None can be an impartial or wise
observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what
we should call voluntary poverty.
observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what
we should call voluntary poverty.
Warner - World's Best Literature - v25 - Tas to Tur
—
"Fly, darling, without rest,
Over land and sea to my Love,
And fold your wings in her breast! »
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14871
HENRY D. THOREAU
(1817-1862)
BY JOHN BURROUGHS
N THE front of the second order of American authors we must
place Henry D. Thoreau. He had many qualities which
would seem to entitle him to a place in the first order,
with Emerson, Longfellow, Bryant, Whitman; but he lacked at least
one thing which these men possessed — he lacked breadth: his sym
pathies were narrow; he did not touch his fellows at many points.
It has been complained that Emerson was narrow too; but Emerson
looked over a much wider field than Thoreau, had many more inter-
ests, was more affirmative, and in every way was a larger, more help-
ful spiritual force. In his life, Thoreau isolated himself from his
fellows as much as possible; he was very scornful of ordinary human
ends and ambitions, and seemed to set slight value upon the ordi-
nary human affections.
Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts, July 12th, 1817, and
died there in May 1862, of consumption; having seen forty-five years
of life, and probably spent more of it in the open air than any other
American man of letters. The business of his life was walking,—or
sauntering, as he preferred to call it,—and he aimed to spend half
of each day the year round in field or wood. He was a new kind of
sportsman, who carried a journal instead of a gun or trap, and who
brought home only such game as falls to the eye of the poet and
seer.
Thoreau was of French extraction on his father's side, and English
on his mother's. His intellectual traits were evidently from the former
source, his moral traits from the latter. That love of the wild and
savage, that crispness and terseness of expression, that playful exag-
geration, and that radical revolutionary cry, were French; while his
English blood showed itself more in his love of the homely, the aus-
tere, and his want of sociability.
His grandfather, John Thoreau, was born in the isle of Guernsey,
was a merchant in Boston; and died in Concord of consumption, in
1801. His father, also named John, after an unsuccessful mercantile
career became a lead-pencil maker in Concord in 1823; and from
that date to the time of his death in 1859, says Henry's biographer,
"led a plodding, unambitious, and respectable life. " Henry Thoreau
## p. 14872 (#450) ##########################################
14872
HENRY D. THOREAU
was the third of four children,- John, Helen, Henry, and Sophia,-
all persons of character and mark. "To meet one of the Thoreaus,"
says Mr. Sanborn, "was not the same as to encounter any other per-
son who might cross your path. Life to them was something more
than a parade of pretension, a conflict of ambitions, or an incessant
scramble for the common objects of life. " John and Helen were both
teachers, and died comparatively young. John is described as a sunny
soul, always serene and loving, and as possessed of a generous flow-
ing spirit; Henry was deeply attached to him, and his death in 1842
was an irreparable loss. He said seven years later that "a man can
attend but one funeral in his life,- can behold but one corpse. "
him this was the corpse and the funeral of his brother John.
To
Henry and his brother assisted their
former attaining great skill in the art.
him says that he at last succeeded in
the best English ones.
father in pencil-making; the
Emerson in his sketch of
making as good a pencil as
The way to fortune seemed open to him. But he said he should
never make another pencil. "Why should I? I would not do again
what I have done once. " This saying pleased Emerson: it has an
Emersonian ring. But Thoreau did not live up to it. Mr. Sanborn
says, "He went on many years, at intervals working at his father's
business. »
Thoreau entered Harvard College in 1833, and graduated in due
course, but without any special distinction. In his Senior year his
biographer says, "He lost rank with his instructors by his indiffer-
ence to the ordinary college motives for study. " The real Thoreau
was already cropping out: the ambition of most mortals was not his
ambition; there was something contrary and scornful in him from the
first. His noble sister Helen earned part of the money that paid his
way at college.
In 1838 he went to Maine in quest of employment as teacher, car-
rying recommendations from Mr. Emerson, Dr. Ripley, and from the
president of Harvard College; but his journey was not successful.
Later in the same year he seems to have been employed as teacher
in Concord Academy. About this time he first appeared as a lecturer
in the lyceum of his native village; and he continued to lecture as he
received calls from various New England towns till near the close of
his life. But it is doubtful if he was in any sen: e a popular lecturer.
He puzzled the people. I have been told, by man who when a
boy heard him read a lecture in some Massachi Setts town, that the
audience did not know what to make of him. They hardly knew
whether to take him seriously or not. His paradoxes, his strange
and extreme gospel of nature, and evidently hi: indifference as to
whether he pleased them or not, were not in the style of the usual
lyceum lecturer.
## p. 14873 (#451) ##########################################
HENRY D. THOREAU
14873
There is a tradition that while teaching, he and his brother John
both fell in love with the same girl, and that Henry heroically gave
way to John. It doubtless cost him less effort than the same act
would have cost his more human brother.
It seems to have been about this time that he began his daily
walks and studies of nature. In August 1839 he made his voyage
down the Concord and Merrimac Rivers, in company with his
brother; out of which experience grew his first book, or rather which
he made the occasion of his first book,—'A Week on the Concord
and Merrimack Rivers,'-published ten years later. The book was
not a success commercially, and the author carried home the seven
hundred unsold copies on his back; boasting that he now had a very
respectable library, all of his own writing. The title of the book is
misleading: it is an account of a voyage on far other and larger
rivers than the Concord and Merrimac,- the great world currents
of philosophy, religion, and literature. The voyage but furnishes the
thread with which he ties together his speculations and opinions upon
these subjects. It is not, in my opinion, his most valuable or read-
able book, though it contains some of his best prose and poetry.
offends one's sense of fitness and unity. It is a huge digression.
We are promised a narrative of travel and adventure, spiced with
observation of nature; and we get a bundle of essays, some of them
crude and loosely put together. To some young men I have known,
the book proved a great boon; but I imagine that most readers of
to-day find the temptation to skip the long ethical and literary dis-
cussions, and be off down-stream with the voyagers, a very strong
one. When one goes a-fishing or a-boating, he is not in the frame
of mind to pause by the way to listen to a lecture, however fine.
It
In 1845 Thoreau put his philosophy of life to the test by build-
ing a hut in the woods on the shore of Walden Pond, a mile or
more from Concord village, and spending over two years there. Out
of this experiment grew his best-known and most valuable book,-
'Walden, or Life in the Woods. ' The book is a record of his life in
that sylvan solitude, and abounds in felicitous descriptions of the sea-
sons and the scenery, and fresh and penetrating observations upon
the wild life about him.
-
He went to the woods for study and contemplation, and to in-
dulge his taste for the wild and the solitary, as well as to make an
experiment in the art of simple living. He proved to his own satis-
faction that most of us waste our time on superfluities, and that a
man can live on less than $100 per year and have two-thirds of his
time to himself. He cultivated beans, gathered wild berries, did a
little fishing, and I suspect, went home pretty often for a square
meal. " In theory he seems to have been a vegetarian; but it is told
of him that when he had a day of surveying on hand, he was wont
«<
## p. 14874 (#452) ##########################################
14874
HENRY D. THOREAU
to fortify himself with pork as well as beans. At Walden he seems
to have written much of the 'Week,' his essay on Carlyle, and others
of his papers. Alcott and Emerson were his visitors; and besides
these, he reports that he had a good deal of company in the morning
when nobody called. He was a born lover of solitude. He says he
"never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. »
"I am
no more lonely than the loon in the pond that laughs so
loud, or than Walden Pond itself. What company has that lonely
lake, I pray? And yet it has not the blue devils, but the blue angels
in it, in the azure tint of its waters. "
Thoreau whistled a good deal, and at times very prettily, as in
this quotation, to help keep his courage up. Indeed the whole vol-
ume is a cheery exultant whistle, at times with a bantering defiant
tone in it. It is, on the whole, the most delicious piece of brag in
our literature. Who ever got so much out of a bean-field as Thoreau!
He makes one want to go forthwith and plant a field with beans,
and hoe them barefoot. He makes us feel that the occupation yields
a "classic result. "
"When my hoe tinkled against the stones, that music echoed to the woods
and the sky, and was an acco
ccompaniment to my labor which yielded an instant
and immeasurable crop. It was no longer beans that I hoed, nor I that hoed
beans; and I remembered with as much pity as pride, if I remembered at all,
my acquaintances who had gone to the city to attend the oratorios.
"On gala days the town fires its great guns, which echo like popguns to
these woods, and some waifs of martial music occasionally penetrate thus far.
To me, away there in my bean-field at the other end of the town, the big
guns sounded as if a puff-ball had burst; and when there was a military turn-
out of which I was ignorant, I have sometimes had a vague sense all the day
of some sort of itching and disease in the horizon, as if some eruption would
break out there soon, either scarlatina or canker-rash,-until at length some
more favorable puff of wind, making haste over the fields and up the Way-
land road, brought me information of the trainers. >>
After the Walden episode, Thoreau supported himself by doing
various odd jobs for his neighbors, such as whitewashing, gardening,
fence-building, land-surveying. He also lectured occasionally, and
wrote now and then for the current magazines. Horace Greeley
became his friend, and disposed of some of his papers for him to
Graham's Magazine, Putnam's Magazine, and the Democratic Review.
He made three trips to the Maine woods, —in 1846, 1853, and 1857,-
where he saw and studied the moose and the Indian. The latter
interested him greatly. Emerson said the three men in whom
Thoreau felt the deepest interest were John Brown, his Indian guide
in Maine, and Walt Whitman. The magazine papers which were the
outcome of his trips to the Maine woods were published in book form
## p. 14875 (#453) ##########################################
HENRY D. THOREAU
14875
after his death; and next to Walden' I think make his most inter-
esting contribution.
In 1850, in company with his friend Ellery Channing, he made a
trip to Canada, and reports that he found traveling dirty work, and
that "a man needs a pair of overalls for it. " This poetic couple
wore very plain clothes, and by way of baggage had a bundle and
an umbrella. "We styled ourselves Knights of the Umbrella and the
Bundle. " The details of this trip may be found in his 'A Yankee
in Canada,' — also published after his death.
