, a Painter (I mean a 
 House Painter), a Carpenter, a Mason, a Day-labourer, a Pencil- 
 maker, a Glass-paper-maker, a Writer, and sometimes a Poetaster. 
 If you will act the part of lolus, and apply a hot iron to any of 
 
THOREAU. 89 
 
 these heads, I shall be greatly obliged to you. My present employ 
 ment is to answer such orders as may be expected from so general 
 an advertisement as the above. That is, if I see lit, which is not 
 always the case, for I have found out a way to live without what is 
 commonly called employment or industry, attractive or otherwise. 
 Indeed, my steadiest employment, if such it can be called, is to 
 keep myself at the top of my condition, and ready for whatever 
 may turn up in heaven or on earth. The last two or three years I 
 lived in Concord woods, alone, something more than a mile from 
 any neighbour, in a house built entirely by myself. 
 
 "P.S. I beg that the class will not consider me an object of 
 charity, and if any of them are in want of any pecuniary assistance 
 and will make known their case to me, I will engage to give them 
 some advice of more worth than money." 1 
 
 He has sometimes been called an ascetic; but if he 
 seldom used flesh or wine, tea or coffee, and other 
 supposed " necessaries " of diet, this abstinence was 
 assuredly due to the fact that he found he thus 
 increased, rather than diminished, the pleasure of 
 existence. The rare delicacy of his nature showed 
 itself in his abhorrence of every form of sensuality, or 
 grossness, and in his expressed desire to live "as 
 tenderly and daintily as one would pluck a flower." 
 Yet seldom has there been a greater lover of healthy 
 physical life. The keenness of his senses was extra 
 ordinary, and the perceptions of colour, sound, smell, 
 and taste are always spoken of in his diaries as luxuries 
 for which he can never be sufficiently grateful. Music 
 had at all times a peculiar attraction for him (he was 
 himself a skilful player on the flute), and is repeatedly 
 mentioned in the diaries and letters as one of the 
 
 1 From " Memorials of the Class of 1837, prepared for the 
 Fiftieth Anniversary of the Graduation/ by Henry Williams, 
 Boston, 1887. 
 
90 LIFE OF 
 
 supreme delights of life. But, if we wish to discover 
 the central and distinctive quality of Thoreau s character, 
 we must look beyond the above-mentioned faculties to 
 the inner secret of his power the ideality that domin 
 ated all his thoughts and actions. He was a transcend- 
 entalist in a far deeper and more literal sense than the 
 majority of those who bore that name. 
 
 It was this ideality that gave 1 to his character a certain 
 external coldness and remoteness. " I love Henry," 
 said one of his friends, " but I cannot like him; and as 
 for taking his arm, I should as soon think of taking 
 the arm of an elm-tree." The misunderstandings thus 
 generated were keenly felt by Thoreau himself, who 
 rightly attributes them to his own extreme sensibility 
 and exacting disposition. There are a number of 
 passages in the diaries (perhaps not to be taken very 
 literally), in which his over-sensitive nature seems to be 
 tormented by unnecessary doubts as to his relations 
 with his friends, and this rigid strictness of ideal is 
 especially observable in his essays on Love and Friend 
 ship, the latter of which forms a portion of one of the 
 best known chapters in The Week. Thus it was that 
 the very value which Thoreau set on his friendships 
 was his chief difficulty in maintaining them, their 
 rarity being to him the measure of their worth; so 
 that, with a few exceptions, he turned to nature for 
 what he could not find in man. It is only fair to add 
 that Ellery Channing, who, as Thoreau s most intimate 
 friend, should be an authority on this point, asserts 
 positively that the essay on Friendship was "poetical 
 and romantic," and that to read it literally would be to 
 accuse its author of stupidity. "The living actual 
 
THOREAU. 91 
 
 friendship and affection," says Channing, " which makes 
 time a reality, no one knew better. He meant friend 
 ship, and meant nothing else, and stood by it without 
 the slightest abatement." 
 
 To a man of this temperament, who needed leisure, 
 breathing-space, and elbow-room, and could not endure 
 to be shut up in polite drawing-rooms and dining-rooms, 
 where the guests jostled each other, mentally and bodily, 
 and where all true individuality was hidden and wasted, 
 the frivolities and formalities of conventional society 
 could not be otherwise than a burden and an irritant. 
 Under such conditions he became contradictory and 
 pugnacious, and marred the course of conversation by 
 the promptitude with which he negatived every pro 
 position that might be advanced, most of all when he 
 detected any signs of hypocrisy, foppishness, or dilet 
 tantism. The sharp sayings, and still more " accusing 
 silences," as Emerson terms them, which Thoreau dealt 
 out to all pretentious personages, had, of course, the 
 effect of getting him the reputation of cynicism and 
 misanthropy; those readers, however, who rightly appre 
 ciate his character, will distinguish between the normal 
 churlishness, which certainly was not one of his failings, 
 and the occasional acridity of speech which he deliber 
 ately adopted in his intercourse with his fellow-citizens. 
 " If he had any affectation in his sincere and aspiring 
 nature," wrote one who knew him well, Mr. Edward 
 Hoar, of Concord, " it was a sort of inherited petulance, 
 that covered a sensitive and affectionate nature, easily 
 wounded by the scornful criticism which his new de 
 parture sometimes brought upon him." 
 
 To style Thoreau a misanthrope is to misunderstand 
 
92 LIFE OF 
 
 his whole nature, and to do him a great injustice. He 
 loved to study all forms of innocent and healthy char 
 acter, and in one of his works he quotes, as specially 
 applicable to himself, Terence s famous maxim of regard 
 for our common humanity. Had he been the mere 
 fastidious recluse that some critics have supposed 
 him, he could not have drawn his sympathetic and 
 humorous sketches of the sturdy Concord farmers, or 
 of the hearty unsophisticated wood-chopper by whom he 
 was visited at Walden, or of the aged brown-coated 
 fisherman who haunted the banks of the Musketaquid, 
 or of the drunken Dutchman on board a New York 
 steamboat, or of the merry old oysterman who gave him 
 hospitality at Cape Cod. For idealist and enthusiast 
 though he was, he possessed a true vein of humour, 
 which is none the less piquant because it ; s expressed in 
 a manner so dry, pithy, and laconic. It is pleasant, 
 too, to note that the gravity which was habitual with the 
 hermit and philosopher could melt, when occasion arose, 
 into merriment and good-fellowship, and that when he 
 laughed " the operation was sufficient to split a pitcher." 
 He was fond of playing on his flute, and would at times 
 sing " Tom Bowling " and other nautical songs with 
 much gusto and animation; and it is even recorded that 
 he once or twice startled his friends by performing an 
 improvised dance. 
 
 Reference has already been made to his sympathy 
 with children, and his remarkable power of interesting 
 and amusing them. He would tell them stories, sing to 
 them, and play on his flute, or perform various pieces 
 of jugglery for their entertainment an accomplishment 
 which he had probably learnt from his eccentric uncle, 
 
THOREA U. 93 
 
 Charles Dunbar, in whose oddities he always took much 
 interest. But it was in the huckleberry expeditions that 
 his services were in greatest request, for then he would 
 drive the hay-cart in which the children journeyed to the 
 hills where the berries abounded, and who knew each 
 knoll and dingle so intimately as Thoreau? "leading 
 the frolic with his jokes and laughter as they jolted 
 along." When we read the delightful accounts of his 
 kindness and helpfulness on these occasions, we know 
 how to estimate the charges of misanthropy and 
 churlishness. 
 
 "Though shy of general society," says the writer of the re 
 miniscences in Fraser, " Thoreau was a hero among children, and 
 the captain of their excursions. He was the sine qua non of the 
 Concord huckleberry party, which is in that region something of an 
 institution. To have Thoreau along with them was to be sure of 
 finding acres of bushes laden with the delicious fruit. ... A child 
 stumbles and falls, losing his carefully gathered store of berries ; 
 Thoreau kneels beside the weeping unfortunate, and explains to 
 him and to the group that nature has made these little provisions 
 for next year s crop. If there were no obstacles, and little boys did 
 not fall occasionally, how would berries be scattered and planted ? 
 and what would become of huckleberryings ? He will then arrange 
 that he who has thus suffered for the general good shall have the 
 first chance at the next pasture." 
 
 The severity of Thoreau s ideal was not less con 
 spicuous in matters of business than in his relations 
 towards his friends. He was absolutely and austerely 
 faithful to his inner sense of right, keeping his engage 
 ments with stem regularity, and never failing in the full 
 discharge of his duty to those who engaged him as 
 surveyor or handicraftsman. Himself thus inflexible in 
 his probity, he expected and exacted a corresponding 
 
94 LIFE OF 
 
 uprightness in others; and where this was not exhibite 
 he made no polite pretence of concealing his dissatisfa 
 tion. No meanness, hypocrisy, or dishonesty, wheth 
 on the part of rich or poor, could escape the rigoroi 
 censure of "that terrible Thoreau," as his acquaintanc 
 called him ; nor would he waste on thriftless applican 
 one cent of the money which he had earned by his ov 
 conscientious labours. He maintained sincerity to I 
 the chief of all virtues. 
 
 "A Yankee stoic" is a term that has been applied 
 Thoreau. Though cosmopolitan in his philosophic 
 views, he was American to the backbone in sentime 
 and manner, and did not study to. conceal his indifferem 
 or aversion for English and European fashions, f 
 possessed in large measure the American qualities 
 self-consciousness and self-assertion, and avows 
 Walden his intention "to brag as lustily as chanticle 
 in the morning," in order to wake up his neighboui 
 And as America was the most favoured of countries, i 
 did he extol his native Concord as the most favoured 
 towns. This preference, however, was not due, as son 
 have supposed, to mere parochialism and narrowness 
 mind for parochialism, the study of the little instej 
 of the great, was certainly not one of Thoreau s failin: 
 but was, as Emerson has pointed out, a half-seriou 
 half-humorous way of reasserting the old stoical maxi 
 that all places are the same to a wise man, and that "tl 
 best place for each is where he stands." On the san 
 principle, being asked at table what dish he preferre 
 he is said to have answered, " The nearest." 
 
 Not even the suspicion of provincial prejudice a 
 attach to Thoreau s literary tastes. It is true that h 
 
THOREAU. 95 
 
 earnest practical mind could not relish the subtleties of 
 metaphysical works, the dulness of moral treatises, or 
 the floweriness of romance; and he was usually averse 
 to reading the magazines and journals of the day, the 
 " news " in which he was interested being other than 
 that which newspapers report. But he read largely and 
 widely nevertheless, and his discrimination never deterior 
 ated into fastidiousness and partiality. The class of 
 books which he most highly valued was undoubtedly 
 the " sacred scriptures," as he calls them, of the poets 
 and philosophers of Persia and India the Bhagvat 
 Geeta, Vishnu Sarma, Laws of Menu, Saadi, and other 
 " bibles " of the old Oriental religions. These he studied 
 chiefly in French and German translations, which he 
 accumulated with such zeal that he is said to have had 
 the best library of such books in the country; and this 
 was supplemented, in 1855, by a handsome present of 
 volumes in English, French, Latin, Greek, and Sanscrit, 
 sent him by Mr. Cholmondeley, a young English 
 friend. There are numerous citations from these 
 ancient writings in Thoreau s own works, and so great 
 was his reverence for them that he jealously asserted 
 their claim to the title of " scriptures " in common 
 with those of Jewish origin. When a young visitor 
 from Harvard College informed him that he was 
 studying "the Scriptures," Thoreau quickly retorted, 
 " But which ? " 
 
 Thoreau s classical studies were not confined to his 
 early years, but were fully maintained in after-life, 
 Homer, ./Eschylus, Virgil, and the poets of the Greek 
 Anthology being his chief favourites. Classical learning 
 is eulogised in both the Week and Walden^ as being the 
 
96 LIFE OF 
 
 most heroic and tranquillising of all branches of reading 
 " The value of the classic languages," says Wentworth 
 Higginson, " was never better exemplified than in their 
 influence on his training. They were real humanities 
 to him, linking him with the great memories of the race, 
 and with high intellectual standards, so that he could 
 never, like some of his imitators, treat literary art as a 
 thing unmanly and trivial. I remember how that fine 
 old classical scholar, the late John Glen King, of Salem, 
 used to delight in Thoreau as being the only man who 
 thoroughly loved both nature and Greek, " His reading 
 in Greek and Latin included not only the "classics" 
 proper, but many old-fashioned authorities on agriculture 
 and natural history, such as Aristotle, /Elian, Theo- 
 phrastus, Cato, Varro, and Pliny. 
 
 His respect for Linnaeus was, according to Channing, 
 " transcendent." He loved to study Froissart and the 
 old-fashioned chronicles, and such voyages as those of 
 Drake and Purchas, with any books of travel that came 
 in his way. Among poets the old English writers were 
 most to his liking; he read and appreciated old ballad- 
 writers, Chaucer, Spenser, Ossian, Herbert, Cowley, 
 Quarles, and, above all others, Milton, whose "Lycidas" 
 was often on his lips. For the moderns he cared com 
 paratively little, the chief exceptions being Goethe, 
 Wordsworth, Coleridge, Ruskin, and Carlyle. He 
 admired Ruskin, but thought him somewhat bigoted, 
 finding in him, as he expressed it, "too much about 
 art for me and the Hottentots." For Carlyle he felt 
 and expressed the sincerest admiration, as may be seen 
 in the essay which he contributed to Grahairts Maga 
 zine in 1847. 
 
THOREAU. 97 
 
 There was another and wholly different branch of 
 reading to which Thoreau devoted a considerable 
 portion of his time the records of the native Indian 
 tribes, which he extracted with much labour and research 
 from the histories of the Jesuit missionaries, the early 
 New England chroniclers, and various other sources of 
 information. Everything connected with the Indians 
 had a strange interest and fascination for him ; he noted 
 and admired their natural instinct of woodcraft, their 
 immobility and self-possession, and their mysterious 
 sense of remoteness from the white man ; he several 
 times visited Maine in order to study their language 
 and habits, and never failed to converse with the 
 wandering parties who sometimes pitched their tents 
 for a few weeks on the banks of the Concord river. 
 His collection of Indian relics had been commenced 
 while he was still a youth, for the soil of Concord an 
 old settlement of Indian tribes was rich in these 
 treasures, arrow-heads, pottery, and stone implements 
 being often turned up by the plough. Regularly every 
 spring, when the fields had been washed bare by rains 
 and thawing snow, would Thoreau set out to gather his 
 crop of arrow-heads, and his extraordinary keenness of 
 sight in detecting these relics was often a cause of 
 wonder to less observant minds. " I do not see where 
 you find your Indian arrow-heads," once remarked the 
 companion of his walk. " Here is one," replied Thoreau 
 on the instant, picking one up and presenting it to his 
 astonished friend. 
 
 This remarkable sympathy, on the part of one of the 
 most advanced of modern thinkers, with the spirit of a 
 savage and decaying race is accounted for by Thoreau s 
 
 7 
 
98 LIFE OF 
 
 strong natural inclination to the uncultivated and wild. 
 He loved the sea and all desert places ; preferred the 
 wild apple to the cultured orchard, and the dreariest 
 swamp to the most fragrant garden; and it cheered him 
 to see the young forest-pines springing up anew in the 
 
 (fertile corn-land. The Indian, the human representative 
 
 lof^wildlife in New^^glandfTTiT^^ 
 
 [jpathies, just as the sympathies of George Borrow were 
 
 I attracted to the roaming gipsy tribes. 
 
 This inclination of Thoreau to wild nature was not, 
 as some critics have suggested, a symptom of an un 
 healthy temperament, but rather a method of retaining 
 the excellent soundness of his mind. " His whole life," 
 says Lowell, " was a search for the doctor." This was 
 not the case. He went to nature, not as a sickly 
 valetudinarian, seeking a cure for his ailments, but as a 
 sane and healthy man, the secret of whose health lay in 
 this very familiarity with the open air. Walking was a 
 necessity of Thoreau s existence; he demanded four 
 hours at least each day for sauntering at leisure over 
 hills, and woods, and fields, taking short cuts when he 
 could, and avoiding for the most part the grit and noise 
 of the busier high-roads. The old Marlboro road which 
 led south-west from Concord, through a spacious tract 
 of open country abounding in patches of scrub-oak and 
 wild apples, was one of his favourite haunts; so, too, 
 were Walden woods and the " Cliffs " which overhang 
 Fairhaven, the wide bay formed by a bend of the river 
 two miles south of the village. The river was much 
 frequented by him at all seasons of the year; for in 
 summer he made almost daily voyages in his boat, 
 which he kept moored in Ellery Channing s riverside 
 
THOREAU. 99 
 
 garden, and in winter the frozen stream offered a 
 convenient pathway. 
 
 On these expeditions Thoreau was generally un 
 accompanied, unless Ellery Channing or one of his 
 few chosen friends happened to be with him. Offers 
 of companionship were not rarely forthcoming, but 
 these he for the most part declined with that frankness 
 which was all his own. " Would he not walk with 
 them?" some acquaintances would ask. "He did not 
 know; there was nothing so important to him as his 
 walk ; he had no walks to throw away on company." 
 But for those who succeeded in gaining this privilege 
 a rare treat was assured. Here is a reminiscence of 
 Thoreau from a private letter of G. W. Curtis : 
 
 " It always seems to me one of the good fortunes of 
 my life that I knew Concord when Emerson, Hawthorne, 
 and Thoreau were citizens there, and that I personally 
 knew them. If in personal intercourse Thoreau some 
 times seemed to be, as Hawthorne said, a cast-iron 
 man, he was after all no more rigid than the oak which 
 holds fast by its own roots whatever betides. One of 
 my most vivid recollections of my life in Concord is 
 that of an evening upon the shallow river with Thoreau 
 in his boat. We lighted a huge fire of fat pine in an 
 iron crate beyond the bow of the boat and drifted slowly 
 through an illuminated circle of the ever-changing aspect 
 of the river bed. In that house beautiful you can fancy 
 what an interpreter he was." 
 
 " His powers of conversation," says another who was 
 thus favoured, " were extraordinary. I remember being 
 surprised and delighted at every step with revelations of 
 laws and significant attributes in common things. . . . 
 
100 LIFE OF 
 
 The acuteness of his senses was marvellous; no hound 
 could scent better, and he could hear the most faint and 
 distant sound without even laying his ear to the ground 
 like an Indian. As we penetrated farther and farther 
 into the woods he seemed to gain a certain transforma 
 tion, and his face shone with a light that I had not seen 
 in the village." The account of Thoreau s skilful and 
 genial leadership of the Concord huckleberry-parties has 
 already been quoted, and from the same authority we 
 have an equally charming description of how he would 
 guide his friends to the haunts of the water-lily. 1 
 
 " Upon such occasions his resources for our entertainment were 
 inexhaustible. He would tell stories of the Indians who once 
 dwelt thereabouts, till the children almost looked to see a red man 
 skulking with his arrow on shore ; and every plant or flower on the 
 bank or in the water, and every fish, turtle, frog, lizard about us, 
 was transformed by the wand of his knowledge from the low form 
 into which the spell of our ignorance had reduced it, into a mystic 
 beauty. One of his surprises was to thrust his hand softly into the 
 water, and as softly raise up before our astonished eyes a large 
 bright fish, which lay as contentedly in his hand as if they were old 
 acquaintances." 
 
 This fish was probably the Bream, whose nest-guarding 
 habits are described by Thoreau in The Week. "The 
 Breams are so careful of their charge that you may stand 
 close by in the water and examine them at your leisure. 
 I have stood over them half-an-hour at a time, and 
 stroked them familiarly without frightening them, . . . 
 and have even taken them gently out of the water with 
 my hand." 
 
 His extraordinary sympathy with animals was one of 
 
 1 Moncure Con way, Fraser, April 1866. 
 
THOREAU. 101 
 
 the most singular and pleasing features in Thoreau s 
 character. Like St. Francis, he felt a sense of love 
 and brotherhood towards the lower races, and regarded 
 them not as " brute beasts," without sensibility or soul, 
 but as possessing " the character and importance of 
 another order of men." He protested against the con 
 ceited self-assurance with which man sets down the 
 intelligence of animals as mere " instinct," while over 
 looking their real wisdom and fitness of behaviour. 
 They were his " townsmen and fellow-creatures," whose 
 individuality must be recognised as much as his own, 
 and who must be treated with courtesy and gentleness. 
 
 The strange influence which Thoreau was able to 
 exercise over beasts, and birds, and fishes was doubtless 
 chiefly due to the power of his humane sympathy, partly, 
 also, to his habits of patient silence and watchfulness, 
 in which he resembled the hermits of the Middle Ages. 
 His hut at Walden was inhabited by other creatures 
 besides himself; the birds would flit fearlessly through 
 the room ; the red squirrel raced over the roof, while 
 moles and hares stabled in the cellar; and chickadees 
 perched on the armfuls of wood which he carried across 
 his threshold. Once, as he was hoeing in a garden, a 
 sparrow alighted on his shoulder, which he regarded as 
 "a greater honour than any epaulet he could have worn." 
 Nor was this all, for his mingled firmness and sympathy 
 enabled him to take all sorts of liberties with the wildest 
 of wild creatures. A story is told how a squirrel, which 
 he had taken home for a few days in order to observe its 
 habits, refused to be set at liberty, returning again and 
 again to its new friend with embarrassing persistence, 
 climbing up his knee, sitting on his hand, and at last 
 
102 LIFE OF 
 
 gaining the day by hiding its head in the folds of his 
 waistcoat an appeal which Thoreau was not able to 
 withstand. 
 
 Thoreau was essentially a "poet-naturalist," as Ellery 
 Channing entitled him, and not a man of science. He 
 was, indeed, an honorary member and correspondent of 
 the Boston Natural History Society; but he declined, as 
 a rule, to write memoirs of his experiences in this branch 
 of study, on the ground that he could not properly 
 detach the mere external record of observation from the 
 inner associations with which such facts were connected 
 in his mind in a word, the natural history of the subject 
 could not be separated from the poetry. His whole 
 method, as we have seen, was different from that of the 
 scientific anatomist; he observed but he did not kill, 
 making it his object to hojd his bird " in the affections " 
 rather than in the hand.j It is said that when some 
 Concord loafers mockingly asked Thoreau if he really 
 did not shoot a bird when he wanted to study it, he 
 replied, " Do you think I should shoot you if I wanted 
 to study you?" 
 
 His diaries testify to the immense diligence and keen 
 ness of his rnmrrmninn with nature, and his unflagging 
 interest in the seasons and all they bring with them. 
 He noted and recorded the habits of animals, the tracks 
 of the fox and otter, the migrations and song of birds, 
 the croak of frogs and chirp of crickets, the spawning 
 and nests of fishes, the blossoming of flowers, the fall of 
 leaves, the height of the river, the temperature of ponds 
 and springs, and innumerable other phenomena of out 
 door life. Like all true naturalists, he loved birds, and 
 many are the entries in his journal respecting the kinds 
 
THOREAU. 103 
 
 that are native at Concord the bobolink, the robin, the 
 song-sparrow, the whip-poor-will, the cat-bird, and the 
 blue-bird, which, as he beautifully said of it, "carries 
 the sky on its back." He loved to be awakened in 
 the early summer mornings by the song of birds, and 
 nothing cheered him so much in the midst of a winter 
 storm as a bird s chirp or whistle. 
 
 The neighbourhood of Concord, with its wide tracts 
 of meadow and woodland, was a fine field for the 
 naturalist; and Thoreau, in his characteristic love of 
 paradox, was fond of asserting that it surpassed all other 
 places as a centre of observation a foible for which he 
 was gently bantered by Emerson. He talked about 
 nature, it was wittily remarked, as if she had been bom 
 and brought up at Concord." Ne quid quasiveris extra 
 te Concordiamque was his humorous maxim. He con 
 tended that all the important plants of America were 
 included in the flora of Massachusetts, and after reading 
 Kane s Arctic Voyage he expressed his conviction that 
 most of the Arctic phenomena might be noted at 
 Concord an assertion which he partly substantiated 
 by the discovery of red snow and one or two Labrador 
 plants. He had thoughts of constructing a complete 
 calendar for the natural phenomena of Concord, and 
 believed that if he waked up from a trance the time of 
 year would be as plain to him from the plants as the 
 time of day from a dial. Of all flowers the water-lily 
 was his favourite, but there were none that he did not 
 know and love ; even the growth of the sturdy aboriginal 
 weeds gave him a sense of satisfaction. He often 
 walked miles to note the condition of some rare tree or 
 shrub, and congratulated himself that the time thus spent 
 
104 LIFE OF THOREAU. 
 
 was more profitably laid out than in a good many social 
 visits. " On one occasion," says a friend who visited 
 him at Concord, "he mentioned the hibiscus beside the 
 river a rare flower in New England and when I 
 desired to see it, told me it would open about Monday 
 and not stay long. I went on Tuesday afternoon and 
 was a day too late the petals lay on the ground." 
 
 Such were the points in Thoreau s personality which 
 made him an object of interest and wonder from the 
 first to his own friends and acquaintances, and after 
 wards to a far wider circle. We can well believe that a 
 man gifted with such an intense and genuine individu 
 ality often found himself, as Emerson tells us, in 
 " dramatic situations," and that in any debatable matter 
 there was no person whose judgment was awaited by his 
 townsmen with keener expectation. As his fame spread 
 he gained an increasing number of admiring friends, 
 some of whom travelled long distances to see and 
 converse with him, in the belief that "this was the 
 man they were in search of, the man of men, who could 
 tell them all they should do." 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 TN the autumn of 1847, shortly after leaving the hut 
 at Walden, Thoreau again took up his residence at 
 Emerson s house, and lived there a year during his 
 friend s absence in Europe, in order to keep Mrs. 
 Emerson company and take charge of the garden. He 
 was in the habit of assisting Mr. Alcott in garden work 
 on his estate at "Hillside," and in 1847 the two friends 
 and fellow-workers had built Emerson a summer-house, 
 to be used as a study. Early in October Thoreau 
 accompanied Emerson to Boston to see him start on 
 his voyage, and in a letter to his sister Sophia he feelingly 
 described the appearance and dimensions of the philo 
 sopher s cabin, and how, instead of a walk in Walden 
 woods, he would be compelled to promenade on deck, 
 "where the few trees, you know, are stripped of their 
 bark." Emerson, on his part, was not forgetful of 
 Thoreau during his visit to England, and we find him 
 planning, in 1848, a new joint American and English 
 magazine, to which Thoreau was to be one of the chief 
 contributors. After Emerson s return to Concord in 
 1849 Thoreau lived at his father s house in the village, 
 and this continued to be his home for the rest of his 
 life. 
 
 He had now begun to consider literature his regular 
 
106 LIFE OF 
 
 occupation, and it was as a writer and lecturer that he 
 was henceforth chiefly known. We have seen that 
 during his literary novitiate he had contributed articles 
 (unpaid, for the most part) to the Dial and other 
 journals; and in 1847, by the kind services of Horace 
 Greeley, his essay on Carlyle was printed in Graham s 
 Magazine. This was followed in 1849 by the essay on 
 " Civil Disobedience," an expression of his anarchist 
 views, which found place in the Boston sEstlietic Papers. 
 In the spring of the same year he took a more daring 
 and important step by the publication of his first volume, 
 the Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers, which 
 was issued, at the author s expense, by Munroe, a Boston 
 bookseller. The book was well reviewed, but did not 
 sell, and the result was that Thoreau was compelled to 
 raise money to pay off the debt by devoting his time for 
 an unusually long period to the more remunerative but 
 less congenial task of surveying. An edition of one 
 thousand copies had been printed, and for several years 
 the bulk of these lay idle on the publisher s shelves, 
 until, in 1853, the remaining seven hundred volumes 
 were returned en masse to the author. This event was 
 recorded by Thoreau in his characteristic vein of dry 
 humour, and with a manly courage and self-reliance not 
 to be surpassed in the history of literary authorship. 
 
 I 
 
 " The wares are sent to me at last, and I have an opportunity to 
 
 . examine my purchase. They are something more substantial than 
 
 i fame, as my back knows, which has borne them up two flights of 
 
 ! stairs to a place similar to that to which they trace their origin. 
 
 Of the remaining two hundred ninety and odd, seventy-five were 
 
 given away, the rest sold. I have now a library of nearly nine 
 
 hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself. 
 
THOREAU. 107 
 
 h it not well that the author should behold the fruits of his labour ? 
 My works are piled up in my chamber, half as high as my head, my 
 opera onmia. This is authorship. These are the work of my brain. 
 There was just one piece of good luck in the venture. The un 
 bound were tied up by the printer four years ago in stout paper 
 wrappers, and inscribed H. D. Thoreau s Concord River, fifty 
 copies. So Munroe had only to cross out River and write 
 Mass., and deliver them to the express-man at once. I can see 
 now what I write for, and the result of my labours. Nevertheless, 
 in spite of this result, sitting beside the inert mass of my works, I ; 
 take up my pen to-night, to record what thought or experience I 
 may have had, with as much satisfaction as ever. Indeed, I believe 
 that this result is more inspiring and better than if a thousand had 
 bought my wares. It affects my privacy less, and leaves me 
 freer." 
 