-
Thoreau was almost as local as a woodchuck. He never went
abroad, probably could not have been hired to go. He thought Con-
cord contained about all that was worth seeing. Nature repeats her-
self everywhere; only you must be wide awake enough to see her.
He penetrated the West as far as Minnesota in 1862 for his health,
but the trip did not stay the progress of his disease. He made several
trips to New York and Brooklyn to see Walt Whitman, whose poems
and whose personality made a profound impression upon him.
"The
greatest democrat the world has ever seen," was his verdict upon the
author of 'Leaves of Grass. '
One of the most characteristic acts of Thoreau's life was his pub-
lic defense of John Brown on October 30th, 1859, when the sentiment
of the whole country-abolitionists and all-set so overwhelmingly
the other way. Emerson, and other of Thoreau's friends, tried to
dissuade him from any public expression in favor of Brown just then;
but he was all on fire with the thought of John Brown's heroic and
righteous act, and he was not to be checked. His speech was calm
and restrained; but there was molten metal inside it, and metal of
the purest kind. It stirs the blood to read it at this time. Thoreau
and Brown were kindred souls-fanatics, if you please, but both
made of the stuff of heroes. Brown was the Thoreau of action and
of politics, and Thoreau was the Brown of the region of the senti-
ments and moral and social ideals.
It is Thoreau's heroic moral fibre that takes us. It is never re-
laxed; it is always braced for the heights. He was an unusual mixture
of the poet, the naturalist, and the moralist: but the moralist domi-
nated. Yet he was not the moralist as we know him in English
literature, without salt or savor, but a moralist escaped to the woods,
full of a wild tang and aroma. He preaches a kind of goodness that
sounds strange to conventional ears, - the goodness of the natural,
the simple. "There is no odor so bad as that which arises from
goodness tainted. " And goodness is tainted when it takes thought
of itself. A man's
"goodness must not be a partial and transitory act, but a constant super-
fluity, which costs him nothing, and of which he is unconscious. " "If I knew
for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design
## p. 14876 (#454) ##########################################
14876
HENRY D. THOREAU
of doing me good, I should run for my life,- as from that dry and parching
wind of the African desert called the Simoon, which fills the mouth and nose
and ears and eyes with dust till you are suffocated,- for fear that I should
get some of his good done to me, some of its virus mingled with my blood. »
Thoreau's virtue is a kind of stimulating contrariness; there is no
compliance in him: he always says and does the unexpected thing,
but always leaves us braced for better work and better living. "Sim-
plicity, simplicity, simplicity," he reiterates: "I say, let your affairs
be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a
million, count half a dozen; and keep your accounts on your thumb-
nail. "
He was a poet too, through and through, but lacked the perfect
metrical gift. In this respect he had the shortcomings of his mas-
ter, Emerson, who was a poet keyed to the highest pitch of bardic
tension, but yet whose numbers would not always flow. Thoreau
printed a few poems; one on 'Smoke' and one on 'Sympathy' have
merits of a high order. Thoreau's naturalism is the salt that gives
him his savor. He caught something tonic and pungent from his
intercourse with wild nature. Sometimes it is biting and smarting
like crinkle-root or calamus-root; at others it is sweet and aromatic
like birch or wintergreen: but always it is stimulating and whole-
some.
As a naturalist Thoreau's aim was ulterior to science: he loved
the bird, but he loved more the bird behind the bird, -the idea it
suggested, the mood of his mind it interpreted. He would fain see a
mythology shine through his ornithology. In all his walks and ram-
bles and excursions to mountains and to marsh, he was the idealist
and the mystic, and never the devotee of pure science.
His pages
abound in many delicious natural-history bits, and in keen observa-
tion; but when we sternly ask how much he has added to our store
of exact knowledge of this nature to which he devoted his lifetime,
we cannot point to much that is new or important. He was in quest
of an impalpable knowledge,- waiting, as he says in Walden,' "at
evening on the hill-tops for the sky to fall, that I might catch some-
thing, though I never caught much; and that, manna-wise, would dis-
solve again in the sun. ”
But he caught more than he here gives himself credit for; and it
does not dissolve away in the sun. His fame has increased from
year to year. Other names in our literature, much more prominent
than his in his own day,-as that of Whipple, Tuckerman, Giles,
etc. ,- have faded; while his own has grown brighter and brighter,
and the meridian is not yet.
John Burroughs
## p. 14877 (#455) ##########################################
HENRY D. THOREAU
14877
INSPIRATION
By permission of Houghton, Mifflin & Co. , publishers
HATE'ER we leave to God, God does,
And blesses us;
The work we choose should be our own,
God leaves alone.
WHATE
*
If with light head erect I sing,
Though all the Muses lend their force,
From my poor love of anything,
The verse is weak and shallow as its source.
But if with bended neck I grope
Listening behind me for my wit,
With faith superior to hope,
More anxious to keep back than forward it;
Making my soul accomplice there
Unto the flame my heart hath lit,-
Then will the verse for ever wear:
Time cannot bend the line which God hath writ.
Always the general show of things.
Floats in review before my mind,
And such true love and reverence brings,
That sometimes I forget that I am blind.
But now there comes unsought, unseen,
Some clear divine electuary,
And I, who had but sensual been,
Grow sensible, and as God is, am wary.
I hearing get, who had but ears,
And sight, who had but eyes before;
I moments live, who lived but years,
And truth discern, who knew but learning's lore.
I hear beyond the range of sound,
I see beyond the range of sight,
New earths and skies and seas around,
And in my day the sun doth pale his light.
A clear and ancient harmony
Pierces my soul through all its din,
## p. 14878 (#456) ##########################################
14878
HENRY D. THOREAU
As through its utmost melody,-
Farther behind than they, farther within.
More swift its bolt than lightning is;
Its voice than thunder is more loud;
It doth expand my privacies
To all, and leave me single in the crowd.
It speaks with such authority,
With so serene and lofty tone,
That idle time runs gadding by,
And leaves me with Eternity alone.
Now chiefly is my natal hour,
And only now my prime of life:
Of manhood's strength it is the flower;
'Tis peace's end and war's beginning strife.
It comes in summer's broadest noon,
By a gray wall or some chance place,
Unseasoning Time, insulting June,
And vexing day with its presuming face.
Such fragrance round my couch it makes,
More rich than are Arabian drugs,
That my soul scents its life and wakes
The body up beneath its perfumed rugs.
Such is the Muse, the heavenly maid,
The star that guides our mortal course,
Which shows where life's true kernel's laid,
Its wheat's fine flour, and its undying force.
She with one breath attunes the spheres,
And also my poor human heart;
With one impulse propels the years
Around, and gives my throbbing pulse its start.
I will not doubt for evermore,
Nor falter from a steadfast faith;
For though the system be turned o'er,
God takes not back the word which once he saith.
I will not doubt the love untold
Which not my worth nor want has bought,
Which wooed me young, and wooes me old,
And to this evening hath me brought.
## p. 14879 (#457) ##########################################
HENRY D. THOREAU
14879
My memory I'll educate
To know the one historic truth,
Remembering to the latest date
The only true and sole immortal youth.
Be but thy inspiration given,
No matter through what danger sought,
I'll fathom hell or climb to heaven,
And yet esteem that cheap which love has bought,
*
M
**
Fame cannot tempt the bard
Who's famous with his God,
Nor laurel him reward
Who has his Maker's nod.
THE FISHER'S BOY
By permission of Houghton, Mifflin & Co. , publishers
Y 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 sea;
Yet oft I think the ocean they've sailed o'er
Is deeper known upon the strand to me.
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.
## p. 14880 (#458) ##########################################
14880
HENRY D. THOREAU
SMOKE
By permission of Houghton, Mifflin & Co. , publishers
IGHT-WINGED Smoke, Icarian bird,
L
Melting thy pinions in thy upward flight;
Lark without song, and messenger of dawn,
Circling above the hamlets as thy nest;
Or else, departing dream and shadowy form
Of midnight vision, gathering up thy skirts;
By night star-veiling, and by day
Darkening the light and blotting out the sun,—
Go thou, my incense, upward from this hearth,
And ask the gods to pardon this clear flame.
WORK AND PAY
From Walden. ' Copyright 1854, by Henry D. Thoreau; 1893, by Houghton,
Mifflin & Co.
T THE present and in this country, as I find by my own
A experience, a few implements, a knife, an axe, a spade, a
wheelbarrow, etc. , and for the studious, lamplight, station-
ery, and access to a few books, rank next to necessaries, and can
all be obtained at a trifling cost. Yet some, not wise, go to the
other side of the globe, to barbarous and unhealthy regions, and
devote themselves to trade for ten or twenty years, in order that
they may live-that is, keep comfortably warm-and die in New
England at last. The luxuriously rich are not simply kept com-
fortably warm, but unnaturally hot; as I implied before, they are
cooked, of course à la mode.
Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of
life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the
elevation of mankind. With respect to luxuries and comforts,
the wisest have ever lived a more simple and meagre life than
the poor. The ancient philosophers - Chinese, Hindoo, Persian,
and Greek — were a class than which none has been poorer
in outward riches, none so rich in inward. We know not much
about them. It is remarkable that we know so much of them
as we do. The same is true of the more modern reformers and
benefactors of their race.
None can be an impartial or wise
observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what
we should call voluntary poverty. Of a life of luxury the fruit is
## p. 14881 (#459) ##########################################
HENRY D. THOREAU
14881
luxury, whether in agriculture, or commerce, or literature, or art.
There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philoso-
phers. Yet it is admirable to profess, because it was once admi-
rable to live. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle
thoughts, nor even to found a school; but so to love wisdom
as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independ-
ence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the prob-
lems of life, not only theoretically but practically. The success of
great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success;
not kingly, not manly. They make shift to live merely by con-
formity, practically as their fathers did, and are in no sense the
progenitors of a nobler race of men. But why do men degen-
erate ever? What makes families run out? What is the nature
of the luxury which enervates and destroys nations? Are we sure
that there is none of it in our own lives? The philosopher is
in advance of his age even in the outward form of his life.