 That The Week should at first have failed to win the 
 favour of any but a few sympathetic readers can hardly 
 be a matter of surprise, since its intense idealism and 
 strongly pantheistic tone were ill calculated to conciliate 
 the ordinary American mind. Purporting to be a record 
 of the trip made by the two brothers in 1839, it was in 
 reality an outpouring of its author s ideal philosophy on 
 a great variety of topics, a number of essays and poems 
 (mostly reprints from the Dial) being interwoven, in the 
 most arbitrary manner, with the thread of the nominal 
 subject. The book is thus rendered vague, disjointed, 
 and discursive; and is, moreover, almost arrogant in its 
 transcendental egoism. Yet, with all its deficiencies, it 
 has, and must ever have, a great and indefinable charm 
 for the lovers of Thoreau s genius. Its very lack of 
 cohesion and entire disregard of method contribute to 
 enhance the effect of its poetical mysticism and brilliant 
 descriptive power, while several of the discourses intro 
 duced into it notably those on Friendship and Religion 
 
108 LIFE OF 
 
 are written in Thoreau s most admirable and telling 
 style. 1 
 
 In the autumn of 1849 Thoreau accompanied a friend 
 on an excursion to the wild sandy tract of Cape Cod, 
 for which he conceived so great a liking that he visited 
 it again on several occasions; in like manner he spent 
 a week in Canada, with Ellery Charming as his fellow- 
 traveller, in September 1850. Each of these excursions 
 provided material for a series of articles in Putnam s 
 Magazine; but both came to an abrupt conclusion 
 owing to misunderstandings between author and pub 
 lisher a mishap to which Thoreau s outspoken tone 
 and uncompromising temper made him peculiarly liable. 
 His visit to the Maine Woods in 1846 was described in 
 the Union Magazine two years later; and he again went 
 to Maine in 1853 and 1857.2 These occasional excur 
 sions were a great pleasure to Thoreau, as extending the 
 circle of his observations, without putting any restriction 
 on his freedom ; but he still resolutely declined to 
 extend his travels to more distant regions, in spite of the 
 offers he sometimes received from admirers and friends, 
 who wished to take him round the world at their own 
 cost. Believing that " the far-fetched is of least value," 
 he asserted that the sight of a marsh-hawk in the Con 
 cord meadows was of more interest to him than the 
 entry of the allies into Paris. It is easy to laugh at 
 
 1 The Aihenceum of 27th October 1849 contained a brief notice 
 of The Week. "The matter is for the most part poor enough," 
 said the reviewer, "but there are a few things in the volume, 
 scattered here and there, which suggest that the writer is a man 
 with a habit of original thinking." 
 
 2 For an account of these excursions, see Chapter VII. 
 
THOREAU. 109 
 
 this deliberate concentration of thought on a particular 
 locality; but a study of Thoreau s life inclines one to 
 believe that he gauged correctly the peculiar strength 
 and the peculiar weakness of his shy and sensitive 
 genius. 
 
 The course of his life at Concord was singularly quiet 
 and uneventful. Always an affectionate son and brother, 
 he lived contentedly as a member of the household 
 of his father, who, with his assistance, had now built 
 himself a dwelling of his own and was no longer a 
 tenant. Thoreau s study was in the garret, where he 
 stored his collections of birds eggs, botanical specimens, 
 and Indian relics, and carried on his literary work. His 
 regard for his father was in nowise diminished by the 
 dissimilarity of their characters, a contrast which is 
 illustrated by some suggestive passages in the journal. 
 On one occasion we find a protest made by the quiet, 
 unobtrusive, but eminently practical old man against 
 what he considered a waste of time on the part of his 
 more imaginative son, who was busying himself in 
 making sugar from a neighbouring maple-grove when 
 he could have bought it cheaper at the village shop. 
 To his father s remark that it took him from his studies, 
 Thoreau made the characteristic answer that it was his 
 study, and that after being engaged in this pursuit he 
 felt "as if he had been to a university." Mrs. Thoreau, 
 who was of the same age as her husband, retained all 
 her dramatic vivacity of manner, love of society, and 
 extraordinary power of talk. It is said that when his 
 mother began to talk at table, Thoreau would patiently 
 remain silent until she had finished, and then, with a 
 courteous obeisance, resume the thread of his conversa- 
 
110 LIFE OF 
 
 tion at the [:oint where it had been interrupted. In 
 1849 the family circle suffered a heavy loss in the death 
 of Helen, Thoreau s elder sister, whose character, like 
 that of the brother who died seven years earlier, was full 
 of ability and promise. 
 
 It was about this time that Thoreau became acquainted 
 with Mr. Harrison G. O. Blake, a clergyman and tutor 
 residing at Worcester, Massachusetts, with whom he 
 corresponded largely from 1848 onwards, chiefly on 
 subjects connected with his ideal method of thought. 
 Mr. Blake has kindly furnished me with the following 
 reminiscences of his friendly intercourse with Thoreau : 
 
 " I was introduced to him first by Mr. Emerson more than forty 
 years ago, though I had known him by sight before at college. I 
 recall nothing of that first interview unless it be some remarks upon 
 astronomy, and his want of interest in the study as compared with 
 studies relating more directly to this world remarks such as he 
 has made here and there in his writings. My first real introduction 
 was from the reading of an article of his in the Dial on Aulus 
 Fersius Flaccus, which appears now in the Week. That led to my 
 first writing to him, and to his reply, which is published in the 
 volume of letters. Our correspondence continued for more than 
 twelve years, and we visited each other at times, he coming here to 
 Worcester, commonly to read something in public, or being on his 
 way to read somewhere else. 
 
 "As to the outward incidents of our intercourse, I think of little 
 or nothing that it seems worth while to write. Our conversation, 
 or rather his talking, when we were together, was in the strain of 
 his letters and of his books. Our relation, as I look back on it, 
 seems almost an impersonal one, and illustrates well his remark 
 that our thoughts are the epochs in our lives; all else is but as a 
 journal of the winds that blew while we were here. His personal 
 appearance did not interest me particularly, except as the associate 
 of his spirit, though I felt no discord between them. When to 
 gether, we had little inclination to talk of personal matters. His 
 
THOREAU. Ill 
 
 aim was directed so steadily and earnestly towards what is essential 
 in our experience, that beyond all others of whom I have known, 
 he made but a single impression on me. Geniality, versatility, 
 personal familiarity are, of course, agreeable in those about us, and 
 seem necessary in human intercourse, but I did not miss them in 
 Thoreau, who was, while living, and is still in my recollection and 
 in what he has left to us, such an effectual witness to what is 
 highest and most precious in life. As I re-read his letters from 
 lime to time, which I never tire of doing, I am apt to find new 
 significance in them, am still warned and instructed by them, with 
 more force occasionally than ever before ; so that in a sense they 
 are still in the mail, have not altogether reached me yet, and 
 will not probably before I die. They may well be regarded as 
 addressed to those who can read them best." 
 
 In addition to his pedestrian excursions, Thoreau 
 paid occasional visits to Cambridge and Boston, the 
 attraction at the former place being the University 
 Library, from which, owing to the insistence with which 
 he petitioned the librarian and president, he was per 
 mitted unusual privileges in the taking out of books. 
 At Boston he was fond of studying the books of the 
 Natural History Society and walking on the Long 
 Wharf; the rest "was barrels." Salem, too, he some 
 times visited as the guest of Hawthorne, who had left 
 Concord in 1846, and he lectured once or twice at the 
 Salem Lyceum, of which Hawthorne was the secretary. 
 One other journey he had about this time of a more 
 mournful character. In July 1850, when Margaret 
 Fuller, who had become the wife of the Marquis of 
 Ossoli, was shipwrecked on her return from Italy and 
 drowned off the coast of Fire Island, near New York, 
 Thoreau with her other friends hurried to the scene of 
 the disaster, to assist in the vain attempt to recover her 
 body. 
 
112 LIFE OF 
 
 Though Thoreau had now attained a certain recog 
 nised position as a writer, he was still compelled to earn 
 the greater part of his means of subsistence by pencil- 
 making or land-surveying. This last employment or 
 rather the company into which his employment brought 
 him was very far from being a congenial one; on 
 such occasions he was no longer the poet-naturalist 
 and idealist, but "merely Thoreau the surveyor," as he 
 informs his friend Blake. Lecturing was probably a 
 more agreeable occupation, though here, too, he speaks 
 of himself as " simply their hired man " ; while his 
 candour occasionally placed him in strained relations 
 towards his audience. Though he several times made 
 his mark on the platform, the more usual result was to 
 puzzle and bewilder those who heard him. " He was a 
 poor lecturer," says Joseph Hosmer. "Pie had no 
 magnetism, and only gave simple dry details, as though 
 he was before a jury to give his evidence under oath. 
 Hence he never succeeded as a platform or lyceum 
 speaker, which I think he desired to be." 
 
 In the autumn of 1852 Thoreau met Arthur Hugh 
 Clough, who had come over to Boston with Thackeray 
 and thence paid Emerson a visit at Concord. " Walk 
 with Emerson to a wood with a prettyish pool," writes 
 Clough in his diary for i4th November, the pool being 
 presumably Walden. "Concord is very bare; it is a 
 small sort of village, almost entirely of wood houses, 
 painted white, with Venetian blinds, green outside, with 
 two white wooden churches. There are some American 
 elms and sycamores, i.e. planes ; but the wood is mostly 
 pine white pine and yellow pine somewhat scrubby, 
 occupying the tops of the low banks and marshy hay- 
 
THOREAU. 113 
 
 land between. A little brook runs through to the 
 Concord river. At 6.30, tea and Mr. Thoreau; and 
 presently Air. Ellery Charming, Miss Channing, and 
 others." It was in this same year that Nathaniel 
 Hawthorne returned to Concord, and took up his 
 residence at "Hillside" now renamed "Wayside" 
 an estate which had been for some years in Alcott s 
 possession, and on which Thoreau and Alcott had done 
 a great deal of manual work in constructing terraces 
 and summer-houses. 
 
 It has already been stated that Thoreau s sympathies 
 were enlisted from his earliest manhood in the cause 
 of abolition, and that he was himself instrumental in 
 furthering the escape of a fugitive slave. Another 
 instance of this kind has been recorded by Mr. Con way, 
 who was introduced to Thoreau by Emerson in the 
 summer of 1853 : l 
 
 "When I went to the house next morning I found them all in a 
 state of excitement by reason of the arrival of a fugitive negro from 
 the South, who had come fainting to their door about daybreak, 
 and thrown himself on their mercy. ... I sat and watched the 
 singularly lowly and tender devotion of the scholar to the slave. 
 He must be fed, his swollen feet bathed, and he must think of 
 nothing but rest. Again and again this coolest and calmest of men 
 drew near to the trembling negro, and bade him feel at home, and 
 have no fear that any power should again wrong him. He could 
 not walk this day, but must mount guard over the fugitive, for 
 slave-hunters were not extinct in those days, and so I went away 
 after a while, much impressed by many little traits that I had seen 
 as they appeared in this emergency, and not much disposed to cavil 
 at their source, whether Bible or Bhaghavat." 
 
 At this time Thoreau s mind was a good deal occupied 
 
 1 Fraser, April 1 865. 
 
 8 
 
114 LIFE OF 
 
 with the question of slavery, for in 1850 the iniquitous 
 Fugitive Slave Law had been passed by Act of Congress, 
 and in the spring of 1854 the heart of Massachusetts had 
 been stirred by the case of Anthony Burns, an escaped 
 slave, who was sent back by the authorities of the State 
 in compliance with the demand of his owner. This 
 event formed the main topic of Thoreau s essay on 
 11 Slavery in Massachusetts," which was delivered as an 
 address at the anti-slavery celebration at Framingham in 
 1854, on which occasion the Constitution of the United 
 States was publicly burned by Lloyd Garrison, an incident 
 which may explain the passionate tone of Thoreau s 
 paper. " For my part," he said, u my oldest and worthiest 
 pursuits have lost I cannot say how much of their 
 attraction, and I feel that my investment in life here 
 is worth many per cent, less since Massachusetts last 
 deliberately sent back an innocent man, Anthony Burns, 
 to slavery." In his kindred essay on " Civil Dis 
 obedience," when dealing with this same subject of 
 state-supported slavery, he had expressed the conviction 
 that if but one honest man in the State of Massachusetts 
 were to withdraw his allegiance as a protest against this 
 iniquity, and to be imprisoned therefor, " it would be 
 the abolition of slavery in America." This was written 
 before the appearance of John Brown. 
 
 In 1854 occurred the most memorable event of 
 Thoreau s literary life the publication of Walden by 
 Messrs. Ticknor & Co. of Boston. The greater part of 
 the book was drawn from the journal kept by Thoreau 
 during his residence in the woods, but there are also 
 passages which were written at a later date, when he was 
 working his materials into their ultimate form. The 
 
THOREAU. 115 
 
 inducement to Thoreau to give the story of his sojourn 
 at Walden to the world was, he tells us, that very 
 particular inquiries had been made by his townsmen 
 concerning the manner of his life, and that he felt he 
 had something to say which bore not remotely on the 
 social condition of the inhabitants of Concord. The 
 result justified the expectations of the author in writing 
 the book, and of the publishers in printing it, for in 
 spite of the ridicule and hostility of some critics, a great 
 deal of interest was aroused by Walden, and the edition 
 appears to have been sold out in the course of a few 
 years, in marked contrast to the unsaleableness of its 
 predecessor, The Week. 1 From whatever point of view 
 it be regarded, Walden is undoubtedly Thoreau s master 
 piece; it contains the sum and essence of his ideal 
 philosopny; it is written in his most powerful ancl 
 incisive style, while by the freshness and na ivete of its 
 narrative it excites the sympathy and imagination of 
 the reader, and wins a popularity far exceeding that of 
 his other writings. 
 
 "Welcome, Englishmen! welcome, Englishmen!" 
 Thoreau exclaimed in Walden, "for I had had com 
 munication with that race." " A young Englishman, 
 Mr. Cholmondeley, is just now waiting for me to take 
 a walk with him," he writes in a letter dated ist October 
 1854. This was Mr. Thomas Cholmondeley, of Over- 
 
 i In March 1855 the New York Knickerbocker devoted an article, 
 entitled " Town and Rural Humbugs," to a comparison of Barnum 
 and Thoreau, and declared Walden to be the antidote of Barnum s 
 autobiography. Walden was reviewed in Putnam s Magazine in 
 1854, and was noticed in this country in Chambers s Journal for 
 November 1857, under the title of " An American Diogenes." 
 
116 LIFE OF 
 
 leigh, Cheshire, a nephew of Bishop Heber, and six 
 years Thoreau s junior in age, the only Englishman, it 
 appears, with whom Thoreau ever became intimate. He 
 spent some time with Thoreau at Concord, accompanying 
 him on a visit to Mr. Ricketson, a friend who lived at 
 New Bedford; and the strong personal admiration which 
 this travelled English gentleman conceived for the Con 
 cord hermit is one of many testimonies to Thoreau s 
 singularly impressive character. A correspondence was 
 maintained after Mr. Cholmondeley s return to Europe 
 in 1855, and towards the end of that year Thoreau 
 received a splendid gift of Oriental books from his 
 English friend, who knew how deep an interest he felt 
 in Buddhist literature. Mr. Cholmondeley again visited 
 Concord in 1859. In later years he took the name of 
 Owen. He succeeded to the Condover estate, near 
 Shrewsbury, in 1863, and died in the following year. 
 
 Increasing fame brought Thoreau an increasing 
 number of friends, while his intimacy with Emerson, 
 Alcott, and Channing continued as close as ever. One 
 of these later friends and correspondents was Mr. Daniel 
 Ricketson. Their first meeting was at Christmas 1854, 
 when Thoreau, then on his way to lecture at Nantucket, 
 paid a passing visit to New Bedford, and spent a day or 
 two in Mr. Ricketson s house. On presenting himself 
 to his host, he was at first mistaken, as on several other 
 occasions, for " a pedlar of small wares," but this un 
 favourable impression was quickly corrected when he 
 gave proof of his singular conversational powers. The 
 points in his personal appearance which particularly 
 arrested Mr. Ricketson s attention were his keen blue 
 eyes, "full of the greatest humanity and intelligence," 
 
THOREAU. . 117 
 
 and, next to these, his sloping shoulders (in which he 
 resembled Emerson), long arms, and short sturdy legs, 
 which generally enabled him to outwalk his companions 
 in his daily excursions. 
 
 In Mr. F. B. Sanborn, who as a young man came to 
 live at Concord early in 1855, Thoreau found another 
 friend with whom he gradually became intimate. The 
 first impressions of Thoreau, as recorded at the time by 
 one who was destined to be his biographer a quarter of 
 a century later, are extremely interesting. "Thoreau 
 looks eminently sagacious, like a sort of wise wild beast. 
 He dresses plainly, wears a beard in his throat, and has 
 a brown complexion." Thoreau s beard, which is here 
 for the first time mentioned, must have been of quite 
 recent growth, for in the crayon portrait of 1854 he 
 appears as beardless. 
 
 Thoreau s friendship with Horace Greeley, editor of 
 the New York Tribune, had been kept up since his 
 visit to Staten Island chiefly by letter, for Thoreau 
 was seldom at New York; but Greeley had done him 
 valuable service at a critical period in obtaining publica 
 tion for several of his articles in Graham, Putnam, and 
 other magazines, and in acting generally as a literary 
 friend and adviser. Greeley had a farm at Chappaqua, 
 thirty-six miles north of New York, and in the early part 
 of 1856 he pressed Thoreau to come to reside at this 
 place and act as tutor to his children, which offer seems 
 to have been for a time seriously entertained. 
 
 It was in the following November, when Thoreau 
 accompanied Alcott on a short visit to Chappaqua, 
 that he had a memorable interview with an even more 
 powerful and remarkable personality than his own. The 
 
118 LIFE OF 
 
 meeting of Thoreau with Walt Whitman, of the author 
 of Walden with the author of Leaves of Grass, is told 
 by Thoreau in his letters to Mr. Blake. It is remark 
 able, when one considers the strong dissimilarity between 
 the two men types as they are of different sides of 
 human nature, the thrifty, simple, self-complete type, as 
 opposed to the largely inclusive and sympathetic that 
 Thoreau should have so rightly appreciated, after one 
 short conversation, the breadth of Whitman s genius, 
 and should have recognised in him "the greatest democrat 
 the world has seen," one who suggested " something a 
 little more than human." 
 
 " To be sure," wrote Thoreau, " I sometimes feel a little imposed 
 on. By his heartiness and broad generalities he puts me into a 
 liberal frame of mind, prepared to see wonders as it were, sets me 
 upon a hill or in the midst of a plain stirs me well up, and then 
 throws in a thousand of brick. Though rude and sometimes in 
 effectual, it is a great primitive poem, an alarum or trumpet-note 
 ringing through the American camp. Wonderfully like the 
 Orientals, too, considering that when I asked him if he had read 
 them, he answered, No ;. tell me about them. 
 
 " I did not get far in conversation with him two more being 
 present and among the few things I chanced to say, I remember 
 that one was, in answer to him as representing America, that I did 
 not think much of America, or of politics, and so on, which may 
 have been somewhat of a damper to him. 
 
 " Since I have seen him I find that I am not disturbed by any 
 brag or egoism in his book. He may turn out the least of a 
 braggart of all, having a better right to be confident. He is a 
 great fellow." 
 
 We can only regret that Whitman, on his part, left 
 no record of his impressions of Thoreau ; but it is 
 interesting, in this connection, to note the mention of 
 
THOREAU. 119 
 
 Thoreau in Specimen Days in America. On iyth Sep 
 tember 1 88 1, when visiting Concord, Whitman met 
 Emerson, Alcott, Louisa Alcott, and other Concord 
 friends. "A good deal of talk," he records, "the 
 subject Henry Thoreau some new glints of his life 
 and fortunes, with letters to and from him one of 
 the best by Margaret Fuller, others by Horace 
 Greeley, Charming, etc. one from Thoreau himself, 
 most quaint and interesting." Mr. Sanborn informs me 
 that on this occasion Whitman expressed a high opinion 
 of Thoreau. 
 
 In the following year Thoreau had the satisfaction of 
 meeting another of the great figures of American demo 
 cracy. John Brown, then fresh from his anti-slavery 
 struggle in Kansas, was a guest at Mr. Sanborn s house 
 in March 1857, and was introduced by his host to 
 Emerson, Alcott, Thoreau, and other Concord friends. 
 It was arranged that Brown should address a meeting in 
 the Town Hall on the subject of slave-holding. " On 
 the day appointed," says Mr. Sanborn, 1 " Brown went 
 up from Boston at noon, and dined with Mr. Thoreau, 
 then a member of his father s family, and residing not 
 far from the railroad station. The two idealists, both ot 
 them in revolt against the civil government because of 
 its base subservience to slavery, found themselves friends 
 from the beginning of their acquaintance. They sat 
 after dinner discussing the events of the border warfare 
 in Kansas, and Brown s share in them, when, as it often 
 happened, Mr. Emerson called at Mr. Thoreau s door 
 on some errand to his friend. Thus the three men met 
 
 1 Memoirs of John Brozvn, 1878. 
 
120 LITE OF 
 
 under the same roof, and found that they held the same 
 opinion of what was uppermost in the mind of Brown." 
 Emerson and Thoreau were both present at the meeting 
 in the evening, when Brown produced a thrilling effect 
 on his audience by his earnestness and eloquence, and 
 by the display of the very chain worn by one of his 
 sons who had been made prisoner and tortured by the 
 champions of slavery. From that time there were 
 many people in Concord who were favourable to 
 Brown s cause. 
 
 On the occasion of one of his visits to Mr. Ricketson 
 at "Brooklawn," New Bedford, Thoreau surprised the 
 company by an unexpected outburst of hilarity, under 
 which impulse he sang "Tom Bowling," and finally 
 entered upon an improvised dance. Mr. Ricketson, 
 " not being able to stand what appeared at the time the 
 somewhat ludicrous appearance of our Walden hermit," 
 retreated to his shanty, a short distance from his house, 
 whilst the more "humour-loving" Alcott remained to 
 see the entertainment. Thoreau afterwards told his 
 sister Sophia that in the excitement of this dance he had 
 made a point of treading on the toes of the guileless 
 Alcott. 
 
 Here is an extract from Alcott s diary in 1857 : 
 
 " 1st April 1857. At Mr. Ricketson s, two and a half miles from 
 New Bedford, a neat country residence, surrounded by wild pastures 
 and low woods ; the little stream Achushnet flowing east of the 
 house and into Fair Haven Bay at the City. Ricketson s tastes are 
 pastoral, simple even to wildness, and he passes a good part of his 
 day in the fields and woods, or in his rude shanty near his house, 
 where he writes and reads his favourite authors, Cowper having the 
 first place in his affections. He is in easy circumstances, and has 
 the manners of an English gentleman frank, hospitable, and with 
 
THOREAU. 121 
 
 positive persuasions of his own ; a man to feel on good terms with, 
 and reliable as to the things good and true mercurial, perhaps, and 
 wayward a little sometimes. 
 
 " yd April, A.M. In house and shanty. Thoreau and Ricketson 
 treating of nature and the wild. Thoreau has visited Ricketson be 
 fore, and won him as a disciple, though not in the absolute way he 
 has Blake of Worcester, whose love for his genius partakes of the 
 exceeding tenderness of woman, and is a pure Platonism to the 
 fineness and delicacy of the devotee s sensibility. But Ricketson 
 is himself, and plays the manly part in the matter, defending 
 himself against the master s tough thoroughcraft with spirit and 
 ability." 
 
 Mr. Blake s estimate of Thoreau s character has already 
 been quoted ; equally interesting is that given me by Mr. 
 Ricketson, with which this chapter may fitly conclude. 
 
 " On this point I can bear my own testimony, that without any 
 formality he was remarkable in his uprightness and honesty ; indus 
 trious and frugal ; simple though not fastidious in his tastes, 
 whether in food, dress, or address; an admirable conversationist, 
 and a good story-teller, not wanting in humour. His full blue eye, 
 aquiline nose, and peculiarly pursed lips added much to the effect 
 of the descriptive powers. He was a man of rare courage, physi 
 cally and intellectually. In the way of the former, he arrested two 
 young fellows on the lonely road leading to his hermitage by Walden 
 Pond, who were endeavouring to entrap a young woman on her 
 way home, and took them to the village. Intellectually his was a 
 strong manly mind, enriched by a classical education, and extensive 
 knowledge of history, ancient and modern, and English literature 
 himself a good versifier, if not true poet, whose poetic character is 
 often seen in his prose works." 
 
CHAPTER VII. 
 
 ""TO avoid the need of too frequently breaking the con- 
 tinuity of the story of Thoreau s Concord life, it is 
 convenient to group together some of the chief excur 
 sions made by him between 1846 and 1860, And first 
 as to his mode of journeying. The perfection of travel 
 ling, he thought, was to travel without luggage ; and 
 after considerable experience he decided that "the best 
 bag for the foot-traveller is made with a handkerchief, or, 
 if he study appearances, a piece of stiff brown paper well 
 tied up." He would travel as a common man, and not 
 as a gentleman, for he had no wish to spend a moment 
 more than was necessary in the railway-carriage, among 
 the sedentary travellers, "whose legs hang dangling the 
 while," or to be a prey to the civility and rapacity of the 
 landlords of hotels ; he preferred to journey on foot, and 
 to spend the night in the homes of farmers and fisher 
 men, where he could sit by the kitchen fire, and hear the 
 sort of conversation in which he was always interested. 
 " The cheapest way to travel," he wrote in The Week, 
 "and the way to travel the farthest in the shortest 
 distance, is to go afoot, carrying a dipper, a spoon, and 
 a fish-line, some Indian meal, some salt, and some sugar. 
 When you come to a brook or pond, you can catch fish 
 and cook them ; or you can boil a hasty-pudding ; or 
 
LIFE OF THOREAU. 123 
 
 you can buy a loaf of bread at a farmer s house for four- 
 pence, moisten it in the next brook that crosses the road, 
 and dip it into your sugar this alone will last you a 
 whole day." He wore a shabby grey coat and a drab 
 hat, and carried with him a piece of tallow for greasing 
 his boots, for he no more thought of blacking these than 
 his face ; and " many an officious shoe-black," he tells 
 us, who carried off his shoes while he was slumbering, 
 mistaking him for a gentleman, " had occasion to repent 
 it before he produced a gloss on them." He was better 
 pleased when the farmers called out to him, as he passed 
 their fields, to come and help in the hay-making; or 
 when he was mistaken for a travelling mechanic, and 
 asked to do tinkering jobs, and repair clocks or um 
 brellas ; or when, as once happened, a man wished to buy 
 the tin cup which he carried strapped to his belt. 
 
 Before starting on an expedition it was his habit to 
 procure all the available information from maps and 
 guide-books, and he often took with him a part of the 
 large Government map of Massachusetts. His pack was 
 quickly made up, for he kept a list of the few necessaries 
 that he carried, among which were sewing materials, a 
 book for pressing plants, spy-glass, compass, and measur 
 ing-tape. He had learnt the art of camping out in his 
 earlier excursions, and was well skilled in pitching a tent 
 or constructing a hut at the shortest possible notice. 
 On these occasions his favourite drink was tea, which he 
 made strong and sweet in his tin cup, so that, as Chan- 
 ning hints, the traveller was not only refreshed but "grew 
 intimate with tea-leaves." He was fond of carrying with 
 him a large slice of cake, with plums in it, for he found 
 that this furnished him with dinner and dessert at the 
 
124 LIFE OF 
 
 same time. Thus simply equipped, he was practically 
 independent of time-tables and hotel-lists, could roam 
 wherever the fancy took him, and take his own time in 
 his observation of the fauna and flora of the districts 
 which he visited. Such expeditions were not only an 
 agreeable change in themselves, but were a means of 
 adding to his various collections and suggesting new 
 subjects for his pen ; so that it was natural that the 
 pleasant experience which he gained in his week s jaunt 
 in 1839 should have been repeated more frequently in 
 later years. 
 
 Cape Cod, the long sandy spit which was visited by 
 Thoreau in 1849, and on several later occasions, is 
 described by him as "the bared and bended arm of 
 Massachusetts, behind which the State stands on her 
 guard, with her back to the Green Mountains, and her 
 feet planted on the floor of the ocean, like an athlete 
 protecting her Bay." All wild and desolate landscapes 
 had an attraction for him, and he delighted in the dreary 
 expanse of this long monotonous tract of shore, with its 
 drift-wood and kelp-weed, flocks of gulls and plovers, 
 and incessant din of waves. His accounts of these vast 
 sandy tracts are extremely vivid and picturesque; the 
 very dash and roar of the waves seem to be reproduced, 
 as though we were reading, as the author suggests, " with 
 a large conch-shell at our ear." 
 
 It was amidst these surroundings that Thoreau, after 
 witnessing the pathetic scenes that followed the wreck of 
 an Irish brig at Cohasset, walked and meditated with a 
 companion (Ellery Charming, presumably, though the 
 name is not recorded) in the wet, windy days of a stormy 
 October. "Day by day," it has been said, "with his 
 
THOREAU. 125 
 
 stout pedestrian shoes, he plodded along that level beach 
 the eternal ocean on one side, and human existence 
 reduced to its simplest elements on the other and he 
 pitilessly weighing each." They journeyed northward, 
 on the Atlantic side of the Cape, till they came to 
 Provincetown at its upper extremity, avoiding towns and 
 villages on their route, and spending the nights in the 
 cottages of fishermen and lighthouse-keepers, where 
 Thoreau was several times mistaken for a travelling 
 pedlar. " Well," said an old fisherman, unconvinced by 
 the explanations that had been offered, " it makes no 
 odds what it is you carry, so long as you carry truth 
 along with you." At Wellfleet, where the wayfarers were 
 entertained in the hut of an aged oysterman, an idiot son 
 of their host expressed his determination to get a gun 
 and shoot the "damned book-pedlars, all the time talk 
 ing about books." What might have been a more 
 serious misunderstanding was caused by a robbery of the 
 Provincetown Bank about the time of their visit to Cape 
 Cod, for Thoreau learnt afterwards that the suspicion of 
 the police had centred on him and his companion, and 
 that their journey had been traced the whole length of 
 the Cape. 
 
 The volume on Cape Cod, parts of which appeared in 
 Putnam s Magazine in 1855, and in the Atlantic Monthly 
 in 1864, is deliberately formless in style, being inter 
 spersed with quotations from old histories and records of 
 merely local interest; it abounds, however, in its author s 
 dry sententious humour and sparkling paradoxes. It has 
 been said that Cape Cod is in one sense the most human 
 of Thoreau s books, and has more tenderness of tone 
 than Waldeii) as if the sea had exercised a mellowing 
 
126 LIFE OF 
 
 influence on his mind. Especially good are the Dutch 
 pictures of the Wellfleet oysterman and the " sea- 
 captains" of Provincetown. "It is worth the while," 
 says Thoreau, " to talk with one whom his neighbours 
 address as Captain, though his craft may have long been 
 sunk, and he may be holding by his teeth to the shattered 
 mast of a pipe alone, and only gets half-seas-over in a 
 figurative sense now. He is pretty sure to vindicate his 
 right to the title at last can tell one or two good stories 
 at least." In Cape Cod the experiences of several visits 
 are condensed into one account. 
 
 On 25th September 1850, Thoreau and Ellery Chan- 
 ning started on a week s tour in Canada, equipped each 
 of them in the simple fashion which Thoreau adopted on 
 his excursions (he avows that he wore his " bad weather 
 clothes" on this occasion), and styling themselves, accord 
 ingly, the "Knights of the Umbrella and the Bundle." 
 They first visited Montreal, where the Church of Notre 
 Dame made a great impression on Thoreau s imagination, 
 as described by him in a very characteristic passage 
 
 " It was a great cave in the midst of a city, and what were the 
 altars and the tinsel but the sparkling stalactites ? into which you 
 entered in a moment, and where the still atmosphere and the sombre 
 light disposed to serious and profitable thought. Such a cave at 
 hand, which you can enter any day, is worth a thousand of our 
 churches which are open only Sundays, hardly long enough for an 
 airing, and then filled with a bustling congregation a church where 
 the priest is the least part, where you do your own preaching, where 
 the universe preaches to you and can be heard. In Concord, to be 
 sure, we do not need such. Our forests are such a church, far 
 grander and more sacred. I think of its value not only to religion, 
 but to philosophy and to poetry ; besides a reading-room, to have a 
 thinking-room in every city ! Perchance the time will come when 
 every house even will have not only its sleeping-rooms, and dining- 
 
THOREAU. 127 
 
 room, and talking-room or parlour, but its thinking-room also, and 
 the architects will put it in their plans. Let it be furnished and 
 ornamented with whatever conduces to serious and creative thought. 
 I should not object to the holy water, or any other simple symbol, 
 if it were consecrated by the imagination of the worshippers." l 
 
 From Montreal they went on to Quebec, and thence 
 to the Falls of St. Anne, thirty miles lower down the 
 St. Lawrence. In the latter district they obtained lodging 
 in a house where their French host and his family could 
 speak but a few words of English, and they concluded 
 that "a less crime would be committed on the whole if 
 they spoke French with him, and in no respect aided or 
 abetted his attempts to speak English," a resolve which 
 they carried into effect with some amusing difficulties 
 for in spite of his Gallic extraction, a knowledge of the 
 French tongue was not one of Thoreau s accomplish 
 ments solving their frequent misunderstandings by 
 writing on the table with a piece of chalk. What chiefly 
 impressed Thoreau, during his brief visit to Canada, was 
 the contrast between the imperialism of the Canadian 
 cities, whose inhabitants appeared to him " to be suffer 
 ing between two fires the soldiery and the priesthood/ 
 and the more homely free-thinking independence of 
 American life. 
 
 The Excursion to Canada, in which his experiences 
 and impressions are related, was partly published in 
 Putnam in 1853. It is certainly one of the least suc 
 cessful of its author s writings ; for though it contains a 
 few fine passages and interesting touches, it is overladen 
 with description, the cities being, as Horace Greeley 
 expressed it, "described to death." " I fear that I have 
 1 Putnam s Magazine, 1853. 
 
128 LIFE OF 
 
 not got much to say about Canada," says Thoreau, in 
 his opening sentence, "not having seen much; what I 
 got by going to Canada was a cold." 
 
 The object of Thoreau s three excursions to the Maine 
 Woods, the wild district which lies at the extreme north 
 east of New England, was chiefly to gratify his strong 
 curiosity and interest in the habits and character of the 
 Indians. In September 1846, during his fortnight s 
 absence from the Walden hermitage, he visited Maine, 
 and in company with a cousin, who was employed in the 
 Bangor lumber trade, made a voyage up the western 
 branch of the Penobscot river, and ascended Ktaadn, 
 one of the loftiest mountains of New England, over 5000 
 feet in height. The paper on " Ktaadn and the Maine 
 Woods," which appeared in the Union Magazine in 1848, 
 is a record of this expedition, and contains some vivid 
 descriptions of the outlying lumber-farms and log-huts ; 
 the manufacture and management of the battean, or 
 " bark-canoe," by which they navigated the rapids of the 
 Penobscot ; their trout-fishing extraordinary in the clear 
 swift streams which descend from the heights of Ktaadn ; 
 and, above all, the primitive solitudes of the Maine 
 forests, which were still the haunt of the bear, the moose, 
 the deer, the wolf, and other wild animals. 
 
 " Perhaps I most fully realised that this was primeval, untamed, 
 and for ever untamable Nature, or whatever else men call it, while 
 coming clown this part of the mountain. We were passing over 
 Burnt Lands, burnt by lightning, perchance, though they showed 
 no recent marks of fire, hardly so much as a charred stump, but 
 looked rather like a natural pasture for the moose and deer, 
 exceedingly wild and desolate, with occasional strips of timber 
 crossing them, and low poplars springing up, and patches of blue 
 berries here and there. I found myself traversing them familiarly, 
 
THOREAU. 129 
 
 like some pasture run to waste, or partially reclaimed by man- but 
 when I reflected what man, what brother or sister or kinsman of 
 our race made it and claimed it, I expected the proprietor to rise 
 up and dispute my passage. It is difficult to conceive of a region 
 uninhabited by man. We habitually presume his" presence and 
 |nfiuence everywhere. And yet we have not seen pure Nature, 
 unless we have seen her thus vast and drear and inhuman, though 
 m the midst of cities. . . . 
 
 "What is most striking in the Maine wilderness is the con 
 tinuousness of the forest, with fewer open intervals or glades than 
 you had imagined. Except the few burnt-lands, the narrow inter 
 vals on the rivers, the bare tops of the high mountains, and the 
 lakes and streams, the forest is uninterrupted. It is even more grim 
 and wild than you had anticipated, a damp and intricate wilderness 
 in the spring everywhere wet and miry. . . . Who shall describe 
 the inexpressible tenderness and immortal life of the grim forest 
 where nature, though it be mid-winter, is ever in her spring, where 
 the moss-grown and decaying trees are not old, but seem to enjoy a 
 perpetual youth; and blissful, innocent nature, like a serene infant 
 
 In the autumn of iS$ 3 Thoreau, accompanied by the 
 same relative, and by an Indian hunter named Joe 
 Aitteon, paid his second visit to the Maine Woods the 
 lake of Chesuncook being this time his destination The 
 paper entitled "Chesuncook," which was published in 
 the Atlantic Monthly in 1858, is occupied in great 
 measure with the subject of moose-hunting, and contains 
 among other things, some characteristic reflections on 
 the "murder of the moose," in which Thoreau had been 
 witness and to some extent a participator. 
 "The Allegash and East Branch," the account of his 
 iird and final excursion to Maine, in July 1857, at which 
 ime he had been in weak health for two years, forms the 
 Concluding portion of the volume afterwards published 
 
 9 
 
130 LIFE OF 
 
 under the title of The Maine Woods, and is chiefly con 
 cerned with geographical topics, botanical specimens, and 
 the character of Joe Polls, an intelligent Indian guide, 
 from whom Thoreau derived much valuable information. 
 "As to Thoreau s courage and manliness," says Mr. 
 Edward Hoar, of Concord, who was his fellow-traveller 
 on this expedition, "nobody who had seen him among 
 the Penobscot rocks and rapids, the Indian trusting his 
 life and his canoe to his skill, promptitude, and nerve, 
 would ever doubt it." 
 
 The following extracts from a letter addressed by 
 Thoreau to Colonel Wentworth Higginson, in reference 
 to a projected tour through the Maine forests to Canada, 
 are interesting as showing with what precision and 
 practical acuteness his expeditions were planned: 
 
 "CONCORD, i&th January 1858. 
 
 "DEAR SIR, It would be perfectly practicable to go to the 
 Madawaska the way you propose. As for the route to Quebec, I 
 do not find the Sugar Loaf Mts. on my maps. The most direct 
 and regular way, as you know, is substantially Montresor s and 
 Arnold s and the younger John Smith s by the Chaudiere ; but this 
 is less wild. If your object is rather to see the St. Lawrence River 
 below Quebec, you will probably strike it at the Riviere du Loup 
 (v. Hodge s account of his excursion thither via the Allegash. I 
 believe it is in the second Report on the Geology of the Public 
 Lands of Maine and Mass, in 37). I think that our Indian last 
 summer, when we talked of going to the St. Lawrence, named 
 another route, near the Madawaska perhaps the St. Francis, 
 which would save the long portage which Hodge made. 
 
 " I do not know whether you think of ascending the St. Lawrence 
 in a canoe but if you should, you might be delayed not only by the 
 current, but by the waves, which frequently run too high for a canoe 
 on such a mighty stream. It would be a grand excursion to go to 
 Quebec by the Chaudiere descend the St. Lawrence to the Riviere 
 
THOREAU. 131 
 
 du Lonp and return by the Madawaska and St. John s to 
 Frederick ton, or further almost all the way down stream a very 
 important consideration. . . . 
 
 " Perhaps you would like a few more details. We used (three of 
 us) exactly 26 Ibs. of hard bread, 14 Ibs. of pork, 3 Ibs. of coffee, 
 12 Ibs. of sugar (and could have used more), besides a little tea, 
 Indian meal and rice, and plenty of berries and moose-meat. This 
 was faring very luxuriously. I had not formerly carried coffee, 
 sugar, or rice. But for solid food, 1 decide that it is not worth 
 the while to carry anything but hard bread and pork, whatever 
 your tastes and habits may be. These wear best, and you have no 
 time nor dishes in which to cook anything else. Of course you 
 will take a little Indian meal to fry fish in, and half-a-dozen lemons 
 also, if you have sugar, will be very refreshing, for the water is 
 warm. 
 
 "To save time, the sugar, coffee, tea, salt, etc., etc., should be 
 in separate watertight bags, labelled and tied with a leathern 
 string ; and all the provisions and blankets should be put into two 
 large india-rubber bags, if you can find them watertight. Ours 
 were not. 
 
 " A four-quart tin pail makes a good kettle for all purposes, and 
 tin plates are portable and convenient. Don t forget an india- 
 rubber knapsack, with a large flap, plenty of dish cloths, old news 
 papers, strings, and twenty-five feet of strong cord. 
 
 " Of india-rubber clothing the most you can wear, if any, is a 
 very light coat, and that you cannot work in. 
 
 " I could be more particular, but perhaps have been too much 
 so already. Yours truly, 
 
 " HENRY D. THOREAU." 
 
 Mention has already been made of Thoreau s fond 
 ness for mountains. He possessed in a marked degree 
 the instinct of topography, and with map and compass 
 would make out his way unerringly through the 
 wildest regions, and could run up the steepest places 
 without losing breath. " He ascended such hills as 
 Monadnock or Saddleback mountains," says Channing, 
 
132 LIFE OF 
 
 " by his own path, and would lay down his map on the 
 summit and draw a line to the point he proposed to visit 
 below, perhaps forty miles away in the landscape, and 
 set off bravely to make the short cut. The lowland 
 people wondered to see him scaling the heights as if he 
 had lost his way, or at his jumping over their cow-yard 
 fences, asking if he had fallen from the clouds." 
 
 In July 1858 he made another expedition with his 
 friend Edward Hoar, this time to the White Mountains 
 of New Hampshire, the Switzerland of New England, 
 which he had visited with his brother nineteen years 
 earlier. They travelled by carriage, and Thoreau com 
 plains in his journal of the loss of independence, as 
 regards choice of camping-stations, which this method 
 involved; it was not simple and adventurous enough to 
 suit his tastes. He also disliked the " mountain houses" 
 which were already erected in New Hampshire, with 
 large saloons, and other appurtenances of the city, for 
 the supposed convenience of the tourist ; " give me," he 
 says, "a spruce-house made in the rain." Their chief 
 exploit during the fortnight they spent in New Hamp 
 shire was the ascent of Mount Washington, the highest 
 mountain in New England, where, in descending to 
 wards Tuckerman s Ravine, Thoreau lost his footing 
 on the steep crust of a snow-slope, and was only saved 
 by digging his finger-nails into the snow. They camped 
 for several days in a plantation of dwarf firs near the 
 foot of the ravine, and by the carelessness of their guide 
 in lighting a fire several acres of brushwood were burnt. 
 The next afternoon Thoreau sprained his ankle while 
 scrambling on the rocks, and was laid up in the camp 
 for two or three days. 
 
THOREAU. 133 
 
 Monadnock, a mountain of nearly four thousand feet, 
 which is visible from Concord on the nprth-west horizon, 
 had been visited by Thoreau, like Wachusett, in his early 
 manhood. In 1858, a month before his excursion to 
 the White Mountains, he camped a couple of nights on 
 its summit in company with Mr. Blake, and two years 
 later he again ascended it with Ellery Channing, who, 
 being unaccustomed to mountain life, did not relish its 
 inconveniences as much as his friend, but complains 
 pathetically of the fatigue, "the blazing sun, the face 
 getting broiled ; the pint-cup never scoured ; shaving 
 unutterable; your stockings dreary, having taken to 
 peat," and other similar discomforts. This visit to Mon 
 adnock was the last excursion of Thoreau s in which he 
 camped out. The reasons which compelled the dis 
 continuance of a practice in which he found such 
 pleasure will appear when we resume the story of his 
 life at Concord. 
 
CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 AS early as 1855 Thoreau s health had begun to be a 
 "^ matter of some anxiety to himself and to his friends- 
 Frequent mention has been made by those who knew 
 him personally of the iron endurance and sturdy strength 
 of limb which enabled him to outstrip the companions 
 of his walks and open-air pursuits. Emerson, who was 
 himself little qualified for an outdoor life, marvelled 
 at his friend s indefatigable energy in tree-felling and 
 field-work ; while Channing and others who accompanied 
 him to the mountains suffered acutely from the exposure 
 Thoreau seemed not to feel. Nevertheless, this power 
 of prolonged endurance was due, there is reason to 
 believe, far more to an indomitable spirit than to a 
 natural strength of constitution ; for, idealist as he was, 
 he was too apt to compel his body at all times to keep 
 pace with his mind, and if he was somewhat exacting in 
 his demands on his friends, he had still less consideration 
 for his own weaknesses. " The physique given him at 
 birth," says Dr. E. W. Emerson, "was unusually slight. 
 I have never seen a person with more sloping shoulders, 
 and seldom a narrower chest. Yet he made his frame 
 all that it could be made." It is on record that his 
 college career was interrupted by an illness which kept 
 him for some time from his studies ; and as early as 1841 
 
LIFE OF THOREAU. 135 
 
 there is reference in the journal to a bronchial attack, 
 which is significant when read in connection with the 
 story of his closing years. 
 
 In the autumn of 1855 we find him writing of the 
 "months of feebleness" that had preceded, and of his 
 satisfaction at partly regaining his health, though he 
 would have liked " to know first what it was that ailed 
 him." During the winter that followed he was able to 
 walk afield as usual, and boasts that he had made it 
 a part of his business "to wade in the snow and take the 
 measure of the ice," and that, in spite of his recent ill- 
 health, he was probably the greatest walker in Concord. 
 In the spring of 1857 he refers to his "two-year-old 
 invalidity," from which we see that the disquieting 
 symptoms had not wholly abated; and it cannot be 
 doubted that he at all times subjected himself to 
 considerable risks both by the severity of his ex 
 ertions in carrying heavy loads and taking long walks, 
 and also in the recklessness with which he exposed 
 himself to all extremes of weather, and all changes of 
 season, regardless alike of frost and sun, wind and snow, 
 the chills of midnight and the mists of the early morning. 
 For the present, however, we hear no more of his illness, 
 and he continued to lead the same equable contented 
 state of life which has already been described. 
 
 After the appearance of Walden in 1854, Thoreau did 
 not publish any further volume, though he was busily 
 engaged in various literary plans, chief among which was 
 his projected book on the Indians. His relations with 
 editors and publishers, partly no doubt owing to his own 
 unaccommodating temperament, had not always been 
 of the most amicable kind ; his essays were repeatedly 
 
136 LIFE OF 
 
 refused by papers and magazines on account of their 
 religious unorlhodoxy, and it is said an editor once 
 begged Emerson to persuade Thoreau to write an article 
 containing no allusion to God. In 1858, when, at 
 Emerson s suggestion, he contributed his paper on 
 "Chesuncook" (the Maine Woods) to the Atlantic 
 Monthly, of which Mr. Lowell was then editor, a fresh 
 point of difference arose. A sentence in which Thoreau 
 had spoken in his idealistic style of the "living spirit" of 
 the pine tree ("it is as immortal as I am, and perchance 
 will go to as high a heaven, there to tower above me 
 still ") was struck out under editorial censorship, without 
 the permission of the author, and this being an indignity 
 to which Thoreau would never submit, he sent no more 
 of his essays to the Atlantic Monthly until the editorship 
 had passed into other hands. The sentence in question 
 was of course restored when the article on "Chesuncook" 
 was included in the volume on The Maine Woods. 
 
 On 3rd February 1857 Thoreau records in his diary 
 the death of his father, who had lived to the age of 
 seventy-two. This was the third time- he had mourned 
 the loss of a near relative, his brother having died, as 
 narrated, in 1842, and his sister Helen in 1849. In the 
 following letter to Mr. Daniel Ricketson he gives an 
 interesting account of his father s character : 
 
 " CONCORD, 121/1 February 1859. 
 
 " FRIEND RICKETSON, I thank you for your kind letter. I 
 sent you the notice of my father s death as much because you knew 
 him as because you know me. I can hardly realise that he is dead, 
 lie had been sick about two years, and at last declined rather rapidly 
 though steadily. Till within a week or ten days before he died he 
 was hoping to see another spring, but he then discovered that this 
 
THOREAU. 137 
 
 was a vain expectation, and thinking that he was dying, he took 
 his leave of us several times within a week before his departure. 
 Once or twice he expressed a slight impatience at the delay. He 
 was quite conscious to the last, and his death was so easy that 
 though we had all been sitting around the bed for an hour or more 
 expecting that event, as we had sat before, he was gone at last 
 almost before we were aware of it. 
 
 "I am glad to read what you say about his social nature. I 
 think I may say that he was wholly unpretending, and there was 
 this peculiarity in his aim, that though he had pecuniary difficulties 
 to contend with the greater part of his life, he always studied 
 merely how to make a good article, pencil or other (for he practised 
 various arts), and was never satisfied with what he had produced. 
 Nor was he ever in the least disposed to put off a poor one for the 
 sake of pecuniary gain, as if he laboured for a higher end. 
 
 " Though he was not very old, and was not a native of Concord, 
 I think that he was, on the whole, more identified with Concord 
 street than any man now alive, having come here when he was 
 about twelve years old, and set up for himself as a merchant here at 
 the age of twenty-one, fifty years ago. 
 
 "As I sat in a circle the other evening with my mother and 
 sister, my mother s two sisters, and my father s two sisters, it 
 occurred to me that my father, though seventy-one, belonged to the 
 youngest four of the eight who recently composed our family. 
 
 " How swiftly at last, but unnoticed, a generation passes away ! 
 Three years ago I was called, with my father, to be a witness to 
 the signing of our neighbour Mr. Frost s will. Mr. Samuel Hoar, 
 who was there writing it, also signed it. I was lately required to 
 go to Cambridge to testify to the genuineness of the will, being the 
 only one of the four who could be there, and now I am the only 
 one alive. 
 
 " My mother and sister thank you heartily for your sympathy. 
 The latter in particular agrees with you in thinking that it is com 
 munion with still living and healthy nature alone which can restore 
 to sane and cheerful views. I thank you for your invitation to 
 New Bedford, but I feel somewhat confined here for the present. 
 I did not know but we should see you the day after Alger was 
 here. It is not too late for a winter walk in Concord. It does me 
 
138 LIFE OF 
 
 good to hear of spring birds and singing ones too, for spring seems 
 far away from Concord yet. I m going to Worcester to read a 
 parlour lecture on the 22nd, and shall see Blake and Brown. 
 What if you were to meet me there ? or go with me from here ? 
 You would see them to good advantage. Cholmondeley has been 
 here again, after going as far south as Virginia, and left for Canada 
 about three weeks ago. He is a good soul, and I am afraid that I 
 did not sufficiently recognise him. 
 
 " Please remember me to Mrs. Ricketson, and to the rest of your 
 family. Yours, HENRY DAVID TIIOREAU." 
 
 After his father s death Thoreau carried on the family 
 business, pencil-making and the preparation of plumbago, 
 on behalf of his mother and his younger sister Sophia. 
 This same year, 1859, was destined to be one of the 
 most memorable in his experience. We have seen how 
 he was, from the first, an ardent abolitionist, how he had 
 withdrawn his allegiance from the State of Massachusetts 
 owing to its sanction of slavery, and had delivered 
 lectures and published essays on the subject at a time 
 when the outspoken profession of abolitionist principles 
 was neither safe nor comfortable ; and how he had himself 
 assisted escaped slaves in their flight to Canada. True- 
 hearted American though he was, he had little respect 
 for the patriotic feelings of those of his fellow-countrymen 
 who could combine a pride in their national liberties 
 with an indifference to negro slavery ; and on one of the 
 occasions when a runaway was surrendered to his owners 
 by the Massachusetts Government, he is said to have 
 proposed to his townsmen at Concord that the monu 
 ment which commemorated American independence 
 should be coated with black paint. 
 
 When he was introduced to John Brown in 1857 he 
 doubtless recognised in him the " one righteous man " 
 
THOREAU. 139 
 
 whose advent he had heralded in the essay on Slavery 
 in Massachusetts, which he had written and published 
 several years before, and it is not difficult to imagine 
 the intensity of admiration with which he must have 
 followed the phases of the great emancipator s career. 
 Himself an individualist, and, as regards politics, less a i 
 man of action than a man of thought, he reverenced | 
 in Brown the very qualities in which he was himself 
 deficient. The final effort of Brown s heroism was now 
 at hand, and the events that followed proved to be in 
 some respects the crowning point of Thoreau s life also. 
 
 In October 1859 John Brown, who was just entering 
 on his sixtieth year, was again in Concord, and it was 
 from Mr. Sanborn s house that he started on his last and 
 fateful expedition against the Virginian slaveholders. On 
 1 6th October Brown was arrested at Harper s Ferry, and 
 then ensued those seven weeks of suspense and anxiety 
 and vituperation which ended in his trial and death. 
 To Thoreau the anchorite and idealist belongs the 
 lasting honour of having spoken the first public utterance 
 on behalf of John Brown, at a time when a torrent of 
 ridicule and abuse was being poured by the American 
 press on the so-called crazy enthusiast whose life was 
 to pay forfeit for his boldness. Notice was given by* 
 Thoreau that he would speak in the Town Hall on 
 Sunday evening, 3oth October, on the subject of John 
 Brown s condition and character; and when this course 
 was deprecated by certain republicans and abolitionists 
 as hasty and ill-advised, they received the emphatic 
 assurance that he had not sent to them for advice, but 
 to announce his intention of speaking. A large and 
 attentive audience, composed of men of all parties, 
 
140 LIFE OF 
 
 assembled to hear Thoreau s address, the "Plea for 
 Captain John Brown," which is in every respect one of 
 the very finest of his writings. In the plainest and most 
 unequivocal terms, and with all his accustomed incisive- 
 ness of style and expression, he avowed his absolute 
 approval of the conduct of a man who was indicted as 
 a rebel and traitor. When we read the magnificent and 
 heart-stirring passages in which he eulogised the heroic 
 character of John Brown, we can well believe Emerson s 
 statement that the address was heard " by all respect 
 fully, by many with a sympathy that surprised them 
 selves." 
 
 On November ist Thoreau read the same lecture at 
 Boston, an event which was reported in the Liberator of 
 November 4 " This exciting theme," it says, " seemed 
 to have awakened the hermit of Concord from his 
 usual state of philosophic indifference, and he spoke 
 with real enthusiasm for an hour and a half. A very 
 large audience listened to this lecture, crowding the hall 
 half-an-hour before the time of its commencement, and 
 giving hearty applause to some of the most energetic 
 expressions of the speaker." 
 
 The time was short, and from the first it could 
 scarcely have been hoped that Brown s life would be 
 spared. Those few weeks were probably the only period 
 in Thoreau s career when he turned in vain to nature for 
 the customary comfort and repose; and he has put on 
 record the stunned, incredulous feelings with which he 
 received, on 2nd December, the news of the execution. 
 On that day a solemn service "in commemoration of 
 Brown s martyrdom was held in" the Town Hall at 
 Concord, when addresses were delivered by Thoreau, 
 
THOREAU. 141 
 
 ^ 
 
 Alcott, Emerson, and other abolitionists, and a funeral- 
 hymn, composed by Sanborn, was sung by those 
 assembled. 1 
 
 Thoreau regarded the whole episode of Brown s 
 capture and trial as a touchstone designed to bring 
 out into a strong light the nature of the American 
 Government. That it afforded a touchstone of his own 
 character few will deny. It has been well remarked 
 by John Burroughs that " this instant and unequivocal 
 indorsement of Brown by Thoreau, in the face of the 
 most overwhelming public opinion even among anti- 
 slavery men, throws a flood of light upon him. It is 
 the most significant act of his life. It clinches him. 
 It makes the colours fast." The "Plea for Captain 
 John Brown," which bears in every sentence unmis 
 takable signs of the intensity of feeling under which it 
 was written, must have convinced even those of Thoreau s 
 hearers who were least in accord with him that they saw 
 before them no cynical misanthrope who had placed 
 himself in unreasonable antagonism to the social opinions 
 of his townsmen, but a man of humaner sympathies and 
 larger aspirations than their own. 2 
 
 And indeed the judgment of the good people of Con 
 cord had already changed concerning the eccentric recluse 
 who, some twelve years before, had excited their con- 
 
 1 These speeches may be read in Echoes from Plarper s Ferry, 
 Boston, 1860. 
 
 a Yet Professor Nichol {American Literature] speaks of Thoreau 
 as " lethargic, self-complacently defiant, and too nearly a stoico- 
 epicurean adiaphorist (!)lo discompose himself in party or even in 
 national strifes." Full justice is done to this zeal in the anti-slavery 
 cause by Dr. Japp (" II. A. Page ") in his book on Thoreau. 
 
142 LIFE OF 
 
 temptuous surprise by his sojourn in the Walden woods; 
 they had learnt to appreciate the kindness and courtesy 
 that underlay his rough exterior, and the shrewd wisdom 
 which found expression in his trenchant and out-spoken 
 words. He thus came to be respected and honoured 
 in the very quarter where honour is proverbially most 
 difficult to attain for the prophet who is not willing to 
 prophesy smooth things ; and his fellow-citizens recog 
 nised the superiority of character " which addressed all 
 men with a native authority." 
 
 Nor had the lapse of years and the increase of ex 
 perience failed to exercise a mellowing effect on Thoreau s 
 own temperament; and his intimate friends have noted 
 how the foibles and crudeness which marked the less 
 pleasing side in his distinctive and self-assertive per 
 sonality were gradually losing their sharpness as he 
 grew older, while he still retained all the freshness and 
 originality of his genius, and looked forward to the 
 future with the same unbounded confidence as ever. 
 This prospect, unhappily, was not destined to be 
 realised; but there is satisfaction in the thought that it 
 was his championship of John Brown which formed the 
 last public act of Thoreau s career, and that no act could 
 possibly have been more characteristic and significant. 
 