He is not fed, sheltered, clothed, warmed, like his contemporaries.
How can a man be a philosopher and not maintain his vital heat
by better methods than other men?
-
When a man is warmed by the several modes which I have de-
scribed, what does he want next? Surely not more warmth of the
same kind,—as more and richer food, larger and more splendid
houses, finer and more abundant clothing, more numerous inces-
sant and hotter fires, and the like. When he has obtained those
things which are necessary to life, there is another alternative
than to obtain the superfluities; and that is, to adventure on life
now, his vacation from humbler toil having commenced. The
soil, it appears, is suited to the seed; for it has sent its radicle
downward, and it may now send its shoot upward also with con-
fidence. Why has man rooted himself thus firmly in the earth,
but that he may rise in the same proportion into the heavens
above? — for the nobler plants are valued for the fruit they bear
at last in the air and light, far from the ground, and are not
treated like the humbler esculents; which, though they may be
biennials, are cultivated only till they have perfected their root,
and often cut down at top for this purpose, so that most would
not know them in their flowering season.
I do not mean to prescribe rules to strong and valiant natures,
who will mind their own affairs whether in heaven or hell, and
perchance build more magnificently and spend more lavishly than
the richest, without ever impoverishing themselves, not knowing
XXV-931
## p. 14882 (#460) ##########################################
14882
HENRY D. THOREAU
how they live if indeed there are any such, as has been
dreamed; nor to those who find their encouragement and inspira-
tion in precisely the present condition of things, and cherish it
with the fondness and enthusiasm of lovers-and to some extent
I reckon myself in this number; I do not speak to those who
are well employed, in whatever circumstances-and they know
whether they are well employed or not; - but mainly to the
mass of men who are discontented, and idly complaining of the
hardness of their lot or of the times, when they might improve
them. There are some who complain most energetically and
inconsolably of any, because they are, as they say, doing their
duty. I also have in my mind that seemingly wealthy, but most
terribly impoverished class of all, who have accumulated dross
but know not how to use it or get rid of it, and thus have
forged their own golden or silver fetters.
If I should attempt to tell how I have desired to spend my
life in years past, it would probably surprise those of my readers
who are somewhat acquainted with its actual history; it would
certainly astonish those who know nothing about it. I will only
hint at some of the enterprises which I have cherished.
In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been
anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick
too: to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and
future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line.
You will pardon some obscurities, for there are more secrets in
my trade than in most men's; and yet not voluntarily kept, but
inseparable from its very nature. I would gladly tell all that I
know about it, and never paint "No Admittance" on my gate.
I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and
am still on their trail. Many are the travelers I have spoken
concerning them, describing their tracks and what calls they
answered to. I have met one or two who had heard the hound,
and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear
behind a cloud; and they seemed as anxious to recover them as
if they had lost them themselves.
To anticipate, not the sunrise and the dawn merely, but if
possible, Nature herself! How many mornings, summer and
winter, before yet any neighbor was stirring about his business,
have I been about mine! No doubt many of my townsmen have
met me returning from this enterprise,-farmers starting for Bos-
ton in the twilight, or wood-choppers going to their work. It is
## p. 14883 (#461) ##########################################
HENRY D. THOREAU
14883
true, I never assisted the sun materially in his rising; but, doubt
not, it was of the last importance only to be present at it.
So many autumn, ay, and winter days, spent outside the
town, trying to hear what was in the wind, to hear and carry
it express! I well-nigh sunk all my capital in it, and lost my
own breath into the bargain, running in the face of it. If it had
concerned either of the political parties, depend upon it, it would
have appeared in the Gazette with the earliest intelligence. At
other times watching from the observatory of some cliff or tree,
to telegraph any new arrival; or waiting at evening on the hill-
tops for the sky to fall, that I might catch something,- though
I never caught much, and that, manna-wise, would dissolve again
in the sun.
For a long time I was reporter to a journal, of no very wide
circulation, whose editor has never yet seen fit to print the bulk
of my contributions, and, as is too common with writers, I got
only my labor for my pains. However, in this case my pains
were their own reward.
For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snow-storms
and rain-storms, and did my duty faithfully; surveyor, if not
of highways, then of forest paths and all across-lot routes,-keep-
ing them open, and ravines bridged and passable at all seasons,
where the public heel had testified to their utility.
I have looked after the wild stock of the town, which give a
faithful herdsman a good deal of trouble by leaping fences; and
I have had an eye to the unfrequented nooks and corners of the
farm: though I did not always know whether Jonas or Solomon
worked in a particular field to-day, that was none of my business.
I have watered the red huckleberry, the sand-cherry and the
nettle-tree, the red pine and the black ash, the white grape and
the yellow violet, which might have withered else in dry seasons.
In short, I went on thus for a long time (I may say it with-
out boasting), faithfully minding my business, till it became more
and more evident that my townsmen would not after all admit
me into the list of town officers, nor make my place a sinecure
with a moderate allowance. My accounts, which I can swear to
have kept faithfully, I have indeed never got audited, still less
accepted, still less paid and settled. However, I have not set my
heart on that.
## p. 14884 (#462) ##########################################
14884
HENRY D. THOREAU
SOLITUDE
From Walden. ' Copyright 1854, by Henry D. Thoreau; 1893, by Houghton,
Mifflin & Co.
TH
HIS is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense,
and imbibes delight through every pore. I go and come
with a strange liberty in Nature, a part of herself. As I
walk along the stony shore of the pond in my shirt-sleeves,
though it is cool as well as cloudy and windy, and I see nothing
special to attract me, all the elements are unusually congenial to
me. The bullfrogs trump to usher in the night, and the note
of the whippoorwill is borne on the rippling wind from over
the water. Sympathy with the fluttering alder and poplar leaves
almost takes away my breath; yet, like the lake, my serenity is
rippled but not ruffled. These small waves raised by the even-
ing wind are as remote from storm as the smooth reflecting sur-
face. Though it is now dark, the wind still blows and roars in
the wood, the waves still dash, and some creatures lull the rest
with their notes. The repose is never complete. The wildest
animals do not repose, but seek their prey now; the fox and
skunk and rabbit now roam the fields and woods without fear.
They are Nature's watchmen,-links which connect the days of
animated life.
When I return to my house I find that visitors have been
there and left their cards, either a bunch of flowers, or a wreath
of evergreen, or a name in pencil on a yellow walnut leaf or a
chip. They who come rarely to the woods take some little piece
of the forest into their hands to play with by the way, which
they leave, either intentionally or accidentally. One has peeled a
willow wand, woven it into a ring, and dropped it on my table.
I could always tell if visitors had called in my absence, either
by the bended twigs or grass, or the print of their shoes; and
generally of what sex or age or quality they were, by some slight
trace left, as a flower dropped, or a bunch of grass plucked
and thrown away, even as far off as the railroad half a mile
distant, or by the lingering odor of a cigar or pipe. Nay, I was
frequently notified of the passage of a traveler along the high-
way sixty rods off by the scent of his pipe.
There is commonly sufficient space about us. Our horizon is
never quite at our elbows. The thick wood is not just at our
door, nor the pond; but somewhat is always clearing, familiar
and worn by us, appropriated and fenced in some way, and
―――――
―
―
## p. 14885 (#463) ##########################################
HENRY D. THOREAU
14885
reclaimed from Nature. For what reason have I this vast range
and circuit, some square miles of unfrequented forest, for my
privacy, abandoned to me by men? My nearest neighbor is a
mile distant, and no house is visible from any place but the hill-
tops within half a mile of my own. I have my horizon bounded
by woods all to myself; a distant view of the railroad where it
touches the pond on the one hand, and of the fence which skirts.
the woodland road on the other. But for the most part it is as
solitary where I live as on the prairies. It is as much Asia or
Africa as New England. I have, as it were, my own sun and
moon and stars, and a little world all to myself. At night there
was never a traveler passed my house, or knocked at my door,
more than if I were the first or last man; unless it were in the
spring, when at long intervals some came from the village to fish
for pouts, they plainly fished much more in the Walden Pond
of their own natures, and baited their hooks with darkness,— but
they soon retreated, usually with light baskets, and left "the
world to darkness and to me," and the black kernel of the night
was never profaned by any human neighborhood. I believe that
men are generally still a little afraid of the dark, though the
witches are all hung, and Christianity and candles have been
introduced.
-
Yet I experienced sometimes that the most sweet and tender,
the most innocent and encouraging society may be found in any
natural object, even for the poor misanthrope and most melan-
choly man. There can be no very black melancholy to him who
lives in the midst of Nature and has his senses still. There was
never yet such a storm but it was Æolian music to a healthy
and innocent ear. Nothing can rightly compel a simple and
brave man to a vulgar sadness. While I enjoy the friendship of
the seasons, I trust that nothing can make life a burden to me.
The gentle rain which waters my beans and keeps me in the
house to-day is not drear and melancholy, but good for me too.
Though it prevents my hoeing them, it is of far more worth than
my hoeing. If it should continue so long as to cause the seeds
to rot in the ground and destroy the potatoes in the low lands,
it would still be good for the grass on the uplands; and being
good for the grass, it would be good for me. Sometimes, when
I compare myself with other men, it seems as if I were more
favored by the gods than they, beyond any deserts that I am
conscious of; as if I had a warrant and surety at their hands
## p. 14886 (#464) ##########################################
14886
HENRY D. THOREAU
which my fellows have not, and were especially guided and
guarded. I do not flatter myself; but if it be possible, they flat-
ter me. I have never felt lonesome, or in the least oppressed by
a sense of solitude, but once; and that was a few weeks after
I came to the woods, when for an hour I doubted if the near
neighborhood of man was not essential to a serene and healthy
life. To be alone was something unpleasant. But I was at the
same time conscious of a slight insanity in my mood, and seemed
to foresee my recovery. In the midst of a gentle rain, while
these thoughts prevailed, I was suddenly sensible of such sweet
and beneficent society in Nature, in the very pattering of the
drops, and in every sound and sight around my house, an infinite
and unaccountable friendliness all at once like an atmosphere
sustaining me, as made the fancied advantages of human neigh-
borhood insignificant, and I have never thought of them since.