 It was in November 1860 that his fatal illness had its 
 beginning. He took a severe cold while counting the 
 rings on trees, at a time when the ground was covered 
 with a deep snow ; this led to a bronchial affection, 
 which was increased by his persistence in keeping a 
 lecturing engagement at Waterbury, and the precautions 
 which he afterwards exercised were too late, as con 
 sumption had then set in. It is to be noted that his 
 
THOREAU. H3 
 
 grandfather, the emigrant from St. Helier, had died of 
 consumption; so that it is possible that Thoreau inherited 
 consumptive tendencies from that source. In the spring 
 of 1 86 1 he was advised by his doctor to travel, and he 
 was now willing to do in sickness what he had always 
 refused to do in health, though even now he preferred to 
 remain within the boundaries of the States. 
 
 Mr. Blake being unable to accompany him in this 
 journey to Minnesota, his place was taken by Horace 
 Mann, a connection of Nathaniel Hawthorne s. In a 
 letter addressed to Mr. Sanborn from Minnesota, on 
 26th June, Thoreau speaks of himself as better in health 
 than when he left home, but still far from well, having 
 performed the journey in a very dead-and-alive manner, 
 though he much enjoyed the weeks they spent in the 
 neighbourhood of St. Paul s and the novel sights of the 
 Mississippi. From St. Paul s Thoreau and his com 
 panion made a further expedition some three hundred 
 miles up the Minnesota or St. Peter s River, in order to 
 witness a gathering of the Sioux Indians at Redwood, 
 where an annual payment was made to the tribe by the 
 United States Government. One of the sights which 
 most interested Thoreau, during this tour in the West, 
 was that of the aboriginal crab-apple, as told by him in 
 the essay on "Wild Apples," which appeared in the 
 Atlantic Monthly in 1862. 
 
 Meantime the spark which had been kindled by John 
 Brown s heroism had not been quenched by his death, and 
 the war between the northern and southern States had 
 already commenced in the spring of 1861. The mis 
 fortunes of the North in the first months of the war 
 affected Thoreau so powerfully that he used to say he 
 
144 LIFE OF 
 
 could never recover while the war lasted, and he told his 
 friends in these dark days that he was "sick for his 
 country." There is not the least justification for Lowell s 
 statement that Thoreau " looked with utter contempt on 
 the august drama of destiny, of which his country was 
 the scene, and on which the curtain had already risen." 
 "Was it Thoreau or Lowell," asks Wentworth Higgin- 
 son, " who found a voice when the curtain fell, after the 
 first act of that drama, upon the scaffold of John Brown? 
 Had Thoreau retained health and life, there is no telling 
 but what the civil war might have brought out a wholly 
 new aspect of him, as it did for so many." 
 
 The journey to Minnesota was not productive of any 
 lasting improvement in Thoreau s health. When he 
 visited Mr. Ricketson at New Bedford a few weeks later 
 (on which occasion an ambrotype portrait was taken at 
 Mr. Ricketson s request), his racking cough impressed 
 his friend with the conviction that his strength was fast 
 failing, though his face, " except for a shade of sadness 
 in the eyes," did not betray the change. But in the 
 course of the winter that followed it became evident 
 that the disease had reached a point at which it could 
 not be arrested, and that there was no longer any hope 
 of saving his life. " It was my good fortune to see him 
 again last November," wrote G. W. Curtis (Harper s 
 Magazine, July 1862), " when he came into the library of 
 a friend to borrow a volume of Pliny s Letters. He was 
 much wasted, and his doom was clear. But he talked 
 in the old strain of wise gravity without either sentiment 
 or sadness." Then it was that the exaltation of spirit 
 over matter, of the mind over the body, which had 
 throughout his life been one of Thoreau s prominent 
 
THOREAU. 145 
 
 characteristics, was still more strongly manifested as he 
 neared his death; whatever his friends might feel, he 
 himself appeared to be unaffected by his illness ; he 
 looked at himself, as it were, from an outer standpoint, 
 surveying, without alarm and without anxiety, this in 
 trusion into his bodily system of a weakness to which 
 his mind at least should never be subject. 
 
 It was one of Thoreau s maxims that work of some 
 kind is as necessary for those who are sick as for those 
 who are strong, and it is recorded by his sister Sophia, 
 who, with their mother s help, tenderly nursed him in 
 his illness, that to the last day of his life he never ceased 
 to call for the manuscripts on which he was engaged. 
 He was about to become a contributor to the Atlantic 
 Monthly magazine, which was now edited by Mr. Fields 
 in the place of Mr. Lowell, and during the last few 
 months of his life he accomplished, in his sister s words, 
 "a vast amount of labour," in preparing these papers 
 for the press, and in completing the records of his visits 
 to the Maine Woods. There was something fitting in 
 the fact that in this closing scene of his life his thoughts 
 should be occupied with the Indian, whom he resembled 
 not only in his sympathy with wild nature, but also in 
 his stoical reserve, unfaltering self-command, and passive 
 acquiescence in whatever his destiny had in store for 
 him. 
 
 His unfailing patience and fortitude are described as 
 wonderful by those who witnessed them; it was impos 
 sible to be sad in his presence, or to realise that one 
 so cheerful and contented was on the verge of death. 
 When he could not sleep he would ask his sister to 
 arrange the furniture so as to cast weird shadows on the 
 
 10 
 
H6 LIFE OF 
 
 walls, and he expressed the wish that his bed were in 
 spiral form, that he might curl up in it as in a shell; at 
 other times, when rest was not altogether denied him, he 
 would interest his friends by a narration of his strange 
 and fantastic dreams, saying that "sleep seemed to hang 
 round his bed in festoons." As long as sufficient strength 
 remained to him, he resolutely took his seat at table 
 with his mother and sister, insisting that " it would not 
 be social to take his meals alone," and when he could no 
 longer walk, his bed was brought down into the front 
 parlour of the house, where he was visited by many of 
 his neighbours and townsmen, from whom, during the 
 whole course of his illness, he received such touching 
 and gratifying tokens of kindness and affection that he 
 would sometimes protest he would be ashamed to stay 
 in the world after so much had been done for him. 
 
 Several of the remarks which he made on these 
 occasions were very characteristic. When Channing, 
 the faithful and intimate companion of his walks and 
 studies, hinted at the weary change that had now come 
 over his life, and how " solitude began to peer out 
 curiously from the dells and wood-roads," he whispered 
 in reply, " It is better some things should end." He 
 said to Alcott that he " should leave the world without a 
 regret." Nor in these last weary months of suffering did 
 he lose his shrewd humour and native incisiveness of 
 speech. " Well, Mr. Thoreau, we must all go," said a 
 well-meaning visitor, who thought to comfort the dying 
 man by the ordinary platitudes. " When I was a boy," 
 answered Thoreau, " I learnt that I must die, so I am 
 not disappointed now; death is as near to you as it is to 
 me." When asked whether he "had made his peace 
 
THOREAU. 147 
 
 with God," he quietly replied that "he had never 
 quarrelled with him." He was invited by another 
 acquaintance to enter into a religious conversation con 
 cerning the next world. "One world at a time/ was 
 the prompt retort. 
 
 It would, however, be an injustice to Thoreau to 
 represent his death-bed as nothing but a scene of stoical 
 fortitude and iron self-restraint there are other and not 
 less admirable traits of tenderness and love. From his 
 window, which looked out on the village street, he saw 
 passing and repassing some of his favourite children, 
 whom he had so often conducted in their merry expedi 
 tions after the huckleberry or water-lily. " Why don t 
 they come to see me?" he said to his sister. "I love 
 them as if they were my own, 1 and it is pleasant to 
 read that they often visited him, and enjoyed these last 
 meetings scarcely less than the first. The sound of 
 music had the same charm for him to the end, and on 
 hearing a street musician play some old tune that had 
 been familiar to him in childhood, he is said to have 
 shed tears and asked his mother to give the man some 
 money. 
 
 The thought of death was never a cause of anxiety to 
 him; but terrible indeed to a man of Thoreau s tem 
 perament must have oeen the death-m-life of that long 
 and dreary winter, when the daily walk and converse 
 with nature, which had seemed necessities of his exist 
 ence, were but memories of the past, and even the 
 carefully kept journal must needs be discontinued, 
 since there was in fact nothing to record. Yet of this 
 outer life, in which for twenty-five years he had so faith 
 fully and unremittingly busied himself, he now spoke 
 
148 LIFE OF 
 
 no word, and we are told that no stranger could have 
 imagined from his manner that " he ever had a friend in 
 field or wood." Once only, as he stood at his window, 
 did he allude to what must have been so constantly in 
 his thoughts. "I cannot see on the outside at all," 
 he said to his friend Channing. " We thought our 
 selves great philosophers in those wet days, when we 
 used to go out and sit down by the wall-sides." There 
 is on this point a singular and pathetic similarity between 
 Thoreau s last illness and that of Richard Jefferies, who 
 of all men was nearest to him in passionate devotion to 
 open-air life; but Thoreau s sterner and more reticent 
 nature -would not give his thoughts the expression in 
 which Jefferies found relief. 
 
 It was on 6th May 1862, a beautiful spring morning, 
 that the end came. At eight o clock, shortly after 
 enjoying the odour of a bunch of hyacinths from a friend s 
 garden, he asked to be raised upright in his bed; his 
 breathing became gradually fainter and fainter, until he 
 died without pain or struggle in the presence of his 
 mother and sister, his last audible words being " moose " 
 and "Indian" the thought still intent on the scenes 
 that had detained it so long. 
 
 He was buried, near his brother and sister, in " Sleepy 
 Hollow," the quiet Concord burial-ground, close to the 
 spot which became the grave of Nathaniel Hawthorne 
 two years later. An address was given at the funeral by 
 Emerson, 1 and one of Thoreau s poems, "Sic Vita," was 
 
 1 Afterwards published in the Atlantic Monthly, August 1862, 
 and prefixed to Excursions, 1863. A few sentences were omitted, 
 at Sophia Thoreau s request, when the address was printed. Among 
 these was one in which Emerson enumerated the persons whom 
 
THOREAU. 149 
 
 read by Alcott. " While we walked in procession up to 
 the church," says one who was present, 1 "though the bell 
 tolled the forty-four years he had numbered, we could 
 not deem that he was dead whose ideas and sentiments 
 were so vivid in our souls. As the fading image of 
 pathetic clay lay before us, strewn with wild-flowers and 
 forest sprigs, thoughts of its former occupant seemed 
 blent with all the local landscapes. We still recall with 
 emotion the tributary words so fitly spoken by friendly 
 and illustrious lips. The hands of friends reverently 
 lowered the body of the lonely poet into the bosom of 
 the earth, on the pleasant hill-side of his native village, 
 whose prospects will long wait to unfurl themselves to 
 another observer so competent to discriminate their 
 features, and so attuned to their moods." His grave was 
 marked by a red stone, which bore no inscription but his 
 name and date of death. That stone is now gone. Its 
 successor bears the names, and dates of birth and death, 
 of every member of the family, except John, whose 
 birthday no one could recall. 
 
 Thoreau s collections of plants, Indian relics, and the 
 like, were bequeathed by him to the Society of Natural 
 History at Boston, of which he was an honorary member. 
 The family business of pencil-making was carried on for 
 some years after his death by his sister Sophia, who 
 herself lived till 1876. The last remaining member of 
 the family was Miss Maria Thoreau, the sister of 
 Thoreau s father, who outlived her brother and her 
 
 Thoreau specially admired viz., John Brown, the abolitionist; 
 Joe Polis, an Indian guide; and " one who is not known to those 
 here assembled," i.e., Walt Whitman. 
 
 1 W. R. Alger : Solitudes of Nature and of Man. 
 
150 LIFE OF 
 
 brother s children, and died in Maine at an advanced 
 age in 1881. But though the family is thus extinct in 
 New England, the name of Thorcau is indelibly associated 
 with the scenes amidst which he lived and died ; and it 
 has been well remarked that "the village of Concord 
 is his monument, covered with suitable inscriptions 
 by himself." A cairn of stones marks the site of 
 the hut on the shore of Walden Pond, where the poet- 
 naturalist spent the two most memorable years of his 
 life, and wrote the greater part of his most memorable 
 volume. 1 
 
 My greatest skill," says Thorcau himself, in words 
 that might stand as his epitaph, "has been to want 
 but little. For joy I could embrace the earth. I 
 shall delight to be buried in it. And then I think 
 of those amongst men who will know that I love 
 them, though I tell them not." Truly there is a love 
 that needs not telling that is deepest and tenderest 
 untold. And those who understand this love will 
 understand the secret of Thoreau s story, and will never 
 fail to own and reverence the sincerity and heroism of 
 his life. 
 
 1 The following is an extract from the journal of the greatest of the 
 many pilgrims who have since visited these scenes: "A half-hour 
 at Hawthorne s and Thoreau s graves. I got out and went up, of 
 course, on foot, and stood a long while and pondered. They lie close 
 together in a pleasant wooded spot well up the cemetery hill, Sleepy 
 Hollow. . . . Then to Walden Pond, that beautifully embower d 
 sheet of water, and spent over an hour there. On the spot in the 
 woods where Thoreau had his solitary house is now quite a cairn 
 of stones, to mark the place ; I too carried one and deposited on 
 the heap." Walt Whitman s Specimen Days in America^ September 
 1881. 
 
THOREAU. 15 i 
 
 "He kept the temple as divine 
 
 Wherein his soul abided ; 
 He heard the Voice within the shrine, 
 
 And followed as it guided ; 
 Pie found no bane of bitter strife, 
 
 But laws of His designing ; 
 He quaffed the brimming cup of Life, 
 
 And went forth unrepining." l 
 
 1 From a poem on Thoreau by S. A. Jones. 
 
CHAPTER IX. 
 
 A DELIBERATE intent of advocating any particular 
 class of doctrines is more than once disclaimed by 
 N f Thoreau. He was an independent thinker, who put his 
 theories into practice with unusual courage, and expressed 
 himself in his books with unusual frankness, but he had 
 no preconceived designs on the opinions of his fellow- 
 men; he lived his life and said his say, and if he sought 
 to exercise any influence on others, it was by no direct 
 persuasion of argument or proselytism, but indirectly by 
 the example of his own personality. He once asked a 
 friend, who had entered the ministry, whether he had ever 
 yet in preaching been " so fortunate as to say anything." 
 On being answered in the affirmative, he remarked, 
 " Then your preaching days are over. Can you bear to 
 say it again ? " By nature and temperament he was 
 averse to any elaborate "system" of philosophy or 
 ethics; he questioned everything, and would accept no 
 philosophical formula for himself, nor offer any to his 
 readers. This constitutional unwillingness to be tram 
 melled by any intellectual tenet left its mark very 
 distinctly both on the substance and the form of 
 Thoreau s writings, and should be borne in mind when 
 he is spoken of as the preacher of an ethical gospel; 
 
LIFE OF THOREAU. 153 
 
 nevertheless, since he did in truth dwell with much 
 insistence on certain important truths, intellectual and 
 moral, which are too generally overlooked, we are justi 
 fied, with this reservation, in formulating as "doctrines" 
 the views which he most frequently expressed. 
 
 We have already seen that he was before everything 
 an idealist his transcendentalism was not an adopted 
 creed, but an innate habit of mind from which he never 
 swerved, and which dominated all his philosophy. So 
 far, it may be said, he did not differ to any remarkable 
 degree from other idealists, who have all more or less 
 recognised and followed the guiding light of the inner 
 consciousness. But here we come to that distinctive 
 quality which sets Thoreau on a separate footing from 
 Emerson and other transcendentalist writers the resolute 
 practicalness which shows itself as clearly in his doctrines 
 a^_iiLjiis___actions, Though the ideal was" always before 
 him, he had no taste for the subtleties of mere meta 
 physical abstractions, but made a strong actuality the 
 basis of his reasoning : there were thus two sides to his 
 character and philosophy, the one the mystical and 
 transcendental, which faced the boundless possibilities of 
 the future, the other the practical and terrestrial, which 
 was concerned with the realities of the present and the 
 past. 
 
 It is true that these two qualities did not always work 
 quite harmoniously together; for Thoreau was not care 
 ful to be systematic and verbally consistent ; as he 
 himself says, " How can I communicate with the gods, 
 who am a pencil-maker on earth, and not be insane ? " 
 But, as a rule, the successful combination of common 
 sense with transcendental sense is the characteristic 
 
154 LIFE OF 
 
 feature of his doctrines; and this very dreamer and 
 mystic who boasted that he built his castles in the air 
 and then put the foundations under them, could also 
 assert with equal truth, in another connection, that "it 
 afforded him no satisfaction to commence to spring an 
 arch before he had got a solid foundation." His philo 
 sophy of life is eminently keen-sighted, sound, and 
 practical. 
 
 It has been asserted that Thoreau " is Emerson 
 without domestic ties, or wish for them; save for a 
 streak of benevolence, without those of humanity." 1 
 But this subordination of Thoreau as a mere pupil and 
 follower of Emerson is not warranted by the facts of 
 their relationship. The greater practicalness of Thoreau 
 is frankly recognised by Emerson himself in a passage of 
 his diary. "In reading Henry Thoreau s journal," he 
 wrote, a year after his friend s death, "I am very sensible 
 of the vigour of his constitution. That oaken strength 
 which I noted whenever he walked or worked or sur 
 veyed wood-lots, the same unhesitating hand with which 
 a field-labourer accosts a piece of work which I should 
 shun as a waste of strength, he shows in his literary 
 task. He has muscle, and ventures on and performs 
 feats which I am forced to decline. In reading him 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 in a sleepy 
 generalisation." "The resemblance of Thoreau to 
 Emerson," says Mr. Conway, " was as superficial as that 
 of a leaf-like creature to a leaf. Thoreau was quite as 
 original as Emerson. He was not an imitator of any 
 Professor Nichol s American Literature. 
 
THOREAU. 155 
 
 mortal; his thoughts and expressions are suggestions of 
 a Thoreau-principle at work in the universe/ 1 
 
 This practical tendency in Thoreau was fostered and 
 strengthened by his firm belief in the freedom of the 
 human will. " I know of no more encouraging fact," 
 he says, " than the unquestionable ability of man to 
 elevate his life by a conscious endeavour." His religious 
 and moral creed was founded on a fixed optimistic con 
 viction that nature is working to some wise and bene 
 volent end; joy was for him "the condition of life," and 
 despondency nothing more than a senseless and idle 
 aberration. 
 
 I n spired bv this optimistic faith, Thoreau inculcates, 
 more -strongly perhaps than any other writer, a sense of 
 content in one s own personality; he would have each 
 individual develop quietly according to his own capacity 
 and conditions. To waste no time in brooding over the 
 past, but to live in the present, and nourish unbounded 
 confidence in the future this was the essence of his 
 practical philosophy; and for support in this creed, and 
 refreshment in the weaker moments of life, he looked to 
 the unfailing health and beneficence, as he considered 
 it, of wild nature. 
 
 This calm, optimistic nature-worship mainly deter 
 mined Thoreau s attitude towards the religious sects, 
 whose " snappish tenacity," and faint-hearted craving for 
 external comfort and grace, were in direct contrast to 
 his own absolute self-possession. " Really there is no 
 infidelity nowadays," he wrote in The Week, "so great 
 as that which prays, and keeps the Sabbath, and rebuilds 
 the churches. The church is a sort of hospital for men s 
 ^"^msrson^ii^If^ine and Abroad. 
 
156 LIFE OF 
 
 souls, and as full of quackery as the hospital for their 
 bodies. Those who are taken into/it live like pensioners 
 in their Retreat or Sailors Snug Harbour, where you 
 may see a row of religious cripples sitting outside in 
 sunny weather. Let not the apprehension that he may 
 one day have to occupy a ward therein discourage the 
 cheerful labours of the able-souled man." It may be 
 imagined that the spirit of " defiant pantheism," as 
 Horace Greeley called it, which breathes through all 
 Thoreau s utterances on the subject of religion, and 
 especially through the magnificent passage in the chapter 
 on "Sunday" in The Week, must have caused him, and 
 still causes him, to be mistrusted and misunderstood in 
 so-called religious circles. It has been truly remarked 
 of him that " he creates as much consternation among 
 the saints as the sinners." Yet his unsparing candour 
 and incisiveness of speech ought not to blind his readers 
 to the fact that it was the very depth and sincerity of his 
 religious sentiment that caused him to set all forms and 
 dogmas at defiance. 
 
 / What, then, is the practical outcome of Thoreau s 
 ethical teaching? In the first place, he is an earnest 
 and unwearied advocate of self-culture and self-respect, 
 and insists again and agairi on the need ot preserving 
 our higher and nobler instincts from the contamination 
 of what is base, trivial, and worldly; the body must 
 be exercised into purity and vigour, and carefully safe 
 guarded against sloth, vice, and disease, and in like 
 manner, from an intellectual point of view, the mind 
 must be kept secure from the harmful and distracting 
 influences of conventionality and gossip. The extreme 
 delicacy of Thoreau s nature a delicacy which was 
 
" 
 
 i vf -var ^ 
 
 THOREAU. 157 
 
 sensitive almost to fastidiousness may be seen in the 
 sharp and perhaps too arbitrary contrast which he some 
 times draws between the spiritual and the animal instincts, 
 and especially in the tone of his remarks on the subject 
 of love. "The intercourse of the sexes," he says, "I 
 have dreamed, is incredibly beautiful, too fair to be 
 remembered. I have had thoughts about it, but they 
 are among the most fleeting and irrecoverable in my 
 experience. It is strange that men will talk of miracles, 
 revelation, inspiration, and the like, as things past while 
 love remains. Some have asked if the stock of men 
 could not be improved if they could not be bred as 
 cattle. Let Love be purified, and all the rest will follow. 
 A pure love is thus indeed the panacea for all the ills of 
 the world." 
 
 The eager self-seeking restlessness of modern society, 
 with its ignorance or disregard of the claims of thoughtful 
 repose, was summed up for Thoreau in the word " busi 
 ness." Nothing, in his opinion, not even crime, is so 
 much opposed to the poetry of life as "business," it is 
 "a negation " of life itself. Yet, as has already been said, 
 the leisure which he advocated as essential to the well- 
 being of every man was very different from idleness; 
 indeed there have been few writers who, both in word 
 and deed, have exhibited the value of time more power 
 fully than Thoreau. If he rejected "business " in its com 
 mercial and money-making aspect, he none the less 
 recognised that hard work is as important a discipline 
 for the mind and morals as exercise is for the body, and 
 that those who fail to support themselves by their own 
 labour are doing a wrong both to themselves and others. 
 For the same reason he urges on students and men of 
 
^58 LIFE OF 
 
 \ 
 
 sedentary habits the advisability of taking a share in the 
 simple common labours of everyday life, asserting that 
 ;"the student who secures his coveted leisure and retire 
 ment by systematically shirking any labour necessary to 
 man obtains but an ignoble and unprofitable leisure, 
 defrauding himself of the experience which alone can 
 make leisure fruitful." 
 
 We see, then, that Thoreau s first demand is for 
 leisure and elbow-room, that each individual mind, 
 instead of being crushed and warped in the struggle 
 of life, may have space to develop its own distinctive 
 qualities and follow the bent of its own natural tempera 
 ment. Never has there lived a more determined and 
 unalterable individualist. Everything, according to his 
 maxims, must be examined; nothing must be taken on 
 trust; he was, as Emerson calls him, "a protestant a 
 Foutraiice" and unhesitatingly rejected many Customs 
 which are supposed to have the sanction of experience 
 and tradition. He declared that after living some thTfty 
 years on this planet he had yet to hear a word of valuable 
 advice from his elders. When a young man of his 
 acquaintance professed a desire to adopt his mode of 
 life, his answer was that he would have each one find 
 out and pursue his own way, and not that of his father \ 
 or his neighbour. 
 
 It must not be supposed, however, that he wholly \ 
 ignored the possibility of wise co-operation on the , 
 contrary, he expressly states in Walden, when advocating 
 the adoption of a better system of village education, that 
 " to act collectively is according to the spirit of our 
 institutions;" and in the account of his Canadian tour, 
 when he describes the machine-like regularity with which 
 
_ 
 
 THOREAU. 159 
 
 >H7 y^ 
 
 the troops at Montreal went through their drill in Ijhe 
 Champ de Mars, he exclaims that a true co-operation 
 and harmony might be possible, "if men could combine 
 thus earnestly and patiently and harmoniously to some 
 really worthy end." But this seems to have been 
 nothing more than a distant anticipation; under present 
 conditions he considered that the best hope of society 
 lay in the progress and gradual perfecting of the indi 
 vidual man by his own personal effort. At a time when 
 Fourier s doctrines had obtained great hold in New 
 England, and when various schemes of co-operative 
 associations, by which society was to be entirely re 
 organised and regenerated, were being eagerly discussed, 
 it was inevitable that so shrewd and practical a thinker 
 as Thoreau should in spite of his idealism fall back 
 more and more on what he considered the solid basis 
 of individual independence. This view is stated very 
 clearly in his criticism of a volume entitled The Paradise 
 within the Reach of All Men, in which the magical 
 results of co-operation had been depicted in glowing 
 colours 
 
 "Alas ! this is the crying sin of the age, this want of faith in the 
 prevalence of a man. Nothing can be effected but by one man. 
 He who wants help wants everything. True, this is the condition of 
 our weakness, but it can never be the means of our recovery. We 
 must first succeed alone, that we may enjoy our success together. 
 We trust that the social movements which we witness indicate an 
 aspiration not to be thus cheaply satisfied. In this matter of 
 reforming the world we have little faith in corporations ; not thus 
 \vas it first formed. " * 
 
 Closely connected with this strong individualism are 
 Thoreau s anarchist doctrines. He regards all estab- 
 1 Democratic Review, November 1843. 
 
160 LIFE OF 
 
 lished government as, at best, a necessary evil, which 
 we must tolerate as we can during the present tran 
 sitional phase of human society, in the belief that the 
 ultimate condition of mankind will be, like the primitive, 
 one of individual liberty. Politics he set aside as 
 " unreal, incredible, and insignificant." " Blessed are the 
 young," was his new version of the Beatitudes, " for 
 they do not read the President s Message." For the 
 same reasons he expressed a strong dislike of the general 
 tone of the American press, which he considered, with a 
 few exceptions, to be venal and time-serving. In at 
 least two of his essays, the "Plea for Captain John 
 Brown" and "Slavery in Massachusetts," this feeling 
 finds an outlet in a fierce philippic against the hireling 
 journals which did not scruple to use their utmost 
 influence in the service of the slave-holding party. 
 
 Yet here too, as elsewhere, there is a danger of ex 
 aggerating the extent of Thoreau s lack of sympathy 
 with contemporary modes of thought. It is true he 
 preaches anarchism and civil disobedience; yet, under a 
 rough exterior, he loved his country well, and in his 
 peculiar way was perhaps as patriotic a citizen as any 
 , to be found in Massachusetts. He admits that the 
 1 American Government, though not an ideal one, is 
 igood enough when viewed from a lower than the ideal 
 ; standpoint, and more than once expresses his own 
 desire to be a peaceable and law-abiding citizen. Morc- 
 >ver, in spite of his contempt for politics and politicians, 
 does not deny that "countless reforms are called for," 
 md shows that he is aware that the condition of the 
 working classes is destined to be the paramount question 
 of the age. But all his social doctrines point finally to 
 
THOREAU. 1G1 
 
 this end that the path must be left clear for the free 
 development of individual character. 
 
 "There will never be a really free and enlightened State," he 
 says, f until the State comes to recognise the individual as a higher 
 and independent power, from which all its own power and authority 
 are derived, and treats him accordingly. I please myself with 
 imagining a State at last which can afford to be just to all men, 
 and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbour ; which 
 even would not think it inconsistent with its own repose, if a few 
 were to live aloof from it, not meddling with it, nor embraced by 
 it, who fulfilled all the duties of neighbours and fellow-men. A 
 State which bore this kind of fruit, and suffered it to drop off as 
 fast as it ripened, would prepare the way for a still more perfect 
 and glorious State, which also I have imagined, but not yet any 
 where seen." 1 
 
 Society then is to be reformed, according to Thoreau s 
 doctrine, by individual effort, and the gospel which he 
 preaches to the individual is that of simplicity. Simpli 
 fication of life (by which is meant a questioning, and 
 perhaps rejection, of the various artificial " comforts " 
 and luxuries, and a dependence only on the actual 
 necessaries food, shelter, clothing, and fuel) is re 
 peatedly advocated by Thoreau, from his own practical 
 experience, as lending strength, courage, and self-reliance 
 to the individual character, and so, in proportion to the 
 extent of its practice, to the State. It must be repeated 
 that this doctrine, however strange and unpalatable it 
 may be to the popular mood, is not that of an ascetic. 
 The simplicity which Thoreau inculcates does not, like 
 asceticism, renounce the luxuries of life by way of a 
 religious penance, but because it is convinced that life, 
 
 1 " Resistance to Civil Government," /Esthetic Papers, Boston, 
 1849. 
 
 1 1 
 
162 LIFE OF 
 
 on the whole, is healthier and happier without them. 
 What he urges is not that men should deny themselves 
 certain comforts while they still believe them to be 
 comforts, but that in each case they should test the 
 truth by practical experience, and not continue to regard 
 as necessaries many things which a day s trial would 
 prove to be superfluous and perhaps actually harmful. 
 This distinction between a natural taste and an acquired 
 habit is a vital one, yet it is generally overlooked by the 
 opponents of Thoreau s philosophy. He laughs at the 
 absurdity of those writers who talk of the usefulness of 
 " artificial wants " in drawing out the resources of nature, 
 since every artificial want must of necessity bring with 
 it its own Nemesis of proportionally increased toil; 
 whereas, on the contrary, the practice of hardihood and 
 frugality is productive of health, independence, and 
 restfulness both . to body and mind. In a word, the 
 simplicity which he preaches is based not on the repres 
 sion, but rather on the better gratification, of the true 
 pleasures of existence. Which is the more enjoyable to 
 indulge the spiritual instinct or the sensual? Let each 
 man make his own choice; but let him at least be sure 
 that he is really following his own tastes, and not merely 
 conforming to the dictates of custom and tradition. 
 
 The charge often made against Thoreau, that he is in 
 opposition to the course of onodern progress, and prefers 
 savagery to civilisation, is only tenable on a very short 
 sighted and perfunctory view of the meaning of his 
 gospel. He himself notes in his diary that his lectures 
 used to call forth such inquiries as " Would you have us 
 return to the savage state ? " a misconception of his 
 meaning which was doubtless rendered more general 
 
THOREAU. 163 
 
 by his brevity of speech, epigrammatic tone, and char 
 acteristic unwillingness to explain himself. But a careful 
 study of his writings as a whole, and of Walden in parti 
 cular, can leave us in no doubt as to his true position on 
 this point. He expressly states his belief that civilisation 
 is a real advance in the condition of mankind, and that 
 the farmer displaces the Indian "because he redeems 
 the meadow, and so makes himself stronger and in some 
 respects more natural." But, while making this admis 
 sion, he points out what is too often overlooked by com 
 fortable statisticians, that, though the majority of civilised 
 men are better situated than the savage, there is a 
 minority which is not so. He asserts, then, that the 
 problem to which we should apply ourselves is how " to 
 combine the hardiness of the savage with the intellectual- 
 ness of the civilised man." When he inveighs against 
 the numerous follies, and defects, and diseases observable 
 in civilisation, he does so, not because he doubts or 
 denies its superiority to the savage state, but because 
 (to quote his own words) he wishes " to show at what a 
 sacrifice this advantage is at present obtained, and to 
 suggest that we may possibly so live as to secure all the 
 advantage without suffering any of the disadvantage." 
 
 In the same connection it should be noted that 
 Thoreau exhibits no reactionary feeling against the 
 strides made by science and modern mechanical inven 
 tion, however strongly he may protest against the un 
 necessary desecration of natural scenery. He descants 
 on the enterprise, courage, and alertness of commerce, 
 which goes steadily on its path undismayed and un 
 hindered by the obstacles of climate and season, and 
 declares that it cheered him in his Walflen hermitage 
 
164 LIFE OF 
 
 when he heard the train rattle past each morning on its 
 road to Boston. All he. desiderates is a worthier object 
 as the end and aim of so much toil and industry. Nor 
 was he, as some have supposed, an enemy to art, though 
 he may have been, as Emerson says, "insensible to some 
 fine traits of culture." He did not wish to banish 
 ornament from our dwellings, except such as is external 
 and superficial, a mere conventional and fashionable 
 appendage, instead of what it should be, a simple and 
 natural growth. 
 
 It may here be worth while to inquire how far these" 
 principles of individualism and simplicity were meant by 
 Thoreau to be applied, and how far they were rightly 
 applicable, to the social question of his time. There is 
 no indication whatever in any of his writings that he 
 intended his doctrines to be understood, directly and 
 literally, as containing a panacea for human ills ; he 
 did not wish his fellow-beings to leave their towns and 
 villages in order to live in shanties, nor was he under 
 
 /the impression, as some of his critics would have us 
 believe, that the inhabitants of crowded cities were free 
 to march out and live in blissful seclusion in some neigh 
 bouring wood. Thoreau, whatever the limitations of 
 his genius may have been, was a shrewd and clear 
 sighted man; and if any of his readers find themselves 
 attributing to him such ineptitudes as those just men 
 tioned, they may feel assured that the misunderstanding 
 is on their own side, and that by lack of sympathy they 
 have failed to grasp his true meaning. It should be 
 remembered that he wrote primarily and immediately 
 for his own fellow-citizens of Concord and a limited 
 New England audience; and, further, that the social 
 
THOREAU. 165 
 
 problem was far less difficult and complex at that time 
 in New England than it is now after a lapse of thirty or 
 forty years. Extreme poverty "was a rare exception and 
 not a normal condition among the peasantry of Concord; 
 there was more elbow-room and opportunity for indi 
 vidual effort than in an English country town, so that 
 an example such as that set by Thoreau was not by any 
 means the impossibility which it would have been in 
 other places and under other circumstances. As a 
 matter of fact, he seldom recommended his own way 
 of living to his neighbours or fellow-townsmen, being \ 
 convinced that each man must shape his own career; j 
 though in one or two cases, as in the conversation with 
 a thriftless Irish labourer, recorded in Walden, we find 
 him pointing out the advantages of a frugal diet, since 
 those who can dispense with tea, coffee, butter, milk, 
 and flesh-meat can also spare themselves the heavy 
 labour which is required to purchase these unnecessary 
 "comforts/ But in so far as Thoreau addressed his 
 doctrines to the general public, it was distinctly not with 
 the intent of persuading them to live as he did, but 
 in the hope of stimulating independent thought by the 
 force of his example and admonition, and of drawing 
 attention to those simple common-sense principles 
 without which there can be no lasting health or con 
 tentment either for individual or community. 
 
 Mr. Stevenson has remarked of Thoreau that in his 
 whole works one can find no trace of pity. If it were 
 possible at all to maintain this assertion, it could only be 
 in the limited sense that he dwells usually on the iniquity 
 of the wrong-doer rather than on the feelings of the 
 sufferer; he does not, for instance, express his pity for 
 
166 LIFE OF 
 
 the slave (though we know from the accounts already 
 quoted how strong his pity was), but he shows it in a 
 more practical form by his attitude towards the slave 
 holder. It is true that, with his characteristic dislike of 
 system, he disclaims any distinct theory of compassion, 
 while his optimistic belief in the beneficence of nature 
 prevents him from repining at the mere existence of 
 suffering and wrong. Nevertheless, Thoreau is himself 
 one of the humanest of writers, and has contributed to the 
 literature of humanitarianism some of its most striking 
 protests. His detestation of war was shown in his refusal 
 to pay the poll-tax at the time when the United States 
 made an unjustifiable attack on Mexico. He declares 
 fighting to be "a damnable business," and at variance 
 with the will and conscience of those compelled to 
 engage in it "soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, 
 powder-monkeys, and all." Of his opinions concerning 
 slaveholding it is not necessary to say more; but there 
 is a remarkable saying of his about John Brown which 
 deserves to be quoted in this connection. Noting the 
 fact that Brown had not received a college education, 
 but had studied Liberty in "the great University of the 
 West," he adds : " Such were his humanities, and not any 
 study of grammar. He would have left a Greek accent 
 slanting the wrong way, and righted up a falling man." 
 It would be well if all our professors and students of 
 lilerce. humaniores would lay this admirable sentiment to 
 heart. 
 
 Humanity to animals was one of the most conspicuous 
 virtues in Thoreau s character, and is constantly, if 
 indirectly, advocated in his writings. His conception of 
 the animal races has been described as "a sort of mystic 
 
THOREAU. 167 
 
 evolution." Thus he regards the foxes as "rudimental 
 burrowing men, still standing on their defence, awaiting 
 their transformation ; " while the dog is to the fox as the 
 white man to the red. The horse appears to him as a 
 human being in a humble state of existence, and the 
 human way in which the oxen behave when loosed from 
 the yoke at evening affects him pathetically. The wild 
 shaggy moose in the Maine forests are "moose-men, clad 
 in a sort of Vermont gray or homespun," and he expresses 
 respect even for the skunk, for its suggested resemblance 
 to one of the human aborigines of the country. In 
 dividuality is recognised and respected by him in the 
 non-human no less than the human races ; he complains 
 of man s "not educating the horse, not trying to develop 
 bis nature, but merely getting work out of him." It was 
 this sense of brotherhood, as I have already remarked, 
 which gave Thoreau his extraordinary power over beasts 
 and birds ; and his singular humanity to animals is due 
 to the same source. During the greater part of his life 
 he was a vegetarian in practice, and in Walden has made 
 profession of his faith in the humanities of diet. 
 
 His position as a naturalist was strongly influenced by 
 the same humane sentiments. His methods were not 
 those of the anatomist and man of science ; he held that 
 "nature must be viewed humanly to be viewed at all, 
 that is, her scenes must be associated with humane 
 affections ; " she was to him a living entity, to be loved 
 and reverenced, and not a subject for cold and unim- 
 passioned observation. Accordingly, in his remarks on 
 nature and natural history there is a decided prevalence 
 of that peculiarly introspective and moralising mood, 
 characteristic of the poet-naturalist as distinct from the 
 
168 LIFE OF 
 
 scientist, which seeks to transmute the mere facts and 
 results of external observation into symbolical thoughts 
 } and images which may illustrate the life of man. It is 
 this human self-consciousness that differentiates Thoreau 
 from the naturalist and observer pure and simple, such 
 as Gilbert White. It has been remarked by Mr. John 
 Burroughs that it was super-natural rather than natural 
 history that Thoreau studied, and that he made no 
 discoveries of importance in the scientific field because 
 he looked through nature instead of at her, and was 
 " more intent on the natural history of his own thought 
 than on that of the bird." 
 
 It is no doubt true that Thoreau s keenness of vision 
 was generally in proportion to the interest of the subject 
 with which he had to deal ; he saw what, he already had 
 in mind His observations, however, are not the less 
 important because they differ from those acquired by 
 the ordinary method ; on the contrary, they are more 
 valuable on that account, inasmuch as the poet is higher 
 and rarer than the naturalist. Nathaniel Hawthorne 
 has recorded how Thoreau was enabled by this inner 
 faculty to see the water-lily as few others could see it ; 
 "he has beheld beds of them unfolding in due suc 
 cession as the sunrise stole gradually from flowei to 
 flower a sight not to be hoped for, unless when a poet 
 adjusts his inward eye to a proper focus with the outward 
 organ." This idealist quality constitutes the peculiar pro 
 perty of Thoreau s teaching on the subject of nature; 
 but that it did not disqualify him from doing good service 
 as a scientific observer may be gathered from the remark 
 able tribute which has been paid to him by one of 
 Darwin s interpreters : 
 
THOREAU 169 
 
 "Like no one else, he knew the meaning of every note and 
 movement of bird and beast, and fish and insect. Born out of due 
 time, just too early for the great change in men s views of nature 
 which transferred all interest in outer life from the mere dead 
 things one sees in museums to their native habits and modes of 
 living, he was yet in some sort a vague and mystical anticipatory 
 precursor of the modern school of functional biologists. . , . Page 
 after page of his diary notes facts about the pollen showers of pine- 
 trees, the fertilisation of skunk-cabbage, the nesting of birds, the 
 preferences of mink or musk-rat, the courtship of butterflies, all of 
 a piece with those minute observations on which naturalists now 
 adays build their most interesting theories." 1 
 
 The conclusion ot our view of Thoreau s doctrines 
 thus brings us back to the contention with which we 
 started. He was an idealist who looked through the 
 outer husk and surface of life, and saw the true reality in 
 what to most men is but a vision and a dream. He had 
 in large measure what Emerson calls " the philosopher s 
 perception of identity " ; the phenomena of time and 
 space did not affect him Walden Pond was to him an 
 Atlantic Ocean, a moment was eternity. The means on 
 which he relies for the correction of popular delusions 
 are the independence of the individual mind, and, those 
 simple, practical modes of living which alone can keep a 
 man independent. Finally, for all his asperity of tone 
 in the reproof of what he considered to be blameworthy, 
 he was a firm believer in the gradual progress and 
 ultimate renovation of mankind, being convinced that 
 improvement is "the only excuse for reproduction." It 
 was no cynical or misanthropic faith that found ex 
 pression in his writings. 
 
 1 Grant Allen, Fyrtnightly Review, May 1888. 
 
CHAPTER X. 
 
 HP HE lack of system which is noticeable in Thoreau s 
 character may be traced in the style of his writings 
 as plainly as in his philosophical views. He was not 
 careful as to the outer form and finish of his works, for 
 he believed that the mere literary contour is of quite 
 secondary importance in comparison with the inner 
 animating spirit; let the worthiness of the latter once be 
 assured, and the former will fall naturally into its proper 
 shape. Furthermore, although, as we have seen, writing 
 was more and more recognised by him as his profession 
 in his later years, he was at all times conscious of a fuller 
 and higher calling than that of the literary man as he 
 valued nature before art, so he valued life before litera- 
 ture. He both preached and practised a combination of 
 literary work and manual; of the pen and of the spade; 
 of the study and of the open sky. He protested against 
 that tendency in our civilisation which carries division of 
 labour to such an extent that the student is deprived of 
 healthy out-door work, while the labourer is deprived 
 of opportunity for self-culture. He imagines the case of 
 some literary professor, who sits in his library writing 
 a treatise on the huckleberry, while hired huckleberry- 
 pickers and cooks are engaged in the task of preparing 
 him a pudding of the berries. A book written under 
 
LIFE OF THOREAU. 171 
 
 such conditions will be worthless. " There will be none 
 of the spirit of the huckleberry in it. I believe in a 
 different kind of division of labour, and that the professor 
 should divide himself between the library and the huckle 
 berry field." His opinions on the subject of literary 
 style are clearly stated in The Week, and are no doubt 
 in great measure a record of his own practice : 
 
 "Can there be any greater reproach than an idle learning? 
 Learn to split wood at least. The necessity of labour and conver 
 sation with many men and things to the scholar is rarely well 
 remembered ; steady labour with the hands, which engrosses the 
 attention also, is unquestionably the best method of removing 
 palaver and sentimentality out of one s style, both of speaking and 
 writing. If he has worked hard from morning till night, though 
 he may have grieved that he could not be watching the train of his 
 thoughts during that time, yet the few hasty lines which at evening 
 record his day s experience will be more musical and true than his 
 freest but idle fancy could have furnished. Surely the writer is to 
 address a world of labourers, and such therefore must be his own 
 discipline. He will not idly dance at his work who has wood to 
 cut and cord before nightfall in the short days of winter, but every 
 stroke will be husbanded, and ring soberly through the wood; and 
 so will the strokes of that scholar s pen, which at evening record the 
 story of. the day, ring soberly, yet cheerily, on the ear of the reader, 
 long after the echoes of his axe have died away." 
 
 Such were, in fact, the conditions under which Thoreau 
 wrote many of the pages of the journal from which his 
 own essays were constructed; and, whatever may be 
 thought of the force of his general principle, there can be 
 no doubt that in his particular case the result was very 
 felicitous. It was his pleasure and his determination 
 that his writing should be redolent of the open-air 
 scenery by which it was primarily inspired. "I trust," 
 
172 LIFE OF 
 
 - he says of The Week (and the same may be said of all 
 his volumes), " it does not smell so much of the study 
 and library, even of the poet s attic, as of the fields and 
 
 I woods; that it is a hypcethral or unroofed book, lying 
 open under the ether, and permeated by it, open to all 
 weathers, not easy to be kept on a shelf." In this way 
 Thoreau added a new flavour to literature by the un 
 studied freshness and wildness of his tone, and succeeded 
 best where he made least effort to be successful. " It is 
 only out of the fulness of thinking," says Mr. R. L. 
 Stevenson, "that expression drops perfect like a ripe 
 fruit; and when Thoreau wrote so nonchalantly at his 
 desk, it was because he had been vigorously active 
 during his walk." Even Mr. Lowell, a far less friendly 
 critic, is compelled, on this point, to express his admira 
 tion " With every exception, there is no writing 
 comparable with Thoreau s in kind that is comparable 
 with it in degree, where it is best. His range was 
 narrow, but to be a master is to be a master. There are 
 sentences of his as perfect as anything in the language, 
 and thoughts as clearly crystallised; his metaphors and 
 images are always fresh from the soil/ 
 
 This success, although naturally and unconsciously 
 attained, had of course been rendered possible in the 
 first instance by an honest course of study; for Thoreau, 
 like every other master of literary expression, had passed 
 through his strict apprenticeship of intellectual labour. 
 Though comparatively indifferent to modern languages, 
 
 \ he was familiar with the best classical writers of Greece 
 
 ; and Rome, and his style was partly formed on models 
 drawn from one of the great eras in English literature, 
 the post-Elizabethan period. It is a noticeable fact that 
 
THOREAU. 173 
 
 " mother-tongue" was a word which he loved to use even 
 in his college days; and the homely native vigour of his 
 own writings was largely due to the sympathetic industry 
 with which he had laboured in these quiet but fertile 
 fields. Nor must it be supposed, because he did not 
 elaborate his work according to the usual canons, that 
 he was a careless or indolent writer on the contrary, 
 it was his habit to correct his manuscripts with unfailing 
 diligence. He deliberately examined and re-examined 
 each sentence of his journal before admitting it into the 
 essays which he sent to the printer, finding that a certain 
 lapse of time was necessary before he could arrive at 
 a satisfactory decision His absolute sincerity showed 
 itself as clearlyin_the style orchis writing as in the 
 manner of his life. "The one great rule of composition 
 and if I were a professor of rhetoric I should insist 
 on this is to speak the truth. This first, this second, 
 -this third/ 
 
 \/ In his choice of subjects it was the common that 
 most often enlisted his sympathy and attention. " Tlie 
 theme," he - says, " is nothing ; the life is everything. 
 Give me simple, cheap, and homely themes. I omit 
 the unusual the hurricanes and earthquakes, and de 
 scribe the common. This has the greatest charm, and 
 is the true theme of poetry. Give me the obscure life, 
 the cottage of the poor and humble, the work-days of 
 the world, the barren fields." But while he took these 
 as the subjects for his pen, he so idealised and trans 
 formed them by the power of his imagination as to 
 present them in aspects altogether novel and unsus 
 pected ; it being his delight to bring to view the latent 
 harmony and beauty of all existent things, and thus 
 
 k "trfrttihui 
 
 ^ *~*~^ \: 
 
174 LIFE OF 
 
 indirectly to demonstrate the unity and perfection of 
 nature. 
 
 Numerous passages might be quoted from Thoreau s 
 works which exhibit these picturesque and suggestive 
 qualities. He had a poet s eye for all forms of beauty, 
 moral and material alike, and for the subtle analogies 
 that exist between the one class and the other in a 
 word, he was possessed of a most vivid and quickening 
 imagination. His_iinages etn4 m^tepkots axe___bold, 
 novel, and impressive ns when, to take but a couple 
 of instances, he alludes to the lost anchors of vessels 
 wrecked off the coast of Cape Cod as " the sunken faith 
 and hope of mariners, to which they trusted in vain ; " 
 or describes the autumnal warmth on the sheltered 
 side of Walden as "the still glowing embers which the 
 summer, like a departing hunter, had left." And, with 
 all his simplicity and directness of speech, he has an 
 unconscious, almost mystic, eloquence which stamps 
 him unmistakably as an inspired writer, a man of true 
 and rare genius ; so that it has been well said of him 
 that " he lived and died to transfuse external nature 
 into human words." In this respect his position among 
 prose-writers is unique; no one, unless it be Richard 
 Jcfferies, can be placed in the same category with him. 
 
 In so far as he studied the external form of his 
 writings, the aim and object which Thoreau set before 
 -him may be summed up in one word concentration. 
 He avows his delight in sentences which are " concen 
 trated and nutty." The distinctive feature of his own 
 literary style could not have been more accurately de 
 scribed. The brief, barbed, epigrammatic sentences 
 which bristle throughout his writings, pungent with 
 
THOREA U. 
 
 - 
 
 shrewd wisdom and humour, are the appropriate 
 
 expression of his keen thrifty nature; there is not a 
 superfluous word or syllable, but each passage goes 
 straight to the mark, and tells its tale, as the work of a 
 man who has some more urgent duty to perform than to i 
 adorn his pages with artificial tropes and embellishments. . 
 He is fond of surprising and challenging his readers by 
 the piquancy and strangeness of his sayings, and his 
 use of paradox is partly due to the same desire to 
 stimulate and awaken curiosity, partly to his wayward 
 and contradictory nature. The dangers afttMclemerits 
 of a paradoxical style are sufficiently obvious ; and no 
 writer has ever been less careful than Thoreau to safe 
 guard himself against misunderstandings on this score. 
 He has consequently been much misunderstood, and will 
 always be so, save where the reader brings to his task 
 a certain amount of sympathy and kindred sense of 
 humour. 
 
 To those who are not gifted with the same sense of 
 the inner identity which links together many things that 
 are externally unlike, some of Thdreau s thoughts and 
 sayings must necessarily appear tcybe a fair subject for 
 ridicule. Yet that he she#W~trave been charged with 
 possessing no " humour " would be inexplicable, save for 
 the fact that the definitions of that quality are so various 
 and so vague. Broad wit and mirthful genial humour 
 he certainly had not, and he confessedly disliked writings 
 in which there is a conscious and deliberate attempt to/ 
 be amusing. He found Rabelais, for instance, intolerable; 
 " it may be sport to him," he says, " but it is death to us; 
 a mere humorist, indeed, is a most unhappy man, and 
 his readers are most unhappy also." But though he 
 
176 LIFE OF 
 
 would not or could not recognise humour as a distinct 
 and independent quality, and even attempted, as we are 
 told, to eliminate what he considered " levity " from some 
 of his essays, he none the less enjoyed keenly and him 
 self unmistakably exhibited the quiet, latent, unobtru 
 sive humour which is one of the wholesome and saving 
 principles of human life. Among Thoreau s own writings, 
 Walden is especially pervaded by this subtle sense of 
 humour, grave, dry, pithy, sententious, almost saturnine 
 in its tone, yet perhaps for that very reason the more 
 racy and suggestive to those readers who have the faculty 
 for appreciating it. 
 
 It has been remarked that it is impossible to classify 
 Thoreau "he cannot be called a man of science, he 
 cannot be called a poet, he cannot even be called a 
 prose poet." 1 If classification of any kind be desirable 
 in the case of such a protestant and free-lance, he should 
 probably be called an essayist with a strong didactic 
 tendency. He could not, as his friend Charming 
 observes, " mosaic " his essays, but preferred to give 
 himself free play by throwing them into the narrative 
 and autobiographical form. The Week and Walden, 
 the two volumes which were published in his lifetime, 
 are both framed on this principle, a more or less slight 
 record of personal experience being made the peg on 
 which to hang a great deal of ethical moralising and 
 speculation. Apart from all question of the value of 
 the opinions advanced, the charm of those books lies 
 mainly in their intellectual alertness, keen spiritual 
 insight, and brilliant touches of picturesque description. 
 Few authors have created such a rich store of terse 
 1 Athenaum, October 1882. 
 
THOREAU. 177 
 
 felicitous apothegms, or have drawn such vivid and 
 sympathetic sketches of natural scenery. Numerous 
 examples of his laconic incisive utterances have already 
 been incidentally quoted. Here is a characteristic open- 
 air picture of a bright breezy day on the Concord river, 
 where he spent so much of his time 
 
 " Many waves are there agitated by the wind, keeping nature 
 fresh, the spray blowing in your face, reeds and rushes waving; 
 ducks by the hundred, all uneasy in the surf, in the raw wind, just 
 ready to rise, and now going off with a clatter and a whistling like 
 riggers straight for Labrador, flying against the stiff gale with 
 reefed wings, or else circling round first with all their paddles 
 briskly moving, just over the surf, to reconnoitre you before they 
 leave these parts ; gulls wheeling overhead ; musk-rats swimming 
 for dear life, wet and cold, with no fire to warm them by that you 
 know of, their laboured homes rising here and there like haystacks; 
 and countless mice and moles and winged titmice along the sunny 
 windy shore ; cranberries tossed on the waves and heaving up on 
 the beach, their little red skiffs beating about among the alders ; 
 such healthy natural tumult as proves the last day is not yet at 
 hand. And there stand all around the alders and birches and oaks 
 and maples full of glee and sap, holding in their buds until the 
 waters subside." 
 
 Here, too, to show the more human side of Thoreau s 
 genius, is one of the picturesque character-sketches which 
 are far from uncommon in his writings 
 
 " I can just remember an old brown-coated man who was the 
 Walton of this stream, who had come over from Newcastle, Eng 
 land, with his son the latter a stout and hearty man who had lifted 
 an anchor in his day. A straight old man he was, who took his 
 way in silence through the meadows, having passed the period of 
 communication with his fellows; his old experienced coat, hanging 
 long and straight and brown as the yellow-pine bark, glittering 
 with so much smothered sunlight, if you stood near enough, no 
 work of art but naturalised at length. I often discovered him 
 
 12 
 
178 LIFE OF 
 
 unexpectedly amid the pads and the gray willows when he moved, 
 fishing in some old country method for youth and age then went 
 a-fishing together full of incommunicable thoughts, perchance 
 about his own Tyne and Northumberland. lie was always to be 
 seen in serene afternoons haunting the river, and almost rustling 
 with the sedge; so many sunny hours in an old man s life, entrap 
 ping silly fish ; almost grown to be the sun s familiar ; what need 
 had he of hat or raiment any, having served out his time, and seen 
 through such thin disguises. I have seen how his coeval fates 
 rewarded him with the yellow perch, and yet I thought his luck 
 was not in proportion to his years ; and I have seen when, with 
 slow steps and weighed down with aged thoughts, he disappeared 
 with his fish under his low-roofed house on the skirts of the village. 
 I think nobody else saw him ; nobody else remembers him now, for 
 he soon after died, and migrated to new Tyne streams. His fishing 
 was not a sport, not solely a means of subsistence, but a sort of 
 solemn sacrament and withdrawal from the world, just as the aged 
 read their Bibles." 
 
 Those of Thoreau s shorter essays which deal with 
 natural history and outdoor life are to be found reprinted 
 in Excursions^ a volume published the year after his 
 death, with the well-known prefatory memoir by Emerson. 
 These Excursions have been described as " landscapes in 
 miniature, embracing every feature of New England 
 summers and winters." 1 There is a wild, racy, inde 
 finable charm about them which is all their own; they 
 are by no means well "finished " and rounded off, when 
 viewed from an artistic or shall we say artificial 
 standpoint; for Thoreau here loves to gossip on without 
 regard to the laws of essay-writing, and will not deny 
 himself the pleasure of quoting largely, when the whim 
 takes him, from his favourite poets, or from the old 
 prose chroniclers who wrote of the places which he 
 
 1 Professor Nichol s American Literature. 
 
Til ORE A U, 179 
 
 visited, nor will he spare the minutest details which 
 concern his own experiences. Yet the final effect is 
 altogether delightful; and no reader who has once 
 caught and appreciated the rare mystic flavour of these 
 wildlings of literature could ever regret that they were 
 not subjected to the conventional pruning. They can 
 no more be taken to the literary market and weighed 
 in the critical balance than their prototype the " wild 
 apple," which furnished Thoreau with some of his 
 choicest themes. 
 
 The " Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers," which were 
 first included in the Yankee in Canada volume, and 
 afterwards in the Miscellanies, are more direct and 
 didactic in aim than the Excursions. Some of 
 Thoreau s most brilliant and pungent sayings are to 
 be found in these essays, of which the very best are 
 the " Plea for John Brown," the most impassioned of 
 all his writings, and " Life without Principle," which 
 conveys in brief form the substance of his protest against 
 the follies of modern society. 
 
 The original source which provided material for all 
 these essays and volumes was the daily journal, which 
 was kept by Thoreau with great fulness and regularity 
 from 1837, the year when he left college, to a short time 
 before his death in 1862, and amounted in all to no less 
 than thirty large volumes. This diary formed a complete 
 chronicle of his outward and inward life, and was not a 
 mere collection of chance jottings, but a private auto 
 biography, written throughout with the utmost serious 
 ness and devotion, useful not only as a record of facts 
 and thoughts, but also as a means of stimulating further 
 meditations. 
 
180 LIFE OF 
 
 We have seen, in the story of Thoreau s life, how his 
 daily walks were not, as with most men, a time of leisure 
 and recreation, but an essential part of his day s work 
 and of his duties as poet-naturalist. He went to hill-top, 
 or forest, or swamp, or river-bank, not as an aimless 
 wanderer seeking to while away an afternoon, but as 
 an inspector going his rounds; and he paid his visits 
 deliberately and on principle to such animals, birds, 
 nests, trees, or flowers as he happened to have under 
 observation. He took notes on the spot, even when he 
 walked, as was frequently the case, in the night-time; 
 and on his return home he expanded these notes into 
 graphic descriptions, interspersed with appropriate medi 
 tations, which sometimes, in the earlier volumes of the 
 journal, took the form of verse. His notes on natural 
 history constitute a large portion of the diary, and are 
 often tinged with that tone of mysticism which so largely 
 dominated his character. 
 