Every little pine needle expanded and swelled with sympathy
and befriended me. I was so distinctly made aware of the
presence of something kindred to me, even in scenes which we
are accustomed to call wild and dreary, and also that the nearest
of blood to me and humanest was not a person nor a villager,
that I thought no place could ever be strange to me again. —
"Mourning untimely consumes the sad;
Few are their days in the land of the living,
Beautiful daughter of Toscar. "
Some of my pleasantest hours were during the long rain-
storms in the spring or fall, which confined me to the house for
the afternoon as well as the forenoon, soothed by their ceaseless
roar and pelting; when an early twilight ushered in a long even-
ing, in which many thoughts had time to take root and unfold
themselves. In those driving northeast rains which tried the
village houses so, when the maids stood ready with mop and pail
in front entries to keep the deluge out, I sat behind my door in
my little house, which was all entry, and thoroughly enjoyed its
protection. In one heavy thunder-shower the lightning struck a
large pitch-pine across the pond, making a very conspicuous and
perfectly regular spiral groove from top to bottom, an inch or
more deep and four or five inches wide, as you would groove a
walking-stick. I passed it again the other day, and was struck
with awe on looking up and beholding that mark, now more dis-
tinct than ever, where a terrific and resistless bolt came down out
## p. 14887 (#465) ##########################################
HENRY D. THOREAU
14887
of the harmless sky eight years ago.
Men frequently say to me,
"I should think you would feel lonesome down there and want to
be nearer to folks,- rainy and snowy days and nights especially. "
I am tempted to reply to such,-This whole earth which we
inhabit is but a point in space. How far apart, think you, dwell
the two most distant inhabitants of yonder star, the breadth of
whose disk cannot be appreciated by our instruments? Why
should I feel lonely? is not our planet in the Milky Way? This
which you put seems to me not to be the most important ques-
tion. What sort of space is that which separates a man from
his fellows and makes him solitary? I have found that no exer-
tion of the legs can bring two minds much nearer to one another.
What do we want most to dwell near to? Not to many men,
surely, the depot, the post-office, the bar-room, the meeting-
house, the schoolhouse, the grocery, Beacon Hill, or the Five
Points, where men most congregate,- but to the perennial source
of our life, whence in all our experience we have found that to
issue, as the willow stands near the water and sends out its roots
in that direction. This will vary with different natures, but this
is the place where a wise man will dig his cellar. -I one even-
ing overtook one of my townsmen, who has accumulated what is
called "a handsome property,"-though I never got a fair view
of it, on the Walden road, driving a pair of cattle to market,
who inquired of me how I could bring my mind to give up so
many of the comforts of life. I answered that I was very sure
I liked it passably well; I was not joking. And so I went home
to my bed, and left him to pick his way through the darkness
and the mud to Brighton,-or Bright-town,-which place he
would reach some time in the morning.
Any prospect of awakening or coming to life, to a dead man
makes indifferent all times and places. The place where that
may occur is always the same, and indescribably pleasant to all
our senses. For the most part we allow only outlying and trans-
ient circumstances to make our occasions. They are in fact the
cause of our distraction. Nearest to all things is that power
which fashions their being. Next to us the grandest laws are
continually being executed. Next to us is not the workman
whom we have hired, with whom we love so well to talk, but
the workman whose work we are.
-
"How vast and profound is the influence of the subtile pow-
ers of Heaven and of Earth!
## p. 14888 (#466) ##########################################
14888
HENRY D. THOREAU
"We seek to perceive them, and we do not see them; we
seek to hear them, and we do not hear them; identified with the
substance of things, they cannot be separated from them.
"They cause that in all the universe men purify and sanctify
their hearts, and clothe themselves in their holiday garments to
offer sacrifices and oblations to their ancestors. It is an ocean
of subtile intelligences. They are everywhere, above us, on our
left, on our right; they environ us on all sides. "
We are the subjects of an experiment which is not a little
interesting to me. Can we not do without the society of our
gossips a little while under these circumstances, - have our own
thoughts to cheer us? Confucius says truly, "Virtue does not
remain as an abandoned orphan: it must of necessity have
neighbors. "
With thinking, we may be beside ourselves in a sane sense.
By a conscious effort of the mind we can stand aloof from
actions and their consequences; and all things, good and bad, go
by us like a torrent. We are not wholly involved in Nature. I
may be either the driftwood in the stream, or Indra in the sky
looking down on it. I may be affected by a theatrical exhibi-
tion; on the other hand, I may not be affected by an actual event
which appears to concern me much more. I only know myself as
a human entity, -the scene, so to speak, of thoughts and affec
tions; and am sensible of a certain doubleness by which I can
stand as remote from myself as from another. However intense
my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a
part of me, which as it were is not a part of me, but spectator,
sharing no experience but taking note of it; and that is no more.
I than it is you. When the play-it may be the tragedy — of
life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction,
a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned. This
doubleness may easily make us poor neighbors and friends some-
times.
I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time.
To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and
dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion
that was
so companionable as solitude. We are for the most
part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we
stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always
alone, let him be where he will. Solitude is not measured by
the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows.
## p. 14889 (#467) ##########################################
HENRY D. THOREAU
14889
The really diligent student in one of the crowded hives of Cam-
bridge College is as solitary as a dervis in the desert. The
farmer can work alone in the field or the woods all day, hoeing
or chopping, and not feel lonesome, because he is employed; but
when he comes home at night he cannot sit down in a room
alone, at the mercy of his thoughts, but must be where he can
«< see the folks," and recreate, and as he thinks remunerate, himself
for his day's solitude: and hence he wonders how the student
can sit alone in the house all night and most of the day without
ennui and "the blues"; but he does not realize that the student,
though in the house, is still at work in his field, and chopping
in his woods, as the farmer in his, and in turn seeks the same
recreation and society that the latter does, though it may be a
more condensed form of it.
Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short inter-
vals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each
other. We meat at meals three times a day, and give each other
a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are. We have had
to agree on a certain set of rules, called etiquette and polite-
ness, to make this frequent meeting tolerable and that we need.
not come to open war. We meet at the post-office, and at the
sociable, and about the fireside every night; we live thick and
are in each other's way, and stumble over one another: and I
think that we thus lose some respect for one another. Cer-
tainly less frequency would suffice for all important and hearty
communications. Consider the girls in a factory,- never alone,
hardly in their dreams. It would be better if there were but
one inhabitant to a square mile, as where I live. The value of a
man is not in his skin, that we should touch him.
I have heard of a man lost in the woods and dying of famine
and exhaustion at the foot of a tree, whose loneliness was relieved
by the grotesque visions with which, owing to bodily weakness,
his diseased imagination surrounded him, and which he believed
to be real. So also, owing to bodily and mental health and
strength, we may be continually cheered by a like but more
normal and natural society, and come to know that we are never
alone.
I have a great deal of company in my house; especially in
the morning, when nobody calls. Let me suggest a few compari-
sons, that some one may convey an idea of my situation. I am
no more lonely than the loon in the pond that laughs so loud, or
## p. 14890 (#468) ##########################################
14890
HENRY D. THOREAU
than Walden Pond itself. What company has that lonely lake, I
pray? And yet it has not the blue devils, but the blue angels in
it, in the azure tint of its waters. The sun is alone, except
in thick weather, when there sometimes appear to be two, but
one is a mock sun. God is alone,- but the Devil, he is far from
being alone: he sees a great deal of company; he is legion. I
no more lonely than a single mullein or dandelion in a
pasture, or a bean leaf, or sorrel, or a horse-fly, or a humble-bee.
I am no more lonely than the Mill Brook, or a weathercock, or
the North Star, or the south wind, or an April shower, or a Jan-
uary thaw, or the first spider in a new house.
I have occasional visits in the long winter evenings, when the
snow falls fast and the wind howls in the wood, from an old set-
tler and original proprietor, who is reported to have dug Walden
Pond, and stoned it, and fringed it with pine woods; who tells
me stories of old time and of new eternity: and between us we
manage to pass a cheerful evening, with social mirth and pleasant
views of things, even without apples or cider,-a most wise and
humorous friend, whom I love much, who keeps himself more
secret than ever did Goffe or Whalley; and though he is thought
to be dead, none can show where he is buried. An elderly
dame too dwells in my neighborhood, invisible to most persons,
in whose odorous herb garden I love to stroll sometimes, gather-
ing simples and listening to her fables; -for she has a genius
of unequaled fertility, and her memory runs back farther than
mythology, and she can tell me the original of every fable, and
on what fact every one is founded-for the incidents occurred
when she was young. A ruddy and lusty old dame, who delights
in all weathers and seasons, and is likely to outlive all her
children yet.
The indescribable innocence and beneficence of Nature,- of
Isun and wind and rain, of summer and winter,- such health, such
cheer, they afford forever! and such sympathy have they ever
with our race, that all Nature would be affected, and the sun's
brightness fade, and the winds would sigh humanely, and the
clouds rain tears, and the woods shed their leaves and put on
mourning in midsummer, if any man should ever for a just cause
grieve.
Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I
not partly leaves and vegetable mold myself?
What is the pill which will keep us well, serene, contented?
Not my or thy great-grandfather's, but our great-grandmother
## p. 14891 (#469) ##########################################
HENRY D. THOREAU
14891
Nature's universal, vegetable, botanic medicines, by which she
has kept herself young always, outlived so many old Parrs in her
day, and fed her health with their decaying fatness.
For my
panacea, instead of one of those quack vials of a mixture dipped
from Acheron and the Dead Sea, which come out of those long
shallow black schooner-looking wagons which we sometimes see
made to carry bottles, let me have a draught of undiluted morn-
ing air.