 From this journal Thoreau drew freely when preparing 
 his essays or lectures, as the case might be; but, before 
 being given to the world, every passage and sentence 
 underwent further careful revision. After his death 
 the unpublished manuscripts and diaries remained for 
 fourteen years in the charge of his sister Sophia, who, 
 at her death in 1876, bequeathed them to her brother s 
 friend and correspondent, Mr. Blake. 1 Portions of the 
 journal have since been edited by Mr. Blake in four 
 
 1 Soon after Thoreau s death there was a talk of publishing the 
 complete journal, but Sophia Thoreau could not make up her mind 
 to it, and the plan was dropped. In 1866 she wrote to a friend : 
 " These papers are very sacred to me, and I feel inclined to defer 
 giving them to the public for the present." 
 
THOREAU. 181 
 
 volumes, under the titles of Early Spring in Massachusetts, 
 Summer, Autumn, and Winter, various passages, written 
 in different years, being grouped together according to the 
 days on which they were written, so as to give a connected 
 picture of the seasons. This arrangement was apparently 
 foreshadowed by Thoreau, who makes a note in his 
 journal of " a book of the seasons, each page of which 
 should be written in its own season and out of doors, or 
 in its own locality, wherever it may be." The years 
 represented in these volumes are mostly between 1850 
 and 1860, the Walden period having presumably been 
 almost exhausted by Thoreau himself. It has been 
 noticed by a writer in the Academy, 1884, that the pub 
 lished journal contains no dates between loth April and 
 ist June. This deficiency is, however, to some extent 
 supplied by the extracts given in the Atlantic Monthly 
 in 1878 under the titles "April Days" and "May Days." 
 A volume of Thoreau s Letters was edited by Emerson 
 in 1865. He was not what is known as a "regular" 
 correspondent, and the number of his extant letters is 
 not very great. " Not to have written a note for a year," 
 he said, "is with me a very venial offence. Some are 
 accustomed to write many letters, others very few; I am 
 one of the last." The letters included in the volume of 
 1865 are, as a rule, much more severely transcendental 
 in tone than the essays and diaries "abominably 
 didactic," Charming called them and their seriousness 
 is seldom relieved by the keen humour of Walden. It 
 seems that Emerson, in selecting them, made it his 
 object to exhibit a " perfect piece of stoicism," and 
 therefore inserted only a few of the domestic letters, 
 which showed the other and tenderer side of Thoreau s 
 
182 LIFE OF 
 
 character an arrangement which was justly described 
 by Sophia Thoreau as not quite fair to her brother. 
 This one-sided impression has now been corrected by 
 the volume of Familiar Letters, edited by Mr. Sanborn 
 in 1894, which gives a far wider and fairer idea of the 
 scope of Thoreau s character. 
 
 Last in the list of Thoreau s writings there remains 
 to be considered his poetry. Strictly speaking, he can 
 hardly be called a poet at all, for, though he had a 
 large gift of the poetic inspiration, he lacked the lyrical 
 lire and melodious utterance which are at least equally 
 indispensable to the creation of a true poem; his verses 
 are therefore interesting less for their own intrinsic 
 value than for the light they indirectly throw on his 
 personality and genius. The description which Emerson 
 gave of his own poetic talent may be applied totidon 
 verbis to that of Thoreau. " I am born a poet of a low 
 class without a doubt, yet a poet. My singing, be sure, 
 is very husky, and is for the most part in prose. Still, 
 I am a poet in the sense of a perceiver and dear lover 
 of the harmonies that are in the soul and in matter, 
 and specially of the correspondence between these and 
 
 Thoreau s poems were mostly written from 1837 to 
 1847, when he was between twenty and thirty years of 
 age. It was his method to jot down in his journal 
 a stanza or two from time to time, and afterwards to 
 combine these scattered pieces into a connected poem, 
 each verse of which would thus be brief, pointed, and 
 sententious. He had been strongly influenced by his 
 early readings in the seventeenth-century school, and the 
 resemblance in his style to that of Herbert, Cowley, and 
 
THOREAV. lg$ 
 
 other writers of that era is very striking, his poetry being 
 distinctly of the same gnomic order, abounding in quaint 
 conceits, thrifty maxims, and elaborate antitheses, with 
 here and there a dainty stanza or series of stanzas, 
 marked by deep insight and felicitous expression. His 
 idea of the poet s vocation is characteristic. The poet is 
 "no tender slip of fairy stock, but the toughest son of 
 earth and heaven, and by his greater strength and 
 endurance his fainting companions will recognise the 
 god in him. He will hit the nail on the head, and we 
 shall not know the strength of his hammer." Thus in 
 his poems he is less the artist than the moralist; but the 
 delicacy and nobility of the thought often lift the rough 
 unpolished lines out of the region of commonplace, and 
 make them pleasing and memorable. Take, for instance, 
 this fine piece of blank verse from the " Natural History 
 of Massachusetts " (1842) 
 
 " Within the circuit of this plodding life, 
 There enter moments of an azure hue, 
 Untarnished fair as is the violet 
 Or anemone, when the spring strews them 
 By some meandering rivulet, which make 
 The best philosophy untrue that aims 
 But to console man for his grievances. 
 I have remembered when the winter came, 
 High in my chamber in the frosty nights, 
 When in the still light of the cheerful moon, 
 On every twig and rail and jutting spout, 
 The icy spears were adding to their length 
 Against the arrows of the coming sun, 
 How in the shimmering noon of summer past 
 Some unrecorded beam slanted across 
 The upland pastures where the Johnswort grew; 
 Or heard, amid the verdure of my mind, 
 
184 LIFE OF 
 
 The bee s long smothered hum, on the blue flag 
 
 Loitering amidst the mead ; or busy rill, 
 
 Which now through all its course stands still and dumb, 
 
 Its own memorial, purling at its play 
 
 Along the slopes, and through the meadows next, 
 
 Until its youthful sound was hushed at last 
 
 In the staid current of the lowland stream ; 
 
 Or seen the furrows shine but late upturned, 
 
 And where the fieldfare followed in the rear, 
 
 When all the fields around lay bound and hoar 
 
 Beneath a thick integument of snow. 
 
 So by God s cheap economy made rich, 
 
 To go upon my winter s task again." 
 
 Many of Thoreau s early poems found publication in 
 the Dial, and met with much ridicule in critical and 
 anti-transcendental circles; we are told that an un 
 quenchable laughter, "like that of the gods at Vulcan s 
 limping, went up over his ragged and halting lines." 
 He afterwards included some of these pieces in The 
 Week and other prose volumes, preferring, after the dis 
 continuance of the Dial, not to publish them separately, 
 but "as choruses or hymns or word-pictures, to illustrate 
 the movement of his thought." He told a friend during 
 his last illness that he had destroyed many of his verses 
 because Emerson did not praise them, an act which he 
 afterwards regretted. A large number of Thoreau s 
 poems may be found in The Week, and a few were 
 reprinted by Emerson in an appendix to the volume of 
 Letters; but the first collection that can at all claim to 
 be a representative one is that published in 1895 under 
 the title of Poems of Nature. 
 
 The final conclusion of the reader will probably be 
 that the best poetry of Thoreau s nature found expression 
 
THOREAU. 185 
 
 in his prose. "Great prose of equal elevation," he 
 thinks, " commands our respect more than great verse, 
 since it implies a more permanent and level height, and 
 a life pervaded with the grandeur of the thought. The 
 poet only makes an irruption, like a Parthian, and is off 
 again, shooting while he retreats; but the prose writer 
 has conquered, like a Roman, and settled colonies." 
 
CHAPTER XI. 
 
 PHUS, as we have seen, the most vigorous protest 
 ever raised against that artificiality in life and 
 literature which is one of the chief dangers of our com 
 plex civilisation, proceeded not from some sleepy old- 
 world province, which might have been expected to be 
 unable to keep pace with a progressive age, but from the 
 heart of the busiest and most advanced nation on the 
 globe it is to Yankeeland that we owe the example and 
 the teaching of the " Bachelor of Nature." The person 
 ality of Thoreau is so singular and so unique that it 
 seems useless to attempt, as some have done, to draw 
 out any elaborate parallel between his character and that 
 of other social, or un-social, reformers, who have pro 
 tested against some prevalent tendency in the age in 
 which they lived. Those who are interested in seeking 
 for literary prototypes may perhaps, in this case, find one 
 in Abraham Cowley, a member of that school of gnomic 
 poets with which Thoreau was so familiar, and moreover 
 a zealous lover of the peace and solitude of nature. He 
 lived in close retirement during the later years of his life, 
 and his death, which, like Thoreau s, was due to a cold 
 caught while he was botanising, is attributed by his 
 biographer to " his very delight in the country and the 
 fields, which he had long fancied above all other plea- 
 
LIFE OF THOREAU. 187 
 
 sures." Some of Cowley s remarks in his essays on 
 solitude are conceived in a spirit very similar to that of 
 Thoreau. " The First Minister of State," he says, "has 
 not so much business in public as a wise man in private; 
 if the one has little leisure to be alone, the other has less 
 leisure to be in company; the one has but part of the 
 affairs of one nation, the other all the works of God and 
 nature under his consideration;" and elsewhere he ex 
 presses the wish that men could " unravel all they have 
 woven, that we might have our woods and our innocence 
 again, instead of our castles and our policies." But 
 these parallels, between two men of widely different 
 periods and purposes, can contain nothing more than 
 slight and superficial resemblances. Nor, except for 
 his general connection with Emerson and the trans- 
 cendentalists, is it more easy to match Thoreau with any 
 ethical writer of his own generation. 
 
 As a "poet-naturalist," however, Thoreau is distinctly 
 akin to Richard Jefferies and other writers of that school. 
 Jefferies character was richer and more sensuous than 
 Thoreau s, but they had the same mystic religious tem 
 perament, the same impatience of tradition and con 
 ventionality, the same passionate love of woods and 
 fields and streams, and the same gift of brilliant language 
 in which to record their observations. It is curious to 
 compare these modern devotees of country life with the 
 old-fashioned naturalists of whom Izaak Walton and 
 Gilbert White are the most illustrious examples. While 
 the honest old angler prattles on contentedly, like the 
 babbling streams by which he spent his days, with here 
 and there a pious reflection on the beneficence of 
 Providence and the adaptation of means to ends, and 
 
188 LIFE OF 
 
 while the kindly naturalist of Selborne devotes himself 
 absolutely and unreservedly to the work of chronicling 
 the fauna and flora of the district about which he writes, 
 these later authors have brought to the treatment of 
 similar subjects a far deeper insight into the beauty and 
 pathos of nature, and a power of poetical description 
 which was not dreamed of by their simple yet not less 
 devoted predecessors. It is mainly to Thoreau in 
 America, and to Jefferies in England, that we owe the 
 recognition and study of what may be called the poetry 
 of natural history a style of thought and writing which 
 is peculiar to the last thirty or forty years. The study 
 of nature has, of course, been from time immemorial 
 one of the great subjects of poetry, but, so far, it was 
 nature in its more general aspects; it was not till com 
 paratively recent years that there was discovered to be 
 poetry also in the accurate and patient observation of 
 natural phenomena. We have now learnt that natural 
 history, which was formerly regarded as a grave and 
 meritorious study of a distinctly prosaic kind, may be 
 made to yield material for the most imaginative and 
 poetical reflections. 
 
 When Thoreau died in 1862, Richard Jefferies was a 
 boy of fourteen, busily engaged among his native Wilt 
 shire Downs in laying the foundation of his wonderful 
 knowledge of outdoor life. As far as I am aware, there 
 is no mention of Thoreau in his writings, nor any indi 
 cation that he had read him; yet one is often struck 
 by suggestive resemblances in their manner of thought. 
 Take, for instance, that half-serious, half-whimsical con 
 tention of Thoreau s, which has probably been more 
 misunderstood than any other of his sayings that 
 
THOREAU. 189 
 
 Concord, in its natural features, contains all the 
 phenomena that travellers have noted elsewhere and 
 compare it with the following opinion expressed by 
 Jefferies: "It has long been one of my fancies that 
 this country is an epitome of the natural world, and that 
 if any one has come really into contact with its produc 
 tions, and is familiar with them, and what they mean 
 and represent, then he has a knowledge of all that 
 exists on the earth." In reading these words, one has a 
 difficulty in remembering that they were not written by 
 Thoreau. 
 
 The association of Thoreau s name with the district 
 in which he lived and died is likely to become closer 
 and closer as the years go on. Great nature-lovers, it 
 has been truly remarked, have the faculty of stamping 
 the impress of their own character on whole regions of 
 country, so that there are certain places which belong 
 by supreme and indisputable right to certain persons 
 who have made them peculiarly and perpetually their 
 own. As the Lake District is inseparably connected 
 with the names of the poets who dwelt and wrote there ; 
 as the Scotch border-land owns close allegiance to Scott, 
 and the Ayrshire fields to Burns ; and as the little 
 Hampshire village of Selborne is the inalienable property 
 of Gilbert White so the thoughts of those who visit 
 Concord turn inevitably to Thoreau. " Thoreau s affec 
 tions and genius," says one of his admirers, "were so 
 indissolubly bound up with this country that now he is 
 gone he presents himself to my mind as one of these 
 local genii or deified men whom the Scandinavian 
 mythology gave as guardians to the northern coasts and 
 mountains. These beings kept off murrain from the 
 
190 LIFE OF 
 
 cattle and sickness from men. They made the nights 
 sweet and salubrious, and the days productive. If 
 Thoreau had lived in the early ages of Greece, he would 
 have taken his place in the popular imagination along 
 with his favourite god Pan." 
 
 That a personality so stubbornly and aggressively 
 independent as Thoreau s would be a stumbling-block 
 to many critics, good and bad alike, might have been 
 foreseen, and indeed was foreseen, from the first. 
 " What an easy task it would be," said one who under 
 stood him unusually well, 1 " for a lively and not entirely 
 scrupulous pen to ridicule his notions, and raise such a 
 cloud of ink in the clear medium as entirely to obscure 
 his true and noble traits ! " Just three months after these 
 prophetic words were written appeared Mr. Lowell s 
 well-known criticism of Thoreau in the North American 
 Review ^ afterwards reprinted in My Study Windows^ an 
 essay which was a masterpiece of hostile innuendo and 
 ingenious misrepresentation, written with all the clever 
 ness and brilliancy of which its author was capable. 
 Mr. Lowell, who had been one of Thoreau s fellow- 
 students at Harvard University, and had held friendly 
 relations with him after the close of their college career, 
 had certainly not made the discovery of his intellectual 
 feebleness at the time of the publication of the Week on 
 the Concord River in 1849, for in that same year he 
 highly eulogised him in the Massachusetts Quarterly as 
 one of those rare persons who, in a utilitarian age, can 
 still feel and express the almost indefinable charm of 
 wild nature, and further spoke of him in a tone of much 
 .personal friendliness. Ten years later, however, this 
 1 John Weiss, Christian Examiner, July 1865. 
 
THOREAU. 191 
 
 friendly acquaintance was sharply terminated by a 
 difference which arose, as already mentioned, about 
 an article contributed by Thoreau to the Atlantic 
 Monthly, then under Mr. Lowell s editorship; and we 
 have had it stated, on Emerson s authority, that Mr. 
 Lowell " never forgave Thoreau for having wounded his 
 self-consciousness" presumably in a correspondence 
 that arose on this subject. I make no apology for 
 calling attention to this nexus of events, because it 
 furnishes the explanation of the otherwise strange 
 animus which underlies Lowell s article. Brilliant as 
 is the view obtained from My Study Windows, it ought 
 to be more generally known that there is at least one 
 pane therein which is discoloured and distorted, and 
 which cannot be trusted by those literary students who 
 would keep an unprejudiced outlook. 
 
 "A skulker" is the phrase in which Mr. R. L. 
 Stevenson summed up Thoreau s character in his essay 
 in Men and Books ; but as he himself admits in the 
 later-written preface that he had quite misread Thoreau 
 through lack of sufficient knowledge of his life, there is 
 no reason why admirers of Walden should feel disturbed 
 at the bestowal of that singularly inappropriate epithet. 
 Other critics, again, while enjoying ,much of Thoreau s 
 writing, have been haunted by a suspicion that he was 
 the victim of a theatrical self-consciousness, and that he 
 became a hermit rather to attract attention than to 
 avoid it. " We have a mistrust of the sincerity of the 
 St. Simeon Stylites," said a contemporary reviewer of 
 Walden, " and suspect that they come down from the 
 pillars in the night-time when nobody is looking at them. 
 Diogenes placed his tub where Alexander would be sure 
 
192 LIFE OF 
 
 of seeing it, and Mr. Thoreau ingenuously confesses that 
 he went out to dine." So inconceivable does it seem to 
 those who have not considered, much less practised, a 
 simple and frugal life, that a man should deliberately, 
 and for his own pleasure, abandon what they believe to 
 be luxuries and comforts, that critics are always dis 
 covering some far-fetched and non-existent object in the 
 Walden experiment, while they miss its true and salutary 
 lessons. 
 
 It seems scarcely necessary nowadays to rebut the 
 absurd charge of " selfishness " which used once to be 
 brought against Thoreau. But the charge still crops 
 up now and then in belated circles of thought. "The 
 general impression of the reader," says the Church 
 Quarterly Review?- "is that, while the descriptions of 
 scenery are extremely beautiful, and the notes about 
 animal life and plants are most interesting, yet the man 
 himself is thoroughly selfish, quite out of sympathy with 
 men and their sufferings, barbaric, if not animal, in his 
 tastes, and needlessly profane." 
 
 Thoreau s "lack of ambition" is another point that 
 has caused him to be much misunderstood even Emer 
 son gave his sanction to this rather futile complaint. "I 
 cannot help counting it a fault in him," he said, " that 
 he had no ambition. Wanting this, instead of engineering 
 for all America, he was the captain of a huckleberry 
 party. Pounding beans is good to the end of pounding 
 empires one of these days; but if, at the end of years, it 
 is still only beans!" But the obvious answer to this 
 criticism is that, in Thoreau s case, it was not only beans. 
 The chapter on " The Bean Field," in Walden, is one of 
 1 October 1895. 
 
THOREAU. 193 
 
 the most imaginative and mystic in all his works "it 
 was no longer beans that I hoed," he says, " nor I that 
 hoed beans " for the object of his quest and labour was 
 not the actual huckleberry nor the tangible bean, but the 
 glorified and idealised fruit of a lifetime spent in com 
 munion with nature, which imparted to his writings a 
 freshness and fragrance as of nature itself. In this 
 matter Thoreau was the wiser judge of his own powers, 
 and conferred a far greater benefit on the human race 
 by writing Walden than he could have done by engineer 
 ing for all America. 
 
 After all that has been said in this book of Thoreau s 
 great debt to Emerson, it may, I think, be added without 
 prejudice or ingratitude that the common misappre 
 hension of Thoreau s character must be partly traced 
 back to Emerson s Biographical Sketch," and to his 
 unfortunate manner of editing the Letters and Poems. 
 That excessive insistence on Thoreau s " stoicism/ to 
 the subordination of his gentler and more affectionate 
 traits, has done much to postpone a general recognition 
 of the deep tenderness that underlay the rugged nature 
 and rough sayings of the author of Walden. It is said 
 that as Thoreau s character matured and hardened, his 
 friendship with Emerson grew somewhat " Roman " and 
 austere; and we may be permitted to doubt whether 
 Emerson had really gauged his friend s mind as fully as 
 he imagined. That Thoreau, on his side, was sensible 
 of Emerson s limitations, is proved by the opinion which 
 he expressed to a friend that Emerson would be classed 
 by posterity with Sir Thomas Browne an estimate far 
 lower than the usual one. 
 
 And here I would hazard the suggestion (though 
 
 3 
 
194 LIFE OF 
 
 well aware that it must at present seem fantastic) that 
 Thoreau s genius will eventually be at least as highly 
 valued as Emerson s. No sane critic could for a moment 
 doubt the mighty influence which Emerson s great 
 and beneficent intellect wielded among his contem 
 poraries, or dream of comparing Thoreau with him as 
 a nineteenth-century power. But the class of mind 
 which has the most lasting hold on men s interest and 
 homage is not always, and not often, the same as that 
 which rules contemporary thought; and in the long 
 run the race is to the most brilliant rather than to the 
 most balanced of writers, to the poet rather than to the 
 philosopher, to him who most keenly challenges the 
 curiosity and imagination of his readers. Of all the 
 Concord group, by far the most inspired, stimulating, 
 and vital personality is Thoreau s; and when time has 
 softened down the friction caused by superficial blemishes 
 and misunderstandings, the world will realise that it was 
 no mere Emersonian disciple, but a master-mind and 
 heart of hearts who left that burning message to his 
 fellow-men. 
 
 The sum of the whole matter is, that Thoreau had a 
 .clear and definite object before him which he followed 
 with inflexible earnestness, and that his very faults and 
 oddities subserved the main purpose of his life. "There 
 is a providence in his writings," says John Weiss, " which 
 ought to protect him from the complaint that he was not 
 somebody else. No man ever lived who paid more 
 ardent and unselfish attention to his business. If pure 
 minds are sent into the world upon errands, with strict 
 injunction not to stray by other paths, Thoreau certainly 
 was one of these elect. A great deal of criticism is 
 
THOREAU. 195 
 
 inspired by the inability to perceive the function and 
 predestined quality of the man who passes in review. 
 It only succeeds in explaining the difference between 
 him and the critic. Such a decided fact as a man of 
 genius is, ought to be gratefully accepted and inter 
 preted." 
 
 That Thoreau s doctrines, no less than his character, 
 have their shortcomings and imperfections, few will be 
 disposed to deny. He could not realise, or perhaps 
 did not care to realise, the immense scope and com 
 plexity of the whole social problem; he had scarcely 
 the data or opportunities for doing so; and in any case 
 his intensely individualistic nature would probably have 
 incapacitated him. We therefore cannot look to him 
 for any full and satisfactory solution of the difficulties by 
 which our modern civilisation is surrounded, but it 
 would be a great error to conclude that we are not to 
 look to him at all. If it is true that the deadlock 
 resulting from the antagonism of labour and capital 
 can never be relieved without external legislation, it is 
 equally true that there can be no real regeneration of 
 society without the self-improvement of the individual 
 man; it is idle to assert that the one or the other must 
 come first both are necessary, and the two must be 
 carried on side by side. In Thoreau the social instinct 
 was deficient or undeveloped; but, on the other hand, 
 he has set forth the gospel of the higher intellectual 
 individualism with more force and ability than any 
 modern writer; if it be but a half-truth that he preaches, 
 it is none the less a half-truth of the utmost moment and 
 significance. "As to Thoreau," says Edward Carpenter, 
 in England s Ideal, a volume worthy to rank with 
 
196 LIFE OF 
 
 Walden in the literature of plain living and high 
 thinking, "the real truth about him is that he was a 
 thorough economist. He reduced life to its simplest 
 terms, and having, so to speak, labour in his right hand 
 and its reward in his left, he had no difficulty in seeing 
 what was worth labouring for and what was not, and no 
 hesitation in discarding things which he did not think 
 worth the time or trouble of production." 
 
 We have seen that he was not, like Emerson, a 
 philosopher of wide far-reaching sympathies and cautious 
 judicial temperament, but rather a prophet and monitor 
 outspoken, unsparing, irreconcilable. He addressed 
 himself to the correction of certain popular tendencies 
 which he perceived to be mischievous and delusive, and 
 preached what may be comprehensively termed a gospel 
 of simplicity, in direct antagonism to the prevailing tone 
 of a self-indulgent and artificial society. Who will 
 venture to say that the protest was not needed then 
 that it is not still more needed now? "The years 
 which have passed," says a well-known writer, 1 "since 
 Thoreau came back out of Walden wood, to attend 
 to his father s business of pencil-making, have added 
 more than the previous century to the trappings and 
 baggage of social life, which he held, and taught by 
 precept and example, that men would be both better 
 and happier for doing without. And while we succumb 
 and fall year by year more under the dominion of these 
 trappings, and life gets more and more overlaid with one 
 kind and another of upholsteries, the idea of something 
 simpler and nobler probably never haunted men s minds 
 more than at this time." Herein lies the strength of 
 1 Mr. T. Hughes, Academy^ i;th November 1877. 
 
THOREAU. 197 
 
 Thoreau s position, that the very excess of the evil, 
 which turns our supposed comforts into discomforts and 
 our luxuries into burdens, must at last induce us to 
 listen to the voice of sobriety and reason. 
 
 As to the manner in which Thoreau expresses his 
 convictions nothing more need here be said, except that 
 his style is justly adapted to his sentiments. His "knock 
 down blows at current opinion " are likened by Mr. R. L. 
 Stevenson to the "posers" of a child, "which leave the 
 orthodox in a kind of speechless agony." " They know 
 the thing is nonsense they are sure there must be an 
 answer, yet somehow they cannot find it." We may 
 shrewdly doubt whether the conclusive answer will ever 
 be forthcoming; but it is something that people should 
 be at all aroused from the complacent lethargy of custom 
 and tradition. Thoreau is thus seen to have a quicken 
 ing, stimulating, and, at times, exasperating effect as an 
 ethical teacher; it is no part of his object to prophesy 
 smooth things, to deal tenderly with the weaknesses of 
 his readers, or even to explain those features of his 
 doctrine which, from their novelty or unpopularity, are 
 most likely to be misunderstood. This being so, his 
 character and writings were certain to prove as distasteful 
 to some readers as they are attractive to others; if he is 
 a good deal misapplied at present, time will set that 
 right. 
 
 In conclusion, we see in Thoreau the extraordinary 
 product of an extraordinary era his strange, self-centred, 
 solitary figure, unique in the annals of literature, chal 
 lenges attention by its originality, audacity, and inde 
 pendence. He had, it has been well remarked, "a 
 constitutional No in him"; he renounced much that 
 
198 LIFE OF 
 
 other men held dear, and set his heart on objects which 
 to the world seemed valueless; it was part of his mission 
 to question, to deny, to contradict. But his genius was 
 not only of the negative and destructive order. In an 
 age when not one man in a thousand had a real sympathy 
 with nature, he attained to an almost miraculous acquaint 
 ance with her most cherished secrets; in an age of 
 pessimism, when most men, as he himself expresses it, 
 "lead lives of quiet desperation," he was filled with an 
 absolute confidence in the justice and benevolence of his 
 destiny; in an age of artificial complexity, when the ideal 
 is unduly divorced from the practical, and society stands 
 in false antagonism to nature, he, a devout pantheist, 
 saw everywhere simplicity, oneness, relationship. In 
 his view, God was not to be considered apart from the 
 material world, nor was man to be set above and aloof 
 from the rest of creation and the lower forms of life; 
 he tracked everywhere the same divine intelligence 
 "inanimate" nature there was none, since all was 
 instinct with the same universal spirit. It was his 
 purpose, in a word, "to civilise nature with the highest 
 intuitions of the mind, which show her simplicity to 
 restless and artificial men." 
 
 This ideal he pursued, as we have seen, with a rare 
 courage, sincerity, and self-devotion. Whether he suc 
 ceeded or failed in his endeavour is a question which 
 time alone can fully answer. His example and doctrines 
 were coldly and incredulously received during his life 
 time by most of those with whom he came in contact, 
 and his comparatively early death cut him off, in the 
 prime of his vigour, from reaping the harvest he had 
 sown with such patience and assiduity; so far his career, 
 
THOREAU. 199 
 
 like that of most idealists, must be confessed a failure. 
 But these are not the tests by which idealists, least of all 
 Thoreau, can be judged. For he enjoyed, in the first 
 place, that priceless and inalienable success which con 
 sists in perfect serenity of mind and contentment w r ith 
 one s own fortunes. " If the day and night," he says in 
 Walden, "are such that you greet them with joy, and 
 life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented 
 herbs is more elastic, starry, and immortal that is 
 your success." And, secondly, he had the assurance, 
 which is seldom denied to a great man, that the true 
 value of his work would ultimately be recognised and 
 appreciated. During the period that has passed since 
 his death his fame has steadily increased both in 
 America and England, and is destined to increase 
 yet further. 
 
 The blemishes and mannerisms of Thoreau s character 
 are written on its surface, easy to be read by the in 
 different passer-by who may miss the strong and sterling 
 faculties that underlie them. His lack of geniality, his 
 rusticity, his occasional littleness of tone and temper, his 
 impatience of custom, degenerating sometimes into in 
 justice, his too sensitive self-consciousness, his trick of 
 over-statement in the expression of his views these 
 were incidental failings which did not mar the essential 
 nobility of his nature. We shall do wisely in taking 
 him just as he is, neither shutting our eyes to his defects 
 nor greatly deploring their existence, but remembering 
 that in so genuine and distinctive an individuality the 
 "faults" have their due place and proportion no less than 
 the " virtues." Had he added the merits he lacked to 
 those which he possessed, had he combined the social 
 
200 LIFE OF THOREA U, 
 
 with the individual qualities, had he been more catholic 
 in his philosophy and more guarded in his expression, 
 then we might indeed have admired him more, but 
 should scarcely have loved him so well, for his character, 
 whatever it gained in fulness, would have missed the 
 peculiar freshness and piquancy which are now its chief 
 attraction whatever else he might have been, he would 
 not have been Thoreau. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 A. 
 