"Fly, darling, without rest,
Over land and sea to my Love,
And fold your wings in her breast! »
## p. 14870 (#445) ##########################################
## p. 14870 (#446) ##########################################
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## p. 14870 (#447) ##########################################
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## p. 14871 (#449) ##########################################
14871
HENRY D. THOREAU
(1817-1862)
BY JOHN BURROUGHS
N THE front of the second order of American authors we must
place Henry D. Thoreau. He had many qualities which
would seem to entitle him to a place in the first order,
with Emerson, Longfellow, Bryant, Whitman; but he lacked at least
one thing which these men possessed — he lacked breadth: his sym
pathies were narrow; he did not touch his fellows at many points.
It has been complained that Emerson was narrow too; but Emerson
looked over a much wider field than Thoreau, had many more inter-
ests, was more affirmative, and in every way was a larger, more help-
ful spiritual force. In his life, Thoreau isolated himself from his
fellows as much as possible; he was very scornful of ordinary human
ends and ambitions, and seemed to set slight value upon the ordi-
nary human affections.
Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts, July 12th, 1817, and
died there in May 1862, of consumption; having seen forty-five years
of life, and probably spent more of it in the open air than any other
American man of letters. The business of his life was walking,—or
sauntering, as he preferred to call it,—and he aimed to spend half
of each day the year round in field or wood. He was a new kind of
sportsman, who carried a journal instead of a gun or trap, and who
brought home only such game as falls to the eye of the poet and
seer.
Thoreau was of French extraction on his father's side, and English
on his mother's. His intellectual traits were evidently from the former
source, his moral traits from the latter. That love of the wild and
savage, that crispness and terseness of expression, that playful exag-
geration, and that radical revolutionary cry, were French; while his
English blood showed itself more in his love of the homely, the aus-
tere, and his want of sociability.
His grandfather, John Thoreau, was born in the isle of Guernsey,
was a merchant in Boston; and died in Concord of consumption, in
1801. His father, also named John, after an unsuccessful mercantile
career became a lead-pencil maker in Concord in 1823; and from
that date to the time of his death in 1859, says Henry's biographer,
"led a plodding, unambitious, and respectable life. " Henry Thoreau
## p. 14872 (#450) ##########################################
14872
HENRY D. THOREAU
was the third of four children,- John, Helen, Henry, and Sophia,-
all persons of character and mark. "To meet one of the Thoreaus,"
says Mr. Sanborn, "was not the same as to encounter any other per-
son who might cross your path. Life to them was something more
than a parade of pretension, a conflict of ambitions, or an incessant
scramble for the common objects of life. " John and Helen were both
teachers, and died comparatively young. John is described as a sunny
soul, always serene and loving, and as possessed of a generous flow-
ing spirit; Henry was deeply attached to him, and his death in 1842
was an irreparable loss. He said seven years later that "a man can
attend but one funeral in his life,- can behold but one corpse. "
him this was the corpse and the funeral of his brother John.
To
Henry and his brother assisted their
former attaining great skill in the art.
him says that he at last succeeded in
the best English ones.
father in pencil-making; the
Emerson in his sketch of
making as good a pencil as
The way to fortune seemed open to him. But he said he should
never make another pencil. "Why should I? I would not do again
what I have done once. " This saying pleased Emerson: it has an
Emersonian ring. But Thoreau did not live up to it. Mr. Sanborn
says, "He went on many years, at intervals working at his father's
business. »
Thoreau entered Harvard College in 1833, and graduated in due
course, but without any special distinction. In his Senior year his
biographer says, "He lost rank with his instructors by his indiffer-
ence to the ordinary college motives for study. " The real Thoreau
was already cropping out: the ambition of most mortals was not his
ambition; there was something contrary and scornful in him from the
first. His noble sister Helen earned part of the money that paid his
way at college.
In 1838 he went to Maine in quest of employment as teacher, car-
rying recommendations from Mr. Emerson, Dr. Ripley, and from the
president of Harvard College; but his journey was not successful.
Later in the same year he seems to have been employed as teacher
in Concord Academy. About this time he first appeared as a lecturer
in the lyceum of his native village; and he continued to lecture as he
received calls from various New England towns till near the close of
his life. But it is doubtful if he was in any sen: e a popular lecturer.
He puzzled the people. I have been told, by man who when a
boy heard him read a lecture in some Massachi Setts town, that the
audience did not know what to make of him. They hardly knew
whether to take him seriously or not. His paradoxes, his strange
and extreme gospel of nature, and evidently hi: indifference as to
whether he pleased them or not, were not in the style of the usual
lyceum lecturer.
## p. 14873 (#451) ##########################################
HENRY D. THOREAU
14873
There is a tradition that while teaching, he and his brother John
both fell in love with the same girl, and that Henry heroically gave
way to John. It doubtless cost him less effort than the same act
would have cost his more human brother.
It seems to have been about this time that he began his daily
walks and studies of nature. In August 1839 he made his voyage
down the Concord and Merrimac Rivers, in company with his
brother; out of which experience grew his first book, or rather which
he made the occasion of his first book,—'A Week on the Concord
and Merrimack Rivers,'-published ten years later. The book was
not a success commercially, and the author carried home the seven
hundred unsold copies on his back; boasting that he now had a very
respectable library, all of his own writing. The title of the book is
misleading: it is an account of a voyage on far other and larger
rivers than the Concord and Merrimac,- the great world currents
of philosophy, religion, and literature. The voyage but furnishes the
thread with which he ties together his speculations and opinions upon
these subjects. It is not, in my opinion, his most valuable or read-
able book, though it contains some of his best prose and poetry.
offends one's sense of fitness and unity. It is a huge digression.
We are promised a narrative of travel and adventure, spiced with
observation of nature; and we get a bundle of essays, some of them
crude and loosely put together. To some young men I have known,
the book proved a great boon; but I imagine that most readers of
to-day find the temptation to skip the long ethical and literary dis-
cussions, and be off down-stream with the voyagers, a very strong
one. When one goes a-fishing or a-boating, he is not in the frame
of mind to pause by the way to listen to a lecture, however fine.
It
In 1845 Thoreau put his philosophy of life to the test by build-
ing a hut in the woods on the shore of Walden Pond, a mile or
more from Concord village, and spending over two years there. Out
of this experiment grew his best-known and most valuable book,-
'Walden, or Life in the Woods. ' The book is a record of his life in
that sylvan solitude, and abounds in felicitous descriptions of the sea-
sons and the scenery, and fresh and penetrating observations upon
the wild life about him.
-
He went to the woods for study and contemplation, and to in-
dulge his taste for the wild and the solitary, as well as to make an
experiment in the art of simple living. He proved to his own satis-
faction that most of us waste our time on superfluities, and that a
man can live on less than $100 per year and have two-thirds of his
time to himself. He cultivated beans, gathered wild berries, did a
little fishing, and I suspect, went home pretty often for a square
meal. " In theory he seems to have been a vegetarian; but it is told
of him that when he had a day of surveying on hand, he was wont
«<
## p. 14874 (#452) ##########################################
14874
HENRY D. THOREAU
to fortify himself with pork as well as beans. At Walden he seems
to have written much of the 'Week,' his essay on Carlyle, and others
of his papers. Alcott and Emerson were his visitors; and besides
these, he reports that he had a good deal of company in the morning
when nobody called. He was a born lover of solitude. He says he
"never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. »
"I am
no more lonely than the loon in the pond that laughs so
loud, or than Walden Pond itself. What company has that lonely
lake, I pray? And yet it has not the blue devils, but the blue angels
in it, in the azure tint of its waters. "
Thoreau whistled a good deal, and at times very prettily, as in
this quotation, to help keep his courage up. Indeed the whole vol-
ume is a cheery exultant whistle, at times with a bantering defiant
tone in it. It is, on the whole, the most delicious piece of brag in
our literature. Who ever got so much out of a bean-field as Thoreau!
He makes one want to go forthwith and plant a field with beans,
and hoe them barefoot. He makes us feel that the occupation yields
a "classic result. "
"When my hoe tinkled against the stones, that music echoed to the woods
and the sky, and was an acco
ccompaniment to my labor which yielded an instant
and immeasurable crop. It was no longer beans that I hoed, nor I that hoed
beans; and I remembered with as much pity as pride, if I remembered at all,
my acquaintances who had gone to the city to attend the oratorios.
"On gala days the town fires its great guns, which echo like popguns to
these woods, and some waifs of martial music occasionally penetrate thus far.
To me, away there in my bean-field at the other end of the town, the big
guns sounded as if a puff-ball had burst; and when there was a military turn-
out of which I was ignorant, I have sometimes had a vague sense all the day
of some sort of itching and disease in the horizon, as if some eruption would
break out there soon, either scarlatina or canker-rash,-until at length some
more favorable puff of wind, making haste over the fields and up the Way-
land road, brought me information of the trainers. >>
After the Walden episode, Thoreau supported himself by doing
various odd jobs for his neighbors, such as whitewashing, gardening,
fence-building, land-surveying. He also lectured occasionally, and
wrote now and then for the current magazines. Horace Greeley
became his friend, and disposed of some of his papers for him to
Graham's Magazine, Putnam's Magazine, and the Democratic Review.
He made three trips to the Maine woods, —in 1846, 1853, and 1857,-
where he saw and studied the moose and the Indian. The latter
interested him greatly. Emerson said the three men in whom
Thoreau felt the deepest interest were John Brown, his Indian guide
in Maine, and Walt Whitman. The magazine papers which were the
outcome of his trips to the Maine woods were published in book form
## p. 14875 (#453) ##########################################
HENRY D. THOREAU
14875
after his death; and next to Walden' I think make his most inter-
esting contribution.
In 1850, in company with his friend Ellery Channing, he made a
trip to Canada, and reports that he found traveling dirty work, and
that "a man needs a pair of overalls for it. " This poetic couple
wore very plain clothes, and by way of baggage had a bundle and
an umbrella. "We styled ourselves Knights of the Umbrella and the
Bundle. " The details of this trip may be found in his 'A Yankee
in Canada,' — also published after his death.