 Abolition, Thoreau s zeal for, 
 22, 77, 78, 113, 114, 138- 
 141, 166 
 
 Academy at Concord, Thoreau s 
 connection with, 23, 30 
 
 Esthetic Papers, Thoreau s 
 contribution to, 106, 161 
 
 Agassiz, Louis, correspondence 
 with Thoreau, 80, 81 
 
 Aitteon, Joe, Indian hunter, 
 129 
 
 Alcott, Amos Bronson, a pro 
 minent transcendentalist, 32, 
 43, 44, 78; his "conversa 
 tions" at Concord, 45; inti 
 macy with Thoreau, 47, 67, 
 68, 76, 105, 113, 116, 117, 
 119, 120; colony at Fruit- 
 lands, 62, 64 ; refusal to pay 
 poll-tax, 79 ; quoted, 120, 
 
 121, 146, 149 
 
 Alger, W. R., his account of 
 
 Thoreau s funeral, 149 
 "Allegash and East Branch," 
 
 third excursion to Maine 
 
 Woods, 129 
 Allen, Grant, his article on 
 
 Thoreau quoted, 169 
 Anarchism, Thoreau s advocacy 
 
 of, 159, 160; his refusal to 
 
 pay taxes, 79, 80 
 Animals, Thoreau s sympathy 
 
 with, 72, 101, 169 . 
 "Anti-Slavery and Reform 
 
 Papers," 179 
 " April Days," 181 
 Arrow-heads, collection of, 97, 
 
 149 
 Artificiality and nature, n, 12, 
 
 65, 157, 158, 186 
 Assabet River, 16, 17 
 Atlantic Monthly, Thoreau s 
 
 contributions to, 125, 129, 
 
 136, I43 181 ; change of 
 
 editors, 145, 191 
 Auttimn, 181 
 
 B. 
 
 "Bachelor of Nature," name 
 applied to Thoreau, 40, 67, 
 1 86 
 
 Blake, Harrison G. O., of 
 Worcester, Mass., no; his 
 reminiscences of Thoreau, 
 1 10, in, 112; Thoreau s 
 letter to, quoted, 117, 133 ; 
 edits the journal, 180 
 
 Boston, Thoreau s visits to, 14, 
 105, ill, 112, 140 
 
202 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Boston Miscellany, Thoreau s 
 contribution to, 56 
 
 Boston Natural History Society, 
 1 02, in; Thoreau s bequest 
 to, 149 
 
 Brook Farm community, 6 1, 65 
 
 " Brooklawn," New Bedford, 
 Thoreau s visit to, 120 
 
 Brown, John, the abolitionist, 
 Thoreau s acquaintance with, 
 119; Thoreau s admiration 
 for, 138-141 ; death, 139, 166 
 
 Brown, Mrs., of Plymouth, 
 introduces Thoreau to Emer 
 son, 37, 42 
 
 Brownson, Rev. O., 24 
 
 Burns, Anthony, 114 
 
 Burroughs, John, quoted, 141 
 
 C. 
 
 Cambridge (Mass.), Thoreau s 
 visits to, in 
 
 Canada, Thoreau s visits to, 
 1 08, 126, 127; A Yankee in 
 Canada, 179 
 
 Cape Cod, Thoreau s visit to, 
 1 08, 124, 125 
 
 "Cape Cod "volume, 125, 126 
 
 Carlyle, 31 ; Emerson s letter 
 to, 6 1 ; Thoreau s admiration 
 for, 96 ; Thoreau s essay on, 
 1 06 
 
 Carpenter, Edward, his Eng 
 land s Ideal quoted, 195, 196 
 
 Channing, William Ellery, the 
 poet, description of Thoreau, 
 26, 27, 31, 43, 57, 86, 87, 
 102, 131, 132 ; friendship 
 with Thoreau, 47, 48, 53, 76, 
 99, 108, 113, 116, 124, 126, 
 133, 134, 146, 148 
 
 Channing, W. H., 43; meets 
 Thoreau at New York, 60, 62 
 
 Chappaqua, Thoreau s visit to, 
 117 
 
 " Chesuncook," paper in the 
 Atlantic Monthly, 129, 136 
 
 Children, Thoreau s sympathy 
 with, 92, 93, 147 
 
 Cholmondeley, Thomas, Tho 
 reau s English friend, his gift 
 to Thoreau, 95, 115, 116 
 
 " Civil Disobedience," essay 
 quoted, 78, 106, 114 
 
 Civilisation, Thoreau s attitude 
 towards, II, 12, 161-165 
 
 Classical studies, Thoreau s 
 mastery of, 23, 95, 172 
 
 Clough, Arthur Hugh, meets 
 Thoreau, quoted, 112, 113 
 
 Cohasset, Thoreau s visit to, 49, 
 124 
 
 Communities in New England, 
 Thoreau s view of, 61, 62 
 
 Concord, Massachusetts, Tho 
 reau s birthplace, 12, 13; its 
 traditions, inhabitants, sce 
 nery, etc., 14-18, 24; Tho 
 reau s devotion to, 29, 94, 
 103, 108, 189; the centre of 
 the transcendentalist move 
 ment, 33, 38, 44-48; Thoreau 
 returns to, 82, 99, 109 
 
 Concord River, 14, 16, 19, 54, 
 63, 66, 97, 98, 177 
 
 Conway, Moncure D., descrip 
 tion of Thoreau cmted, 86, 
 100, 113, 154 
 
 Co-operation, Thoreau s views 
 on, 61, 62, 159 
 
 Cowley, Abraham, 37 ; com 
 pared with Thoreau, 186, 187 
 
 Curtis, George William, assists 
 in raising Thoreau s hut, 68 ; 
 quoted, 99, 144 
 
 D. 
 
 Democratic Review, Thoreau s 
 contributions to, 61 ; quoted, 
 159 
 
INDEX. 
 
 203 
 
 " Departure," the, 58 
 
 Dial, the, organ of .transcen- 
 dentalists, 38, 39, 43 ; change 
 of editors, 55; its discon 
 tinuance, 61, 106, 107, no, 
 184 
 
 Diaries, Thoreau s, 28, 33, 37 ; 
 quoted, 63, 74, 82, 88, 90, 
 102, 109, 114, 132, 135, 136, 
 147, 154, 162, 171, 173, 179; 
 portions of published, 180, 
 181, 182 
 
 Doctrines, Thoreau s, 156, 169, 
 
 170* I95- J 98 
 Dunbar, Charles, Thoreau s 
 
 uncle, 13 
 Dunbar, Cynthia. See Thoreau, 
 
 Mrs. 
 
 E. 
 
 Early Spring in Massachusetts , 
 
 181 
 Emerson, Dr. E. W. , quoted, 
 
 46, S3, 3> 134 
 
 Emerson, R. W., assists Tho 
 reau at Harvard, 24, 30, 
 3 2 > 37> 39 5 quoted, 40 ; his 
 friendship with Thoreau, 42, 
 43, 48 ; effects of his presence 
 at Concord, 44, 45 ; his in 
 fluence on Thoreau, 51-53, 
 184; edits Dial, 55; Tho 
 reau s letters to, 58, 60; 
 letter to Carlyle quoted, 61, 
 62, 67, 76, 79, 88, 91, 99, 
 105, no, 112, 116, 119, 134, 
 136, 148; compared to Tho 
 reau, 153, 154, 193. J 945 
 writes memoir to Excursions, 
 178 ; edits Thoreau s letters, 
 181, 193 ; quoted, 182 
 Emerson, Mrs., 44, 51, 105 
 Emerson, Waldo, 47, 51 
 Emerson, Judge, Thoreau s 
 tutorship in his family, 58- 
 64 
 
 Essays, Thoreau s, 178-181 
 Evening Post, the New York, 
 
 article on Thoreau s country 
 
 quoted, 17, 18 
 Excursions made by Thoreau, 
 
 41, 55, 56, 122-133 
 Excursions, 178 
 Excursions to Canada, 127 
 
 F. 
 
 Familiar Letters, Thoreau s, 
 
 published, 182 
 Fields, James, editor of Atlantic 
 
 Monthly, 145 
 Fire Island, New York, scene 
 
 of Margaret Fuller s death, 
 
 in 
 Fitchburg Railway, construction 
 
 of, 75 
 Flint s Pond, Thoreau s visit to, 
 
 62 
 Fourier, his doctrines in New 
 
 England, 60, 62, 159 
 " Fruitlands," Alcott s experi 
 ment at, 62, 64 
 Fuller, Margaret, transcen- 
 
 dentalist, edits Dial, 43, 45 ; 
 
 quoted, 47 ; resigns editorship 
 
 of Dial, 55, 60, 62, 63; 
 
 death, in 
 
 G. 
 
 Graham s Magazine, Thoreau s 
 contributions to, 96, 106 
 
 Greeley, Horace, editor 6f the 
 Tribune, friendship with 
 Thoreau, 60, 62, 106, 117, 
 156 
 
 II. 
 
 Harvard University, Thoreau s 
 
 residence at, 23-29, 37 
 Haskins, Rev. D. G. , Thoreau s 
 
204 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 class-mate, quoted, 25, 51, 
 52 
 
 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, at Con 
 cord, 41, 45, 48, 52 ; quoted, 
 53, 54, 168; at Salem, ill; 
 returns to Concord, 113; 
 buried near Thoreau, 148 
 
 Herbert, George, his poems 
 studied by Thoreau, 37 
 
 Higginson, Colonel Wentworth, 
 77 ; ^ quoted, 96, 144 ; Tho- 
 reau s letter to, quoted, 130, 
 131 
 
 Hoar, Edward, describes Tho 
 reau, 91, 131 ; travels with 
 Thoreau, 132 
 
 Hoar, Elizabeth, 45 
 
 Hoar, Samuel, 16 
 
 Hollowell Farm, the, 63 
 
 Hosmer, Edmund, friendship 
 with Thoreau, 68, 76 
 
 Hosmer, Joseph, quoted, 72, 
 73, 76, 112 
 
 Huckleberry picking, 93 
 
 Hughes, T., quoted, 196 
 
 I. 
 
 Indians, Thoreau s interest in, 
 97, 135= 143, MS. 148, 162, 
 163 
 
 J- 
 
 Jefteries, Richard, compared 
 with Thoreau, 148, 174, 187, 
 1 88, 189 
 
 Jones, Dr. S. A., article on 
 Thoreau quoted, 20, 21, 77, 
 
 Journal, Thoreau s. Sfe Diaries 
 K. 
 
 Ktaadn and the Maine Woods," 
 128 ; quoted, 128, 129 
 
 Lafayette, at Concord, 15 
 
 Land-surveying, Thoreau s oc 
 cupation, 36, 106, 112 
 
 Lectures, Thoreau s, 36, 37, 
 106, in, ii2, 139, 142, 162 
 
 Letters, Thoreau s, published 
 and unpublished, 136-138, 
 182. 184 
 
 Liberator, the, quoted, 140 
 
 " Life without Principle," essay 
 on, 179 
 
 Lowell, J. R., his criticism of 
 transcendentalists, 32, 43 ; 
 criticism of Thoreau s shanty 
 life quoted, 83, 98 ; criticisms 
 of Thoreau, 144, 172; criti 
 cism in My Sttidy Windows, 
 190, 191 
 
 Lyceum at Concord, Thoreau s 
 lectures at, 37 
 
 Lyceum, Salem, Thoreau lectures 
 at, in 
 
 M. 
 
 Maine, Thoreau s visits to, 31, 
 
 80, 97, 1 08, 128-130 
 " Maine Woods," 130, 136, 
 
 167 
 Mann, Horace, accompanies 
 
 Thoreau to Minnesota, 143 
 "May Days," 181 
 Merrimac River, Thoreau s week 
 
 on, 41, 49, 54 
 Minnesota, Thoreau s visit to, 
 
 J43, 144 
 
 Minott, Mrs., Thoreau s grand 
 mother, 14 
 Miscellanies, 179 
 Mississippi, the, Thoreau s visit 
 
 to, 143 
 Monadnock, mountain seen from 
 
 Concord, 17; ascent of, 131, 
 
 133 
 
INDEX. 
 
 205 
 
 Montreal, Thoreau s visit to its 
 
 cathedral, 126, 127 
 Mountains, Thoreau s love of, 
 
 56, 131, 132 
 Music, Thoreau s love of, 89, 
 
 M7 
 
 Musketaquid River. See Con 
 cord River 
 
 N. 
 
 Nature and civilisation, II, 12, 
 61 ; Thoreau snature-worship, 
 22, 27, 28, 29, 49, 57, 62-65, 
 70, 71, 81, 98, 128, 129, 189; 
 the "Bachelor of Nature," 
 40, 1 86 
 
 Natural history, Thoreau s know 
 ledge of, 28, 81, 99, 100, 102, 
 103, 169, 1 80, 198 ; essays 
 on, 178 ; his peculiar position 
 among naturalists, 102, 103, 
 167, 168; the "poet-natural 
 ist," 102 
 
 Natural History Society of 
 Boston, 102, ill; Thoreau s 
 bequest to, 149 
 
 " Natural History of Massachu 
 setts," 55; quoted, 183, 184 
 
 New Bedford, Thoreau s visits 
 to, 120, 144 
 
 New York, Thoreau s visits to, 
 60 
 
 P. 
 
 Parker, Theodore, writes in 
 Dial, 43 
 
 Pencil-making, Thoreau s occu 
 pation, 34, 36, 112, 138, 149 
 
 " Plea for Captain John Brown," 
 141, 160, 179 
 
 Poems, Thoreau s, 37, 42, 148, 
 182-185 
 
 Poems of Nature, 184 
 
 "Poet-naturalist," the, 87, IO2, 
 180, 187, 188 
 
 Polis, Joe, Indian guide, 130 
 Portraits of Thoreau, 87, 144 
 Ihitnam s Magazine, Thoreau s 
 
 contributions to, 108, 125; 
 
 quoted, 126, 127 
 
 Q. 
 
 Quarles, studied by Thoreau, 37 
 R. 
 
 Red Journal, Thoreau s diary, 
 
 37 
 
 " Resistance to Civil Govern 
 ment," 161 
 
 Ricketson, Daniel, of New 
 Bedford, his friendship with 
 Thoreau, 116, 120, 144; de 
 scription of Thoreau, 121 ; 
 Thoreau s letter to, quoted, 
 136-138 
 
 Ripley, Dr. Ezra, Unitarian 
 pastor of Concord, 15, 16, 
 
 24, 30, 33> 43. 44, 45 
 Ripley, George, transcendenta- 
 
 list, 32, 43, 60, 62 
 Ruskin, Thoreau s view of, 96 
 
 Salem, Thoreau s visits to, in 
 Sanborn, Frank B., friendship 
 for Thoreau, 117; introduces 
 him to.John Brown, 119, 139, 
 143 ; edits Familiar Letters 
 of Thoreau, 182 
 Sewall, Ellen, Thoreau s love 
 
 for, 38, 39 
 
 " Sic Vita," poem, 37, 42, 148 
 Simplicity of living advocated 
 by Thoreau, 35, 61, 83, 84, 
 122-124, 161-165, 169, 196; 
 misunderstood by critics, 82- 
 85* 90, 190-193 
 Sioux Indians, gathering of, 143 
 
206 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Slavery. See Abolition 
 
 " Slavery in Massachusetts," 
 114, 139, 1 60 
 
 Slaves, fugitive, assisted by 
 Thoreau, 77, 113 
 
 Sleepy Hollow, Concord burial- 
 place, 148 
 
 Society, when disliked by Tho 
 reau, 57, 91 ; when enjoyed 
 by him, 57, 75, 92 
 
 St. Helier, Jersey, birthplace of 
 Thoreau s grandfather, 12 
 
 St. Paul s, Minnesota, Thoreau s 
 visit to, 143 
 
 Staten Island, Thoreau s stay* 
 on, 58, 59, 64 
 
 Stevenson, R. L., his remarks 
 on Thoreau, 40, 165, 172; his 
 essay on Thoreau in Men and 
 Books, 191, 197 
 
 Stoicism of Thoreau s nature, 
 89, 181, 193 
 
 Style, Thoreau s view of, 170- 
 173, 174, I75 178, 182, 183, 
 197 
 
 Summer, 181 
 
 Surveying, Thoreau s occupa 
 tion, 36, 1 06, 112 
 
 " Sympathy," poem on, 39, 43 
 
 T. 
 
 Thoreau, Helen, elder sister of 
 Henry, 22, 29, 42; death, 
 no 
 
 Thoreau, Henry David, birth 
 and parentage, 12, 13; child 
 hood, 18-20; influence of 
 heredity and association, 20- 
 22 ; educated at Concord and 
 Harvard College, 23-29; be 
 comes a schoolmaster, 30, 31 ; 
 resigns his post, 31 ; affected 
 by transcendentalist move 
 ment, 31-34; secedes from 
 the church, 33 ; question of 
 
 a profession, 34-36 ; the study 
 of wild nature, 35 ; pencil- 
 making, land surveying, litera 
 ture, 34, 36-37 ; early love, 
 38-40; a week s boating ex 
 cursion, 41 ; introduced to 
 Emerson, 42 ; the Dial and 
 the transcendentalists, 43-48 ; 
 resides in Emerson s family, 
 46 ; friendship with Alcott, 
 Margaret Fuller, Ellery Chan- 
 ning, 47-49; death of his 
 brother John, 48, 49 ; how 
 far influenced by Emerson, 
 51-53 ; acquaintance with 
 Hawthorne, 53-55 ; contribu 
 tions to the Dial, 55 ; the 
 "Walk to Wachusett," 55, 
 56 ; predilection for solitude, 
 57 ; tutorship in Staten Island, 
 58-64 ; friendships made in 
 New York, 60 ; Individualism, 
 62 ; plan of retirement to the 
 woods, 62-65 ; building and 
 furnishing his hut, 67-69 ; 
 his two years at Walden, 70- 
 82 ; arrested for refusal to 
 pay poll-tax, 78, 79; leaves 
 Walden, 82 ; criticisms on 
 his life there, 82-85 ; his 
 personality, 86-94 > literary 
 tastes, 95-97 ; sympathy with 
 Indians, 97 ; love of Nature, 
 98-104; second residence at 
 Emerson s, 105 ; lives at 
 .home, 105 ; publication of 
 The Week, 106-107; friend 
 ship with Harrison Blake, 
 no; life at Concord, in; 
 surveying and lecturing, 112; 
 meets A. H. Clough and M. 
 D. Conway, 112, 113; oc 
 cupied with question of slavery , 
 
 113, 114; publishes Walden, 
 
 114, 115; friendship with 
 Thos. Cholmondeley, Daniel 
 
JNDEX. 
 
 207 
 
 Ricketson, F. B. Sanborn, 
 1 16, 1 17 ; meets Walt Whitman 
 and John Brown, 118, 119; 
 visit to New Bedford, 120 ; 
 excursions to Cape Cod, 
 Canada, Maine Woods, etc., 
 122-133 ; signs of ill-health, 
 134-136; death of his father, 
 136-138; his "Plea for John 
 Brown," 138-141; fatal illness 
 begins, 142, 143 ; visit to 
 Minnesota, 143, 144; the 
 civil war, 144; his last winter, 
 144-148; death and funeral, 
 148, 149; his dress, 72, 87, 
 123; death, 72, 89, 165; 
 appearance, 24, 25, 86, 87, 
 Il6; physique, 134; fitness 
 of body and mind, 88 ; in 
 dustry, 34, 70, 71, 145; dis 
 like of system, 62, 152, 171 ; 
 humanity, 166 ; humour, 92 ; 
 imagination, 168 ; delicacy of 
 mind, 89 ; love of children, 
 93, 147 ; love of music, 89, 
 147 ; his doctrines, 156, 169, 
 170, 195-198; style, 170; 
 final estimate of his genius, 
 195-200 
 
 Thoreau, John, grandfather of 
 Henry, emigrated from Jersey, 
 12, 143 
 
 Thoreau, John, father of 
 Henry, 12; character, 20, 21 ; 
 skill in pencil-making, 34, 
 109 ; death, 136 
 
 Thoreau, John, elder brother of 
 Henry, 22, 29 ; love for Ellen 
 Sewall, 38, 40, 41, 46 ; death, 
 48 
 
 Thoreau, Maria, last surviving 
 member of the family in New 
 England, 23, 38, 79, 149 
 
 Thoreau, Mrs. (nee Cynthia 
 Dunbar), 13; character, 21,79, 
 109, 138, 145, 146 
 
 Thoreau, Sophia, younger sister 
 
 of Henry, 22, 105, I2O, 138, 
 
 145, 149, 180, 182 
 Transcendentalism, its influence 
 
 on Thoreau, 31-34, 61-65 
 Transcendentalists of Concord, 
 
 32, 43-48, 51-55, 61-65 
 Tuckerman s Ravine, on Mount 
 
 Washington, 132 
 
 U. 
 
 Union Magazine, Thoreau s con 
 tribution to, 1 08, 128 
 
 V. 
 
 Vegetarianism practised by 
 Thoreau, 72 
 
 Wachusett, mountain in Massa 
 chusetts, 17; the "Walk to 
 Wachusett," 56 
 
 Walden Pond, Thoreau s asso 
 ciations with, 17, 19, 63, 64, 
 112, 150 
 
 Walden Woods, Thoreau s her 
 mitage in, 64, 67-82, 98, 
 101 
 
 Walden, 63, 74, 76, 82, 94, 95 ; 
 published, 114, 115, 158, 163, 
 165, 167, 176, 191, 192, 199 
 
 Walton, Izaak, Thoreau com 
 pared with, 55, 187 
 
 Washington, Mount, ascent of, 
 132 
 
 Week on the Concord and Merri- 
 mac River s, 38, 41, 49, 59> 
 74, 90, 95, 100 ; published, 
 106, 107, no, 115, 184; 
 quoted, 122, 123, 155, 156, 
 171, 172, 176 
 
 Weiss, Rev. John, fellow-col 
 legian of Thoreau, quoted, 
 24, 25, 52, 190, 194 
 
208 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Wheeler, Stearns, 28; Tho- 
 reau s visit to, 62 
 
 White, Gilbert, the naturalist, 
 Thoreau compared with, 55, 
 1 68, 187, 1 88, 189 
 
 White Mountains of New Hamp 
 shire, Thoreau s visits to, 17, 
 41, 132 
 
 White Tond, the, 17, 66 
 
 \Vhitman, Walt, Thoreau s meet 
 
 ing with and impressions of, 
 118; his description of Tho 
 reau s grave quoted, 150 
 
 "Wild Apples," 143 
 
 Winter, 181 
 
 "Winter Walk," 55; quoted, 
 
 74 
 
 Yankee in Canada^ 179 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY. 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN P. ANDERSON 
 {British Museum}. ( ( 
 
 I. WORKS. 
 II. SELECTIONS. 
 III. CONTRIBUTIONS TO MAGAZINES. 
 
 IV. APPENDIX 
 
 Biography, Criticism, etc. 
 Magazine Articles. 
 
 V. CHRONOLOGICAL LIST. OF 
 
 WORKS. 
 
 I. WORKS. 
 
 A Week on the Concord and 
 
 Merriinack Rivers. Boston, 
 
 1849, 12mo. 
 -Another edition. Boston, 
 
 1862, 12tno. 
 New and revised edition. 
 
 Boston, 1867, 16mo. 
 Another edition. With a Pre 
 fatory Note by Will II. Dircks. 
 
 London [18S9], 12mo. 
 Riverside edition. Vol. i. 
 
 Boston and New York, 1894, 
 
 12 mo. 
 Waldi-n; or, Life in the Woods. 
 
 Boston, 1854, 12mo. 
 
 Re-issued in 1864. 
 Another edition. Edinburgh, 
 
 1884, 8vo. 
 
 Another edition. With an 
 
 Introductory Note by Will H. 
 
 Dircks. London, 1886, 12mo. 
 
 Part of the " Camelot Series." 
 
 Another edition. 2 vol?. 
 
 Boston, 1889, 12mo. 
 
 Part of the "Riverside Aldine 
 Series." 
 
 Riverside edition, vol. ii. 
 
 Boston and New York, 1894, 
 8vo. 
 
 Another edition. With an 
 
 Introductory Note by Will II. 
 Dircks. London [1895], 8vo. 
 
 Excursions. Boston, 186 j, 12mo. 
 [Edited by Ii. W. Emerson and 
 Sophia Thoreau, with a bio 
 graphical sketch by the former.] 
 
 Riverside edition, vol. ix. 
 
 Boston and New York, 18J4, 
 8vo. 
 
11 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY. 
 
 The Maine Woods. Boston, 1864, 
 12mo. 
 
 Riverside edition, vol. iii. 
 
 Boston and New York, 1891, 
 8vo. 
 
 Cape Cod. [Edited by Sophia 
 Thoreau and William Elleiy 
 Channing.] Boston, 1865, 
 12mo. 
 
 Another edition. London, 
 
 1865, 12mo. 
 
 Another edition. Boston, 
 
 1892, 8vo. 
 
 Riverside edition, vol. iv. 
 
 Boston and New York, 1894, 
 8vo. 
 
 Letters to Various Persons. 
 [Edited by R. \V. Emerson.] 
 Boston, 1865, 12mo. 
 A Yankee in Canada, with Anti- 
 Slavery and Reform Papers. 
 [Edited by Sophia Thoreau 
 and William Ellery Channing.] 
 Boston, 1866, 12mo. 
 Early Spring in Massachusetts. 
 From the Journal of Henry D. 
 Thoreau. [Edited by II. G. 0. 
 Blake.] Boston, 1881, 12mo. 
 
 Riverside edition, vol. v. 
 
 Boston and New Yoik, 1891, 
 8vo. 
 
 Summer: From the Journal of 
 Henry D. Thoreau. Edited by 
 H. G. 0. Blake. Boston, 1884, 
 12mo. 
 
 Another edition. London, 
 
 1884, 8vo. 
 
 Riverside edition, vol. vi. 
 
 Boston and New York, 1894, 
 8vo. 
 
 Winter : From the Journal ol 
 Henry D. Thoreau. Edited by 
 H. G. 0. Blake. Boston, 1888, 
 12mo. 
 
 Riverside edition, vol. vni. 
 
 Edited by H. G. 0. Blake. 
 Bostin and New York, 1891, 
 Svo. 
 
 Autumn : From the Journal of 
 Henry D. Thoreau. Edited by 
 H. G. 0. Blake. Boston, 1892, 
 12mo. 
 
 Riverside edition, vol. vii. 
 Edited by H. G. 0. Blake. 
 Boston and New York, 1894, 
 Svo. 
 
 Miscellanies. With a biographical 
 sketch, by Ralph Waldo Emer 
 son, and a general index to the 
 writings. Boston and New 
 York, 1894, Svo. 
 Vol. x. of the Riverside edition. 
 
 Familiar Letters of Henry David 
 Thoreau. Edited, with an 
 Introduction and Notes, by F. 
 B. Sanborn. Boston and New 
 York, 1894, Svo. 
 Vol. xi. of the Riverside edition. 
 
 II. SELECTIONS. 
 
 The Succession of Forest Trees, 
 Wild Apples, and Sounds. With 
 a biographical sketch by Ralph 
 Waldo Emerson. Boston, 18S7, 
 Svo. 
 
 No. 27 of the "Riverside Litera 
 ture Series." The first two papers 
 and Emerson s sketch are from 
 Excursions; the third paper is 
 from Walden. 
 
 Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers 
 by Henry D. Thoreau. Selected 
 and edited by H. S. Salt. Lon 
 don, 1890, Svo. 
 
 Essays and other Writings of 
 Henry Thoreau. Edited, vvitli 
 a Prefatory Note, by Will II. 
 Dircks. London [1891], Svo. 
 Part of the " Camelot Series." 
 
 Thoreau s Thoughts. Selections 
 from the Writings of Henry 
 David Thoreau. Edited by H. 
 G. 0, Blake. [With a biblio 
 graphy.] Boston and New 
 York, 1894, 12mo. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY. 
 
 m 
 
 Selections from Thoreau. Edited, 
 
 with an introduction, by H. S. 
 
 Salt. London, 1895, 8vo. 
 Poems of Nature. Edited by 
 
 H. S. Salt and F. B. Sanborn. 
 
 London, Boston and New York, 
 
 1895, 8vo. 
 
 III. CONTRIBUTIONS TO 
 MAGAZINES, ETC. 
 
 Dial, vol. i., 1840. Sympathy, 
 " Lately alas ! I knew a gentle 
 boy," pp. 71, 72; reprinted in A 
 Week on the Concord and Merri 
 mack Rivers. 
 
 Aulus Persius Flaccus, pp. 
 
 117-121; reprinted in A Week 
 on the Concord and Merrimack 
 Rivers. 
 
 Stanzas, "Nature doth have 
 
 her dawn each day ; " reprinted 
 in A Week on the Concord and 
 Merrimack Rivers. 
 
 Vol. ii., 1841. Sic Vita, " I 
 
 am a parcel of vain strivings 
 tied," p. 81 ; reprinted in A 
 Week on the Concord and Merri 
 mack Rivers. 
 
 Friendship, " Let such pure 
 
 hate still under-prop," pp. 204, 
 205; reprinted in A IVeekonthe 
 Concord and Merrimack Rivers. 
 