-
Thoreau was almost as local as a woodchuck. He never went
abroad, probably could not have been hired to go. He thought Con-
cord contained about all that was worth seeing. Nature repeats her-
self everywhere; only you must be wide awake enough to see her.
He penetrated the West as far as Minnesota in 1862 for his health,
but the trip did not stay the progress of his disease. He made several
trips to New York and Brooklyn to see Walt Whitman, whose poems
and whose personality made a profound impression upon him.
"The
greatest democrat the world has ever seen," was his verdict upon the
author of 'Leaves of Grass. '
One of the most characteristic acts of Thoreau's life was his pub-
lic defense of John Brown on October 30th, 1859, when the sentiment
of the whole country-abolitionists and all-set so overwhelmingly
the other way. Emerson, and other of Thoreau's friends, tried to
dissuade him from any public expression in favor of Brown just then;
but he was all on fire with the thought of John Brown's heroic and
righteous act, and he was not to be checked. His speech was calm
and restrained; but there was molten metal inside it, and metal of
the purest kind. It stirs the blood to read it at this time. Thoreau
and Brown were kindred souls-fanatics, if you please, but both
made of the stuff of heroes. Brown was the Thoreau of action and
of politics, and Thoreau was the Brown of the region of the senti-
ments and moral and social ideals.
It is Thoreau's heroic moral fibre that takes us. It is never re-
laxed; it is always braced for the heights. He was an unusual mixture
of the poet, the naturalist, and the moralist: but the moralist domi-
nated. Yet he was not the moralist as we know him in English
literature, without salt or savor, but a moralist escaped to the woods,
full of a wild tang and aroma. He preaches a kind of goodness that
sounds strange to conventional ears, - the goodness of the natural,
the simple. "There is no odor so bad as that which arises from
goodness tainted. " And goodness is tainted when it takes thought
of itself. A man's
"goodness must not be a partial and transitory act, but a constant super-
fluity, which costs him nothing, and of which he is unconscious. " "If I knew
for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design
## p. 14876 (#454) ##########################################
14876
HENRY D. THOREAU
of doing me good, I should run for my life,- as from that dry and parching
wind of the African desert called the Simoon, which fills the mouth and nose
and ears and eyes with dust till you are suffocated,- for fear that I should
get some of his good done to me, some of its virus mingled with my blood. »
Thoreau's virtue is a kind of stimulating contrariness; there is no
compliance in him: he always says and does the unexpected thing,
but always leaves us braced for better work and better living. "Sim-
plicity, simplicity, simplicity," he reiterates: "I say, let your affairs
be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a
million, count half a dozen; and keep your accounts on your thumb-
nail. "
He was a poet too, through and through, but lacked the perfect
metrical gift. In this respect he had the shortcomings of his mas-
ter, Emerson, who was a poet keyed to the highest pitch of bardic
tension, but yet whose numbers would not always flow. Thoreau
printed a few poems; one on 'Smoke' and one on 'Sympathy' have
merits of a high order. Thoreau's naturalism is the salt that gives
him his savor. He caught something tonic and pungent from his
intercourse with wild nature. Sometimes it is biting and smarting
like crinkle-root or calamus-root; at others it is sweet and aromatic
like birch or wintergreen: but always it is stimulating and whole-
some.
As a naturalist Thoreau's aim was ulterior to science: he loved
the bird, but he loved more the bird behind the bird, -the idea it
suggested, the mood of his mind it interpreted. He would fain see a
mythology shine through his ornithology. In all his walks and ram-
bles and excursions to mountains and to marsh, he was the idealist
and the mystic, and never the devotee of pure science.
His pages
abound in many delicious natural-history bits, and in keen observa-
tion; but when we sternly ask how much he has added to our store
of exact knowledge of this nature to which he devoted his lifetime,
we cannot point to much that is new or important. He was in quest
of an impalpable knowledge,- waiting, as he says in Walden,' "at
evening on the hill-tops for the sky to fall, that I might catch some-
thing, though I never caught much; and that, manna-wise, would dis-
solve again in the sun. ”
But he caught more than he here gives himself credit for; and it
does not dissolve away in the sun. His fame has increased from
year to year. Other names in our literature, much more prominent
than his in his own day,-as that of Whipple, Tuckerman, Giles,
etc. ,- have faded; while his own has grown brighter and brighter,
and the meridian is not yet.
John Burroughs
## p. 14877 (#455) ##########################################
HENRY D. THOREAU
14877
INSPIRATION
By permission of Houghton, Mifflin & Co. , publishers
HATE'ER we leave to God, God does,
And blesses us;
The work we choose should be our own,
God leaves alone.
WHATE
*
If with light head erect I sing,
Though all the Muses lend their force,
From my poor love of anything,
The verse is weak and shallow as its source.
But if with bended neck I grope
Listening behind me for my wit,
With faith superior to hope,
More anxious to keep back than forward it;
Making my soul accomplice there
Unto the flame my heart hath lit,-
Then will the verse for ever wear:
Time cannot bend the line which God hath writ.
Always the general show of things.
Floats in review before my mind,
And such true love and reverence brings,
That sometimes I forget that I am blind.
But now there comes unsought, unseen,
Some clear divine electuary,
And I, who had but sensual been,
Grow sensible, and as God is, am wary.
I hearing get, who had but ears,
And sight, who had but eyes before;
I moments live, who lived but years,
And truth discern, who knew but learning's lore.
I hear beyond the range of sound,
I see beyond the range of sight,
New earths and skies and seas around,
And in my day the sun doth pale his light.
A clear and ancient harmony
Pierces my soul through all its din,
## p. 14878 (#456) ##########################################
14878
HENRY D. THOREAU
As through its utmost melody,-
Farther behind than they, farther within.
More swift its bolt than lightning is;
Its voice than thunder is more loud;
It doth expand my privacies
To all, and leave me single in the crowd.
It speaks with such authority,
With so serene and lofty tone,
That idle time runs gadding by,
And leaves me with Eternity alone.
Now chiefly is my natal hour,
And only now my prime of life:
Of manhood's strength it is the flower;
'Tis peace's end and war's beginning strife.
It comes in summer's broadest noon,
By a gray wall or some chance place,
Unseasoning Time, insulting June,
And vexing day with its presuming face.
Such fragrance round my couch it makes,
More rich than are Arabian drugs,
That my soul scents its life and wakes
The body up beneath its perfumed rugs.
Such is the Muse, the heavenly maid,
The star that guides our mortal course,
Which shows where life's true kernel's laid,
Its wheat's fine flour, and its undying force.
She with one breath attunes the spheres,
And also my poor human heart;
With one impulse propels the years
Around, and gives my throbbing pulse its start.
I will not doubt for evermore,
Nor falter from a steadfast faith;
For though the system be turned o'er,
God takes not back the word which once he saith.
I will not doubt the love untold
Which not my worth nor want has bought,
Which wooed me young, and wooes me old,
And to this evening hath me brought.
## p. 14879 (#457) ##########################################
HENRY D. THOREAU
14879
My memory I'll educate
To know the one historic truth,
Remembering to the latest date
The only true and sole immortal youth.
Be but thy inspiration given,
No matter through what danger sought,
I'll fathom hell or climb to heaven,
And yet esteem that cheap which love has bought,
*
M
**
Fame cannot tempt the bard
Who's famous with his God,
Nor laurel him reward
Who has his Maker's nod.
THE FISHER'S BOY
By permission of Houghton, Mifflin & Co. , publishers
Y 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 sea;
Yet oft I think the ocean they've sailed o'er
Is deeper known upon the strand to me.
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.
## p. 14880 (#458) ##########################################
14880
HENRY D. THOREAU
SMOKE
By permission of Houghton, Mifflin & Co. , publishers
IGHT-WINGED Smoke, Icarian bird,
L
Melting thy pinions in thy upward flight;
Lark without song, and messenger of dawn,
Circling above the hamlets as thy nest;
Or else, departing dream and shadowy form
Of midnight vision, gathering up thy skirts;
By night star-veiling, and by day
Darkening the light and blotting out the sun,—
Go thou, my incense, upward from this hearth,
And ask the gods to pardon this clear flame.
WORK AND PAY
From Walden. ' Copyright 1854, by Henry D. Thoreau; 1893, by Houghton,
Mifflin & Co.
T THE present and in this country, as I find by my own
A experience, a few implements, a knife, an axe, a spade, a
wheelbarrow, etc. , and for the studious, lamplight, station-
ery, and access to a few books, rank next to necessaries, and can
all be obtained at a trifling cost. Yet some, not wise, go to the
other side of the globe, to barbarous and unhealthy regions, and
devote themselves to trade for ten or twenty years, in order that
they may live-that is, keep comfortably warm-and die in New
England at last. The luxuriously rich are not simply kept com-
fortably warm, but unnaturally hot; as I implied before, they are
cooked, of course à la mode.
Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of
life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the
elevation of mankind. With respect to luxuries and comforts,
the wisest have ever lived a more simple and meagre life than
the poor. The ancient philosophers - Chinese, Hindoo, Persian,
and Greek — were a class than which none has been poorer
in outward riches, none so rich in inward. We know not much
about them. It is remarkable that we know so much of them
as we do. The same is true of the more modern reformers and
benefactors of their race.
None can be an impartial or wise
observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what
we should call voluntary poverty. Of a life of luxury the fruit is
## p. 14881 (#459) ##########################################
HENRY D. THOREAU
14881
luxury, whether in agriculture, or commerce, or literature, or art.
There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philoso-
phers. Yet it is admirable to profess, because it was once admi-
rable to live. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle
thoughts, nor even to found a school; but so to love wisdom
as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independ-
ence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the prob-
lems of life, not only theoretically but practically. The success of
great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success;
not kingly, not manly. They make shift to live merely by con-
formity, practically as their fathers did, and are in no sense the
progenitors of a nobler race of men. But why do men degen-
erate ever? What makes families run out? What is the nature
of the luxury which enervates and destroys nations? Are we sure
that there is none of it in our own lives? The philosopher is
in advance of his age even in the outward form of his life.
He is not fed, sheltered, clothed, warmed, like his contemporaries.
How can a man be a philosopher and not maintain his vital heat
by better methods than other men?
-
When a man is warmed by the several modes which I have de-
scribed, what does he want next? Surely not more warmth of the
same kind,—as more and richer food, larger and more splendid
houses, finer and more abundant clothing, more numerous inces-
sant and hotter fires, and the like. When he has obtained those
things which are necessary to life, there is another alternative
than to obtain the superfluities; and that is, to adventure on life
now, his vacation from humbler toil having commenced. The
soil, it appears, is suited to the seed; for it has sent its radicle
downward, and it may now send its shoot upward also with con-
fidence. Why has man rooted himself thus firmly in the earth,
but that he may rise in the same proportion into the heavens
above? — for the nobler plants are valued for the fruit they bear
at last in the air and light, far from the ground, and are not
treated like the humbler esculents; which, though they may be
biennials, are cultivated only till they have perfected their root,
and often cut down at top for this purpose, so that most would
not know them in their flowering season.
I do not mean to prescribe rules to strong and valiant natures,
who will mind their own affairs whether in heaven or hell, and
perchance build more magnificently and spend more lavishly than
the richest, without ever impoverishing themselves, not knowing
XXV-931
## p. 14882 (#460) ##########################################
14882
HENRY D. THOREAU
how they live if indeed there are any such, as has been
dreamed; nor to those who find their encouragement and inspira-
tion in precisely the present condition of things, and cherish it
with the fondness and enthusiasm of lovers-and to some extent
I reckon myself in this number; I do not speak to those who
are well employed, in whatever circumstances-and they know
whether they are well employed or not; - but mainly to the
mass of men who are discontented, and idly complaining of the
hardness of their lot or of the times, when they might improve
them. There are some who complain most energetically and
inconsolably of any, because they are, as they say, doing their
duty. I also have in my mind that seemingly wealthy, but most
terribly impoverished class of all, who have accumulated dross
but know not how to use it or get rid of it, and thus have
forged their own golden or silver fetters.
If I should attempt to tell how I have desired to spend my
life in years past, it would probably surprise those of my readers
who are somewhat acquainted with its actual history; it would
certainly astonish those who know nothing about it. I will only
hint at some of the enterprises which I have cherished.
In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been
anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick
too: to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and
future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line.
You will pardon some obscurities, for there are more secrets in
my trade than in most men's; and yet not voluntarily kept, but
inseparable from its very nature. I would gladly tell all that I
know about it, and never paint "No Admittance" on my gate.
I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and
am still on their trail. Many are the travelers I have spoken
concerning them, describing their tracks and what calls they
answered to. I have met one or two who had heard the hound,
and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear
behind a cloud; and they seemed as anxious to recover them as
if they had lost them themselves.
To anticipate, not the sunrise and the dawn merely, but if
possible, Nature herself! How many mornings, summer and
winter, before yet any neighbor was stirring about his business,
have I been about mine! No doubt many of my townsmen have
met me returning from this enterprise,-farmers starting for Bos-
ton in the twilight, or wood-choppers going to their work. It is
## p. 14883 (#461) ##########################################
HENRY D. THOREAU
14883
true, I never assisted the sun materially in his rising; but, doubt
not, it was of the last importance only to be present at it.
So many autumn, ay, and winter days, spent outside the
town, trying to hear what was in the wind, to hear and carry
it express! I well-nigh sunk all my capital in it, and lost my
own breath into the bargain, running in the face of it. If it had
concerned either of the political parties, depend upon it, it would
have appeared in the Gazette with the earliest intelligence. At
other times watching from the observatory of some cliff or tree,
to telegraph any new arrival; or waiting at evening on the hill-
tops for the sky to fall, that I might catch something,- though
I never caught much, and that, manna-wise, would dissolve again
in the sun.
For a long time I was reporter to a journal, of no very wide
circulation, whose editor has never yet seen fit to print the bulk
of my contributions, and, as is too common with writers, I got
only my labor for my pains. However, in this case my pains
were their own reward.
For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snow-storms
and rain-storms, and did my duty faithfully; surveyor, if not
of highways, then of forest paths and all across-lot routes,-keep-
ing them open, and ravines bridged and passable at all seasons,
where the public heel had testified to their utility.
I have looked after the wild stock of the town, which give a
faithful herdsman a good deal of trouble by leaping fences; and
I have had an eye to the unfrequented nooks and corners of the
farm: though I did not always know whether Jonas or Solomon
worked in a particular field to-day, that was none of my business.
I have watered the red huckleberry, the sand-cherry and the
nettle-tree, the red pine and the black ash, the white grape and
the yellow violet, which might have withered else in dry seasons.
In short, I went on thus for a long time (I may say it with-
out boasting), faithfully minding my business, till it became more
and more evident that my townsmen would not after all admit
me into the list of town officers, nor make my place a sinecure
with a moderate allowance. My accounts, which I can swear to
have kept faithfully, I have indeed never got audited, still less
accepted, still less paid and settled. However, I have not set my
heart on that.
## p. 14884 (#462) ##########################################
14884
HENRY D. THOREAU
SOLITUDE
From Walden. ' Copyright 1854, by Henry D. Thoreau; 1893, by Houghton,
Mifflin & Co.
TH
HIS is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense,
and imbibes delight through every pore. I go and come
with a strange liberty in Nature, a part of herself. As I
walk along the stony shore of the pond in my shirt-sleeves,
though it is cool as well as cloudy and windy, and I see nothing
special to attract me, all the elements are unusually congenial to
me. The bullfrogs trump to usher in the night, and the note
of the whippoorwill is borne on the rippling wind from over
the water. Sympathy with the fluttering alder and poplar leaves
almost takes away my breath; yet, like the lake, my serenity is
rippled but not ruffled. These small waves raised by the even-
ing wind are as remote from storm as the smooth reflecting sur-
face. Though it is now dark, the wind still blows and roars in
the wood, the waves still dash, and some creatures lull the rest
with their notes. The repose is never complete. The wildest
animals do not repose, but seek their prey now; the fox and
skunk and rabbit now roam the fields and woods without fear.
They are Nature's watchmen,-links which connect the days of
animated life.
When I return to my house I find that visitors have been
there and left their cards, either a bunch of flowers, or a wreath
of evergreen, or a name in pencil on a yellow walnut leaf or a
chip. They who come rarely to the woods take some little piece
of the forest into their hands to play with by the way, which
they leave, either intentionally or accidentally. One has peeled a
willow wand, woven it into a ring, and dropped it on my table.
I could always tell if visitors had called in my absence, either
by the bended twigs or grass, or the print of their shoes; and
generally of what sex or age or quality they were, by some slight
trace left, as a flower dropped, or a bunch of grass plucked
and thrown away, even as far off as the railroad half a mile
distant, or by the lingering odor of a cigar or pipe. Nay, I was
frequently notified of the passage of a traveler along the high-
way sixty rods off by the scent of his pipe.
There is commonly sufficient space about us. Our horizon is
never quite at our elbows. The thick wood is not just at our
door, nor the pond; but somewhat is always clearing, familiar
and worn by us, appropriated and fenced in some way, and
―――――
―
―
## p. 14885 (#463) ##########################################
HENRY D. THOREAU
14885
reclaimed from Nature. For what reason have I this vast range
and circuit, some square miles of unfrequented forest, for my
privacy, abandoned to me by men? My nearest neighbor is a
mile distant, and no house is visible from any place but the hill-
tops within half a mile of my own. I have my horizon bounded
by woods all to myself; a distant view of the railroad where it
touches the pond on the one hand, and of the fence which skirts.
the woodland road on the other. But for the most part it is as
solitary where I live as on the prairies. It is as much Asia or
Africa as New England. I have, as it were, my own sun and
moon and stars, and a little world all to myself. At night there
was never a traveler passed my house, or knocked at my door,
more than if I were the first or last man; unless it were in the
spring, when at long intervals some came from the village to fish
for pouts, they plainly fished much more in the Walden Pond
of their own natures, and baited their hooks with darkness,— but
they soon retreated, usually with light baskets, and left "the
world to darkness and to me," and the black kernel of the night
was never profaned by any human neighborhood. I believe that
men are generally still a little afraid of the dark, though the
witches are all hung, and Christianity and candles have been
introduced.
-
Yet I experienced sometimes that the most sweet and tender,
the most innocent and encouraging society may be found in any
natural object, even for the poor misanthrope and most melan-
choly man. There can be no very black melancholy to him who
lives in the midst of Nature and has his senses still. There was
never yet such a storm but it was Æolian music to a healthy
and innocent ear. Nothing can rightly compel a simple and
brave man to a vulgar sadness. While I enjoy the friendship of
the seasons, I trust that nothing can make life a burden to me.
The gentle rain which waters my beans and keeps me in the
house to-day is not drear and melancholy, but good for me too.
Though it prevents my hoeing them, it is of far more worth than
my hoeing. If it should continue so long as to cause the seeds
to rot in the ground and destroy the potatoes in the low lands,
it would still be good for the grass on the uplands; and being
good for the grass, it would be good for me. Sometimes, when
I compare myself with other men, it seems as if I were more
favored by the gods than they, beyond any deserts that I am
conscious of; as if I had a warrant and surety at their hands
## p. 14886 (#464) ##########################################
14886
HENRY D. THOREAU
which my fellows have not, and were especially guided and
guarded. I do not flatter myself; but if it be possible, they flat-
ter me. I have never felt lonesome, or in the least oppressed by
a sense of solitude, but once; and that was a few weeks after
I came to the woods, when for an hour I doubted if the near
neighborhood of man was not essential to a serene and healthy
life. To be alone was something unpleasant. But I was at the
same time conscious of a slight insanity in my mood, and seemed
to foresee my recovery. In the midst of a gentle rain, while
these thoughts prevailed, I was suddenly sensible of such sweet
and beneficent society in Nature, in the very pattering of the
drops, and in every sound and sight around my house, an infinite
and unaccountable friendliness all at once like an atmosphere
sustaining me, as made the fancied advantages of human neigh-
borhood insignificant, and I have never thought of them since.