 Vol. iii., 1842. Natural 
 
 History of Massachusetts, pp. 
 19-40 ; reprinted in Excursions. 
 
 Stanzas, " Great God, I ask 
 
 Thee for no meaner pelf," pp. 
 79, 80 ; reprinted in A Yankee 
 in Canada. 
 
 The Black Knight, " Be sure 
 
 your fate," p. 180 ; reprinted in 
 Riverside edition, vol. x. 
 
 The Inward Morning, 
 
 " Packed in my mind lie all the 
 clothes," p. 198 ; reprinted in 
 A Week on the Concord and 
 Merrimack Rivers. 
 
 Free Love, " My love must 
 
 be as free," p. 199; reprinted 
 in A Week on the Concord and 
 Merrimack Rivers. 
 
 The Poet s Delay, "In vain 
 
 I see the morning rise," p. 200 ; 
 reprinted in A Week on the 
 Concord and Merrimack Rivers. 
 
 Rumours from an ^Eolian 
 
 Harp, p. 200 ; reprinted in A 
 Week on the Concord and 
 Merrimack Rivers. 
 
 The Moon, "The full-orbed 
 
 moon with unchanging ray," 
 p. 222 ; reprinted in Riverside 
 edition, vol. x. 
 
 To the Maiden in the East, 
 
 " Low in the Eastern sky," pp. 
 222-224 ; reprinted in A Week 
 on the Concord and Merrimack 
 Rivers. 
 
 The Summer Rain, "My 
 
 books I d fain cast off, I cannot 
 read," pp. 224, 225 ; reprinted 
 in A Week on the Concord and 
 Merrimack Rivers. 
 
 The Laws of Menu, selected 
 
 by Thoreau, pp. 331-340. 
 
 The Prometheus Bound, a 
 
 translation, pp. 363-386; re- 
 printed in Riverside edition, 
 vol. x. 
 
 Anacreon, eleven poems trans 
 lated, pp. 484-490 ; reprinted 
 in A Week on the Concord and 
 Merrimack Rivers. 
 
 ; Sayingsof Confucius, selected, 
 pp. 493, 494. 
 
 To a Stray Fowl, " Poor bird ! 
 
 destined to lead thy life," p. 
 505 ; reprinted in Riverside 
 edition, vol. x. 
 
 Orphics, i. Smoke ; ii. Haxo, 
 
 pp. 505, 506 ; reprinted in 
 Letters to Various Persons. 
 
 Daik Ages, pp. 527-529 ; 
 
 reprinted in A Week on the 
 Concord and Merrimack Rivers. 
 
IV 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY, 
 
 Friendship. From Chaucer s 
 " Romaunt of the Rose," pp. 
 529-531. 
 
 Vol. iv., 1843. Ethnical 
 
 Scriptures. Chinese four books, 
 
 selected by Thorean, pp. 205- 
 
 210. 
 
 A Winter Walk, pp. 211-220; 
 
 reprinted in Excursions, 
 
 Homer, Ossian. Chaucer, pp. 
 
 290 303, reprinted in A Week 
 
 on the Concord and Merrimack 
 
 Rivers. 
 
 Pindar, note and translations, 
 
 pp. 379-390 ; reprinted in River 
 side edition, vol. x. 
 
 The Preaching of Buddha, 
 
 selections, pp. 391-404. 
 Ethnical Scriptures. Hermes 
 Trismegistus, selections, pp. 
 402-404. 
 
 Herald of Freedom, pp. 507- 
 512 ; reprinted in A Yankee in 
 Canada. 
 
 Fragments of Pindar, pp. 513, 
 
 514; reprinted in Riverside 
 edition, vol. x. 
 
 The Boston Miscellany, 1843. 
 A Walk to Wachusett, vol. iii., 
 p. 51 ; reprinted in Excursions. 
 The Democratic Review, 1843. 
 The Landlord, vol. xiii., pp. 
 427-430 ; reprinted in Excur 
 sions. 
 
 Paradise (to be) Regained, 
 
 vol. xiii., pp. 451-463; re 
 printed in A Yankee in Canada. 
 The Liberator. Wendell Phillips 
 before the Concord Lyceum, 
 March 23, 1845; reprinted in 
 A Yankee in Canada. 
 
 Slavery in Massachusetts, an 
 
 address delivered (July 4) at the 
 Anti-Slavery Celebration at 
 Framingham, July 21, 1854; 
 reprinted in A Yankee in 
 Canada. 
 
 The Last Days of John Brown. 
 
 Read (July 4) at North Elba, 
 N.Y., July 27, 1860. 
 
 Graham s Magazine, 1845. 
 Thomas Carlyle and his Woiks, 
 vol. xxx., pp. 145, 238; re 
 printed in A Yankee in Canada. 
 
 The Union Magazine, IS 45. 
 Ktaadn and the Maine Woods, 
 vol. Hi., pp. 29, 73, 132, 177, 
 216 ; reprinted in The Maine 
 Woods. 
 
 ^Esthetic Papers, 1849. Resist 
 ance to Civil Government, pp. 
 189-211; reprinted in A Yankee 
 in Canada. 
 
 Putnam s Magazine, 1853-55. 
 An Excursion to Canada, vol. i., 
 pp. 54-59, 179-184, 321-329; re 
 printed in A Yankee in Canada. 
 
 Cape Cod, vol. v., pp. 632- 
 
 640; vol. vi., pp. 59-66, 157- 
 164 ; reprinted in Cape Cod. 
 
 The New York Tribune, I860. 
 The Succession of Forest Trees 
 (read before the Middlesex 
 Agricultural Society, Concord, 
 Sept. 1860); reprinted in Ex 
 cursions. 
 
 Echoes of Harpsrs Ferry, by 
 James Redpath, I860. A Plea 
 for Captain John Brown, read 
 to the citizens of Concord, 
 Mass., Oct. 30, 1359, pp. 16-42; 
 reprinted in A Yankee in 
 Canada. 
 
 Remarks at Concord on the 
 
 day of the Execution of John 
 Brown (Dec. 2, 1860), pp. 439- 
 445 ; reprinted in Riverside 
 edition, vol. x. 
 
 Atlantic Monthly, 1858-93. 
 Chesuncook, vol. ii., 1858, pp. 
 2-12, 224-233, 305-317; re 
 printed in The Maine Woods. 
 Walking, vol. ix., 162, pp. 
 657-674 ; reprinted in Excur 
 sions. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY. 
 
 Autumnal Tints, vol. x 
 
 1862, pp. 385-402; reprint e 
 in Excursions. 
 
 Wild Apples, vol. x., 1862 
 
 pp. 513-526; reprinted in Ex 
 cursions. 
 
 -Life without Principle, vo 
 
 xii., 1863, pp. 484-495; re 
 printed in A Yankee i 
 Canada. 
 
 Night and Morning, vol. xii. 
 
 1863, pp. 579-583 ; reprinted i 
 Excursions. 
 
 The Wellfleet Oysterman 
 
 vol. xiv., 1864, pp. 470-478 
 reprinted in Cape Cod. 
 
 The Highland Light, vo l 
 
 xiv., 1864, pp. 649-659; re 
 piinted in Cape Cod. 
 
 April Days, vol. xii., 1878 
 
 pp. 445-454; reprinted in Rivei 
 side edition, vol. v. 
 
 May Days, vol. xii., 1878 
 
 pp. 567-576; reprinted in 
 Riverside edition, vol. ix. 
 
 Days in June, vol. xii., 1878, 
 
 pp. 711-719 ; reprinted in River 
 side edition, vol. v. 
 
 Winter Days, vol. lv., 1885, 
 
 pp. 79-88; reprinted in River 
 side edition, vol. viii. 
 The Boston Commonwealth, 1863. 
 Poems. Inspiration, vol i 
 No. 42; The Funeral Bell, voi. 
 i.,No. 44; Travelling: Greece, 
 vol. i., No. 47 ; The Departure, 
 vol. i., No. 52; The Fall of 
 the Leaf, vol. ii., No. 58 
 Independence, vol. ii., No. 61 
 The Soul s Season, vol. ii. } N 
 62. 
 
 IV. APPENDIX. 
 BIOGRAPHY, CRITICISM, ETC. 
 
 Alcott, A. Bronson. Concord 
 Davs. Boston, 1872, 8vo. 
 
 pp> n 20; Waklen Pond . 
 
 Sonnets and Canzonets. 
 
 Boston, 1882, 8vo. 
 
 Thoreau, Sonnet xiv., p. 121. 
 Alger, William R. The Solitudes 
 of Nature and of Man. Boston, 
 1867, 8vo. 
 
 Thoreau, pp. 329-338. 
 Alhbone, S. Austin. A critical 
 dictionary of English Litera 
 ture, etc. London, 1871. 8vo. 
 
 Thoreau, vol. iii., pp. 2406, 2407. 
 Barton, W. G. Thoreau, Fla^g, 
 and Burroughs. (Essex Institute, 
 Historical Collections, vol. xxii 
 pp. 53-80.) Salem, Mass., 1885, 
 8vo. 
 
 Beers, Henry A. An outline 
 sketch of American Literature 
 New York, 1887, 12mo. 
 
 Numerous references to Thoreau. 
 Besant, Walter. The Eulogy of 
 Richard Jefferics. London 
 1888, 8vo. 
 Reference to Thoreau, pp. 221- 
 
 Brown, John. The Life and 
 Letters of John Brown. Edited 
 by F. B. Sanborn. London 
 1885, 8vo. 
 
 Numerous references to Thoreau 
 burroughs, John. Indoor 
 
 Studies. Boston, 1889, Svo 
 
 Henry D. Thoreau, pp. 1.42. 
 Clianning, William Ellery. 
 Thoreau: the poet-naturalist. 
 Boston, 1873, Svo. 
 
 Comvay, Moncure Daniel. 
 
 Emerson at Homo and Abroad 
 Boston, 1882, 8vo. 
 
 Thoreau, pp. 279-289. 
 Cooke, George Will is. Ralph 
 \\aldo Emerson: his life 
 
 and 
 
 philosophy. 
 
 o 
 
 London, 1882, Svo. 
 
 Numerous references to Thoreau. 
 ritic. Essays from " The 
 Critic.". Boston, 1882, I2mo. 
 
 Thoreau s Wiklncsa, by John 
 Burroughs, pp. 9-18; Thoreau s 
 unpublished poetry, by F ]J 
 Sanborn, pp. 7l-7s. " 
 
VI 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY. 
 
 Curtis, George William. Homes 
 of American Authors. New 
 York, 1857, 8vo. 
 
 Thoreau, pp. 247, 248, 250, 251. 
 From the Easy Chair. Lon 
 don, 1892, 12mo. 
 
 Thoreau and my Lady Cavaliere, 
 pp. 62-73. 
 
 Duyckinck, Evert A., and George 
 L. Cyclopaedia of American 
 Literature. 2 vols. Phila 
 delphia, 1877, 8vo. 
 
 Henry David Thoreau, vol. ii., pp. 
 601-604. 
 
 Ellis, Havelock. The New Spirit. 
 London, 1890, 8vo. 
 Thoreau, pp. 90-99. 
 
 Emerson, Edward Waldo. Emer 
 son in Concord : a Memoir 
 written for the "Social Circle" 
 in Concord, Massachusetts. 
 London, 1883, 8vo. 
 
 Numerous references to Thoreau. 
 Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Lectures 
 and Biographical Sketches. 
 London, 1884, 8vo. 
 
 Thoreau, pp. 419-452; prefixed 
 also to Thoreau s Excursions. 
 Encyclopedia Britannica. En 
 cyclopaedia Britannica, 9th 
 edition. Edinburgh, 1888, 4to. 
 Henry D. Thoreau, by William 
 Sharp, vol. 23, pp. 313, 314. 
 Essays. Essays from "The 
 Critic." Boston, 1882, Svo. 
 
 Thoreau s Wildness. By John 
 Burroughs, pp. 9-18. Ihoreau s 
 unpublished poetry. By F. B. 
 Sanborn, pp. 71-78. 
 Flagg, Wilson. The Woods and 
 By-ways of New England. 
 Boston, 1872, 8vo. 
 Thoreau, pp. 392-396. 
 
 Halcyon Days. Boston, 
 
 1881, 8vo. 
 
 Thoreau, pp. 164-168. 
 Garnett, Richard. Life of Ralph 
 Waldo Emerson. London, 1888, 
 8vo. 
 
 Thoreau, pp. 157-159. 
 Graham, P. Anderson. Nature 
 
 in Books ; some Studies in 
 
 Biography. London, 1891, 8vo. 
 
 The Philosorhy of Idleness 
 
 (Henry David Thoreau), pp. 66-93. 
 
 Griswold, R. W. Prose Writers 
 ofAmeiica. Philadelphia [1870], 
 8vo. 
 Thoreau, p. 657. 
 
 Haskins, David Greene. Ralph 
 Waldo Emerson ; his maternal 
 ancestors, etc. London [1887], 
 8vo. 
 Henry D. Thoreau, pp. 119-122. 
 
 Hawthorne, Julian. Nathaniel 
 Hawthorne and his wife : a 
 biography. 2 vols. London, 
 1885, 8vo. 
 References to Thoreau. 
 
 Hawthorne, Nathaniel. Passages 
 from the American Note-Books. 
 2 vols. Boston, 1868, 8vo. 
 
 References to Thoreau, vol ii., pp. 
 96-99, 110-113, 123. 
 
 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth. 
 Short Studies of American 
 Authors. Boston, 1888, 8vo. 
 Thoreau, pp. 22-31. 
 
 Holmes, Oliver Wendell. Ameri 
 can Men of Letters. Ralph 
 Waldo Emerson. Boston, 1885, 
 
 8vo. 
 Numerous references to Thoreau. 
 
 Hubert, Philip G. Liberty and a 
 Living. New York, 1889, Svo. 
 Thoreau, pp. 171-190. 
 
 James, Henry. Hawthorne. 
 (English Men of Letters.) 
 London, 1879, 8vo. 
 Thoreau, pp. 96-99. 
 
 Jones, Samuel Arthur. Thoreau: 
 a Glimpse. Ann Arbor, Mich., 
 .1890, Svo. 
 
 Privately printed. 
 
 Bibliography of Henry David 
 
 Thoreau, with an outline of his 
 life. Compiled and chrono 
 logically arranged by S. A. 
 Jones. New York, U94, Svo. 
 
 Lowell, James Russell. A Fable 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY. 
 
 vn 
 
 for Clitics. [New York] 1848, 
 8vo. 
 Thoreau, p. 32. 
 
 My Study Windows. Second 
 
 edition. London, 1871, 8vo. 
 
 Thoreau, pp. 145-15G. 
 Nichol, John. American Litera 
 ture: an historical sketch. 
 Edinburgh, 1882, 8vo. 
 
 Henry D. Thoreau, pp. 313-321. 
 Page, II. A., i.e. A. H. Japp. 
 Thoreau, his Life and Aims. 
 London, 1878, 8vo. 
 R chardson, Charles F. American 
 Literature, 1607-1885. 2 vols. 
 New York, 1887-89, Svo. 
 
 References to Thoreau. 
 Salt, H. S. Literary Sketches. 
 London, 1888, Svo. 
 
 Henry D. Thoreau, pp. 124-166. 
 Appeared originally in Temple Bar, 
 Nov. 1886. 
 The Life of Henry David 
 
 Thoreau. London, 1890, Svo. 
 Sanborn, F. B. American Men 
 of Letters. Henry D. Thoreau. 
 Boston, 1882, Svo. 
 
 The Genius and character of 
 
 Emerson ; lectures at the Con 
 cord School of Philosophy. 
 Boston, 1885, 8vo. 
 
 References to Thoreau. 
 Scudder, Horace E. American 
 Prose. Boston, 18fcO, Svo. 
 
 Henry David Thoreau, pp. 296-301. 
 Stedman, Edmund Clarence. A 
 Library of American Literature. 
 New York, 1891, Svo. 
 
 Thoreau, vol. xi., p. 594. 
 Stevenson, Robert Louis. Fami 
 liar Studies of Men and Book?. 
 London, 1882, Svo. 
 
 Henry David Thoreau : his char 
 acter and opinions, pp. 129-171 ; a 
 reprint of article in ConihiU, June 
 1880. 
 
 Stewart, George. Thoreau; the 
 Hermit of Walden. A paper 
 read before the Society, March 
 2nd, 1882. (Trans, of the 
 Literary and Hist. Soc. of Quebec, 
 
 No. 16, 1882, pp. 121-151.) 
 Quebi-c, 1882, Svo. 
 Triggs, Oscar L. Browning and 
 Whitman. London, 1893, Svo. 
 
 Thoreau, pp. 35-37. 
 
 Underwood, Francis H. The 
 Builders of American Literature. 
 First Series. London, 1893, 
 Svo. 
 
 Henry David Thoreau, pp. 213-216. 
 
 Welsh, Allied H. Development 
 
 of English Literature and 
 
 Language. 2 vols. Chicago, 
 
 1882, Svo. 
 
 Thoreau, vol. ii. pp. 409-414. 
 Woodbury, Charles J. Talks with 
 Ralph Waldo Emerson. London, 
 1890, Svo. 
 
 Thoreau, pp. 76-95. 
 
 Wilson, James Grant, and Fiske, 
 Joh n. Apple ton s Cy clopsed ia 
 of American Biography. 6 vols. 
 New York, 1887-89, Svo. 
 
 Thoreau, vol. vi., pp. 100, 101. 
 Wolfe, Theodore F. Literary 
 Shrines ; the haunts of some 
 famous American authors. 
 Philadelphia, 1895, Svo. 
 Numerous references to Thoreau. 
 
 MAGAZINE ARTICLES, Eic. 
 
 Thoreau, Henry David. Atlantic 
 Monthly, by R. W. Emerson, 
 vol. 10, 1862, pp. 239-249. 
 Boston Commonwealth, vol. 1, 
 No. 33, 1863. Monthly Re- 
 ligious Magazine, by W. R. 
 Alger, vol. 35, 1865, p. 382. 
 Christian Examiner, by J. 
 Weiss, vol. 79, 1865, pp. 96-117. 
 Eraser s Magazine, by Mon- 
 cure D. Conway, vol. 73, 1866, 
 pp. 447-465 ; same article, 
 Eclectic Magazine, vol. 4 N.S., 
 1866, pp. 180-195. Every 
 Saturday, by J. R. Lowell, 
 vol. 10, 1870, p. 166. British 
 Quarterly Review, by Dr. A. 
 
Vlll 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY. 
 
 Thoreau, Henry David. 
 
 II. Japp, vol. 59, 1874, pp. 
 181-194; same article, Littell s 
 Living Age, vol. 120, pp. 643- 
 650, and Eclectic Magazine, vol. 
 19 N.S., pp. 305-312. Harper s 
 New Monthly Magazine, by 
 Miss H. R. Hudson, vol. 61, 
 1875, pp. 28-31. Dublin Uni 
 versity Magazine, by M. Collins, 
 vol. 90, 1877, pp. 610-621. 
 Harvard Register (with por 
 trait), by F. B. Sanborn, vol. 
 3, 1&81, pp. 214-217. Century 
 (with portrait), by J. Bur 
 roughs, vol.2 N.S., 1882, pp. 
 368-379. Dial (Chicago), by 
 II. N. Towers, vol. 3, 1882, 
 pp, 70, 71. Spectator, vol. 56, 
 1883, pp. 239, 240 ; vol. 56, 
 
 1885, pp. 122, 123. Temple 
 Bar, by H. S. Salt, vol. 78, 
 
 1886, pp. 369-383 ; same article 
 in Critic, vol. 8 N.S., pp. 276- 
 278, 289-291; and Eclectic Maga 
 zine, vol. 45 N.S., pp. 89-98. 
 Welcome, by A. H. Japp, vol. 14, 
 
 1887, pp. 652-656. Academy, 
 by W. Lcwin, October 25, 1890, 
 pp. 357, 353. Chautauquan, by 
 John Burroughs, vol. 9, 1889, 
 pp. 530-533. Good Words, by 
 F. H. Underwood, vol. 29, 1888, 
 pp. 445-452. Belgravia, vol.. 
 81, 1893, pp. 375-383. Labour 
 Prophet (with portrait), by John 
 Trevor, vol. ?, 1893, p. 190. 
 Lippincott s Magazine, by C. C. 
 Abbott, June 18^5, pp. 852-855. 
 Great Thoughts, by W. J. 
 Jupp, January 19 and 26, 1895, 
 pp. 256-258, 268, 287. 
 
 A n American Diogenes. 
 
 Chamber s Journal, vol. 8, 
 
 1858, pp. 330-332. 
 An American Rousseau. 
 
 Saturday Review, vol. 18, 
 
 1864, pp. 694, 695. 
 
 Thoreau, Henry David. 
 
 and his Biographers. Lippin 
 cott s Magazine, by S. A. Jones, 
 vol. 48, 18)1, pp. 224-228. 
 and his Books. Harvard 
 Magazine, by Edwin Morton, 
 vol. ], 1855, p. 87, etc. 
 
 and his }Vorks. Inlander, by 
 
 S. A. Jones, vol. 4, 1894, p. 234. 
 
 and New England Transcen 
 dentalism. Catholic "Woild, by 
 J. V. O Conor, vol. 27, 1878, pp. 
 289-303. 
 
 and Thomas Cholmondelcy. 
 
 Atlantic Monthly, by F. B. 
 Sanborn, vol. 72, 1893, pp. 741- 
 756. 
 
 Anti-Slavery and Reform 
 
 Papers. Lippincott s Magazine, 
 by H. S. Salt, vol. 46, 1890, pp. 
 277-283. 
 
 a Rural Humbug. Knicker 
 bocker, vol. 45, 1855, pp. 235- 
 241. 
 
 Autumn. Vassar Miscellany, 
 
 vol. 22, 1892, p. 92. 
 Cape Cod. Boston Common 
 wealth, vol. 3, No. 30, 1865. 
 
 Ch aiming s Life of. Nation, 
 
 vol. 18, 1874, p[. 29, 30. 
 Character and Opinions of. 
 Corn hill Magazine, by R. L. 
 Stevenson, vol. 41, 1880, pp. 
 665-682; same article, Eclectic 
 Magazine, vol. 95, pp. 257-270, 
 and Littell s Living Age, vol. 
 146, pp. 179-190. 
 
 Correspondence with Emerson. 
 
 Atlantic Monthly, by F. B. 
 Sanborn, vol. 69, 1892, pp. 577- 
 596, 736-753. 
 
 Days and Nights in Concord. 
 
 Scribner s Monthly, by W. E. 
 Channing, vol. 1(5, 1878, pp. 
 721-728. 
 
 Excursions. Boston Common 
 wealth, vol. 2, No. 60, 1863. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY. 
 
 IX 
 
 Thoreau, Henry David. 
 
 A Faithful Lover of N at lire, 
 
 Frank It. Leslie s Popular 
 
 Monthly, by W. Lincoln J. 
 
 Adams, vol. 33, 1892, p. 74. 
 Flute (Poem). Atlantic 
 
 Monthly, by Louisa M. Alcott, 
 
 vol. 12, 1863, pp. 280, 281. 
 The Forrester. Atlantic 
 
 Monthly, by A. B. Alcott, 
 
 vol. 9, pp. 443-445. 
 -A Glimpse. Unitarian, by 
 
 S. A. Jones, vol. 5, February 
 
 April. 
 
 Gospel of Simplicity. Pater 
 noster Review, by H. S. Salt, 
 
 vol. 1, 18L-1, pp. 461-468. 
 Inheritance of. Inlander, by 
 
 S. A. Jones, vol. 3, 1892, p. 
 
 199. 
 Letters to Various Person*. 
 
 Atlantic Monthly, by T. \V. 
 
 Higginson, vol. 16, 1865, pp. 
 
 5 4, 505. North American 
 
 Review, by J. R. Lowell, vol. 
 
 101, 1865, pp. 597-608. 
 Life of, by H. S. Salt. 
 
 Spectator, by A. H. Japp, 
 
 Oct. 18, 1890, pp. 526, 527. 
 
 Animal World, Dec. 1890, pp. 
 
 186, 187. 
 The Maine Woods. Boston 
 
 Commonwealth, vol. 3, No. 30, 
 
 1864. Atlantic Monthly, by 
 
 T. W. Higginson, vol. 14," 1864, 
 
 pp. 386, 387. 
 Nature Notes. Selborne 
 
 Society s Jouinal, by J. L. 
 
 Otter, vol. 1, 1890, p. 185. 
 New Estimate of. Penn 
 
 Monthly, by W. S. Kennedy, 
 
 vol. 11, pp. 794, etc. 
 Page s Life of. Academy, by 
 
 Thomas Hughes, Nov. 17, 1877, 
 
 pp. 462, 463. 
 Philosophy at Concord. 
 
 Nation, Sept. 2, 18SO, pp. 
 
 \ 64-1 66. 
 
 Thoreau, Henry David. 
 
 Pity and Humour of (from 
 
 the Spectator). Littell s Living 
 Age, vol. 146, 1880, pp. 190, 
 191. 
 
 Poems of Nature. Scribner s 
 
 Magazine, by F. B. Sanborn, 
 March 1895, pp. 352-355. 
 Saturday Review, Jan. 18, 
 1896; Star, Jan. 23, 1896, by 
 Richard Le Gallienne. 
 
 Poetry of. Lippincott s 
 
 Magazine, by J. Ben ton, vol. 
 37, 1886, pp. 491-500. --Art 
 Review, by H. S. Salt, May 
 1890, pp. 153-155. 
 
 Portrait of, by Himself. 
 
 Literary World (Boston), 
 March 26, 1881. 
 
 Portraits of, with a Beard. 
 
 Critic, vol. 1, 1881, p. 95. 
 
 Sanborn s Life of. Nation, 
 
 by A. G. Sedgwick, vol. 35, 
 1882, pp. 34, 35. Literary 
 World (Boston), vol. 13, 1882, 
 pp. 227, 228. Athenreum, 
 Oct. 28, 1882, pp. 558-560. 
 Academy, by J. Purves, Oct. 
 14, 1882, pp. 271, 272. Ameri 
 can, by T. A. Janvier, vol. 4, 
 1882, p. 218. 
 Selections from, II. S. Salt s. 
 
 Academy, by Walter Lewin, 
 May 4, 1895, p. 377. 
 
 Some Recollections and Inci 
 dents concerning. Concord 
 Freeman, by Joseph Hosmer, 
 October 1880. 
 
 Study of. Eclectic Magazine 
 (from the Academy), by Thomas 
 Hughes, vol. 27 N.S., 1878, 
 pp. 114-116. 
 
 Summer. Academy, by 
 
 Walter Lewin, Sept. 27, 1884, 
 pp. 193, 194. Literary World 
 (Boston), July 12> 1884, p. 223. 
 The Nation, vol. 39, 1884, 
 pp. 98-99. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY. 
 
 Thoreau, Henry David. 
 
 Sunday at Concord. Fort 
 nightly Review, by Grant 
 Allen, vol. 43 N.S., 1888, pp. 
 675-690. 
 
 Ten Volumes of. New Eng- 
 
 lander, by Joshua W. Caldwell, 
 vol. 55, 1891, pp. 404-424. 
 
 Unpublished Poetry of (with 
 portrait). Critic, by F. B. 
 Sanborn, March 26, 1881, pp. 
 75, 76. 
 
 Visit to Walden Pond. Natural 
 Food, by Hector Waylen, July 
 1895, pp. 438, 439. 
 
 Walden. Putnam s Monthly, 
 
 by C. F. Briggs, vol. 4, 1854, 
 
 Thoreau, Henry David. 
 
 pp. 443-448. Boston Common 
 wealth, vol. 1. No. 56, 1863. 
 
 Walden Pond. Boston 
 
 Commonwealth, vol. 3, No. 
 47, 1865. 
 
 Week on the Concord. Massa 
 chusetts Quarterly Review, 
 byj. R, Lowell, vol. 3, 1849, 
 pp. 40-51. Saturday Review, 
 August 17, 1889, pp. 195, 196. 
 
 Wild/less of. Critic, by J. 
 
 Burroughs, March 26, 1881, 
 p. 74. 
 
 Works of. New Englander, 
 
 by J. W. Caldwell, vol. 55, 
 1891, pp. 404-424. 
 
 V. CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF WORKS. 
 
 A Week on the Concord and 
 
 Merrimack Rivers . 1849 
 
 Walden ; or, Life in the 
 
 Woods .... 1854 
 
 Excursions 
 The Maine Woods 
 Cape Cod . 
 
 Letters to Various Persons 
 A Yankee in Canada 
 Early Spring in Massa 
 chusetts: Fiom the 
 
 1863 
 1864 
 1864 
 1865 
 1866 
 
 Journal of Henry D. 
 
 Thoreau . . .1881 
 Summer: From the 
 
 Journal of Henry D. 
 
 Thoreau . . . 1884 
 Winter : From the Journal 
 
 of Henry D. Thoreau . 1888 
 Autumn : From the 
 
 Journal of Henry D. 
 
 Thoreau - . . 1892 
 Miscellanies . . . -1894 
 Familiar Letters . .1894 
 Poems of Nature . . 1895 
 
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