Every little pine needle expanded and swelled with sympathy
and befriended me. I was so distinctly made aware of the
presence of something kindred to me, even in scenes which we
are accustomed to call wild and dreary, and also that the nearest
of blood to me and humanest was not a person nor a villager,
that I thought no place could ever be strange to me again. —
"Mourning untimely consumes the sad;
Few are their days in the land of the living,
Beautiful daughter of Toscar. "
Some of my pleasantest hours were during the long rain-
storms in the spring or fall, which confined me to the house for
the afternoon as well as the forenoon, soothed by their ceaseless
roar and pelting; when an early twilight ushered in a long even-
ing, in which many thoughts had time to take root and unfold
themselves. In those driving northeast rains which tried the
village houses so, when the maids stood ready with mop and pail
in front entries to keep the deluge out, I sat behind my door in
my little house, which was all entry, and thoroughly enjoyed its
protection. In one heavy thunder-shower the lightning struck a
large pitch-pine across the pond, making a very conspicuous and
perfectly regular spiral groove from top to bottom, an inch or
more deep and four or five inches wide, as you would groove a
walking-stick. I passed it again the other day, and was struck
with awe on looking up and beholding that mark, now more dis-
tinct than ever, where a terrific and resistless bolt came down out
## p. 14887 (#465) ##########################################
HENRY D. THOREAU
14887
of the harmless sky eight years ago.
Men frequently say to me,
"I should think you would feel lonesome down there and want to
be nearer to folks,- rainy and snowy days and nights especially. "
I am tempted to reply to such,-This whole earth which we
inhabit is but a point in space. How far apart, think you, dwell
the two most distant inhabitants of yonder star, the breadth of
whose disk cannot be appreciated by our instruments? Why
should I feel lonely? is not our planet in the Milky Way? This
which you put seems to me not to be the most important ques-
tion. What sort of space is that which separates a man from
his fellows and makes him solitary? I have found that no exer-
tion of the legs can bring two minds much nearer to one another.
What do we want most to dwell near to? Not to many men,
surely, the depot, the post-office, the bar-room, the meeting-
house, the schoolhouse, the grocery, Beacon Hill, or the Five
Points, where men most congregate,- but to the perennial source
of our life, whence in all our experience we have found that to
issue, as the willow stands near the water and sends out its roots
in that direction. This will vary with different natures, but this
is the place where a wise man will dig his cellar. -I one even-
ing overtook one of my townsmen, who has accumulated what is
called "a handsome property,"-though I never got a fair view
of it, on the Walden road, driving a pair of cattle to market,
who inquired of me how I could bring my mind to give up so
many of the comforts of life. I answered that I was very sure
I liked it passably well; I was not joking. And so I went home
to my bed, and left him to pick his way through the darkness
and the mud to Brighton,-or Bright-town,-which place he
would reach some time in the morning.
Any prospect of awakening or coming to life, to a dead man
makes indifferent all times and places. The place where that
may occur is always the same, and indescribably pleasant to all
our senses. For the most part we allow only outlying and trans-
ient circumstances to make our occasions. They are in fact the
cause of our distraction. Nearest to all things is that power
which fashions their being. Next to us the grandest laws are
continually being executed. Next to us is not the workman
whom we have hired, with whom we love so well to talk, but
the workman whose work we are.
-
"How vast and profound is the influence of the subtile pow-
ers of Heaven and of Earth!
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HENRY D. THOREAU
"We seek to perceive them, and we do not see them; we
seek to hear them, and we do not hear them; identified with the
substance of things, they cannot be separated from them.
"They cause that in all the universe men purify and sanctify
their hearts, and clothe themselves in their holiday garments to
offer sacrifices and oblations to their ancestors. It is an ocean
of subtile intelligences. They are everywhere, above us, on our
left, on our right; they environ us on all sides. "
We are the subjects of an experiment which is not a little
interesting to me. Can we not do without the society of our
gossips a little while under these circumstances, - have our own
thoughts to cheer us? Confucius says truly, "Virtue does not
remain as an abandoned orphan: it must of necessity have
neighbors. "
With thinking, we may be beside ourselves in a sane sense.
By a conscious effort of the mind we can stand aloof from
actions and their consequences; and all things, good and bad, go
by us like a torrent. We are not wholly involved in Nature. I
may be either the driftwood in the stream, or Indra in the sky
looking down on it. I may be affected by a theatrical exhibi-
tion; on the other hand, I may not be affected by an actual event
which appears to concern me much more. I only know myself as
a human entity, -the scene, so to speak, of thoughts and affec
tions; and am sensible of a certain doubleness by which I can
stand as remote from myself as from another. However intense
my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a
part of me, which as it were is not a part of me, but spectator,
sharing no experience but taking note of it; and that is no more.
I than it is you. When the play-it may be the tragedy — of
life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction,
a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned. This
doubleness may easily make us poor neighbors and friends some-
times.
I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time.
To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and
dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion
that was
so companionable as solitude. We are for the most
part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we
stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always
alone, let him be where he will. Solitude is not measured by
the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows.
## p. 14889 (#467) ##########################################
HENRY D. THOREAU
14889
The really diligent student in one of the crowded hives of Cam-
bridge College is as solitary as a dervis in the desert. The
farmer can work alone in the field or the woods all day, hoeing
or chopping, and not feel lonesome, because he is employed; but
when he comes home at night he cannot sit down in a room
alone, at the mercy of his thoughts, but must be where he can
«< see the folks," and recreate, and as he thinks remunerate, himself
for his day's solitude: and hence he wonders how the student
can sit alone in the house all night and most of the day without
ennui and "the blues"; but he does not realize that the student,
though in the house, is still at work in his field, and chopping
in his woods, as the farmer in his, and in turn seeks the same
recreation and society that the latter does, though it may be a
more condensed form of it.
Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short inter-
vals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each
other. We meat at meals three times a day, and give each other
a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are. We have had
to agree on a certain set of rules, called etiquette and polite-
ness, to make this frequent meeting tolerable and that we need.
not come to open war. We meet at the post-office, and at the
sociable, and about the fireside every night; we live thick and
are in each other's way, and stumble over one another: and I
think that we thus lose some respect for one another. Cer-
tainly less frequency would suffice for all important and hearty
communications. Consider the girls in a factory,- never alone,
hardly in their dreams. It would be better if there were but
one inhabitant to a square mile, as where I live. The value of a
man is not in his skin, that we should touch him.
I have heard of a man lost in the woods and dying of famine
and exhaustion at the foot of a tree, whose loneliness was relieved
by the grotesque visions with which, owing to bodily weakness,
his diseased imagination surrounded him, and which he believed
to be real. So also, owing to bodily and mental health and
strength, we may be continually cheered by a like but more
normal and natural society, and come to know that we are never
alone.
I have a great deal of company in my house; especially in
the morning, when nobody calls. Let me suggest a few compari-
sons, that some one may convey an idea of my situation. I am
no more lonely than the loon in the pond that laughs so loud, or
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HENRY D. THOREAU
than Walden Pond itself. What company has that lonely lake, I
pray? And yet it has not the blue devils, but the blue angels in
it, in the azure tint of its waters. The sun is alone, except
in thick weather, when there sometimes appear to be two, but
one is a mock sun. God is alone,- but the Devil, he is far from
being alone: he sees a great deal of company; he is legion. I
no more lonely than a single mullein or dandelion in a
pasture, or a bean leaf, or sorrel, or a horse-fly, or a humble-bee.
I am no more lonely than the Mill Brook, or a weathercock, or
the North Star, or the south wind, or an April shower, or a Jan-
uary thaw, or the first spider in a new house.
I have occasional visits in the long winter evenings, when the
snow falls fast and the wind howls in the wood, from an old set-
tler and original proprietor, who is reported to have dug Walden
Pond, and stoned it, and fringed it with pine woods; who tells
me stories of old time and of new eternity: and between us we
manage to pass a cheerful evening, with social mirth and pleasant
views of things, even without apples or cider,-a most wise and
humorous friend, whom I love much, who keeps himself more
secret than ever did Goffe or Whalley; and though he is thought
to be dead, none can show where he is buried. An elderly
dame too dwells in my neighborhood, invisible to most persons,
in whose odorous herb garden I love to stroll sometimes, gather-
ing simples and listening to her fables; -for she has a genius
of unequaled fertility, and her memory runs back farther than
mythology, and she can tell me the original of every fable, and
on what fact every one is founded-for the incidents occurred
when she was young. A ruddy and lusty old dame, who delights
in all weathers and seasons, and is likely to outlive all her
children yet.
The indescribable innocence and beneficence of Nature,- of
Isun and wind and rain, of summer and winter,- such health, such
cheer, they afford forever! and such sympathy have they ever
with our race, that all Nature would be affected, and the sun's
brightness fade, and the winds would sigh humanely, and the
clouds rain tears, and the woods shed their leaves and put on
mourning in midsummer, if any man should ever for a just cause
grieve.
Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I
not partly leaves and vegetable mold myself?
What is the pill which will keep us well, serene, contented?
Not my or thy great-grandfather's, but our great-grandmother
## p. 14891 (#469) ##########################################
HENRY D. THOREAU
14891
Nature's universal, vegetable, botanic medicines, by which she
has kept herself young always, outlived so many old Parrs in her
day, and fed her health with their decaying fatness.
For my
panacea, instead of one of those quack vials of a mixture dipped
from Acheron and the Dead Sea, which come out of those long
shallow black schooner-looking wagons which we sometimes see
made to carry bottles, let me have a draught of undiluted morn-
ing air.
